Censorship In Cyberspace 4/6

[rarachel@photon.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian)]

          MODERATOR:  Thank you very much, Ellen.  Now.  Can we
imagine what it would be like if there were no traffic cops in
communication?  Well, we don't really need to, because no laws
control the InterNet and no one owns it.  How does it work?  Gerard
Van Der Leun, who was the first Communications Director of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, finds that free speech and civil
liberties are, as he puts it, "the default state of the global
InterNet," and he will tell us why and how.
          VAN DER LEUN:  Hi.  My name is Boswell at BELL.COM (ph),
and I'm a Cyberholic.  I started out chipping with an RCA dumb
monitor at 300 baud, and now I'm looking to start mainlining off a
slip connection.  There's just never enough for me.  
          I first sort of became I guess aware of the potential of
this when I was a book editor in the mid 1980's at Houghton-Mifflin
in Boston.  Through a series of events I no longer recall I bumped
into this woman named Elizabeth Ferrarini (ph) who was verging on
a functional illiterate but wanted to write a book about her
experiences on the fledgling nets then.  I think she was one of the
early members of The Source.  And she used to log on with the
handle "THIS IS A NAKED LADY."  So those of you with any experience
on the Net know what kind of E-mail and sends this starts to draw
to you while you're on the Net.  Her keystroke cup will runneth
over in no time.  
          Actually knowing nothing about this I ended up
(a) commissioning the book, (b) rewriting it, and (c) publishing
it.  It became a book called Infomania: Life in the On-Line World. 
I think it was sort of the first book about this subject, and
dutifully sank into obscurity by being the first in about 1987.  
          A couple of years later in another incarnation I was at
a tag sale and I bought a box for $60.  It was an RCA dumb monitor
with a 300 baud modem, and you could put about ten phone numbers in
it.  And I took it home, sort of figured it out from the manual, I
went to Computer Shopper, found a BBS with my area code on it and
bingo -- I was in Dave's Cave, a Fidonet (ph) node, looking for
filthy stories and other things.  And then it came to me one night
in an epiphanous moment that you could actually with a telephone
connection basically get things onto the disk of your computer you
didn't have to type in yourself.  Ah, revelation.  This was nice. 
And from then, you know, just like Topsy the addiction simply grew
until I sort of found myself floating around the InterNet for many
years now, and actually in different years I've become one of the
rarer breeds of people on the Net.  I actually manage to make a
modest living out of it rather than just shoveling lots of connect
time dollars back into it.  
          In the course of this I guess I stumbled into a system on
the West Coast, if anything can be said to be anywhere in cyber-
space, called The Well.  Most people that have been on the Nets for
some time have a vague idea that the Well is actually one of these
systems whose impact is bigger than its userbase, and while on The
Well I bumped into other denizens of cyberspace such as Mnemonic,
who is actually Mike Godwin, one of the legal beagles for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington, and also into this
very strange, slightly seedy cowpoke named Barlow, who had with his
palaver actually talked Mitch Kapur (ph) into parting with some
hard change to fund and found the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which at its inception was actually a very exciting organization to
be involved with since they basically wanted to defend young hack-
ing kids against big crackdowns by Feds.  I'm always looking for a
good game of Feds and Heads in my life.  I like to play with the
Heads.  
          You know, the EFF later devolved into what's now sort of
a wonk tank and luncheon society down in Washington, D.C., but that
was after my time, or I should say my time ended when it evolved
into lunching with lobbyists.  But since then I've gone on to be I
guess a gadfly around the Net and on The Well to people.  On The
Well I run a conference that's called, well, I run two conferences. 
One is called Z (ph), which is basically a digest of all the other
conferences, the best and the worst, what have you.  And then the
conference I'm proudest of is called The Weird Conference, and The
Weird Conference's rule is that we don't have any rules, and you
can say anything you want and nothing is forbidden.  And nothing is
ever censored except sometimes by me in a purely arbitrary fashion
to keep people aware of what censorship feels like.  It's true. 
Boswell will sometimes just log on and say, "Well, I'm going to
erase your comment because I just don't like it."  Checheche cht --
gone.  What?  What?  There it is.
