In crude terms, governments are deciding what to do about networks. Since the rise and fall of Napster, everyone seems to have a theory about what to do about piracy on the Internet, but piracy is the smallest of the threats waiting for us in the digital age. The real danger is the spread of dangerous technologies.

The creative capacity of every industry is migrating into software. Combine that capacity with the Internet, and you have individuals all over the planet empowered to wreak all manner of unpredictable mischief. "The Gene Construction Kit" would have been a surreal title for a software application twenty years ago; today we can easily imagine "The Genome Construction Kit." Authorities around the world have been powerless to stop the spread of DeCSS, a program that circumvents DVD encryption, despite continued successful litigation against hackers. If someone posted a new Ebola-AIDS genome, the likelihood is that authorities would be equally helpless to stop its dissemination among terrorists. This approaching reality leaves us with a basic question about how to monitor information networks and protect ourselves from knowledge-enabled attacks.

Science-fiction writer David Brin, writing about surveillance technology for Wired in 1996, formulates the alternative futures well as a "tale of two cities" -- a choice between two ways of policing a city. The choice applies equally well to the Internet.

His point of departure is the surveillance craze that has swept the U.K. Beginning with King's Lynn, where crime in "trouble spots" dropped 98.6 percent when 60 remote-controlled video cameras were installed, constabularies all over the U.K. have rushed to duplicate the King's Lynn miracle. By the year 2000, over 1 million closed circuit cameras were operating in the U.K. The trend has been slower in North America but unmistakable. In 2000, the New York Police Department had grown its surveillance effort to over 1,000 security cameras in public places such as parks, subway stations and public housing, up from a few hundred in 1998. The public surveillance issue offers a timely thought-experiment about how a society should manage its own self-knowledge.

In one hypothetical city, only the authorities have access to the cameras. The network is centralized, secret, and therefore vulnerable to abuses by government employees. Criminals are intimidated, but "[c]itizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau." In the other city, the cameras can be accessed by any citizen with a "wristwatch/TV" -- or, presumably, any device connected to the Internet. The network can be used by a parent whose child has wandered off, a person walking home alone at night, or, broadly speaking, a society that wants to make sure that police show a "minute attention to ritual and rights" when apprehending a suspect.

If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character than one in which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government. Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the "authorities" to monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear.

But, not surprisingly, the surveillance networks installed in the U.K., New York, and elsewhere more closely resemble the model of the first city. The most tangible threat we face in our daily lives is each other, and increasingly, especially since Sept. 11, we are calling for top-down solutions for keeping each other in check.

A similar trend has appeared in proposed solutions to high-tech terrorist threats. Advances in biotech, chemistry, and other fields are expanding the power of individuals to cause harm, and this has many people worried. Glenn E. Schweitzer and Carole C. Dorsch, writing for The Futurist, gave this warning in 1999: "Technological advances threaten to outdo anything terrorists have done before; superterrorism has the potential to eradicate civilization as we know it." Schweitzer and Dorsch are so alarmed that they go on to say, "Civil liberties are important for a democratic society; the time has arrived, however, to reconfigure some aspects of democracy, given the violence that is on the doorstep."

The Sept. 11 attacks have obviously added credence to their opinions. In 1999, they recommended an expanded role for the CIA, "greater government intervention" in Americans' lives, and the "honorable deed" of "whistle-blowing" -- proposals that went from fringe ideas to policy options and talk-show banter in less than a year. Taken together, their proposals aim to gather information from companies and individuals and feed that information into government agencies. A network of cameras positioned on street corners would nicely complement their vision of America during the 21st century.

If after Sept. 11 and the anthrax scare these still sound like wacky Orwellian ideas to you, imagine how they will sound the day a terrorist opens a jar of Ebola-AIDS spores on Capitol Hill. As Sun Microsystems' chief scientist, Bill Joy, warned: "We have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies -- robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology -- pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once -- but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control."

Joy calls the new threats "knowledge-enabled mass destruction." To cause great harm to millions of people, an extreme person will need only dangerous knowledge, which itself will move through the biosphere, encoded as matter, and flit from place to place as easily as dangerous ideas now travel between our minds. In the information age, dangerous knowledge can be copied and disseminated at light speed, and it threatens everyone. Therefore, Joy's perfectly reasonable conclusion is that we should relinquish "certain kinds of knowledge." He says that it is time to reconsider the open, unrestrained pursuit of knowledge that has been the foundation of science for 300 years.

"[D]espite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs."

