Bob - I'm not sure if you copied David separately/Bcc on your reply, and I've dropped Cc:s to some of your lists that I'm not on, and I missed your original message that David flamed you for which you're flaming back about, but....
Perhaps I've missed some really critical things the time or two that I've read "The Transparent Society", or projected too much liberarian hype into my reading, but to me the big points were - Moore's Law, etc., will make networked cameras so appallingly cheap that that they'll be pretty much universal. It'll do it to other information technologies as well, but the public has an easier time understanding what a camera means than a database, so that's the one to focus on when you're writing popular science.
- Usual digressions into what Moore's Law and cheap and universal mean, and some implications about the realism of expecations of privacy that need to be said slowly for people who haven't spent years talking about geodesic economies and therefore don't get it (:-)
- Lots of people will be watching you on cameras, either because they feel like it, or because they're watching something else and it's too much trouble to not watch you at the same time. And you'll be watching lots of people or things, for similar reasons, and realistically there's not much that'll stop it.
- The government will be watching you, like it or not. Brin spends a while discussing the issue of whether we should try to stop them from doing so through legislation, but basically views it as a lost cause for economic reasons, and all the related reasons of power, convenience, control, etc. (I don't remember how much time he spent on the "even if they ban government from watching you most of the time, they'll always give themselves exemptions even if they bother following the rules, so just get used to it" issue, but it was there. Video's too cheap.)
- We might be watching the government, or we might not, and the government are the only major group that can easily make it hard to watch them, because they can throw you in jail if you get in their face, and they've got enough control over their actions to make it difficult to watch them. THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO FOCUS AS CITIZENS, because if you don't force them to do their work in the sunshine, they won't, and because getting them not to watch you is a lost cause.
- Cypherpunks technologies are mostly a lost cause, because Bad Guys (mainly the government) will use them to do their bad open things, whereas they can put cameras in your ceiling to watch you type your passwords, hide bugs under your bed (next to the Communists) to listen to
Thanks Bill, for passing on your message, along with the news that I've been dissed and discussed by R.A. Hettinga. Naturally, he never informed me, nor copied me his missives, nor invited me to answer. This appears to be quite typical. Let me make clear, this is not a case of disagreement over public issues of privacy, security and freedom. That topic area merits serious attention by adults, and your attempt, below, to paraphrase my position in The Transparent Society, is an example of adult discourse. Paraphrasing is what men and women do when they truly want to understand another's point of view. They then seek feedback in order to find out if their impressions are right, or if they've been just in their counter-arguments. Your attempt, below, is a good effort. Inaccurate in some details, but also quite interesting. I wish I had time for a full reaction. Perhaps I will try later, after returning from giving a keynote at the Libertarian National Convention. (An irony that will surely gall cypherpunks who routinely insist that theirs is the only possible pro-freedom zeitgeist.) No, my case against Hettinga is much simpler. The man publicly attributed to me views that I do not have, and have never expressed. Views that are, in fact, diametrically opposite to anything that I believe. Moreover, this cannot be due to inadvertence or carelessness, since he used quotation marks, something that an educated person only does when he can back it up with demonstrable citations. Not inadvertence or laziness, then, but rather deliberate falsehood bordering on libel. The man is an outright liar. I had no choice but to say so, lest the words that he tried to cram into my mouth become part of the public record. But enough about such people. They are noisy and - I've learned - quite irrelevant. It's why I no longer bother with cypherpunks. They are romantics who dream of fighting 'Big Brother". If tyranny ever does come, the loudest - already foolishly on record - will never get a chance to try out their fancy spy toys before they are shot. It's up to adults like you and me to see to it that never happens. For you, I'll offer the respect of a (brief) argument. Let's shift from technological determinism (the Moore's Law thing) to basic epistemology. * It is fundamentally impossible ever to verify for certain that someone else does NOT know something. * It is demonstrably possible - though sometimes difficult - to verify that YOU do know something. That's it, in