[OT] Chelsea's freedom and the importance of leaks

[Mychaela Falconia]

Dear supporters of FreeCalypso,

Given the vital role that proprietary source code leaks and the breaking
of NDAs have played in making our project possible, I feel a need to
pause and reflect on the great significance of today's momentous event:
our dear sister Chelsea Manning, our modern-day Prometheus, is now a
free woman!

Ancient Greeks understood quite well the importance of doing The Right
Thing for the benefit of all Humankind and publicly releasing those
secrets that should not be secret, even when doing this Right Thing
requires breaking NDAs.  The mythology of ancient Greece, the same
mythology that gave names to the GSM baseband chips we hack on
(Hercules, Ulysse, Samson, Calypso, Nausica, Iota, Syren and so forth),
includes the tale of Prometheus, the great benefactor of Humankind.

According to this story, the greedy and power-hungry gods tried to
keep the secret of Fire proprietary, much like the big corporate
players of today.  Prometheus had access to Fire under an NDA like all
other gods (back then there were many, many small-g gods, no fewer
than the number of people today who have access to various proprietary
sources under NDAs), but whereas all other small-g gods complacently
went along with the edicts of Zeus and withheld the proprietary source
for Fire from Humankind, Prometheus did the Right Thing: he willingly
and deliberately broke his NDA and gave Fire to Humankind.

Prometheus faced the wrath of Zeus for his valiant NDA-breaking act,
and was subjected to hideously brutal punishment: he was chained to a
rock, and Zeus sent one of his eagles to pluck out and eat his liver
every day.  Being an immortal god, Prometheus did not die from being
eaten out alive and his liver would grow back every night, only to
have the same torture repeated the next day, and onward for all of
Eternity.

According to the legend, Prometheus remained chained to that rock and
had his liver eaten out every day for 30,000 years.  It was supposed
to be for Eternity, but another hero intervened.  Heracles, better
known as Hercules (that's where the 'HERC' in HERCROM400G2 came from),
encountered Prometheus in his predicament while looking for a way to
liberate some golden apples from the Garden of Hesperides.  Heracles
killed the eagle and freed Prometheus, and thus our original hero, the
world's greatest NDA breaker of all times, was able to finally heal
and move on with his presumably immortal life.

Against this backdrop of ancient mythology we have the present-day
story of Chelsea Manning.  The secrets she disclosed to Wikileaks back
in 2010 consisted of information which we all have the right to know,
and she was brutally punished for her disclosures, much like Prometheus
- and the gang of murderers known as USA whose war crimes she exposed
even uses the eagle as its symbol.  The same mass murderers whose
atrocities are laid bare in Chelsea's disclosures sentenced her to 35
years in an all-male military prison where she languished for 7 years
prior to today's release, with forced military male haircuts every two
weeks - much like Prometheus' brutal punishment at the hands of Zeus.

In light of this analogy with the ancient legend, the massive campaign
for Chelsea's freedom mounted by the millions of her supporters around
the world that culminated earlier today in her release can be compared
to the valiant act of Heracles in the legend, who killed the eagle and
freed Prometheus.

So what is the take-away message from this story to the rest of us?  I
say it is as follows: anyone who is in a position of access to any
kind of material that is wrongfully withheld from the public, be it
government documents or proprietary source code and chip docs, has a
DUTY to follow in the footsteps of Prometheus and Chelsea Manning, and
release the secrets free to the world no matter what the threat of
adverse consequences may be.  To do otherwise is despicable cowardice.

Being a wise and immortal god, Prometheus surely knew what punishment
was in store for him, and yet he proceeded nonetheless with granting
Fire to Humankind.  Chelsea Manning said that she fully expected the
worst to come as a result of her disclosures, but she felt compelled
to share those documents nonetheless - she said that she wouldn't be
able to live with a clear conscience otherwise.

In light of the stories of Prometheus and Chelsea Manning, we can all
clearly see how cowardly and despicable are the actions of those who
hide behind NDAs and refuse to become leakers when they have far, far
less at risk.  Chelsea knew that she might never see the outside of
prison again, yet she published the secret documents anyway.  In
contrast, former employees or contractors of some obscure cellphone or
modem manufacturing company sitting on some source code or documents
under an NDA did not have to fear even a single day in jail should
they choose to leak, much less the 7 y that Chelsea endured as a woman
in an all-male military prison.  Therefore, if someone has access to
some proprietary source code but chooses to cowardly uphold their NDAs
instead of following Prometheus, I have nothing but shame and contempt
for those persons.

