path: root/draft/rfd4/rfd4.md

%%%
title = "Nonfree Software Mandates and Lockdowns"
abbrev = "Nonfree Software Mandates and Lockdowns"
area = "Society"
workgroup = "Libre Society"
submissiontype = "independent"
ipr = "none"
keyword = ["education", "software", "government", "covid", "society"]
#updates = [ <++> ]
#date = 2003-04-01T00:00:00Z

[seriesInfo]
name = "Internet-Draft"
value = "Request for Discussions 4"
stream = "independent"
status = "informational"

[[author]]
initials = "A."
surname = "Yu"
fullname = "Andrew Yu"
#role = "author"
organization = "The 2nd School Aff. to FDU"
  [author.address]
  email = "andrew@andrewyu.org"
  uri = "https://www.andrewyu.org/"
%%%

.# Abstract

During COVID, many governments mandate usage of nonfree software on ordinary
citizens, with questionable constitutionality.  Some governments impose extreme
lockdown.  This memo discusses its injustices and consequences.

.# Status of This Memo

This memo documents a small email thread to the LibrePlanet-discuss maialing
list[@THREAD] and adds some elaboration.

This document is a draft.

This document describes the author's viewpoint.  Distribution of this memo is
unlimited.


{mainmatter}

# Original Message
I am a secondary school student from Shanghai, China.  This email discusses the
problems I discovered in the Chinese educational system, in terms of students'
right to freedom in computing and options to control the COVID-19 pandemic from
the standpoint of a person living in China.

When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, students were required to watch lecture videos
produced by the city's education department for twenty minutes, then join the
Tencent Meetings room to discuss in their own class for 10--15 minutes.

Watching the videos wasn't an issue for me.  Our apartment has cable TV, where
the videos are broadcast; there was also a website that played the livestream
without JavaScript.  However, Tencent Meetings presented a problem to me.

At the time, I run Arch Linux. (Currently, I run Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre, a
Free Software-only distribution, which would have made this even harder.)
Tencnet Meetings, claiming to support "all operating systems and platforms",
only supports Windows and macOS. (I wonder how they passed the resolution to
display that statement, I believe that they have many programmers who use
GNU/Linux.) (As of October 2021, a classmate noted that there is a "Linux
versuon".) School required Tencent Meetings, therefore I went through a hard
proccess to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtural machine---I believed that 7
would be slightly better than 10 in terms of privacy, though as always with
nonfree software, I can't really know for sure.  It was slightly unstable,
which is an annoyance, for example the connection from the Windows audio server
to pulseaudio would stop working from time to time, but it was acceptable.
Though my setup was okay (in the perspective of my school), it left me in a
psycological crisis about education and freedom. More on that later.

Offline classes resumed in May 2020, as most of China has minimal cases of
COVID-19.  This freed me from using a proprietary non-privacy-respecting
bloated piece of software in a virtual machine, but it did not free me from
teachers' requirement to use WeChat (think of it as the equiv of WhatsApp in
China), Xiaoheiban (A proprietary classroom information distribution system),
or other pieces of nonfree software.

Similar to the beliefs stated in the GNU Education project, I believe that
schools and educaion are a means of sharing information and knowledge.  I
understand that meeting software and lesson management software are used as
means of distributing knowledge, rather than the knowledge being distributed
themselves.  However, I believe this doesn't lead to the argument that the
mandate of proprietary software usage is just, for three reasons as below.

1. There are always going to be curious students who wonder how the technology
works.  Proprietary software denies them this right.

2. The usage of proprietary software when young may implant dependence on it in
the future.

3. Education is a right and a responsility.  Mandating nonfree software in
education adds unjust responsibilities on students.

Point 1 and 2 are explained well in the Education section of the GNU website,
therefore I am not going to focus on them.  Focusing on the third point:

Under laws of almost all countries, citizens have the right to an education.
Traditionally, this involves going to school, meeting teachers and classmates,
listening to classes, taking notes, passing exams (I have strong opinions that
exam systems ought to change to better represent individual talents, but this
is out of scope of this memo.) and finishing homework.  Students loose a slight
bit of their time and freedom of movement (as in, it's not easy to move to a
house 100 miles away from school), in exchange for being educated.

