Open Source Organisations should leave the USA

The USA abuse the internet to spy on every citizen of every nation in the world. They built a disgusting surveillance apparatus to record and store our private communications. They destroy privacy, democracy and freedom. They want to control our thoughts, to undermine free speech and to enslave the rest of the world. And they use Open Source Software to do this. It is time to leave a country which surpassed the threshold and became a totalitarian surveillance state.

Many if not most Open Source organisations are US-based: the Mozilla foundation, the Apache foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Linux foundation. I am member of the Python Software Foundation and the Plone Foundation, which are US-based as well.

The NSA can enforce great companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google to collaborate by integrating backdoors or by opening their API to surveillance. The NSA has access to customer data on all systems run by US-based companies. When really big companies are unable to secure their customers data, small foundations are fair game to the NSA. Employees of the foundations who live in the USA and to a greater extent foundation members who are not legal US citizens work under unaccaptable circumstances. They are defenseless. They are at the mercy of a state within the state. They could be detained at any time without any legal assistance. The NSA can browbeat Open Source developers to include backdoors or security bugs in the source code of Open Source Software. As long as the code is open, the community can have an eye on this, but when the NSA manipulates the compilation of software packages it is much more difficult to discover a backdoor.

I am well aware that goverments of other nations collaborate with the NSA. Especially the Five Eyes. The government of Germany acts like a semi-independent state. But the core state of surveillance are the USA. Add to this the US-strategy to enslave the rest of the world with secret trades treaties like TTIP oder TISA and you have the big picture of a tyranny destroying freedom and democracy throughout the world.

I think it is time to leave the United States and search a safe harbor for Open Source Software outside the USA, the Five Eyes and other surveillance states.