Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Computers, Freedom & Privacy/3: In the Hallways Tom Maddox Between March 9th and 12th, 1993, the Third Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (henceforth CFP/3) was held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel, a windswept venue on the mudflats just off the glide path to SFO, a less than attractive mise en scene, distinguished primarily by ease of access from the airport and a symbolically and geographically apt location between San Francisco to the north and Silicon Valley to the south. As the technology of Silicon Valley has become central to the more general culture in the country (and world), the nerds of the Valley have hooked up with the hipster culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco has become a great place for this kind of gathering. Perhaps the clearest instance of this connection and its importance is the WELL (the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), the computer conferencing system and Internet node which, as its name indicates, is the information age child of the '60s counterculture--a place where one can find Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary, and a host of other folks whose social and political thinking is rooted in the psychedelic and anti-establishment ethos of that time. The magazines Mondo 2000 and Wired are also important in this context. In fact, if you read the Time article on cyberpunk published a few months ago, you saw the influence of the WELL and Mondo, in particular. Much of the information in the piece came from people at both places, and I would argue that the layout of the article has obvious stylistic affinities with Mondo, which appears to be handing out information exclusively in milli-second doses. So folks came from the Valley--from Apple and Xerox PARC and Stanford and Interval Research and Project Xanadu, but they also came from Washington, D.C.--from the IRS and Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Technology Assessment (even the FBI and CIA had at least one representative apiece), and from universities and corporations and bureaucracies all over the country. Various CERT (Computer Emergency Response Teams) agencies were there, along with the security officers from a number of big computer systems, most of them academic. Los Alamos and Livermore and the RAND Corporation were represented, but so were the League for Programming Freedom and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (an interesting presence, as I will discuss later). CFP/3 had industry suits and programmers, hackers and cops and bureaucrats, and a large number of information age hipsters of various persuasions--more exotic fauna included, among others, editors of breathtakingly pricey newsletters, high-profile civil libertarians specializing in the cyberspace milieu, cypherpunks (about whom, more later) and consultants with a variety of portfolios and accomplishments; and various mythic figures--creators or envisioners of key hardware, software, and systems, from FIDO to Ethernet to Xanadu. To quote Bruce Sterling, who kindly and expertly served as my native guide to the conference, it was "a happening event." If you really care about the issues it addresses (as I have said in previous columns, I do), you should know about it. It has become in its three years as important as such conferences are likely to be. Here gather the folks who are moving policy and practice in a number of ways, both publicly and privately. I arrived the afternoon of the first day of the conference, which was given over entirely to "tutorials." I had a hard time picking which tutorial to attend but settled on one led by Russell Brand of Reasoning Systems titled "Practical Data Inferencing: What We Think We Know About You." Though Brand said some interesting things in his tutorial, his whole approach mystified me: the session was run as a series of weird thought experiments (for instance, what sources of data would you use to get this kind of information?) without reference either to the practical facts of the matter (for instance, given that you have decided to acquire data from the DMV, how, realistically, do you get the cooperation of a DMV employee?) or to the ethical or philosophical implications of having a society where such practices are commonplace. Everyone I talked to who attended the session came away with some variation of this puzzlement--what was the point of it all? I later heard that my other choice, "Telecommunications Fraud," led by by Donald Delaney of the New York State Police, turned out nicely. And when I met Delaney, a detective with attitude who appears to have wandered out of an Elmore Leonard novel, I was really sorry I had not caught his public act. Oh well. In fact, when it came to attending official functions, I am afraid I was a bust. At first I felt bad about my propensity to bolt hurriedly from the conference halls minutes after a panel had started in order to avoid the onset of coma. I questioned my own journalistic seriousness, as it were, and thought guiltily that a real reporter would gladly risk years on life support in order to bring back an accounting of all the important Facts & Issues. However, like many deviations from accepted behavior, my inability to function properly as a reporter proved interesting, maybe even valuable. I soon discovered that out in the hallways much more interesting stuff was happening. While the general conferencegoers sat quietly in the giant economy sized meeting rooms, many of the stars were out feeding the media beast in the hallways. Also, the serious Movers and Shakers and Heavies in the Know were swapping gossip and generally laying their trips on anyone who would listen. In fact, in discussions on the WELL after the conference, several people suggested that the next conference's organizers