a nutshell. The premise of the cypherpunks - to protect themselves and their freedom from inimical elites by limiting what those elites know - is untenable. Cowering under blankets and covers and shrouds and ciphers cannot possibly work in the long run, because it is based on an absurdity. They will never know which of their encryption programs has a back door, or which anonymity site is a police front. (Hint: they ALL will be.) Cowering can never offer any peace of mind. Moreover, it is a craven, self-centered and ultimately futile approach. In setting me up as a strawman, guys like Hettinga claim that I 'trust' government elites. Hogwash. I am far more suspicious of authority than any of them are! They would pick and choose some elites to trust while focusing their ire on just one (government). I don't trust ANY elite, of government, wealth, criminality or technology. Moreover, I will not cower from them. The only defense of freedom that works is the one americans have used for 200 years. An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! These guys see themselves as Keanu Reaves - cheap movie cliche heroes - skipping ratlike through garbage under the dark towers of the Neuromancer zaibatsus, while the rest of their fellow citizens mewl like sheep. Meanwhile, in real life, those citizens are standing up and - en masse - empowering themselves with the very same technology that the cynics and pundits think will enslave us! See: http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm Feh! Dig it, man. My freedom is NOT contingent on blinding govt. Let em see! They will, anyway. Maybe if they see better, they will do their jobs better. So? My freedom is protected by MY ability to supervise govt... to know what they are up to and to hold them accountable if they abuse their power. Not only is that epistemologically possible, it is exactly how we got the freedom we now have! I never said that task would be easy! The present administration makes daily efforts to erect barriers to public oversight and accountability, with vigor unseen since the Sedition Acts. I wish the cypherpunks were helping in the fight to preserve transparency, instead of playing into the concealers' hands. I don't want a blind guard dog. I want a guard dog who can see... but with a fierce choke chain around its neck, controlled by every american who is empowered to clearly supervize what the dog is up to and react quickly if so much as growls in the wrong direction. A few who read this will get it. The rest will call it 'naive', even though it's what worked for us so far. Nor is it any more naive than actually trusting PGP! In ten years, not one cypherpunk has answered my challenge to name a society in history that adopted widespread secrecy as a freedom-protection measure - and thrived. Ours, utilizing the tool of open accountability, has. Oh, one last metaphor. Humans are monkeys. Ever try to BLIND a big monkey? It won't let you! But you can LOOK at a big monkey. You can look at it, and yell for help from other little monkeys if you see it try mischief. You can do that if your top priority is protecting YOUR eyes, not trying to hide. Enough. Thanks again, Bill. Look up Witness.org. They are doing more good in the world than all the cypherpunks, cowering under their fantasy masks... masks that will blow away like dust, if ever a real storm comes. With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> writes: the
conversations you're having on your EnCryptoPhone, etc. Making sure the government is maximally watchable is more
important,
and if you say you're allowed to hide your actions, they'll make sure they're allowed to hide theirs, and they're better at this organized coercion thing than you are.
Perhaps I'm putting words in Brin's mouth, especially about the latter, but it has seemed to have been the major bone of contention between Brin and various Cypherpunks. Meanwhile, Big Brother *is* increasingly watching us, even if in GeodesicWorld nobody else has bothered paying enough to watch hi-res videos of most of us very
often,
and BB is trying very hard to make himself much less accountable, because if we can see where George is, we can question him, and if that happens, the Terrorists Have Won...
(Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been promising heavy scrutiny of the Worldcom Debacle, if nothing else because they're so pleased to have dishonesty from somebody who's not in the Oil Business or Military-Industrial Complex for a change.)
At 12:54 PM 06/25/2002 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or whoever's) Law, and all that.
I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property (call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. ... Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the "consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual bananas.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 3:31 AM -0700 on 6/29/02, davidbrin@cts.com paints a picture out of the second "Planet of the Apes" movie, Roddy McDowell, Ceasar Romero, and all...:
An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked!
