Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever
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SoftwareMultiplication signPhysical lawRevision controlChaos (cosmogony)Self-organizationSoftwarePower (physics)Computer animationXMLLecture/Conference
01:09
FreewareBitSoftwareBuildingMultiplication signBlock (periodic table)Video gameWordProcess (computing)MathematicsPower (physics)Lecture/Conference
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Element (mathematics)WeightState of matterForcing (mathematics)Arithmetic meanView (database)Natural numberData structureLevel (video gaming)SoftwareCodePower (physics)Multiplication signEvent horizonRevision controlFreewareMathematicsWordDistribution (mathematics)Point (geometry)Mechanism designDirection (geometry)Physical lawSurface of revolutionGame controllerGaussian eliminationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)CodeWater vaporContext awarenessTerm (mathematics)Limit (category theory)ExistenceHydraulic motorLecture/Conference
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FacebookGoogolPower (physics)Physical systemMikroblogService (economics)InformationMultiplication signOrder (biology)TelecommunicationExistenceSound effectDistribution (mathematics)MathematicsGame controllerState of matterResultantBasis <Mathematik>Surface of revolutionCodeWeightVulnerability (computing)DatabaseMereologyOcean currentReal numberOpen sourceForm (programming)CurveReal-time operating systemChemical equationHypermediaEntire functionEvoluteSoftwareRoundness (object)Different (Kate Ryan album)FreewareLecture/Conference
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Data miningRouter (computing)Flow separationTerm (mathematics)Centralizer and normalizerCharge carrierInformation securityDatabaseTelecommunicationRight angleGraph (mathematics)SoftwarePolygon meshQuicksortGame controllerForcing (mathematics)Group actionState of matterType theoryLevel (video gaming)Video gameService (economics)Multiplication signAnalytic setSeries (mathematics)CuboidReal-time operating systemSmartphoneInternet service providerAuthorizationVermaschtes NetzRow (database)Physical lawIntegrated development environmentFreewareComplex (psychology)Physical systemMathematicsInteractive televisionVulnerability (computing)Survival analysisSpeech synthesisCondition numberPerspective (visual)Projective planeWordContext awarenessWeb 2.0Order (biology)Process (computing)Online help2 (number)Power (physics)GoogolCombinational logicMereologyCybersexLecture/Conference
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CybersexComputerService (economics)Field (computer science)TelecommunicationLimit (category theory)Point (geometry)Centralizer and normalizerSoftwareInformation securityFacebookOpen setMultiplication signTime zonePhysical systemBuildingSystem callEnterprise architectureGame controllerAreaInformation privacyMereologyLevel (video gaming)WeightTable (information)System administratorCategory of beingInternet service providerWindowState of matterProxy serverOrder (biology)Physical lawExtension (kinesiology)Server (computing)Data miningCuboidDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Computer hardwareFile formatAuthorizationForm factor (electronics)PerimeterDirection (geometry)Term (mathematics)Right angleCASE <Informatik>Computing platformWeb 2.0Uniform resource locatorPosition operatorEmailFreewareStack (abstract data type)Distribution (mathematics)BitRule of inferenceData conversionCartesian coordinate systemMikroblogDigital photographyOcean currentFirewall (computing)Power (physics)In-System-ProgrammierungEuler anglesChemical equationOperating systemSpeech synthesisEncryptionPlastikkarteLecture/Conference
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Multiplication signPoint (geometry)Faculty (division)Identity managementComplete metric spaceParameter (computer programming)BuildingSelf-organizationElectric generatorDatabaseVideo gameBasis <Mathematik>Internet service providerPublic-key cryptographyComputerInformation privacyReal numberMereologyEncryptionInformationInternetworkingService (economics)Table (information)Speech synthesisGroup actionRight angleSoftwarePower (physics)State of matterProcess (computing)SmartphoneClient (computing)Computer programPerspective (visual)Radio-frequency identificationFingerprintStatement (computer science)Data conversionIntercept theoremObject (grammar)Physical lawQuicksortArithmetic meanCuboidWeightWorld Wide Web ConsortiumSystem callComputer clusterLecture/Conference
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Data conversionSoftwareOrder (biology)Line (geometry)Physical lawSurface of revolutionRight angleState of matterPhysical systemInformationMultiplication signStrategy gameRoutingDirection (geometry)NetzwerkverwaltungProduct (business)Ring (mathematics)Forcing (mathematics)Service (economics)Degree (graph theory)CuboidGSM-Software-Management AGInternet service providerDataflowModal logicWireless LANComputer configurationMereologyCondition numberRegulator geneComputer hardwareRouter (computing)Water vaporHexagonFreewareTwitterPower (physics)TelecommunicationSpeech synthesisGame controllerPoint (geometry)Internet forumSpacetimeWeightEvent horizonShared memoryWebsiteArithmetic meanArrow of timeControl flowEmailFlow separationGodDaylight saving timeLecture/Conference
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Okay, so it's time for the keynotes, and we're very honored to have Eben Moglen here as first keynote speaker. He's a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University.
