Re:A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

strata@virtual.net wrote:

>Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be as
>armed federal marshals walk into a major ISP and shut down their
>routers, as replays of Operation Sun Devil occur in people's houses,

Operation Sun Devil happened in 1990.  A couple of BBS' were shut down.  It
hasn't been repeated much since.  There are currently more than 7,000
commercial ISPs in the world.  At one or two shutdowns per decade, it will
take a while.  Note too that an ISP is more like a carrier (common or not)
than like a publisher.  Legal difficulties for the Feds.  Even harder in the
future when 100 million households worldwide have full-time net access
running on real multitasking workstations.

>as major idiocy of the sort that only a scared government in a country
>which considers itself free can carry out.

>digress. All the little-boy fantasies of the Powerful Internet don't
>mean two beans when an officially sanctioned thug turns the switch
>from 1 to 0 on your POP. It'll happen. Just watch.

I'm waiting.  Then I'll have to call all the way to Montreal to log on.
They will have a lot of fun trying to *find* all the ISPs though.  There are
quite a few and that still leaves company, academic, government, and private
TCP/IP servers up.

>Oh, let's start right off pretending that 
>a) the net is an independently funded entity with no government
>infrastructure and

There's not much government infrastructure left on the Net.  The backbone
went private the weekend after the OKC Federal building was blown up.

>While we're at it, let's press a monkey-brain hot button in any person
>of political power by saying their power does/should not apply here.
>This will not only make them receptive to the reasoning which we will
>lay out in the rest of the document, it will impress them with our
>real-world suavity, tact, and general with-it-ness.

Defeat is a process that occurs in the mind of the enemy.  If you can
convince them not to fight, you and they are better off.  In any case, you
don't get anywhere by failing to assert your strength.  A declaration of
independence doesn't mean you are independent it is the opening shot in a
conflict by which you win (prove) your independence.

>Nature abhors a vacuum. I assume it surprises no one that much of the
>major flack about the net began when it became widely known to
>government that the net considered itself anarchic.

It doesn't consider itself anarchic -- it is.  The IETF reaches decisions by
consensus and the software that becomes part of what we call "the Net"
becomes a part of the Net only when a large enough number of individual
servers decide to run it.

>We took a defense department network and ran with it, but since we've
>been playing with it for over a decade, it's ours now. Just like when
>the neighbor kid loaned us his toy and we fixed it up, painted it, put
>new wheels on it, and now he wants it back! WAAAAAAHHHH!

Neither Arpanet nor the Internet were Defense Department networks.  They
were (for a while) academic networks funded (in part) by DOD and many other
sources.  Certainly when the Internet went international (when exactly did
that happen?)  the DOD became an insignificant player.

>network culture. You did not again and again provide equipment and
>resources only to watch them become privatized by the core of
>sysadmins and techies that you paid over the years, often in outright
>blackmail ("we'll walk away unless you sell/give us the equipment and
>facility"). 

These sorts of informal negotiations of the terms of employment are quite
common in life.  Anyone could have been fired at anytime if their
supervisors didn't like what they were doing.  It is blackmail to threaten
to quit only if you are a slave who is not "allowed" to do so.  Here, we can
quit a job any time for any (or no) reason.  Certainly employers both public
and private have benefitted from the development of networking technology.

>Like use of copyrighted material, for instance. We who forward things
>from the "experimental" (but going for years) AP and NYT news wire
>feeds, the Dave Barry mailing lists, the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon
>daily web sites, we will identify them and address them by our means
>if we ever decide there's a problem there that we actually care about.

Fair use (private distribution) or published on the net by the copyright
holders themselves.

>Same with snuff stories about real people

You mean like novels about the Kennedy assassination.

>harrassment of women, minorities, or homo/bi/trans-sexuals online, etc.

Well *somebody* has to do it.  Women, minorities and the differently sexed
certainly harass other people.  I thought we all had equal rights.

>Online advertising actually bothers us, so we completely smite and try to 
>drive out of business people who are clueless enough to try spamming.

This obviously hasn't worked.  There's an awful lot of advertizing on the
net these days.

>Right, only by ISP and spelling and punctuation ability. This
>paragraph is where I decided I finally had to come out and call
>bullshit to this whole thing. And how many of the people on the mailing lists
>that claim to be full of internet liberators, free-speech advocates,
>people who are "building cyberspace" etc look at something posted by,
>say, an AOL account, with the same level of fair judgement as they do

<Various complaints about net elitist misbehavior elided.>

When one goes out into the marketplace, one encounters many different people
and many challenges.  You must win acceptance from some of the other
participants you find there.  There are mores.  You have to learn some of
them or find others of your ilk who already share you mores.  It is not
hard.  It is called life. 

>I'm rolling on the floor, but I'm not sure if I'm laughing or crying.
>WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM? Can someone take an anonymous poll of the
>Known Network and ask the following: "I routinely refrain from
>posting my opinions or beliefs to mailing lists and/or newsgroups for
>fear of flaming, harrassment, or ridicule, even when I am confident of 
>those beliefs or opinions (strongly-disagree disagree no-opinion agree
>strongly-agree)" 

I've never been bothered.  Tim has had the cops called on him.  We still
post at will.  A short survey of the Feed suggests that many other people
continue to post at will.  Probably too many.  In fact, they obviously feel
freer to do so on the net than in real life.

>Hell, look what the cypherpunk community did to Detweiler! I've never
>met the man, but I've read his papers and he doesn't seem like a total
>nut case to me. 

Opinions differ.

>does that mean we have to handle them with a complete
>lack of compassion? Do we have to be little boys with sticks
>tormenting a wounded animal? I don't think so.

This is not a therapy group.  Compassion is a personal matter.  Certainly LD
is not noted for his compassion.

