Chapter Six
Governments and the
Net: Making Sure
Orwell Was Wrong
If a programmer named Phil Zimmermann had his druthers, he would be leading a pretty sedate life on the whole. He drives a Saturn, lives in a small house in a middle-class suburb in Colorado with his wife and children, and dons a suit and does a pretty good yuppie act when he consults for East Coast companies. In California he fits in with his blue jeans. Short and paunchy, he is bearded yet harmless.
Some American bureaucrats, however, would lump Zimmermann in with CIA turncoats and peddlers of illegal plutonium. In November 1994 customs agents detained him at a Washington-area airport when he was reentering the States from Eastern Europe. Twice they combed through his bags then warned him that in the future he might be in for more of the same.
Why this Kafkaesque treatment? Because many in the U.S. national security establishment hate Phil Zimmermann’s guts. He came up with Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short—a snoop-resistant way of transmitting e-mail over the Internet and other networks.
Zimmermann loathes snoops and jackboots. Clearly he was not in the former communist Europe to subvert democracies; in fact, he was telling people how encryption[6.1] could help preserve their freedom. “I don’t have to explain to Eastern Europe,” he said, “why it is important for their governments not to get too powerful.”[6.2]
This dictator-proofing helped win Phil Zimmermann a “Pioneer Award” from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil liberties group, which praised him for creating “a worldwide standard for e-mail encryption.”
Zimmermann, however, as the Net’s many libertarians are quick to note, may end up in jail for allegedly having violated an American export law that carries penalties as high as a decade in prison and a million-dollar fine. The Feds treat PGP-style software as a weapon just like Stealth bombers, ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads. And some Washington bureaucrats hate the idea of such a privacy protector in the hands of too many civilians who are not, well, Washington bureaucrats.
Even if the Feds don’t indict and convict Zimmermann, the U.S. government has already done its share of bullying here.
The U.S. Constitution forbids prosecutors from dragging Zimmermann into an overlit room and interrogating him without a lawyer present. Tell that to Washington, however. Although the law bans the export rather than the import of powerful encryption software, customs agents at Dulles Airport, eager for any excuse they could find, quizzed Zimmermann when he returned from Eastern Europe. An oft-zealous enemy of privacy, the Clinton Administration has even promoted the manufacture of encryption devices that would let Feds listen in on supposedly confidential phone calls. Washington is also spending billions of tax dollars to make telephone lines more susceptible to tapping.
Zimmermann, meanwhile, has been working on a phone-style piece of software. Used on the right computer with a $50 sound card and a $7 microphone, it would let people speak securely over the Internet or ordinary phone lines.
Bill Clinton’s snoops must love Zimmermann about as much as they enjoy static during wiretaps. Here’s a man who they fear could break the connection altogether. Many in Washington, especially FBI Director Louis Freeh, would love to see unauthorized encryption banned entirely, the real issue here. And Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has proposed to make it a crime to distribute scrambling programs by way of international nets if the Feds lacked the electronic keys to defeat them. The Grassley measure would even ban some software now classified as exportable.
Like it or not, however, Washington no longer can control the fate of industrial-strength encryption.
Far too many Americans—and Russians, Germans, Czechs, Iranians, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Japanese, Chinese, you name it—know about the technology. The Feds instead should focus on different law enforcement techniques, and on powerful computers to unravel the bad guys’ codes. But the Clinton people and their allies won’t budge. They keep dreaming of the mass use of D.C.-blessed hardware and software to let law enforcement people listen in on supposedly confidential phone calls. Just like the old Soviet KGB, the Feds think that bureaucracy can prevail over technology, and that government has a God-given right to force citizens to be snoop-friendly.
The saga of Phil Zimmermann is hardly the only indication that some Big Brotherism is alive and well in the United States—especially when one considers other outrages, such as the recent net.censorship jihad or the elitist copyright proposals that would crimp public debate.
In all fairness, the United States is less backwards on encryption matters than are countries such as France, which bans powerful cryptography for private use.[6.3] And certainly Bill Clinton isn’t a dictator. In fact, the trouble with him, at least at the personal level, is the opposite: He is too much of a wimp to resist civil liberties threats from the FBI, the National Security Agency, other bureaucracies, and the more maniacal of the “law-and-order” crowd on the Hill.
Whatever Clinton’s problem, though, his encryption policy is making him reviled among many skeptical young people in Generation Net, not to mention the baby boomers, who suffered lie after lie from LBJ and Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. A lifelong Democrat, I voted for Clinton. I might not again. His constitutional lapses, or at least those of his bureaucrats, just might help pave the way for true Orwellian scenarios in the United States and elsewhere.
So might the shameful war that a powerful Clinton appointee has waged against public libraries, one of society’s best defenses against Orwellian Ministries of Truth.
“Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong,” then, is an apt sub-title for this chapter. You’ll remember the basics of the novel 1984—bureaucrats tinkered with back issues of the London Times to suit the policies of the moment, brainwashed the proles of Oceania, and spied on most everyone with TV cameras. All had to obey the mythical Big Brother. The most vivid image from 1984 was a boot smashing again and again into a man’s face. In the era of mainframe computers bigger than overgrown Cadillacs, many critics of the Vietnam War invoked Orwell and similar pessimists. Wouldn’t pasty-faced drones in windowless rooms use the technology to keep dossiers on us?
Then microcomputers popped up. Suddenly good people could use bits and bytes to fight back against Big Brother. Amnesty International, for example, could keep databases documenting murder, torture, and other crimes by dictators. And then, via the Internet and other networks, Amnesty could spread the news around and marshal world opinion against the thugs. Other human rights groups and environmental organizations benefited, too, and soon most everyone agreed about high tech: George Orwell had been wrong. Progressives with unpopular ideas celebrated the new tools available to them. And conservatives didn’t disagree that Big Brother was dead; if microcomputers could nurture freedom and diversity, why worry so much about antitrust laws and other regulations? A New York think-tanker would eventually write a reverse 1984 in which hackers won over Big Brother.[6.4]
Meanwhile, an open government movement was growing on the Internet, along with efforts to use networks as an efficient conduit for services. Far from being Big Brotherish in all ways, Clinton’s people commendably put a wealth of official documents on the Net, everything from White House speeches to reports from the Agriculture Department. The states, too, acted. Californians could track down a complete set of laws and proposed laws on the Internet. North Carolinians could hook into an electronic job bank, indicate their desired kind of work, click on a map to designate a favored location, and watch jobs pop up. Oregonians could get fishing-and hunting-license information online.
Bureaucrats in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Finland, Austria, Poland, Japan, and a host of other countries went on the Net to one extent or another.
Even Singapore, hardly famous for civil liberties and freedom of information, took a few steps to open up. I was surprised and pleased to find on a government server a 1993 Wired article with the not-so-flattering title of “The Intelligent Island?” Like many countries, Singapore faced a dilemma. Would the country’s strict culture suffer if the masses were allowed access to the Net? Singapore had flogged an American teenager merely for vandalizing automobiles; imagine if authorities instead had caught him in a sex act with a local. The whip was in character; it was a source of local pride, not shame. And yet if Singapore didn’t truly open itself on the Internet, if it couldn’t provide a hospitable electronic environment to megaconglomerates, the country would fall behind nations with a freer flow of information.
“Most Singaporeans are little rule followers,” a local hacker told Wired. “They are used to being spoon-fed what they are supposed to know by the government.” He predicted that Singapore would turn into a “controlled information center. The government will try to suppress hackers.”[6.5] And yet the very distribution of the article—for all to see on a Web server, amid official government documents—told me that the Orwellian scenario was not a full certainty. If Singapore could ease up a little, there might yet be a little hope for the rest of the cosmos.
However, the need for some healthy paranoia remains, even if, yes, Orwell overstated his case. An Internet Central doesn’t exist for bureaucrats to shut down, of course; messages can arrive by way of many paths, and electronic mail if need be can travel over normal voice lines. But martinets of all ilks can’t resist the urge to censor or unplug. A government computer in Canada is rumored to be programmed to reject Anglo-Saxonisms as passwords, and I don’t doubt it. Would that all outrages were so funny.
Claiming software piracy, cops shut down the electronic bulletin boards of scores of Italian progressives. “In some places,” the activist Bernardo Parrella reported, “sleeping people were abruptly woken up facing machine guns.” The boards were part of FidoNet, a worldwide BBS system with electronic mail connections to the Internet. Significantly the police didn’t undertake similar harassment against the high-tech admirers of Hitler and Mussolini. The victims were liberal or left wing. Within a year, the Italian cops were back at it again, seizing computers, disks, books, diaries, and other materials from citizens suspected of anarchistic sympathies. This time the police made no pretense; the raids were clearly political.
Politicians and bureaucrats can be just as prickly about sex as about politics. In Singapore, prudes searched the hard disk of computer systems to see if the good citizens were enjoying the alt.sex newsgroups. And back in the States, Senator J. James Exon of Nebraska concocted a nutty scheme to ban “indecent” material from the public areas of the Net. 1984 once more came to mind. Big Brother loathed sex, as Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, knew all too well in carrying on an illicit affair with a female bureaucrat.
Jim Exon also hated sex—at least on the Net. I could appreciate his worries; did nine-year-olds really need to gawk at alt.sex.bestiality, or kiddie porn, or the next Brandy’s Babes? Exon, though, again and again, scrambled his facts. He relied partly on a breathless article that the Washington Post had run under the headline “Molesting Children by Computer.” Among other things, writer Sandy Rovner had advised parents to check their kids’ computers for files ending in “.BMP”. None other than the Microsoft Windows software, however, left.BMP files on hard drives—as a way to display images such as the corporate logo. Might Microsoft be a new Sodom?
“Obviously I had not researched the story enough,” Rovner admitted to her great credit. “I am new to the world of cyberspace.... I have a computer coach, but even he is behind on the Internet. Yes, I violated a cardinal rule of journalism—I didn’t know enough about what I was writing about. And I certainly wasn’t thinking censorship. Mea culpa. I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment, as all journalists are or should be.” And yet Exon cited “Molesting” on the Senate floor to justify his repressive, cyberspace-oriented change in the existing Communications Decency Act. “Argghh,” went Rovner.
Even more significantly, Exon, as noted earlier, failed to grasp the difference between the Internet and television. Children wouldn’t just flick on a computer and see a Madonna look-alike climaxing with a German shepherd. They would have to look for pornography. And the industry was ready to work on software, such as SurfWatch, to help parents keep their kids out of pre-designated areas of the Net.
Nothing would be foolproof or teen-proof, of course. Brilliant technologists had designed the Internet to survive 100-megaton H-bombs. “The Net,” said the hacker John Gilmore in an oft-repeated quote, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Parents’ best response would be at home. Mothers and fathers shouldn’t expect Uncle Sam to play nanny. As Steve Case, president of America Online, noted in connection with his company, parents should never turn their children loose in a city of millions of people. And I believed that the same held true of the Internet. Why should parents count on everything being constantly under control. Put the Net on a leash short enough to suit Exon, and the pornography would still persist—encrypted and on non-Net bulletin boards if nothing else—but legitimate users would suffer. Some Internet providers might even shut down to avoid legal liabilities. Moreover, in an era of global commerce, Washington shouldn’t put America at such a disadvantage. The losses in trade and jobs eventually would reach the billions, given the estimated hundreds of billions of Net-generated business.
“The only thing that censorship will do is drive the best and brightest members of the U.S. Internet community to countries where they can express themselves without risk of reprisal—and drain the United States of its valuable intellectual capital,” Interactive Publishing Alert’s Rosalind Resnick would later write.[6.6] “Personally I’d rather see a few four-letter words flicker across my computer screen every now and then than risk losing talented writers, artists and programmers to our economic competitors.” A mother of two, she counseled parents: “Keep the computer in a public area of the house, such as the den or living room, not in your kid’s bedroom. Warn your kids about the dangers of pedophiles and urge them never to give out their phone number or address to anyone they meet online.” That was a far better approach than Washington-mandated net.censorship, one that could work with the smartest hacker-child. Even the hyper Post article had played up similar solutions. But Jim Exon couldn’t keep his hands off the Net.
In a superb illustration of the dark side of electronic democracy, Exon held up a blue binder full of net.smut and, on the C-SPAN television network, argued for censorship of cyberspace. The vote in the Senate was 84 to 16—how could U.S. senators oppose “decency?” Given all the sex scandals on the Hill, it was scene worthy of Elmer Gantry, the Sinclair Lewis novel about a moralizing preacher who nonetheless indulges in sex and booze. The book, of course, ends with the Rev. Gantry promising, “We shall yet make these United States a moral nation.”
Around the same time the Senate was hoping to Disneyize the Internet, Bob Dole, the Republican majority leader, was protecting Bob Packwood by opposing a move to open the Ethics Committee hearings into the personal behavior of the oversexed senator from Oregon. As reported by the Washington Post, Packwood allegedly had grabbed and kissed scads of women—from campaign workers to female staff members, lobbyists, a hotel clerk, and a baby-sitter—“sometimes forcing his tongue into their mouth or fondling them.” Packwood, while not owing up to every particular, had apologized for being “terribly offensive to women.” And now he and Bob Dole had voted for Draconian net.morality? Dole had even teamed up with several other senators, including Charles Grassley, the champion of snoop-friendly software, to offer a cyber-censor bill worse even than Exon’s.