00:21
He's probably most known for his involvement in the FSF and for creating the Software Freedom Law Center. He was also heavily involved in the creation of the GPL version three, and many other things, of course. And so he will give a talk here today about why political liberty depends
00:42
on software freedom more than ever. Eben Moglen, thank you. Thank you, good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here. I wanna thank the organizers for the miracle
01:01
that FOSDEM is. You all know that only chaos could create an organization of this quality and power, and it's an honor for me to play a little bit of a role in it. I know how eager you are to deal with technical matters,
01:21
and I'm sorry to start with politics first thing in the morning, but it's urgent. You've been watching it all around the world the past several weeks, haven't you? It's about how politics actually works
01:41
for people actually seeking freedom now, for people trying to make change in their world now. Software is what the 21st century is made of. What steel was to the economy of the 20th century,
02:03
what steel was to the power of the 20th century, what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It's the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made,
02:22
and when I speak of everything else, I mean, of course, freedom, as well as tyranny, as well as business as usual, as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.
02:43
In other words, the very composition of social life, the way it works or doesn't work for us, the way it works or doesn't work for those who own, the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress, all now depends on software.
03:04
At the end of this hastening process, when we started our little conspiracy, you and me and everybody else, you remember how it works, right? I mean, it's a simple idea.
03:21
Make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on, right? That was how the conspiracy was designed. That's how the thing is supposed to work. We did pretty well with it, and about halfway through stage one, my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out
03:42
what was going on for us, and he wrote his first quite astonishing book, Code, in which he said that Code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century. That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born,
04:01
including Creative Commons and a bunch of other useful things. The really important point now is that Code does the work of law and the work of the state, and Code does the work of revolution against the state, and Code does all the work that the state does
04:23
trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations, but Code also organizes the people in the street. We're having enormous demonstration around the world right now of the power of code in both directions.
04:44
The newspapers in the United States this past month have been full of the buzz around the book called The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, a very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view of the political nature of the changes in the net.
05:04
Mr. Morozov, who comes from Belarus and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism, sees the ways in which the institutions of the net are increasingly being co-opted by the state
05:21
in an effort to limit, control, or eliminate freedom. And his summary of a half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is,
05:44
about the nature of the net delusion that the net brings freedom. I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists, because I do think the net brings freedom. I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however.
06:02
The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom. This is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution that say Stallman was right. The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny because it all depends on how the code works.
06:23
All right, so we all know that. We've spent a lot of time making free software. We've spent a lot of time putting free software in everything, and we have tried to turn freedom on. We have also joined forces with other elements of the free culture world
06:41
that we helped to bring into existence. I've known Jimmy Wales a long time, and Julian Assange, and that changes the world. Wikipedia and WikiLeaks are two sides of the same coin.