should try very hard to bring what happened in the hallways into the main conference rooms. That would be tough. What occurred in the hallways was informal, unscheduled, spontaneous, and often semi- private at least. And, of course, much of it comprised primate rituals of deference, obligation, and intimacy, among other things; there may even have been a mating dance or two going on out there. At any rate, I found myself following two topics in the hallways over those days: the drama accompanying recent changes at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the emerging phenomenon of the cypherpunks. I will relate both these stories, but they require a bit of background. I have mentioned the Electronic Frontier Foundation (more popularly, EFF, pronounced ee-eff-eff) in this column. EFF was founded by Mitch Kapor, daddy of Lotus 1-2-3 and megabucks angel for EFF, and John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and general heavy cyberdude, in the wake of various governmental anti-hacker initiatives (which you can read about in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown). Since 1990 the organization has been one of the primary rallying places for people concerned with civil liberties in cyberspace. Meanwhile EFF has struggled to shake off its media reputation as a "hacker defense fund" while maintaining its willingness to assist anyone who gets caught in the morass of unresolved legal issues characteristic of cyberspace during its frontier days--which is to say, now. Well, in January of this year, EFF underwent a major organizational reshuffling. A complete account of the changes can be had in the document "Major Changes at the Electronic Frontier Foundation" (available by ftp from ftp.eff.org). To summarize the more important of them: Mitch Kapor stepped down as Executive Director and was replaced by Jerry Berman, a lobbyist; EFF's Cambridge office closed, and two very visible Cambridge employees were fired, and EFF "centralized" in Washington, D. C.; EFF gave up on the notion of having local chapters; Mike Godwin's role as Staff Counsel was thrown into doubt--"to be determined" as the document said. After this announcement, EFF groups on the WELL and the Internet became agitated as charges and counter-charges flew. EFF had sold out its civil libertarian mission in order to focus on getting Mitch Kapor's hobbyhorse, ISDN, through Congress (if you have never heard of ISDN, that is fine--I trust you get the organizational point). EFF had despicably fired two good people with no warning. EFF had been taken over by Beltway policyheads with no clue about cyberspace and what was happening there. Etcetera. Many people felt the ugly onset of the phenomenon Max Weber called "routinization of charisma," which might be viewed very loosely as the inevitable transformation of a visionary organization into a rational or bureaucratic one. So, come CFP/3, the EFF Board (composed of Kapor, Barlow, John Gilmore, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Dave Farber, Cliff Figallo, and Jerry Berman) met to decide some issues that had developed since this reorganization. In particular, Mike Godwin's role remained unclear; this was especially important given Godwin's high visibility: because of his position as staff counsel and the importance of technical legal issues to many of EFF's concerns, Godwin has been for many people the voice of EFF regarding high- profile issues and events, such as those surrounding the Steve Jackson Games suit. Further, Godwin is very active online--he is in many ways the only EFF person comfortable online these days--on the WELL and groups on the Internet. According to my informants (who wore Groucho glasses and nose and so successfuly concealed their identities from me), Godwin and Jerry Berman, the new Executive Director, had already gotten into difficult squabbles which showed no signs of getting better. In fact, Godwin was depressed about what he saw as an emerging policy under which he would not be able to give legal information as he saw fit--which can include very simple advice, such as saying that BBSs can maintain "phreak philes" if they wish, or can involve giving brief tutorials in obscenity law to system operators worried about the pictures of naked ladies appearing on their systems. Another source of conflict is that Godwin has often advised defense lawyers how to deal with computer crime prosecutions (on the principle that a vigorous defense insures everyone's civil rights), and his giving such advice came too close to the feared charge of "hacker defense fund" for some people's liking. Given all this, Godwin apparently was close to walking off the job. This sort of backstory and accompanying rumors about what was happening now went up and down the hallways. Meanwhile, EFF Board Members clenched their teeth and met long hours until, my informants say, the immediate conflicts were resolved largely in Godwin's favor. Now, whether my informants had been chewing Yage vines (as they sometimes do) and hallucinating all this, I cannot say, but the current word on Godwin is that he feels he can do the job he was hired to do, which I take as a good sign. However, I think that anyone interested in the pursuit of civil liberties in cyberspace should most definitely stay tuned because EFF's commitment to civil liberties could be altered and diluted in coming months. Meanwhile, talk in the hallways also concerned the emergence of the "cypherpunks," a group of guerrilla cryptographers, many working out of Berkeley and Silicon Valley, to insure privacy through encryption. Their main weapon is called public-key encryption, a breakthrough in cryptography done by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1975. I will not attempt to communicate the details, a task beyond the scope of this article (and probably this writer as well), and one