Chavez, Secure Calling, and The Day is Coming

From Random Hipatia

Once again, I spoke at the International Free Knowledge conference, this year hosted in Maturin. There were a couple of items on my trip I had pondered how I would write about. There was the lovely Indian woman who said if she were American, the only Bush she would ever trust was her own. I also discovered that Ian from KDE thinks much like what we can now call North American anarchists, which I have already come to consider and think of as a distinct subset of traditional anarchists. I am sure it has to do with culture.

I also learned a new card game from one of my other translators, a lovely Italian woman who works for a volunteer translation organization that is under threat from a new and terrible Italian law. There were a number of other people who showed me great personal loyalty over extremely difficult conditions, including Diego from Ututo, Enrico Zini from Debian Italy, and Jeff Zucker from Perl Mongers, but this was very much related to the one item I had not yet discussed and which I need to explain further.

Originally I was to speak and present on Community Telecenters, which is of course one of two recent initiatives we have undertaken in Hipatia and GNU Telephony, which now has begun to locally organize the Bolivarian Association de Telefonia Libre with the help of a lovely woman from T’chira state. I actually did this presentation on Thursday, and it took a day beforehand discussing and translating my slides and working with the various translators and volunteers to get it all correct. Copies of my presention may now be found in both English and Spanish. But that presentation went extremely well and was one of the most heavily attended at the conference. However it actually proved of far less interest to some than when I casually described our other major project over breakfast on Tuesday, which defined much of the rest of my trip from that moment forward.

As I discussed the secure calling project over breakfast, there was sudden and complete silence, followed shortly thereafter by one of the directors from PDVSA reaching for his cell phone to speak with people about arranging a national press conference and with the office of the president. So I put together a team from various people at the conference to create something that would be suitable for presentation on national television, and that consumed a lot of the rest of my time there. There is an interesting back story to this which I shortly learned as well which explained the silence and great interest.

Apparently, much to my own surprise, I learned that when Chavez calls Castro, he does so over an ordinary phone. It is not so much that the CIA is listening, which no doubt they are, but that people who work for the opposition candidate bribe people at the telco so they too can listen in. The CIA offers some excerps to Gobovision as well. Sometimes they have released excerpts of Chavez’s calls with Castro out of context to make him look bad on TV. One must remember that not only is there a free press in Venezuela, but it is all currently owned by the wealthy, those that oppose Chavez.

Given the issue with media, Chavez’s solution in the 2006 election is much the same as 2000. In the weeks leading to his election back in 2000, one could find graffiti everywhere in all the cities with just one simple phrase, “El día está viniendo” and nobody willing then to explain what it really referred to, as it was a secret that was revealed on that election day to the world. Similarly, graffiti is the tool of choice for Chavez’s mass mobilization for the 2006 elections.

With respect to secure calling, this technology is out to stay. There are enough people who have set it up now around the world, including some I personally showed. In Venezuela there are people who understand it and can maintain it if needed, as well as others in other parts of the world. The source is available and mirrored worldwide. Binaries have been build and now distributed in Debian. Much of that was all done very rapidly and early on at the start of the month, the rest while I was in Maturin, to deliberately make sure it was immediately usable and widely disseminated.

Certainly everyone has a right and expectation to privacy, whether you are Chavez calling to thank Castro for a gift of Cigars, a union organizer in a company, or simply talking to your family and friends. This very basic idea, so very obvious, is now lost in the U.S., along with so many other of our most basic rights and freedoms.