MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Ellen. Now. Can we imagine what it would be like if there were no traffic cops in communication? Well, we don't really need to, because no laws control the InterNet and no one owns it. How does it work? Gerard Van Der Leun, who was the first Communications Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, finds that free speech and civil liberties are, as he puts it, "the default state of the global InterNet," and he will tell us why and how. VAN DER LEUN: Hi. My name is Boswell at BELL.COM (ph), and I'm a Cyberholic. I started out chipping with an RCA dumb monitor at 300 baud, and now I'm looking to start mainlining off a slip connection. There's just never enough for me. I first sort of became I guess aware of the potential of this when I was a book editor in the mid 1980's at Houghton-Mifflin in Boston. Through a series of events I no longer recall I bumped into this woman named Elizabeth Ferrarini (ph) who was verging on a functional illiterate but wanted to write a book about her experiences on the fledgling nets then. I think she was one of the early members of The Source. And she used to log on with the handle "THIS IS A NAKED LADY." So those of you with any experience on the Net know what kind of E-mail and sends this starts to draw to you while you're on the Net. Her keystroke cup will runneth over in no time. Actually knowing nothing about this I ended up (a) commissioning the book, (b) rewriting it, and (c) publishing it. It became a book called Infomania: Life in the On-Line World. I think it was sort of the first book about this subject, and dutifully sank into obscurity by being the first in about 1987. A couple of years later in another incarnation I was at a tag sale and I bought a box for $60. It was an RCA dumb monitor with a 300 baud modem, and you could put about ten phone numbers in it. And I took it home, sort of figured it out from the manual, I went to Computer Shopper, found a BBS with my area code on it and bingo -- I was in Dave's Cave, a Fidonet (ph) node, looking for filthy stories and other things. And then it came to me one night in an epiphanous moment that you could actually with a telephone connection basically get things onto the disk of your computer you didn't have to type in yourself. Ah, revelation. This was nice. And from then, you know, just like Topsy the addiction simply grew until I sort of found myself floating around the InterNet for many years now, and actually in different years I've become one of the rarer breeds of people on the Net. I actually manage to make a modest living out of it rather than just shoveling lots of connect time dollars back into it. In the course of this I guess I stumbled into a system on the West Coast, if anything can be said to be anywhere in cyber- space, called The Well. Most people that have been on the Nets for some time have a vague idea that the Well is actually one of these systems whose impact is bigger than its userbase, and while on The Well I bumped into other denizens of cyberspace such as Mnemonic, who is actually Mike Godwin, one of the legal beagles for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington, and also into this very strange, slightly seedy cowpoke named Barlow, who had with his palaver actually talked Mitch Kapur (ph) into parting with some hard change to fund and found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which at its inception was actually a very exciting organization to be involved with since they basically wanted to defend young hack- ing kids against big crackdowns by Feds. I'm always looking for a good game of Feds and Heads in my life. I like to play with the Heads. You know, the EFF later devolved into what's now sort of a wonk tank and luncheon society down in Washington, D.C., but that was after my time, or I should say my time ended when it evolved into lunching with lobbyists. But since then I've gone on to be I guess a gadfly around the Net and on The Well to people. On The Well I run a conference that's called, well, I run two conferences. One is called Z (ph), which is basically a digest of all the other conferences, the best and the worst, what have you. And then the conference I'm proudest of is called The Weird Conference, and The Weird Conference's rule is that we don't have any rules, and you can say anything you want and nothing is forbidden. And nothing is ever censored except sometimes by me in a purely arbitrary fashion to keep people aware of what censorship feels like. It's true. Boswell will sometimes just log on and say, "Well, I'm going to erase your comment because I just don't like it." Checheche cht -- gone. What? What? There it is. Anyway, I was just sort of looking at the Net and I've been thinking about censorship, and I've been through Operation Sun Devil and I've seen Hacker Crackdown and I have Digital Telepathy and I'm aware -- I'm sure Mr. Zimmermann will enlighten you of what can happen to someone who goes out to play on the Nets when it's an essential Net tool. I mean you need to pack a lunch and have a legal fund. Nevertheless, I would say to you today, not just to this small group but almost to anyone, that my basic state is one of really intense optimism. I think the war against censorship is effectively over and we've won. I think what we're going to be dealing with now in policy areas and programming areas is what I would call mopping up operations and attempts by local and global authority to put the genie back in the bottle. But it's gone. I mean it's out there. The Net is out there. The Net has, in my mind at least, the Net has no center. It has no owners, none that I know of. It respects no borders. I mean, you know, Australia is just a domain name to the Net. It doesn't really matter where you are. English is pretty much its default language, much like air traffic control. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of waves of efforts to limit and otherwise control this medium. I would think, if you look at the growth statistics on the Net, if you look at the number of people coming on and you look at the kind of minds you're dealing with when you're dealing with the Net, I mean you are not dealing with the left side of the Bell curve when you're hitting on the Net. I mean you are dealing with people who are bright enough to get there, because it isn't easy. You're dealing with people who are really sharp about this new technology, because some of them write the programs that it runs on. You're also dealing, way at the bottom of the InterNet you're dealing with software, you're dealing with Send Mail, you're dealing with Read This, you're dealing with a lot of assorted software that all nodes have to have to talk to each other, and if you really look at that code and say, "Who wrote this code? Who wrote the thing that -- who created the water in which all this information swims?" Well, I think if you look at those original people a lot of them were basically anarcho-crypto heads that happened to be programmers and just wanted to, you know, send jokes to each other and talk about computers. I think it's --, you know, the default state of the Net is absolute freedom. In fact it's to such an extent that a large part of the Net is sort of set up to recognize attempts at censor- ship as system damage and simply route around it. I want to send pedophile memoirs from site A to site C. Well, you know, it's supposed to take the most efficient route and that's through site B. Well, this happens to be Jerry Falwell's machine. He decides what he wants on his machine in his "home." That's fine with me. So down it goes. Whup! Sorry. We don't take any pedophile stuff through this site. Boom! We'll kick it to D. D doesn't care. Boom! You know. I don't care if Jerry -- you know, it's fine with me what people have in their home. It's more complicated than this obviously and there's going to be a lot of argument and a lot of, you know, shouting back and forth and a lot of federal regulations passed and all of that, but I think what's happening here is we -- you know, what is the Net? The Net is basically the medium, and the Net reminds me of this book that was published at the end of the '70's where a man said, "Well, my idea for a really great book is a book of 350 pages and there's nothing on any of the pages. So I'm going to call it the Nothing Book." And everyone said, "What a terrible commercial idea." Well, of course he published the Nothing Book and now you go into any bookstore there's, you know, a big case of blank books. What we've got with the Net is we have, fundamentally we have the linking of millions and millions of hard drives. This fulfills the dream of every computer junkie in the world, that you have infinite drive space. You basically have infinite drive space. The Net is really -- what it is, is what we make it, every- body individually. It's like sort of the largest group hack in history. I think second to the phone company it's certainly the largest machine that's ever been built. Some people will get rather mystical. Under certain chemicals I'll get mystical and tell you it's the emergence of the World Mind. And like anything in the World Mind, it's got a lot of dark areas in it. Well, we'll just have to live with our dark fantasies as we live with our better deeds. To deny them is not really a good idea. I think one of the things that we're feeling right now with the immense growth is we're feeling three fundamental tensions within the Net, and I would also propose to you that for each ten- sion the Net also has the capacity to alleviate that tension. I think the first tension is between the concepts which can exist in a single human mind, in a single human society, that on the one hand ideas, ideas, need to be free. They need to be exchanged. They need to have no limit to the ability to make them baroque or make them fresh or make them new. But at the same time the same mind that has ideas that need to be free, we also hold within ourselves beliefs that need to be protected. Censorship is bad. I believe that. I need to protect that idea. That's central to something important to me. As an idea, censorship is bad? That may not be such a fundamentally true idea. Maybe there are some cases that people can make that censorship is good. All right. But my belief needs to be protected, although my ideas need to be free. Well, how does the Net deal with that? The Net, or UseNet, which is sort of this large machine, this large sort of Mother Ship of interest groups that rides upon the vast InterNet ocean, basically just creates infinite areas in which all beliefs can exist and all ideas can be free. And if you wander into an area with a certain belief -- say you wander into -- oh, the sex areas are always good because that's where everyone gets excited. You wander into ALT.SEX.MEMBERS OF THE SAME SEX. MOTSS. And you say, as we see in that group every month, you enter a message with the stirring headline, "FAGS MUST DIE." Well, it will be about four nanoseconds before about thirty other people will flame you hairless. Your I.D. will be exposed either in its strength or its weakness by thirty other minds working on that -- whew. At the same time you might want to say, "I believe that everyone should worship Jesus. Christ. Christian." Right? Well, you might sort of wander over to the Muslim and you might not feel too comfortable in the ALT.MUSLIM area doing that, but the Net has created, the wonderful alt groups have created ALT.CHRISTNET. They even have ALT.CHRISTNET.SEXUALITY. So what happens is when people feel a need to have a belief area in which their beliefs can be protected they'll just create an area and anybody who wanders in there that's not quite in the program, just flamed hairless and thrown out. That's all right, because you can wander over, you know, to another area or to a "secret moderated (ph) mailing list" that says, you know, "Kill Catholics Mailing List." Okay? We're going to talk with six other people on the Net about killing Catholics. That's a good idea. We'll just all be in that room together. You know, other people just put you in their Kill file and you're out of here. So the Net sort of resolves those two, that particular tension set. Next tension set, tension set number two, is information. Hmmmm. Information wants to be free. All right. Information wants to be free. True. True thing. All information wants to be free, and we don't really want to pay connect time charges to get it, either. On the other hand information is generated by people, and people need to be paid, okay? Because, you know, the information environment that makes my apartment, the landlord wants to be paid for that solid piece of information I live in so I need to get something coming in the other way. Well, I would propose to you that the way that both we can have free information and also