Re: A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

["Dave Emery" <die@pig.die.com>]

	Congratulations.,.  most of the polemics about the overweaning
power of the net, particularly in such communities as cypherpunks are
touchingly nieve tripe.   You have spoken the truth - and the hard words
need to be heard and  understood before it is too late.

	A lot of people forget the basic truth that the net is based
almost entirely on physical communications facilities owned for the most
part by huge corperations that have deeply incestuous relationships with
the political power structure and very little interest in preserving the
self important dreams of a few members of a self selected net "elite".  
If ordered to pull the plug they will, and cyberspace as we know it will
evaporate overnight.

	And there is essentially no possibility of practical alternative
communications facilities becoming available - aside from the titanic
capital costs of creating such, most of the resources required such as
radio spectrum, orbital slots and rights of way are tightly controlled by
the entrenched corperations that operate the present facilities. 

	And the communications network infrastructure in the US has long
since outgrown its earlier days of comparative electronic anonymity - if
the government decides it has to control and or eliminate a network or
host it does not like it will be damned hard to construct one that
cannot be detected, mapped  and tracked down to physical people typing
on physical keyboards at the end of physical wires and fibers.  Crypto
may help until it is so regulated and controlled that the mere act of
possessing uncontrolled crypto software or hardware, or sending,
receiving or even just storing on disk a message that the government
cannot read is ipso facto justification for a long mandatory jail term -
(and that day is  coming). Remailers may help until anonymous
forwarding of electronic messages of any kind to third parties for the
purpose of concealing the sender or recipients true identity is a
serious crime except for certain very narrowly defined exceptions such
as otherwise legal anonymous political speech and such things as
legitimate anonymous self help groups. International sites may help
until the government decides that international traffic to rogue states
is something that it historically has had control of and can regulate
(witness the embargo for many years on telephone traffic to Cuba),
But it seems very clear as long as the government  has ultimate
control of the communications facilities used to send the messages the
government can and will control their passage if it feels it has to.

	Unfettered, uncontrolled, uncensored  net access to anything
like  the current wide cross section of the great washed, upper income,
upper education sector of the population reached by the current
Internet is a short term historical accident - there are too many
powerful groups challenged and threatened by such for this period of 100
flowers to last. 

	And, alas, the overbroad controls put in place by scared
politicians in response to the "excesses" of this period of freedom  may
well have the effect of making it completely impossible to create
another academic, fringe, elite, intellectual, anarchic  Internet ... it
may well become seriously illegal to operate any free electronic forum
of wide scope without rigorous pre-publication mechanisms in place to
eliminate illegal information, pornography, stolen intellectual
property, improper racist, sexist, or nationalistic sentiments,
blasphemy, seditious speech, profantity, concealment of true traceable
identity, impersonation of another, and quite possibly anything that
could be construed as defaming the character of a person or institution.

	I'm enough of a coward to believe that perhaps we should concede
the greater public Internet to the commercial interests that seek to
turn it into a vast shopping mall and let them control speech, regulate
content and license speakers provided that it still is possible for
private, academic, fringe, full free speech electronic networks to exist
for at least some of the intelligensia. And I'm afraid that may be the
real bargain we face....

						A defeated pessimist,
 						die@die.com