Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. Additionally, he has a tech entrepreneur background and loves good whisky and fast motorcycles.
An Argentinian court ordered an interim censorship of The Pirate Bay this week, at the request of the copyright industry. It affects all ISPs in Argentina, and spills over into…
A ten-year study in Sweden shows a sharply falling popular support for mass surveillance, even if necessary to protect national security. Over a ten-year period, opinion has shifted ten points,…
There's no shortage of justifications for new surveillance powers. One of the more disturbing ones is a trend toward outlawing the mere attempt of maintaining your own privacy against intrusion.…
While the NSA is collecting vast amounts of data about everybody, we need to learn from history that even basic population records have been used for systemic discrimination and genocide.…
In findings that contradict Facebook and the NSA, teenagers are more aware of privacy than ever. But privacy isn't about "keeping everything to yourself". It's much more nuanced than that.…
When dismissing privacy concerns, many people use the idea that since they haven't done anything wrong, they have "nothing to hide". This disregards the most fundamental fact: it's not them…
Our parents had certain rights and liberties that they took for granted, inherited from our grandparents. They have not been passed on to our children. That is an enormous failure…
The advertising industry has created a private mass-surveillance nightmare on the web, in addition to the government spooks. One resurfacing suggestion to solve this has been a "no surveillance please"…
There is an alarming lack of understanding of basic information hygiene among people at large. In the next decade, this is going to come back to bite quite a few…
I grew up in Western Europe in the 1980s. My teenage years were characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the now-collapsed Soviet Union. We learned that…