Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 07:35:20 -0500
To: interesting_people@aurora.cis.upenn.edu
From: Dave Farber
Remarks of John Perry Barlow
to the First International Symposium on
National Security & National Competitiveness
McLean, Virginia
December 1, 1992
I can't tell you the sense of strangeness that comes over someone who earns
his living writing Grateful Dead songs, addressing people who earn their
livings as many of you do, especially after hearing the last speaker. If
you don't appreciate the irony of our appearing in succession, you have no
sense of irony at all. You and I inhabit very different worlds, but I am
pleased to note, as my presence here strongly suggests, these two worlds
may be growing closer.
The reason I am here has absolutely nothing to do with the Grateful Dead.
I'm here because I met a fellow named Mitch Kapor in 1989. Despite obvious
differences, I felt as if we'd both been up in the same saucer or
something...that we shared a sense of computers being more than just better
adding machines or a better typewriters. We saw that computers, connected
together, had the capacity to create an environment which human beings
could and did inhabit.
Yesterday, I was encouraged to hear evidence that [former Presidential
Science Advisor] Dr. Jay Keyworth and [Conference Organizer and former CIA
agent] Robert Steele, might have been up in that saucer too. The people
who share this awareness are natives of the future. People who have a hard
time with it may always be immigrants.
When Mitch and I saw that computers had created a place, we started asking
some questions about what kind of place it was....what were the operating
terms and conditions of this place, what kinds of people already lived
there, who was going to inhabit it, what was going on in it, did it have a
name?
We decided to name it Cyberspace, after Bill Gibson's description of a
futuristic place rather like it which we found in his novel Neuromancer.
Rather than being a figment of Bill's imagination, we felt that Cyberspace
was already up and happening.
Indeed, if you're having trouble with the concept, ask yourself where phone
conversation takes place. That's right. Cyberspace is where you are when
you're on the phone. It's also where most of your money is, unless you keep
it in Krugerands buried out in the garden...which I suppose some folks in
this room might just do. It's also...and I think this is very important...
the place where the greater part of the world's business is happening now.
So it's a highly significant locale, and yet it's invisible to most of the
people who are in it every day of their lives. I believe it was Marshall
McLuhan who said, "We don't know who it was that discovered water, but
we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish..."
In any case, when EFF first got together, our principal concern was making
certain the U.S. Constitution applied to Cyberspace. We could see the
government, specifically the Secret Service, taking actions which made it
obvious that they didn't quite get it. They didn't seem to be acting out
malice, but they were, at best, differently clued. They clearly didn't
understand that the First Amendment applied as certainly to bytes as it did
to ink on paper.
At the time we thought that we could just hire a few nasty civil liberties
lawyers from New York to put the fear of God in them, and that would be
that. But it's been like tugging at a thread on your sweater, where you
begin to pull, and pretty soon you have more thread on the ground than on
your back. It turns out that there are questions raised in this
environment to which we don't have good answers.
Indeed, it turns out that this is a place where the First Amendment...along
with just about every other law on the planet...is a local ordinance.
There are no clean jurisdictional boundaries. This is a place which may
always be outside the law. This may be an unwelcome concept, but it is
true, and it is something we will all have to grapple with as society moves
into the virtual world.
I believe you folks in the Intelligence Community are going to challenged
by these issues as directly as anyone. This is because intelligence, and
especially the CIA and NSA, are supposed to work under stern guidelines
intended to separate the domestic from the foreign. You're not supposed to
be conducting domestic surveillance. Well, in Cyberspace, the difference
between domestic and foreign, in fact the difference between any country
and any other country, the difference between us and them, is extremely
blurry. If it exists at all...
This is also an economic environment in which everyone seems to be
everywhere at once. I hear you're becoming interested in protecting
American Business from foreign espionage. But against this "everywhereness"
it becomes very difficult to say, "Alright, this is our guy, this is
General Motors, we're going to take care of his interests." Nothing is so
cleanly delineated.
These are a few of the fundamental changes which arise as a result of
literally moving out of the world of experience and onto the map of
information. Another one which is especially pertinent to the people in
this room, is what happens when you have direct e-mail access to every
member of your organization.
