Coming Into The Country for Communications of the ACM
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Private Life in Cyberspace for Communications of the ACM
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The Great Work for Communications of the ACM
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Decrypting the Puzzle Palace for Communications of the ACM
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Will Japan Jack In? for Communications of the ACM
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Bill O' Rights Lite for Communications of the ACM
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A Plaintext On Crypto for Communications of the ACM
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Dad's Invisible Shield for Communications of the ACM
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Death from Above for Communications of the ACM
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Coming Into the Country
For the January, 1991 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other side.
Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might
exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to
exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate which expands with development.
Imagine a place were trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be
stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of
their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the
history of your personal affairs, where only children feel fully at home,
where the physics is psychology, and where everyone is as virtual as the
shadows in Plato's cave.
Such a place actually exists, if "place" is the right word for it. It
consists of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and
thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our electronic
processing and communication systems. I used to call it the Datasphere
until I read William Gibson's Neuromancer and discovered that he had
already given it the perfectly evocative name of Cyberspace.
Of course Gibson thought he was conjuring up some manifestation of a
fanciful future. In fact, Cyberspace has been around, with rapidly
increasing range and density, since that moment in March of 1876 when a
certain Mr. Watson encountered Alexander Graham Bell there.
It is still familiar to most people as the "location" of a long-distance
telephone conversation. But it is also the repository for all digital or
electronically transferred information, and, as such, it is the venue for
most of what is now commerce, industry, and broad-scale human interaction.
Indeed, if you have any money besides what's crumpled in your pocket, it's
probably in Cyberspace.
Few have even noticed this arising domain, despite the fact that most of us
use its resources daily. Every day millions of people use ATM's and credit
cards, place telephone calls, make travel reservations, and access
information of limitless variety without any clear perception of the
digital machinations behind these transactions.
Our financial, legal, and even physical lives are increasingly dependent on
realities of which we have only dimmest awareness. We have entrusted the
basic functions of modern existence to institutions we cannot name, using
tools we've never heard of and could not operate if we had.
Thus, for all its importance to modern existence, Cyberspace remains a
frontier region, across which roam the few aboriginal technologists and
cyberpunks who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer
interfaces, incompatible communications protocols, proprietary barricades,
cultural and legal ambiguities, and general lack of useful maps or
metaphors.
Certainly, the old concepts of property, expression, identity, movement,
and context, based as they are on physical manifestation, do not apply
succinctly in a world where there can be none.
Sovereignty over this new world is not well defined. Large institutions own
much of the hardware which supports it and therefore claim, with some
justification, to hegemony over the whole thing.
Some of the locals... the UNIX cultists, sysops, netheads and byte
drovers... are like the mountain men of the Fur Trade. They may be
somewhat uncivilized, but most of them have come here in the service of
corporations. However grudgingly, they tend to accept the idea that
institutions can own information.
Another group, the cyberpunks, are nomadic and tribal. They have an Indian
sense of property and are about as agreeable to the notion of proprietary
data as the Shoshones were to the idea that the Union Pacific owned the
landscape of southern Wyoming. By asserting their freedom of both movement
and access to the local resource... knowledge... they have developed a
culture in which the violation of institutional boundaries is inevitable.
This will lead to more adamant efforts at security. And they will be met
with an ascending symmetry of cracker ingenuity until either security is
perfect (at which time no system will be accessible) or the savages take on
civilization.
As communications and data processing technology continues to advance at a
pace many times faster than society can assimilate it, additional conflicts
have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical
world. Among the non-nerdly a kind of neo-Luddism is arising at the
prospect of being dragged by Brute Progress into a place where they can't
even take their bodies.
Every day it dawns on more ordinary corporate employees that they have
become "knowledge workers." They find themselves chained to a device which
is maddeningly uncooperative and inflexible in its mysterious requirements,
and with which they perform tasks of questionable necessity. Worse, each
time they master one opaque interface, their MIS master imposes on them
version 2.0 and they have to start all over again. They are stuck on the
Learning Curve of Sisyphus. They are not happy there.
And whether he works in an office or not, nearly everyone now has the
nagging suspicion that, somewhere out there are hard disks containing
information about his personal affairs which is either inaccurate or which
he would prefer than no one knew. Worse, he knows that there is little he
can do to alter this condition.
As a consequence, increasing numbers are coming to hate and fear not only
the technology itself but the people who create it. In a very short time,
the term "hacker" has gone from being an honorable appellation implying
computer wizardry to a malign epithet of digital nihilism. There is a
reason for this.
But Cyberspace is the homeland of the Information Age, the place where the
citizens of the future are destined to dwell. We will all go there whether
we want to or not and we would do better to approach the place with a
settler's determination to civilize it as rapidly as possible.
What would it mean to civilize Cyberspace? To some, the answer to this
question is simple and historically familiar: exterminate the savages,
secure the resources into corporate possession, establish tariffs, and
define culture strictly in terms of economy.
Such an approach, while highly advantageous to large institutions, might
have serious consequences for the individuals of the future, whose privacy,
freedom of expression, economic opportunity, and property rights could be
foreclosed in a Cyberspace of this design. Indeed, it calls into question
whether in the future the individual will count for very much at all.
Arising on the electronic frontier are questions which are subtle,
profound, and of fundamental importance to the way tomorrow's society will
function. With this column I hope to raise those questions and offer my
own modest speculations about how we might begin the process of answering
them.
This column will are also concern itself with the development of a new
social contract for the digital domain... sort of a Cyberspace equivalent
to the Code of the West... and an attendant definition of the rights and
responsibilities of the inhabitants. I also hope to help create an
awareness of the cultural implications of electronic design. And, finally,
I want to propose some fundamental revision of our notions of speech,
property, and place.
Big stuff. And easily ignored on that account. But a new world is being
born. Uncorrected flaws in its design will scale up along with the rest of
it. Today's minor misjudgements will become tomorrow's established
horrors.
An example from the past might serve to illuminate this point. In the
early days of broadcasting, the government decided that the airwaves (as
well as the frequency resolution of crystal set receivers) had such limited
bandwidth that it would be necessary for the government to license
broadcasters. Well and good. However, someone also decided that if the
government were going to regulate frequency allocation, it should regulate
content as well.
Thus what is today the most common form of expression exists under
constraints of governmental censorship which the founding fathers would
have found intolerable, all because of bureaucratic error which, at the
time, seemed too insignificant to correct.
Similar errors are being made today around the subject of intellectual
property and its interstate transport. In our zeal to protect this stuff
as though it were tangible as pig iron, we are enacting laws and
regulations which will almost certainly limit free expression in the future
unless we fix the system now. (See Dorothy Denning's article about Phrack
in this issue for a good example of what I'm talking about.)
Pretending that it ain't broke sure won't fix it, but, in the numerous
discussions I've had with members of the computer community, there doesn't
seem to be much willingness to tackle these issues at any depth. Most of
you have your attentions so firmly fixed on the concrete business at
hand... and important business it usually is... that it's hard to find time
for shadow-boxing abstractions.
"Hey, I do bus architecture, I'm no social philosopher," is the sort of
rejoinder I hear a lot. It's a hard one to argue with. Keep your head
down, do what you know, and hope it's all headed someplace good.
Trouble is, the rest of society is so utterly perplexed by digital
technology that most ordinary citizens are even less qualified than bus
architects to engage in cybernetic social philosophy. As readers of this
magazine, you are almost certainly more knowledgeable about the legal and
cultural ambiguities surrounding digital communication and property than
your computerphobic fellow citizens. You are thus well suited to the task
of civilizing Cyberspace. I hope you will join me on the electronic
frontier, because I believe it is time for that process to begin
consciously.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we are presently shaping the future
ethics and culture of Cyberspace. Only by bringing awareness to this task
will we create the sort of place we would want to send our children as
settlers.
Pinedale, Wyoming
Friday, November 9, 1990
Private Life in Cyberspace
For the June, 1991 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
I have lived most of my life in a small Wyoming town, where there is little
of the privacy which both insulates and isolates suburbanites. Anyone in
Pinedale who is interested in me or my doings can get most of the
information he might seek in the Wrangler Cafe. Between them, any five
customers could probably produce all that was known locally about me,
including a quite a number of items which were well known but not true.
For most people who have never lived in these conditions, the idea that
one's private life might be public knowledge...and, worse, that one's
neighbors might fabricate tales about him when the truth would do...is a
terrifying thought. Whether they have anything to hide or not (and most
everyone harbors something he's not too proud of), they seem to assume that
others would certainly employ their private peccadillos against them. But
what makes the fishbowl of community tolerable is a general willing ness of
small towns to forgive in their own all that should be forgiven. One is
protected from the malice of his fellows not by their lack of dangerous
information about him but by their disinclina tion to use it.
I found myself thinking a lot about this during a recent San Francisco
conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom. Like most of the attendees,
I had arrived there bearing the assumption that there was some necessary
connection between privacy and freedom and that among the challenges to
which computers may present to our future liberties was their ability to
store, transfer, and duplicate the skeletons from our closets.
With support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Apple Computer, the
WELL, and a number of other organiza tions, the confer ence was put on by
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibili ty, a group which has done
much to secure to Americans the ownership of their private lives.Their Man
in Washing ton, Marc Rotenberg, hit the hot key which resulted in Lotus
getting 30,000 letters, phone calls, and e-mail messages protesting the
release of Lotus Marketplace: Households.
In case you haven't left your terminal in awhile, this was a product whose
CD-ROM's of addresses and demo graph ic informa tion would have ushered in
the era of Desktop Junkmail. Suddenly anyone with 600 bucks and a CD-ROM
drive could have been stuffing your mailbox with their urgent appeals.
Marketplace withered under the heat, and I didn't hear a soul mourn its
passage. Most people seemed happy to leave the massive marketing databases
in institutional hands, thinking perhaps that junkmail might be one
province where democracy was better left unspread.
I wasn't so sure. For example, it occurred to me that Lotus could make a
strong legal, if not commercial, case that Marketp lace was a publication
protected by the First Amend ment. It also seemed that a better approach to
the scourge of junkmail might be political action directed toward getting
the Postal Service to raise its rates on bulk mailing. (Or perhaps even
eliminating the Postal Service, which seems to have little function these
days beyond the delivery of instant landfills.) Finally, I wondered if we
weren't once again blaming the tool and not the workman, as though the
problem were informa tion and not its misuse. I felt myself gravitating
toward the politically incorrect side of the issue, and so I kept quiet
about it.
At the Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom, the no one was
keeping quiet. Speaker after speaker painted a picture of gathering
informational fascism in which Big Brother was entering our homes dressed
in the restrained Italian suit of the Marketroid. Our every commercial
quiver was being recorded, collated, and widely redistributed. One began to
imagine a Cyberspace smeared all over with his electronic finger prints,
each of them gradually growing into a full-blown virtual image of himself
as Potential Customer. I could see an almost infinite parade of my digital
simulacra marching past an endless wall of billboards.
There was discussion of opting out of the databases, getting through modern
American life without ever giving out one's National Identity Number (as
the Social Security Number has indisputably become by default), endeavoring
to restrict one's existence to the physical world. The poor fellow from
Equifax mouthed smooth corporatisms about voluntary restraints on the
secondary use of information...such practices as selling the fact of one's
purchase from one catalog to fifteen other aspirants...but no one believed
him. Everyone seemed to realize that personal information was as much a
commodi ty as pork bellies, fuel oil, or crack and that the market would be
served.
They were right. In the week following the Conference, I got a solicitation
from CACI Marketing Systems which began: Now Available! Actual 1990 Census
Data. This despite Depart ment of Commerce assurances that Census Data
would not be put to commercial use. Marketplace is dead. Long live
Marketplace.
When it came down to solutions, however, there seemed to be developing a
canonical approach which was all too familiar: let's write some laws. The
European Commu ni ty's privacy standards, scheduled to be implemented by
the member nations in 1992, were praised. Similar legislation was proposed
for the United States.
Quite apart from the impracticality of entrusting to government another
tough problem (given its fairly undistin guished record in addressing the
environ men tal, social, or educational responsi bil i ties it already
has), there is a good reason to avoid this strategy. Legally assuring the
privacy of one's personal data involves nothing less than endowing the
Federal Govern ment with the right to restrict information.
It may be that there is a profound incompati bility between the
requirements of privacy (at least as achieved by this methods) and the
require ments of liberty. It doesn't take a paranoid to believe that
restrictions placed on one form of information will expand to include
others. Nor does it take a Libertarian to believe that the imposition of
contraband on a commodity probably won't eliminate its availability. I
submit, as Exhibit A, the War on Some Drugs.
I began to envision an even more dystopian future in which the data cops
patrolled Cyberspace in search of illicit personal info, finding other
items of legal interest along the way. Meanwhile, institu tions who could
afford the elevated price of illegal goods would continue to buy it from
thuggish Data Cartels in places like the Turks and Caicos Islands, as
sf-writer Bruce Sterling predicted in Islands in the Net.
I returned to Wyoming in a funk. My ghostly electronic selves increased
their number on my way home as I bought airline tickets, charged to my
credit cards, make long distance phone calls, and earned another speeding
ticket. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that
nothing short of a fugitive cash-based existence would prevent their
continued duplication. And even that would never exorcise them all. I was
permanently on record.
Back in Pinedale, where I am also on record, my head started to clear.
Barring government regula tion of information, for which I have no
enthusiasm, it seemed inevitable that the Global Village would resemble a
real village at least in the sense of eliminating the hermetic sealing of
one's suburban privacy. Everyone would start to lead as public a life as I
do at home.
And in that lies at least a philosophical vector towards long-term social
solution. As I say, I am protected in Pinedale not by the restriction of
information but by a tolerant social contract which prohibits its use
against me. (Unless, of course, it's of such a damning nature that it ought
to be used against me.) What may be properly restricted by government is
not the tool but the work that is done with it. If we don't like junkmail,
we should make it too expensive to send. If we don't trust others not to
hang us by our errors, we must work to build a more tolerant society.
But this approach has a fundamental limit on its effectiveness. While it
may, over the long run, reduce the suffering of marketing targets, it does
little to protect one from the excesses of a more authori tar i an
govern ment than the one we have today. This Republic was born in the
anonymous broad sides of citizens who published them under Latinate
pseudonyms like Publius Civitatus. How would the oppressed citizens of the
electronic future protect the source of rebellion?
Furthermore, much of the tolerance which I experience in Pinedale has to do
with the fact that we experience one another here. We are not abstracted
into information, which, no matter how dense it becomes, is nothing to grow
a human being from. And it will be a long time before we exist in
Cyberspace as anything but information.
While I generally resist technical solutions to social problems, it seems
best approach to this digital dilemma is also machine-based: encryption. At
the CFP Conference, EFF co-founder John Gilmore called on the computer
industry to include in their products tools which would enhance the privacy
of their communications. These might include hardware-based public key
encryption schemes, though these are probably too narrow in scale to cover
the whole problem.
He also noted that it is possible to have an electronic identity which is
not directly connected to one's physical self. I agree with him that it is
not only possible but advisable. From the standpoint of credit assurance,
there is no difference between the information that John Perry Barlow
always pays his bills on time or that Account #345 8849 23433 (to whomever
that may belong) is equally punctilious.
There are, of course, a number of problems with encrypted identity, not the
least of which the development of a long-term credit record attached to
disembodied number. And keeping that number disembodied over the same long
term is not a trivial enterprise. Finally, there is the old political
question..."What are you trying to hide?"...in which the effort to conceal
is taken to be a statement of guilt. This might limit a willingness on the
part of information carriers to engage in the compli ance necessary to make
this system work.
Of course, neither machine-based encryption systems nor encrypted
identities will become reality unless the computer, communications, and
information industries perceive there to be technically feasible methods of
providing these services and people willing to pay for them. ACM members
are well situated to provide both the technology and the initial market for
it.
And, as usual, we would be well-advised to keep of abreast of political
developments. As I write this, there are before congress a Couple of bills
which would render encryption meaningless. Senator Joseph Biden has
intro duced Senate Bill 266 which declares:
It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications
systems permit the govern ment to obtain the plain text contents of voice,
data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.
It appears that the FBI's concern in requesting this language was the
difficulty of tapping multi plexed phone lines, but the bill nevertheless
says, "turn over your encryption keys." These words probably won't become
law, but even if they don't, it seems certain that we haven't seen the last
of them, inasmuch as similar language is also to be found in S. 618, The
Violent Crime Control Act of 1991. Both of these bills address a legitimate
law-enforce ment concern: how to build a case when all the evidence is
en crypted, but as in other areas of information vs. action, they should
place their focus on the dirty deed and not the planning of it.
Another legislative vicinity to watch are efforts to amend the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act to address more adequately cellular and other
wireless technologies. This is especially relevant since, as Nicholas
Negroponte has predicted, information which has traditionally flowed
through cables, like telephone conversations, are taking to the air while
broadcast information is moving underground. Entirely different assumptions
prevail between broadcast and one-to-one communica tions which will now be
questioned legally and technically.
EFF believes that legal constraints on intercepting private wireless
communications will not be sufficient to address the problem. Cellular
manufacturers and service providers must be urged provide their customers
with the cheap encryption methods which are already available. At the same
time, they should be legally required to inform their customers of the easy
interception of non-encrypted communications. Finally, in our zeal to
protect the privacy of cellular conversa tion, we should be careful not to
criminalize simple scanning of the airwaves, most of which has no specific
target or intent, lest we pass laws which inhibit access to information.
All in all, we are looking at some tough challenges, both technologically
and politically. Computer technolo gy has created not just a new medium but
a new place. The society we erect there will probably be quite different
from the one we now inhabit, given the fact that this one depends heavily
on the physical property of things while the next one has no physical
properties at all. Certain qualities should survive the transfer, howev er,
and these include tolerance, respect for privacy of others, and a
willingness to treat one's fellows as something besides potential
customers.
But until we have developed the Social Contract of Cyberspace, we must
create, though encryption and related means, the virtual envelopes and
rooms within which we can continue to lead private lives as we enter this
new and very public place.
Pinedale, Wyoming
March 30, 1991
The Great Work
For the January, 1992 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
Earlier in this century, the French philosopher and anthropologist Teilhard
de Chardin wrote that evolution was an ascent toward what he called "The
Omega Point," when all consciousness would converge into unity, creating
the collective organism of Mind. When I first encountered the Net, I had
forgotten my college dash through Teilhard's Phenomenon of Man. It took me
a while to remember where I'd first encountered the idea of this immense
and gathering organism.
Whether or not it represents Teilhard's vision, it seems clear we are about
some Great Work here...the physical wiring of collective human
consciousness. The idea of connecting every mind to every other mind in
full-duplex broadband is one which, for a hippie mystic like me, has clear
theological implications, despite the ironic fact that most of the builders
are bit wranglers and protocol priests, a proudly prosaic lot. What
Thoughts will all this assembled neurology, silicon, and optical fiber
Think?
Teilhard was a Roman Catholic priest who never tried to forge a SLIP
connection, so his answers to that question were more conventionally
Christian than mine, but it doesn't really matter. We'll build it and then
we'll find out.
And however obscure our reasons, we do seem determined to build it. Since
1970, when the Arpanet was established, it has become, as Internet, one of
the largest and fastest growing creations in the history of human endeavor.
Internet is now expanding as much as 25% a month, a curve which plotted on
a linear trajectory would put every single human being online in a few
decades.
Or, more likely, not. Indeed, what we seem to be making at the moment is
something which will unite only the corporate, military, and academic
worlds, excluding the ghettos, hick towns, and suburbs where most human
minds do their thinking. We are rushing toward a world in which there will
be Knows, constituting the Wired Mind, and the Know Nots, who will count
for little but the labor and consumption necessary to support it.
If that happens, the Great Work will have failed, since, theological issues
aside, its most profound consequence should be the global liberation of
everyone's speech. A truly open and accessible Net will become an
environment of expression which no single government could stifle.
When Mitch Kapor and I first founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we
were eager to assure that the rights established by the First Amendment
would be guaranteed in Cyberspace. But it wasn't long before we realized
that in such borderless terrain, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.
While we haven't abandoned a constitutional strategy in assuring free
digital commerce, we have also come to recognize that, as Mitch put it,
"Architecture is politics." In other words, if the Net is ubiquitous,
affordable, easy to access, tunnelled with encrypted passageways, and based
on multiple competitive channels, no local tyranny will be very effective
against it.
A clear demonstration of this principle was visible during the recent coup
in the Soviet Union. Because of the decentralized and redundant nature of
digital media, it was impossible for the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin
to suppress the delivery of truth. Faxes and e-mail messages kept the
opposition more current with developments than the KGB, with its
hierarchical information systems, could possibly be. Whatever legal
restraints the aspiring dictators might have imposed were impotent against
the natural anarchy of the Net.
Well, I could have myself a swell time here soliloquizing about such notions
as the Great Work or the assurance of better living through electronics,
but all great journeys proceed by tedious increments. Though the
undertaking is grand, it is the nuts and bolts...the regulatory and
commercial politics, the setting of standards, the technical acceleration
of bits...that matter. They are so complex and boring as to erode the most
resolute enthusiasm, but if they don't get done, It doesn't.
So we need to be thinking about what small steps must be undertaken today.
Even while thinking globally, we must begin, as the bumper sticker
fatuously reminds us, by acting locally. Which is why I will focus the
remainder of this column on near-term conditions, opportunities, and
preferred courses of action within the boundaries of the United States.
To a large extent, America is the Old Country of Cyberspace. The first
large interconnected networks were developed here as was much of the
supporting technology. Leaving aside the estimable French Minitel system,
Cyberspace is, in is present condition, highly American in culture and
language. Though fortunately this is increasingly less the case, much of
the infrastructure of the Net still sits on American soil. For this reason,
the United States remains the best place to enact the policies upon which
the global electronic future will be founded.
In the opinion of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the first order of
business is the creation of what we call the National Public
Network...named with the hope that the word "National" should become
obsolete as soon as possible. By this, we mean a ubiquitous digital web,
accessible to every American in practical, economic, and functional terms.
This network would convey, in addition to traditional telephone service,
e-mail, software, faxes, such multimedia forms of communication as "video
postcards," and, in time, High Definition Television as well as other media
as yet barely imagined.
Its services should be extended by a broad variety of providers, including
the existing telephone, cable, publishing, broadcast, and digital network
companies. Furthermore, if its architecture is appropriately open to free
enterprise, we can expect the emergence of both new companies and new kinds
of companies. Properly designed, the National Public Network will
constitute a market for goods and services which will make the $100 billion
a year personal computer business look like a precursor to the Real Thing.
As a first step, we are proposing that Congress and state agencies
establish regulatory mechanisms and incentives that will:
* Establish an open platform for information services by speedy
nation-wide deployment of "Personal ISDN".
* Ensure competition in local exchange services in order to provide
equitable access to communications media.
* Promote free expression by reaffirming principles of common carriage.
* Foster innovations that make networks and information services easier
to use.
* Protect personal privacy.
That's a tall bill, most of which I will have to take up in subsequent
columns. I will focus now on the first two.
Personal ISDN
For the last two years, the Internet community has generally regarded
Senator Albert Gore's proposed National Research and Education Network as
the next major component of the Great Work. This has been regrettable.
NREN, as presently envisioned, would do little to enable the settlement of
ordinary folks in Cyberspace. Rather it would make plusher accommodations
for the "mountain men" already there.
Actually, NREN has been and may continue to be useful as a "policy
testbed." By giving Congress a reason to study such legal connundra as
unregulated common carriage and the intermingling of public and private
networks, NREN may not be a waste of time and focus. But, as of this
writing, it has become a political football. If the House version (H656) of
the High Performance Computing Act passes with Dick Gephart's "Buy
American" provisions in it, the Administration will surely veto it, and
we'll be back to Square One.
Meanwhile, ISDN, a technology available today, has languished. ISDN or
Integrated Services Digital Network is a software-based system based on
standard digital switching. Using ISDN, an ordinary copper phone line can
provide two full-duplex 64 kbs digital channels. These can be used
independently, concurrently, and simultaneously for voice and/or data.
(Actually, it's a bit more complex than that. Garden variety ISDN contains
three channels. The third is a 16 kbs "signal" channel, used for dialing
and other services.)
It isn't new technology, and, unlike fiber and wireless systems, it
requires little additional infrastructure beyond the digital switches,
which most telcos, under an FCC mandate, have installed anyway or will
install soon. Even at the currently languid development rate, the telcos
estimate that 60% of the nation's phones could be ISND ready in two years.
While those who live their lives at the end of a T1 connection may consider
64 kbs to be a glacial transfer rate, the vast majority of digital
communications ooze along at a pace twenty-seven times slower, or 2400
baud. We believe that the ordinary modem is both too slow and too
user-hostile to create "critical mass" in the online market.
We also believe that ISDN, whatever its limitations, is rapid enough to
jump start the greatest free market the world has ever known. Widespread
deployment of ISDN, combined with recent developments in compression
technology, could break us out of what Adobe's John Warnock calls the
"ascii jail", delivering to the home graphically rich documents, commercial
software objects, and real-time multimedia. Much of the information which
is now inappropriately wedged into physical objects...whether books,
shrink-wrapped software, videos, or CD's...would enter the virtual world,
its natural home. Bringing consumers to Cyberspace would have the same
invigorating effect on online technology which the advent of the PC had on
computing.
We admit that over the long term only fiber has sufficient bandwidth for
the future we imagine. But denying "civilian" access to Cyberspace until
the realization of a megabillion buck end-to-end fiber network leaves us
like the mainframe users in the 60's waiting for the supercomputer. The
real juice came not from the Big Iron but from user adaptable consumer
"toys" like the Apple II and the original PC.
Just as consumers were oblivious to the advantages of FAX technology until
affordable equipment arrived, we believe there is a great sleeping demand
for both ISDN and the tools which will exploit it. And then there's the
matter of affording the full fiber national network. Until the use of
digital services has become as common as, say, the use of VCR's, Joe
Sixpack's willingness to help pay fiber's magnificent cost will be
understandably restrained.
Given that most personal modem users are unaware that ISDN even exists
while the old elite of Internet grossly underestimates its potential
benefits, it's not surprising that the telcos have been able to claim lack
of consumer demand in their reluctance to make it available. A cynic might
also point to its convenience as a hostage in their struggles with Judge
Green and the newspaper publishers. They wanted into the information
business and something like "Allow us to be information providers or we
starve this technology," has been one of their longest levers.
This issue should now be moot. Judge Greene ruled in July that the telcos
could start selling information. They got what they wanted. Now we must
make them honor their side of the bargain.
Unfortunately it still seems they will only let us use their playing field
if they can be guaranteed to win the game. To this end, they have managed
to convince several state Public Utility Commissions that they should be
allowed to charge tariffs for ISDN delivery which are grotesquely
disproportionate to its actual costs. In Illinois, for example, customers
are paying 10 to 12 cents a minute for an ISDN connection. This, despite
evidence that the actual telco cost of a digitally switched phone
connection, whether voice or data, runs at about a penny a minute. Even in
the computer business, 1200% is not an ethical gross margin. And yet the
telcos claim that more appropriate pricing would require pensioners to pay
for the plaything of a few computer geeks.
Unfortunately, the computer industry has been either oblivious to the
opportunities which ISDN presents or reluctant to enter the regulatory fray
before Congress, the FCC, and the PUC's. The latter is understandable.
National telecommunications policy has long been an in-house project of
AT&T. It is brain-glazingly prolix by design and is generally regarded as a
game you can't win unless you're on the home team. The AT&T breakup changed
all that, but the industry has been slow to catch on.
Assurance of Local Competition
In the wake of Ma Bell's dismemberment, the world is a richer and vastly
more complex place. Who provides what services to whom, and under what
conditions, is an open question in most local venues. Even with a scorecard
you can't tell the players since many of them don't exist yet.
Legislation is presently before the Edward Markey's (D-MA) Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance (a subset of the House Energy and Commerce
Committee) which would regulate the entry of the Regional Bells into the
information business. The committee is correctly concerned that the RBOC's
will use their infrastructure advantage to freeze out information
providers. In other words, rather as Microsoft uses DOS and Windows.
Somewhat hysterical over this prospect, the Newspaper Publishers
Association and the cable television companies have seen to the
introduction of a House Bill 3515 by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) which would
essentially cripple telco delivery of information services for the next
decade. The bill would bar existing telephone service providers from
information provision until 50% of subscribers in a given area had access
to alternative infrastructures.
Of course neither approach would serve the public interest. The telcos have
had so little experience with competition that we can't expect them to
welcome it. And while eventually there will be local phone connection
competition through wireless technologies, it's silly to wait until that
distant day.
We need a bill which would require the telcos to make ISDN open and
affordable to all information providers, conditioning their entry into the
information business to the willing delivery of such service.
The computer industry has an opportunity to break the gridlock between the
telcos and the publishers. By representing consumer interests, which are,
in this case, equivalent to our own, we can shape legislation which would
be to everyone's benefit. What's been missing in the debate has been
technical expertise which serves neither of the existing contenders.
Finally, the Public Utilities Commissions seem unaware of the hidden
potential demand for digital services to the home. What on earth would a
housewife want with a 64 kbs data line? This is another area in which both
consumers and computer companies need to be heard from.
What You Can Do
Obviously, the first task upon entering a major public campaign is
informing oneself and others. In this, many Communications readers have a
great advantage. Most of us have access to such online fora as RISKS
digest, Telecom Digest, and the EFFectors regularly published in the EFF's
newsgroup comp.org.eff.news. I strongly recommend that those interested in
assisting this effort begin monitoring those newsgroups. I'm tempted to
tell you to join the EFF and support our Washington lobbying efforts, but I
probably abuse this podium with our message too much as it is.
Once you're up to speed on these admittedly labyrinthine issues, there are
three levers you can start leaning against.
First, Congress will be actively studying these matters for the remainder
of the year and is eagerly soliciting viewpoints other than those
self-servingly extended by the telcos and the publishers. Rep. Markey said
recently in a letter to the EFF,
"Please let me and my staff know what policies you and others in the
computer industry believe would best serve the public interest in creating
a reasonably priced, widely available network, in which competition is open
and innovation is rewarded. I also want to learn what lessons from the
computer industry over the past 10 to 15 years should apply to the current
debate on structuring the information and communication networks of the
future."
Second, it is likely that the Public Utility Commission in your state will
be taking up the question of ISDN service and rates sometime in the next
year. They will likely be grateful for your input.
Finally, you can endeavor to make your own company aware of the
opportunities which ISDN deployment will provide it as well as the
political obstacles to its provision. No matter what region of the computer
business employs your toils, ISDN will eventually provide a new market for
its products.
Though these matters are still on the back pages of public awareness, we
are at the threshold of one of the great passages in the history of both
computing and telecommunications. This is the eve of the electronic
frontier's first land rush, a critical moment for The Great Work.
Pinedale, Wyoming
Friday, November 15, 1991
Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
For the June, 1992 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
"A little sunlight is the best disinfectant."
--Justice Louis Brandeis
Over a year ago, in a condition of giddier innocence than I enjoy today, I
wrote the following about the discovery of Cyberspace:
"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other side.
Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might
exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to
exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate which expands with
development."
One less felicitous feature of this terrain which I hadn't noticed then is
what seems to be a long-encamped and immense army of occupation.
This army represents interests which are difficult to define, guards the
area against unidentified enemies, meticulously observes almost every
activity undertaken there, and continuously prevents most who inhabit its
domain from drawing any blinds against such observation.
It marshals at least 40,000 troops, owns the most advanced computing
resources in the world, and uses funds the dispersal of which does not fall
under any democratic review.
Imagining this force won't require from you the inventive powers of a
William Gibson. The American Occupation Army of Cyberspace exists. Its name
is the National Security Agency.
It may be argued that this peculiar institution inhibits free trade, has
directly damaged American competitiveness, and poses a threat to liberty
anywhere people communicate with electrons. It's principal function, as my
EFF colleague John Gilmore puts it, is "wire-tapping the world," which it
is free to do without a warrant from any judge.
It is legally constrained from domestic surveillance, but precious few
people are in a good position to watch what, how, or whom the NSA watches.
And those who are tend to be temperamentally sympathetic to its objectives
and methods. They like power, and power understands the importance of
keeping it own secrets and learning everyone else's.
Whether it is meticulously ignoring every American byte or not, the NSA is
certainly pursuing policies which will render our domestic affairs
transparent to anyone who can afford big digital hardware. Such policies
could have profound consequences on our liberty and privacy.
More to point, the role of the NSA in the area of domestic privacy needs to
be assessed in the light of other recent federal initiatives which seem
directly aimed at permanently denying privacy to the inhabitants of
Cyberspace, whether foreign or American.
Finally it seems a highly opportune time, directly following our
disorienting victory in the Cold War, to ask if the threats from which the
NSA purportedly protects us from are as significant as the hazards its
activities present.
Like most Americans I'd never given much thought to the NSA until recently.
(Indeed its very existence was a secret for much of my life. Beltway types
used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency.")
I vaguely knew that it was another of the 12 or so shadowy federal spook
houses which were erected shortly after the Iron Curtain with the purpose
of stopping its further advance. It derives entirely from a memorandum sent
by Harry Truman on October 24, 1952 to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and
Defense Secretary Robert Lovatt. This memo, the official secrecy of which
remained unpenetrated for almost 40 years, created the NSA, placed it under
the authority of the Secretary of Defense, and charged it with monitoring
and decoding any signal transmission relevant to the security of the United
States.
Even after I started noticing the NSA, my natural immunity to paranoia
combined with a general belief in the incompetence of all
bureaucracies...especially those whose inefficiencies are unmolested by
public scrutiny...to mute any sense of alarm. But this was before I began
to understand the subterranean battles raging over data encryption and the
NSA's role in them. Lately, I'm less sanguine.
As I mentioned in a previous column (Private Life in Cyberspace, August
1991), encryption may be the only reliable method for conveying privacy to
the inherently public domain of Cyberspace. I certainly trust it more than
privacy protection laws. Relying on government to protect your privacy is
like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
In fact, we already have a strong-sounding federal law protecting our
electronic privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or ECPA. But
this law has not particular effective in those areas were electronic
eavesdropping is technically easy. This is especially true in the area of
cellular phone conversations, which, under the current analog transmission
standard, are easily accessible to anyone from the FBI to you.
The degree of law enforcement apprehension over secure cellular encryption
provides mute evidence of how seriously they've been taking ECPA. They are
moving on a variety of fronts to see that robust electronic privacy
protection systems don't become generally available to the public. Indeed,
the current administration may be so determined to achieve this end that
they may be willing to paralyze progress in America's most promising
technologies rather than yield on it.
Push is coming to shove in two areas of communications technology: digital
transmission of heretofore analog signals and the encryption of transmitted
data.
As the communications service providers move to packet switching, fiber
optic transmission lines, digital wireless, ISDN and other advanced
techniques, what have been discrete channels of continuous electrical
impulses, voices audible to anyone with alligator clips on the right wires,
are now becoming chaotic blasts of data packets, readily intelligible only
to the sender and receiver. This development effectively forecloses
traditional wire-tapping techniques, even as it provides new and different
opportunities for electronic surveillance.
It is in the latter area where the NSA knows its stuff. A fair percentage
of the digital signals dispatched on planet Earth must pass at some point
through the NSA's big sieve in Fort Meade, Maryland, 12 underground acres
of the heaviest hardware in the computing world. There, unless these
packets are also encrypted with a particularly knotty algorithm, sorting
them back back into their original continuity is not so difficult.
Last spring, alarmed at a future in which it would have to sort through an
endless fruit salad of encrypted bits, the FBI persuaded Senator Joseph
Biden to include language in Senate Bill 266 which would have directed
providers of electronic communications services and devices (such as
digital cellular phone systems or other multiplexed communications
channels) to implement only such encryption methods as would assure
governmental ability to extract from the data stream the plaintext of any
voice or data communications in which it took a legal interest. It was if
the government had responded to a technological leap in lock design by
requiring building contractors to supply it with skeleton keys to every
door in America.
The provision raised wide-spread concern in the computer community, which
was better equipped to understand its implications than the general public,
and in August of last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in
cooperation with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and other
industry groups, successfully lobbied to have it removed from the bill.
Our celebration was restrained. I knew we knew we hadn't seen the last of
it. For one thing, the movement to digital communications does create some
serious obstacles to traditional wire-tapping procedures. I fully expected
that law enforcement would be back with new proposals, which I hoped might
be ones we could support. But what I didn't understand then, and am only
now beginning to appreciate, was the extent to which this issue had already
been engaged by the NSA in the obscure area of export controls over data
encryption algorithms.
Encryption algorithms, despite their purely defensive characteristics, have
been regarded by the government of this country as weapons of war for many
years. If they are to be employed for privacy (as opposed to
authentication) and they are any good at all, their export is licensed
under State Department's International Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITAR.
The encryption watchdog is the NSA. It has been enforcing a policy, neither
debated nor even admitted to, which holds that if a device or program
contains an encryption scheme which the NSA can't break fairly easily, it
will not be licensed for international sale.
Aside for marvelling at the silliness of trying to embargo algorithms, a
practice about as practicable as restricting the export of wind, I didn't
pay much attention to the implications of NSA encryption policies until
February of this year. It was then that I learned about the deliberations
of an an obscure group of cellular industry representatives called the Ad
Hoc Authentication Task Force, TR45.3 and of the influence which the NSA
has apparently exercised over their findings.
In the stately fashion characteristic of standard-setting bodies, this
group has been working for several years on a standard for digital cellular
transmission, authentication, and privacy protection to be known by the
characteristically whimsical telco moniker IS-54B.
In February they met near Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. At that
meeting, they recommended, and agreed not to publish, an encryption scheme
for American-made digital cellular systems which many sophisticated
observers believe to be intentionally vulnerable. It was further thought by
many observers that this "dumbing down" had been done in direct cooperation
with the NSA.
Given the secret nature of the new algorithm, its actual merits were
difficult to assess. But many cryptologists believe there is enough in the
published portions of the standard to confirm that it isn't any good.
One cryptographic expert, one of two I spoke with who asked not to be
identified lest the NSA take reprisals against his company, said:
"The voice privacy scheme , as opposed to the authentication scheme, is
pitifully easy to break. It involves the generation of two "voice privacy
masks" each 260 bits long. They are generated as a byproduct of the
authentication algorithm and remain fixed for the duration of a call. The
voice privacy masks are exclusive_ORed with each frame of data from the
vocoder at the transmitter. The receiver XORs the same mask with the
incoming data frame to recover the original plaintext. Anyone familiar with
the fundamentals of cryptanalysis can easily see how weak this scheme is."
And indeed, Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of Public Key cryptography and
arguably the dean of this obscure field, told me this about the fixed
masks:
"Given that description of the encryption process, there is no need for the
opponents to know how the masks were generated. Routine cryptanalytic
operations will quickly determine the masks and remove them.''
Some on committee claimed that possible NSA refusal of export licensing had
no bearing on the algorithm they chose. But their decision not to publish
the entire method and expose it to cryptanalytical abuse (not to mention
ANSI certification) was accompanied by the following convoluted
justification:
"It is the belief of the majority of the Ad Hoc Group, based on our current
understanding of the export requirements, that a published algorithm would
facilitate the cracking of the algorithm to the extent that its fundamental
purpose is defeated or compromised." (Italics added.)
Now this is a weird paragraph any way you parse it, but its most singular
quality is the sudden, incongruous appearance of export requirements in a
paragraph otherwise devoted to algorithmic integrity. In fact, this
paragraph is itself code, the plaintext of which goes something like this:
"We're adopting this algorithm because, if we don't, the NSA will slam an
export embargo on all domestically manufactured digital cellular phones."
Obviously, the cellular phone systems manufacturers and providers are not
going to produce one model for overseas sale and another for domestic
production. Thus, a primary effect of NSA-driven efforts to deny some
unnamed foreign enemy secure cellular communications is on domestic
security. The wireless channels available to private Americans will be
cloaked in a mathematical veil so thin that, as one crypto-expert put it,
"Any county sheriff with the right PC-based black box will be able to
monitor your cellular conversations."
When I heard him say that, it suddenly became clear to me that, whether
consciously undertaken with that goal or not, the most important result of
the NSA's encryption embargoes has been the future convenience of domestic
law enforcement. Thanks to NSA export policies, they will be assured that,
as more Americans protect their privacy with encryption, it will be of a
sort easily penetrated by authority.
I find it increasingly hard to imagine this is not their real objective as
well. Surely, they must be aware of how ineffectual their efforts have been
in keeping good encryption out of inimical military possession. An
algorithm is somewhat less easily stopped at the border than, say, a
nuclear reactor. As William Neukom, head of Microsoft Legal puts it, "The
notion that you can control this technology is comical."
I became further persuaded that this was the case upon hearing, from a
couple of sources, that the Russians have been using the possibly
uncrackable (and American) RSA algorithm in their missile launch codes for
the last ten years and that, for as little as five bucks, one can get a
software package called Crypto II on the streets of Saint Petersburg which
includes both RSA and DES encryption systems.
Nevertheless, the NSA has been willing to cost American business a lot of
revenue rather than allow domestic products with strong encryption into the
global market.
While it's impossible to set a credible figure on what that loss might add
up to, it's high. Jim Bidzos, whose RSA Data Security licenses RSA, points
to one major Swiss bid in which a hundred million dollar contract for
financial computer terminals went to a European vendor after American
companies were prohibited by the NSA from exporting a truly secure network.
The list of export software containing intentionally broken encryption is
also long. Lotus Notes ships in two versions. Don't count on much
protection from the encryption in the export version. Both Microsoft and
Novell have been thwarted in their efforts to include RSA in their
international networking software, despite frequent publication of the
entire RSA algorithm in technical publications all over the world.
With hardware, the job has been easier. NSA levied against the inclusion of
a DES chip in the AS/390 series IBM mainframes in late 1990 despite the
fact that, by this time, DES was in widespread use around the world,
including semi-official adoption by our official enemy, the USSR.
I now realize that Soviets have not been the NSA's main concern at any time
lately. Naively hoping that, with the collapse of the Evil Empire, the NSA
might be out of work, I then learned that, given their own vigorous crypto
systems and their long use of some embargoed products, the Russians could
not have been the threat from whom this forbidden knowledge was to be kept.
Who has the enemy been then? I started to ask around.
Cited again and again as the real object of the embargoes were Third-World
countries. terrorists and... criminals. Criminals, most generally
drug-flavored, kept coming up, and nobody seemed terribly concerned that
some of their operations might be located in areas supposedly off-limits to
NSA scrutiny.
Presumably the NSA is restricted from conducting American surveillance by
both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and a series
of presidential directives, beginning with one issued by President Ford
following Richard Nixon's bold misuse of the NSA, in which he explicitly
directed the NSA to conduct widespread domestic surveillance of political
dissidents and drug users.
But whether or not FISA has actually limited the NSA's abilities to conduct
domestic surveillance seemed less relevant the more I thought about it. A
better question to ask was, "Who is best served by the NSA's encryption
export policies?" The answer is clear: domestic law enforcement. Was this
the result of some spook plot between NSA and, say, the Department of
Justice? Not necessarily.
Certainly in the case of the digital cellular standard, cultural congruity
between foreign intelligence, domestic law enforcement, and what somebody
referred to as "spook wannabes on the TR45.3 committee" might have a lot
more to do with the its eventual flavor than any actual whisperings along
the Potomac.
Unable to get anyone presently employed by the NSA to comment on this or
any other matter and with little opportunity to assess the NSA's
congeniality toward domestic law enforcement from the inside, I approached
a couple of old hands for a highly distilled sample of intelligence
culture.
I called Admirals Stansfield Turner and Bobby Ray Inman. Not only had their
Carter administration positions as, respectively, CIA and NSA Directors,
endowed them with considerable experience in such matters, both are
generally regarded to be somewhat more sensitive to the limits of
democratic power than their successors. None of whom seemed likely to
return my calls anyway.
My phone conversations with Turner and Inman were amiable enough, but they
didn't ease my gathering sense that the NSA takes an active interest in
areas which are supposedly beyond its authorized field of scrutiny.
Turner started out by saying he was in no position to confirm or deny any
suspicions about direct NSA-FBI cooperation on encryption, but he didn't
think I was being exactly irrational in raising the question. In fact, he
genially encouraged me to investigate the matter further.
He also said that while a sub rosa arrangement between the NSA and the
Department of Justice to compromise domestic encryption would be
"injudicious," he could think of no law, including FISA (which he helped
design), which would prevent it.
Most alarmingly, this gentleman who has written eloquently on the hazards
of surveillance in a democracy did not seem terribly concerned that our
digital shelters are being rendered permanently translucent by and to the
government.
He said, "A threat could develop...terrorism, narcotics, whatever...where
the public would be pleased that all electronic traffic was open to
decryption. You can't legislate something which forecloses the possibility
of meeting that kind of emergency."
Admiral Inman had even more enthusiasm for assertive governmental
supervision. Although he admitted no real knowledge of the events behind
the new cellular encryption standard, he wasn't the least disturbed to hear
that it might be flawed.
And, despite the fact that his responsibilities as NSA Director had been restricted to foreign intelligence, he seemed a lot more comfortable talking about threats on the home front.
"The Department of Justice," he began, "has a very legitimate worry. The
major weapon against white collar crime has been the court-ordered wiretap.
If the criminal elements go to using a high quality cipher, the principal
defense against narcotics traffic is gone." This didn't sound like a guy
who, were he still head of NSA, would rebuff FBI attempts to get a little
help from his agency.
He brushed off my concerns about the weakness of the cellular encryption
standard. "If all you're seeking is personal privacy, you can get that with
a very minimal amount of encipherment."
Well, I wondered, Privacy from whom?
And he seemed to regard real, virile encryption to be something rather like
a Saturday Night Special. "My answer," he said, "would be legislation
which would make it a criminal offense to use encrypted communication to
conceal criminal activity."
Wouldn't that render all encrypted traffic automatically suspect? I asked.
"Well, he said, "you could have a registry of institutions which can
legally use ciphers. If you get somebody using one who isn't registered,
then you go after him."
You can have my encryption algorithm, I thought to myself, when you pry my
cold dead fingers from its private key.
It wasn't a big sample, but it was enough to gain a better appreciation of
the cultural climate of the intelligence community. And these guys are the
liberals. What legal efficiencies might their Republican successors be
willing to employ to protect the American Way?
Without the comfortably familiar presence of the Soviets to hate and fear,
we can expect to see a sharp increase in over-rated bogeymen and virtual
states of emergency. This is already well under way. I think we can expect
our drifting and confused hardliners to burn the Reichstag repeatedly until
they have managed to extract from our induced alarm the sort of government
which makes them feel safe.
This process has been under way for some time. One sees it in the war on
terrorism, against which pursuit "no liberty is absolute," as Admiral
Turner put it. This, despite the fact that, during last year for which I
have a solid figure, 1987, only 7 Americans succumbed to terrorism.
You can also see it clearly under way in the War on Some Drugs. The Fourth
Amendment to the Constitution has largely disappeared in this civil war.
And among the people I spoke with, it seemed a common canon that drugs (by
which one does not mean Jim Beam, Marlboros, Folger's, or Halcion) were a
sufficient evil to merit the government's holding any more keys it felt the
need for.
One individual close to the committee said that at least some of the
afore-mentioned "spook wannabes" on the committee were "interested in weak
cellular encryption because they considered warrants not to be "practical"
when it came to pursuing drug dealers and other criminals using cellular
phones."
In a miscellaneously fearful America, where the people cry for shorter
chains and smaller cages, such privileges as secure personal communications
are increasingly regarded as expendable luxuries. As Whitfield Diffie put
it, "From the consistent way in which Americans seem to put security ahead
of freedom, I rather fear that most of them would prefer that all
electronic traffic was open to government decryption right now if they had
given it any thought."
In any event, while I found no proof of an NSA-FBI conspiracy to gut the
American cellular phone encryption standard, it seemed clear to me that
none was needed. The same results can be delivered by a cultural
"auto-conspiracy" between like-minded hardliners and cellular companies who
will care about privacy only when their customers do.
You don't have to be a hand-wringing libertarian like me to worry about the
domestic consequences of the NSA's encryption embargoes. They are also, as
stated previously, bad for business, unless, of course, the business of
America is no longer business but, as sometimes seems the case these days,
crime control.
As Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) said to me, "We have the largest information
based economy in the world. We have have lots of reasons for wanting to
protect information, and weakening our encryption systems for the
convenience of law enforcement doesn't serve the national interest."
But by early March, it had become clear that this supposedly
business-oriented administration had made a clear choice to favor cops over
commerce even if the costs to the American economy were to become extremely
high.
A sense of White House seriousness in this regard could be taken from their
response to the first serious effort by Congress to bring the NSA to task
for its encryption embargoes. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Calif.) proposed an
amendment to the Export Administration Act to transfer mass market software
controls to the Commerce Department, which would relax the rules. The
administration responded by saying that they would veto the entire bill if
the Levine amendment remained attached to it.
Even though it appeared the NSA had little to fear from Congress, the
Levine amendment may have been part of what placed the agency in a
bargaining mood for the first time. They entered into discussions with the
Software Publishers Association who, acting primarily on behalf of
Microsoft and Lotus, got to them to agree "in principle" to a streamlined
process for export licensing of encryption which might provide for more
robust standards than have been allowed previously.
But the negotiations between the NSA and the SPA were being conducted
behind closed doors, with the NSA-imposed understanding that any agreement
they reached would be set forth only in a "confidential" letter to
Congress. As in the case of the digital cellular standard, this would
eliminate the public scrutiny by cryptography researchers which anneals
genuinely hardened encryption.
Furthermore, some cryptographers worried that the encryption key lengths to
which the SPA appeared willing to restrict its member publishers might be
too short to provide much defense against the sorts of brute-force
decryption assaults which advances in processor technology will yield in
the fairly near future. And brute force has always been the NSA's strong
suit.
Whether accurate or not, the impression engendered by the style of the
NSA-SPA negotiations was not one of unassailable confidence. The lack of it
will operate to the continued advantage of foreign manufacturers in an era
when more and more institutions are going to be concerned about the privacy
of their digital communications.
But the economic damage which the NSA-SPA agreement might cause would be
minor compared to what would result from a startling new federal
initiative, the Department of Justice's proposed legislation on digital
telephony. If you're wondering what happened to the snooping provisions
which were in Senate Bill 266, look no further. They're back. And they're
bigger and bolder than ever.
They are contained in a sweeping proposal which have been made by the
Justice Department to the Senate Commerce Committee for legislation which
would "require providers of electronic communications services and private
branch exchanges to ensure that the Government's ability to lawfully
intercept communications is unimpeded by the introduction of advanced
digital telecommunications technology or any other telecommunications
technology."
Amazingly enough, this really means what it says: before any advance in
telecommunications technology can be deployed, the service providers and
manufacturers must assure the cops that they can tap into it. In other
words, development in digital communications technology must come to a
screeching halt until Justice can be assured that it will be able to grab
and examine data packets with the same facility they have long enjoyed with
analog wire-tapping.
It gets worse. The initiative also provides that, if requested by the
Attorney General, "any Commission proceeding concerning regulations,
standards or registrations issued or to be issued under authority of thiss
ection shall be closed to the public." This essentially places the Attorney
General in a position to shut down any telecommunications advance without
benefit of public hearing.
When I first heard of the digital telephony proposal, I assumed it was a
kind of bargaining chip. I couldn't imagine it was serious. But it now
appears they are going to the mattresses on this one.
Taken together with NSA's continued assertion of its authority over
encryption, a pattern becomes clear. The government of the United States is
so determined to maintain law enforcement's traditional wire-tapping
abilities in the digital age that it is willing to fundamentally cripple
the American economy to do so. This may sound hyperbolic, but I believe it
is not.
The greatest technology advantage this country presently enjoys is in the
areas of software and telecommunications. Furthermore, thanks in large part
to the Internet, much of America is already wired for bytes, as significant
an economic edge in the Information Age as the existence of a railroad
system was for England one hundred fifty years ago.
If we continue to permit the NSA to cripple our software and further convey
to the Department of Justice the right to stop development the Net without
public input, we are sacrificing both our economic future and our
liberties. And all in the name of combatting terrorism and drugs.
This has now gone far enough. I have always been inclined to view the
American government as pretty benign as such creatures go. I am generally
the least paranoid person I know, but there is something scary about a
government which cares more about putting its nose in your business than it
does about keeping that business healthy.
As I write this, a new ad hoc working group on digital privacy, coordinated
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is scrambling to meet the challenge.
The group includes representatives from organizations like AT&T, the
Regional Bells, IBM, Microsoft, the Electronic Mail Association and about
thirty other companies and public interest groups.
Under the direction of Jerry Berman, EFF's Washington office director, and
John Podesta, a capable lobbyist and privacy specialist who helped draft
the ECPA, this group intends to stop the provisions in digital telephony
proposal from entering the statute books.
We also intend to work with federal law enforcement officials to address
their legitimate concerns. We don't dispute their need to conduct some
electronic surveillance, but we believe this can be assured by more
restrained methods than they're proposing.
We are also preparing a thorough examination of the NSA's encryption export
policies and looking into the constitutional implications of those
policies. Rather than negotiating behind closed doors, as the SPA has been
attempting to do, America's digital industries have a strong self-interest
in banding together to bring the NSA's procedures and objectives into the
sunlight of public discussion.
Finally, we are hoping to open a dialog with the NSA. We need to develop a
better understanding of their perception of the world and its threats. Who
are they guarding us against and how does encryption fit into that
endeavor? Despite our opposition to their policies on encryption export, we
assume that NSA operations have some merit. But we would like to be able to
rationally balance the merits against the costs.
We strongly encourage any organization which might have a stake in the
future of digital communication to become involved. Letters expressing your
concern may be addressed to: Sen. Ernest Hollings, Chairman, Senate
Commerce Committee, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC and to Don Edwards,
Chairman, Subcommitee on Constitutional Rights, House Judiciary Committee.
(I would appreciate hearing those concerns myself. Feel free to copy me
with those letters at my physical address, c/o P.O. Box 1009, Pinedale, WY
82941 or in Cyberspace, barlow@eff.org.)
If your organization is interested in becoming part of the digital privacy
working group, please contact EFF's Washington office at: 666 Pennsylvania
Avenue SE, Suite 303, Washington, DC 20003, 202/544-9237, fax:
202/547-5481. EFFs also encourages individuasl interested in these issues
to join the organization. Contact us at: Electronic Frontier Foundation,
155 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141, 617/864-0665, eff-request@eff.org.
The legal right to express oneself is meaningless if there is no secure
medium through which that expression may travel. By the same token, the
right to hold certain unpopular opinions is forfeit unless one can discuss
those opinions with others of like mind without the government listening
in.
Even if you trust the current American government, as I am still largely
inclined to, there is a kind of corrupting power in the ability to create
public policy in secret while assuring that the public will have little
secrecy of its own.
In its secrecy and technological might, the NSA already occupies a very
powerful position. And conveying to the Department of Justice what amounts
to licensing authority for all communications technology would give it a
control of information distribution rarely asserted over English-speaking
people since Oliver Cromwell's Star Chamber Proceedings.
Are there threats, foreign or domestic, which are sufficiently grave to
merit the conveyance of such vast legal and technological might? And even
if the NSA and FBI may be trusted with such power today, will they always
be trustworthy? Will we be able to do anything about it if they aren't?
Senator Frank Church said of NSA technology in 1975 words which are more
urgent today:
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people
and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to
hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, the technological capacity
that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
impose total tyranny. There would be no way to fight back, because the most
careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no
matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to
know. Such is the capacity of this technology."
San Francisco, California
Monday, May 4, 1992
Will Japan Jack In?
For the October, 1992 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
I am writing this column in a large aluminum tube somewhere over the
Pacific Ocean, halfway between El Camino Real and the Ginza. A airliner
over the gulf which separates the two parallel universes of the United
States and Japan is probably the right "place" to think about culture on
the electronic frontier. This is about as virtual an experience as one can
have and bring his body along.
There are no landmarks anywhere in this viewshed. The cabin is darkened so
the other (mostly Japanese) passengers can watch the American movie, but
when I raise the shade and peer below, the sea is featureless and vast as
the Net.
The design aesthetics inside this aircraft are classic Generican... as
culturally inert as possible. Like most modern American corporate
designers, be they decorating Marriotts or the Friendly Skies, the folks
who picked these earth tones wished to offend no one, whether American,
Japanese or Martian. It's as odorless and colorless as ascii, but it is
this very aspect of it, the intentional absence of cultural content, which
makes it both so perfectly American and so much in keeping with the rest of
the Information Age.
When I first became conscious of the existance of Cyberspace, it didn't
immediately dawn on me what an American place...one might even say
colony...it is.
An American myself, I didn't find it strange that the Virtual World, from
the televised sit-com barrens of the Global Suburbs to the linear vectors
of international air traffic control to the Net itself, is a landscape
where American English is the lingua franca and American "culture"
dominates to the point of invisibility. As McLuhan once observed, "We don't
know who it was that discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a
fish."
That this should be the case is not surprising. In addition to being the
being birthplace of both telephony and the Internet, America has always had
a fascination with blank slates, an impulse to form itself unhindered on
the conceptual map rather than adapt to the physical requrements of the
landscape.
My first sense that there might be something parochial about my model of
the Datasphere arrived not long after the Electronic Frontier Foundation
began to make itself known on the Net.
At first, we presented outselves as an organization which primarily
intended to assure the application of the First Amendment to digital media.
I got a plaintive piece of e-mail from what was still the Soviet Union
saying, in effect, "That's all very good, but what about us?" More of the
same followed from such precincts as Canada and the United Kingdom. I
realized that I had always thought... incorrectly...there was something
inherently free about the English language.
Since then, we have placed less emphasis on the easily revised assurances
of local law and more on promoting the more robust and natural protections
provided by an architecture for Cyberspace which is commercially and
technically open, ubiquitous, redundant, and cheap.
But, as I am now discovering, there are other barriers to jacking in which
all the fiber, coax, RJ-11 outlets, and sensible rate structures in the
world aren't going to overcome immediately. It may be that the most
obdurate of these is cultural immune response.
Subtler questions arise. I mean, our aspirations to assure freedom of
speech sound noble enough to our own American ears or even recently Soviet
sensibilities, but this plane is about to land on an island where dwell
millions of people for many of whom freedom of speech is a puzzling
irrelevancy.
A Japanese magazine recently requested reprint and translation rights on an
essay of mine which deals in part with person's right to speak his or her
mind. They are trying to find someone to write an introduction which will
attend to the trickier task of cultural translation. As one of their
editors told me, "You are preaching the freedom of individuals, but that
concept really doesn't exist here, constitutionally or otherwise."
By which I don't mean to suggest that Japan is not a "free country" in our
terms. But the very word "free" may mean something profoundly different in
a society which is in collective agreement, not due to the imposed
ideological will of a despotic bureaucracy, but because they, well...agree.
I sense some restlessness with that agreement in certain surprising
precincts of Japanese society. At a conference on globally networked
computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a number
of Japanese corporate officials, apparently orderly as soldiers in their
blue pinstripes, proclaim enthusiastically the potential of the
"Hypernetwork" (as they call Cyberspace) to tenderize the hierarchical
rigidity of both own organizations and Japanese society.
It was a little disorienting. Imagine an IBM vice-president with his fist
thrust passionately in the air and you'll get the idea,
But it occurred to me that, if they are right, no organism with an immune
system as subtle and robust as that of the larger, unindividuated Japanese
whole is going to admit without response a virus which promises to attack
its structural integrity. And not without cause. This is, after all, a
society which is also largely free of such artifacts of individuality as
random and violent crime. It is a society which works to the satisfaction
of most of its constuents who might be expected to ask, "Why fix it? It
ain't broke."
Perhaps if there were other persuasive reasons for Japan to jack into the
Net, they might be willing to tolerate the deconstructive risks of
networked computing. But why would people whose language is written, not
typed, be eager to enter an environment where they would have to express
themselves in the hard little alphanumerics of lower ascii? In fact, the
recently developed Kanji keyboard does make it possible for the Japanese to
input their data with something besides a calligraphy brush.
Why would a people who speak very little English be eager to enter a place
where little else is spoken? Why would a people who have shown themselves
to resistant to the global cultural blender of American culture eagerly
enter a place as thoroughly American as Cyberspace is today?
Then there is the most fundamental question: why would a society so deeply
interlaced with ancient and completely de-bugged human networks want a
cranky new one of our design?
That there are no ready answers to these questions probably accounts for
the scarcity, relative to population and technological sophistication, of
Japanese Internet connections and a subdued market for high-speed data
links in general. Unless one counts fax traffic, little of what passes
through Japan's wires is digital. The best estimates I can get from several
different sources indicate only about five to ten percent of Japan's 10
million personal computers are connected to a modem. Of these, about
200,000 are subscribers to NEC's PCvan. NiftyServe also has about 200,000
subscribers, but it's thought that many of these are the same people.
NEC is very committed to changing all this and one sees its billboards
everywhere extolling "C&C", it's trademarked Romanji icon for computers and
communications. Unfortunately, NEC's beliefs in the future of this market
are not shared by the institution which must provide much of the
infrastructure for that connection, the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph
Company, the stately bureaucracy which does the phone in Japans.
When I spoke with Koichiro Hayashi, NTT's vice president of Leased Line
Services (now head of NTT America), he told me there were only about 12,500
ISDN hook-ups in Japan (as of February of this year). When I asked him why
this was, he said he couldn't imagine a general market for ISDN. His
beliefs had a cultural basis.
"What about telecommuting?" I asked. Many of the office workers in Tokyo
spend up to four hours every day in the middle of the most hellish commute
imaginable. Wouldn't it be better if they could only come into the office a
couple of days a week? "Japanese will never accept working in the home," he
said.
He went on to point out that being part of the group is something which
requires direct physical proximity with one's fellow workers. (There are
neither individual offices nor even divided cubicles in Japanese white
collar environments.) He didn't say so, but he also inferred that managers
wouldn't accept a system where they couldn't watch their workers all the
time.
He also that fewer than 5 percent of Japan's lines are digitally switched
and thus ISDN ready, a figure which NTT feels no compelling justification
for changing any time soon. Again, its reasons are cultural. NTT feels a
sense of familial responsbility to the 70,000 telephone operators who jobs
would be endangered by converson to digital switches. They claim there is
neither a market now, nor on the horizon, which would justifiy laying off
any of those operators.
This might change fairly soon. The same renegade managers who welcome
networked computing labor in organizations which are busily trying to
provide technological answers to the questions asked above. They are hard
at work on their own pen-based interfaces and Kanji character-recognition
systems. These will shortly make computers usable to the vast majority of
Japanese who understandably find the Kanji keyboard an unacceptable kludge.
They have also embraced multmedia (or New Media, as the Newspeak commissars
at Apple have now decreed it be called) and Virtual Reality with
considerably greater enthusiasm than their American counterparts. As the
cognitive bandwidth of Cyberspace fattens from text into video, sound and
3-D Garoud-rendered body puppets, we can expect to see a Japanese interest
both in computing and digital communications which will reveal our current
lead in these fields to be less a matter of our superiority than their
disinterest.
At that point, we might might see some stiffening of our own cultural immune response systems.
More and more American commerce is in"soft" products... media, content,
works of the mind. Whether actual software, digitized Hollywood films, the
latest bestsellers, rock 'n' roll, dirty pictures, inside dope, you name
it, if it can be turned into ones and zeros, it will be.
Once digitized, information is free to slip from the old physical "bottles"
to which we have always attached our protective marks and into its natural
home,
Cyberspace. Online, it will be as hard to own or contain as air. Harder, in
fact, since, unlike air, digitized data is infinitely reproducable and and
malleable.
As things stand, practically the only protection which can be afforded soft
products is the cultural willingness of people to pay for them. Contrast
the American software market (where at least some percentage of the users
feel ethically bound to pay for the stuff) with the market in Europe (where
almost no one does) and you get some sense of how important conscience
becomes when enforcement becomes impractical.
For all of their recent self-protective patent-filing, the ownership of
ideas is as culturally alien to the Asian conceptial frame as the ownership
of real estate was to the Sioux. It just doesn't seem to make sense to
them. (Possibly because it may not make sense, but that's a topic for
another column...)
Are we really going to want to share Cyberspace with cultures don't feel
morally bound by our concepts of property, especially if those concepts are
backed neither by workable laws, nor clearly defined jurisdictions to pass
them. nor realistic means of enforcing anything which did get passed?
Then there is the matter of paying for Cyberspace itself. In the past, this
wasn't a problem. There were only a couple of ways to ship a bit from here
to there. You could use the phone system or the Internet.
The phone companies, public or private, owned the phones and that which
connected. They knew what they had and how much it cost to keep it up.
They knew how many users there were, how much they used it, and, with a
little basic arithmetic and some horse trading with the Public Utilities
Commission, how much to charge for carrying your data across the country.
The Internet was always a something of an anarchy, created and maintained
from the bottom largely by volunteers with a little help from the Military
Industrial Complex up top, but it was too small to cost much and too
unimportant to raise many alarms as grew in complexity beyond anyone's
mapping abilities.
More to the point, digtal communication tended to stay either within the
confines of the a country or a company. Either way, it was pretty clear who
set the fares, who paid them, and who was using what service.
These days, the Internet extends around the globe, and is too important to
rely entirely on grad students and an underfunded arm of the American
government, the National Science Foundation. Besides, there's a lot of
money to be made.
Now, any entity which can propagate a signal is lining up to get rich in
the info transport racket. The Net floats in an increasingly baffling web
of heterogeneous connections: the suddenly bidirectonal coax of cable TV
providers, optical fiber owned by railroad lines, microwaves bounced from
surplus Soviet satellites, packets from amateur radios, the whole mess
woven and tangled into an impossible spagetti of chaotic unaccountability.
When I finish this column and dispatch it from the Roppongi section of
Tokyo to ACM headquarters on west 42nd Street, will consist of about a
hundred thousand voltage shifts. No one will nor could know all the wires,
waves, hard disks, central processors, earth stations, and light tubes will
convey them there. No one will know who owns all these various media nor
how to pay each of them a fair toll for this column's way.
Somehow, it all works, by grace and spit, but one wonders how long it can
continue to do so before differences between such rigid, centralized
organizational approaches as Japan's NTT will be culturally incompatible
with the increasingly incomprehensible ecosystem of American
telecommuncations.
Will it be possible for companies like Sprint or PSI to enter Japan to
simply pull an end run around NTT and get provide high speed packet
switched service? (I saw an advertisment for SprintLink in the Japan Times
this morning.) Will other indigenous Japanese digital service providers
arise? Will NTT suddenly recognize the economic potential of connected
computing?
It all adds up to this: digitally connecting the two most most advanced
technology bases in the world is not going to be an easy or
straight-forward process. Getting Japan jacked into the Net in any useful
sense may take years. Until they can overcome their cultural aversions to
this evironment we may find America all hooked up with nowhere to go.
It's kind of like an updated version of the old Koan: what is the sound of
one modem handshaking?
Tokyo, Japan
Thursday, July 30, 1992
Bill O' Rights Lite
For the March, 1993 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
-Saint Theresa of Avila
It's now been almost three years since I first heard of the Secret Service
raids on Steve Jackson Games and the cyberurchins from the Legion of Doom.
These federal exploits, recently chronicled in Bruce Sterling's book Hacker
Crackdown, precipitated the formation of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and kicked loose an international digital liberties movement
which is still growing by leaps and conferences.
I'm greatly encouraged by the heightened awareness among the citizens of
the Global Net of our rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. I am
also heartened that so many good minds now tug at the legal, ethical, and
social riddles which come of digitizing every damned thing. The Social
Contract of Cyberspace is being developed with astonishing rapidity,
considering that we are all still deaf, dumb, and disembodied in here.
Meanwhile, back in the Physical World, I continue to be haunted by the
words of the first lawyer I called on behalf of Steve Jackson, Phiber
Optik, and Acid Phreak back in the Spring of 1990. This was Eric Lieberman
of the prestigious New York civil liberties firm Rabinowitz, Boudin,
Standard, Krinsky, and Lieberman. I told him how the Secret Service had
descended on my acquaintances and taken every scrap of circuitry or
magnetized oxide they could find. This had included not only computers and
disks, but clock radios and audio cassettes.
I told him that, because no charges had been filed, the government was
providing their targets no legal opportunity to get recoup their
confiscated equipment and data. (In fact, most of the victims of Operation
Sun Devil still have neither been charged nor had their property returned
to them.)
The searches were anything but surgical and the seizures appeared directed
less at gathering evidence than inflicting punishment without the
bothersome formality of a trial. I asked Lieberman if Secret Service might
not be violating the 4th Amendment's assurance of "The right of the people
to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures."
He laughed bitterly. "I think if you take a look at case law for the last
ten years or so, you will find that the 4th Amendment has pretty much gone
away, " he said.
I did. He was right. A lot of what remained of it was flushed a year later
when the Rehnquist Court declared that in the presence of "probable
cause"...a phrase of inviting open-ness...law enforcement officials could
search first and obtain warrants later.
Furthermore, I learned that through such sweeping prosecutorial enablements
as RICO and Zero Tolerance, the authorities could enact their own
unadjudicated administrative "fines" by keeping much of what they seized
for their own uses.
(This incentive often leads to disproportionalities between "punishment"
and "crime" which even ol' Kafka might have found a bit over the top. I
know of one case in which the DEA acquired a $14 million dollar Gulfstream b
izjet from a charter operator because one of its clients left half a gram
of cocaine in its washroom.)
I tried to imagine a kind of interactive Bill of Rights in which Amendments
would fade to invisibility as they became meaningless, but I knew that was
hardly necessary. The citizens of Stalin's Soviet Union had a
constitutional guarantee of free expression which obviously, like our own,
allowed some room for judicial interpretation.
It occurred to me then that a more honest approach might be to maintain a
concordant Bill of Rights, running in real time and providing up to the
minute weather reports from the Federal Bench, but I never got around to
it.
Recently I started thinking about it again. These thoughts were inspired
partly by Dorothy Denning's apology for the FBI's Digital Telephony
proposal (which appears elsewhere in this issue). I found her analysis
surprisingly persuasive, but I also found it fundamentally based on an
assumption I no longer share: the ability of the Bill of Rights to restrain
government, now or in the future.
The men who drafted the United States Constitution and its first ten
amendments knew something which we have largely forgotten: Governments
exist to limit freedom. That's their job. And to the extent that utterly
unbridled liberty seems to favor the reptile in us, a little government is
not such a bad thing. But it never knows when to quit. As there is no limit
to either human imagination or creativity in the wicked service of the
Self, so it is always easy for our official protectors to envision new
atrocities to prevent.
Knowing this, James Madison and company designed a government which was
slightly broken up front. They intentionally created a few wrenches to cast
into the works, and these impediments to smooth governmental operation were
the Bill of Rights.
Lately though, we find ourselves living in a world where the dangers we
perceive are creatures of information rather than experience. Since the
devil one knows is always less fearsome than the worst one can imagine,
there is no limit to how terrifying or potent these dangers can seem.
Very few of us, if any, have ever felt the malign presence of a real, live
terrorist or drug lord or Mafia capo or dark side hacker or kiddy
pornographer. They are projected into our consciousness by the media and
the government, both of which profit directly from our fear of them. These
enemies are, in our (tele)visions of them, entirely lacking in human
decency or conscience. There is no reason they should be mollycoddled with
constitutional rights.
And so, we have become increasingly willing to extend to government what
the founding fathers would not: real efficiency. The courts, heartily
encouraged by the older white suburbanites who still vote, have been
updating the Bill of Rights to fit modern times and perils, without
anyone's having to go through the cumbersome procedure of formal amendment.
The result, I would suggest with only a little sarcasm or hyperbole, has
come to look something like this:
Bill o' Rights Lite
Amendment 1
Congress shall encourage the practice of Judeo-Christian religion by its
own public exercise thereof and shall make no laws abridging the freedom of
responsible speech, unless such speech is in a digitized form or contains
material which is copyrighted, classified, proprietary, or deeply offensive
to non-Europeans, non-males, differently-abled or alternatively preferenced
persons; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, unless such
assembly is taking place on corporate or military property or within an
electronic environment, or to make petitions to the Government for a
redress of grievances, unless those grievances relate to national security.
Amendment 2
A well-regulated Militia having become irrelevant to the security of the
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms against one another
shall nevertheless remain uninfringed, excepting such arms as may be
afforded by the poor or those preferred by drug pushers, terrorists, and
organized criminals, which shall be banned.
Amendment 3
No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the
consent of the owner, unless that house is thought to have been used for
the distribution of illegal substances.
Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers. and
effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, may be suspended to
protect public welfare, and upon the unsupported suspicion of law
enforcement officials, any place or conveyance shall be subject to
immediate search, and any such places or conveyances or property within
them may be permanently confiscated without further judicial proceeding.
Amendment 5
Any person may be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime
involving illicit substances, terrorism, or child pornography, or upon any
suspicion whatever; and may be subject for the same offense to be twice put
in jeopardy of life or limb, once by the State courts and again by the
Federal Judiciary; and may be compelled by various means, including the
forced submission of breath samples, bodily fluids, or encryption keys, to
be a witness against himself, refusal to do so constituting an admission of
guilt; and may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without further
legal delay; and any property thereby forfeited shall be dedicated to the
discretionary use of law enforcement agents.
Amendment 6
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy
and private plea bargaining session before pleading guilty. He is entitled
to the Assistance of underpaid and indifferent Counsel to negotiate his
sentence, except where such sentence falls under federal mandatory
sentencing requirements.
Amendment 7
In Suits at common law, where the contesting parties have nearly unlimited
resources to spend on legal fees, the right of trial by jury shall be
preserved.
Amendment 8
Sufficient bail may be required to ensure that dangerous criminals will
remain in custody, where cruel punishments are usually inflicted.
Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others which may be asserted by the
Government as required to preserve public order, family values, or national
security.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, shall be
reserved to the United States Departments of Justice and Treasury, except
when the States are willing to forsake federal funding.
New York, New York
January 3, 1993
A Plain Text on Crypto Policy
For the October, 1993 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
The field of cryptography, for centuries accustomed to hermetic isolation
within a culture as obscure as its own puzzles, is going public. People who
thought algorithms were maybe something you needed to dig rap music are
suddenly taking an active interest in the black arts of crypto.
We have the FBI and NSA to thank for this. The FBI was first to arouse
public concerns about the future of digital privacy with its injection of
language year before last into a major Senate anti-crime bill (SB 266)
which would have registered the congressional intent that all providers of
digitized communications should provide law enforcement with analog access
to voice and data transmissions of their subscribers.
When this was quietly yanked in committee, they returned with a proposed
bill called Digital Telephony. If passed, it would have essentially called
a halt to most American progress in telecommunications until they could be
assured of their continued ability to wiretap. Strange but true.
They were never able to find anyone in Congress technologically backward
enough to introduce this oddity for them, but they did elevate public
awareness of the issues considerably.
The National Security Agency, for all its (unknown but huge) budget, staff,
and MIPS, has about as much real world political experience as the Order of
Trappists and has demonstrated in its management of cryptology export
policies the maddening counter-productivity that is the usual companion of
inexperience.
The joint bunglings of these two agencies were starting to infuriate a lot
of people and institutions who are rarely troubled by Large Governmental
Foolishness in the Service of Paranoia. Along with all the usual paranoids,
of course.
Then from the NSA's caverns in Fort Meade, Maryland there slouched a chip
called Clipper.
For those of you who just tuned in (or who tuned out early), the Clipper
Chip...now called Skipjack owing to a trademark conflict...is a hardware
encryption device that NSA designed under Reagan-Bush. In April it was
unveiled by the Clinton Administration and proposed for both governmental
and public use. Installed in phones or other telecommunications tools, it
would turn any conversation into gibberish for all but the speaker and his
intended listener, using a secret military algorithm.
Clipper/Skipjack is unique, and controversial, in that it also allows the
agents of government to listen under certain circumstances. Each chip
contains a key that is split into two parts immediately following
manufacture. Each half is then placed in the custody of some trusted
institution or "escrow agent."
If, at some subsequent time, some government agency desires to legally
listen in on the owner of the communications device in which the chip has
been placed, it would present evidence of "lawful authority" to the escrow
holders. They will reveal the key pairs, the agency will join them, and
begin listening to the subject's unencrypted conversations.
(Apparently there are other agencies besides law enforcement who can
legally listen to electronic communications. The government has evaded
questions about exactly who will have access to these keys, or for that
matter, what, besides an judicial warrant, constitutes the "lawful
authority" to which they continually refer.)
Clipper/Skipjack was not well received. The blizzard of anguished ASCII it
summoned forth on the Net has been so endlessly voluble and so painstaking
in its "How-many-Cray-Years-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-Clipper-Chip"
technical detail that I would guess all but the real cypherpunks are by now
data-shocked into listlessness and confusion.
Indeed, I suspect that even many readers of this publication...a group with
prodigious capacity for assimilating the arid and obscure...are starting to
long for the days when their knowledge of cryptography and the public
policies surrounding it was limited enough to be coherent.
So I almost hesitate to bring the subject up. Yet somewhere amid this
racket, decisions are being made that will profoundly affect your future
ability to communicate without fear. Those who would sacrifice your liberty
for their illusions of public safety are being afforded some refuge by the
very din of opposition.
In the hope of restoring both light and heat to the debate, I'm going to
summarize previous episodes, state a few conclusions I've drawn about the
current techno-political terrain, and recommend positions you might
consider taking, as well as actions that might support them.
Clipper/Skipjack Really Is A Dumb Idea.
When I first heard about Clipper/Skipjack, I thought it might not be such a
bad idea. This false conclusion was partly due to the reality distorting
character of the location...I was about fifty feet away from the Oval
Office at the time...but it also seemed like one plausible approach to what
may be the bright future of crime in the Virtual Age.
I mean, I can see what the Guardian Class is worried about. The greater
part of business is already being transacted in Cyberspace. Most of the
money is there. At the moment, however, most of the monetary bits in there
are being accounted for. Accounting is digital, but cash is not.
It is imaginable that, with the widespread use of digital cash and
encrypted monetary exchange on the Global Net, economies the size of
America's could appear as nothing but oceans of alphabet soup. Money
laundering would no longer be necessary. The payment of taxes might become
more or less voluntary. A lot of weird things would happen after that...
I'm pretty comfortable with chaos, but this is not a future I greet without
reservation.
So, while I'm not entirely persuaded that we need to give up our future
privacy to protect ourselves from drug dealers, terrorists, child
molesters, and un-named military opponents (the Four Horsemen of Fear
customarily invoked by our protectors), I can imagine bogeymen whose
traffic I'd want visible to authority.
Trouble is, the more one learns about Clipper/Skipjack, the less persuaded
he is that it would do much to bring many actual Bad Guys under scrutiny.
As proposed, it would be a voluntary standard, spread mainly by the market
forces that would arise after the government bought a few tons of these
chips for their own "sensitive but unclassified" communications systems. No
one would be driven to use it by anything but convenience. In fact, no one
with any brains would use it if he were trying to get away with anything.
In fact, the man who claims to have designed Clipper's basic specs, Acting
NIST Director Ray Kammer, recently said, "It's obvious that anyone who
uses Clipper for the conduct of organized crime is dumb." No kidding. At
least so long as it's voluntary.
Under sober review, there mounted an incredibly long list of reasons to
think Clipper/Skipjack might not be a fully-baked idea. In May, after a
month of study, the Digital Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition
of some 40 companies and organizations chaired by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), sent the White House 118 extremely tough questions
regarding Clipper, any five of which should have been sufficient to put the
kibosh on it.
The members of this group were not a bunch of hysterics. It includes DEC,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, MCI, Microsoft, Apple, and AT&T (which was also,
interestingly enough, the first company to commit to putting
Clipper/Skipjack in its own products).
Among the more troubling of their questions:
* Who would the escrow agents be?
* What are Clipper's likely economic impacts, especially in regard to
export of American digital products?
* Why is its encryption algorithm secret and why should the public have
confidence in a government-derived algorithm that can't be privately
tested?
* Why is Clipper/Skipjack being ram-rodded into adoption as a government
standard before completion of an over-all review of U.S. policies on
cryptography?
* Why are the NSA, FBI, and NIST stone-walling Freedom of Information
inquiries about Clipper/Skipjack? (In fact, NSA's response has been,
essentially, "So? Sue us.")
* Assuming Clipper/Skipjack becomes a standard, what happens if the escrow
depositories are compromised?
* Wouldn't these depositories also become targets of opportunity for any
criminal or terrorist organization that wanted to disrupt US. law
enforcement?
* Since the chip transmits its serial number at the beginning of each
connection, why wouldn't it render its owner's activities highly visible
through traffic analysis (for which government needs no warrant)?
* Why would a foreign customer buy a device that exposed his conversations
to examination by the government of the United States?
* Does the deployment and use of the chip possibly violate the 1st, 4th,
and 5th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution?
* In its discussions of Clipper/Skipjack, the government often uses the
phrase "lawfully authorized electronic surveillance." What, exactly, do
they mean by this?
* Is it appropriate to insert classified technology into either the public
communications network or into the general suite of public technology
standards?
And so on and so forth. As I say, it was a very long list. On July 29,
John D. Podesta, Assistant to the President and White House Staff Secretary
(and, interestingly enough, a former legal consultant to EFF and Co-Chair
of the Digital Privacy Working Group), responded to these questions. He
actually answered few of them.
Still un-named, undescribed, and increasingly unimaginable were the escrow
agents. Questions about the inviolability of the depositories were met with
something like, "Don't worry, they'll be secure. Trust us."
There seemed a lot of that in Podesta's responses. While the government had
convened a panel of learned cryptologists to examine the classified
Skipjack algorithm, it had failed to inspire much confidence among the
crypto establishment, most of whom were still disinclined to trust anything
they couldn't whack at themselves. At the least, most people felt a proper
examination would take longer than the month or so the panel got. After
all, it took fifteen years to find a hairline fissure in DES .
But neither Podesta nor any other official explained why it had seemed
necessary to use a classified military algorithm for civilian purposes. Nor
were the potential economic impacts addressed. Nor were the concerns about
traffic analysis laid to rest.
But as Thomas Pynchon once wrote, "If they can get you asking the wrong
questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Neither asked nor
answered in all of this was the one question that kept coming back to me:
Was this trip really necessary?
For all the debate over the details, few on either side seemed to be
approaching the matter from first principles. Were the enshrined
threats...drug dealers, terrorists, child molesters, and foreign
enemies...sufficiently and presently imperiling to justify fundamentally
compromising all future transmitted privacy?
I mean...speaking personally now...it seems to me that America's greatest
health risks derive from the drugs that are legal, a position the
statistics overwhelmingly support. And then there's terrorism, to which we
lost a total of two Americans in 1992, even with the World Trade Center
bombing, only 6 in 1993. I honestly can't imagine an organized ring of
child molesters, but I suppose one or two might be out there. And the last
time we got into a shooting match with another nation, we beat them by a
kill ratio of about 2300 to 1.
Even if these are real threats, was enhanced wire-tap the best way to
combat them? Apparently, it hasn't been in the past. Over the last ten
years the average total nation-wide number of admissible state and federal
wire-taps has numbered less than 800. Wire-tap is not at present a major
enforcement tool, and is far less efficient than the informants, witnesses,
physical evidence, and good old fashioned detective work they usually rely
on.
(It's worth noting that the World Trade Center bombing case unraveled, not
through wire-taps, but with the discovery of the axle serial number on the
van which held the explosives.)
Despite all these questions, both unasked and unanswered, Clipper continues
(at the time of this writing) to sail briskly toward standardhood, the full
wind of government bearing her along.
On July 30, NIST issued a request for public comments on its proposal to
establish Clipper/Skipjack as a Federal Information Processing Standard
(FIPS). All comments are due by September 28, and the government seems
unwilling to delay the process despite the lack of an overall guiding
policy on crypto. Worse, they are putting a hard sell on Clipper/Skipjack
without a clue as to who might be escrow holders upon whose political
acceptability the entire scheme hinges.
Nor have they addressed the central question: why would a criminal use a
key escrow device unless he were either very stupid...in which case he'd be
easily caught anyway...or simply had no choice.
All this leads me to an uncharacteristically paranoid conclusion:
The Government May Mandate Key Escrow Encryption and Outlaw Other Forms.
It is increasingly hard for me to imagine any other purpose for the
Clipper/Skipjack operetta if not to prepare the way for the restriction of
all private cryptographic uses to a key escrow system. If I were going to
move the American people into a condition where they might accept
restrictions on their encryption, I would first engineer the wide-spread
deployment of a key escrow system on a voluntary basis, wait for some blind
sheik to slip a bomb plot around it and then say, "Sorry, folks this ain't
enough, it's got to be universal."
Otherwise, why bother? Even its most ardent proponents admit that no
intelligent criminal would trust his communications to a key escrow device.
On the other hand, if nearly all encrypted traffic were Skipjack-flavored,
any transmission encoded by some other algorithm would stick out like a
licorice Dot.
In fact, the assumption that Cyberspace will roar one day with Skipjack
babble lies behind the stated reason for the secrecy for the algorithm. In
their Interim Report, the Skipjack review panel puts it this way:
Disclosure of the algorithm would permit the construction of devices that
fail to properly implement the LEAF [or Law Enforcement Access Field],
while still interoperating with legitimate SKIPJACK devices. Such devices
would provide high quality cryptographic security without preserving the
law enforcement access capability that distinguishes this cryptographic
initiative.
In other words, they don't want devices or software out there that might
use the Skipjack algorithm without depositing a key with the escrow
holders. (By the way, this claim is open to question. Publishing Skipjack
would not necessarily endow anyone with the ability to build an
interoperable chip.)
Then there was the conversation I had with a highly-placed official of the
National Security Council in which he mused that the French had, after all,
outlawed the private use of cryptography, so it weren't as though it
couldn't be done. (He didn't suggest that we should also emulate France's
policy of conducting espionage on other countries' industries, though
wide-spread international use of Clipper/Skipjack would certainly enhance
our ability to do so.)
Be that as it may, France doesn't have a Bill of Rights to violate, which
it seems to me that restriction of cryptography in America would do on
several counts.
Mandated encryption standards would fly against the First Amendment, which
surely protects the manner of our speech as clearly as it protects the
content. Whole languages (most of them patois) have arisen on this planet
for the purpose of making the speaker unintelligible to authority. I know
of no instance where, even in the oppressive colonies where such languages
were formed, that the slave-owners banned their use.
Furthermore, the encryption software itself is written expression, upon
which no ban may be constitutionally imposed. (What, you might ask then,
about the constitutionality of restrictions on algorithm export. I'd say
they're being allowed only because no one ever got around to testing from
that angle.)
The First Amendment also protects freedom of association. On several
different occasions, most notably NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson and
Talley vs. California, the courts have ruled that requiring the disclosure
of either an organization's membership or the identity of an individual
could lead to reprisals, thereby suppressing both association and speech.
Certainly in a place like Cyberspace where everyone is so generally
"visible," no truly private "assembly" can take place without some
technical means of hiding the participants.
It also looks to me as if the forced imposition of a key escrow system
might violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits secret searches. Even with a warrant, agents
of the government must announce themselves before entering and may not
seize property without informing the owner. Wire-taps inhabit a gray-ish
area of the law in that they permit the secret "seizure" of an actual
conversation by those actively eavesdropping on it. The law does not permit
the subsequent secret seizure of a record of that conversation. Given the
nature of electronic communications, an encryption key opens not only the
phone line but the filing cabinet.
Finally, the Fifth Amendment protects individuals from being forced to
reveal self-incriminating evidence. While no court has ever ruled on the
matter vis a vis encryption keys, there seems something involuntarily
self-incriminating about being forced to give up your secrets in advance.
Which is, essentially, what mandatory key escrow would require you to do.
For all these protections, I keep thinking it would be nice to have a
constitution like the one just adopted by our largest possible enemy,
Russia. As I understand it, this document explicitly forbids governmental
restrictions on the use of cryptography.
For the moment, we have to take our comfort in the fact that our
government...or at least the parts of it that state their
intentions...avows both publicly and privately that it has no intention to
impose key escrow cryptography as a mandatory standard. It would be, to use
Podesta's mild word, "imprudent."
But it's not Podesta or anyone else in the current White House who worries
me. Despite their claims to the contrary, I'm not convinced they like
Clipper any better than I do. In fact, one of them...not Podesta...called
Clipper "our Bay of Pigs," referring to the ill-fated Cuban invasion cooked
up by the CIA under Eisenhower and executed (badly) by a reluctant Kennedy
Administration. The comparison may not be invidious.
It's the people I can't see who worry me. These are the people who actually
developed Clipper/Skipjack and its classified algorithm, the people who,
through export controls, have kept American cryptography largely to
themselves, the people who are establishing in secret what the public can
or cannot employ to protect its own secrets. They are invisible and silent
to all the citizens they purportedly serve save those who sit the
Congressional intelligence committees.
In secret, they are making for us what may be the most important choice
that has ever faced American democracy, that is, whether our descendants
will lead their private lives with unprecedented mobility and safety from
coercion, or whether every move they make, geographic, economic, or
amorous, will be visible to anyone who possesses whatever may then
constitute "lawful authority."
Who Are the Lawful Authorities?
Over a year ago, when I first fell down the rabbit hole into Cryptoland, I
wrote a Communications column called Decrypting the Puzzle Palace. In it, I
advanced what I then thought a slightly paranoid thesis, suggesting that
the NSA-guided embargoes on robust encryption software had been driven not
by their stated justification (keeping good cryptography out of the
possession of foreign military adversaries) but rather restricting its use
by domestic civilians.
In the course of writing that piece, I spoke to a number of officials,
including former CIA Director Stansfield Turner and former NSA Director
Bobby Ray Inman, who assured me that using a military organization to shape
domestic policy would be "injudicious" (as Turner put it), but no one could
think of any law or regulation that might specifically prohibit the NSA
from serving the goals of the Department of Justice.
But since then I've learned a lot about the hazy Post-Reagan/Bush lines
between law enforcement and intelligence. They started redrawing the map of
authority early in their administration with Executive Order 12333, issued
on December 4, 1981. (Federal Register #: 46 FR 59941)
This sweeping decree defines the duties and limitations of the various
intelligence organizations of the United States and contains the following
language:
1.4 The Intelligence Community. The agencies within the Intelligence
Community shall...conduct intelligence activities necessary for the...
protection of the national security of the United States, including:
...
(c) Collection of information concerning, and the conduct of activities to
protect against, intelligence activities directed against the United
States, international terrorist and international narcotics activities, and
other hostile activities directed against the United States by foreign
powers, organizations, persons, and their agents; (Italics Added)
Further, in Section 2.6, Assistance to Law Enforcement Authorities,
agencies within the Intelligence Community are
authorized to...participate in law enforcement activities to investigate or
prevent clandestine intelligence activities by foreign powers, or
international terrorist or narcotics activities.
In other words, the intelligence community was specifically charged with
investigative responsibility for international criminal activities in the
areas of drugs and terrorism.
Furthermore, within certain fairly loose guidelines, intelligence
organizations are "authorized to collect, retain or disseminate information
concerning United States persons" that may include "incidentally obtained
information that may indicate involvement in activities that may violate
federal, state, local or foreign laws."
Given that the NSA monitors a significant portion of all the electronic
communications between the United States and other countries, the
opportunities for "incidentally obtaining" information that might
incriminate Americans inside America are great.
Furthermore, over the course of the Reagan/Bush administration, the job of
fighting the War on Some Drugs gradually spread to every element of the
Executive Branch.
Even the Department of Energy is now involved. At an Intelligence Community
conference last winter I heard a proud speech from a DOE official in which
he talked about how some of the bomb-designing supercomputers at Los Alamos
had been turned to the peaceful purpose of sifting through huge piles of
openly available data...newspapers, courthouse records, etc....in search of
patterns that would expose drug users and traffickers. They are selling
their results to a variety of "lawful authorities," ranging from the
Southern Command of the U.S. Army to the Panamanian Defense Forces to
various County Sheriff's Departments.
"Fine," you might say, "Drug use is a epidemic that merits any cure." But I
would be surprised if there's anyone who will read this sentence who has
broken no laws whatever. And it's anybody's guess what evidence of other
unlawful activities might be "incidentally obtained" by such a wide net as
DOE is flinging.
The central focus that drugs and terrorism have assumed within the
intelligence agencies was underscored for me by a recent tour of the
central operations room at the CIA. There, in the nerve center of American
intelligence, were desks for Asia, Europe, North America, Africa and
"Middle East/Terrorism," and "South America/Narcotics." These bogeymen are
now the size of continents on the governmental map of peril.
Given this perception of its duties, the NSA's strict opposition to the
export of strong cryptographic engines, hard or soft, starts to make more
sense. They are not, as I'd feared, so clue-impaired as to think their
embargoes are denying any other nation access to good cryptography.
(According to an internal Department of Defense analysis of crypto policy,
it recently took 3 minutes and 14 seconds to locate a source code version
of DES on the Internet.)
Nor do they really believe these policies are enhancing national security
in the traditional, military sense of the word, where the U.S. is, in any
case, already absurdly over-matched to any national adversary, as was
proven during the Gulf War.
It's the enemies they can't bomb who have them worried, and they are
certainly correct in thinking that the communications of drug traffickers
and whatever few terrorists as may actually exist are more open to their
perusal than would be the case in a world where even your grandmother's
phone conversations were encrypted.
And Clipper or no Clipper, such a world would be closer at hand if
manufacturers hadn't known than any device that embodies good encryption
would not be fit for export.
But with Clipper/Skipjack, there is a lot that the combined forces of
government will be able to do to monitor all aspects of your behavior
without getting a warrant. Between the monitoring capacities of the NSA,
the great data-sieves of the Department of Energy, and the fact that, in
use, each chip would continually broadcast the whereabouts of its owner,
the government would soon be able to isolate just about every perpetrator
among us.
I assume you're neither a drug-user nor a terrorist, but are you ready for this? Is your nose that clean? Can it be prudent to give the government this kind of corrupting power?
I don't think so, but this is what will happen if we continue to allow the
secret elements of government to shape domestic policy as though the only
American goals that mattered were stopping terrorism (which seems pretty
well stopped already) and winning the War on Some Drugs (which no amount of
force will ever completely win).
Unfortunately, we are not able to discuss priorities with the people who
are setting them, nor do they seem particularly amenable to any form of
authority. In a recent discussion with a White House official, I asked for
his help in getting the NSA to come out of its bunker and engage in direct
and open discussions about crypto embargoes, key escrow, the Skipjack
algorithm, and the other matters of public interest.
"I'll see what we can do," he said.
"But you guys are the government," I protested. "Surely they'll do as you
tell them."
"I'll see what we can do," he repeated, offering little optimism.
That was months ago. In the meantime, the NSA has not only remained utterly
unforthcoming in public discussions of crypto policy, they have unlawfully
refused to comply with any Freedom of Information Act requests for
documents in this area.
It is time for the public to reassert control over their own government. It
is time to demand that public policy be made in public by officials with
names, faces, and personal accountability.
When and if we are able to actually discuss crypto policy with the people
who are setting it, I have a list of objectives that I hope many of you
will share. There are as follows:
A Policy on Cryptography
1. There should no law restricting any use of cryptography by private citizens.
2. There should be no restriction on the export of cryptographic algorithms
or any other instruments of cryptography.
3. Secret agencies should not be allowed to drive public policies.
4. The taxpayer's investment in encryption technology and related
mathematical research should be made available for public and scientific
use.
5. The government should encourage the deployment of wide-spread encryption.
6. While key escrow systems may have purposes, none should be implemented
that places the keys in the hands of government.
7. Any encryption standard to be implemented by the government should
developed in an open and public fashion and should not employ a secret
algorithm.
And last, or perhaps, first...
8. There should be no broadening of governmental access to private
communications and records unless there is a public consensus that the
risks to safety outweigh the risks to liberty and will be effectively
addressed by these means.
If you support these principles, or even if you don't, I hope you will
participate in making this a public process. And there are a number of
actions you can take in that regard.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a
request for public comments on its proposal to establish the "Skipjack"
key-escrow system as a Federal Information Processing Standard. You've got
until September 28 to tell them what you think of that. Comments on the
NIST proposal should be sent to:
Director, Computer Systems Laboratory
ATTN: Proposed FIPS for Escrowed Encryption Standard
Technology Building, Room B-154
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899
If you belong to or work for an organization, you can encourage that
organization to join the Digital Privacy Working Group. To do so they
should contact EFF's Washington office at:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
1001 G Street, NW
Suite 950 East
Washington, DC 20001
202/347-5400
Fax 202/393-5509
eff@eff.org
I also encourage individuals interested in these issues to either join EFF,
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, or one of the related
local organizations which have sprung up around the country. For the
addresses of a group in your area, contact EFF.
Dad's Invisible Guard-All Shield
For the April, 1993 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on
edge.
--Jeremiah 31:29
Some years back, when I was still a Wyoming environmentalist, I found
myself crossing South Pass with an old sheep rancher I knew. We were going
to a federal hearing in Casper where, as an ideologically committed
resource rapist, he would be my principal opponent. I can't remember the
issue at contest. Probably strip-mine reclamation or something. That memory
is blurred by the more vivid recollection of sun dogs through the tinted
windows of his Olds Tornado and something he said to me that winter
afternoon.
Our opinions had few intersections, but we liked each other. Our opposition
was cultural, not personal. He had his sense of Nature and what one might
responsibly do to Her. I had mine. We'd been arguing for about an hour,
getting nowhere near any joint accommodation, when old Leonard leaned back
and said, "Well, John Perry, look at it this way. Someday I'll be dead and
you won't."
By this he meant that a time would come when world management would be up
to me and others of my generation. Then it would be ours to mess up as we
saw fit. Of course, he was also saying that we should wait patiently while
his generation continued to mess it up as they saw fit. But still, he had a
point.
Over the last year I've frequently found myself close to the places from
which the world really does get managed, to whatever little degree it
doesn't somehow manage itself. As Leonard predicted, the good old boys are
now mostly either dead or terminally golfing. For the first time in my
life, the President is a contemporary.
During its first year, Bill 'n' Al's Excellent Adventure seemed proof that,
however unwillingly, the previous generation had finally relaxed their
defining grip on the dominant American Reality. It looked like the
stiff-lipped, big-fisted, team-playing, can-do geopolitical style to which
they adapted while coming of age in World War II might finally be ready for
History's Yard Sale.
But now I begin to wonder if they haven't out-foxed us after all. Like
Pharaohs booby-trapping the Pyramids, they have left behind great
institutional automata which will keep much of government dancing to
Sinatra (and all the cultural perceptions and values he embodies) until the
Dead finally are. They are reaching out from the grave (or some back nine
at Palm Desert) and defining the New World Order around the same old
paranoid paradigm.
The Sixties were a scary time for everyone. I, for one, fully intended to
bring about The End of Civilization as We Knew It. Of course, the guardians
of that Civilization responded accordingly. First, they disinherited the
lot of us. Then they remained in office themselves much longer than is
usually the custom any place but Beijing or Salt Lake City. Then whenever
possible, they passed the torch over to our younger siblings who, being
more generally comfortable in a nice blue serge, were less likely to
conduct government by apocalypse.
Given what was going down at the time, I could hardly blame the old guys
for their reaction to us. And, in retrospect, I am even forced to admit
that a few of their policies, most notably Mutually Assured Destruction,
were not as mad as they seemed to me then. After all, there hasn't been a
global bloodbath since the one they fought in. It may well be that such
vile psychic weather as used to blow up every generation was prevented by
their tight forty year focus on assuring the Soviets that attacking us was
tantamount to committing national suicide.
But maintaining that threat also meant keeping my peacenik kind away from
the hideous machines which would carry it out, so they protected them
behind billowing ink-clouds of secrecy and semi-permeable political
membranes called security clearances.
The latter included, as a prerequisite to serious government service, being
asked the following questions (from National Agency Questionnaire (NAQ) DD
Form 398-2):
Question 20: Drug/Alcohol Use and Mental Health ("YES" answers must be
explained in accordance with DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS)
a. Have you ever tried or used or possessed any narcotic (to include heroin
or cocaine), depressant, (to include quaaludes), stimulant, hallucinogen,
(to include LSD or PCP), or cannabis (to include marijuana or hashish), or
any mind-altering substance (to include glue or paint), even one time or on
an experimental basis, except as prescribed by a licensed physician.
b. Have you ever been involved in the illegal purchase, manufacture,
trafficking, production, or sale of any narcotic, depressant, stimulant,
hallucinogen, or cannabis?
c. Have you ever misused or abused any drug prescribed by a licensed
physician for yourself or someone else?
d.
e. Have you ever been treated for a mental, emotional, psychological, or
personality disorder/condition/problem?
The "DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS" say:
If "Yes" is answered to any of the questions in this item, describe the
circumstance in item 14, in accordance with the following explanations. If
necessary, attach additional sheets for a full detailed statement.
a. Drug Use/Possession. A listing of those drugs which have been designated
as controlled substances is located on the last page of these instructions.
If you used any of these drugs, or any other mind-altering substances, mark
"Yes", and provide in Item 14, the following details:
* Drug(s) used/possessed
* Date(s) of use/possession
* Frequency of use/possession
* Intentions regarding future use/possession
* City and state (or country if not in U.D.) where used/possessed
* Circumstances surrounding use/possession
IF MORE THAN ONE DRUG HAS BEEN USED/POSSESSED, PROVIDE THE Information
ABOVE FOR EACH DRUG SEPARATELY
b. Drug Activity. The drugs referred to are again those listed on the
attachment or any other mind-altering substances. If "Yes", you must
indicate on the NAQ the activity (or activities) in which you were involved
by circling "purchase", "manufacture", "trafficking", "production", or
"sale" and provide in Item 14 the following details:
* drugs involved
* Dates(s) of activity
* Number of times you participated in activity
* Current activity
* Intentions regarding future activity
* City and state (or country if not in U.S.) where activity took place
* Circumstances surrounding activity
AGAIN, IF MORE THAN ONE DRUG IS INVOLVED, PROVIDE SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR
EACH DRUG SEPARATELY.
Now I'm probably a special case, but I don't have very many friends or
colleagues who could remember detailed answers to such a quiz, let alone
find time to answer them in the required detail. Then of course there's the
matter the matter of self-incrimination. Or the fact that either way, you
don't get the job.
Even if you were perfectly straight with regard to other drugs besides the
legal ones, getting a security clearance requires that neither you nor your
friends are made uncomfortable by having FBI agents inquiring into the
finer shades of your sexual settings (and, sex being what it is, almost
everyone has some minor oddity in the closet), your political associations,
your personal associations, or any of the other details of a life which
might deviate from their own pious path.
A security clearance is, in other words, a cultural filter which is
designed to assure that the higher reaches of government will be staffed by
the conventional, the dutiful (generally younger or older than me), the
strangely old paradigm Dan Quayle types nobody wanted to hang out with in
college, or those of us who are willing to swear under oath that we never
did any of the things that most of my generation did several times a week.
(And that, in many cases, they still do.)
In fact, it assures that America will be run by people who are
temperamentally quite different from the people they serve, unless you
think that most Americans are like FBI agents and career military officers.
(I think it's safe to say that a majority of the members of Association of
Computing Machinery would have a hard time making it through this invisible
Guard-All shield.) It certainly assures that it will be run by people who
have roughly the same values, perceptions, view of the world...the same
culture...which our fathers had. (Note that I do not say "mothers.")
Thanks to this engine of cultural self-propagation, the official culture of
American government is straight from the Fifties. In the view of most of
those now gathered around the misty summits of power, the Sixties were a
period in which you either didn't participate or only did so by some
mistake of which you are now soundly repentant. They were an experiment
that failed. There was nothing to be learned from them. No consciousness
was altered for the better.
Indeed, consciousness is not a word they use there much, and certainly not
in reference to anything more than the difference between waking and
sleeping. In short, not much has changed in a very long time. Nor is it
likely to in a environment in which the prevailing sentiment is that all
change is for the worse.
Elsewhere, of course, things have changed, rather fundamentally and in many
ways that arise directly from the lessons, insights, technologies, and
paradigm shifts cut loose by the Sixties.
Elsewhere, the Cold War is over and America has other jobs besides
preserving its borders against hostile attack. Indeed, all the political,
cultural, and geographical boundaries over which humans glowered at one
another from World War II until a few years ago seem barely functional
constructs in the instantaneous reality most of us now inhabit.
The very idea which is so central to those who can get security
clearances...the primacy of national security...bases itself on the premise
that there is a clearly defined Nation to secure, that national borders are
still meaningful, that there is something like an American consensus.
Exactly what is the United States of America these days? I recently asked a
couple of Clinton/Gore staffers this question. What, I wanted to know, did
they regard it their duty to protect?
Whatever pays taxes to Washington? Whatever lies within our traditional
geographical boundaries? Whomever speaks English with an American accent,
believes in Jesus and free markets, and beams his global reality from CNN
above?
They looked at me funny, of course. "That's not the kind of question we ask
around the White House," one of them said, dismissing me for some kind of
precious Post-Modernist ninny. They didn't ask questions like that because,
as my father (or old Leonard) would have said, it just isn't practical.
However similar these fellows were to me in their age, education,
intelligence, and general commitment to the human commonweal, they were on
the other side of that cultural barricade, our fathers' side. They had
security clearances. They had passed through a filter which vouchsafed
their adherence to a paradigm which hasn't been mine since that fine day
back in 1967 when I dropped acid for the first time, eliminating my shot of
ever simultaneously being both an honest man and a high government official
I also eliminated on that day my sense that reality was a fact and not an
opinion. But for these fellows, there were no new realities to accommodate
because, as our fathers knew before us, reality is not something which
might be mutable. Reality just is. As it always has been. World without
end. That it might now be impractical not to ask such questions, or that
failure to do so might be a form of institutionalized denial, has not
apparently occurred to many in this or any other government in my lifetime.
The purpose of the foregoing rant is not quite as self-serving as it might
appear. I'm not simply another old hippie belly-aching about his shattered
dreams, though I'm certainly vulnerable to the charge. Nor am I whining
over being excluded from government, nor even bragging that my mind is too
expanded to fit through the artificially narrowed portals of power. It's
also expanded enough to know that power is itself a largely delusory
condition from which I am well enough pleased to be excluded.
Rather, I'm trying to give you a context in which to understand a number of
government actions and policies which baffled me until I understood who was
promulgating them, how their directors looked at the world, and why that
particular world view, quaint though it is, still seems to be in the
promulgative driver's seat.
Readers of this column will hardly be surprised at the policies which snap
most readily to my mind. They're things like:
* Export embargoes on encryption products and indeed, on knowledge about
encryption despite the incredible porosity of the environment where such
things exist.
* Digital Telephony and its underlying assumption that the ability to
conduct surveillance on American citizens is more important than progress
in our most economically promising technology: telecommunications.
* The Clipper Chip. Of course.
* Information infrastructure policies which seem to assume that there is a
national Net which is somehow sublimely abstracted from the international
Net.
* The belief that that this spreading digital neurology really is like the
Interstate Highway System with all the imposed Fifties-style centralization
of design, funding, and, most of all, susceptibility to control inherent in
such an architecture.
* And, of course, continuing astronomical expenditures on "national
security" at a time when when the greatest collective threat we face is the
deficit that these outlays are ramming deeper into the red.
What these policies have in common is an underlying assumption that we
still live on the crisply divided planet of our father's experience, a
world where the Us/Them dichotomy is not open to conjecture and where They
are so depraved and well-armed that few measures are too extreme to ensure
our safety from them.
Those of who live in the world as it has become, and particularly those of
us who live on the Net, may find it hard to believe that there enough Old
Paradigm types left to staff the power end of the Executive Branch. But, as
I say, the security clearance filter has managed to catch the few that are
available.
In addition, the more evolved people who did somehow make the cut (usually
by some lawyerly gavotte around certain questions) are soon subsumed into
the mind-field on the other side of the security membrane. In a fairly
short time, they drink that Kool-Aid and the result is straight out of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I got a close-up look at this phenomenon recently while trying, with
pitiful futility, to convince various White House officials of the folly of
their freshly hardened positions on crypto. Though I knew that some of
these folks had once been rather like me...indeed, I had known them when
they were...they now seemed, well, different.
They were transfixed by the vision of the nuclear-armed terrorist, and they
were ready to do just about anything, no matter how ridiculous, if it could
seen as an honest effort to stop this heretofore unexperienced disaster.
Within the strait confines of the national security logic, they were
prepared dedicate the same level of wartime energy (and expediency
regarding civil liberties) to protecting against nuclear horror that our
fathers had when the other side had missiles rather than Ryder trucks to
deliver its warheads.
Every time I thought I had them logically backed into some particularly
goofy aspect of the Clipper "solution" to this threat, they would zip down
the tautological rabbit hole of: "If you knew what we know and can't tell
you, you'd feel the same way we do."
Where had I heard that phrase before? It was all-purpose "reason" behind
which my father's generation pursued everything from the massive
manufacture of nuclear weapons to the War in Vietnam.
It said that no matter how apparently senseless a governmental policy
seemed to the unbriefed, there was certain knowledge, forbidden to all but
our self-selecting guardians, in which lay the necessary components of
reason. That argument didn't work for me then. It doesn't work for me now.
And it wouldn't have worked for Thomas Jefferson, who said: ""I know of no
safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that
control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from
them, but to inform their discretion."
It's time for the paternalism to end. And it's time we restored government
by the people, such as we are, and not such as our fathers always wanted us
to be.
Death From Above
For the March, 1995 Electronic Frontier column
in Communications of the ACM
by
John Perry Barlow
Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an
astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War
II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on
people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world
view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation.
It was an experience particularly suited to the style of broadcast media.
Aerial bombardment is clearly a one-to-many, half-duplex medium, offering
the bomber a commanding position over his "market" and terrific economies
of scale.
Now, most of these jut-jawed former flyboys are out to pasture on various
golf courses, but just as they left their legacy in the still thriving Cold
War machinery of the National Security State, so their cultural perspective
remains deeply, perhaps permanently, embedded in the corporate institutions
they led for so long, whether in media or manufacturing. America remains a
place where companies produce and consumers consume in an economic
relationship which is still as asymmetrical as that of bomber to bombee.
The lop-sided character of this world view has been much on my mind lately
with regard to various corporate projects on what they are all too pleased
to call the "Information Superhighway" (evoking as it does the familiar
comforts of Big Construction by Big Government in cooperation with Big
Business). The cable companies and Baby Bells have a model for developing
the next phase of telecom infrastructure which, were it applied to the
design of physical superhighways, would have us building them with about
five thousand lanes in one direction and one lane in the other.
The only more manipulative consumer architecture I've seen is the quarter
mile of one way conveyor belt which sucks the unsuspecting off the Strip in
Vegas and drops them into the digestive maze of Caesar's Palace Casino
without any return route at all.
Nursing such gloomy metaphors as these, I was encouraged to receive an
e-mail message recently from Gordon Bell, one of the Titans of computing,
with the cumbersome but evocative subject: line, "Building Cyberspace with
One-way Streets - Bad idea? Conspiracy? Short-sightedness? Incompetence?'"
In it, he exhorted me and a number of better qualified digerati (including
The Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte and Bellcore Vice President and telecom
god Bob Lucky) to put our "bodies in front of the backhoes that are
installing asymmetric networks that simply mimic cable TV."
There followed a passionate argument against what appears to be the default
asymmetry and the following vision of a better future: "The distinction
and needs between homes and offices will disappear. Also, there needn't be
places like information warehouses that are the sole video providers into
the network to form new franchises and monopolies. Every home should, in
principle, be capable of being a producer or consumer. This needs to be
the goal of the information highway."
Unfortunately, as things stand, it isn't. At least it is in no way the goal
of the institutions that currently building the more overtly commercial
aspects of it. Whether cable companies or telcos, they see the NII as
pay-per-view on steroids. They seem to envision their economic future in
creating for the Generican consumer the ability to watch any movie or
re-run without risking such human interaction as a trip to the video store
might produce.
The strangest aspect of this vision (or trance) is that pay-per-view has
been available for nearly twenty years and has never, to my knowledge,
managed to penetrate more than 18% of its possible target market of cable
subscribers. The idea that this unpopular service will power our economic
future would seem preposterous on its face were not some many billions
headed that way.
Institutions from John Malone's TCI to Oracle are building titanic video
servers, the mothers of all mainframes, in order that they might blast down
at you "My Mother, the Car" or "Motel Hell" at any moment you might hunger
for that sort of thing. From these great repositories of digitized dreck
will dangle a thatch of fiber/coax tentacles, one of which will presumably
extend its coaxial tip into your living room.
One design model popular with the RBOC's and at least one cable company
would initially offer a gigabit comin' at ya and about 200 kbps of back
channel, presumably to support the "buy" button on the remote controller of
your set-top box and other such boons of "Interactive" Television.
In this model, the telco runs a fiber into a neighborhood of about 500
homes, connecting subscribers to that point with coax and modems.
Downstream from the distribution point there would be about 200 MHz
available, from which the modems can derive about 5 bits per Hz., giving
one gigabit for video services of whatever sort.
Upstream is a different story altogether. There you've only about 30 MHz.
available in the whole neighborhood router, and the modems only derive
about 2 bits per Hz., leaving a pool of 60 Mbps to be shared by the 300
customers, or, as I say, about 200 kbps. Not much more than AppleTalk.
To be honest, that's a little misleading. The back-channel 60 Mbps pool can
be switched dynamically between users. Thus the average available might be
as much as 1 Mpbs, given that not everybody in a neighborhood will be
sending bits upstream all the time.
While this wouldn't be all the bandwidth a byte-pig like me might want, it
would be a hell of a start. But there is also the question of whether it
will even be available to the customer. Most of the models I've seen, cable
or telco, seem to reserve it for their own purposes. I believe if they were
willing to open it up to the users, they would, as Mitch Kapor speculates,
"quickly find there was far more demand for the service than they
imagined." Mitch goes on: "This would be agood thing as it would speed up
their accepting the inevitable."
What about the economics? A full fiber installation might cost as much as
$1500 per home. At 100 million homes, that's quite a bottom line. No one is
seriously going to ask the telcos and cable companies to pop for an up
front investment of 150 billion in a market even they can't seriously
believe in, but one wonders why they are designing such hard asymmetry into
their local distribution systems.
For one thing, this $1500 is only five hundred more than the $1000 which is
the rough average cost of installing a new copper pair. Given that there
are many new hookups, both cable and telco, installed daily and many
equipment upgrades as well, it's probably more accurate to say that the
incremental cost of nearly universal fiber-to-the-home would be something
on the order of 20 to 25 billion. That's still real money, but a price one
can imagine the market bearing.
Furthermore, it would seem a good bet on a highly imaginable future to lay
dark fiber in these trenches while they're open, a relatively cheap thing
to do, and to install the expensive parts - the lasers at each end - when
the market is ready.
But very few of the new connections and upgrades being installed at the
moment are taking advantage of the opportunity. When the trenches close
they are, in most cases, closing on coax alone. Laying the fiber will
require their being reopened.
There are other non-recoverable costs associated with the asymmetic
approach the Big Boys seem stuck on. When the folks at the edges start
clamoring for upstream capacity, it will be necessary to replace all those
ADSL modems and other neighborhood routers of fixed asymmetry at a time
when they will be, in my projections, fairly new. We can argue about the
time frame, but it seems wasteful to be installing new equipment that will
be junk sooner than not.
What are the economic or technical disadvantages of designing the fiber
drop-to-home architecture so that it would provide flexible bandwidth
allocation now, even allowing upstream asymmetry if called for? I mean, I
thought one of the beauties of ATM was it ability to rapidly re-deploy
routing and bandwidth on demand.
The answer I get back is that there is no serious demand for upstream
services while the cable business has at least demonstrated a market for
downstream services. If you take this answer seriously, which I don't, this
is a little like a petroleum company stating in 1900 that since there
wasn't much of a market for gasoline it was going to stick resolutely to
medicinal oils, based on proven market demand. Fortunately, it wasn't too
difficult to retool refineries to produce gas when the automobile hit big,
but one wonders how much it's going to cost to replace all those fixed
asymmetrical modems and .
Actually, I think it would take a market demonstration of retina-searing
obviousness to veer the cable-tel dinosaurs lumbering in the direction of
symmetry. In the meantime, there is a good chance such emerging mammals of
local bit provision as Broad Band Technologies, Inc., WilTel, maybe even
your local electric utility, will have done such a good job of addressing
the upstream digital market that remaining entry share will be too limited
to feed the thunder lizards.
It already seems obvious to me, and to anybody who's launched Mosaic
lately, that the market for upstream bandwidth is about to explode.
Bandwidth is one of those things like money, sex, and power. The more
you've got, the shorter it feels. And there are now a critical number of
Americans who know what bandwidth is and why is feels good.
Look at what's happened on the World Wide Web, where traffic grew 1,713% in
1994. (Which, though down from the previous year's 443,931%, is still
pretty rapid growth.) These figures reflect a burgeoning generation of
Web-sters under 25 who have already started to give up television in
droves. Not even the instantaneous availability of every Brady Bunch
episode is going to lure them back. They want to interact with other
people, not "content," and they are using computers to do it.
Indeed, this generation's "what's your sign" pick-up question is already
"where's your home page." And what's the point of having a home page you
can't illuminate with QuickTime videos of yourself being morphed into a
Klingon or an audio clip of the latest cut by your band? Kids like these
are going to want their home pages at home and not on some distant server
where security considerations are going to prohibit rapid, interactive
updates. Furthermore, these are kids who went all the way through college
at the end of a T1. They're as likely to patiently await images to form in
the developing bath of modem transfer speeds as they are to take up a life
of prayer and contemplation.
Businesses are rushing to put up Web sites which will contain their
catalogues and from which people will be able to order all manner of goods,
hard and soft. If you're selling anything made of bits, whether it's
Photoshop filters or interactive pornographic films, you're not going to
require your customers to receive their orders at 200 kbp. Nor will it make
business sense to rent space in the virtual mall of one of Larry Ellison's
monster nCube servers.
Then there are the increasingly fuzzy boundaries of the American work
place. People are commuting less and traveling more. They want to be able
to jack in, either at home or in the Marriot which all too often serves as
home, and get the same access to information they have on the ethernet in
their official office. Nobody wants to be on a LAN which runs at 14,400
baud, whether their office is traditional or virtual.
I could go on at great length but it wouldn't matter. I would convince no
one in thetelcos or cable companies. The problem isn't the lack of a
potential market. The problem isn't cost. The problem is consciousness. And
culture. What they see is what you get.
This was especially evident to me recently when I had an opportunity to
debate these issues publicly with John Malone at a conference at the
University of Colorado. Now John Malone is a very smart man. Up close, he
has, like Bill Gates, the kind of leaping intellectual force which is
likely to make anyone feel like the lazy brown dog.
John Malone knows the media transport business. But when all you've got is
a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He knows broadcast. He knows
one-to-many. He knows strategic bombing. He is no more likely to recognize
the potency of such guerrilla markets as are growing on the Web as General
Curtis LeMay was to regard the Viet Cong as credible opposition.
I kept trying to convince him that there would be an enormous and growing
upstream surge as more and more individuals and small businesses put up Web
sites, rattling off a long list of all the things which are already
appearing on them.
Finally he conceded the possibility with some exasperation, but said that
even if he could see a way of making money there, providing upstream
bandwidth was not necessarily a business he particularly wanted to be in.
For almost theological reasons, he wanted TCI to remain in the center even
if all the action moved to the edges.
In fairness, George Gilder thinks Malone may have been putting me on. When
I mentioned this episode to Gilder, he said, "Faced with 150 channels of
DBS competition, with better resolution and audio than the studio NTSC at
the headend, cable has to serve computers with bandwidth or it will go out
of business. All the cable people I talk to--including many who work for
John Malone--know this very well." They may know it in their minds, but can
they have the religious conversion necessary to know it in their hearts.
And indeed we are talking about religion here. On one side you've got the
monotheism of Control, the one-to-many system which has dominated the West
at least since the Industrial Revolution, possibly since Gutenberg;
possibly since Moses. And done a damned fine job of creating civilization,
I might add. A necessary thing in its day.
Surging toward these battlements of God Above All are the galloping,
barbarous hoards of pantheism, guerrillas all, from the Cypherpunks to Newt
Gingrich. I sometimes wonder which of these I really want to win, but I'm
pretty sure which one is going to. It's B-52's vs. punji sticks. It's
machine against nature. Sooner or later, nature takes the game.
No matter how much death they rained from above, the bombers lost Viet Nam.
They're going to lose Cyberspace too. For exactly the same reasons.