07:01
They are the two sides of the same coin, the third side of which is FOSDEM. It is the power of ordinary people to organize to change the world without having to create hierarchy and without having to recapitulate the structures of power that are being challenged by the desire to make freedom.
07:25
WikiLeaks was being treated everywhere around the world in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time, and then events in Tunisia made it a little more complicated.
07:41
As it became clear that what was being reported on around the world, as though it were primarily a conspiracy to injure the dignity of the US State Department or to embarrass the United States military, was actually really an attempt to allow people
08:01
to learn about their world, to learn about how power really operates, and therefore to do something about it. And what happened in Tunisia was, I thought, an eloquent rebuttal to the idea that the WikiLeaks end of free culture and free software
08:24
was primarily engaged in destruction, nihilism, or, I shrink from even employing the word in this context, terrorism. It was instead freedom, which is messy, complicated,
08:44
potentially damaging in the short term, but salvational in the long term, the medicine for the human soul. It's hard, I know, because most of the time when we're coding, it doesn't feel like we're doing
09:01
anything that the human soul is directly very much involved in, to take with full seriousness the political and spiritual meaning of free software at the present hour. But there are a lot of Egyptians
09:21
whose freedom now depends upon their ability to communicate with one another through a database owned for profit by a guy in California who obeys orders from governments, who send orders to disclose to Facebook.
09:42
We are watching in real time the evolution of the kinds of politics of liberation and freedom in the 21st century that code can make, and we are watching in real time the discovery of the vulnerabilities that arise from the bad engineering of the current system.
10:07
Social networking, that is the ability to use freeform methods of communication from many to many now, in an instantaneous fashion,
10:23
changes the balance of power in society. Away from highly organized vehicles of state control towards people in their own lives. What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia,
10:44
and what will happen in other societies over the next few years demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking. But everything we know about technology tells us
11:02
that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized. They are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.
11:23
And the design of their technology like the design of almost all unfree software technology is motivated more by business interests seeking profit than by technological interests seeking freedom.
11:41
As a result of which, we are watching political movements of enormous value capable of transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people resting on a fragile basis like, for example, the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg
12:01
or the willingness of Google to resist the state where the state is a powerful business partner and a party Google cannot afford to insult. We are living in a world in which real-time information
12:23
crucial to people in the street seeking to build their freedom depends on a commercial microblogging service in Northern California, which must turn a profit in order to justify its existence to the people who design its technology
12:44
and which we know is capable of deciding overnight all by itself to donate the entire history of everything everybody said through it to the Library of Congress, which means, I suppose, that in some other place
13:01
they could make a different style of donation. We need to fix this. We need to fix it quickly. We are now behind the curve of the movements for freedom
13:21
that depend on code. And every day that we don't fix the problems created by over-capitalized social network media to do the politics of freedom, the real politics of freedom, in the street where the tanks are.
13:42
The more we don't fix this, the more we are becoming part of the system which will bring about a tragedy soon. What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring. But the Egyptian state was late to the attempt
14:04
to control the net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been. It is not hard when everybody's just in one big database
14:21
controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse. We need to think deeply
14:40
and rapidly and to good technological effect about the consequences of what we have built and what we haven't built yet. I've pointed a couple of times already to the reason why centralized social networking
15:01
and data distribution services should be replaced by federated services. I was talking about that intensively last year before this recent round of demonstrations in the street of the importance of the whole thing began. And I wanna come back to the projects
15:20
I have been advocating. But let me just say here again from this other perspective that the over-centralization of network services is a crucial political vulnerability. Friends of ours, people seeking freedom are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured
15:43
and eventually killed somewhere on Earth because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom on technology we know is built to sell them out.
16:04
If we care about freedom as much as we do and if we're as bright with technology as we are, we have to address that problem. We're actually running out of time because people whose movements we care deeply about are already out there in harm's way
16:22
using stuff that can hurt you. I don't want anybody taking life or death risks to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him
16:40
without our having any way to control it, stop it, help it or even know it's going on. We need to think infrastructurally about what we mean to freedom now and we need to learn the lessons of what we see happening around us in real time.
