One man - One vote - One Program (another Boardwatch excerpt)

[Anonymous <nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>]

excerpted from:
 
 
         B  O  A  R  D  W  A  T  C  H      M  A  G  A  Z  I  N  E
 
                   Guide to the World of Online Services
 
 Editor: Jack Rickard   Volume VII: Issue 11   ISSN:1054-2760   November 1993
 
 
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 EDITORS' NOTES
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 One Man - One Vote - One Program
 
The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action document was
released September 12 and made available to the online community in full
ascii text form the same day. This document outlines the administration's
blueprint for a future national data highway. We don't normally devote nine
pages of Boardwatch to publishing government literature. But, while the
document is easily available electronically, this will probably affect
everyone online at some point or another. You will undoubtedly see it quoted
and analyzed in coming months, but I'm going to guess the full text is not
going to be carried widely in print. So we decided to run the whole thing -
albeit as "the fine print."
 
The NII Agenda is remarkable in that they did manage to assemble every cliche
in the free world regarding online communications and actually pile them all
into one document. As government detritus goes, it is actually quite
readable. A persistent, if effete segment of the online community has
campaigned for some time for government to "get involved" online. They
parade across Washington in a continuous stream attempting to get our
government to fund various notions of what they want the online world to look
like.
 
And in some areas, government participation in the online process has been
productive. The National Science Foundation has devoted a relatively modest
amount of public investment in the Internet and this money has leveraged a
hundred times that much private investment in the technology. I agree, there
is a role for government in the future network.
 
But in the context of the other things this administration is trying to do, I
originally approached this topic with some trepidation. These people have no
moral qualms whatsoever in saying one thing and doing quite another. The
concepts of truth and lies and right and wrong are foreign to their view of
the way the world works. The action items regarding encryption and copyright
law revision are worded innocently enough. Beneath those words I detect an
agenda more in keeping with the current health care program proposal, the
budget recently passed, a corps of youth working for the government, the
addition of 50,000 police officers on a national basis, and an entire
political agenda focused quite single mindedly on one thing - control of the
population - at all levels and in areas American's just aren't accustomed to
thinking of as something anyone would want to control.
 
This document does refer to legislation that would open the local telephone
loop to competition - a concept we first came out for in 1988. The
legislation they refer to basically frees the local telephone companies to
provide video, information, long distance services - it has little to do with
competition in the local loop other than to provide these telephone companies
precisely what they've been lobbying for - freedom to exploit their
monopolies on the local line infrastructure. The players are cable tv
companies and telephone companies. Six months ago telco U.S. West purchased
25% of Time Warner, and this past week, Bell Atlantic and TCI, the nation's
largest cable company holding group, announced a complete merger. The
standoff between cable companies and telephone companies is over - and there
will be LESS competition, not more. The inside deal making all of this work
is that the government becomes a "partner" in developing our
telecommunications infrastructure - the "controlling" influence.
 
The more pressing current concern is encryption and privacy. The
administration rolled out the Clipper Chip proposal earlier this year as a
toe in the water. Clinton apologists are quick to point out that this was a
Bush administration proposal. Poppycock. There are thousands of proposals
making the rounds in Washington in a continous cloud - the plankton of the
political seascape. A relative handful ever see the light of day. This one,
given little chance under the Bush administration, did under President
Clinton.
 
The Clipper Chip concept is a bit startling. Everyone gets to encrypt their
data, and in fact are encouraged to do so - with the government holding the
decryption keys. I can't separate the stupid from those accused of stupid
here, so I'll just note that it was proposed, and is still pursued. But they
do apparently feel it important that if anyone has any "secret stuff", the
government should, as a matter of course, have access to it. You have no
"right" to privacy - quite the contrary.
 
In health care, before it is over, if you want health care coverage, it will
only be available in ONE place - a government office. You will present
yourself in person, along with a little basket of receipts showing you've
paid your taxes, registered for the draft, the national service program,
given blood, quit smoking, have exercised regularly, have your car insurance
in order, your driver's license, social security receipt, and anything else
necessary to "make us safe." And if all your papers are in order, and you pay
the fees, you will receive a little plastic card allowing you to visit a
doctor or clinic. George Orwell never had it so good.
 
And I would fear this same socialist greed for control of our lives will be
applied to the online community via this National Information Infrastructure.
I would, but I don't, and I'm feeling particularly enchanted right now by why
I don't.
 
First, they can be counted on to be as buffoonish about it as possible given
the laws of physics. Currently, the State Department is actually pursuing a
lone Boulder programmer with a Grand Jury investigation of possible
infraction of export controls - alleging that he illegally exported a data
encryption program - Pretty Good Privacy. The farce is of course that he
never left Boulder. He posted it on a couple of local Internet sites, and of
course, within about 12 minutes it was all over the world. It allows anyone
to encrypt e-mail messages in such a fashion that all the kings horses and
all the kings men can't figure out what the hell you said in it on a bet.
 
And this is the heartening jewel. The online world has always moved
powerfully toward the least common denominator grass roots end of the
electronic path. All things that have grown have grown DOWN toward the end
user, not UP toward a central authority. The entire energy in the online
explosion has been OUT and DOWN and many of the innovations have been to
extend functionality to the least equipment, at the least cost, in a never
ending quest for "free" and something I can run on my OWN computer. The
natural conclusion of this will be instant worldwide communication from a
handheld $4 pocket calculator.
 
The Internet is fascinating in that it is a belief system that allows people
to connect to a common backbone for communications. That was the part we
needed. Something persuasively "in the middle." But it was ALL we needed.
There are now 130 million personal computers out there. And some percentage
of these people are Phil Zimmermanns. This one man, with one wee little
Borland compiler, wrote a piece of software. And whether they prosecute him
to make him an example or not, he released ONE program in the wee hours of
the morning in 1991, that will never allow the government or anyone else to
put the data encryption genie back in the bottle. It did not change the
world. It demonstrated that the world had changed. It's free. It's
everywhere. There is no way to track down all the copies in all the world. It
transcends national boundaries. He did it for the notoriety - and he got it.
But he could have just as easily done it anonymously. An avowed leftist
himself, he really gets just as bristley as Pat Buchanon from the far right
on this thing about government control of individuals. And he's not alone.
 
Whatever elaborate systems are contrived, at the cost of billions of dollars,
with the full collusion of giant corporate telco/cable entities controlling
vast territories of fiberglass and copper, they will become symbols of vanity
- towers of Babel standing in testimony to the futility of trying to use
electronics to control people. Electronics is a good material for building
freedom, and a most notably poor one for forging chains. Wherever there is
one guy with an attitude, a compiler, and a few free afternoons, all the
plans and all the plots of all the kings go awry with a single program
release.
 
We have lots of guys with attitudes, lots of compilers, and lots of
afternoons.
 
Let them build the NII. Let us use it without fear. With a handful of
Zimmermanns, we can remake the world to suit us.
 
Now, if only we could get Phil to compile us a health care program....
 
 Jack Rickard
 Editor Rotundus
 
P.S. Mr. Zimmermann, guilty, innocent, free, or jailed, will undoubtedly
incur the usual mountain of legal fees - poor thanks for his contribution.
It might just serve an interesting purpose to make a numeric show of force on
his behalf to demonstrate that the usual economic coercion won't work either.
Stick a lone dollar bill in an envelope and send it to his legal defense
fund. For a buck twenty-nine, it's a cheap political statement. And if
enough of us do it, maybe the world will change again.
 
 Phil Zimmermann Legal Defense Fund
 c/o Philip Dubois, Esq.
 2305 Broadway
 Boulder, CO 80304