salon.com > Technology April 13, 2000
URL: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/04/13/libertarians
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
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.'"
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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.
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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?
salon.com | April 13, 2000
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About the writer
Ellen Ullman is a software engineer. She is the author of "Close to the Machine:
Technophilia and Its Discontents."
