excerpted from: B O A R D W A T C H M A G A Z I N E Guide to the World of Online Services Editor: Jack Rickard Volume VII: Issue 11 ISSN:1054-2760 November 1993 ============== EDITORS' NOTES ============== One Man - One Vote - One Program The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action document was released September 12 and made available to the online community in full ascii text form the same day. This document outlines the administration's blueprint for a future national data highway. We don't normally devote nine pages of Boardwatch to publishing government literature. But, while the document is easily available electronically, this will probably affect everyone online at some point or another. You will undoubtedly see it quoted and analyzed in coming months, but I'm going to guess the full text is not going to be carried widely in print. So we decided to run the whole thing - albeit as "the fine print." The NII Agenda is remarkable in that they did manage to assemble every cliche in the free world regarding online communications and actually pile them all into one document. As government detritus goes, it is actually quite readable. A persistent, if effete segment of the online community has campaigned for some time for government to "get involved" online. They parade across Washington in a continuous stream attempting to get our government to fund various notions of what they want the online world to look like. And in some areas, government participation in the online process has been productive. The National Science Foundation has devoted a relatively modest amount of public investment in the Internet and this money has leveraged a hundred times that much private investment in the technology. I agree, there is a role for government in the future network. But in the context of the other things this administration is trying to do, I originally approached this topic with some trepidation. These people have no moral qualms whatsoever in saying one thing and doing quite another. The concepts of truth and lies and right and wrong are foreign to their view of the way the world works. The action items regarding encryption and copyright law revision are worded innocently enough. Beneath those words I detect an agenda more in keeping with the current health care program proposal, the budget recently passed, a corps of youth working for the government, the addition of 50,000 police officers on a national basis, and an entire political agenda focused quite single mindedly on one thing - control of the population - at all levels and in areas American's just aren't accustomed to thinking of as something anyone would want to control. This document does refer to legislation that would open the local telephone loop to competition - a concept we first came out for in 1988. The legislation they refer to basically frees the local telephone companies to provide video, information, long distance services - it has little to do with competition in the local loop other than to provide these telephone companies precisely what they've been lobbying for - freedom to exploit their monopolies on the local line infrastructure. The players are cable tv companies and telephone companies. Six months ago telco U.S. West purchased 25% of Time Warner, and this past week, Bell Atlantic and TCI, the nation's largest cable company holding group, announced a complete merger. The standoff between cable companies and telephone companies is over - and there will be LESS competition, not more. The inside deal making all of this work is that the government becomes a "partner" in developing our telecommunications infrastructure - the "controlling" influence. The more pressing current concern is encryption and privacy. The administration rolled out the Clipper Chip proposal earlier this year as a toe in the water. Clinton apologists are quick to point out that this was a Bush administration proposal. Poppycock. There are thousands of proposals making the rounds in Washington in a continous cloud - the plankton of the political seascape. A relative handful ever see the light of day. This one, given little chance under the Bush administration, did under President Clinton. The Clipper Chip concept is a bit startling. Everyone gets to encrypt their data, and in fact are encouraged to do so - with the government holding the decryption keys. I can't separate the stupid from those accused of stupid here, so I'll just note that it was proposed, and is still pursued. But they do apparently feel it important that if anyone has any "secret stuff", the government should, as a matter of course, have access to it. You have no "right" to privacy - quite the contrary. In health care, before it is over, if you want health care coverage, it will only be available in ONE place - a government office. You will present yourself in person, along with a little basket of receipts showing you've paid your taxes, registered for the draft, the national service program, given blood, quit smoking, have exercised regularly, have your car insurance in order, your driver's license, social security receipt, and anything else necessary to "make us safe." And if all your papers are in order, and you pay the fees, you will receive a little plastic card allowing you to visit a doctor or clinic. George Orwell never had it so good. And I would fear this same socialist greed for control of our lives will be applied to the online community via this National Information Infrastructure. I would, but I don't, and I'm feeling particularly enchanted right now by why I don't. First, they can be counted on to be as buffoonish about it as possible given the laws of physics. Currently, the State Department is actually pursuing a lone Boulder programmer with a Grand Jury investigation of possible infraction of export controls - alleging that he illegally exported a data encryption program - Pretty Good Privacy. The farce is of course that he never left Boulder. He posted it on a couple of local Internet sites, and of course, within about 12 minutes it was all over the world. It allows anyone to encrypt e-mail messages in such a fashion that all the kings horses and all the kings men can't figure out what the hell you said in it on a bet. And this is the heartening jewel. The online world has always moved powerfully toward the least common denominator grass roots end of the electronic path. All things that have grown have grown DOWN toward the end user, not UP toward a central authority. The entire energy in the online explosion has been OUT and DOWN and many of the innovations have been to extend functionality to the least equipment, at the least cost, in a never ending quest for "free" and something I can run on my OWN computer. The natural conclusion of this will be instant worldwide communication from a handheld $4 pocket calculator. The Internet is fascinating in that it is a belief system that allows people to connect to a common backbone for communications. That was the part we needed. Something persuasively "in the middle." But it was ALL we needed. There are now 130 million personal computers out there. And some percentage of these people are Phil Zimmermanns. This one man, with one wee little Borland compiler, wrote a piece of software. And whether they prosecute him to make him an example or not, he released ONE program in the wee hours of the morning in 1991, that will never allow the government or anyone else to put the data encryption genie back in the bottle. It did not change the world. It demonstrated that the world had changed. It's free. It's everywhere. There is no way to track down all the copies in all the world. It transcends national boundaries. He did it for the notoriety - and he got it. But he could have just as easily done it anonymously. An avowed leftist himself, he really gets just as bristley as Pat Buchanon from the far right on this thing about government control of individuals. And he's not alone. Whatever elaborate systems are contrived, at the cost of billions of dollars, with the full collusion of giant corporate telco/cable entities controlling vast territories of fiberglass and copper, they will become symbols of vanity - towers of Babel standing in testimony to the futility of trying to use electronics to control people. Electronics is a good material for building freedom, and a most notably poor one for forging chains. Wherever there is one guy with an attitude, a compiler, and a few free afternoons, all the plans and all the plots of all the kings go awry with a single program release. We have lots of guys with attitudes, lots of compilers, and lots of afternoons. Let them build the NII. Let us use it without fear. With a handful of Zimmermanns, we can remake the world to suit us. Now, if only we could get Phil to compile us a health care program.... Jack Rickard Editor Rotundus P.S. Mr. Zimmermann, guilty, innocent, free, or jailed, will undoubtedly incur the usual mountain of legal fees - poor thanks for his contribution. It might just serve an interesting purpose to make a numeric show of force on his behalf to demonstrate that the usual economic coercion won't work either. Stick a lone dollar bill in an envelope and send it to his legal defense fund. For a buck twenty-nine, it's a cheap political statement. And if enough of us do it, maybe the world will change again. Phil Zimmermann Legal Defense Fund c/o Philip Dubois, Esq. 2305 Broadway Boulder, CO 80304