In other words, using the nation-state (a mob by any other name smells just same) to solve a technological, a physical, problem. Shall we legislate pi, while we're at it? I think my original point about Brin "trusting" the nation-state -- one I thought fairly tangential to my review of Wayner's excellent "Translucent Databases", though apparently not tangential enough -- is proven above, and throughout Dr. Brin's latest fulmination. Meet the new mob, same as the old mob, with a nod to Mr. Townsend and the now late Mr. Entwhistle. Sure, we're going to have ubiquitous *supervision* of *property* using exponentially cheaper charge-coupled camera devices attached to geodesic internetworks. Moore's, Metcalfe's, Gilder's(?) "laws", will not be denied. But it will be increasingly done by property owners, and not by nation states. I think that Brin used his entire book to grope for that same point, but, apparently, he can't see beyond his own statist nose to the ultimate answer to the problem he poses there. That's because, cryptography, and financial cryptography in particular, is not just about anonymity. It is, ultimately, about the control of property, and without the use of force, much less the monopolistic use of force found in a nation-state, or any other form of mob rule. :-). First, encrypted information -- like informed opinion, the most important thing in a ubiquitously networked world -- actually becomes property, in the sense that if information, "content", whatever, is encrypted, and I have the key, it's my property, to do with what I want, including selling it to someone else. The more strong cryptography there is in the network, the more that becomes so. I do not define Microsoft/WAVE/AMD's digital "rights" "management" attempts in this regard as strong cryptography, of course. Ronald Coase, who first noted that property is necessary for the existence of a market, much less an economy, is smiling somewhere, I bet. Second, and most important to what I'm interested in, protocols like those of Chaum, Brands, and Wagner, and others every year, are all designed to *anonymously* transfer ownership of assets, particularly financial assets. It is that deliberate anonymity of design that paradoxically makes exchanges of those assets cheaper to use because you don't need *identity*, Mr. Brin's cherished "transparency", to do business anymore. If it's cheaper to do it privately instead of keeping an ostensibly public database at a "trusted" third party, and sending someone to jail if they lie about a debit or a credit, then, obviously, we'll use functionally anonymous bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols instead of the "transparent" book-entry settlement systems we now use. "Transparency", like privacy, is orthogonal to transaction cost. Look at it this way. If it were cheaper to use anonymous paper bearer certificates hauled in armored trucks than it is to do batch, then interactive book-entry transaction settlement, using mainframe and then client-server over securely transported tape and now proprietary communication networks, then we'd still use Brinks trucks, vaults and cages, and wallets full of paper to do business with each other. But that's not what we do, and, frankly, if it's cheaper to do anonymous bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols on a public internetwork then we'll do that instead of the current "trusted", "transparent" book-entry regime backed up by monopolistic government force. By the same, um, token, :-), if you reduce transaction cost, firm size goes down, and that means that, maybe, someday, we do not even "buy" (pay for it gunpoint at tax-time) force from governments anymore. Surveillance of citizens so they don't break the law becomes supervision of your property so people don't damage it. Dr. Brin says something about never hearing of "society", much less a nation-state, that succeeded in an atmosphere of ubiquitous personal privacy, and, oddly enough, I believe he's right. First, we haven't been able to organize in large groups without force monopolies until now, and second, of course, nation-states probably can't survive in a world of ubiquitous strong financial cryptography and geodesic internetworks. That, by the way, is why I was happy to review Peter Wayner's book, "Translucent Databases", which, not so tangentially, now, is the ultimate topic under discussion here. Using simple techniques, Wayner shows that we can have as much anonymity as we like in a database, and, among other things, it's because we can do the encryption in the client if we want. Exactly what is done in blind signature bearer-certificate financial cryptography, something Wayner only skirts a couple of times in the book itself because it's a more advanced solution to the original problem. Which was my point, all along. If it's cheaper to use encryption, in terms of transaction cost, liability to