The ironies wouldn’t stop. None other than Donna Rice, whose escapades with ex-Senator Gary Hart had helped kill off his political career, was now praying and crusading against cyber smut—as a spokeswoman for an antiporn group.
Another irony hit me. Tobacco and liquor advertisements, which promote products far deadlier to children than any obscenities, were reaching the Net. The Internet Sleuth, for example, one of my favorite collections of Net indexes, had advertised Smokin’ Joe’s tobacco products over a period of at least several weeks. And yet the Exonians could not stop fixating on words and pictures, as opposed to a massive, proven threat that had killed millions of Americans. I didn’t want the government to ban even cancer-weed ads from cyberspace, lest the regulators go wild and try to make the Net TV-bland; but if Exon and allies had to crusade, they might as well be consistent about it. Perhaps as a true children’s advocate, Exon could even give back the more than $27,000 that his campaign had collected between January 1989 and December 1994 from the tobacco and liquor industries. That was just a fraction of his total take, but a statement just the same. Maybe the operators of “adult” bulletin board systems—who used the Net to post samples, the real source of the problem—could befriend Exon-style pols with a well-funded political-action committee. “PornoPAC”?
I wondered what would happen next if the net.censors won in the House of Representatives. Earlier, in chapter 4, I had quoted Peter Lewis of the New York Times as alluding to the “pencil-dicked geeks” who flamed him. Would Washington let NetWorld! go out over an Exonized Internet? This was the only time I had ever seen such language in e-mail from Lewis, a gifted professional. Society didn’t prevent a woodcarver from using a certain kind of wood just because hoodlums might buy some baseball clubs made from it and split each other’s skulls open. Why, then, draft legislation that so despicably intruded on writers’ work? And what about teachers and students of literature, including bright, stable teenagers under eighteen? Or readers who just loved good, expressive writing? Knowingly or not, the savages in the Senate could be banning even Ulysses from the public area of the Internet. Never mind the forthcoming age of electronic books; might Washington someday go on to suppress the paper editions from stores and libraries?
Quite correctly the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned of the folly of turning the public regions of the Internet into “the equivalent of the Children’s Room at the public library,” and forcing Netfolks to seek out “adult” areas. Get carried away on an Exonized Net, use the wrong word, and the Feds could fine you up to $100,000 and jail you for up to two years. Even in private e-mail you’d need to behave yourself: You could not harass anyone with an “obscene” remark or image, lest he or she report you. What if an ex-lover took innocent comments and put them in the wrong context? Tough luck. Sooner or later the courts would probably clean up after the politicians and toss out the censorship, but that would hardly matter to the many who suffered in the meantime.
In July 1995 the censorship debate was still at full blast. Just as Jim Exon had relied on the misleading Post story, so did his side brandish a sensationalistic Time magazine cover. A shocked, wide-eyed child gaped at “CYBERPORN,” as the headline described it “EXCLUSIVE: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” Out of character, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, one of the most Net-aware of all the reporters in the mass media, had relied on a flawed paper out of Carnegie Mellon University. The student perpetrator of the study, one Martin Rimm, had overgeneralized, and two professors at Vanderbilt disemboweled him with a 9,000-word rebuttal on the World Wide Web. If nothing else, the Rimm study had blurred the distinction between bulletin board systems and the Internet itself and also confused Usenet with the Net as a whole.
Carnegie Mellon investigated whether Rimm had violated people’s privacy. Most deliciously of all, however, from a Net perspective, he had written something else—a self-published novel with such picturesque terms as “rectum rocket.” Would that Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken had been around to chronicle the circus.
Over on the House side, Speaker Newt Gingrich sensibly let his libertarian side prevail and opposed Exon. I wasn’t surprised. How could Gingrich play nanny while railing in general against regulation and bureaucracy, especially when he himself had set up shop as a novelist? My fellow liberals, though, were amazed. It was as if they were watching the T-Rex in Jurassic Park gobble up a velociraptor that was about to enjoy a human snack.
Maybe the Exon-style proposals by now will have suffered the fate of the smaller dinosaur, but similar lunacy is bound to break out anew.[6.7] Among some on Capitol Hill, the urge to censor is as powerful as the passion for reserved parking places.[6.8]
If the censors do win, their narrow-mindedness may backfire in ways beyond the ones I’ve already described—and these risks will only grow in the future, as the Net becomes still more international. Puritanical countries such as Singapore might arbitrarily jail visiting Americans who, from the States, had made Internet postings deemed offensive by the standards of local dictators.[6.9] The possibilities are endless. A U.S. novelist passing through a Mideastern country could become the next Rushdie if the local ayatollahs deemed his online work offensive.
Clinton’s Feds hardly helped when they went jurisdiction shopping and prosecuted the owners of a California BBS for sex-related material that violated community standards in Tennessee. Applied internationally, the local-standards principle could send an American to a sword-wielding executioner someday. The Bill of Rights, alas, is just a U.S. phenomenon.
Exon You!
When the U.S. Senate passed Jim Exon’s net.censorship bill, the journalist Brock Meeks wrote a lead for the ages: “U.S. Capitol, Senate Gallery—It’s all over. Fuck it.” But what happens if net.censors prevail someday on the House side, too (if they haven’t already), and you can’t use the F word? Netfolks have a solution:
Just substitute the last name of the senior senator from Nebraska. Enemies and lovers can then say, “Exon,” to each other.
That’s obvious. But the gifted trolls at Bianca’s Smut Shack, spreading a post from the mythical “Ezra Pound Is Innocent Committee,” have actually promoted a whole new lexicon in honor of Exon and allies. For example:
Byrd: (noun) The posterior or hinderparts, specifically the anus.
Coats: (noun) Excrement, or as a verb to excrete.
Exon: (verb) To copulate with, the act of copulation.
Gorton: (noun) The female genitals, or specifically the vagina.
Gramm: (verb) To orgasm. Also colloquially used as a noun.
Heflin: (noun) The female secondary sexual characteristics.
Helms: (noun) The male phallus.
Specter: (noun) The clitoris.
However, a borderless Internet can also hinder the censorship crowd. If American bluenoses such as Exon tried to restrict an electronic Tropic of Cancer, for example, a U.S. publisher just might set up shop in countries with less infantile politicians. People in the States could then dial up the computer overseas.
Already the Net has made fools of martinets in the Canadian government. Ottawa tried to squelch newspaper accounts of a murder, claiming that the coverage would preclude a fair trial. So people in the States sent electronic care packages to their Canadian friends—articles from U.S. papers. Canadian officials banned a pulped-wood issue of Wired for attacking their stupidity; that was one of the biggest debacles of all, given the ease of dialing up electronic versions of the magazine, one of the planet’s most plugged-in publications.
Consider, too, the ramifications of anonymous servers, which strip names and other identifiers from messages, allowing Netfolks to circumvent legal bullying by governments and others. In 1995, the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles got Finnish police to raid a server in Helsinki that was posting anonymous exposés of this rather litigious organization. The server survived. But the cops forced Johan Helsingius, operator of the server, to reveal the name of a Church enemy who originated the messages. “Now users fear their secrets are at risk,” Time said of people using his computer service. Case closed on anonymous servers? Hardly.
Within weeks after the incident I read a note from a hacker telling how encrypted messages could wend their ways through chains of anonymous e-mailers in several countries, with the names of the senders remaining hidden unless most or all of the e-mailers broke under pressure. Yes, abuses are possible, such as the release of trade secrets, outright libels, forgeries, or the most vile and violent of pornography. But how much better to live out this future than one of the Orwellian variety. Tyrant-bashers in the Thirteen Colonies used the wizardry of their day, the printing press, to agitate against the Tories; now let’s hope that if Exonian politicians try to stifle the Net, enough hackers will have their most dangerous presses ready to go, the servers I’ve just described. Obsolete or not, the censors aren’t going to stop.
Other Big Brotherish urges have surfaced. While some Power People hope to be able to learn more about us by fighting PGP-style programs, they are stymieing our efforts to learn more about them. At the same time the Feds put online thousands of public documents and even the visage of Bill Clinton’s cat, some politicians on the Hill sought to weaken the Freedom of Information Act, which makes it easier to dig up dirt on public officials. Just as important, Clinton people in early 1995 were proposing new copyright laws that in effect would discourage the intelligent discussion of public issues on the Internet. It would be harder to share electronic newspaper clips. Even more disturbingly, Clinton’s copyright policy could menace our public library system in the future. Bruce Lehman, his czar of intellectual property, was coming across as Andrew Carnegie in reverse.
Carnegie is remembered as a Scot who grew rich off steel in the States and who encouraged people throughout the world to start libraries for all. He gave millions toward library buildings, with the understanding that the local taxpayers would finance their support. Carnegie wanted public libraries to be universities for the common man, and the metaphor holds up. Today, without paying for college or even for books, Americans can educate themselves on subjects ranging from microcomputer chips to medieval history, to Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on democracy, to the case for or against feminism or abortion or public broadcasting or capital punishment. That is life in the era of paper books.
If Lehman had his wishes, however, Americans would not be able to dial up copyrighted electronic library books from home by way of the Internet Instead they would have to tote around CD-ROMs and floppy disks.
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that, in the era of the Internet, the Lehman vision would be “the equivalent of requiring everyone who listens to music to buy 78 rpm shellac records. What will the children dial in to read? The collected speeches of Vice President Al Gore? And believe it or not, there’s also talk of the Postal Service getting involved in local public libraries through information kiosks.”[6.10] In effect the White House approach would jack up the price of independent, privately originated information, while making it easier to obtain Washington-blessed information.
The information kiosks led some librarians to think of noses and camel’s tents. For the Postal Service at one point said it would let local librarians and citizens use the kiosks to retrieve only designated categories of information, as opposed to, say, everything on the World Wide Web. On a 1 to 10 scale of Big Brotherism, the kiosk idea as originally proposed was an 8.5 or worse.[6.11] If the postal bureaucrats weren’t trying to be Big Brother in the strictest sense—and no, they weren’t—then they at least were unwittingly paving the way for him.
Worse, the Postal Service has talked of issuing tens of millions of “U.S. Cards” that would “mediate all government services and controls over citizens,” while at the same time an Internal Revenue Service official has proposed a system that would file our tax returns for us.[6.12] I hate both ideas. Rather than compiling Orwellian dossiers on citizens, governments should help us computerize via TeleRead-style programs so we can more easily do the “paperwork” ourselves by way of electronic forms. Investigators could audit the forms, but only under appropriate circumstances. How much better this would be—not just e-books, but electronic empowerment against bureaucracy—than the vision that Washington and other governments have in mind for us.
Perhaps the Lehman idea and the Postal and IRS plans will have been beaten back or rendered harmless by now. Whatever happens, though, it is clear that new technology may harm both privacy and democracy if our vigilance lapses.
The threat of electronic oligarchy, stanching the free flow of facts that intelligent nonmillionaires demand, is hardly unique to the States. In the United Kingdom, for example, The Times Higher Education Supplement has warned against a copyright regime that would be a paradise for read-o-meter companies but a nightmare to people valuing free libraries. Just like Lehman’s proposal in the U.S., the wrong laws in the U.K. could lead to a Copyright Gestapo; let’s hope that neither country will criminalize one of the prerequisites for democracy: curiosity.
Given the global nature of both encryption technology and copyright law, the whole world should be watching Washington’s policies. The Clinton Administration, after all, hopes to internationalize the same mindset that could send Phil Zimmermann to jail; in fact, many of the American export controls are in effect in other countries, raising the possibility that an Australian or a British hacker could end up someday in the same predicament. In the pages that follow I’ll tell about the battles that Zimmermann and his allies have fought with Washington.
You’ll read, too, of my fight for an alternative to the Lehmanesque copyright law. My little case history suggests that the White House is not so eager to listen to ordinary mortals who speak up on the Net. Clinton’s people would rather pander to the usual campaign contributors. So far at least, pious rhetoric notwithstanding, they have basically neglected the need to put the public library system online with free or low-cost books from the private sector. Video just might end up reigning even more supreme than it does today—at the expense of abstract thought and democracy. Winston Smith would not be happy.
PGP and the Fight for Privacy—and
Against Clipper—on the Internet
Father Bill Morton, an Anglican priest in Woodstock, New Brunswick, could take confessions via e-mail without violating his vows. Encryption software guarded the privacy of his communications. In Florida a bright teenager without any vices—but with a nosy mother—could protect her diaries. And in New York, an employee of a leading investment house could routinely guard his credit card number. The same software made it possible for thousands to use the Net for confidential business transactions. At the same time, democratic activists in the former Soviet Union would be able protect their messages if tyranny returns.
The name for this encryption package was PGP and by 1995 it was as much a cause as a program. Thousands had downloaded it off the Internet and other networks. Named in tribute to Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery on Garrison Keillor’s radio show, PGP stood for Pretty Good Privacy. PGP lived up to its name—people needed it. Part of the reason was the nature of the Net itself. A skilled hacker could intercept unencrypted e-mail more easily than on the regular commercial networks. Mail often passed through computers at a number of universities and companies before reaching its destination. Without question the best way to protect the contents of your outgoing mail was to scramble its message before you sent it into cyberspace.
PGP was also popular because its use showed that the Net would never accept Clipper chip encryption schemes—designed to make it easier for the government to snoop on citizens.
