Letters to the editor

Twilight of the Crypto-Geeks
BY ELLEN ULLMAN
(04/13/00)

I organized the CFP Workshop on Freedom and Privacy by Design, a brand-new experiment for this year's CFP, and was alarmed at the poor fact-checking and the depth of Ullman's misunderstanding of the workshop, and of CFP, in her piece, "Twilight of the Crypto-Geeks."

Let's consider just the workshop for the moment. Ullman claimed that I was a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab (in fact, I received my Ph.D. there a year ago); publicly attributed various actions to Ann Cavoukian, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner (in fact, Cavoukian was unexpectedly detained due to Bill C-6 and didn't arrive at CFP until the next day); and undercounted the audience by a factor of two (as demonstrated by standing-room-only turnout and by the number of handouts distributed). I pointed out all three errors to Salon; the first two have been corrected.

I mention these relatively trivial errors to demonstrate that she didn't fact-check her work. The larger errors are much more serious, in which she apparently completely misunderstands (a) the workshop she talks about and (b) a lot of the rest of CFP. Alma Whitten said it better than I could when she said:

I agree with the central thesis of your Salon article on CFP 2000; certainly the struggle between the libertarian loner perspective and that of the social organizer/activist was shockingly blatant at times. However, I find it bizarre that you chose to hold up Lenny Foner's workshop, in which I was one of the invited participants, as some sort of elitist, isolationist, ultra-libertarian contrast to the passage of Bill C-6. How utterly insulting to Lenny, who spent months putting together that workshop, not out of some sort of geeky adolescent desire to be the next Linus Torvalds, but as an attempt to spark creative, activist technical development. It was Lenny, after all, who chose David Phillips to talk to us about the history of activism and the importance of forming broad coalitions -- perhaps you missed that part? "Smoosh" was a strawman proposal, offered to get us thinking about solutions to a problem, not some personal baby of Lenny's, and the fact that we wound up recognizing that the problem was actually several interrelated problems is to the workshop's credit, not a reason for scorn -- it's what we were there for. I won't even go into the fact that the DNS problem only represented half the workshop, and that discussion of how to get businesses to adopt more socially responsible privacy behavior wouldn't have fit with your intended contrast so well.

Turning to the conference as a whole, her central thesis would be much more powerful if it weren't for a few inconvenient observations:

• This CFP made a deliberate attempt, as its motto said, to challenge the assumptions and avoid the polarizations of prior CFPs. Thus, it's no surprise that speakers like Neal Stephenson took the motto seriously and advanced positions that might not have been heard much at prior CFPs.
• Phil Zimmermann, Tim Berners-Lee and Neal Stephenson have never been libertarians, unless you believe that being a strong proponent of civil liberties necessarily makes one a libertarian. Ullman assumes that a solitary author who writes some software must necessarily (a) be a libertarian and (b) would never consider the social context of his or her work. Neither of these are remotely true of Phil or Tim.
• CFP's demographics were different this year, because CFP's location plays a surprisingly strong role in who attends. Canada is a rather civil society. Furthermore, CFP was on the East Coast, which has never compared to Silicon Valley as a libertarian stronghold. Finally, many of the staunchest technolibertarians who have previously attended are now too involved with startups to make an appearance.
• Many people celebrate libraries and librarians. But this does not necessarily imply that they all support civic institutions in general, or that they believe that such institutions in general or libraries in particular must necessarily be funded via taxes.

In short, Ullman tries to turn a complex situation into a simple, bipolar tug-of-war between clueless, geeky technolibertarians and adult, socially-responsible pragmatists. But when one corrects the serious misunderstandings that are the underpinnings of her examples, one finds that the situation is far more nuanced, and her simple thesis far less compelling, than she would have us believe.

-- Lenny Foner

• View blog reactions