Interesting mail (fwd)

[Al Billings <mimir@u.washington.edu>]

 I received this on the Leri list and thought a little amusement might be
appreciated here given the current conversations.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 01 May 1993 20:57:34
From: David L Racette <dlr@medical.win.net>
To: Leri <Leri@pyramid.com>
Subject: Interesting mail


 Opening Statement to the House Subcommittee on
 Telecommunications and Finance, Washington DC, April 29,
 1993

        Hello everyone and thanks for inviting me here.  My
 name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer and
 sometime science journalist.   Since writing my nonfiction book
 HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC
 FRONTIER, I have returned to writing science fiction.  And I've
 returned to that with some relief, frankly, since the world of
 science fiction is in most ways rather less strange and less
 bizarre than the contemporary world of telecommunications
 policy.

        I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I testify
 today as a science fiction writer.  It's one of the perks of my
 profesion to write about the future, or attempt to, and I
 thought you might like to meet someone from the
 telecommunications future that you are so busy creating.

        With your kind indulgence for my novelist's whimsy
 then, the rest of my brief presentation today will be given by a
 Mr. Bob Smith, with is an NREN network administrator from the
 year 2015.

        I present Mr. Smith.

        "Thank you, Mr. Sterling.  It's a remarkable privilege to
 talk to the legislators who historically created my working
 environment.  As a laborer in the fields of 21st Century
 cyberspace I of course would have no job without NREN and
 my wife and small son and I are all properly grateful for your
 foresight in establishing the Information Superhighway.

        "Your actions in this regard have affected American
 society every bit as strongly as did the telegraph, the railroads,
 the telephone, the highway system, and television.  In fact, it's
 impossible for me to imagine contemporary life in 2015
 without the Global Net; living without the Net would be like
 trying to live without electricity.

        "However, it's a truism in technological development that
 no silver lining comes without its cloud.  Today I'd like to
 mention two or three trifling problems that have come up that
 were not entirely obvious from the perspective of the early
 1990s.

        "First of all, this 'Research and Education' aspect.  Since
 communications *is* power in an Information Society, giving
 fantastically advanced communications to the Research and
 Education communities did in fact empower those communities
 quite drastically by comparison with interest-groups lacking
 that advantage.  Today, one of the most feared political
 organizations in the world is the multi-national anarchist
 libertarian group called the Students for an Utterly Free
 Society.

        "Of course, there have always been campus radicals, but
 thanks to their relative lack of financial clout, and lack of even
 a steady home address, these young fanatics once found it very
 difficult to organize politically.  Therefore, they were easy for
 the powers-that-be to ignore, except during occasional spasms
 of violent campus unrest.

        "Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student unrest can
 now spread like lightning across entire continents.  Advanced
 AI translation programs installed on the Net only made matters
 worse, since in 2015 the global leaders of the student
 movements are not only extremely radical, but French.

        "Attempts by campus authorities to control this unrest
 have failed miserably.  In 2015, NREN sites are always the first
 buildings occupied during a campus strike.  Campus chancellors
 and faculty are themselves so utterly dependent on NREN that
 they become quite helpless off-line.

        "A second major problem has been the growth of
 unlicenced encryption, which has proved quite unstoppable.
 Today some seventy-five percent of NREN archives are
 material that no one in authority can read.  Countries that
 attempted to control and monitor network traffic have lost
 market share and service revenue as data processing simply
 moves offshore.

        "The United States has profited by this phenomenon to a
 great extent as people worldwide have flocked to the relative
 liberty of our networks.  Unfortunately many of these
 electronic virtual immigrants are not simply dissidents looking
 for free expression but in fact are organized criminals.

        "Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an enormous
 archive of encrypted Iranian files, illicitly stored in an obscure
 NREN node in North Dakota.  Luckily the FBI was able to
 decrypt these files thanks to an inside informant.  Deciphering
 these archives revealed the following contraband:

        "Eighty percent graphic image files of attractive young
 women without veils on, or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.

        "Fifteen percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western
 pop music and Western videos, still illegal to possess in
 Teheran.

        "And, five percent text files in the Farsi language
 describing how to guild, deliver and park truck-bombs in major
 urban areas.

        "I can't conclude my brief remarks today without a
 mention of a particularly odd development having to do with
 *wireless* computer telecommunications.  Since it is now
 possible to transact business entirely in cyberspace, including
 financial transactions, many information entrepreneurs in 2015
 have simply given up any physical home.  Basically, they have
 become stateless people, 21st Century gypsies.

        "A recent tragic example of this occurred in the small
 town of North Zulch, Texas.  There some rural law enforcement
 officers apprehended a scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle in a
 high-speed chase.  Unfortunately he was killed.  A search of his
 backpack revealed a device the size of a cigarette pack.  In
 searching the dead man's effects, the police officers, who were
 not computer literate, accidentally broke the device.  This tiny
 device was actually a privately owned computer bulletin board
 system with some 15,000 registered users.

        "Many of the users were wealthy celebrities, and the
 apparent outlaw biker was actually an extremely popular and
 nationally known system operator.  These 15,000 users were
 enraged by what they considered the wanton destruction of
 their electronic community.  They pooled their resources and
 took a terrible vengeance on the small town of North Zulch,
 which, by contrast, had only 2,000 residents, none of them
 wealthy or technologically sophisticated.  Through a
 combination of harassing lawsuits and sharp real-estate deals,
 the vengeful board users bankrupted the town.  Eventually the
 entire township was bulldozed flat and purchased for parkland
 by the Nature Conservancy.

        "Thanks in part to the advances that you yourselves set
 in motion, violent conflicts between virtual and actual
 communities have become a permanent feature of the cultural
 landscape in 2015."

        Thank you for your patience in entertaining my
 speculations.  I'll be happy to take any questions -- though
 only in my real-life persona.  Thank you very much.