17:01
One thing that the Egyptian situation showed us as we probably knew after the Iranian situation when we watched the forces of the Iranian state by the telecommunications carriers, as we learned when the Egyptians begin to lean on Vodafone last week,
17:21
we learn again why closed networks are so harmful to us, why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers who must have a way of life with government
17:40
in order to survive can harm our people seeking freedom using technology we understand well. Now what can we do to help freedom under circumstances where the state has decided to try to clamp the network infrastructure?
18:03
Well, we can go back to mesh networking. We've got to go back to mesh networking. We've got to understand how we can provide people using the ordinary devices already available to them or cheaply available to them to build networking that resists centralized control.
18:27
Mesh networking in densely populated urban environments is capable of sustaining the kind of social action we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week.
18:41
Even without the centralized network services providers, if people have wireless routers that mesh up in their apartments, in their workplaces, in the places of public resort around them, they can continue to communicate
19:02
despite attempts in central terms to shut them down. We need to go back to ensuring people secure end-to-end communications over those local meshes. We need to provide survivable conditions
19:23
for the kinds of communications that people now depend upon outside the context of centralized networking environments that can be used to surveil, control, arrest, or shut them down.
19:40
Can we do this? Sure. Are we gonna do this? If we don't, then the great social promise of the free software movement that free software can lead to free society will begin to be broken.
20:01
Force will intervene somewhere soon. And a demonstration will be offered to humanity that even with all that networking technology and all those young people seeking to build new lives for themselves, the state still wins.
20:20
This must not happen. If you look at that map of the globe at night, the one where all the lights are, and imagine next time you look at it that you're looking instead at a network graph instead of an electrical infrastructure graph,
20:43
you will feel a kind of pulsing coming off the North American continent where all the world's data mining is being done. Think of it that way, all right?
21:01
North America is becoming the heart of the global data mining industry. Its job is becoming knowing everything about everybody everywhere. When Dwight Eisenhower was leaving the presidency in 1960, he made a famous farewell speech to the American people
21:24
in which he warned them against the power of the military industrial complex, a phrase that became so commonplace that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant.
21:41
The general who had run the largest military activity of the 20th century, the invasion of Europe, the general who had become the president of America at the height of the Cold War was warning Americans about the permanent changes
22:03
to their society that would result from the interaction of industrial capitalism with American military might. And since the time of that speech, as you all know, the United States has spent on defense
22:22
more than the rest of the world combined. Now, in the 21st century, which we can define as after the latter part of September 2001, the United States began to build a new thing
22:44
a surveillance industrial military complex. The Washington Post produced the most important piece of public journalism in the United States last year, a series available to you online called Top Secret America, in which the Washington Post
23:03
not only wrote eight very useful, lengthy analytic stories about the classified sector of American industrial life built around surveillance and data processing, the Post produced an enormous database which is publicly available to everyone
23:22
through the newspaper. Of all the classified contractors available to them in public record, what they do for the government, what they're paid, and what can be known about them, a database which can be used to create all sorts of journalism beyond
23:41
what the Post published itself, I would encourage everybody to take a look at Top Secret America. What it will show you is how many Googles there are under the direct control of the United States government as well as how many Googles there are under the control of Google.
24:02
In other words, the vast, outspreading web which joins the traditional Post Second World War US listening to everything everywhere on Earth outside the United States, to the newly available listening to things
24:21
inside the United States that used to be against the law in my country as I knew its law, to all the data now available in all the commercial collection systems, which includes everything you type into search boxes about what you believe, wish, hope, fear, or doubt,
24:40
as well as every travel reservation you make and every piece of tracking data coming off your friendly smartphone. When governments talk about the future of the net these days, I have on decent authority
25:03
from government officials in several countries, when governments talk about the future of the net these days, they talk almost entirely in terms of cyber war, a field in which I've never had much interest and which has a jargon all its own,
25:20
but some current lessons from intergovernmental discussions about cyber war are probably valuable to us here. The three most powerful collections of states on Earth, the United States of America, the European Union, and the People's Republic of China,
25:41
discuss cyber war at a fairly high intergovernmental level fairly regularly. Some of the people around that table have disagreements of policy, but there is a broad area of consensus. In the world of cyber war, they talk about exfiltration.
