Hacking policy talk at HAR2009

Had fun doing talk this afternoon at HAR2009. While I was taking a nap afterward someone wrote a very nice review on the HAR wiki.

I re-iterated many of the points I made at the CCC-conference in Berlin. My main points were also written down in english in a recent interview with the Indian Center for Internet & Society.

To spice things up a bit I added a new aspect about areas of public sector IT that should be under ultimate control by public sector organisations. I'm still refining these ideas but this is the gist of it:

In modern nations many laws and policies are implemented through software and supporting computer systems. Control over these systems is therefore control over the functioning of the state and its laws. A democratic government should therefore have total control over critical information processing functions, on behalf of its citizens. Having access to the sourcecode and the right to compile it into working binaries is a crucial part of this control. Examples of area's of application are voting tabulation, national defense&security, the police- and justice system, power grids, water and sewage systems, Air-traffic, harbour and transport control systems and the national media. Opensourcing these critical government applications and supporting systems is therefore a required step for continued national sovereignty.

The CC-licenced slides are here: ODF, PDF. Thanks to Y0landa for taking the above picture and making it available.

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