          Anyway, I was just sort of looking at the Net and I've
been thinking about censorship, and I've been through Operation Sun
Devil and I've seen Hacker Crackdown and I have Digital Telepathy
and I'm aware -- I'm sure Mr. Zimmermann will enlighten you of what
can happen to someone who goes out to play on the Nets when it's an
essential Net tool.  I mean you need to pack a lunch and have a
legal fund.  Nevertheless, I would say to you today, not just to
this small group but almost to anyone, that my basic state is one
of really intense optimism.  I think the war against censorship is
effectively over and we've won.  I think what we're going to be
dealing with now in policy areas and programming areas is what I
would call mopping up operations and attempts by local and global
authority to put the genie back in the bottle.  But it's gone.  I
mean it's out there.  The Net is out there.
          The Net has, in my mind at least, the Net has no center. 
It has no owners, none that I know of.  It respects no borders.  I
mean, you know, Australia is just a domain name to the Net.  It
doesn't really matter where you are.  English is pretty much its
default language, much like air traffic control.  
          I'm sure there's going to be a lot of waves of efforts to
limit and otherwise control this medium.  I would think, if you
look at the growth statistics on the Net, if you look at the number
of people coming on and you look at the kind of minds you're
dealing with when you're dealing with the Net, I mean you are not
dealing with the left side of the Bell curve when you're hitting on
the Net.  I mean you are dealing with people who are bright enough
to get there, because it isn't easy.  You're dealing with people
who are really sharp about this new technology, because some of
them write the programs that it runs on.  
          You're also dealing, way at the bottom of the InterNet
you're dealing with software, you're dealing with Send Mail, you're
dealing with Read This, you're dealing with a lot of assorted
software that all nodes have to have to talk to each other, and if
you really look at that code and say, "Who wrote this code?  Who
wrote the thing that -- who created the water in which all this
information swims?"  Well, I think if you look at those original
people a lot of them were basically anarcho-crypto heads that
happened to be programmers and just wanted to, you know, send jokes
to each other and talk about computers.  
          I think it's --, you know, the default state of the Net
is absolute freedom.  In fact it's to such an extent that a large
part of the Net is sort of set up to recognize attempts at censor-
ship as system damage and simply route around it.  I want to send
pedophile memoirs from site A to site C.  Well, you know, it's
supposed to take the most efficient route and that's through site
B.  Well, this happens to be Jerry Falwell's machine.  He decides
what he wants on his machine in his "home."  That's fine with me. 
So down it goes.  Whup!  Sorry.  We don't take any pedophile stuff
through this site.  Boom!  We'll kick it to D.  D doesn't care. 
Boom!  You know.  I don't care if Jerry -- you know, it's fine with
me what people have in their home.  
          It's more complicated than this obviously and there's
going to be a lot of argument and a lot of, you know, shouting back
and forth and a lot of federal regulations passed and all of that,
but I think what's happening here is we -- you know, what is the
Net?  The Net is basically the medium, and the Net reminds me of
this book that was published at the end of the '70's where a man
said, "Well, my idea for a really great book is a book of 350 pages
and there's nothing on any of the pages.  So I'm going to call it
the Nothing Book."  And everyone said, "What a terrible commercial
idea."  Well, of course he published the Nothing Book and now you
go into any bookstore there's, you know, a big case of blank books.
          What we've got with the Net is we have, fundamentally we
have the linking of millions and millions of hard drives.  This
fulfills the dream of every computer junkie in the world, that you
have infinite drive space.  You basically have infinite drive
space.  The Net is really -- what it is, is what we make it, every-
body individually.  It's like sort of the largest group hack in
history.  I think second to the phone company it's certainly the
largest machine that's ever been built.  Some people will get
rather mystical.  Under certain chemicals I'll get mystical and
tell you it's the emergence of the World Mind.  And like anything
in the World Mind, it's got a lot of dark areas in it.  Well, we'll
just have to live with our dark fantasies as we live with our
better deeds.  To deny them is not really a good idea.
          I think one of the things that we're feeling right now
with the immense growth is we're feeling three fundamental tensions
within the Net, and I would also propose to you that for each ten-
sion the Net also has the capacity to alleviate that tension.  I
think the first tension is between the concepts which can exist in
a single human mind, in a single human society, that on the one
hand ideas, ideas, need to be free.  They need to be exchanged. 