Not surprisingly, then, at the time I was writing this book, Phil Zimmermann was a hero to many on the Internet. His program meant dignity. It meant safer commerce on the Net. Other privacy protection programs existed, but his was most popular, making it all the more useful. So when the Feds threatened Zimmermann, many people correctly felt as if Washington were attacking them along the way. The irony was that the federal government’s policies against safe encryption could actually threaten world security and had already set back efforts on behalf of computer security.
In a sense the PGP story was part of a continuum, and not just because the Egyptians had scrambled messages four thousand years ago or because encryption had been a staple of Cold Warriors.
Even while growing up in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Phil Zimmermann had tinkered with secret codes. At around age ten he had learned Morse code, Braille, and, via lemon juice, invisible ink. By his teens he was building code wheels; at Florida Atlantic University, he kept up his passion for puzzles and secrets. He started out there in physics; switched to computer science; married; packed up for Boulder, Colorado, where he became a computer consultant; and thought of a move to New Zealand. Phil Zimmermann believed it would be safer, in the event of nuclear war, than Ground Zero countries.
Instead of leaving the States, however, Zimmermann decided to stay and help throttle back the military. Along with the astronomer Carl Sagan and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame—and hundreds of others—Zimmermann was arrested at testing grounds in Nevada. Soon his love of computers would be converging with his distrust of people in uniforms.
Zimmermann in the early ’80s was selling a gadget that plugged into an Apple II computer but used an 8088 chip just like the then-new IBM personal computer. This gadget was designed to allow people to keep their old Apple hardware and software while running new programs for the fast new chip. Zimmermann called his company Metamorphic Systems. A programmer from Arkansas saw a Metamorphic ad and called Zimmermann to pitch to him an encryption system that was too long to run on most machines. Would Zimmermann care to adapt the system to run on an 8088 chip? He would.[6.13]
RSA was the encryption method here. Named after its three originators—Ronald Rivert, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman—RSA was a virtually uncrackable form of public key encryption. So what did public key mean? Well, you didn’t have to worry about the wrong set of eyes seeing the jumble of letters and other characters that made up keys for messages transmitted to you. You could freely spread it around. Then someone who wanted to send something confidential to you didn’t have to contact you for a secret key known only to you. He could use your public key by way of his RSA software.
Simply put, the public key approach did away with a major problem: how to send descrambling tools over networks if the information itself wasn’t secured. People who didn’t know each other could trade public keys, then share secrets from the start. They could even use the same software to verify their identities with the help of trusted third parties, who “signed” the keys with sequences of their own. Imagine the many possibilities for allowing safe business transactions on networks between strangers. A lucrative business just might await Zimmermann if he added his own wrinkles.
With RSA, however, came a series of legal nightmares for Zimmermann. Starting work on his own software using RSA, he hadn’t any idea at the start that Rivert, Shamir, and Adleman would be claiming a patent on it.
The trio farmed their rights out to RSA Data Security and, eventually, Public Key Partners. Jim Bidzos, negotiating for RSA, in many ways stood out as a political and philosophical opposite of Zimmermann. Bidzos carried a Greek passport for business reasons but at the same time felt patriotic enough to have volunteered for the U.S. Marines. The way Bidzos tells the story (to Simson Garfinkel, author of PGP: Pretty Good Privacy), Zimmermann asked for a “free license” for use of RSA. “When I told him ‘No,’” Bidzos said, “he was really upset. He told me that he was behind on his mortgage payments and that he had invested years in writing this piece of software.” Bidzos said he suggested that Zimmermann try licensing the patent from a larger company.[6.14]
Zimmermann’s own side of the story differed starkly—in 1991 he wrote Jim Bidzos a letter saying that Bidzos and Ron Rivert had told him that “you would grant me a free license to make and sell products with your algorithm.”[6.15] A few years later he would note to the Wall Street Journal that he hadn’t sold PGP before his contract with ViaCrypt, one of RSA’s licensees.[6.16] He steadfastly maintained he had not broken any laws. Many on the Internet would have agreed, if for no other reason than that they considered software patents to be abominations. Without patents to limit them, many programmers felt they could be more creative. Their ethos was quite in line with the traditional Net ethos. The predecessor of the Internet, after all, hadn’t just been started to allow the Pentagon to survive nukes. It also existed to share knowledge.
By 1991 the patent issue wasn’t the only one dogging Zimmermann. The U.S. Senate was considering a law that would in effect ban Fedproof encryption here in the United States and potentially prevent him from selling the software on which he had been toiling for years now. Washington already forbade export of encryption abroad. The Cold War was winding down, but export controls were still draconian. Hadn’t we won World War II because our technology was better, because we had had nukes, because we could even snoop on secret code transmissions from the enemy? The export laws and the Pentagon put strong encryption equipment in the same category as munitions.
But what about at home? Not surprisingly, the FBI didn’t want the wrong technology to fall into the hands of dope rings, Mafiosi, and others planning or coordinating crimes. In 1991, then, perhaps at the Bureau’s request, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware inserted the following language into an omnibus crime bill: “It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.”
A Senate staffer assured civil libertarians that the measure would not ban strong encryption. Many disagreed. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, library groups, academics, and industry managed to get Washington to drop the offending language.
By then PGP was all over the Net. Smart lobbying, not the software, killed the Biden plan. But Zimmermann’s work was still a good, sound precaution against a relapse. Via bulletin boards and the Internet, a free version was circulating from one end of Planet Earth to the other, having gone overseas within a day of its release. In Zimmermann’s words, it spread “like thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind.” PGP reached Russia and scores of other countries. It wasn’t like nuclear weapons or mini-computers; you couldn’t stop a ship from loading or search the luggage of the suspicious. No, PGP just moved silently over the wires as hackers throughout the world shared Zimmermann’s craft. The way Zimmermann told it, however, he had not broken any of the export laws. And others supported him.
Jim Warren, founder of InfoWorld and a software man respected for his civic activism on the Net, would later recall that Zimmermann gave PGP to an acquaintance named Kelly Goen, who “studiously” limited the uploads to electronic bulletin boards and Internet sites within the United States. Warren was aware of the uploading process while it happened. “The whole idea was to provide it to Americans,” he would remember, “so Americans could have personal privacy and security” in case the U.S. Senate tried to bottle up decent encryption.[6.17]
The National Security Agency—the secret agency that dealt with many of the best cryptographers and dominated the encryption scene in the United States—did not complain formally when PGP first hit the Net. And Zimmermann fretted. Had his baby failed to safeguard privacy enough to worry the National Security Agency?[6.18]
Back at RSA Data Security, Jim Bidzos wasn’t thrilled when PGP appeared with RSA technology. He maintained that PGP violated both patent and export law, and at his urging, some commercial services and universities banished PGP from their servers.[6.19] Legally, Bidzos may or may not have been justified. But once again the hacker ethic prevailed on the Net. Not everyone online took Zimmermann’s side, but by now he was a serious hero to a group of encryption boosters known as “Cypherpunks,” the name that a magazine writer had once given them as a joke.
Many of the Cypherpunks were libertarians, or variants thereof, and they believed in perfect privacy. The punks were to encryption laws what the National Rifle Association was to restrictions on firearms.
Along with scores of corporations, not just people whom the White House might dismiss as fringe, the Cypherpunks wanted to use encryption to protect digital money. They envisioned a society in which bits and bytes—representing cash—could pass from person to person without Party A knowing Party B’s identity. The Cypherpunks were smart, and often very right. Frustrating for others, but rewarding for them, they tested the tolerance of the most ardent Voltaireans.
Tim May was among the punk leaders. He had once worked for Intel, the chip maker. As Steven Levy put it in an article for Wired, May had “’retired’ at 34 with stock options sufficient to assure that he would never flip a burger for Wendy’s.” He in some ways came across as the Internet’s Abbie Hoffman, say, or Jerry Rubin. Baby boomers will forever recall these bearded crazies of the 1960s who ran a pig for president and protested materialism by going to Wall Street and scattering money around.
May did not mind getting rich. But he had something of his own to scatter in cyberspace. It was a series of taunts that appeared at the bottom of the many messages he posted to the Net: “Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments.” If Washington had rigged up a machine to scan the Net and measure people by levels of subversion, May would have blown out all the lights and needles. And one of his programs of choice, as advertised amid the other subversion? PGP, what else?
Timothy May and other Cypherpunks over the next few years would tap out thousands of messages, exchanging technical tips, dreaming up new forms of crypto madness, rallying support for encryption and for Phil Zimmermann. This was a whole subculture with a language and an ethics code of its own. Sometimes the Cypherpunks fought among themselves. Later a punk in Colorado “spoofed” Timothy May and, using May’s Internet address, posted malarkey all over the Net. But true to his anarchistic leanings, May did not press for the dissident’s expulsion from the punk mailing list.
Back in November 1992 the punks may have breathed a little easier. George Bush lost the election. No longer would the president be a Republican, a World War II veteran, and a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bill Clinton was a baby boomer. He had spoken out against Vietnam, he had avoided the draft, he liked Fleetwood Mac, he played a saxophone, and his vice presidential candidate had made a name as a loyal supporter of advanced computer networks. So perhaps the Feds would back off on Zimmermann. At the very least maybe the security bureaucracy would face a long delay while the Clinton people puzzled out what to do.
Clinton’s sax and the rest did not count, however; in encryption matters he might as well have been a ninety-nine-year-old fan of Lawrence Welk. Within just a few weeks of the inauguration, two men from the U.S. Customs Department were quizzing Phil Zimmermann. According to the book PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, they said Jim Bidzos had described PGP as a rip-off of the RSA approach.
Following the Zimmermann interview, Customs pressed ahead both on the patent front and on export law issues. Zimmermann, however, denied having swiped PGP from anyone, and he said patent matters should be between him and Bidzos, not between him and Customs. At the time the Feds told him he was not the target of an investigation.[6.20]
Soon, however, two subpoenas suggested that Washington was still quite eager to justify any and all of the Cypherpunk’s paranoia.
One subpoena went to Austin Code Works, which sold public-domain software that contained some of Zimmermann’s work. Washington struck out. It had been seeking evidence of overseas sales, and Austin lacked any in this case. Zimmermann hadn’t even sold Austin his work directly.[6.21]
Washington was more lucky at ViaCrypt, a company in Arizona, where the subpoena stuck. Zimmermann had just given ViaCrypt a PGP license. Now he indeed would be under investigation. In PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Simson Garfinkel observed that RSA Data did not win similar honors even though it had placed encryption-related software on the Internet. Nor did Internet providers such as Netcom, which stored PGP on computers that people overseas could reach.[6.22] Bill Clinton’s people were letting foreigners dial up this export-controlled software again and again. Needless to say, the bullying of Zimmermann still made the industry nervous—who was next?
As if the Clinton White House hadn’t sinned enough, it was about to embarrass itself in a high-tech version of the Bay of Pigs. That’s how critics regarded a nitwit scheme to control encryption and discourage the public from using good software such as PGP. The Bay of Pigs, a cuckoo plan for the invasion for Cuba, was a legacy that had come to John F. Kennedy from the Eisenhower Administration. The odds would have delighted no one but a masochistic squad of kamikaze pilots. Castro crushed a small band of Cuban exiles who showed up on Washington’s behalf at the Bay of Pigs. Like the debacle on the Cuban beaches, the Clipper chip was really another Republican leftover. The national security apparatus hadn’t been able to con the Bush Administration into implementing Clipper before the election. But Bill Clinton himself lacked the guts to resist the NSA.
“No Such Agency,” as Washington wags called it, operated out of Fort Meade, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps explaining its fondness for assigning nautical names to encryption plans. Many billions of tax money had gone into the NSA over the years. Thousands worked for it. And they weren’t just interested in the survival of the United States. They wanted job security. Clipper was going to be a meal ticket. Just as some wishful planners had deluded themselves into thinking that a small band of men could tame Cuba, now the NSA was telling Bill Clinton’s people that it could use Clipper to control the world of encryption.
All those irksome constitutional details aside, the NSA’s plan might actually have made sense once. The people at Fort Meade had done the United States a service by staying ahead of Soviet encryption in the era of tail fins and air raid drills. But today such an approach was about as appropriate as a backyard bomb shelter. As far back as the 1970s, two men outside NSA’s control had invented public key encryption, which, as noted before, was a good way for strangers to exchange secure messages and authenticate their identities from the start. Whitfield Diffie was a mathematician, computer scientist, and encryption expert. Martin Hellman was an electronic engineer. Both were grouchy about a computer system whose users had to entrust their passwords to the systems managers. So they came up with public key encryption—the same principle that was behind the RSA approach used in PGP, and now available from Boston to Brisbane.
Even Bill Clinton couldn’t repeal the past. Just as the Kennedy Administration had justified Castro’s paranoia, so the Clinton Administration worked hard to do the same with that of the Cypherpunks. This time Washington wouldn’t deploy humans. Instead it wanted to rely on a little computer chip that Steven Levy described as “just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket.”
“Tumor-sized” might have been more apropos. Clipper, in fact, was a tumor of sorts.
In a human body a tumor serves itself, not its host. And that’s what Clipper was supposed to do. The Clinton Administration wanted to license Clipper to the private sector, where it would show up in millions of telephones and dominate the market—displacing future encryption schemes based on technologies such as PGP. Washington hoped to make Clipper too cheap to resist and to provide a federal market for Clipper products. AT&T and the rest could put Clipper in telephones, and then, supposedly, dope peddlers couldn’t peddle and terrorists couldn’t terrorize without the Feds having a chance to intercept their conversations. The government would also work to make computers snoop friendly.