>it. For that matter, source code copyrights on the net are just a
>quaint custom, and so are people's personal privacy expectations with
>regard to their email and to their files. I mean,
>electronic privacy isn't a concept of property, identity, or
>expression is it? What's all this fuss about crypto? Silly people,
>those legal concepts don't apply here!!! Now go read your users mail
>like a good sysadmin and turn in heretics to the thought police. Mr.
>Barlow says it's okay, right here in this widely-forwarded document!

I hadn't noticed much advocacy of reading private email or turning people in
to the thought police anywhere on the Net.  Perhaps you read some unusual
mailing lists.

>Now I understand why there is no fear of the plug being pulled-- so
>what if this message is being read on a physical screen and is stored
>on a physical disk, with a physical junction joining it to the network,
>"there is no matter here". The fact that the computer on which you
>read this may belong to someone else, may be shut down without your
>control, may be being misused according to their intent just by
>transmitting this message, that is irrelevant! OMMMMMMM-- are you
>receiving this message? OMMMMMMMM....

In modern capitalist societies like the US, it is possible to actually own
fairly powerful computers yourself.  In fact, I understand that even the
peasantry in America can put together the $200 for a used 386sx and the $39
for a 14.4K modem and run a free copy of Linux and have a powerful TCP/IP
server of their own.  The dialup connection is not permanent of course.  It
can be bought from many local, national, and overseas providers.  Encrypted
TCP/IP to out-country ISPs will make things a bit harder to track.

>The persons we have kicked off numerous online services, such as
>Cantor & Seigel, email harrassers, stalkers, etc are not really "us",
>so this statement is entirely self-consistent, Selah.

Severing a contractual relationship with someone (under the terms of that
contract) is not physical coercion and bears no resemblance to physical
coercion.  Those who are "disfellowshipped" by lists or ISPs can find others
who will accept them.

>Even if we don't apply it universally to ourselves, only to those
>online bodiless entities who meet with our approval and are clearly
>also members of the intellectual and anarchic elite!

Actually, the ability to control group inclusion and exclusion is the
definition of one sort of a society.  You are arguing that the Net has
become a grouping of various societies and subcultures.  I agree.

>Yes, I should give up my political career and
>the hope of building new housing in my district, getting more school
>funding, etc for a bunch of twenty (or thirty)-something
>non-constitutents who think of me as a pustulent gastropod. I'll run
>right out and vote against TRA!!

We (some of we) don't want the housing or the school funding either.  I
certainly consider slave schools to be the most common form of child abuse
in the world today.

>How much do you go out of your way for people who openly despise you
>and publicly declare your stupidity with every other breath?

Don't go out of your way.  Just stay out of our way.  Play golf instead.  

>Tsk tsk-- how will people find you after your domain name gets taken
>out of the InterNIC servers and your ISP is forced to pull your
>network number or get shut down? Or rather, how will other people
>besides your group of fellow net.elite peers find you?

Use another domain name.  Internic doesn't even have a monopoly of domain
name assignment within the US.  If it casually screws around with too many
people, it will guarantee further loss in market share.  How, exactly, is
there going to be a massive pulling of IP addresses.  That sounds like an
awful lot of expensive litigation to me.  Court orders don't come cheap even
if the Feds do buy them wholesale.  They'll lose that predator hunt energy
balance equation as long as it costs me virtually nothing so set up a new
net presence somewhere else but it costs them $thousands per "takedown."

>We've got a hell of a lot of work to do, then. Let's start by not
>flaming people at the drop of a hat. Perhaps I myself am guilty of
>this-- everyone who flames thinks they have a good enough reason.
>But unlike some people, I've never claimed to be a superior being.

In this century alone, the governments of the world have murdered more than
160 million people.  The Net has very few murders to its (dis)credit.  If
flaming is the worst we ever do...

>Declaration are a major red herring. Every person who takes his or
>her five minutes to forward this to another mailing list or to his or
>her congresscritter is wasting time and helping to promote an
>impression of the net as a place full of immature, unrealistic people.

I've found JPB to be reasonably realistic for one "of the left."  This
debate is *about* who is the most "realistic" the regulators or the
anti-regulators.  So far, the regulators haven't done too well.  Time will
tell.  In any case, it's way too early to declare the game over.  As for
"realism."  One may be permitted to doubt the realism of those who expect
massive physical raids to shut down the net.  That sort of thing worked (for
a while) in commie countries but it's never even been tried here.  If they
are going to do it, they'd better do it soon before the net triples in size
again.  

>Find something original and concrete to do instead. Spend the five 
>minutes writing and *mailing* an original letter to your elected
>official and mention you are in his or her district. 

This is *original*?

>Write a
>non-judgemental, helpful explanation of something to a net newcomer.
>Install PGP on your roomate's machine and teach him/her how to use
>it. Take an hour to write and post a refutation to a meme which 
>you think will harm the net community. Just go DO something.

This happens to be how Barlow spends most of this time.  Many of us as well.

>It's a hard thing to face, that armed persons might come to your door
>and shut down your livelihood and your main access to your chosen
>community of friends, and possibly shoot you or your loved ones in 
>the process. 

Now there's a *real* breach of netiquette.  Remind me not to give my real
address to my ISP.  Too bad their prisons are sort of maxed out with drug
dealers or they might lock up the lot of us (though one wonders on what
charges).

>The sooner we face and deal with that fear in ourselves,
>and use that transformative power to direct our actions for individual
>and collective freedom, the better. 

I thought that that was what you were objecting to.

>Pretending we are ruling a
>powerful invisible empire which is immune to violence is not the way
>to get there. Get real about the virtual.

Not an empire an anarchy and not ruling it either.

DCF