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Bruce Sterling's talk at CFP
I read this in the May 2nd issue of Microtimes, and asked the
author's permission to post it here. On rereading I think it
suffers in the transcription, since it was originally a speech.
And I'm not sure I understand or agree with everything in it.
But I think it does contain some arguments worth disseminating.
Forwarded message:
> From [email protected] Sun May 22 08:41:47 1994
> Date: Sun, 22 May 1994 08:41:33 -0700
> From: Bruce Sterling <[email protected]>
> Message-Id: <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Fan mail & request
>
> Yeah, you can post it if you want. Here.
>
> Bruce Sterling
> [email protected]
>
> LITERARY FREEWARE: NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE
>
> Remarks at Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference IV
> Chicago, Mar 26, 1994
>
> I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the
> topics of privacy threat raised by this panel. And I don't. One reason
> is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large,
> monolithic bureaucracies (of whatever character, political or
> economic) that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way
> surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that
> computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic
> organizations especially when they have computers, is like being
> afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.
>
> The threat simply doesn't concur with my historical
> experience. None of the large organizations of my youth that
> compelled my fear and uneasy respect have prospered. Let me just
> roll off a few acronyms here. CCCP. KGB. IBM. GM. AEC. SAC.
>
> It was recently revealed that the CIA has been of actual
> negative worth -- literally worse than useless -- to American
> national security. They were in the pockets of the KGB during our
> death struggle with the Soviet Union -- and yet we still won.
> Japanese zaibatsus -- Japan Inc. -- the corporate monoliths of Japan
> -- how much hype have we heard about that lately? I admit that
> AT&T has prospered, sort of -- if you don't count the fact that
> they've hollowed themselves out by firing a huge percentage of their
> personnel.
>
> Suppose that, say, Equifax, turned into an outright fascist
> organization and stated abusing privacy in every way they could.
> How could they keep that a secret? Realistically, given current
> employment practices in the Western economies, what kind of
> loyalty could they command among their own personnel? The low
> level temps have no health insurance and no job security; the high
> level people are ready to grab their golden parachutes and bail at any
> time. Where is the fanatically loyal army of gray flannel
> organization men who will swear lifelong allegiance to this
> organization, or *any* organization in this country with the possible
> exception of the Mafia?
>
> I feel that the real threat to our society isn't because people
> are being surveilled but because people are being deliberately
> ignored. People drop through the safety nets. People stumble
> through the streets of every city in this country absolutely wrapped
> in the grip of demons, groping at passersby for a moment's attention
> and pity and not getting it. In parts of the Third World people are
> routinely disappeared, not because of high-tech computer
> surveillance but for the most trivial and insane reasons -- because
> they wear glasses, because they were seen reading a book -- and if
> they survive, it's because of the thin thread of surveillance carried
> out by Amnesty International.
>
> There may be securicams running 24 hours a day all around us,
> but mechanical surveillance is not the same as people actually
> getting attention or care. Sure, rich people, like most of us here, are
> gonna get plenty of attention, probably too much, a poisonous
> amount, but in the meantime life has become so cheap in this society
> that we let people stagger around right in front of us exhaling
> tuberculosis without treatment. It's not so much information haves
> and have-nots and watch and watch-nots.
>
> I wish I could speak at greater length more directly to the
> topic of this panel. But since I'm the last guy to officially speak at
> CFP IV, I want the seize the chance to grandstand and do a kind of
> pontifical summation of the event. And get some irrepressible
> feelings off my chest.
>
> What am I going to remember from CFP IV? I'm going to
> remember the Chief Counsel of NSA and his impassioned insistence
> that key escrow cryptography represents normality and the status
> quo, and that unlicensed hard cryptography is a rash and radical leap
> into unplumbed depths of lawlessness. He made a literary reference
> to BRAVE NEW WORLD. What he said in so many words was, "We're
> not the Brave New World, Clipper's opponents are the Brave New
> World."
>
> And I believe he meant that. As a professional science fiction
> writer I remember being immediately struck by the deep conviction
> that there was plenty of Brave New World to go around.
>
> I've been to all four CFPs, and in my opinion this is the darkest
> one by far. I hear ancestral voices prophesying war. All previous
> CFPs had a weird kind of camaraderie about them. People from the
> most disparate groups found something useful to tell each other.