That was the scenario. Like tumors these government-issue chips were to spread—not only in the States but also overseas. Eventually the Feds would also announce plans to make Clipper available through software, rather than just through the chip. Whatever the incarnation of Clipper, though, Washington would play down the fact that it would corrode the country’s constitutional right to privacy. America’s Winston Smiths would have to trust a government that had covered up an unhealthy number of deaths from nuclear fallout, given us Watergate, and illegally spied on thousands of Americans.
An old friend of mine, Margaret “Peggy” Engel, a former Washington Post reporter who ran and still runs a respected journalism foundation, was among the snoops’ victims. Bureaucrats got the phone company to turn over a list of Peggy’s calls even though she had not committed a crime. It seems a freelance writer had managed to dig up some inside information on the failure of the IRS to collect several billion dollars in back taxes from corporations that had profited from currency hedging. This same writer later applied for a grant from Engel’s organization, the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Vindictively, the Feds snooped on Engel, too, simply because the writer had made a call to Engel’s office for an application for a fellowship.
So it went. Because Peggy and I talked from time to time, the Feds had also tracked her telephone and computer calls to me. They acted against her under a casually issued court order signed not by a judge but by an assistant deputy clerk—one of more than 20,000 such actions issued in the Washington area in 1992. “It’s like getting your parking ticket stamped,” she told me. “That’s the level of scrutiny that these things get. And the number keeps growing. I think it’s because of the increase in fax machines. I think agencies are using it on their employees to find out who talked to the press or Congress.” And now the Feds wanted to license the manufacture of a chip that would spill our secrets on demand.
Granted, the Feds claimed that in the Clipper’s case, one bureaucrat could not spy alone. The official line was that people from both the Treasury Department and the National Institute for Standards and Technology would have to agree before an interception could take place. If they did, the electronic keys would go over the wires to local police or others needing the tap. All this would require a court order. Some Clipper boosters might well have argued, “We’re talking about strict controls.” But Peggy’s experience still showed the potential the Feds had for promiscuous Big Brothering, especially since both the Treasury and the Institute were within the Executive Branch.
Later the front pages would sprout articles about bureaucrats reading the supposedly confidential tax information of their neighbors or of movie stars. Yes, the tax people tightened up their operations to avoid repeats. But supposedly the IRS had been secure in the first place.
The NSA might itself prove capable of some nasty twists. What if it could call up escrow keys from a database despite all talk to the contrary? Or suppose it had a database of its own to unlock all the keys? Would it really want to go to court for authority to snoop? In PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Garfinkel wisely noted that Washington would let Clipper chips be exported. And the NSA was allowed to spy on nondomestic conversations. So he logically wrote: “If Clipper-equipped radios were being used by Iraqi fighter pilots, the NSA would want to listen in. Although the NSA hasn’t said so publicly, it is doubtful that the agency would jeopardize national security in order to play along with the escrow system.” The NSA might even work out secret deals with the company making the chips, to assure that the results didn’t frustrate the snoops.
Adding to the quite-justified paranoia was the fact that only the dumbest of criminals would rely on Clipper to protect privacy. So what was the point of using technology meant to turn the bad guys into jail bait? Why bother to create it in the first place?
Washington countered that criminals would want Clipper phones to talk securely to the world at large. And I suspected that, yes, they indeed would buy some equipment with Clipper. But for plotting a $10 million dope shipment or a terrorist attack, the black hats would quickly learn to use other scrambling systems; in fact, they could run them on top of Clipper so the Feds still got only gibberish. Even if the Feds banned PGP-style protection, criminals would spread the right hardware and software among themselves. Like drugs or sex, this would be a fine opportunity for entrepreneurial lawbreakers.
The underworld might even sell Clipper-crackers that could make criminals just as good at snooping on America’s Winston Smiths as the Feds would be. High-tech hoods could call their new business Credit Card Numbers Unlimited. Small wonder that Clipper appalled many security specialists.
At the same time, experts for the software industry raised questions about whether the Clipper chip could penetrate the market and, if so, to what extent? Any way you looked at it, the plan was crazy. If Clipper couldn’t catch criminals (and did everyone in the White House really swallow this bilge?), then who was left? People like Peggy Engel, her muckraking grantee, and me. At least part of the time, we would need Clipperish encryption if somehow it surprised the experts and did catch on; our banks might not let us use anything else. How much better if a PGP-style alternative were the standard instead.
Technically, Clipper was just as scary as it was politically and in law-enforcement terms. Scientists and mathematicians loved to dissect encryption schemes in academic papers, and keep checking and rechecking them over the years for flaws. But Clipper’s designers withheld the information that outside experts could use to poke holes in the concept. Unknowns indeed existed. A well-connected scientist at AT&T would later find a significant weakness in the network version of Clipper, a way to cripple the snoop-on-me-please feature.
All in all, Clipper actually emerged as a world security threat. Washington was harming electronic commerce by promoting a crippled and questionable program for encryption. The Administration in effect was delaying the adoption of truly comprehensive security standards for the international community, especially business people outside the States. The standards were on the way, but not as fast as if Clinton’s people hadn’t wreaked havoc on the private sector by way of moronic export controls.
“We need strong cryptography for mainstream society on the Net,” Zimmermann told me. “It’s like making locks. It’s as if I were in the business of selling very, very strong locks.” He reminded me of the case of Kevin Mitnick, who was arrested for breaking into scads of computers and stealing oceans of valuable information. The FBI chased him for a couple of years. “Isn’t it ironic that this guy was able to inflict such damage because our systems are so insecure?” Zimmermann asked. “Our own government suppressed the availability of strong encryption technology. They brought it on themselves, or, I should say more accurately, they brought it down on us.”
At the same time, through Clipper and through efforts against PGP and other effective software, Washington in effect was lending moral support to dictatorships. Clipper used a technique called key escrow. That was a nice way of saying you had to trust Uncle with your secrets since he had a copy of your key. But what if Uncle weren’t Uncle Sam? What if he instead were Uncle Saddam?
“You may have the Saddam Husseins of the world, the North Koreans, being able to hang on to power,” Zimmermann said, “by using this technology to oppress their own political opposition.”
Clipper could do harm even in countries friendly to the United States. Washington wanted them to adopt Clipper-style standards. And at the very least the Clinton Administration was encouraging these governments to demand the keys to whatever encryption schemes their citizens used. That could boomerang mightily against American companies doing business outside the States. Phil Zimmermann recounted to me a rumor he’d heard about a giant entertainment conglomerate that had negotiated a huge deal in France; its executives found the French to be uncannily prescient about the Americans’ tactics. The espionage rumor might or might not be accurate. But fear of French spying against Yanks was common enough for many people from U.S. firms to be very careful about what they said on the telephone, or where they left their suitcases. The French had prohibited strong cryptography. And the Clipper plan, while not a ban on decent encryption, certainly deprived American companies of the moral foundations they needed to protest the French law. In the long run a Clipper arrangement might indeed pave the way for a ban in the United States itself against PGP-strength products, and already it could prop up such moves abroad, to the great disadvantage of American companies with secrets to protect.
In another way, too, Clipperish approaches would make U.S. companies less competitive. American software firms wanted to build encryption into spreadsheets, databases, word processors, and other major applications. If the Feds bullied them into using Clipper, then their products would be less attractive than those of rivals. Consider the market for software to store sensitive material such as medical records; would a European hospital favor a crippled American program over a German program with robust encryption?
That wasn’t so abstract a question. An engineer from the giant Siemens conglomerate in Germany told me later that he was working on medical software, and he expected his employer to clobber U.S. rivals if their products used a questionable, Clipperish encryption scheme. What’s more, crypto mavens were common enough overseas for even American companies to think about hiring them in the former Soviet Union to bypass the export controls. If it happened, it would be the ultimate statement on the absurdity of both the controls and Clipper.
Not surprisingly, a great hue and cry against Clipper came from the American software industry, and meanwhile the hackers themselves were waging full-scale warfare against it on the Net. Thousands of Netfolks participated in the anti-Clipper activities of groups such as the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the first group to sound the tocsin.
In 1994, however, as clueless as ever, the White House officially endorsed Clipper—no ifs ands or buts—and made arrangements for the production of the chips. “Encryption is a law-and-order issue since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution,” Al Gore said in justifying Clipper. “It also has huge strategic value. Encryption technology and cryptoanalysis turned the tide in the Pacific and elsewhere during World War II.” But exactly. People on the Net thought that Clipper was just plain brain-dead as a way to protect security, a triumph of bureaucrats over techies.
You even didn’t have to be on the Net to hate the tumor chip. At the request of Time and CNN, Yankelovich Partners polled 1,000 Americans; did they think that private phone calls mattered more than wiretap powers for police? Four-fifths opposed Clipper. Newspapers churned out editorial after editorial, and with good cause: Imagine the joys of trying to expose government corruption if the biggest crooks on the public payroll might someday be able to monitor your conversations whenever they wanted.
Quite properly, then, most citizens did not trust Washington. Hackers wore sweatshirts that played on a slogan that Intel used to promote computers using its chips. Alluding to Clipper, the sweatshirts read, “Big Brother Inside.” Tens of thousands of people on the Net lent their names to an anti-Clipper petition originated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist who cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told how snoopy Feds would have to kill him and pry his private PGP key from his “cold, dead fingers.” Through it all, meg after meg of messages went out over the Net—everything from sophomoric diatribes to carefully reasoned pleas for anti-Clipper letters to local members of Congress.
After questioning some arguments against Clipper, one man found himself vilified all over the Net, complete with a lie that he had made a homosexual advance against a hacker. The privacy movement was supposed to defend Americans’ right to dissent, not enforce its own form of alternative orthodoxy. I felt grumpy, then, about the smear. But that was a relatively rare incident; typical opposition to Clipper was passionate but high minded.
Except for the smear described above, the meanest statements came not from Clipper foes but from Stewart A. Baker, a PGP critic who was about to return to private practice after serving as chief counsel for the National Security Agency. Wired commendably let Baker give his side. The magazine did so “with all the enthusiasm,” Baker wrote, “of Baptist ministers turning their Sunday pulpits over to the Devil.”
Understandably Baker began by denying that Clipper would “create a brave new world of government intrusion into the privacy of Americans.” Baker said that key escrow would merely maintain Washington’s rights to do wire-taps as presently authorized. That was a wrong; the government actually was going out of its way to make us all tap ready, as if we were back in the old Soviet Union in the KGB era. But at least in this case Baker wasn’t maligning the Net. The nastiness oozed out later when his article took on “Myth Number Two: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future liberty.” Baker shrugged off such reasoning as “the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn’t go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide—and kind of endearing—streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world.” Then he let loose against PGP-style programs itself. “Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow.” Presumably thousands of PGP boosters were hunkered down making bombs in Manhattan basements.
Having tried to ignore the legitimate uses of PGP by thousands of peaceful, law-abiding citizens, Baker then told how “a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California, had a PGP-encrypted diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country.” Oh. So between overthrowing the government, PGP users would be seducing eight-year-olds. Baker huffed that “if unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this.”
Poor Baker. If he’d really wanted to do his attacks right, he could have quoted with full grimness the writings that Timothy May, the Cypherpunk, had posted on the Net in the spirit of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
May was the author of a long, detailed, sometimes even Talmudic list of frequently asked questions and answers on cryptography and the fight for privacy, which might or might not have been on the Net at the time Baker was writing his Wired piece. But if not, he could have found equivalent thoughts among May’s many postings to the Cypherpunks’ rather public list. Laying out the case against strong encryption programs in the PGP vein, May conjectured that they could make killing for hire much more practical. People using encryption could rely on trusted agents who dispensed anonymous digital cash. “There are some ways to reduce the popularity of this Murder Incorporated system,” May said, and kindly assured readers that he had been thinking about them.
For good measure May noted that racists such as the Aryan Nation were using encryption, and “other kinds of terrorists” might be relying on it as well. “Expect more uses in the future, as things like PGP continue to spread.” As if that weren’t enough to pull bureaucrats’ chains, May said: “Many of us are explicitly anti-democratic and hope to use encryption to undermine the so-called democratic governments of the world.”
May, ever the idea juggler, also weighed in with some powerful arguments for PGP that appealed strongly to a stodgy old Democrat (small “d” as well) like me. Even the Feds should have grasped them. “Could strong crypto be used for sick and disgusting and dangerous purposes?” May asked. And then he answered himself: “So can locked doors, but we don’t insist on an ‘open door policy’ (outside of certain quaint sorority and rooming houses!). So do many forms of privacy allow plotters, molesters, racists, etc., to meet and plot.” Whatever May was, anarchist, libertarian, objectivist, or nothing, he was making more sense in those three sentences than Baker could have in a 1,000 essays.
After May signed up for Cyberia, a legally oriented list, he was one of the favorite nonlawyers there, winning friends even among those who disagreed with his politics. In one limited way he may have been more threatening to Washington than Hoffman or Rubin, for, rather than just ranting and raving and putting on a good show, he could communicate all too cogently with members of the establishment. At the same time the Feds were fixating on Zimmermann, May casually told the lawyers how he moved in and out of the country without letting Washington veto his speeches on encryption. In effect his gleeful confession made mockery of the laws. If D.C. couldn’t even control a traveler—there in flesh and blood—how could it monitor electrons speeding over the phone wires?