This can have a terrifically decentralizing effect on structure. It
weakens hierarchy. It flattens the organization. It can create one hell
of a lot of confusion, even as it speeds response time. There are in this
room representatives of some tall and rigid outfits. Prepare for the
possibility that your organization is about to go all flat and squishy due
to tenderizing influence of e-mail.
We are also looking at a complete redefinition of ownership and property.
I mean, we now have the mind as our principle source of commercial goods.
At last it seems we can we can really get something for nothing. As
recently as fifteen years ago all new wealth derived from minerals
extraction or agriculture. Everything else was simply passing it around.
No longer must you rip your goods from the ground. You don't have to wait
for the sun to grow some. New wealth can be had by just sitting around and
rubbing some facts together...essentially what you folks have been doing
all along. This economy of virtual substance is a fundamental change and
one which you can exploit if you're willing.
We're also looking at some fundamental shifts in the nature of property.
This is going to be relevant to you as you move into a more open
interaction with the rest of the world. In an information economy, much
depends on the sanctity of copyright. But copyright, it turns out, derives
most of its force from the physical manifestation of intellectual property.
Copyright protects expression, the thing that happens when you print a
book or press a record. In Cyberspace, you don't get that manifestation.
It never goes physical.
So the bottles we have been relying on for the protection of our
intellectual goods are disappearing, and, since we've been selling bottles
and not wine all along, we will soon have a lot of wine and nothing to put
it in. Interesting problems will arise. They're already upon us.
In any case, when EFF saw the multitude of things going on in this arena,
we battened ourselves down for the long haul, and we are dealing with a
whole range of issues, including the Open Platform initiative. Which is
our effort to try to deploy something like universal data service.
We believe that the best thing that could happen for the American economy,
and actually the best thing that could happen for liberty on the Planet
Earth, would be to make everyone capable of jacking in if they want to.
We find that other countries are lagging in this. For example, the
Japanese see absolutely no use for high speed personal data connections.
The folks at NTT certainly can't see any reason to trade their 70,000
operators on digital switches. So we have a significant leg up on the
Japanese that is not well known in this country.
Another thing that we are working on is the FBI's Digital Telephony
proposal which is, as you may know, the idea that we should stop all
telecommunications progress in this country in order to accommodate the FBI
is just amazing to me, and yet it somehow manage to live on Congress.
Also, for those of you whose badges say U.S. Government [code for National
Security Agency], we are trying to overturn NSA's data encryption embargo.
It's our position that trying to embargo software is like trying to embargo
wind. This is a fact that you are going to have to come to grips with.
Digitized information is very to stamp classified or keep contained.
This stuff is incredibly leaky and volatile. It's almost a life form in
its ability to self-propagate. If something hits the Net...and it's
something which people on there find interesting...it will spread like a
virus of the mind. I believe you must simply accept the idea that we are
moving into an environment where any information which is at all
interesting to people is going to get out. And there will be very little
that you can do about it. This is not a bad thing in my view, but you may
differ...
I'm going to talk a little bit now about the very nature of information.
This conference, I must say, has blown me away. I had no idea there were
people in your [the intelligence] community talking about these things. I
am pleased and gratified by the folks I have met here and talked to
personally, but I want to reiterate Dr. Keyworth's phrase yesterday: which
is that government, especially American government, must end its obsession
with secrecy.
We must do so because we are engaged in...and I don't want to use the word
warfare here...we are engaged in form of economic competition where our
principal advantage is our ability to distribute information. It is not our
ability to conceal it.
Perhaps this has always been true. Let me tell you a story. Last year, I
was addressing the computer security establishment at the Department of
Energy. These are the people in charge of protecting the computers that
nuclear weapons get designed on.
The other keynote speaker at this conference was, uh, Edward Teller.
[Laughter.] Yeah, well, I was pretty sure if evil walked the planet, its
name was Edward Teller. Anyway, I got up and said that I wasn't sure that
DOE's secrecy was an asset. I wasn't going to say that it was a liability,
so much as beside the point. After all, I know how to make an atomic bomb.
You give me five and a half pounds of weapons grade plutonium and a week in
my garage and I'll give you a nuclear weapon. It will be dirty, but it
will work. The problem for anyone who wants to do this is that they can't
get enough industrial capacity ginned up to create the plutonium. I mean,
I just can't get my high temperature gas diffusion centrifuges to work.