Joy proposes a system of verification that echoes the ideas of Schweitzer and Dorsch, one that embodies the information-gathering ideal of "transparency," "a verification regime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedented scale." As knowledge gains power to inflict damage on the world, we as a society may be compelled to control its development and dissemination. As a result, we may have to "reconfigure" our basic attitude toward freedom of speech, privacy, freedom of association -- those ideals which to some are the foundation of democracy.

This is the kind of future depicted, dystopically, in the game world I write for (Deus Ex), in which rampant terrorist activity, including a nanotech plague, spurs the United Nations to create a global intelligence agency that has wide latitude to interfere militarily in the affairs of sovereign nations. Spying, surveillance and intimidation of the populace are the modus operandi, and secrets are the currency of power. A shadowy organization finds that its secret knowledge of how to cure the plague gives it enough power to blackmail national governments. Hegemony in human affairs has rapidly fallen to those ruthless enough to pursue the "certain kinds of knowledge" that Bill Joy suggests we relinquish.

Does the future have to be this ugly? Can we safely assume that the world of Deus Ex was exaggerated for dramatic effect?

We cannot doubt that new categories of knowledge will be criminalized and that governments will seek ways to monitor and limit dissemination. Though industries will attempt to contain self-replicating threats on their own -- both with hardware and laboratory security -- the threats will never entirely go away. Consumer-level nanotech "assemblers" will probably be limited to constructing industry-approved products, DNA synthesizing equipment might be relegated to secure laboratories, improved encryption might even make it statistically impossible to copy music and movies, but though many engineers think that such measures will be sufficient, corporations aren't intelligence agencies. At any time, a leak due to human error or deception could compromise a whole class of safeguards, just as poor security in the Xing Technology DVD player enabled hackers to construct DeCSS, the software program capable of "ripping" DVDs.

The case of DVD piracy shows how the legal system might respond to shortcomings in private-sector security. In August of 2000, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) successfully prosecuted the hacker magazine 2600 for posting DeCSS on their Web site, www.2600.com. In addition, they won a court order that forbids 2600 "from linking their site to others that make DeCSS available." 2600 was not convicted of developing the tool, which was written by a 15-year-old Norwegian named Jon Johansen, nor were they convicted of using the tool. 2600 editor Emmanuel Goldstein has stated publicly, "None of us even HAS a DVD player." They were prosecuted under the DMCA provision which states that "no person shall ... offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any technology ... primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the Copyright Act]." The congressional legislation very clearly forbids trafficking in the technology, which U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan says includes providing a URL with "a desire to bring about the dissemination" of infringing technology. Goldstein responded, "We can all laugh at such words but they represent something very sinister. We are now expected to believe that telling someone how to get a file with a link is the same as offering it yourself."

But we should not be surprised. The DMCA and this ruling are only the leading edge of the fight against self-replicating threats. The fact that the legal system has used such strong information-control measures to stop the relatively innocuous threat of DVD piracy indicates that similar measures will be used against the nanotech and biotech threats described by Bill Joy. "Knowledge-enabled" is the key phrase Joy uses to describe the threats; it means that to fight them governments might have to get into the business of controlling the flow of knowledge, as Kaplan did by enjoining 2600 from linking to DeCSS sites.

The legal line between speech and action will blur dramatically during this century. The new technologies, from nanotechnology to the online economy, will be created and implemented with computer language, which by nature is both "expressive" and "functional." How the courts untangle these two aspects of "code" will define 21st century attitudes toward new ideas and their regulation. Even Kaplan acknowledges that, legally, code must be treated as speech: "It cannot seriously be argued that any form of computer code may be regulated without reference to First Amendment doctrine. The path from idea to human language to source code to object code is a continuum." What he painstakingly argues, however, is that in contrast to the "expressive" component, protected by the First Amendment, the "functional" component of computer code can be regulated by government. "Computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement," he writes.

The inevitable concern is that free speech issues will become hazy when computer code is the central medium of expression for commerce, science, and technology. If any individual can code nanobot machinery or an Ebola-AIDS virus, then it won't be enough to e-mail your friends and say, "Watch out for an email called 'ILOVEYOU.'" People will want safeguards. When everyone has access to formal languages that define material processes, then all of our voices will (potentially) have functional components, and maybe they will have to be regulated. We will all have the magical power to bring novel material structures into being simply by defining them on our computer screens, and perhaps, Harry Potter notwithstanding, a society of wizards will fail to coexist with modern democratic institutions.

The question we need to ask is whether a tightly regulated society would really be more secure than an open one. If so, then maybe there is some merit to "reconfiguring" our openness. However, if the benefits of a closed society are not dramatically apparent, then we would be fools to scale back our civil liberties, because, once lost, they would be very difficult to recover.

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