> But now that America's premiere spookocracy has arrived on stage
> and spoken up, I think the CFP community has finally found a group of
> outsiders that it cannot metabolize. The trenchworks are going up
> and I see nothing but confrontation ahead.
>
> Senator Leahy at least had the elementary good sense to
> backpedal and temporize, as any politician would when he saw the
> white-hot volcano of technological advance in the direct path of a
> Cold War glacier that has previously crushed everything in its way.
>
> But that unlucky flak-catcher the White House sent down here
> -- that guy was mousetrapped, basically. That was a debacle! Who
> was briefing that guy? Are they utterly unaware? How on earth
> could they miss the fact that Clipper and Digital Telephony are
> violently detested by every element in this community -- with the
> possible exception of one brave little math professor this high?
> Don't they get it that everybody from Rush Limbaugh to Timothy
> Leary despises this initiative? Don't they read newspapers? The
> Wall Street Journal, The New York Times? I won't even ask if they
> read their email.
>
> That was bad politics. But that was nothing compared to the
> presentation by the gentleman from the NSA. If I can do it without
> losing my temper, I want to talk to you a little bit about how
> radically unsatisfactory that was.
>
> I've been waiting a long time for somebody from Fort Meade to
> come to the aid of Dorothy Denning in Professor Denning's heroic and
> heartbreaking solo struggle against twelve million other people with
> email addresses. And I listened very carefully and I took notes and I
> swear to God I even applauded at the end.
>
> He had seven points to make, four of which were disingenuous,
> two were half-truths, and the other was the actual core of the
> problem.
>
> Let me blow away some of the smoke and mirrors first, more
> for my own satisfaction than because it's going to enlighten you
> people any. With your indulgence.
>
> First, the kidporn thing. I am sick and tired of hearing this
> specious blackwash. Are American citizens really so neurotically
> uptight about deviant sexual behavior that we will allow our entire
> information infrastructure to be dictated by the existence of
> pedophiles? Are pedophiles that precious and important to us? Do
> the NSA and the FBI really believe that they can hide the structure of
> a telephone switch under a layer of camouflage called child
> pornography? Are we supposed to flinch so violently at the specter
> of child abuse that we somehow miss the fact that you've installed a
> Sony Walkman jack in our phones?
>
> Look, there were pedophiles before NII and there will be
> pedophiles long after NII is just another dead acronym. Pedophiles
> don't jump out of BBSes like jacks in the box. You want to impress
> me with your deep concern for children? This is Chicago! Go down
> to the Projects and rescue some children from being terrorized and
> recruited by crack gangs who wouldn't know a modem if it bit them
> on the ass! Stop pornkidding us around! Just knock it off with that
> crap, you're embarrassing yourselves.
>
> But back to the speech by Mr. Baker of the NSA. Was it just me,
> ladies and gentlemen, or did anyone else catch that tone of truly
> intolerable arrogance? Did they guy have to make the remark about
> our missing Woodstock because we were busy with our
> trigonometry? Do spook mathematicians permanently cooped up
> inside Fort Meade consider that a funny remark? I'd like to make an
> even more amusing observation -- that I've seen scarier secret
> police agencies than his completely destroyed by a Czech hippie
> playwright with a manual typewriter.
>
> Is the NSA unaware that the current President of the United
> States once had a big bushel-basket-full of hair? What does he
> expect from the computer community? Normality? Sorry pal, we're
> fresh out! Who is it, exactly, that the NSA considers a level-headed
> sober sort, someone to sit down with and talk to seriously? Jobs?
> Wozniak? Gates? Sculley? Perot -- I hope to God it's not Perot.
> Bob Allen -- okay, maybe Bob Allen, that brownshoe guy from AT&T.
> Bob Allen seems to think that Clipper is a swell idea, at least he's
> somehow willing to merchandise it. But Christ, Bob Allen just gave
> eight zillion dollars to a guy whose idea of a good time is Microsoft
> Windows for Spaceships!
>
> When is the NSA going to realize that Kapor and his people and
> Rotenberg and his people and the rest of the people here are as good
> as people get in this milieu? Yes they are weird people, and yes they
> have weird friends (and I'm one of them), but there isn't any
> normality left for anybody in this society, and when it comes to
> computers, when the going got weird the weird turned pro! The
> status quo is *over!* Wake up to it! Get used to it!
