[ox-en] Declan McCullagh: Geeks in government: A good idea?
- From: "geert lovink" <geert desk.nl>
- Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 12:09:22 +1000
http://news.com.com/2[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED].html?tag=politech
Geeks in government: A good idea?
By Declan McCullagh
August 12, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
WASHINGTON--There's a lot for a politically aware geek to be alarmed about
nowadays.
Big companies are wielding copyright threats to stifle legitimate
security research. Hollywood is itching to hack your PC. Your privacy
is vanishing as fast as Al Gore's 2004 presidential hopes. And the
merry band of technophobes in Congress is just getting started.
Too often, though, programmers, system administrators and other IT
pros become understandably outraged by the latest attempts to restrict
technology--and react by doing precisely the wrong thing. They set up
irate Web sites, launch online petition drives and tell all their
friends to write to their congressional representatives.
Here's the bitter truth: These efforts are mostly a waste of time.
Sure, they may make you feel better, but they're not the way to win.
Take the widely reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Even though
Slashdotters have spent years buzzing around in circles over DMCA lawsuits
brought by the Justice Department against Dmitry Sklyarov, and the big movie
studios against 2600 magazine, Congress simply doesn't care.
Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on
intellectual property, says the law is "performing the way we hoped." No
bill has been introduced in Congress to rescind the DMCA for one simple
reason: Official Washington loves the law precisely as much as hackers and
programmers despise it. Some of Washington's most powerful insiders even
gathered in May to toast the DMCA with glasses of champagne.
Things aren't getting better. The House of Representatives voted 385-3 last
month to approve life prison sentences for malicious computer hackers. The
Senate approved the USA Patriot Act, which expanded police ability to
perform Internet surveillance without a court order, by a 98-1 vote last
fall.
Trust me, a few--even a few thousand--peeved e-mail messages won't change
vote totals that lopsided. (Did you know the Senate approved the DMCA
unanimously?) Washington's political class is used to ignoring frenzied
yowls from far more organized and well-funded groups than "geektivists" can
hope to emulate anytime soon.
Instead, technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing
technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws irrelevant.
"They're much better off doing what they do best, writing code," says Sonia
Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San
Francisco. "That's where their competitive advantage lies."
Put another way, who made a bigger difference: Yet another letter-scribbling
activist or Phil Zimmermann, who wrote the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
encryption software? How about Shawn Fanning, the man who created Napster?
Or the veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which oversees the
fundamental protocols of the Internet?
It's true that such an approach isn't for everyone. Tech companies, of
course, need to take a defensive stance. "There's a difference between geeks
and the technology industry," Arrison says. "I wouldn't say it's wise for
the technology industry to ignore government. But individual tech people are
probably better off spending their energy writing code than being part of
the political process."
Adam Back, an encryption researcher living in Canada, says that he tries to
ignore day-to-day developments in the news. "What's the point?" Back asks.
"You know whatever they are working on will be pretty much exclusively
damaging to Net freedoms and personal liberty. New laws are almost
exclusively damaging to personal freedoms these days."
"By participating in the lobby process, you're effectively giving money to
the political system," Back says. "It's effectively a favor-trading system
where the politician wins and the geek loses...You're better of spending
time writing code and influencing Internet protocols to work towards making
the politicians irrelevant in the future."
That's the motto of the Cypherpunks, a group of programmers-turned-activists
who first met in Silicon Valley a decade ago and graced the second cover of
Wired magazine. They recognized that technology is a more effective tool
than the political process to stop governments from overreaching. (An
example: Unlike Supreme Court justices who may change their views on
privacy, the algorithms embedded in encryption software won't stop working
because of political pressure.)
Lance Cottrell is a former Cypherpunk who founded Anonymizer.com, a San
Diego company that announced an improved fee-based anonymous browsing
service last week.
"I'm of two minds," Cottrell says. "On one hand, I think it's important that
the (technologist) perspective be aired. But I think that rather few geeks
are temperamentally suited for lobbying. I think there's a cultural tendency
toward bluntness and directness, which is not the bread and butter of
politics."
Before starting his company, Cottrell wrote the free mixmaster software that
allows people to send e-mail anonymously." People can sit around saying, 'Is
it a good idea to have anonymity or not?'" Cottrell said. "But if you
actually implement it, you can say, 'How do you want to deal with this
reality?' It's not that my writing the code created the reality. The
possibility was always there. But my writing the code made it impossible to
ignore."
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