Indeed, it takes a whole society to put them together, even if the design
information is available. It is not the information, which is readily
available, that is crucial. It is the ability to execute that is the
critical factor.
I was interested to see how Dr. Teller would respond to that. To my
surprise and satisfaction, he got up and agreed with me completely. He went
on to say that he had never found a nuclear secret that the Russians could
not obtain within a year of its development. Where they couldn't compete
with us was in the areas where we were wide open. He cited the electronics
industry, saying that at the end of World War II, we were about 20 years
ahead of the Russians in nuclear weapons design, and roughly neck and neck
in the electronics.
Both sides entered a closed program on nuclear weapons design. And we went
into a wild free-for-all in electronics. I mean, you should know that in
the computer business, there are so many loose lips, you actually have to
really try not to learn what you competitor is up to. Computer scientists
are the meetingest bunch of people you ever saw, and when they meet, they
tell one anther everything.
The results of this approach speak for themselves. As Dr. Teller pointed
out, by the time the Russians quit being a threat, they had moved to a
position of parity with us in nuclear weapons, but they were 25 to 30 years
behind us in electronics.
I suspect one reasons for this conference is to figure out how you guys are
going to make your living now that the Party's Over. I believe the
Intelligence Community still has a role. We are entering the Information
Age. And Information, after all, is what you do. You have an edge in the
field, and I would hate to see you blow your lead.
But there are some serious issues about information which must be dealt
with, and they have almost nothing to do with whether it is open or closed.
The real questions regarding information relate to usability...whether or
not it is meaningful, whether or not it is relevant, whether or not it
accurate, whether or not it is genuinely useful.
There is, for example, an enormous amount of information on the Net. But
the signal-to-noise ratio on the net is terrible. There's an awful lot of
racket. So I suppose you do get a kind of secrecy, rather as in those
fancy restaurants with the highly reflective walls, where you can hear the
people shouting at you at your table, but you can't make out what anyone
else is saying for the hub-bub. It's the intimacy of white noise.
You folks have some expertise in an important function: sorting out that
which is relevant from the huge spray of data that is coming at everyone.
That is an important problem that is largely overlooked...so far the
software solutions to it don't strike me as being much good. We talk about
"smart agents" but they aren't smart, they're pretty dumb. You send them
out and they return with too much.
The problem is that the difference between data and information is meaning,
something machines know little of. To determine whether data are
meaningful, whether they are, in fact, information, you must pass them
through a human mind. There is also a question of authority, reliability,
and bias. For example, I think one of the things you will find in using
open sources is that most media are intentionally designed to evoke a
fearful response in the reader. I mean, fear sells, as well you know.
Perhaps you have an important role in certifying the reliability of
materials in open circulation. Perhaps you are already engaged in it. I
recently got a call from a friend who is an expert on computer networking
in the Confederation of Independent States, or whatever they call what's
left of the Evil Empire these days. He was in a terrible state. He said,
"I just got visited by the CIA, I don't know what to do. They showed up and
wanted to know all about my most recent report. I'm afraid they're going to
try to make me a CIA agent!" A scary thought, eh?
I told him, "Look, it seems to me you already are a CIA agent." They're
just trying to figure out if you're a good one!"
We may find that there are many CIA agents, of widely varying reliability.
The real CIA agents will have the subtler job of finding out which of them
is telling the truth.
The most important problem which the intelligence community must now
confront relates to your own bureaucratic sclerosis and the pace at which
information moves through your honeycomb of secrecy. The future, as IBM is
learning, will be to the supple and swift and not necessarily to the
mighty.
In a world moving as rapidly as this one, information becomes incredibly
time sensitive. Even if you do...as I think you absolutely must...eliminate
the unnecessary classification within and without your organizations, you
still have all the cumbersome buffers of bureaucracy to contend with.
As I was preparing these remarks, I considered coming in here and
suggesting that you break up the CIA into about five different private
companies and go into business. That's probably too good an idea to
implement. But it seems worthy of consideration. There is something that
happens to your sense of urgency when you have a bottom line. You know
that if you don't deliver, someone else will, which might be exactly the
though to leave you on.
I would like to thank you very much for your indulgence of an entirely
different perspective. I've genuinely enjoyed this opportunity to get to
know you.
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