Twilight of the crypto-geeks

Berners-Lee was speaking unpopular truths to the CFP crowd, but his outspokenness is nothing compared to what is about to happen. The next Pioneer award is to go not to an old programmer or to a lawyer at a think tank, but to ... "librarians everywhere." Can we be hearing correctly? Did they say librarians and not libertarians? But it's true: librarians. It is an unprecedented award, the first to a group that can't be associated with at least a few specific individuals. And in the face of this -- this amazement, this recognition of the great unseen and unsung core of mostly women -- the fourth of our techno-heroes will find himself to be, in his startled heart, a lover of civil servants.

Whitfield Diffie bounds to the platform. Diffie is a crypto-king, the discoverer, with Martin Hellman, of public-key encryption, cornerstone of the libertarian worldview in which technology protects the individual from the reach of goverment. He stands now before the audience with his neat gray beard, shoulder-length blond hair and sudden uncontained enthusiasm. "Librarians!" he exclaims. "I'm thrilled with this award."

He goes on to say he was not involved in the judging; this is the first moment he has learned of it. And now that he thinks of it, those wonderful librarians of his childhood, the ones who helped him when he was working on his dissertation -- yes! Librarians!

"I wouldn't have thought to give this award," he declaims in the full throes of the convert's confession. "Therefore it comes as a revelation."

All those invisible, dedicated civil servants. Mostly working for government. In public libraries. Paid for by taxes. Diffie stands there with arms out. He is truly, naively, nakedly, unabashedly amazed to consider it. The whole libertarian edifice crumbles as he looks at it. Revelation.

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But this is more than a startled, unguarded moment. The next day, in a speech he gives at lunch, Diffie reveals the depth of his conversion.

"Everyone stop eating," he begins, and indeed we should, for what we are about to hear is akin to the more common story of a middle-aged person, communist in his youth, who grows more conservative as he grows older, renounces his youthful beliefs -- except we will hear it in reverse, right to left.

He signals it all right away. "Crypto was a security technique that didn't require trusting anyone else," Diffie says. "Now it turns out you have to trust other people." He was younger, he seems to say, he had ideas, he was wrong. "I had a very mathematical and very inapplicable idea about authentication." And there it is: an implicit rejection of the Gilmore-ian ideal of trust in physics and mathematics. Like Stephenson, like the reluctant Zimmermann, like the unhappy Berners-Lee, the father of public key encryption has come to the conclusion that software may reduce the amount of trust you need in human beings, but as one moves about in the world, the sense of security, privacy and autonomy turns out to be "a function of social structures," as Diffie says.

So far, Diffie has gone from being a techno-libertarian to a standard-issue social democrat -- a remarkable move, if not a remarkable place to wind up. But he is not done.

What has sparked his conversion, it seems, is the recentralization of computing: how we have moved from the centrally controlled timesharing system, to the autonomous powerful desktop PC, to the networked computer, and thence -- sidetracked through the network computer and the "thin client" -- somehow back to the dumb terminal. He foresees how knowledge workers will lose their autonomy by being forced to use such slavish machines; how they can become mere objects of surveillance by the companies they work for, as a result of "corporate imperialism over its workers."

Is there something wrong with the microphone? Is he talking about imperialism? Yes, and on he goes, ever leftward. He can foresee a day when workers, doing their jobs from the "convenience" of their homes, are forced to be subject to "spot inspections" by their employers, a time when the home is effectively turned into an occupied zone where corporations exercise power over their property.

What shall we desperate knowledge workers do? Organize! We need "the rise of labor again," says Diffie, former crypto-believer. "We need to tighten up the relationships among knowledge workers," he says, "and bargain as a whole."

I can't believe what I am hearing.

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The conference ends with a session on "diversity" -- and again, one is startled to find this at CFP, former home ground of crypto-anarchists and techno-libertarians. On the podium is Greg Bishop of TheStreet.com, one of only two African-Americans on the entire conference program, perhaps the only one attending CFP. He is telling us how the black people he knows are amazed he uses a computer -- they believe that once you plug it in, the government knows everything about you. The audience goes on to question the homogeneity of the conference itself -- why there are so few young people, blacks and women in attendance, and indeed in the leadership of the technological world. The culture wars have come to CFP.

And why not? The Internet, with its vast public acceptance, letting people who have never even seen a piece of code do everything from buy a car to search for lovers, can hardly be considered a purely technological system anymore. The Net has become a social space, and it is perhaps right that the practices of programmers -- the small group in isolation -- no longer pertain. We've come to the messy part that very senior programmers get to avoid: the part where the system has moved beyond the "new" and "dreamed-up" stage. Where it is successful -- that is, it has users, millions of them, with all their conflicting needs and desires, and only the messy, horrid, compromised, wonderful, exhausting processes of democratic social discourse can sort them all out.

After the conference is all over, it's fun to sit with Bruce Umbaugh, philosopher and member of the CFP organizing committee, and imagine the sort of happy chaos that can happen at the event next year. We'll invite the UAW! We'll invite the Boeing engineers, knowledge workers who have organized themselves for the first time -- and won! There'll be online dykes and gangsta Napster rappers. There'll be kids and students and mothers and just about anything else you can think of. And why not? When we said the Internet represented a "revolution," we meant it -- didn't we?

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