However, with schools requiring the use of nonfree software, in effect students
are required to give up their privacy, and digital freedom, both crucial rights
in modern society, as the effect of needing to use nonfree software.  The right
to education has effectively turned into an exchange for other basic rights.
This is not acceptable.

Furthermore, in countries like China, 9 years of education is mandatory for
children.  I understand this law as a means to the goal of creating a
knowledgeble and educated society, which is good.  However, when mandatory
edication mandates nonfree software, it deduces to "children are required to
use nonfree software".  So, being a child here is pretty unlucky, because there
goes your right to privacy, your independence, and your freedom, because of a
law that's supposed to help society.

We need to stop using nonfree software in education.

In th beginning of this email, I mentioned COVID-19.  You might be wondering
how China fully put the pandemic under control in just 5 months, which is
seemingly impossible if all you know is how the US dealt with this situation.

The answer is that China is implementing strict contact tracing.  This is
extremely easy because of the prevaliance of survillance.  Many would argue
that this is a benefit of survillance, which I believe to be true.  However, no
comparisons were given between losing privacy and increasing the risk or
infection.  Briefly inspecting this idea in my head, it's really hard to think
about---privacy and freedom is important in the long term, at the cost of many
lives in the pandemic.  The lives of these dead are gone---they lose not only
privacy and computing freedom, they lose their lives, which costs them their
oppurtunity to persue their dreams in this world, and they have no freedom of
choice, speech, etc as they aren't alive.  Once again, this is hard to wrap my
mind around, therefore I would especially like to invite the community to
discuss this.

The contact tracing system used is not Free Software.  At first I didn't
understand why (except for the explanation that they want to profit from
harming citizens), but I noticed that the authenticity and accuracy of the
system may be affected if users are allowed to modify their software.  This
seems to be the core of some problems with regards to software freedom---here,
the user is not running software to complete their tasks.  Rather, it's the
government's way to maintain public safety, therefore I believe that whether
users should be able to modify software in these conditions is up to
discussion.  Back to the point, since a green-code proof from the system is
needed to get in a lot of places, a person basically needs to use proprietary
software to live a normal life (to get into coffee shops, for example).

In America and other countries, things aren't that good either.  For one the
pandemic isn't controlled well.  As a consequence, a lot of places require
negative COVID tests to do stuff.  A thread on the LibrePlanet mailing list
discusses this issue, as a lot of these tests require nonfree software on
users' phones.  Note that this thread spans several months long, as it is a hot
discussion, so look in the september and october archives too.  The thread
explains the implications clearly, thus I am not discussing it here.

(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2021-08/msg00008.html.)

Additionally, I heard that some US courts require Zoom for online cases,
therefore it seems that a person' right to judicial justice comes at the cost
of digital freedom.  I can't confirm this, but if that's true, I'm truely
disappointed at the judicial system, even though I'm not a US citizen.

I am looking foward to a freer society, or at least one where the above
problems get solved.

Sincerely, Andrew Yu

# Reply from jahoti
Thank you for your very interesting and insightful piece on the topic!  It's
nice to hear the personal perspective of someone inside China too, being the
unfortunate rarity it is.

You're unfortunately not alone in this; the way educational institutions (and
no doubt corporations) the world over made such sudden changes, even if it was
understandable, is doubly traumatic for those of us whose perspectives were
never considered. The only option I could come up with for my classes was to
not go- and I took a whole year off just trying to reverse engineer the
necessary software!

I completely agree- the fact that non-free software is required to meet legal
obligations, let alone standard expectations, is completely unacceptable!


However, speaking more broadly, using software in education is itself up for
debate. That's not to say computers should be banned from classrooms or that
schools shouldn't teach computing skills; rather, some uses seem to be less
about genuine evidence of educational value and more about schools' (or
governments', or technology companies') lust for novelty. Some prudence might
improve education, save money, and make using free software a more viable
option for students (and even teachers).


For that matter (as a slightly off-topic personal grievance), using software
well would be a huge improvement. Digital signatures have been around for more
than 20 years, yet they have still not made it into mainstream use, and in fact
some websites implement support for *written signatures*!

Indeed, any weighting of freedom against death is going to be a deeply uneasy
one.


For what it's worth, I would eschew a simple dichotomy to introduce a third
option: providing tools and encouraging citizens to log location data for
themselves, which then helps them help contact tracers. In countries where
authorities are trusted and can easily reach their citizens, this seems like a
very fair balance; civil liberties are respected without significantly
hampering disease control efforts.


Of course, if distrust is widespread or mass media are ineffective, this
doesn't work, and in that case I'd argue limited surveillance requirements
would be warranted. The key word, however, if limited: under absolutely no
circumstances must even a single data entry be available to the police, or
marketers, or the venue a person entered, or anyone except contact tracers
working with the individual whose record it is if they are confirmed to be
infected. It must also not include any data except that which can reliably be
used to significantly improve tracing efforts- simply the fact that something
could be mildly useful is not, in my opinion, an excuse for capturing it and
putting it in a database. Of course, it must also be deleted once it is no
longer potentially useful.


It's worth noting the irony that those areas were violating civil liberties
would be least acceptable are also the kind that would have been more willing
to do so.

This is indeed a double injustice- as well as proprietary software, constant
possession of a digital device (probably a tracking one) is made a prerequisite
for many common activities as well.


In relation to the right to modify contact tracing software, there is
definitely a discussion to be had! Personally I see no reason to restrict that
right; relying heavily on the validity of the data such systems produce seems
doomed to fail for other reasons anyway, and fabricating a plausible dataset is
far harder than just "forgetting your phone at home". 

Definitely- let us hope that these measures die with the emergency they were a
response to, and the others can be fought off successfully. 

# Epilogue

<reference anchor='SHCM'
target='https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/01/covid-lockdown-extended-for-parts-of-shanghai-as-city-struggles-to-control-omicron'>
<front>
        <title>On Free Software, Education in China and the COVID-19 Pandemic</title>
        <author initials='M.' surname='Farrer' fullname='Martin Farrer'>
            <organization>The Guardian</organization>
        </author>
        <date year='2021' month="October" />
    </front>
</reference>

It's closed management in Shanghai again (March 2022). This is the second
citywide lockdown. The last time was in 2020.

The delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 is partly lethal, and highly contagious. It
has wrecked havoc around the world, especially in Europe, causing hundreds of
thousands of infections and thousands of deaths.[Citation needed] If it erupts
in densely populated cities such as Shanghai, the consequences will be
unimaginable.

<reference anchor='OMCNLM'
target='https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies/pages/news/news/2022/01/the-omicron-variant-sorting-fact-from-myth'>
<front>
        <title>The Omicron variant: sorting fact from myth</title>
        <author>
            <organization>World Health Organization</organization>
        </author>
        <date year='2022' month="January" />
    </front>
</reference>

There was a recent global pandemic of the Omicron variant. Originally I was
terrified, I thought it was a "killer" variant similar to Delta. However,
after reading the relevant information, I found that the Omicron variant is
extremely contagious but has quite low mortality rates, slightly higher
mortality rate of influenza.[@!OMCNLM]
Therefore, some countries and regions have adopted
a normal influenza policy, that is, only the close contacts of the patient are
isolated at home, and several tests are completed during the incubation period.
If the test results are all negative, the close contacts are allowed to resume
normal life.


<reference anchor='HTLOB'
target='http://www.eeo.com.cn/2022/0311/525034.shtml'>
<front>
        <title>Erroneous Treatment of Personnel in Huating Hotel causes outbreak</title>
        <author>
            <organization>The Economic Observer</organization>
        </author>
        <date year='2022' month="March" />
    </front>
</reference>

Typically in Shanghai, imported cases detected at airports and train stations
were easy to isolate and track. However, it was the poor management of the
hotel that received the quarantined people that caused Omicron to spread like
crazy.[@HTLOB]
This also led the government to find that Omicron's asymptomatic
infections accounted for a large proportion of infected people, which also
showed that Omicron was less destructive.

<reference anchor='LDPL'
target='https://www.shbsq.gov.cn/shbs/bsdt/20220414/337001.html'>
<front>
        <title>Policy regarding lockdowns</title>
        <author>
            <organization>Shanghai Government</organization>
        </author>
        <date year='2022' month="March" />
    </front>
</reference>
<reference anchor='NCLS'
target='http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/11/WS622b0f91a310cdd39bc8c180.html'>
<front>
        <title>Shanghai schools pivot to e-learning following COVID-19 outbreak</title>
        <author>
            <organization>The Economic Observer</organization>
        </author>
        <date year='2022' month="March" />
    </front>
</reference>