26:03
We would call that spying. They mean exfiltrating our data off our networks into their pockets. Exfiltration, I am told by government officials here and there and everywhere, exfiltration is broadly considered by all the governments
26:21
to be a free fire zone. Everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time. We don't believe in any governmental limits, and the reason is every government wants to listen and no government believes listening can be prevented. On that latter point, I think they're too pessimistic, but let's grant them that they've spent
26:41
a lot of money trying and they think they know. Where the disagreements currently exist, I am told by the government officials I talk to, concerns not exfiltration, but what they call network disruption, by which they mean destroying freedom. The basic attitude here is of two parties
27:03
in balanced speech. One side in that conversation says, what we want is clear rules. We want to know what we're allowed to attack, what we have to defend, and what we do with the things that are neither friendly nor enemy.
27:21
The other side in that conversation says, we recognize no distinctions. Anywhere in the net where there is a threat to our national security or our national interests, we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat regardless of its geographical location.
27:40
I needn't characterize for you which among the governments the United States of America, the European Union, or the People's Republic of China take those different positions. And I should say that my guess is that within all those governments, there are differences of opinion on those points, dominant factions and less dominant factions. But all parties are increasingly aware
28:03
that in North America is where the data mining is. And that's either a benefit, a dubiousness, or a problem, depending upon which state or collection of states you represent. European data protection law has done this much.
28:22
It has put your personal data almost exclusively in North America where it is uncontrolled. To that extent, European legislation succeeded. The data mining industries are concentrated outside the European Union,
28:41
largely for reasons of legal policy. They operate as any enterprise tends to operate in the part of the world where there is least control over their behavior. There is no prospect that the North American governments, particularly the government of the United States,
29:01
whose national security policy now depends on listening and data mining everything, are going to change that for you. No possibility, no time soon. When he was a candidate for president
29:21
at the beginning in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was in favor of not immunizing American telecommunications giants for participation in spying domestically inside the United States without direct public legal authorization. By the time he was a candidate in the general election,
29:43
he was no longer in favor of preventing immunization. Indeed, he, as a senator from Illinois, did not filibuster the legislation immunizing the telecoms giants, and it went through. As you are aware, the Obama administration's policies
30:01
with respect to data mining, surveillance, and domestic security in the net are hardly different from the predecessor administrations, except where they are more aggressive about government control. We can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias
30:23
in the listening to everybody everywhere about everything now going on. Profit motive will not produce privacy, let alone will it produce robust defense for freedom in the street.
30:46
If we are going to build systems of communication for future politics, we're going to have to build them under the assumption that the network is not only untrusted, but untrustworthy.
31:00
And we're going to have to build under the assumption that centralized services can kill you. We can't fool around about this. We can't let Facebook dance up and down about their privacy policy. That's ludicrous.
31:21
We have to replace the things that create vulnerability and lure our colleagues around the world into using them to make freedom, only to discover that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch.
31:41
Fortunately, we actually do know how to engineer ourselves out of this situation. Cheap, small, low-power plug servers are the form factor we need, and they exist everywhere now, and they will get very cheap, very quick, very soon.
32:04
A small device the size of a cellphone charger running a low-power chip with a wireless NIC or two and some other available ports and some very sweet free software of our own
32:22
is a practicable device for creating significant personal privacy and freedom-based communications. Think what it needs to have in it. Mesh networking, we're not quite there, but we should be.