“I myself just presented a paper on ‘Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities’ in Monte Carlo,” May told the cyberlawyers, at least one of whom was an attorney from the Justice Department. “I described algorithms, methods, etc., and was never asked or instructed to submit to the Men in Black in D.C.” He was even carrying around “several gigabytes of code, essays, programs.” But never was he “ever stopped, questioned, or searched. Only upon landing in San Francisco was I asked to state my business overseas. I said I was meeting with cryptographers from around the world! This was met with confusion by the twenty-two-year-old Customs officer; but after asking if any of them were from Russia or Iraq, and I told him I had no idea if there were or not, he waved me through.” May said most U.S. cryptographers “just shrug and ignore the possibility that our papers may be illegal to present outside the U.S.”
His observations came as the Electronic Frontier Foundation was trying to resolve matters in a more tidy way. It was sponsoring a lawsuit to prevent Washington from restricting the spread of encryption-related writing and software. Quite correctly the EFF argued that the encryption laws were an “impermissible prior restraint on speech, in violation of the First Amendment.” An EFF victory, needless to say, could nuke the government’s case against Zimmermann.
With Hooverian tenacity, as if Phil Zimmermann were Dillinger or a godfather, Washington kept up its harassment and even escalated it in some ways. Jim Warren saw this happen firsthand. He had asked to testify several years ago in Zimmermann’s defense, but the authorities ignored his request. Then in 1995 he had published op-ed pieces in San Jose and San Francisco papers, in which he throttled the FBI and NSA for getting in the way of the best possible security on the Net. In the wake of the Mitnick break-ins, he had accused the Feds of “endangering millions of innocent citizens and law-abiding businesses that use the Net or cell phones, in order to protect their ability to monitor the few who might be guilty of something.” Almost immediately two U.S. Customs agents favored Warren with a surprise visit to his house and quizzed him about Zimmermann and PGP. “When they began the interview,” he said, “they handed me a subpoena that said I was ‘COMMANDED to appear and testify before the Grand Jury of the United States District Court’ in San Jose.“[6.23]
“Who says government isn’t responsive,” Warren quipped.
He said this in a folksy newsletter sent to hundreds of people on the Net. Its well-earned name was Government Access; he had been the main organizer of a successful campaign to get California to put legislative information on the Internet for free. As much as anyone he was trying to work within The System. Yet he was ever skeptical toward “Congress Critters.” Again and again Warren’s newsletter in effect depicted a Washington that could be Torylike in its contempt toward Netfolk.
Warren didn’t just write of the well-publicized threats like the Exon bill, or the Clinton Administration’s prosecution of a couple in California because their sex-oriented BBS did not come up to Bible Belt community standards in Tennessee, or the Zimmermann case itself. Warren also wrote of obscure people such as a Berkeley-area hacker who, enraged by restrictions on encryption and by other actions in the vein of King George’s Stamp Act, had fled to Sweden.
“Sweden is no paradise,” the expatriate told Warren via e-mail, “but I don’t ever worry that the government is going to break into my home. I know that I’ll be able to run my BBS, maintain all the contacts I’ve developed over the years, and continue to use the various nets without fear of Uncle Sam attacking me. So now I’m trading in my U.S. passport for one that is a lot less threatening to me and my PC.” Warren added: “This is the second former American I have known who has done this for exactly these reasons!” I remembered a hacker libertarian who had been hoping to construct an island in the Caribbean, beyond the reach of technophobic politicians.
Warren was disappointed enough with Washington to tell the Net: “I’m beginning to feel like a German Jew in 1935.” He didn’t just hate Clipper and the harassment of Zimmermann. On top of everything else, Washington had recently passed a digital telephone bill that “would make Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s Watergate team, and J. Edgar Hoover drool on their bibs.” The project would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars over the years—all this to make the phone system more tappable, out of fear that crooks might otherwise forward phone calls to bugfree locations. Washington was actually setting aside more money for snooping than for electronic libraries. And now Warren feared that the Feds someday would ban encryption outright.
Beyond D.C.’s computer-related stupidities, he loathed the way the Feds played fast and easy with the Constitution on matters such as drug law enforcement. Agencies, for example, could keep money and equipment taken from suspects and use them for their own purposes, thus giving police “a profit motive” to abuse Americans’ rights.
“No doubt,” Warren said, “many in Germany told that nation’s Jews, ‘It’s not that serious’ and ‘It’s just a phase—it’ll pass’ as they disarmed the citizens in the name of law and order only a few years before filling the camps and ovens that somehow good, law-abiding Germans just never knew about until after the war. If we don’t watch out, our government’s cure for ‘crime’ will become even more dangerous than the illness. And this time, I don’t think Sweden will be a safe haven.”
Clearly Warren was a long, long way from the optimism of Orwell’s Revenge, the book in which Big Brother lost to the hackers.
I doubted that the United States was quite as Oceania-like as Jim Warren obviously believed, and his own German parallel might be stretching it. Stamp Act parallels did, however, fit. An old, ignorant, Torylike order wanted to pass laws to contain the new, and I could envision an increasing number of ugly confrontations between bureaucrats and Netfolk. Baker, the ex-NSA man, hadn’t hesitated in the least to come up with his wacky characterizations of Clipper foes. To the D.C. policy elite, we on the Net were fair pickings.
All the hype about the Information Superhighway notwithstanding, most of the Feds didn’t feel quite as at home on computer networks as billed. Most Congress members in mid-1995 still lacked public e-mail addresses.
Meanwhile, the Net was catching on among millions of younger Americans who surfed freely, while their elders could barely master commercial networks such as CompuServe. By way of Clipper and blatantly anti-network copyright proposals, the White House was kissing off all too many within Generation Net.[6.24]
A further embarrassment was the contrasting enlightenment of some Republican conservatives, who many Democrats on the Net might have dismissed entirely in the past. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, didn’t just show up on CompuServe as a visitor. He personally logged on again and again and even met his wife there. He might not be on the Net itself, but he was much more at ease with the technology than were the majority of the liberals on the Hill. Meanwhile, the most powerful conservative of all, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, spoke out against the Exon amendment. William Buckley, the noted conservative journalist, was a major backer of my proposal for a decentralized national library system online. And the conservative writer George Gilder, while all too zealous at times about free markets, had made some of the most prescient predictions on the direction in which the technology was headed.
Too many Democrats were TV-centric, while Gilder believed that computers would be the new entertainment medium, prevailing over television. Sales figures proved him right. More Americans bought desktops computers in 1994 than purchased color televisions, and it was only a matter of time until they logged onto computer networks and worried about their privacy there. And here were Clinton and Gore pushing Clipper with more ardor than they could summon up for well-stocked electronic libraries for all.
Of course, not everybody on the Democratic side was hopeless, and many Republican law-and-order types loved Clipper, the Bush leftover. Also, these same politicians might well applaud the Clinton Administration’s anti-Net copyright proposals, not understanding all the undertows that could ultimately drag property rights under. But at least they hadn’t enlisted civil libertarians and populists in their campaigns to the extent that Bill Clinton had. I’d never have voted for the man if I’d known in advance about Clipper, the harassment of Zimmermann, and the antediluvian copyright policies. Bush in some ways might have been preferable. Not knowing the difference between a potato chip and a silicon chip, he would have done much less damage. A smarter, more principled Democrat than Clinton could pick up the pieces in ’96.
Clinton’s Justice Department showed a brazen and bizarre lack of fairness toward Zimmermann. Until the statute of limitations expired—and that was fuzzy, even to lawyers—the Feds might just let him dangle. Without finding Zimmermann guilty of anything, or even charging him, Washington in a sense was already leveling penalties. He had to spend hours and hours away from his regular consulting business to work on his case.
Total costs might reach $300,000 if the prosecutors decided to act. Even if lawyers donated their time—and Zimmermann might enjoy the services of some noted attorneys outraged by the threat to civil liberties—there would be the burden of telephone costs, travel, and hotels. Appeals for donations went up in such areas of the Usenet as talk.crypto.politics, comp.org.eff.talk, and, of course, alt.security.pgp. People could pay by credit card, encoding their numbers via PGP.[6.25]
In the end, no matter what happened to Zimmermann, the real victory might be in the marketplace. And there Clipper was losing. AT&T and a chip maker named VLSI Technology came out with a chip that would challenge even the NSA’s supercomputer. Given a choice between that and Clipper, who’d want the latter? Even before then, in fact, few customers were going for Clipper-based equipment.[6.26] In the end it looked as if Washington would resort not to a chip but to continued pressure on U.S. corporations to make available the key schemes of more secure plans. And even then, I hoped, the industry would balk. The more such foolishness became a habit here, the less protected would be American companies abroad, as people outside the States followed Washington’s example.
Some of the biggest Clipper haters, meanwhile, were overlooking their differences to unite against the tumor chip. Jim Bidzos’ company had already granted a license for the basic technology to ViaCrypt, which, at least in the latter’s opinion, left it free to sell a commercial version of PGP. And this past action may have been a door opener in a way for Phil Zimmermann. PGP was no longer so much of an outlaw program in the eyes of many, and businesses felt they could use it and get technical support. Beyond that, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whence much of the RSA technology had come, were sick of all the patent wars. They just wanted to see solid encryption in use. And Bidzos, however much he quarreled with Zimmermann, was himself determined that the Feds not control encryption. The compromise could go a long way toward enshrining RSA as at least an informal world standard, and thwarting RSA’s biggest competitor, the NSA.
And so Bizdos and colleagues let PGP be used for noncommercial purposes as long as the newer versions were incompatible with the older ones that lacked the blessing of RSA and Public Key Partners. Of course that still didn’t solve the hassles of securing international commerce with a truly strong encryption standard with which the U.S. government felt comfortable. But even if PGP-style products weren’t official, they were murdering Clipperish schemes before snoop-ready chips and programs could take root. The world’s governments might well have to join countries like France and try to ban strong encryption.
But could they? Too many people in too many countries were already using software such as PGP. Hackers proudly included their public PGP keys—those weird combinations of letters and numbers—at the ends of their messages or told how people could obtain them. PGP keys were becoming status symbols. PGP wasn’t yet built into popular e-mail programs such as Eudora for easy use, so, if nothing else, the keys indicated a certain level of technical expertise. They were the new vanity plates of the dataways. PGP was even becoming a small industry; for example, you could shell out $20 and officially register your key with a company in Palo Alto, California, called SLED. And then people receiving messages from you would know they were really from you.
SLED required a mailed or faxed driver’s license or passport, or a preprinted personal check. This wasn’t the best proof of identity, but it would at least let Netfolks spot obvious forgeries immediately. If nothing else, you could “register” your key with friends who were well known and well trusted on the net.
With or without formal registration, more and more Netfolks felt lost without their PGP. Father Bill Morton, the Anglican priest mentioned earlier, the one who used PGP to accept confessions over the Net, wrote a parody:
It’s one for the money,
Two for the show,
Three to get ready,
Now go, cat, go!
But don’t you step on my PGP.
You can do anything, but lay off my PGP.
Responding to a query I’d posted in several encryption-related newsgroups, he explained in an e-mail why PGP meant so much to him. Confessions were just part of the story:
In the history of Anglican pastoral care, there is a strong tradition of the use of the letter as a means of spiritual guidance. Actually this tradition goes deep into the roots of the Catholic Church. Some of the books regarded as “spiritual classics” are compilations of correspondence between a person and their spiritual director. Until the advent of PGP, e-mail was not a suitable place for such correspondence. It’s one thing to have your correspondence published 100 years after the fact; it’s quite another to run the risk of having your personal thoughts posted to a Usenet newsgroup or read by the sysop of a BBS. Now they know that even if they hit the wrong button and send their e-mail to the wrong place, it is secure.... Legislation that would make encryption illegal or require a mandatory backdoor would totally compromise any trust in e-mail or any other form of electronic text system such as word processors.
Father Morton’s respect for privacy came through when I asked for examples of confidences that people had shared with him by way of PGP: “No matter how I disguise the facts,” he told me, “even if I were to create a fictitious person, someone somewhere would believe that they were reading the details of their life story.” And so he was vague, other than to say, to give an idea of the gravity of what he heard, “Thoughts, dreams, hopes, as well as lust, anger, and hatred. Sometimes, actually oftentimes, there are things that you wouldn’t even tell your spouse. Our lives are based on trust.”
Thanks to PGP, Father Morton could maintain that trust not only with people locally in Woodstock, New Brunswick, but with Netfolk from thousands of miles away.
Some people met him in newsgroups. “We’ll have an exchange of e-mail on a specific topic,” he said, “and at one point it will become evident that I am a priest.” He neither hid nor played up his occupation. Upon learning it, he said, the Netter at the other end “may wish to change the topic and enter into a brief correspondence about a particular question. That conversation might last one or two posts and is usually, though not always, in PGP.” In addition, he corresponded with a very small group of people regularly about significant events in their lives. These conversations were always in PGP.
“Before PGP,” Father Morton said, “e-mail was guarded in its content. A typical e-mail exchange might be to set up a phone conversation or meeting or discuss issues in very general terms. Now, at least in a few cases, the PGP mail is much more open in its content, and as a result the e-mail pastoral relationship can be much more productive.”