>
> Where in hell does a crowd of spooks from Fort Meade get off
> playing "responsible adults" in this situation? This is a laugh and a
> half! Bobby Ray Inman, the legendary NSA leader, made a stab at
> computer entrepreneurism and rapidly went down for the third time.
> Then he got out of the shadows of espionage and into the bright
> lights of actual public service and immediately started gabbling like
> a daylight-stricken vampire. Is this the kind of responsive public
> official we're expected to blindly trust with the insides of our
> phones and computers? Who made him God?
>
> You know, it's a difficult confession for a practiced cynic like
> me to make, but I actually trust EFF people. I do; I trust them;
> there, I've said it. But I wouldn't trust Bobby Ray Inman to go down
> to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.
>
> You know, I like FBI people. I even kind of trust them, sort of,
> kind of, a little bit. I'm sorry that they didn't catch Kevin Mitnick
> here. I'm even sorry that they didn't manage to apprehend Robert
> Steele, who is about one hundred times as smart as Mitnick and ten
> thousand times as dangerous. But FBI people, I think your idea of
> Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster, and I'll tell you
> why.
>
> Because you're going to be filling out your paperwork in
> quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do, because you don't
> have your own pet court like the NSA does. And for you, it probably
> is going to seem pretty much like the status quo used to be. But in
> the meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United States
> around the world with a terrible weapon. Not your court-ordered,
> civilized Digital Telephony -- their raw and tyrannical Digital
> Telephony.
>
> You're gonna be using it to round up wiseguys in streetgangs,
> and people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round up
> democratic activists and national minorities. You're going to
> strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and then you're
> going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported
> truckbombers these rogue governments are sending our way after
> annihilating their own internal opposition by using your tools. You
> want us to put an axe in your hand and you're promising to hit us
> with only the flat side of it, but the Chinese don't see it that way;
> they're already licensing fax machines and they're gonna need a lot
> of new hardware to gear up for Tiananmen II.
>
> I've talked a long time, but I want to finish by saying
> something about the NSA guy's one real and actual argument. The
> terrors of the Brave New World of free individual encryption. When
> he called encryption enthusiasts "romantic" he was dead-on, and
> when he said the results of spreading encryption were unpredictable
> and dangerous he was also dead-on, because people, encryption is not
> our friend. Encryption is a mathematical technique, and it has about
> as much concern for our human well-being as the fact that seventeen
> times seventeen equals two hundred and eighty-nine. It does, but
> that doesn't make us sleep any safer in our beds.
>
> Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me and they have
> since the mid 1980s. The effects are very scary and very
> unpredictable and could be very destabilizing. But even the Four
> Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry
> me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century,
> and we've had enough of them.
>
> Our battle this century against totalitarianism has left
> terrible scars all over our body politic and the threat these people
> pose to us is entirely and utterly predictable. You can say that the
> devil we know is better than the devil we don't, but the devils we
> knew were ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and
> blow up the world. How much worse can that get? Let's not build
> chips and wiring for our police and spies when only their police and
> spies can reap the full benefit of them.
>
> But I don't expect my arguments to persuade anyone in the NSA.
> If you're NSA and I do somehow convince you, by some fluke, then I
> urge you to look at your conscience -- I know you have one -- and
> take the word to your superiors and if they don't agree with you --
> *resign.* Leave the Agency. Resign now, and if I'm right about
> what's coming down the line, you'll be glad you didn't wait till later.
>
> But even though I have a good line of gab, I don't expect to
> actually argue people out of their livelihood. That's notoriously
> difficult.
>
> So CFP people, you have a fight on your hands. I'm sorry that a
> community this young should have to face a fight this savage, for
> such terribly high stakes, so soon. But what the heck; you're
> always bragging about how clever you are; here's your chance to
> prove to your fellow citizens that you're more than a crowd of net-
> nattering MENSA dilettantes. In cyberspace one year is like seven
> dog years, and on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, so I figure
> that makes you CFP people twenty-eight years old. And people, for
> the sake of our society and our children you had better learn to act
> your age.
>
> Good luck. Good luck to you. For what it's worth, I think you're
> some of the best and brightest our society has to offer. Things look
> dark but I feel hopeful. See you next year in San Francisco.
>
>