They need to have no limit to the ability to make them baroque or
make them fresh or make them new.  But at the same time the same
mind that has ideas that need to be free, we also hold within
ourselves beliefs that need to be protected.  Censorship is bad. 
I believe that.  I need to protect that idea.  That's central to
something important to me.  As an idea, censorship is bad?  That
may not be such a fundamentally true idea.  Maybe there are some
cases that people can make that censorship is good.  All right. 
But my belief needs to be protected, although my ideas need to be
free.
          Well, how does the Net deal with that?  The Net, or
UseNet, which is sort of this large machine, this large sort of
Mother Ship of interest groups that rides upon the vast InterNet
ocean, basically just creates infinite areas in which all beliefs
can exist and all ideas can be free.  And if you wander into an
area with a certain belief -- say you wander into -- oh, the sex
areas are always good because that's where everyone gets excited. 
You wander into ALT.SEX.MEMBERS OF THE SAME SEX.  MOTSS.  And you
say, as we see in that group every month, you enter a message with
the stirring headline, "FAGS MUST DIE."  Well, it will be about
four nanoseconds before about thirty other people will flame you
hairless.  Your I.D. will be exposed either in its strength or its
weakness by thirty other minds working on that -- whew.
          At the same time you might want to say, "I believe that
everyone should worship Jesus.  Christ.  Christian."  Right?  Well,
you might sort of wander over to the Muslim and you might not feel
too comfortable in the ALT.MUSLIM area doing that, but the Net has
created, the wonderful alt groups have created ALT.CHRISTNET.  They
even have ALT.CHRISTNET.SEXUALITY.  So what happens is when people
feel a need to have a belief area in which their beliefs can be
protected they'll just create an area and anybody who wanders in
there that's not quite in the program, just flamed hairless and
thrown out.  That's all right, because you can wander over, you
know, to another area or to a "secret moderated (ph) mailing list"
that says, you know, "Kill Catholics Mailing List."  Okay?  We're
going to talk with six other people on the Net about killing
Catholics.  That's a good idea.  We'll just all be in that room
together.  You know, other people just put you in their Kill file
and you're out of here. 
          So the Net sort of resolves those two, that particular
tension set.  Next tension set, tension set number two, is
information.  Hmmmm.  Information wants to be free.  All right. 
Information wants to be free.  True.  True thing.  All information
wants to be free, and we don't really want to pay connect time
charges to get it, either.  On the other hand information is
generated by people, and people need to be paid, okay?  Because,
you know, the information environment that makes my apartment, the
landlord wants to be paid for that solid piece of information I
live in so I need to get something coming in the other way.
          Well, I would propose to you that the way that both we
can have free information and also have information which returns
some kind of money or token back to its creator is probably at hand
within the InterNet within the crypto environment.  In other words
I get a little sample of something.  If I want to have the whole
thing maybe I have to send $5 down the line on my Master Charge in
order to get the key back.  Mr. Zimmermann could probably talk a
little bit more specifically about how cryptography and things like
that probably hold the key to a real kind of commercial series of
transactions over the InterNet.  So that is sort of the Net.
          But on the one hand we have, you have to consider there's
two things going on on the InterNet.  One is speech, and people
feel ASCII is speech and if you don't think it's speech say that on
the Net and they'll probably come back to you and hand you your
ASCII on a platter.  Which empowers individuals.  That's why we
love it.  At the same time the other question is how are we going
to maintain copyright?  Because people feel that maintaining copy-
right disempowers individuals.  Correct.  Copyright was not created
by the United States Government back in the dawn of government to
empower individuals.  That was a side effect.  Copyright was
created because people saw right away that unless people uld
enjoy the fruits of their labor there wouldn't be quite so much
invention within society and it was held to be a good thing to spur
invention within society.  I think that's probably the fundamental
reason for copyright.  And I think again, you know, the Net will
give us the tools to do that.  The Net has been as a global machine
and through a pact that nobody intended and nobody created an
extremely, surprisingly responsive organism to solving its own
problems.  They get solved on a pretty fast track.  
