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 willingness 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 disinclination 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 organizations, the conference was put on by
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group which has done
much to secure to Americans the ownership of their private lives.Their Man
in Washinton, 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 demographic information 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 Marketplace was a publication
protected by the First Amendment. 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 information 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 fingerprints,
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
commodity 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 Department 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 Community'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 undistinguished record in addressing the
environmental, social, or educational responsibilities 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 Government with the right to restrict information.

It may be that there is a profound incompatibility between the
requirements of privacy (at least as achieved by this methods) and the
requirements 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, institutions 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 regulation 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 authoritarian
government than the one we have today. This Republic was born in the
anonymous broadsides 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 compliance 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

introduced Senate Bill 266 which declares:

It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications
systems permit the government 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 multiplexed 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-enforcement concern: how to build a case when all the evidence is
encrypted, 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 communications 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 conversation, 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 technology 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, however,
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