Father Morton was not alone in his use of PGP to protect personal secrets. For example, the Samaritans, a group devoted to talking people out of suicide, said it would accept PGP-encrypted messages.
“The Samaritans,” announced a Usenet post, “have always taken the confidentiality of callers extremely seriously. Indeed the most frequently asked question within the movement about our e-mail service is, ‘What about confidentiality?’” Surely, in an era when more and more communications happened to be electronic, it would be folly to deny reliable encryption to the Samaritans and the people they helped. Although the Samaritans felt more confidence about the security of unprotected e-mail than did Father Morton, they understood an important truth: perceptions mattered as much as anything. If their correspondents lacked faith in the confidentiality of e-mail, they couldn’t write as freely. And, as I saw it, they might not be as open to rescue. If Washington banned PGP, if it replaced it with an inferior, Clipperish arrangement, the Samaritans just might not be as successful as with truly secure encryption.
Privacy wasn’t just for confessions and for suicide prevention. It was also for teenagers. Donna—she supplied her real name but I’ll protect her with a pseudonym—lived in Florida and was a seventeen-year-old junior in high school who was already using PGP. She e-mailed me:
I couldn’t speak for other teenagers and their parents, but with my extremely intrusive mother, I use all the privacy devices I can get. I’ve kept extensive journals since second grade—she’s always read them and nosed around, no matter where I’ve tried to hide them. She’s opened letters from friends and pokes her nose into anything that she considers unorthodox; we don’t quite see eye to eye on many issues. I’m a good student, responsible, don’t drink or do drugs, blah blah blah, but she has continuously invaded my privacy over the years despite her lack of justification.
Two years ago I tried a locked drawer where I kept all of my papers, letters, and the like, but she has opened the drawer with my keys. So now I just do everything on the computer and encrypt/password it. I can see how some parents might justify searching their kids’ rooms—just as police can under circumstances justify searching homes.
But, Donna went on, if a child were doing something illegal, there “would be physical evidence.” That seemed clear: You could encrypt a diary full of unorthodox musings; you could not encode a marijuana stash.
I would have trusted Donna, but I still had mixed feelings about most teenagers using PGP without their parents’ sharing the keys. How long until Senator Exon ranted that the young would encrypt dirty bytes? In the end, however, just as with children’s use of the Net itself, PGP should be a family decision, not a federal one; Washington mustn’t turn into a giant version of Donna’s mother. Risks from a ban, even one limited to children, so outweighed the benefits. If Donna’s mother wanted to understand her daughter, then maybe she needed to spend less time doing a domestic-level KGB act and more time at a computer—seeing for herself what her daughter was up to. In the process she might understand Donna well enough to tolerate her opinions. She’d better learn to brook them; her daughter was almost eighteen, the age of adulthood in the United States. Soon many parents would be more comfortable with the technology, and then, family by family, parents could decide whether to be Big Mama or Big Daddy and look for PGP-encrypted files. It should be a family, not a government, matter.
If nothing else, parents themselves could use PGP to guard their own privacy. “I use PGP at home solely for keeping confidential information from prying eyes—for instance, from my son and my son’s friends, as well as for keeping their information in one central place,” said Joe Collins, an employee of an international investment bank based in New York. It guarded his burglar alarm codes, the codes to the family safe, all credit card numbers, and all passwords to software on the family computer. Yes, some popular software came with encryption, and certain people might have argued that home users such as Collins didn’t need PGP. But the encryption found in popular software was nowhere near in PGP’s league. In fact, Crak Software, a company in Phoenix, Arizona, even sold “password-recovery software” to crack popular programs such as WordPerfect, Word, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro (for backup purposes).
AIDS activists especially understood the possibilities of good, strong encryption; victims of the disease, after all, were treated about as fairly as lepers had been in biblical times. In New York a group called ACT UP tried to get the public health officials to encourage labs to use PGP to protect the identities of patients. The officials liked the idea. The program died at the hands of a parsimonious governor; but sooner or later, I suspected, PGP would be used in one way or another to protect the privacy of AIDS patients, if it wasn’t already.
In the business area, the advantages of keeping PGP legal—and avoiding Clipperish solutions—were just as clear as at the personal level. “PGP is essential,” said Robert David Steele, a former CIA agent whose passion for legalized encryption and dislike of Clipper must have endeared him to many hackers.[6.27] “Security is the foundation for openness. In order for a world of open electronic exchanges actually to succeed, electronic persons have to know three things, all of which PGP supports: (a) that the person on the other end of the link is who he says he is, (b) that the information being received is genuine and not altered, and (c) that a digital cash payment will be forthcoming, assuming that this is part of the transaction.” Steele was not just talking about the benefits of PGP for business alone, but clearly it was among the major uses that he quite properly had on his mind here.
Many business people on the Net agreed. I was hardly surprised to read in the New York Times about the use of PGP “in what was apparently the first retail transactions on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.” A Philadelphia man had used PGP to scramble his credit card number and spent $12.48 and shipping costs on a compact disk with rock music from a New Hampshire company called Net Market. More benefits were to come. Already other companies were working on digital cash, which could let bits and bytes go out over the Net in ways that prevented them from being easily traced. They would be, in other words, just like dollar bills.[6.28] You could spend them without Big Brother knowing that you’d bought a Playboy, a Rush Limbaugh book, a condom, or whatever else might somehow cause your neighbors or your boss to take offense.
PGP also made sense for privacy protection within companies. An accounting firm in Palo Alto, California, for example, used PGP to guard backup tapes in case of loss or theft, and a Washington accountant relied on it for client communications.[6.29] And when Zimmermann himself asked online for PGP testimonials, a man with a telecommunications firm on the West Coast told him how much he loved it as an alternative to Clipper:
Once it becomes a standard, the competitive software industry will have no incentive to continue technical development in crypto. And then once Clipper gets cracked by outsiders or otherwise compromised, there will still be a lot of bureaucratic inertia protecting it and keeping the fact that it’s been compromised a secret.
We see a serious need for crypto to protect client records regarding their telephone systems and computer networks, to protect our internal company memos sent via e-mail, and to protect strategic business information sent via e-mail. We figure that a misrouted piece of client data is a potentially serious liability issue, and a misrouted sales proposal or similar business document is like leaving a credit card on a park bench. Due diligence, fiscal responsibility, and all that. The big plus is simply that we will be able to confidently move a lot more of our business online, which will make a huge difference to us. More efficient handling of client requests, more efficient internal discussions, and more effective communication with investors. In particular I do a lot of strategic business planning online, and it always bugs me in the back of my mind—‘What happens if this gets lost on the Internet?’ In one sense good crypto is like a good business dinner. It facilitates the flow of ideas in a relaxed atmosphere.
At the same time, needless to say, PGP could improve the flow of political ideas. In 1993 Boris Yeltsin had been at odds with foes nostalgic for the old Soviet state. “If a dictatorship takes over Russia,” a message from Latvia had told Zimmermann, “your PGP is widespread from the Baltic to the Far East now and will help democratic people if necessary. Thanks.”[6.30] In Burma rebels used PGP against an oppressive regime. A writer in Thailand said that before PGP reached them, captured papers had “resulted directly in arrest, including whole families, and their torture and death.” Activists in El Salvador and Guatemala also relied on the program. “In this business, lots of people have been killed,” said Daniel Salcedo, a member of the Human Rights Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[6.31] David Banisar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told me of PGP being used in Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Egypt, and Mali, among other countries.
“Wire tapping is conducted in nearly every country in the world,” Banisar wrote in a paper with the marvelous title of “Bug Off!” “It is frequently abused.” A 1992 State Department report, for example, told of governments and private organizations snooping away in dozens of countries. And it hadn’t happened just in the Third World. “There have been numerous cases in the United Kingdom which revealed that the British intelligence services monitor social activists, labor unions, and civil liberties groups,” Banisar said in a paper written for Privacy International.[6.32] What’s more, the Canadian Communications Security Establishment had shelled out more than $1.1 million to scan through millions of messages and pick out dangerous words and phrases.[6.33] Would the CCSE abuse the system and routinely compile dossiers on law-respecting people? And what about the FBI here in the States? Many Netfolks took it for granted that Louis Freeh’s people were keeping up with Usenet.
“The FBI has the ability to police the Internet and, indeed, has been doing so,” David Nadler and Kendrick Fong, two tech-oriented lawyers, would write later on in Computer Digest: The Journal of Professional Development for the Washington-Baltimore Technology Community. “In fact, the FBI has been collecting Usenet postings since the late 1980s.”
A formulaic condemnation of all FBI monitoring, however, would be unfair. I could hardly object to the Feds reading the public messages of egotistical nuts with a clear-cut predilection for violence. What better reason not to censor Usenet and any audio and video equivalents that might follow? Let the kooks rant away, hour after hour, educating Louis Freeh about their plans. Usenet wasn’t anyone’s living room. Posting messages there was like publishing a book or speaking in a town square. Via the free Stanford Netnews Filtering Service, I could receive electronic mail messages whenever a specified word showed up in a major area of Usenet. Yes, I could track people by name. I could also choose words associated with a topic. That was the magic of the Net; it gave us small-fry many of the same tools available to the intelligence bureaucracies. The same kind of wizardry that might let Canadian cops snoop on citizens could allow me to track the utterances of Al Gore on the subject, say, of the Internet.
One technology, however, may have bureaucrats more uncomfortable than any other—encryption. A U.S. database expert named Patrick Ball found this out the hard way when he was in Ethiopia to help the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Ball efficiently helped build a database of crimes that had occurred under the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. He was accomplishing plenty. Then a bureaucratic rival started a turf war with him. The man falsely claimed that Ball had been using PGP for secret correspondence, probably with the CIA, even though the truth was a little more mundane. Ball hadn’t used PGP for anything but test messages; the people at the other end lacked the technical skills. But the rival didn’t know. He confused PGP with uuencoding—a way to prepare programs for accurate transmission via e-mail—and unfortunately the chief special prosecutor believed Ball’s accuser and forced the database expert to resign.
So often that was the case with police: They displayed a mix of fear and ignorance. And they were not totally wrong to be worried. One computer expert predicted that in the next few years criminals would routinely use electronic scrambling. “This could signal the end of computer forensics,” said William Spernow, “before it even gets off the ground.” A criminal relied on a double set of books, employing PGP to conceal the accurate one, and dope-peddlers in Miami used encryption.[6.34]
Not only that, just as I was writing part of this chapter, the newspapers told how terrorists in Japan had killed 10 people and injured about 5,500 by spreading nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station. Wouldn’t restrictions on encryption make such acts harder to commit with impunity?
Strong counterarguments existed, however, against the jackbooters who would ban strong encryption or impose the Clipper variety on us. I would rather that nations not spy on each other. But I fully recall the naiveté of the past, the fantasy that “gentlemen do not open other gentlemen’s mail”; whether we liked it or not, espionage and counterespionage would always go on. In that spirit, instead of wasting money on Clipperish schemes, countries could spend money developing more powerful computers to crack encryption, and they could also refine the unscrambling techniques. That would not be cheap. But since bad guys wouldn’t let Clipper or successors be the apex of technology, the United States hadn’t any other choice. Other countries might feel otherwise. Bureaucrats just couldn’t contain technology. Clipperish schemes would be brainless in any country.
As one alternative, governments could rely more heavily on open sources—for example, newspapers and other media outlets, especially those online. The more journalists out there, and the more independent they were, the harder it would be for nations to keep secrets and conspire against each other. The United States and friends had the most selfish of reasons for encouraging the spread of the free press.
The open source idea was hardly original to me. Others had talked about it for years, most notably Robert Steele, the ex-CIA agent, who observed that publicly available material was often far more useful than the clandestinely gathered variety. I didn’t agree with much of what Steele said—I wanted more isolation between journalists and government than he might have liked. But his basic point was sound. Information was most reliable when it was in the open and could be dissected, rather than hiding it behind a “secret” stamp. The spread of network technology could only strengthen this premise.
Yet another approach could be the selective use of agents, in new-style roles, taking advantage of high technology. Here again I had mixed feelings. But in an era when countries such as Iraq were trying to develop nuclear weapons, this option should be kept alive.
What about terrorists? As with child-molesting rings and drug cartels, Clipper just would not do any good. Secret groups would be the last in the world to use the chip. Far better for intelligence agencies to work on more powerful computers and truly effective software for cracking codes. Breakthroughs might not come immediately, but would sooner or later, and the civilian sector might ultimately benefit when the technology finally did reach the world at large. Advanced supercomputers, for example, could be used for weather forecasting, or for graphics and design—the same wizardry that had helped make possible the Visible Human Project described in the last chapter.
Meanwhile an open-source approach could often do the job. The accused terrorists in Japan hadn’t exactly stayed hidden from the world before the subway incidents. Shoko Asahara, their leader, had delivered sermon after sermon with allusions to poisonous gas; in the city of Matsumoto where he had been at odds with authorities over some land, 7 people had died and 200 had suffered injuries when a cloud of sarin wafted in the area. Small wonder that the Japanese government had caught up with the sect so soon after the Tokyo tragedy. Newspaper databases would have told plenty, beyond any information that happened to be in the government’s own records.
Legally authorized bugs might be yet another solution, and so, at times, might be informers wired to make the best case. In an era of near-invisible electronics, this approach would be increasingly practical.
