I’m sharing a short piece of writing, with a slight modification I made to it by adding some information:

Investigating and publicizing historical revisionism is a crime that gets you jail time and can even cost you your life. In 2011, Obama signed a law that allows terrorism suspects to be detained indefinitely without any kind of trial or due process. Anyone who publicly opposes the powers that be is labeled a terrorist by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote the diligent monitoring of communication channels.

What does all this have to do with computing? In this group, I have mentioned on several occasions a theorist and “hacker” named Richard Stallman who, while he cannot be categorized as a “Third Positionist” or anything of the sort, holds a very complete ideology of what freedom is.

Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and over the three decades that followed, his perspectives — extreme at times, dismissed by the media as “antics” — were ridiculed and ignored as paranoia. But here we are, well into 2013, and his “what if?” questions, once deemed “paranoid,” have become reality.

Even recently, it has been easy to write off Richard Stallman as a paranoid zealot, someone who lost touch with reality long ago. A sort of eternal computer hippie, the perfect embodiment of the archetype of the spiritual computer nerd living in a basement. His beard, his hair, his clothing… in our world of appearances, it is simply very easy to ignore him.

His views have always been extreme. His only computer is a “Lemote Yeelong” netbook, because it is the only computer that runs exclusively free software (no firmware blobs, no proprietary BIOS; it is all free). He also refuses to own a cell phone, because they are too easy to track. Until a cell phone equivalent to the Yeelong exists, Stallman doesn’t want one.

He doesn’t use Facebook or any social network that captures users’ private data in ways that infringe their freedom. In general, all software should be free. Or, as the Free Software Foundation puts it:

“As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society. Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us.”

Free software to fight controlling governments and spies? Malicious corporations that want to control the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? To ordinary people, all of this is “paranoia,” and they write Stallman and the FSF off as insane — but we know very well those “pals” who want to control everything, and their modus operandi.

Obama signed the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act], allowing US citizens to be detained indefinitely without any kind of trial or due process, merely for being suspected of terrorism. At the same time, we have Internet control — websites can be pulled off the network, again without any kind of trial or due process — while also establishing the monitoring of Internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities have labeled opponents, branding them as terrorists, and you can see where this is heading.

If this reminds you of China and feels similar to totalitarian regimes, you are not alone. Even the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA [the US filmmakers’ association], proudly proclaims that what has worked for China, Syria, Iran and others should work for the United States. China’s Great Firewall and similar filtering systems are glorified as useful solutions in what is supposed to be the free world.

The crux of the matter here is that, unlike days of old, when repressive regimes built networks of secret police and informants to monitor communications, all that is needed today is to have control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, and every kind of device play a role in virtually all communications. Do you think you are safe when you communicate face to face? Think again. How did you arrange that meeting? By phone? On the web? And what do you have in your pocket or wallet, always connected to the network?

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years, and most people never take him seriously. Yet as the world changes, the importance of being able to review what the code on your device does — or having someone else do it, in case you lack the skills — becomes ever more evident. If we lose the ability to verify what our own computers are doing, we are done for.

This is the true core of the Free Software Foundation’s and Stallman’s beliefs: that proprietary software wrests control away from the user, which can lead to disastrous consequences, especially now that we depend on computers for virtually everything we do. The fact that Stallman foresaw this almost three decades ago is remarkable and vindicates his activism. It justifies the thirty years of the Free Software Foundation.

And in these times, we will probably need free and open-source software more than ever. At the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (2011), Cory Doctorow gave a talk titled “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation.” In it, Doctorow warns that the general-purpose computer — and more specifically, users’ control over general-purpose computers — is perceived as a threat by the groups that hold power. The copyright wars? Nothing more than a prelude to the real war.

“As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won’t be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body,” explains Doctorow. “So when I get into a car — a computer I put my body into — with my hearing aid — a computer I put inside my body — I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests.”

And this is truly the essence of it all. With computers taking over things like hearing, driving, and more, we really cannot afford to be shut out of them. We need to be able to look inside and see what they are doing, to make sure we are not being monitored, filtered, or whatever else — this is not paranoia. It is reality.

“Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks,” warns Doctorow. “And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on without them.”

This is why you should not use an iPhone. This is why you should support GNU/Linux, even if you use Windows. This is why you should support Apache, even if you run IIS. The time will come when being free or open will no longer be a fun perk, but an indispensable necessity.