Peer-to-peer terrorism

Zealous enforcement tactics against old enemies breed new enemies.

Before Napster, few people had strong opinions about the record companies, and their voices were rarely heard. But in the process of hunting down a few college students whose main offense was liking music too much, the RIAA managed to antagonize much of the software community and civil libertarians everywhere.

How did they blow it so badly? By giving its old enemies powerful new arguments, tons of publicity and an impressionable audience to preach to. Those students and music fans started hearing about cartels and Gestapo tactics when they asked why their Napster wasn't showing any songs today.

It's hardly any surprise the RIAA didn't understand how bad the P.R. consequences of a heavy hand would be: The U.S. as a country has a long and bloody history of isolating moderates while it chases extremists.

What will happen if the government of Pakistan is forced to do so much of our dirty work that it destabilizes itself? How much ill will will we harvest once the bombs start falling? And so on. Bold action may sometimes solve present problems, but it carries enormous risk of creating worse ones in the future. More worryingly ...

You can make them hide, but you can't rid the world of them.

Or at least, if you can, the RIAA hasn't figured out how. Napster went down in flames, but the Napster clones are numerous, thriving, better-hidden and harder than ever to take out.

Flattening your visible enemies inspires your remaining enemies to stay invisible; unless you make them no longer your enemies, they will find a time and a place of their own choosing to emerge from hiding. The best "victory" one can hope for in fighting a decentralized foe is not to eradicate them, but only to suppress their activities.

Try explaining this fact in Washington today, though, and nobody seems to be listening. Has Israel been able to eradicate Hamas? Has Britain been able even to suppress the IRA? For that matter, how well has China done in eliminating Falun Gong? Which raises one last and especially disturbing point, one that ought to go without saying ...

Terrorists are not the only people who operate in decentralized secrecy.

There are other peer-to-peer rebels out there, working in secret to change the world -- and most of them are what we would normally think of as the good guys.

Think of Afghan dissidents spreading the rhetoric of democracy from Internet cafes. From the perspective of the Afghan government, they look much the same way terrorists who coordinate attacks through e-mail look to us. Think of demonstrators scattering to avoid punitive raids from the police; think of rebel leaders trying to organize a resistance movement. A lot of people will be watching very carefully what the United States does to wage this new sort of war.

On the one hand every new tactic we develop to defend democracy can be turned against the forces of democracy somewhere else in the world. And on the other, every bulwark the Internet provides against the anti-dissent squads somewhere far off and repressive, it provides also against the anti-terrorist branch of the FBI back home.

Technology giveth, and it taketh away. The same filtering software that protects children from pornography is used by repressive governments to "protect" their citizens from critical opinions. The new formats for compressing music designed to sell more CDs instead became the leading techniques for its illicit distribution.

As we prepare to develop ruthless new "weapons" in the fight against global terrorism, it is hard to overstate the need for some reflection on the ways those tactics might eventually be turned against us and those principles we believe in. A strange prospect, perhaps, but then again, until last week, how many people seriously thought of a passenger jet as a weapon of war?

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