What’s more, if Bill Clinton and Al Gore really cared about protecting citizens in a high-tech age, they would worry less about snooping on citizens and more about hardening up points of vulnerability. Steele noted how easily criminals could “maliciously interfere with the computers that control the power system. It is relatively easy to destroy computer capabilities—this takes much less skill than to ‘crack’ them and divert computing resources.” Also, terrorists could wreak havoc with computers that controlled telephone systems in such areas as communications for government and banking.
He also warned of interference with the computers of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. “Trillions in digital data” could vanish into the ether. “A massive global economic panic” would ensue. Preventative measures wouldn’t be cheap, but if the American government did care about security, it would prepare realistically for the threats of the information era rather than doing an inept Big Brother act.
To rig up a whole nation for wire taps would be both a waste and a disgrace. I pondered the ironies. Here the NSA and similar agencies were supposed to protect normality—to guard families against dopesters, sex perverts, terrorists, and the rest—and yet Phil Zimmermann the husband and father might go to jail. “I think it’s kind of unreal to him,” Zimmermann said when I asked how his son felt about this. “I tell him that I have some talented lawyers working for me, and that we’re doing the best we can.” And Zimmermann’s wife? “She thinks that they can’t possibly indict me, because that would be wrong—that somehow they’ll realize that and just back out. Of course by the time your book is printed, we’ll know one way or the other whether she was right.”
A Few Words about Library Books,
Democracy, and Socks the Cybercat
The White House in the 1990s was extolling computer nets as a way to Bring Government Closer to the People. Americans could dial up “An Interactive Citizens’ Handbook” on the Internet, see a photo of a teenaged Clinton with JFK, and listen to Socks the Clinton cat meow. But could Clinton-Gore hear us? Just how “interactive” was the White House?
Clinton boosters formed a group called Americans Communicating Electronically to improve electronic contacts between mortals and bureaucrats. Al Gore, meanwhile, had flaunted his typing skills with the famous visit to CompuServe. But was electronic democracy truly alive on the Internet and other computer networks? Not quite. All the techish sizzle notwithstanding, Clinton-Gore might instead be giving us electronic oligarchy, especially if Republicans followed the horrible precedents that the White House was setting. Consider the dubious, somewhat Orwellian process that was shaping the National Information Infrastructure—the famous data highways and related endeavors.
So far Washington had not worked nearly as hard as it should to drive down the cost of knowledge for the average American. At the same time a network-hostile copyright proposal was delighting information monopolists and imperiling the ability of citizens to share electronic newspaper clips in even a limited way.
I testified at an official hearing on the NII in 1993, and what most struck me about Clinton-Gore was the chasm between words and deeds—the same mind-set that led to Oceania’s propaganda agency being named the Ministry of Truth. The gospel according to Al Gore was that people of all income levels would be able to travel the dataways. His musings later adorned the peach-colored newsprint of The Mini Page, a newspaper insert for children.
“No longer will geographical location, wealth, gender, or any other factor limit learning,” Gore reassured elementary schoolers. He told how “a child from my home town of Carthage, Tennessee, will be able to come home from school, turn on a computer, and plug into the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.” The NII would clearly be in the grand democratic tradition, small “d.”
The next day, however, the Washington Post carried news of a different stripe from Bruce Lehman, the Clinton-Gore commissioner of patents and trademarks, who chaired the NII working group on intellectual property. I learned that “because of the ease of digital reproduction, Lehman does not foresee that digital libraries will put copyrighted works within easy reach online the way they do books on a library shelf. Copyrighted digital materials are likely to be available only to subscribers—libraries, for example—who pay royalty fees, he said. People who want the material might have to go to their local library and use a computer there that would not allow them to copy or redistribute the work, Lehman said.”[6.35] A few months later Bruce Lehman would graciously tell the Wall Street Journal that, yes, he would tolerate children carrying home copyrighted CD-ROMs and floppies of electronic books.[6.36]
Compared to networked books, however, the CDs and the rest would be pathetic. Distribution over the Internet and other networks could be the cheapest way to get the material spread around, while assuring a wide variety of material for all. When William Buckley likened CD-ROMs to 78-rpm shellac records in the era of the Internet, he couldn’t have been more precise. And yet this was the future as envisioned by Bill Clinton’s intellectual property czar. So much for the well-informed citizenry needed for a Jeffersonian America. Lehman was beating the bushes for electronic oligarchy.
Once I had felt that the Clinton-Gore people might truly share my own egalitarian dreams. I’d thought that nonlobbyists like me stood a healthy chance. I had been writing about computers for close to a decade; earlier I had covered a poverty beat, and I knew how we could drive down the cost of small computers so that someday even Head Start kids could read electronic books on them. What better way to encourage democracy? The whole country, not just the elite, could grow up understanding abstract thought. Could the Constitution have been drafted by a mob of illiterate TV watchers?
Rather than letting Big Brother choose books for us, we could establish a democratic system with many librarians in many cities empowered to make acquisitions. Never would bureaucrats be able to do the equivalent of tweaking old copies of the London Times behind our backs. It would be too damn hard with so many librarians in so many locations, and with the same material reposing on millions and millions of tablet-style computers that individual Americans owned. My vision was one of electronic federalism, not of Big Brother policing our reading tastes. TeleRead wouldn’t undermine local schools and public libraries. Quite the contrary. TeleRead would buy affordable, sharp-screened machines for them, sending a signal to Silicon Valley and paving the way for similar computers to go on sale at the Kmart for $99.95 for anyone to buy.
Just as important, unlike the Postal plan mentioned earlier in this chapter, my TeleRead plan would let schools and libraries use the hardware without Big Brotherish restrictions. They could store whatever they wanted on their own computers for local people to dial up. And to make the national library more useful at the local level, they could add special, Web-style links designed for the people they served—not just for whole communities, but perhaps even for individual readers.
What’s more, TeleRead would respect diversity and freedom of expression in other ways. Publishers could gamble fees up front to bypass librarians and qualify for royalties, and if censored from the national library, they could post on the Net itself. I took it for granted that Washington would try to censor TeleRead. That was the reason I envisioned a whole network of many librarians, in many places, together with long-range funding. Besides, my plan reflected the old wisdom from hackers: When censorship arises, just route around it. Private companies could make some nice money off officially banned books. Imagine the promotional opportunities; “Nixed by Washington” could be the new “Banned in Boston.” What’s more, since TeleRead was public and involved many librarians, not just a tiny D.C. elite, any censorship would probably be much more conspicuous than in the world of corporate publishing.
In other ways, too, TeleRead would be anti-Big Brother. Americans would not have to make private companies privy to their reading habits. The national library could track dialups for the purpose of paying writers and publishers—you couldn’t retrieve books without reporting past accesses. But TeleRead would include protections. Records associated with individual users could be temporary, just a way to prevent information providers from abusing the system with repeated dialups. People could buy controversial books by way of anonymous digital money. In fact, with sophisticated enough fraud controls, the same techniques might eventually be used to prevent names from being associated with dialup records even for a short time. If nothing else, people could entrust TeleRead records to certified private companies that reported accesses without revealing identities.
TeleRead, then, could provide even more safeguards than public library records in the paper era—significant, since librarians by habit had respected privacy much more than had other government officials. “There was a case back in Nixon’s era,” Phil Zimmermann would eventually remind me, “where Nixon tried to find out what some of his enemies were reading at the library, and the librarians were, of course, up in arms about being asked to supply a list of books that had been checked out by a particular person or a list of people that had checked out a particular book. They were able to resist the efforts by the government to obtain that information. I think that we need to have the same kind of controls in place for future libraries that are on the Net.” I couldn’t have agreed more.
Even the hardware could serve to thwart Big Brother by promoting free expression and democracy. TeleRead would let people talk back to bureaucrats and among themselves; the machines would work with keyboards, and someday they might even serve in part as wireless digital telephones, not just computers. TeleRead would let Americans all be more uppity. The information in the national library would enrich public debate; it would at least somewhat blur distinctions between the wealthy and those who otherwise couldn’t afford top-quality information.
This needn’t be just a dream. The United States had a $6-trillion-plus economy, and if just some of us used electronic forms for government and commercial transactions, we eventually would save tens of billions in time and money. As noted earlier in this book, the same pen interfaces that were ideal for reading would be great for forms. E-forms could help flag errors in tax returns and other documents, “interview” users quickly, and just as quickly narrow down questions to the essentials. And so the saving in time and money could easily justify a well-stocked national library. No magic was involved here, just an old principle of information management. Two applications (smart forms and the electronic books) made more sense than just one (the books). In fact, the American Society for Information Science would later approach me to do a chapter on electronic libraries for an ASIS book from MIT Press, and I would oblige. Clearly TeleRead was a logical link between Gore’s plans for reinventing government and his oft-claimed desire to drive down the cost of knowledge.
I was a writer, not an attorney or information scientist, but a number of well-credentialed people understood the logic of TeleRead, even when I showed them a version somewhat less refined than the one just described. At the urging of a distinguished Washington lawyer, I applied to testify at the interagency hearings on intellectual property law in the digital age. But he warned me some bizarreness was afoot. Experts from the Library of Congress would not run the hearings; nowadays electronic books would be more within the domain of the Commerce Department. A Commerce bureaucrat instead would be the main player here—Bruce Lehman. That should have been my tip-off that the proceedings would be big and furry and jump, and come with a pocket for joeys; but I went ahead just the same. The lawyer organizing the hearing seemed friendly, alert, intelligent, receptive. She said each witness would testify just a few minutes, and that after the hearings the Feds would carefully examine our words.
My optimism grew. I expected at least a modicum of electronic democracy, Gore-style, just as promised. So in November 1993 I joined some thirty other witnesses in Crystal City, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington. Bill Clinton wanted his presidential cabinet to look like America, and, in fact, a black man was secretary of the Commerce. Gazing around the room, however, I saw a sea of white lawyers in dark suits, along with a scattering of women in power clothes. I could have been in California at an elite convocation of the software and entertainment industries.
I ran into one of the members of the intellectual property group, a minor White House advisor named David Lytel, who had promised to read my proposal as sent to him on the Internet. Mr. White House didn’t waste a nanosecond. “This is like Hollywood,” Lytel said. “Not everyone can be a star. We can’t use everyone’s idea.”
“I’m not here to star,” I said, “just to testify. Have you read my proposal?”
He said he had seen the prepared testimony I had left at the entrance to the auditorium.
“But what about the thousands of words I sent you on the Net? I thought you’d have a look and—”
“Excuse me,” he said and moved on.
His Hollywood analogy would strike me later as all too apt, for this was shaping up as a TV-centric NII that favored television and movies over books. Al Gore later would not hold his grand information summit at the Library of Congress; no, he would jet off to Hollywood and to a speech punctuated by jokes with a comedienne.
There in the Crystal City auditorium, I saw a tall, gray-haired man surrounded by a cluster of other people. Heads bobbed. Stephen Metalitz was a lawyer and a power in the Information Industries Association, the IIA. “Welcome, Steve,” Lehman greeted his first witness in a voice that told me who the true star of the day was. The rest of the hearing unfolded as I now feared. Witnesses from trade associations pounded away at the same theme again and again. Copyright law needed to be friendly to megaconglomerates or they would never bless the dataways with their Terminator films. It was as if the Internet, already starting to bristle with small businesses, never existed.
I heard some cogent testimony from some fine people representing librarians and educators, but all in all, I might as well have been at an IIA convention. Lehman’s panel of bureaucrats, some of them strangers to copyright law, just about dozed off during my testimony. Chatting with me informally, certain industry witnesses were more curious about my ideas than were the Feds. It wasn’t just to size up the opposition. For my plan would divert resources from bureaucracy to knowledge, and could actually help many members of the information industry.
A potential obstacle rose ahead, though: the hostility of real, live bureaucrats.
During a break I approached a working-group member from one of the most bureaucratic agencies of them all, the General Services Administration. “What do you think of my ideas for electronic forms?” I asked. “I remember when you guys let a senator benefit illegally from a federal lease on an office building. Imagine what you could have done with better technology to help flag stuff like that.”
“Oh,” he said coldly, “we can just train our contracting officers better.” Better to protect jobs for bureaucrats like him than to offer affordable e-books for schoolchildren.
My foremost opponent, however, as I learned eventually, just may have been Lehman himself—the chairman of the Intellectual Property Working Group, which would help set copyright policy for America’s dataways.
Bruce Lehman was Mr. Politically Correct. As his heroes he claimed the career-enhancing names of Bill Clinton and Martin Luther King; never mind the damage that his child-hostile copyright policies might do to ghetto schools, or the fact that the copyright hearing had been about as well integrated as a Klan meeting. The New York Times would see in Lehman’s office “a handsomely framed photograph taken at last year’s White House Christmas party. Bill and Hillary Clinton stand in the middle. Mr. Lehman is to the left, under a portrait of George Washington.”