          The final tension is sort of what is going on on the Net
all the time in the way the Net only mirrors what we are and what
we make it and who we are as a society, and that is the tension
between the desire for liberty and the fear of liberty that leads
us to yearn for some kind of authority.  You see this polarity move
along on the Net all the time.  You see sort of libertarian --
libertarian anarchists are very big on the Net, are here, and then
there's control freaks.  They're also here.  Anybody who's been out
there for a while sees these people go at each other all the time.
          Then of course we have Net Heads, or Heads, whatever, and
of course we have Feds, you know.  And Heads and Feds have been
playing games on the Net now for almost a decade.  There's no
reason to think they're going to stop.  They sort of need each
other.  The Christ and the Antichrist in an eternal conflict.  But
meanwhile everybody else is just, you know, passing recipes back
and forth and, you know, here's my, you know, here's my secret
pedophile journal over here.  Everybody's -- here's how you crochet
something.  Here's some code.  Here's a filthy E of me and my dog.
Just download, send money, state preferences.
          Then of course you have the anarchists, like I am.  Hey! 
No rules, nothing.  Let's just do it.  You know, you're there.  You
are free.  Just assume it and act on it, and -- THE NET POLICE. 
"You know, you're really a Nazi for saying it that way."  In fact
the famous Mneumonics law on the Net says that the longer any Net
argument goes on, the more, the more ready you are to put us into
-- "as length of the UseNet argument continues, the probability of
a comparison to the Nazis approaches 1."  And this happens. 
          Then of course you have intellectual political explorers,
you know, of all kinds, you know.  Now we even have a Nazi,
AMERICAN NAZI.COM on the Net.  No longer are we approaching 1; the
Nazis are already on the Net.  But we have infinite disk space and
they just go off in their little room.  And then we also have PC
people on the Net.  PC's are very big on the Net, and very big on
college bulletin boards.  These are the people that believe that we
can sort of control people in being nice, wonderful people, and
when everybody's nice and wonderful and has no bad thoughts then
it's going to be the Millenium.  Hearts will open.  You know, all
will walk naked in the world.
          And then you have sort of the hackers and the crackers,
you know, and there's a great deal of confusion about who's hacking
and who's cracking.  You know, if I'm cracking and I'm doing it
because it's cool, I'm hacking, right?  If someone's hammering on
my password file they're cracking.  I don't care how cool they are. 
So I think my fundamental statement about the Net is that it is
literally the greatest tool for free speech that has ever been,
ever been invented.  Free speech is, you know, freedom of the press
is available to those that own one.  Hey.  Two grand.  We all own
one.  That's about the total cash investment.  Never have printing
presses with 15 million potential readers been so cheap, all over
the world.  
          I don't really despair for the future of the Net.  I
think the Net is probably the greatest tool for the potential
liberation of the mind and spirit of all human beings that's ever
existed on the planet.  I view it as sort of the peoples' publish-
ing company, that rejects no manuscripts, you know, that has all
books available for ten cents each, you know, if that.  You know,
please.  Read my screen.  
          And then you're always coming back with the Net tension
people saying, "Yes.  But now that the people have the ability to
communicate with each other globally on any issue from any point of
view that they want to and governments can't really stop it that
easily and it just sort of flows through these borders, don't you
think it's time to call for all of us who use the Net to use it in
a responsible manner?"  
          And I say screw that.  I say screw responsibility.  Just
do what you want.  That's what it is there for.  "Well, you have to
telecommunicate responsibly."  Well, I don't have to put a condom
over my modem.  Enough of this.  You know, I mean everybody's
always got to, you know, "We have a vast new medium.  We must use
it responsibly."  No, I say we use it irresponsibly.  I say we just
fool around with it.  We hack on it.  We hammer on it.  We pound
it.  We just see what happens.  Who knows?  You know, it might be
a pi$ata and we crack it open and, you know, a lot of manure falls
out.  Or we might crack the pi$ata open and a huge Mardi Gras party
will be wandering out.  We don't know, you know.  But I think we
have to use it and use it heavily, because, you know, as they say
in aerobics, "Use it or lose it."  That's all I have to say.

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