various risk, and so on, then we'll use cryptography, up to, and including, functional anonymity. As far as Dr. Brin's particular world view goes, if internet databases are "translucent", the cameras feeding those databases become "translucent" as well. So, if it's in the interest of the *owner* of the *property* being watched by the camera to reveal that information, or even sell it, then that information will be used. Otherwise, it won't. I expect most, if not all information, in databases and going over the net to be encrypted sooner or later, and not to smash the state, or to promote it, but because it's cheaper, safer, less personally and financially risky, to do so. So much for the "Transparent Society". Finally, as to the mechanics of this discussion, I didn't reply to Dr. Brin directly because he didn't reply to *me*, directly, when he had the beef in the first place. Monkey see, monkey do, I suppose. He had my email address. He knew how to use it. And, of course, there was no reason to send him my review of Wayner's book "Translucent Databases", any more than anyone else referring to his ideas would, except to curry his favor, or something. Among other things, The review itself is public. Hell, it even got Slashdotted this week, though I wish I had corrected spelling and grammar a bit more there before I punched the "Submit" button on the review instead of concentrating on the HTML so much. Fortunately, various mail lists, and Dr. Brin through various intermediaries, got the better version. The geodesic network wins again. As to misquoting him, I think his pair of recent emetica on the subject have "quoted" Dr. Brin quite well enough for my taste, thank you very much. I did not "lie", much less misrepresent his views, as most people reading those two missives can see now from his own words. Last but not least, I certainly didn't have to buy his book to have an opinion about his ideas on politics and on transparency itself. Before I got interested in financial cryptography on the net and understood its implications and knew better, I had read most of Brin's prior work, including "Earth", where the "transparency" idea was presented in fiction. His public pronouncements, on the net, in the press, and elsewhere since his non-fiction book's publication have made his point, and rather vociferously, as we've now seen. I suppose it would have been much better to have civil discourse with the man, but he's the one who came out swinging. At the moment I feel an awful lot like someone in a scene from a Monty Python movie. Let's hope he continues to have fewer limbs to swing with at every iteration of this exchange... Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPR3Ob8PxH8jf3ohaEQKELACcDBFyfgcTo0rksdr+1TVSph+fS0YAn0t6 cksW0bOjj1Xop2tgkKTTwATv =9LhI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
At 11:13 AM -0400 on 6/29/02, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
Ceasar Romero,
Oops. Conflation between Ceasar Romero, Aldo Rey, and the character "Aldo" in the *third* and *fourth* Planet of the Apes sequellae, played, in the fourth movie's speaking role, by Claude Akins. IMDB is your friend. ;-). Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
At 03:31 AM 06/29/2002 -0700, davidbrin@cts.com wrote:
Thanks Bill, for passing on your message, along with the news that I've been dissed and discussed by R.A. Hettinga. Naturally, he never informed me, nor copied me his missives, nor invited me to answer. This appears to be quite typical.
Sure. I'd assumed you'd seen his mail; I'm separately forwarding the message that I'd excerpted, though I don't seem to have most of the other messages in the thread; archives are at http://inet-one.com/cypherpunks/ (it's mostly full of spam, because somebody once decided to make a point about list filtering by subscribing us to all the spam he could find but there's real content as well; I read the spam-filtered version of the list, but I'm not aware of an archive of that version.) You do get occasionally discussed on the list, or at least referred to,
Your attempt, below, is a good effort. Inaccurate in some details, but also quite interesting. I wish I had time for a full reaction. Perhaps I will try later, after returning from giving a keynote at the Libertarian National Convention.
Oh, that'll be interesting - I'll see you there. One of the cypherpunks arguments is that you'll get a lot more whistleblowers if they can do so anonymously.
... The only defense of freedom that works is the one americans have used for 200 years. An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! ... My freedom is protected by MY ability to supervise govt... to know what they are up to and to hold them accountable if they abuse their power. Not only is that epistemologically possible, it is exactly how we got the freedom we now have!
participants (3)
-
Bill Stewart -
davidbrin＠cts.com -
R. A. Hettinga