<nettime> twilight of the crypto-geeks

[geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/13/libertarians/index.html

Twilight of the crypto-geeks

Lone-wolf digital libertarians are beginning to abandon their faith in
technology uber alles and espouse suspiciously socialist-sounding ideas. 

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By Ellen Ullman


April 13, 2000 | TORONTO -- On the first day of the 10th Computers,
Freedom and Privacy Conference -- the unique annual meeting that brings
together an unlikely combination of programmers, activists and government
officials -- two very different events took place simultaneously. 

One: About 30 participants and 50 observers crowded into a hotel meeting
room for a workshop led by Lenny Foner -- computer guy in jeans and long
hair, Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab. Foner was trying to get the
group interested in starting up a new domain name system for the Internet. 
He was probably thinking Linux; he was most likely hoping for a Linus
Torvalds sort of role. His idea was to maybe "route around" the current,
dispute-prone system of matching Internet addresses to names. Maybe we
should make a superset of the DNS, the workshop considered, or an
alternative to it, or something -- no one could even agree on the precise
nature of the problem, let alone its solution. 

At any rate, this didn't stop Foner. He had a programmer's idea of how
things get done in the world: Forget about the government; don't form a
committee. Just write up a short proposal, give your idea a silly
hacker-ish sort of name (even he admitted that the name he chose,
"Smoosh," was somewhat unfortunate), talk about it to some very smart
people, get a small group of them interested, then just start hacking out
some code. 

John Gilmore, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
self-described libertarian, was at the workshop, and with terrible
succinctness he laid out the thinking behind Foner's vision of the
programmer-created world. Gilmore was opposed to too many people getting
involved in whatever Foner is going to do. "Almost everything that works
on the Net grew out of tiny groups of people working in isolation," he
said. 

Meanwhile, as Foner was talking about "how to prototype something new," 
there was event No. 2: The Canadian Parliament was passing Bill C-6, a
data protection act like the European Union's Data Directive -- leaving
the United States as the sole highly industrialized nation without legal
data-privacy protections. 

Ann Cavoukian, privacy commissioner for Ontario, was in the room with
Foner and other workshop participants when she heard the news. She clapped
quietly but with obvious signs of relief. Evidently, the process leading
to the passage of the C-6 was nothing like the "tiny groups working in
isolation"  that John Gilmore had described just a few minutes before.
According to Stephanie Perrin, who worked with the Canadian Department of
Commerce and Industry for 20 years and who took part in the drafting of
the bill, it had involved hundreds of people. It required concessions on
all sides. The resulting law is not perfect. "It was a long and difficult
process," she said, "where everyone fought." 

These two events -- the programmers workshop and the passing of a federal
data-privacy law -- are like the ends of a rope in a heatedly fought game
of tug-of-war, a game that has been battled at CPF over the course of the
conference's 10-year existence. 

On one side are the geeks, nerds, crypto-anarchists, libertarians and
cypherpunks -- mistrustful of government, suspicious of all attempts at
regulation, believers in the ability of technology, in and of itself, to
solve society's ills (maybe with a little marginally legal hacking on the
side, just to keep the political pot boiling). Austin Hill, president of
Zero-Knowledge, opened the conference like a true techno-believer, quoting
John Gilmore as saying, "I want to guarantee [privacy] with physics and
mathematics, not with laws." 

Opposing the technologists are the believers in law above all else: the
think-tank and activist lawyers; the privacy commissioners in their
well-cut European suits; the pragmatists advocating commissions and
studies and meetings -- participants in the rough-and-tumble of political
life, with all its confusions and compromises and imperfect results. 

In the past, the techno-believers ruled CFP. The programmers' vision of
creation -- the lone geniuses -- prevailed over the data-privacy
"bureaucrats" -- so hard to listen to, after all, with their thick foreign
accents and their tedious, confusing laws. 

But something different happened this year. The flag in the middle of the
tug-of-war rope moved. Two well-known technologists, known for their
belief in working code and skepticism about the workings of law, stepped
across the divide, moving, maybe despite themselves, toward a recognition
of social and political realities. Two others, whose views have been more
balanced, questioned libertarianism -- the limitations of a technocentric
approach to the complicated questions of privacy and freedom. It was as if
some tipping point had been reached, in which a critical mass of people
involved in technology had suddenly looked up and found themselves to be
older, grown-up, and in need of social supports -- grown-up like the Net
itself. 