When it comes to our beloved Calypso, we already have everything we
need: the TCS211 semi-src that was wrongfully withheld from Humanity
for a full 2 y (the time interval from the first public demand for the
disclosure of this semi-src until its liberation) by those shameworthy
and contemptible persons I just spoke of was liberated in the fall of
2013, and the PCB layout that served as the basis for our FCDEV3B was
liberated in the spring of 2015.  Thus that particular wrong is now in
the past - except that whenever someone asks why I started my own
FreeCalypso project instead of joining OsmocomBB, the only answer I
can give them is that I refuse to participate in a project that is
rooted in cowardice and pandering to immoral copyright regimes.

But there is plenty more proprietary software in the world, and I
vehemently disagree with the Free Software Foundation and their ilk
who believe that the right way to free the world from proprietary
software is to waste innumerable human lifetimes reimplementing it all
from scratch.  Like the FSF et al, I believe that proprietary software
should not exist - but I have a completely different opinion on how to
get there.  Instead of wasting lifetimes making a from-scratch
reimplementation of every proprietary program in the world, we need to
convince all of the world's wage slave employees and contractors with
access to valuable proprietary sources to join Prometheus and Chelsea
and leak those sources, i.e., all of the world's proprietary source
code needs to be leaked, and every potential leaker must become an
actual leaker.

But leaking proprietary sources is only the first part, and the other
equally important part is what happens to those sources after they are
leaked.  The documents Chelsea uploaded to Wikileaks have been read by
millions of people, but sadly more technical projects based on leaked
sources do not receive the attention they deserve - instead our project
is surrounded by a wall of ostracism.  This situation needs to change:
a source leak does no one any good if the FLOSS projects resulting
from that leak are shunned and ostracized, and such shunning of
fruits-of-leaks projects is nothing but an insult to the courageous
NDA-breakers who are the origin of the leaks.

The world needs more free software of the second kind, free sw that is
not a from-scratch reimplementation, but a direct derivative of a
leaked proprietary source, made in valiant disregard of all copyrights
and other nonsense.  Right now our FreeCalypso is the only project of
this kind that I am aware of, but rather than focus on our exceptional
nature, we need to be shining a beacon of shame on the rest of the
world - why are others not doing likewise in other areas of computing?
Cellular telephony is not the only area of computing that is dominated
by proprietary software without competitive free alternatives, there
surely are plenty of others - why aren't there more people out there
in every imaginable area of computing taking leaked proprietary sources
and turning them into free software projects through a trivial act of
disregarding copyrights?

Take FPGAs for example: there are only two chip vendors in the world
that make FPGAs of large enough logic capacity to be interesting
(brand A and brand X), and compiling logic for both FPGA brands
requires the use of their respective proprietary software.  Given how
big Altera and Xilinx are, surely there has to be *someone* out there
who has a leaked copy of the source for their logic synthesis, P&R and
configuration bit generation software - how can there not be?  There
may even be a small circle of people who are quietly sharing those
leaked sources with each other in a hush-hush, whisper-whisper manner.
But why in the hell are they doing this cowardly hush-hush, whisper-
whisper routine?  Why aren't such leaks loudly announced to the whole
world, and why is there no one taking such leaks, hosting them on a
prominently advertised site (like we do on our FTP site), importing
the leaked source into a git or Hg repository and launching a FLOSS
project based on that source?

I similarly hear on occasion about someone here or there having a copy
of the source for Solaris or VxWorks or some other potentially
interesting proprietary sw, but it's always along the lines of "you
can get a copy if you want, but you need to be quiet about it".  I
have consistently refused to participate in such hush-hush, whisper-
whisper business - in my view a source leak is useless unless it is
made truly public and its public availability is loudly announced from
the mountaintops so that anyone who might potentially be interested
will become aware of its existence and will be able to join or start a
FLOSS project treating that leaked source as free software, like we
are doing in FreeCalypso.

All I can say in closing is that I hope that with our dear sister
Chelsea now a free woman, more people will see that the Truth prevails
in the end, and hopefully we will see not only more leaks, but more
projects making direct practical use of those leaks.

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mychaela Nadezhda Falconia,
a fellow trans woman