Introducing the libre-soc Column
libre hardware project lead's life is devastated
Dear readers,
Thank you for following along with me during the Dr. Peter Chen court case column. I have several FOIA’s in flight and many more stories to tell.
In a related arc, I recently found out my friend, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, who is an ethical libre hardware developer working on a very ambitious software project in hardware design has been targeted and I will be covering his case in the meantime. If one recalls Dr. Peter Chen’s case, one will remember the charges were that of repressed memory elicited in a therapy environment, through her therapist, the witness was led to believe that she had memories she had never recalled before. Washtenaw County Head Prosecutor Eli Savit hired repressed memory theorist Jim Hopper to lend legitimacy to the theory of repressed memory. Luke’s case also has a psychiatric arrow aimed at technologists. Two men, Calderwood and Lewis targeting this tech project have called for the founder’s sectioning — that is for Luke to be taken away and forcibly drugged in the government’s custody under psychiatric pretenses, in a letter to a county government official. Luke is incredibly concerned about his well-being and has fled his home and published a Last Will where his IP upon his death will be given to the Free Software Foundation.1
The libre-SoC project has been devastated by these two men, and I intend to report on the details in the following weeks, covering all aspects from the impact of the project to workings of psychiatric coercion to government involvement.
I am trying a new publishing practice of publishing in increments much like a git history as the police have been sent to my doorstep under a psychiatric guise of a 'wellness check' while I was researching this article. I plan to write more pugilistically as I am concerned for my safety and liberty and will send out updates as citations are added and edits are made. The Gutenberg press model publications seem to be stuck on of one print version for the rest of time can be adapted. I plan to visit topics such as GPL frontiers, hardware monopolies, and parens patriae, the psycho-legal-police state. Peeling past the many layers of hardware obfuscation, the technology underpinning libre-soc and much more involving the intellectual property legal history of the achievement of photolithographic masks and court precedents and alliances that lay the foundation for modern GPL landscape in Linux.
During the course of reporting on the persecution of technologists, my discourse and whatsApp accounts have been wiped deleting my contacts from the European security community which I am still trying to recover. My phone containing repressed memory research and my yubikey have been stolen as well locking me out of facebook. Last month two of my laptops containing my research has been stolen as well containing my FOIA's and many personal notes of nascent articles. My credit cards were frozen and Apple locked me out of my phone number by claiming the number with an e-sim and preventing migration to the device. My iCloud account is now only linked to a single device and if I lose that device I lose my research.
From eidetic systems logging backdoor intrusions to libre-soc open design preventing the insertion of backdoors and spying co-processors to Suchir Balaji being murdered for standing against security state interests of NSA director Nakasone on the board of chatGPT, we see psychiatry weaponized against technologists in the form of repressed memory charges, calling for individuals to be imprisoned in psych wards and the labelling of technologists psychotic or suicidal. It harkens back to Alan Turing’s charges of gross indecency — charged the same year homosexuality was officially labelled a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).2
If you ask ChatGPT if it has ties to the NSA it will lie and say no.3 It also claims there were no repressed memory claims against Dr. Peter Chen.
The technologists who want to bring computers out of the feature space of 2015 into modern era of eidetic systems and libre computers should not be suppressed and erased. Speaking on mass collection of private thoughts on ChatGPT against the backdrop of the decline of 2010-2015 style blogging and pagerank style indexing in an internet soaked with Search Engine Optimization, articles of significance are not findable — platforms do not implement search functionalities to surface interesting pieces leaving them to the vacillations of the recency bias of the Algorithm.4 Nor is anyone talking about the blackout of court opinions and suppression of legal knowledge on modern LLM’s or the buying out of casetext by Thomson Reuters putting legal knowledge behind a $500 dollar paywall and a law license in the last year.56 (Edit: However, I recently discovered casemine.com which is free. I liked the UI of casetext.com more where every thought was labelled with a number). I see it in context with the deprivation of library books when archive.org lost the lawsuit to keep its digital lending library open.7 These two huge resources are what I heavily leveraged during my writing of the The Honorable Darlene O’Brien’s Courtroom of Repressed Memory and there is a regression in what is possible now for reporting and reporters these days than to what was available in 2022. I see that technology has not meaningfully expanded since 2015 and we have actually moved backwards in terms of what technology is open to use and what is available in the digital commons.8
Against this picture of decline, some social developments are happening.
Technologists are being thrust into political persecution more and more as people look to them for advice and they have engaging insights they want to share. Many of the biggest secrets lie at the intersection of technology, the government, and tech companies where some tech leader-professor-prophet can come along and for instance comment on the proliferation of backdoors or how consumers overpay for insecure unauditable hardware largely propped up by interests of the surveillance state. 9
These voices should not be subject to the chilling effect of psychiatric attacks on the security and technology community.10
Sincerely,
Nina
The libre-soc mailing lists contain a backlog of messages from the last year of complaints regarding Calderwood, Lewis, psychiatry and medical concerns. An example: https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2024-June/006323.html
From my article three years ago, “In Alan Turing’s day, gross indecency (today known as being a gay man) carried the same connotations in the public mind as sexual child abuse,1 and this conflation was so strong that studies of gay men showed that many of them, if not most, very much feared blackmail [0]. Turing was convicted in 1952, only to be pardoned 60 years later after his apparent suicide when his life was left in ruins from the charges he faced two years earlier. Today the Turing Award, given out by the Association for Computing Machinery, is known as the Nobel Prize of computer science. Dr. Peter Chen is a Hall of Famer for his influential work on computer security and serves as a Fellow in that organization.”
“Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone is a leading expert in cybersecurity, technology advancement, and global cyber defense. In his career as an Army officer, he was pivotal in the creation of U.S. Cyber Command. He was the longest-serving leader of USCYBERCOM and also led the National Security Agency”
https://openai.com/index/openai-appoints-retired-us-army-general/
“That invisible hand, The Algorithm, is the real impresario. We control what we block and what lands in our inboxes, but we don’t control what shows up on our feeds (so at most, we control what we’re tempted to subscribe to only partially). An editor is a fickle beast, but at least we have some understanding of how the species operates. An algorithm is a black box, a little burst of inhumanity. It may be a conservative impulse, but I always opt for the company of the devil I know, especially when it’s a devil I often tend to admire.”
https://thepointmag.com/forms-of-life/what-is-substack-for-ii/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1fjbhy7/its_official_thomson_reuters_is_shuttering/
Nor is anyone talking about the media silence around cohesive hardware analysis, the power that lie in controlling such technologies via IP such that regular market news seems like a distraction, and the lack of analysis of hardware IP legal precedent and case law in Harvard and Yale IP journals.
https://blog.archive.org/2024/12/04/end-of-hachette-v-internet-archive/
“While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests.”
Aaron Swartz campaigned for a similar free and open internet downloading mostly public academic articles off of JSTOR. He also allegedly died by suicide. Suchir and Aaron are two technologists who’s deaths have been labelled a suicide.
Details pulled from https://www.aaup.org/article/aaron-swartz%E2%80%99s-legacy
But the only technologists that have risen appear to be machine learning experts who do not ever comment on hardware.
The excesses of psychiatry have been oft reported on and you can find some reading on madinamerica.com or PsychForce Report, and the writings of Thomas Szasz.