The first famous technologist over the line -- albeit tippy-toeing -- is
Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption software,
techno-hero, defier of the government when it tried to declare encryption
a "weapon" and Zimmermann a felon for "exporting" it. 

His moment comes during the discussion following the dinner speech on
Wednesday night. Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among
the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has
given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After
many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets
around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal
integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social
structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these
structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort
of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties.
The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social
trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a
trusted space. 

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context,
cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for
criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to
protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket.
A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it
with bulging eyes. 

After the speech, Zimmermann puts up his hand, and of course Stephenson
calls on him. It's clear Zimmermann has "gotten" the speech. He doesn't go
so far as to endorse anything like "social structures," communities of
trust, neighborhoods of understanding -- no, of course not. Zimmermann has
been staunchly against laws, rules, regulations: anything that could be
considered a form of social coercion. But he does admit that perhaps code
is not enough, that he never intended encryption, by itself, to work. "I
never meant PGP to be the defense of a lone libertarian," he says. 

It is a huge admission, in its way, from a programmer who has championed
code as a way to save us. But if this libertarian is not "lone," he is
with some other libertarians, presumably. And what are these more-than-one
libertarians doing? Organizing? Petitioning their government? Creating
zones of social trust? Zimmermann is a man who defines the word "loner";
he has a tight manner; one doesn't imagine he's spent a lot of time
working on his empathy or inner doubts. He probably doesn't even let
himself realize the implications of what he's just said. 

"Let the record show," Stephenson says carefully in reply, "I never said
the word 'libertarian.'" 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and director of the World
Wide Web Consortium, will indeed say the word "libertarian." He will say
it on Thursday night, when he is the recipient of an EFF Pioneer Award,
given every year "to honor significant contributions to the advancement of
rights and responsibilities in the Information Society." 

Berners-Lee can't be there, but he has sent a videotape with his thanks.
He feels honored, is genuinely grateful. 

And then he looks less happy. Berners-Lee starts thinking about what has
happened to the Web since he dreamed it up: e-commerce, big corporations,
money. "Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he says, "and
not corporations ..." 

This must be very difficult for him to say. For the libertarians in the
audience to hear that business and free markets may not be the bringers of
unalloyed good ... To imagine that a business is something to be fought,
not respected ... No. Better to go off, leave the thought, don't say
anything more. 

But he can't somehow. Another unhappy thought comes: "I know we don't like
regulation where we can avoid it, but ..." 

And there he surely must stop. Bad enough to imagine fighting a
corporation, but to do it with regulations? Regulations, meaning laws,
meaning government? He has crossed into libertarian anathema. 

Why has this techno-hero raised the specter of libertarianism? 
Theoretically, Berners-Lee personifies the "lone genius" technology ideal: 
While working as a consultant at CERN, he went off by himself, just for
his own amusement, and coded up what we now call hypertext. Theoretically,
he has every right to believe that somebody else will go off alone, just
for his or her own amusement, and solve the problem of corporate control
of the Web. 

But it seems he has recognized a changed world, where neither he nor some
other programmer can do it alone. "We have to make sure that when people
go to the Internet, they get the Internet," he says, meaning the real Net,
the true one, the original -- whatever that might mean to him, or us.
Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our
way back to this idyll. We must route around the new bad corporate Net, or
create a superset of it, or an alternative. Or something. 

Berners-Lee was speaking unpopular truths to the CFP crowd, but his
outspokenness is nothing compared to what is about to happen. The next
Pioneer award is to go not to an old programmer or to a lawyer at a think
tank, but to ... "librarians everywhere." Can we be hearing correctly? Did
they say librarians and not libertarians? But it's true: librarians. It is
an unprecedented award, the first to a group that can't be associated with
at least a few specific individuals. And in the face of this -- this
amazement, this recognition of the great unseen and unsung core of mostly
women -- the fourth of our techno-heroes will find himself to be, in his
startled heart, a lover of civil servants. 

Whitfield Diffie bounds to the platform. Diffie is a crypto-king, the
discoverer, with Martin Hellman, of public-key encryption, cornerstone of
the libertarian worldview in which technology protects the individual from
the reach of goverment. He stands now before the audience with his neat
gray beard, shoulder-length blond hair and sudden uncontained enthusiasm. 
"Librarians!" he exclaims. "I'm thrilled with this award." 