32:42
Open BTS, asterisk, yeah, we could make telephone systems that are self-constructing out of parts that cost next to nothing. Federated rather than centralized microblogging,
33:01
social networking, photo exchange, anonymous publication platforms based around cloudy web servers. We can do all of that. Your data at home in your house where they have to come and get it,
33:22
facing whatever the legal restrictions are, comma, if any, comma, in your society about what goes on inside the precincts of the home. Encrypted email just all the time. Perimeter defense for all those wonky Windows computers
33:41
and other bad devices that roll over any time they're pushed at by a 12-year-old. Proxy services for climbing over national firewalls. Smart tunneling to get around anti-neutrality activity by upstream ISPs and other network providers.
34:04
All of that can be easily done on top of stuff we already make and use all the time. We have general purpose distributions of stacks, more than robust enough for all of this and a little bit of application layer
34:22
to work to do on the top. Yesterday in the United States, we formed the Freedom Box Foundation, which I plan to use as the temporary or long-term,
34:40
as the case may be, organizational headquarters for work making free software to run on small format server boxes, free hardware wherever possible, unfree hardware where we must, in order to make available around the world at low prices appliances human beings
35:04
will like interacting with that produce privacy and help to secure robust freedom.
35:24
We can make such objects cheaper than the chargers for smartphones. We can give people something that they can buy at very low cost that will go in their houses,
35:41
that will run free software to provide them services that make life better on the ordinary days and really come into their own on those not so ordinary days when we're out in the street making freedom. Thank you for calling.
36:04
A Belarusian theater troupe that got arrested and heavily beaten on after the so-called elections in Minsk this winter exfiltrated itself to New York City in January,
36:21
did some performances of Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews. I'm sorry, Harold Pinter and gave some interviews. One of the Belarusian actors who was part of that troupe said in an interview with the New York Times, the Belarusian KGB is the most
36:41
honest organization on earth. After the Soviet Union fell apart, they saw no need to change anything they did, so they saw no need to change their name either. And I thought that was a really quite useful comment.
37:05
We need to keep in mind that they are exactly the same people they always were, whether they're in Cairo or Moscow or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta or anywhere else on earth, they're exactly the same people they always were. So are we exactly the same people we always were too.
37:24
We set out a generation ago to make freedom and we're still doing it. But we have to pick up the pace now. We have to get more urgent now. We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now
37:43
because we have friends in the street trying to create human freedom and if we don't help them, they'll get hurt. We rise to challenges. This is one. We've gotta do it.
38:00
Thank you very much.
38:31
Thank you very much and I think there is enough time for a few questions so please raise your hand if you want to.
38:42
Coming. Two questions, I can hear. Just wait for the microphone, it's arriving.
39:02
Thank you. So the question was what does complete decentralization mean for identity because the state, you may believe who you are but the state gives you a passport or some other legal document that allows you to identify yourself. So in complete decentralization, how do you identify yourself on that network?
39:24
I doubt that complete decentralization is the outcome of anything but let me tell you a story which may help to explain how I feel about this. We need to go back now by 16 years to a time when there was a program called PGP and there was a government in the United States
39:41
that was trying to eradicate it. I know this will seem like ancient history to many people but it's my life so it doesn't to me. We were having a debate at Harvard Law School in January of 1995, two on two, about PGP and the criminal investigation
40:01
and the future of secrecy. The debaters on my side were me and Danny Weitzner then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center later at the W3C and now in the United States Department of Commerce and on the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a former General Counsel
40:21
of the National Security Agency. We debated PGP and the encryption and the clipper chip and various other now long dead subjects for a couple of hours and then we all went off for a friendly little dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club. On the way across the Harvard campus, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said to me,
40:40
Eben, on the basis of your public statements this afternoon, I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations. She thought that was a joke and back in 1995, you could sort of get away with thinking it was a joke as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States because it was so clearly against the law.
41:03
Well, all right, so I smiled and we went off and had our dinner and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts in the port had been strewn about, the Deputy, this former General Counsel to the National Security Agency, I'm concealing names to protect the not so innocent here, this former NSA lawyer,
41:22
he looked around the table calmly and with that sort of plummy through the port kind of look and he said, okay, we'll let our hair down. We agree, we're not gonna prosecute your client. PGP will happen. We've fought a long delaying action against public key encryption but it's coming to an end now
41:40
and then he looked around the table and he said, but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they? And a cold chill went up my spine because I knew what the next 15 years were gonna be about. So I would like to turn around the thing you said to say what we're really talking about is whether there is gonna be any preservation of anonymity at all.
42:02
Where power on the other side made its piece in the mid 1990s was with the idea that there would be strong encryption and e-commerce but there would be no anonymity and in the course of the last decade, they picked up a strong alliance with the global entertainment industries, the things that now call themselves content companies
42:20
which are also adverse to anonymity, right, because they wanna know what you read and listen to and watch every single time so that you can increase their shareholders' wealth for them. The real problem of identity isn't the problem of are we gonna decentralize past the point where we have identity, we're not going to do that, we're not going to be able to do that.
42:40
The real problem of identity is are we gonna have any of our own or are we gonna be the data cloud that everybody else is keeping about us which contains where we are, what we do, what we think, what we read, what we eat and everything else too as long as you send a subpoena to Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database in which you live your entire life.
43:03
I understand the idea that we might be thought of or satirically or even pointedly claimed to be trying to radically decentralize to the point at which identity gets lost but if you find yourself in an argument with people telling you you're trying to anachize so far
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that there won't be any name in the passport anymore, you can reassure them that meatspace will stay pretty much the way it is right now. We just want fewer people ripping fingernails off in meatspace which is why we are busy building freedom boxes and helping people use them. Thank you very much, the passport will remain
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pretty much the way it is right now with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints and the retinal scan and everything. I'm not worried that we're gonna go too far, friends. It's the other folks who went way too far in our jobs to get back home.
44:02
All right, if people have lined up, I'm not controlling. Hello, I've been, I'm here. You? Here. Jeremy from the Lakota Georgia Net. First of all, I want to thank you and I will never thank you enough for how inspiring you are for every one of us.
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Then, by thanking you for inspiring us on the engineering perspective, as I am both an engineering geek and a political activist by what I do,
44:41
I wanted to stress that the ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, that deeply concern strengthening of DRMs and legal protection and also turns every internet service provider, every internet intermediates into private copyright police
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with deep consequence on our freedom of speech, our privacy, right to a fair trial and so on. The ACTA will be coming to the European Parliament around next summer, maybe before, maybe after, and it will be our ultimate chance to defeat the thing. We won in the European Parliament before.
45:21
This is a battle we can win and everybody here can participate into it. And I wanted to ask you, Webern, are those legislative fights worth fighting? Do we still have a chance? And especially on the front of the net neutrality, what are your insights?
45:40
What do you think we can still win today? No European citizen should need any introduction to Chardonnay-Zemerman, right? That's the future of the European Union speaking to you. Your question, should we bother fighting in legislature, seems to me a fair one.
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Yeah, we should. It's unpleasant work. I worry about you. I don't want your heart to burst. I don't want people killing themselves over the strain of it. It's ugly, boring, tedious work and the other side pays people to sit you out,
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to wait until you go home, to decide you give up. Think of Egypt as a place where that was what was done for 30 years, along with torture. Everything stops moving. If you read Claude Montserrat on the French Revolution or the coming of the French Revolution,
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as he moves his thousands of men and women of freedom towards the climactic events of the late 1780s, you see how deeply the feeling in France at the end of the Ancien Régime was of status beginning to break up into movement. The work you're talking about
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is work that is largely defensive to prevent harm from being done. And as you say, you're lucky when you win after enormous effort that nothing happens. But the good news is in legislative politics that there's a thousand ways to stop a thing and only one way for it to get done.
