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[davidbrin at cts.com]

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 at pobox.com> writes:
>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
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.