He goes on to say he was not involved in the judging; this is the first
moment he has learned of it. And now that he thinks of it, those wonderful
librarians of his childhood, the ones who helped him when he was working
on his dissertation -- yes! Librarians! 

"I wouldn't have thought to give this award," he declaims in the full
throes of the convert's confession. "Therefore it comes as a revelation." 

All those invisible, dedicated civil servants. Mostly working for
government. In public libraries. Paid for by taxes. Diffie stands there
with arms out. He is truly, naively, nakedly, unabashedly amazed to
consider it.  The whole libertarian edifice crumbles as he looks at it.
Revelation. 

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But this is more than a startled, unguarded moment. The next day, in a
speech he gives at lunch, Diffie reveals the depth of his conversion. 

"Everyone stop eating," he begins, and indeed we should, for what we are
about to hear is akin to the more common story of a middle-aged person,
communist in his youth, who grows more conservative as he grows older,
renounces his youthful beliefs -- except we will hear it in reverse, right
to left. 

He signals it all right away. "Crypto was a security technique that didn't
require trusting anyone else," Diffie says. "Now it turns out you have to
trust other people." He was younger, he seems to say, he had ideas, he was
wrong. "I had a very mathematical and very inapplicable idea about
authentication." And there it is: an implicit rejection of the Gilmore-ian
ideal of trust in physics and mathematics. Like Stephenson, like the
reluctant Zimmermann, like the unhappy Berners-Lee, the father of public
key encryption has come to the conclusion that software may reduce the
amount of trust you need in human beings, but as one moves about in the
world, the sense of security, privacy and autonomy turns out to be "a
function of social structures," as Diffie says. 

So far, Diffie has gone from being a techno-libertarian to a
standard-issue social democrat -- a remarkable move, if not a remarkable
place to wind up.  But he is not done. 

What has sparked his conversion, it seems, is the recentralization of
computing: how we have moved from the centrally controlled timesharing
system, to the autonomous powerful desktop PC, to the networked computer,
and thence -- sidetracked through the network computer and the "thin
client" -- somehow back to the dumb terminal. He foresees how knowledge
workers will lose their autonomy by being forced to use such slavish
machines; how they can become mere objects of surveillance by the
companies they work for, as a result of "corporate imperialism over its
workers." 

Is there something wrong with the microphone? Is he talking about
imperialism? Yes, and on he goes, ever leftward. He can foresee a day when
workers, doing their jobs from the "convenience" of their homes, are
forced to be subject to "spot inspections" by their employers, a time when
the home is effectively turned into an occupied zone where corporations
exercise power over their property. 

What shall we desperate knowledge workers do? Organize! We need "the rise
of labor again," says Diffie, former crypto-believer. "We need to tighten
up the relationships among knowledge workers," he says, "and bargain as a
whole." 

I can't believe what I am hearing. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The conference ends with a session on "diversity" -- and again, one is
startled to find this at CFP, former home ground of crypto-anarchists and
techno-libertarians. On the podium is Greg Bishop of TheStreet.com, one of
only two African-Americans on the entire conference program, perhaps the
only one attending CFP. He is telling us how the black people he knows are
amazed he uses a computer -- they believe that once you plug it in, the
government knows everything about you. The audience goes on to question
the homogeneity of the conference itself -- why there are so few young
people, blacks and women in attendance, and indeed in the leadership of
the technological world. The culture wars have come to CFP. 

And why not? The Internet, with its vast public acceptance, letting people
who have never even seen a piece of code do everything from buy a car to
search for lovers, can hardly be considered a purely technological system
anymore. The Net has become a social space, and it is perhaps right that
the practices of programmers -- the small group in isolation -- no longer
pertain. We've come to the messy part that very senior programmers get to
avoid: the part where the system has moved beyond the "new" and
"dreamed-up"  stage. Where it is successful -- that is, it has users,
millions of them, with all their conflicting needs and desires, and only
the messy, horrid, compromised, wonderful, exhausting processes of
democratic social discourse can sort them all out. 

After the conference is all over, it's fun to sit with Bruce Umbaugh,
philosopher and member of the CFP organizing committee, and imagine the
sort of happy chaos that can happen at the event next year. We'll invite
the UAW!  We'll invite the Boeing engineers, knowledge workers who have
organized themselves for the first time -- and won! There'll be online
dykes and gangsta Napster rappers. There'll be kids and students and
mothers and just about anything else you can think of. And why not? When
we said the Internet represented a "revolution," we meant it -- didn't we? 



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