47:21
And therefore, the side that wants to stop things has an inherent advantage. Most of the time, that's deeply funded capital, but sometimes it's us. About ACTA, I think there is no question. It's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time. Because as you say,
47:40
it's really the concordat, the treaty between the state and private power for the control of the net under 21st century conditions in the mingled interests of the listeners and the owners. If we do beat it, water it down, force withdrawal of particularly offensive premises
48:03
or significantly expose it to disinfecting daylight, we will help ourselves. We're not going to achieve everything by any means. We need to turn the international trade conversation in the direction of direct support for freedom.
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My line with the trade negotiators around the world has become governments have a right to share. The sharing economy has as much right to support in the international trade system as the owning economy. My colleague, Mishi Chaudhry who directs SFLC India
48:43
was in Beijing making a speech on that point earlier this year. We will be reiterating that point in various places around the world where strong states with which we have other difficulties meet with us in recognizing that the world trade system is now overwhelmingly tilted
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in favor of ownership based production which is only one part of the world's economic production. We need to press hard against ACTA and other pro ownership trade law but we also need to begin to roll out an affirmative strategy of our own
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demanding protection for sharing based economic activities in the global trade system. That effort will take 20 years to begin to show fruit but we need to begin that too now. On network neutrality, I will say this.
49:40
We are going to have to establish counterforce to the various oligopolists of telecommunications. The regulators believe a lot of things they have been told by industry. I was at RCEP myself in September
50:00
to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris with regulators who are well-educated, shrewd, thoughtful, and capable but who believe something which isn't true, namely that it costs enormous monetary investments to build wireless networks.
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And I said to the RCEP regulators, do you know about open BTS? Do you know that I can take a coat hanger and a laptop and make a GSM cell phone base station out of it using some free software? Do you know about asterisks?
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I suggested that maybe they would like to give us a small French city, say Grenoble, where using the extraordinary high quality wired harness that they built around the hexagon that is France, we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere
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using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets and provide service to everybody. And then I say it will be possible to have a realistic fact-based discussion about whether the enormous investment necessities of wireless network build-out require non-neutrality in network routing practices.
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Well, the regulator, of course, nods and smiles and thanks me very much for all that information and forgets it the minute I leave, because he still believes what orange that used to be France Telecom tells him about how you can't make wireless networks without immense monetary investments.
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We will begin to gain on network neutrality when we have a box in everybody's apartment that can offer free telephone service over tunneling around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets. That would be the freedom box. See, that's what I wanna do.
52:01
I wanna build a ring of engineering around the idea of non-neutral network management. I wanna have a box in your house that senses the upstream and says, oh my God, he's stopping port 655. I think I'll route that through my friend's apartment. Then I think we will get some interesting
52:20
network neutrality conversation going. Hi, when you call for decentralization, aren't you really going against the trend of history as we've seen it? For example, we used to have Usenet,
52:41
which was decentralized. That has moved much more to web-based forums. Or likewise, we in geekdom may love IRC. We may go to Freenode, but the general public all know about Twitter, which is moving into that space.
53:00
And I think there are many reasons why this could be happening, but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare. The journalists who report this to the general public outside geekdom know about websites, they know about Twitter. They never knew about Usenet, so only geeks know about that.
53:21
If we take this point, perhaps the mindshare you need to be going for is the journalists who report on the net, get them to report on decentralized networks and get the public to start using them.
53:41
Crucial part of the activity, that's right. We're going to talk to people. Some of those people are gonna be journalists and some of them are gonna be our friends and some of them are gonna be other engineers and some of them are gonna be people who when their wireless router breaks, they can go out and buy a freedom box because it's cheaper and neater and cooler and does more good stuff. And some of them are gonna be people who are gonna buy it because they need it.
54:02
We just have to make the software. The hardware guys will make the hardware and everything will happen. I don't know how long, I don't know with what degree of certainty, but I don't think it's about going against the flow of history. I think it's about pushing the pendulum back.
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The general public have to know that these options exist and will serve their needs. Yes, Apple will always advertise more than we will. But the general public knows about Firefox so they can know about the freedom box too.
54:46
I think we have to stop in order to allow the conference to go on. Thank you very much for your time.