From: bart@netcom.com (Harry Bartholomew)
Date: Mon, 23 May 94 02:38:03 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Bruce Sterling's talk at CFP
Message-ID: <199405230937.CAA04258@netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



    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 bruces@well.sf.ca.us Sun May 22 08:41:47 1994
> Date: Sun, 22 May 1994 08:41:33 -0700
> From: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.sf.ca.us>
> Message-Id: <199405221541.IAA22662@well.sf.ca.us>
> To: bart@netcom.com
> Subject: Re:  Fan mail & request
> 
>    Yeah, you can post it if you want.  Here.
> 
> Bruce Sterling
> bruces@well.sf.ca.us
>  
> 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.
> 
>