A Question Of Trust

WHAT un-patriotic activities am I planning?, Oh, Mr Simunja, where do I begin? Since you asked, I suppose I’ll tell you.

For a start, I happen to think that the kind of patriotism that Swapo espouses is ridiculous at best, and more likely downright dangerous. Your party’s idea of patriotism, as shown by the former President and people like Elijah Ngurare, seems to consist in mindless obedience to the Swapo party line, and an almost paranoid concern with ensuring only Swapo-loyalists end up in key positions which frankly have no business being in Government hands in the first place. Your party’s ‘patriotism’ does not seem to permit one of patriotism’s finest variants: loyal dissent.I could go on at length about this, but I think you know where I’m going. I don’t think that Swapo’s upper echelons are half as stupid as they sometimes seem.Also, and this has nothing to do with Swapo, but everything to do with how I grew up, I don’t consider myself even to have a home country to be loyal to; I think blind loyalty to a piece of land by virtue of a coloured piece of cloth is frankly rather silly. Blame my parents. I’d rather be loyal to my family and my friends. I trust them, they trust me — it’s a two way street.So: quite aside from the fact that I don’t care to be patriotic at all, thereby rendering all of my activities ‘un-patriotic’ by default, here’s my issue with the spy bill:I simply don’t trust the Government not to abuse its position of power. It’s that simple.Given this Government’s obsession with trying to control dissent and dissemination of opinion, given Swapo’s seeming difficulties in grasping some of the core concepts of modern democracy, and given the Government’s seeming commitment to be buddy-buddy with virtually all regimes which are widely regarded as oppressive at best and mass-murdering scum at worst (Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, etc), and given the Government’s apparent lack of grasp of the fundamentals of information technology, I simply have no reason at all to trust you.See, it’s not that the Government has anything to fear from me — it most assuredly doesnt; I wouldn’t harm a fly. No, it’s that I simply don’t trust the Government, either officially or unofficially, not to abuse its power.I don’t want the Government to be able to snoop on my e-mails without my knowledge or consent, and I want to SEE any warrant that is issued. Very simple: show me a warrant, I show you the mail.I don’t trust the Government to maintain the security of its interception centres, and consequently I don’t want to run the risk of any mistakes on the Government’s part to compromise the integrity of my confidential correspondence. This last part is important. If I want to send a confidential, encrypted e-mail, for example to my lawyer, that is because its contents concern me and my correspondent, and nobody else. If I am prohibited from using encryption in order to secure this correspondence (be it to protect it from my commercial competition, my legal adversaries, or simply child-porn-plugging hackers from Kazakhstan), then I have *no* basis of trust. It’s like sending a love letter to a mistress on a postcard. Not. Going. To happen. If I secure something, I do it because I don’t think anybody else in the chain, be it my ISP or any of the other servers between me and my correspondent, is trustworthy.I could always use an off-shore e-mail server (many people do; see how many Namibians have an address with gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc), an off-shore DNS and a web interface to send and receive encrypted e-mail. There’s jack-all the interception centres can do about it, except deep-packet inspection, and then there’s still technology like TOR to render that more or less unusable.Or does the Namibian Government plan to control the internet as tightly as Iran, North Korea or China?These are not people you want to be compared with in this context, Mr Simunja.Paranoid Lockdown BoyVia e-mailNote: Name and address provided – Ed