One of the best magazines ever produced was 2600.
It’s a hackers quarterly, designed for folks who really wanted to know how stuff actually worked. So they tinkered, encoded, decoded, figured out, and all sorts of great stuff. The name of the journal itself based on the Hz noise frequency an old Captain Crunch whistle would make… and when you blew it into a phone, that tone would allow the user to make a free call at a coin operated phone.
…and when’s the last time you saw one of those?
Of course, today? 2600 ain’t what it used to be… and the first folks who will tell you that are the writers, editors, and contributors of America’s greatest hackers quarterly.
So what happened? Well… the PATRIOT Act happened. Hackers thinking they could breathe easier now that “terrorist” had replaced them as the worst things in the world (TM) suddenly realized that their ability to tinker — the so-called “grey hat” hacker — was over, at least in zine form while the rest of the community went underground.
Obviously with all the hubbub over the PATRIOT Act, NSA metadata (not that anyone cares about private commercial data — banks and corporations know more about you than your own mother), libraries, bank account information, spending habits, and so forth the fact remains that our 1st Amendment and 4th Amendment rights to privacy really don’t seem to bear much weight.
Sacrifice a little freedom; you’ll get that security (we promise).
Allow me to posit the following:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The 1st Amendment has been construed to imply all sort of things the Founders never intended: the “separation clause” between church and state, campaign finance, stolen valor, obscenity laws (to a point), and the right to burn a flag. Likewise, the 4th Amendment has been construed to allow a right to privacy, though this right seems utterly defenseless in the face of national security threats. The 14th Amendment gives one the right to have an abortion — something I’m sure the drafters had precisely in mind when they crafted it… but I digress.
Perhaps we’re pushing back against the infringements on our civil liberties with the wrong set of jurisprudence.
Consider our 2nd Amendment. What did the Founders intend with the 2A? A firm literal translation? I have the individual right to own firearms, and that right shall not be infringed by my government — that’s the obvious. Why? Because the Founders knew two things: (1) free men required self-defense, and (2) free men required the means to defend themselves.
Now obviously, the left caricatures this argument into something approximating whether everyone should own a tank. Or a nuclear weapon. Or a missile battery. And while proper God-fearing Americans would identify missile batteries as “a good Fourth of July” the argument is a narrow extrapolation of a specific type of weapon as a form of self-defense.
What are other means of self-defense? Even in an era where low-budget terrorism is demonstrating that firearms and explosives in the wrong hands can really ruin someone’s day, Americans by and large have experienced a different form of disarmament no less invasive to our civil liberties (or our ability to defend them) than a massive gun confiscation program.
We just don’t realize it. Or at least, we don’t realize it in numbers.
Hackers always bristles at being caricatured as folks who went in and caused mayhem. Those were called crackers — the malicious sort that breaks in and publishes 10 million credit card numbers. The comparison of a hacker to a cracker is akin to comparing your champion clay pigeon shooter or firearms collector to the Tsarnaev brothers or Osama Bin Laden. One set is peaceful and law-abiding, the other set are violent and malevolent.
Yet it’s not just the hacking community that deserves some consideration for their rights being violated under an admittedly elastic view of the 2nd Amendment entailing self-defense. Shouldn’t I be able to read whatever books I want under the premise that knowledge is power? Should I not also be able to print, disseminate, and share open sourced information about how objects work? Invasive TSA searches? NSA metadata? Government snooping? Probable cause ordinances? Let’s take it further: what about the idea of “patented foods” and other such irrationalities forced upon us by commercial giants? At what point does a “Robin Hood” principle apply when the government overstretches?
Believe it or not, we are 800 years in the wake of one of the greatest liberating documents known to mankind: the Magna Carta. English nobles stood up and demanded a charter of liberties to protect themselves from the tyrannical overreach and despotic taxation of King John (once Prince John) in the wake of Richard the Lionheart’s Second Crusade and subsequent imprisonment by the Holy Roman Emperor for 65,000 pounds of silver — three years revenue for England.
The English people, though they loved their king, could not bear the weight of King John’s rule and the cost of his wars. 15 years after the death of the Lionheart, the English nobles had enough, and asserted their rights by force of arms and in the name of their civil liberties.
Certainly the English remember the Magna Carta’s significance:
On its 700th anniversary, in 1915, the Scottish legal scholar William McKechnie called the Charter “a clear enunciation of the principle that the caprice of despots must bow to the reign of law; that the just rights of individuals, as defined by law and usage, must be upheld against the personal will of kings”. A century on, and Magna Carta’s reverential status has grown monumentally. Mythologised or not, it is pre-eminent among all English statutes of liberty, the nearest we have to a founding national document. It is the basis of legal systems around the world. It is our greatest export.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could recapture the civil liberties we seem to be forfeiting for safety against perceived threats? The tool to do this might very well be embedded in a legal exploration of the consequences of the 2nd Amendment’s individual right to self-defense in the name of civil liberty.
Your modest proposal for the day… I’ll let the lawyers cleave these musings in two. Yet the defense of our civil liberties and “the security of a Free State” is clearly outlined in the Second Amendment.
The PATRIOT Act might not have touched on firearms, but they have confiscated a great deal of our right of self-defense when it comes to the Information Age. Perhaps when our government trusts us enough to be hackers, tinkerers, purchasers of books, and disseminators of ideas such as 2600 are free to publish as they please what they please. Then maybe we’ll reframe the argument on civil liberties that we seem to have lost these past 15 years.
…and what a thing to say, “when our government trusts us enough.” Sounds like just the thing the Second Amendment was designed to remedy.
