From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 16:45:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: They're running scared.
Message-ID: <m0u68el-0008yhC@pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jim Hoagland's newspaper column from April 4, 1996:

Governments awakening to threat of the Internet

The computer and modem now downsize the globe, enabling citizens to vault 
over walls of secrecy, law and control erected by governments.

Still gathering steam, the information revolution is creating a new 
generation of ticklish foreign policy and national security problems for the 
world's governments.  They are organized to operate in a heirarchical world 
of borders and customs posts and to keep out the unwanted, the unhealthy or 
the dangerous.

But the boundaries of cyberspace are unfixed and amorphous.  They are being 
determined more by the availability and cost of communication modems, 
sophisticated software, satelite stations, encryption techniques and other 
data processing technology than by government fiat.

An example of cyberspace's potential for harm surfaced last week when France 
asked the United States to crack down on a San Diego-based Islamic group 
that posts instructions on the Internet for assembling inexpensive bombs 
like those exploded on the Paris subways last year.

French officials traveling or posted abroad fear they are the intended 
targets of these homemade bombs, the Quai D'Orsay's senior Middle East 
expert, Denis Bouchard, told American diplomats at a meeting last week on 
international terrorism in Washington.

State Department officials offered the French sympathy.  But they did not 
hold out much hope they coudl act on the sparse information the French 
provided.  The line between computer-driven incitement to terrorism and 
electronic free speech still has to be drawn in the brave new cyber world.

The inchoate nature of that world was underscored by the disclosure March 29 
that U.S. authorities had charged an Argentine student with three felonies 
for illegally entering Pentagon and other U.S. military computers to 
obtaining confidential files on satellites, radiation and energy-related 
engineering.

But Julio Cesar Ardita, 22, who raided Washington files from his home in 
Buenos Aires, cannot be extradited under American-Argentine treaties, which 
do not cover these alleged national security violations.

Governments are waking late to the implications of individuals and small 
groups operating across boundaries and oceans to bypass, introde upon or 
flip and electronic finger at bureaucracies that have controlled or 
regulated the security and business of nations for centuries.  The 
implications are particularly dramatic for totalitarian regimes that brook 
no open dissent.

China seeks to impose a government monopoly over economic data transmission 
into China to go along with the draconian political censorship already 
practiced on the nation's traditional media.  But as long as the Middle 
Kingdom remains part of the International telephone system with its faxing 
and modem capabilities, words and facts the communist leadership abhors will 
spread faster than Big Brother can track them.

The world stands roughly where it stood as television began to reshape 
politics, and policy-making, in ways that we still do not fully understand.  
A new communication technology arrives to change what we think, as well as 
how we think and communicate.

Traditionalists fear anarchy (or obsolescence).  Optimists foresee the best 
of all worlds, with Orwell's 1984 predictions of Big Brother tracking and 
brainwashing everyone through television proven to have been 180 degrees off 
course.

But the picture is in fact  mixed.  Governments have begun to talk seriously 
to each other about controlling the computer revolution.  The Pentagon is 
studying the information highway as the route to complete domination of the 
battlefield and thus the ultimate source of power.  THe FBI, IRS, and CIA 
are determined to keep you from being able to encode and transmit 
information they want to see.

Orwell may turn out to have been premature, but not wrong.  The struggle 
over the course of the information revolution is only beginning.  The 
bureaucracies that are most threatened still have powerful hands to play.  
There is no guarantee that cyberspace will provide the world with the era of 
new freedoms that now seem likely.  That battle is still to be fought, and won.

[end of article]


Articles such as this are interesting because they appear to be written 
without any illusion that the interests of governments are anything other 
than just that, interests of governments.  They are NOT the interests of the 
average citizen.