On March 10, 2022, we were notified that the teaching activities of primary and
secondary schools in Shanghai will be online.[@NCLS] The effect of online teaching is
still incomparable to offline teaching, even without considering the ethical
concerns of software used (see section 1). I was surprised at the time,
especially after finding out that Omicron wasn't a big deal. Shanghai actually
adopted administrative measures of closed management. All residents must stay
at home, not go out, or even go to the nearest store to buy food, in order to
completely wipe out SARS-CoV-2.[@LDPL]

That there are actully many workers in Shanghai. Much of their work cannot be
done online from home. Lockdown means that they lose their source of income,
their purchasing power declines, and ultimately lead to long-term economic
problems; furthermore, because the city is now locked down, hospitals are not
accepting new patients, and even basic services such as ambulances and rescues
are very slow. Shanghai usually completes 80,000 surgical operations every day,
including routine chronic disease treatment, myocardial infarction, stroke and
other acute problems rescue, mild disease treatment, etc. This has caused
thousands of stroke and myocardial infarction patients to lose their
lives[Citation needed], and people with kidney disease are also approaching
kidney failure because they cannot complete dialysis. In contrast, as of April
14, 13 of the 300,000 infected people in Shanghai were severely ill to COVID,
none of the 13 had been vaccinated and all had serious underlying diseases. It
can be said that this outbreak has minimal impact on people. In today's aging
society, more patients with chronic diseases are delayed in treatment, with
serious long-term consequences. Even for families with relatively stable lives,
not being able to go out to exercise or buy food will affect our quality of
life.[Multiple citations needed]

Now some communities are gradually unlockdowned due to nobody testing positive
in a long time, and people can finally go downstairs to stroll in the
community, but they cannot leave the block.

It's hard to tell if a lot of extra deaths were related to the coronavirus
lockdown. However, the government, after all, knows how many people die every
day. If we compare the average death rate in 2019 with today's and find that
the current rate is much higher, our policies need to be improved - because the
virus itself cannot directly cause a large number of deaths. The ultimate
purpose of our government's policies is to benefit the people, not to disprove
other countries' slogans of "living with the virus" and to prove that they have
the ability to eliminate COVID.

Politicians often sacrifice the interests of the few at the expense of the many
in an emergency. Kant's philosophical school criticizes this policy because
there is no basic principle behind it, and it is easy to lead to the tyranny of
the majority.

During World War II, however, Turing cracked the Engima used to encrypt
communications in Nazi Germany. Churchill learned that the Nazis would attack
the city of Coventry, but in order not to let the Nazis know that the British
had cracked their code, and to ensure that more important German military
information could be stolen in the future, Churchill chose not to inform the
city. In order not to be discovered by the Germans and to protect greater
military secrets, Churchill decided not to warn Coventry. Tens of thousands of
British compatriots died in that bombing, but Britain helped the anti-fascist
countries win World War II by stealing follow-up communications. Without this
move, we are likely to be surrounded by a greater evil, namely fascism.

But this time, we are probably not sacrificing the interests of the few for the
good of the many. This time, the severe rate is extremely low, and the strict
blockade and prevention and control have led to more and wider trauma. We may
well be sacrificing the interests of the many for the interests of the few. Nor
can I think of any ethics and principles that compel us to do so.

The founder of classical liberalism, John Locke, believed that in order to
protect their negative freedoms (such as the right to life and property
rights), people ceded some of their freedoms and rights to the government, and
the government replaced the powerless individuals to protect their rights. But
when people shout "We need food" on the balcony, when someone is lying on the
ground of the community with a simple fracture and the ambulance needs to be
approved by the neighborhood committee and reported to the higher-level to
enter the community, we need to rethink the policy.


# Conclusion

To be written.

# Government Considerations

To be written.

{backmatter}

{numbered="false"}
# Acknowledgements

To be written.

{numbered="false"}
# Contributors

To be written.

<reference anchor='THREAD'
target='https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2021-10/msg00011.html'>
<front>
        <title>On Free Software, Education in China and the COVID-19 Pandemic</title>
        <author initials='A.' surname='Yu' fullname='Andew Yu'>
            <organization>The Second School affiliated to Fudan University</organization>
            <address>
                <email>andrew@andrewyu.org</email>
                <uri>https://www.andrewyu.org/</uri>
            </address>
        </author>
        <date year='2021' month="October" />
    </front>
</reference>