To Help A Helpless Dog

I sometimes have a hard time when looking to friends who know and have power to do something but only watch. I often asked this my heart,

"why would you let blood spilled when you could stop them from fooling themselves?"

"Why you only watch them, the buzzers, flaunting all the money they got from political play?"

"Why won't you stop them?"

Now, I am in the similar position. And I realize why they just watch these all as if it was only a show. Again, I need to suck my own words back.

===

Had a case against an ISP that tampering our DNS requests because of a Ministry that trying to apply censorship nation wide. They want to install that censorship to our institution which actually by the law should be prohibited.

I was angered because of that. That ministry such a cowardice using that ISP and not going after our institution which was an ISP in itself. May be because in the past they had pushed their agenda directly and failed. And now they are using third party as a change of tactics?

As a result, my work as an IT compromised. I often found many failed DNS requests. As a part of my job, I reported the issue to my boss and then we reported them to the ISP.

Long story short, I found out that the problem actually a national topic. And the ISP was under the pressure to do the same thing to other institutions like mine. Holy cow! I thought the problem only to my own institution, but they do it also to others.

Many of those institutions also fight back against this unlawful dictatorship. In fact, they were doing their own retaliations since years ago. My institution is not the extreme, actually. And they kept it themselves also. Grrr...!

What the ISP did was wrong and they don't have a strong footing. I also could chase the Ministry because it pushed its agenda by bypassing many laws using a law that was recent and full of ambiguity.

We could even clashed that Ministry with our own Ministry (Higher Education) for stepping their boundaries. Especially when our country's law ensure the freedom of our institutions for researching things.

I could even escalating the ISP for a breach of contract. I mean, my institution is an IP Transit client and they even dared to interrupted our pipeline. I could brought this to our legal department to study the contract with that ISP. I think we have the confident with this sue.

A friend of mine who got the direct line to one of the Commissioner in that ISP also told me to go to the said Ministry also. He knows higher people there and he wants me to help him scold them.

I know I could've said,

"F*ck your one million .id program! What is the use of all those .id but most of them are being hosted outside?

Why would you blame innocent people instead of chasing the doers? Even, I, a single person, could track the original poster. Why don't you chase the one that make subversive content instead of punishing other people hard by crippling their infrastructure?

I mean, come on! Them buzzers flaunting their ID and no longer anonymous like they used to. You could chase them. You could hunt them, if you are willing. But, no, you chose the censorship route.

You deter our infrastructure so bad that now people love to have GMail and other more reliable email providers than us.

Damn it! I'm so sad with this.

You make them more reliable than us!

I know DMARC, SPF and DKIM. I know how to setup Reverse DNS. I know the best limit rate. I know how to handle backscatters. I know how to properly setup email infrastructure.

But now! You made me cannot compete on equal ground with them.

How can I compete with so many failed DNS requests?

How can I compete with GMail and friends that have unlimited space also?

Did you know that they are all hosted outside our country? If something happens, it would be beyond our jurisdiction. Don't you have a sense of duty to protect our citizens by doing good infrastructure here?

I'm trying to make our own infrastructure sexy. So sexy that it also comes with added bonus of applying our country law protection to our own people. So sexy that people trust us to use it.

And you ruined that!"

And that's my imaginary scold might be.

Me? Leveraging this issue? Chasing this case to be solved once and for all? To be the one that pull the trigger?

Nah! I'm too scared. People could be stirred to label me as a prodigal who loves porn and terrorism. With so many people could be stirred by those reasons, I don't have the passion to chase the matter.

I mean, look at what happened with Snowden. He is now lumped with Assange, even though they are different. I don't want to be the next Snowden. Being a silly who wanted to defend his country but marked as a traitor instead. Sad.

I had a one night of contemplating with someone. And she said that I should stop caring too much to other people. May be this time I should listen to her. Although it was about something else, but I think the principle is the same. Ha... ha... ha....

I don't know. I'm just an old man inside. Though I'm still young, but my soul not. This time I'm throwing a towel.

To help people who could bite you is a tricky thing. I used to have the energy with Free/Open Source Software movement. But, for the democracy of this country? I don't know. You go!

===

May be this time I'm tired. May be  next time I'll do something about it. Like one of my friend decided to forget about doing his own business and started to live his life by working as a worker. He is too tired to do his own business.

Lo, behold! He didn't stay long employed. May be I will start to fight this battle. For our country! :P

But, hey, I'm not that naive. Since the very beginning I had realized that there would be consequences when trying to help others. Especially the uninformed ones. The worst of it was expecting that they would bite you back as a retaliation.

Like Jesus nailed to the cross. Like William Wallace betrayed by the Prince of Scotland. Like Guevara killed by the very government he was liberating.

Those are the extreme examples. But, hey, know the extremes before jump the shark is a nice start. So I know that when tomorrow comes and the one that I helped crossed me, I know that it was part of the risk.