have information which returns some kind of money or token back to its creator is probably at hand within the InterNet within the crypto environment. In other words I get a little sample of something. If I want to have the whole thing maybe I have to send $5 down the line on my Master Charge in order to get the key back. Mr. Zimmermann could probably talk a little bit more specifically about how cryptography and things like that probably hold the key to a real kind of commercial series of transactions over the InterNet. So that is sort of the Net. But on the one hand we have, you have to consider there's two things going on on the InterNet. One is speech, and people feel ASCII is speech and if you don't think it's speech say that on the Net and they'll probably come back to you and hand you your ASCII on a platter. Which empowers individuals. That's why we love it. At the same time the other question is how are we going to maintain copyright? Because people feel that maintaining copy- right disempowers individuals. Correct. Copyright was not created by the United States Government back in the dawn of government to empower individuals. That was a side effect. Copyright was created because people saw right away that unless people uld enjoy the fruits of their labor there wouldn't be quite so much invention within society and it was held to be a good thing to spur invention within society. I think that's probably the fundamental reason for copyright. And I think again, you know, the Net will give us the tools to do that. The Net has been as a global machine and through a pact that nobody intended and nobody created an extremely, surprisingly responsive organism to solving its own problems. They get solved on a pretty fast track. The final tension is sort of what is going on on the Net all the time in the way the Net only mirrors what we are and what we make it and who we are as a society, and that is the tension between the desire for liberty and the fear of liberty that leads us to yearn for some kind of authority. You see this polarity move along on the Net all the time. You see sort of libertarian -- libertarian anarchists are very big on the Net, are here, and then there's control freaks. They're also here. Anybody who's been out there for a while sees these people go at each other all the time. Then of course we have Net Heads, or Heads, whatever, and of course we have Feds, you know. And Heads and Feds have been playing games on the Net now for almost a decade. There's no reason to think they're going to stop. They sort of need each other. The Christ and the Antichrist in an eternal conflict. But meanwhile everybody else is just, you know, passing recipes back and forth and, you know, here's my, you know, here's my secret pedophile journal over here. Everybody's -- here's how you crochet something. Here's some code. Here's a filthy E of me and my dog. Just download, send money, state preferences. Then of course you have the anarchists, like I am. Hey! No rules, nothing. Let's just do it. You know, you're there. You are free. Just assume it and act on it, and -- THE NET POLICE. "You know, you're really a Nazi for saying it that way." In fact the famous Mneumonics law on the Net says that the longer any Net argument goes on, the more, the more ready you are to put us into -- "as length of the UseNet argument continues, the probability of a comparison to the Nazis approaches 1." And this happens. Then of course you have intellectual political explorers, you know, of all kinds, you know. Now we even have a Nazi, AMERICAN NAZI.COM on the Net. No longer are we approaching 1; the Nazis are already on the Net. But we have infinite disk space and they just go off in their little room. And then we also have PC people on the Net. PC's are very big on the Net, and very big on college bulletin boards. These are the people that believe that we can sort of control people in being nice, wonderful people, and when everybody's nice and wonderful and has no bad thoughts then it's going to be the Millenium. Hearts will open. You know, all will walk naked in the world. And then you have sort of the hackers and the crackers, you know, and there's a great deal of confusion about who's hacking and who's cracking. You know, if I'm cracking and I'm doing it because it's cool, I'm hacking, right? If someone's hammering on my password file they're cracking. I don't care how cool they are. So I think my fundamental statement about the Net is that it is literally the greatest tool for free speech that has ever been, ever been invented. Free speech is, you know, freedom of the press is available to those that own one. Hey. Two grand. We all own one. That's about the total cash investment. Never have printing presses with 15 million potential readers been so cheap, all over the world. I don't really despair for the future of the Net. I think the Net is probably the greatest tool for the potential liberation of the mind and spirit of all human beings that's ever existed on the planet. I view it as sort of the peoples' publish- ing company, that rejects no manuscripts, you know, that has all books available for ten cents each, you know, if that. You know, please. Read my screen. And then you're always coming back with the Net tension people saying, "Yes. But now that the people have the ability to communicate with each other globally on any issue from any point of view that they want to and governments can't really stop it that easily and it just sort of flows through these borders, don't you think it's time to call for all of us who use the Net to use it in a responsible manner?" And I say screw that. I say screw responsibility. Just do what you want. That's what it is there for. "Well, you have to telecommunicate responsibly." Well, I don't have to put a condom over my modem. Enough of this. You know, I mean everybody's always got to, you know, "We have a vast new medium. We must use it responsibly." No, I say we use it irresponsibly. I say we just fool around with it. We hack on it. We hammer on it. We pound it. We just see what happens. Who knows? You know, it might be a pi$ata and we crack it open and, you know, a lot of manure falls out. Or we might crack the pi$ata open and a huge Mardi Gras party will be wandering out. We don't know, you know. But I think we have to use it and use it heavily, because, you know, as they say in aerobics, "Use it or lose it." That's all I have to say. * * *