which has been done extraordinarily well by Steven Levy, the best techno- popularizer I know of, in the article "Crypto Rebels," in the May/June, 1993 Wired--a killer article, in short. I will just say that public-key encryption puts effective and easy encryption into the hands of anyone with a computer. You do not need a secure channel or one-time pads or any of the more arcane paraphernalia or expensive equipment of the NSA, CIA, or other such agencies. So, with the drone of official speakers' voices coming through meeting room doors as a kind of bass line, you could often hear Eric Hughes, moderator of the cypherpunk mailing list, or one of his associates explaining the necessity for such technology to anyone who wanted either to listen or to argue. That position, as stated in Hughes's "A Cypherpunk Manifesto," says, Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. [. . .] We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. In some respects, this vision is utopian and in others naive, charges Hughes will sometimes admit to when pressed, but in some ways it is compelling, at least to those of us who fear for the near-absolute loss of privacy that could be a side-effect of information technology. In fact, since the conference, the Clinton administrations's introduction of the "Clipper Chip," which would allow government wiretapping through built-in phone tapping, has made the issues the cypherpunks deal with even more pressing. The proposal has alarmed not only the cypherpunks but also a number of moderate commentators, on both political and technical grounds. However, also at the conference were some people who despise or fear the cypherpunk vision of absolute privacy of communication--for instance, Dorothy Denning, Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who has become the de facto champion of government or social control positions regarding privacy. In an article in the March, 1993 Communications of the ACM, she made a case for the FBI's proposed digital telephony legislation. I briefly discussed this proposal in the column titled "Cyberspace, Freedom, and the Law," in the January, 1993 Locus, and like many other non- cypherpunks, I find it outrageous. I should note that Denning took considerable heat at the conference, both in the public presentations and in the hallways. Among the ongoing talks about EFF and cypherpunks and a myriad other minor topics (such as speculation about the meaning CIA's and FBI's presence at the conference, and the NSA's absence) I wandered around with Bruce Sterling and did the other compelling thing one can do in the hallways, which is meet people. Dave Hughes, for instance, who started Big Sky Telegraph, a conferencing system that links schools and widely-separated communities in Montana; he had just returned from the xUSSR (as it is known on the net) and was giving out Russian military pins he had bought, cheap, on the streets. And there was Donald Delaney, the New York State cop I mention above, who tells dirty jokes and makes fun of Federal investigations that result in computer confiscations but no indictments. "We arrest people, not computers," he says, and he seems much more concerned with actual criminals-- such as groups selling stolen long-distance access codes on the street--than hackers. And Tom Jennings, inventor of FIDOnet, gay activist in San Francisco, and generally friendly and interesting guy. Among other things, he recycles obsolete hardware and software into dirt-cheap and highly workable computer systems for friends who are both poor and technically unskilled but want to get online. And I talked with Ted Nelson, whom I discussed in the November, 1992 Locus column about hypertext, "I Sing the Body Electric." He invented the term hypertext and for a couple of decades has been has kept pushing the idea of a system called Xanadu--one of the longest-lived and most influential pieces of vaporware ever dreamed of. My notes on our talk baffle me; Nelson was pitching facts, opinions, history, and prediction at high speed, and I was trying unsuccessfuly to understand and record the stream simultaneously. Ah well--another instance of my journalistic failings. However, I did gather that despite Xanadu's having been abandoned by Autodesk, the project remains alive in some form, and Nelson has revised both the conception and his ambitions once again, though the medium of what he is now calling Xanadu Light. And Bruce Sterling and I had lunch with Esther Dyson. As Bruce had said she would be, Dyson was very smart, very nice, and very aware. In addition to being a figure to conjure with in computer circles, she is the daughter of Freeman Dyson, semi-mythic physicist and generator of a number of ideas that science fiction writers have been stealing for years, the "Dyson sphere" being perhaps the best known. She is editor and (I believe) sole writer of Release 1.0, a massively well-informed and dense newsletter available for $495 a year (in the United States; overseas subscriptions are $575, airmail included)--it appears to me, after reading the copy she gave me, that if you are in the industry and have that kind of money to lay down for a magazine subscription, Report 1.0 is a good place to put it. Meanwhile, back at the official conference, there were panels and speeches and "birds of a feather" gatherings--the public business of the conference, in short, that caused a number of people and organizations to cough up something between $300 and $600 (depending on when they registered and whether they included first- day tutorials) and take up residence on the mudflats for a few days. Many of the speeches and proceedings should be available online in coming months, and when they do, I will announce the details in this column. And come the next CFP, I may attend more of the official one. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .