Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Lone-wolf digital libertarians are beginning to abandon their faith in technology uber alles and espouse suspiciously socialist-sounding ideas.
Apr 13, 2000 | On the first day of the 10th Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference -- the unique annual meeting that brings together an unlikely combination of programmers, activists and government officials -- two very different events took place simultaneously.
One: About 30 participants and 50 observers crowded into a hotel meeting room for a workshop led by Lenny Foner -- computer guy in jeans and long hair, MIT Media Lab Ph.D. Foner was trying to get the group interested in starting up a new domain name system for the Internet. He was probably thinking Linux; he was most likely hoping for a Linus Torvalds sort of role. His idea was to maybe "route around" the current, dispute-prone system of matching Internet addresses to names. Maybe we should make a superset of the DNS, the workshop considered, or an alternative to it, or something -- no one could even agree on the precise nature of the problem, let alone its solution.
At any rate, this didn't stop Foner. He had a programmer's idea of how things get done in the world: Forget about the government; don't form a committee. Just write up a short proposal, give your idea a silly hacker-ish sort of name (even he admitted that the name he chose, "Smoosh," was somewhat unfortunate), talk about it to some very smart people, get a small group of them interested, then just start hacking out some code.
John Gilmore, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and self-described libertarian, was at the workshop, and with terrible succinctness he laid out the thinking behind Foner's vision of the programmer-created world. Gilmore was opposed to too many people getting involved in whatever Foner is going to do. "Almost everything that works on the Net grew out of tiny groups of people working in isolation," he said.
Meanwhile, as Foner was talking about "how to prototype something new," there was event No. 2: The Canadian Parliament was passing Bill C-6, a data protection act like the European Union's Data Directive -- leaving the United States as the sole highly industrialized nation without legal data-privacy protections.
Evidently, the process leading to the passage of the C-6 was nothing like the "tiny groups working in isolation" that John Gilmore had described just a few minutes before. According to Stephanie Perrin, who worked with the Canadian Department of Commerce and Industry for 20 years and who took part in the drafting of the bill, it had involved hundreds of people. It required concessions on all sides. The resulting law is not perfect. "It was a long and difficult process," she said, "where everyone fought."
These two events -- the programmers workshop and the passing of a federal data-privacy law -- are like the ends of a rope in a heatedly fought game of tug-of-war, a game that has been battled at CPF over the course of the conference's 10-year existence.
On one side are the geeks, nerds, crypto-anarchists, libertarians and cypherpunks -- mistrustful of government, suspicious of all attempts at regulation, believers in the ability of technology, in and of itself, to solve society's ills (maybe with a little marginally legal hacking on the side, just to keep the political pot boiling). Austin Hill, president of Zero-Knowledge, opened the conference like a true techno-believer, quoting John Gilmore as saying, "I want to guarantee [privacy] with physics and mathematics, not with laws."
Opposing the technologists are the believers in law above all else: the think-tank and activist lawyers; the privacy commissioners in their well-cut European suits; the pragmatists advocating commissions and studies and meetings -- participants in the rough-and-tumble of political life, with all its confusions and compromises and imperfect results.
In the past, the techno-believers ruled CFP. The programmers' vision of creation -- the lone geniuses -- prevailed over the data-privacy "bureaucrats" -- so hard to listen to, after all, with their thick foreign accents and their tedious, confusing laws.
But something different happened this year. The flag in the middle of the tug-of-war rope moved. Two well-known technologists, known for their belief in working code and skepticism about the workings of law, stepped across the divide, moving, maybe despite themselves, toward a recognition of social and political realities. Two others, whose views have been more balanced, questioned libertarianism -- the limitations of a technocentric approach to the complicated questions of privacy and freedom. It was as if some tipping point had been reached, in which a critical mass of people involved in technology had suddenly looked up and found themselves to be older, grown-up, and in need of social supports -- grown-up like the Net itself.
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