His clothes were as aggressively fashionable as his choice of heroes. The Times’s Teresa Riordan would write of “stylish suits detailed with a fresh white handkerchief.” He might display “a touch of exotic color, perhaps a mint-colored watchband or the ruby background of a Brooks Brother tie.”[6.37] Lehman needn’t haunt any thrift shops. During a twelve- to fourteen-month period before joining the Administration, he had pulled down $430,000 as a lobbyist and lawyer for intellectual property clients.[6.38]
The patent office’s Web site said he had represented “individuals, companies, and trade associations in the area of intellectual property rights as it affects the motion picture, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, computer software, and broadcasting industries.”[6.39] His clients had included Lotus and Microsoft.[6.40] The latter was buying up electronic rights as if they were soft drinks for the programmers’ offices. No, Microsoft would hardly be the world’s leading backer of a universally affordable, well-stocked national digital library of the TeleRead variety. I’d lobby anyone, any company, for my idea. But could I ever persuade Microsoft? Oh, come on. This was the company that owned the word “Windows.”
Clinton-Gore campaigners had once talked of “People First.” Based on Lehman’s background and proclivities, however, a better motto in the case of intellectual property might now be “Entertainment, Information, and Software Magnates First.” It was as if Clinton-Gore had turned national health policy over to a zealous insurance lobbyist who had spent years crusading for higher premiums.
Even at the local level, Lehman was no stranger to the world of money and politics. In 1991, while a Georgetown lawyer, he had lent $10,000 at 12 percent interest to Washington city council candidate Jim Zais even though local law apparently restricted candidates to borrowing only from the usual lending institutions. Zais at the time had raised less than $13,000 from other sources. Questioned by election officials, the candidate had claimed ignorance of the law and promptly paid the money back to Lehman, along with some $120 in interest.[6.41]
Like many of his ex-colleagues at Swidler & Berlin, Lehman had kept his checkbook wide open when national politicians needed money. Many months later I learned that between January 1, 1991, and November 28, 1994, the S & B crowd had made at least $191,000 in political donations, including more than $22,000 from Lehman himself during his days there. At least $146,000 of the $191,000 had gone to the firm’s political-action committee. Lehman’s personal contributions had reached at least eighteen congressional candidates. In fairness, let me emphasize that Lehman didn’t just have direct career considerations in mind—he was the first openly gay man whom the U.S. Senate had confirmed as a top federal official,[6.42] and he had given generously to gay political-action committees.
Gay groups, in turn, showed their loyalty. They had wanted Clinton to appoint Bruce Lehman to something, and the White House had made him patent commissioner even though Lehman knew more about copyrights. Ron Brown, however, secretary of Commerce, said: “Bruce Lehman is not here because he’s gay. He’s the absolutely best person for the job.”[6.43]
I believed Brown. If the Clinton Administration wanted library interests to be kept at bay to placate rich campaign donors, Gore’s dreamy rhetoric notwithstanding, no one would beat Lehman the ex-lobbyist.
A few weeks after the intellectual property hearing in Crystal City, a letter arrived from Mr. Reinventing Government himself. I had mailed my TeleRead proposal and a related Washington Post clip to Al Gore many months ago in spring 1993, and now he replied: “I am impressed with this detailed and very professional presentation. The information you provided certainly appears to contain ideas that merit careful attention. I will retain this material for future consideration as the President and I work on related policies and programs.” I hardly expected a meeting with Clinton and Gore. But was it just possible that one of their GS-14s might deem me worth five minutes of time, and follow up with a few questions?
Months passed. An occasional reporter or academic would read my testimony and call or e-mail, but no one phoned from Commerce. Meanwhile, seeing my TeleRead proposal on the Net, major vendors contacted me. Often they asked the big question: “How are you doing in Washington?”
“Well,” I said in effect, “I hope they’re keeping an open mind.”
“That’s nice, bye,” the answers would more or less come back—assuming I heard again from people at all. The NII wasn’t just TV-centric. It was Gore-centric. If you lacked his blessing, and his bland letter to me didn’t count, you were dead or at least comatose unless the right word from the White House revived your idea.
Then a “Green Paper” revealing the Clinton Administration’s preliminary views on data highways and copyright came out. It was even more horrid than I could have imagined, an insult to the memory of Andrew Carnegie. The ethos was exactly the opposite of TeleRead’s. For example, if the paper became law, one could not transmit a newspaper article to a few friends; the present ambiguities here would be resolved in favor of the copyright holders. Yes, Washington should not allow anyone to bootleg newspaper stories or magazine items for hundreds of people in an electronic discussion group. In fact, I’d once reported a gross offender to a magazine; I believed passionately in property rights. Clearly electronic books, of all media, should enjoy protection, which, in fact, TeleRead would promote by making piracy less lucrative. But we also had to understand the purpose of copyright law—to help spread information in a democracy and further the progress of science and the arts. Lehman either was disingenuous or had let his old $430,000 make him a little amnesic toward Constitutional tradition.
Ironically, if Lehman’s side won out, writers and journalists would be among the biggest victims of the very law designed to protect us. After all, we were not just producers of information; we were also consumers. To write a book I would absorb millions of words from the Internet, swapping information with friend after friend along the way, including, yes, some electronic newspaper clips. But the Green Paper bizarrely flouted the natural tendency of most people to share. Imagine the effect on teachers and children. Quite rightly, Jim Warren observed that Washington was cheating the public “to avoid controversy among ’important’ people.”
“The Draft Report comes down firmly on the side of increased rights for copyright owners in all relevant contexts, endorsing the goal of enhanced copyright protection without acknowledging any countervailing concerns,” wrote Jessica Litman, a law professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University. In a reply to the Administration she said of the report: “It appears to be an advocacy document: It at times misrepresents the state of current law, and gives voice to only one side of complicated policy debates.”
Another expert, law professor Pamela Samuelson at the University of Pittsburgh, lambasted the Green Paper in an article for Communications of the ACM, published by the Association for Computing Machinery. She said that “not since the King of England in the sixteenth century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books in exchange for the printers’ agreement not to print heretical or seditious material has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” Contrary to Washington’s claim, the Green Paper was not just a tweaking of existing law but a radical revision in favor of publishers.[6.44]
Directly Orwellian questions arose. What about enforcement? How to thwart the ease of mailing copies over the Net? The Green Paper’s designers thought that laws against circumventing copy protection would provide one of the main answers. But in the case of electronic text, such visions were far too sanguine. People would want the capability to print out material, and if they could print it out, they could scan it and put it online again without the protection feature; what’s more, hackers would inevitably develop software to accomplish the same thing electronically.
Yes, the Green Paper would let publishers and others sue makers of devices that could get around copy protection. But just what gear was covered? Scanners? Fax machines? And what kinds of software? What about legitimate programs that also had illicit uses? Were we the new Soviets, living in fear of the digital equivalent of copiers and other subversive gadgets? As William Buckley would write, “fax machines and e-mail outwitted and frustrated even the comprehensive revolutionary orders of Stalin and Mao. This side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, we should have the resources to handle our native bureaucracy.” The Green Paper was nothing more than Big Bureaucracy trying to serve Big Business.
The Green Paper had much in common with Clipper. In both cases bureaucrats were reducing respect for Washington by trying to control the uncontrollable. I was hardly a kneejerker crying out for a pigmy-sized government. My liberalism remained. I favored prenatal nutrition programs, Head Start, public broadcasting, and a host of other wonderful anachronisms from the heyday of the Democrats. And yet here was the Clinton Administration blundering along in the most obnoxious way and turning so many of my fellow liberals on the Internet into libertarians.
If nothing else, the White House was complicating my job of trying to sell the Net on TeleRead. It was not just a question of preempting my idea in favor of an inferior solution rigged up for Clinton’s powerful friends in entertainment and publishing. Like Clipper, the Green Paper was lessening faith in Washington, period—no small concern for somebody advocating a national program such as TeleRead, even one developed with local sensibilities in mind. Sometimes I wondered if Lehman might be a Manchurian Patent Commissioner.[6.45] Had the Libertarians brainwashed him to sully Washington’s good name?
Again and again I flamed Lehman’s Green Paper on alt.activism and at least half a dozen other newsgroups on the Internet. I hadn’t any choice. He hated the bytes-want-to-be-free philosophy of TeleRead. Clearly, if Lehman had read TeleRead, it would have driven him nuts, given his apparent belief that copyrighted books must cost readers. TeleRead, on the other hand, would mean fair treatment of copyright holders and library users alike. With a TeleRead-style library, publishers, writers, and private nets could still charge for many categories of information and earn handsome sums from online conferences and other services and products, including customized software to guide people through electronic libraries. Also, they would receive fair royalties for covered material such as books. At the same time, however, thanks to the cost justification provided by the e-forms, we could make electronic books free in this TV-fixated era and thus encourage literacy.
Surely TeleRead could be a logical link between Gore’s plans for reinventing government and his oft-claimed desire to drive down the cost of knowledge. With TeleRead, the old scarcities could be obsolete; rich and poor could dial up the same books. It would be a far cry from the present when Beverly Hills spent many times more on library materials than did some poorer jurisdictions. TeleRead was not a cure-all; but in an era of tight budgets, the national library could be phased in carefully, year by year, topic by topic, with minimal pain. The reduction of expensive, onerous paperwork would be like a tax rebate. For once, a program could simultaneously help schoolchildren and small business people.
Perhaps the NII Advisory Council would see merit in TeleRead. The White House didn’t necessarily have to follow its recommendations, but wasn’t this the age of electronic democracy and citizens’ input? A few problems had arisen, however. Bill Clinton’s people had tolerated just one librarian among the more than thirty members of the Council. An overworked teacher was there representing education. But no full-time professional writers of books, and just one newspaper publisher, had ended up tainting the Advisory Council.
Nor did any name show up from a distinguished publishing firm such as Knopf or Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Instead the White House blessed the NII with Vance Opperman, a friend of Al Gore’s and a money man for the Democratic Party,[6.46] who was president of West Publishing. By one estimate West grossed some $600 million a year with pretax margins of almost 30 percent, or twice those of rivals.[6.47] West-style firms were famous for Cadillac-priced data. Opperman’s company had set up collections of court opinions and slapped a proprietary system of citations on them. The meter typically ran at $4 a minute or more, adding up to millions from Feds and taxpayers alike.
Haunted by a group called the Taxpayer Assets Project, the Justice Department had proposed an electronic database with public-domain citations to help users locate material. But West had lobbied away the plans. Nothing must deprive Al Gore’s friend, and so many other politicians’ friend, of a chance to turn a buck. Opperman seemed about as eager to drive down the cost of knowledge as Bull Connor was to further civil rights in the days of cattle prods and police dogs.
At the same time the Advisory Council teemed with people from such library-like outfits as CBS, Black Entertainment Television, and Walt Disney. Bill Clinton’s people also let the movie industry’s premier lobbyist sit on the council—Jack Valenti, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson; yes, the same Valenti who had made history years ago by sleeping better at night because, he said, LBJ was in the White House. To the Council, too, went powerful telephone executives, a man from Microsoft, and John Scully, the former Apple executive who had been a Clinton stalwart in ’92. A co-chair was a Clinton supporter named Ed McCracken. He came from Silicon Graphics, a billion-dollar company that was hoping to make a fortune off the new video technology.
Clearly entertainment was what counted most here. The term National Information Infrastructure just didn’t suffice. A more accurate description, given the paucity of librarians, educators, and journalists on the council, would have been the National Entertainment Infrastructure. Yes, people like Vance Opperman were interested in electronic text, but, above all, from a business perspective. Let the masses watch TV. His company would make a fortune selling pricey information to the elite.
Mass literacy just wasn’t the main show here, not with all the dutiful suits watching out for the earnings of CBS or Disney or Microsoft or West, and without enough librarians and others to balance them out.
A host of other issues remained. How fascinating that so many of the most influential people in the Clinton galaxy were from outfits such as telephone companies that wanted to profit off both transmission and content. Despite all the rhetoric, I wondered how attentive the Clintonians would be to, say, little companies that were more interested in producing books or folk albums than in financing Terminators or laying fiber optic cables.
Could money and politics have mattered just a little in the selection of people for the NII Advisory Council? If nothing else, a few questions arose in the case of West Publishing, the giant publisher of legal information. Vance Opperman was friends with Mack McLarty, Clinton’s first chief of staff.[6.48] What’s more, Opperman cochaired the finance committee during the 1994 reelection campaign of Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic U.S. senator from California who sat on a copyright subcommittee within the Judiciary Committee.[6.49] A study by the Taxpayer Assets Project, one of Ralph Nader’s groups, revealed how civic-minded West was. By way of a political-action committee and gifts from lawyers, lobbyists, and family members, the West crowd in five years had given more than $738,000 to Congress members and the Democratic National Committee.
Judges, too, must have loved the company. A West-run foundation had dispensed $15,000 awards to federal judges for “distinguished service to justice.” Over a dozen years, the selection committee had included seven past or present members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the ultimate interpreter of copyright law. West had paid for trips to places as far off as Hawaii and the Virgin Islands. Benefiting, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, were Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, and now-retired Justices Lewis Powell, Byron White, and William Brennan.[6.50]
West impressed me. Via campaign gifts, friends, and favors such as the trips, Opperman’s crew had cozied up to all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.
Eager to see how representative West was with its people’s political gifts, I phoned the Center for Responsive Politics, the Washington-based group from which I simultaneously got information about Lehman. Would the Center please send me a printout of congressional and presidential donations from some other members of the NII Advisory Council and from people and political-action committees associated with their companies?
A list arrived for the period between January 1, 1991, and November 28, 1994, and I scanned down the names on the laser-printed sheets. The Walt Disney people hadn’t disappointed me. Advisory Council member John F. Cooke, president of the Disney Channel, had given at least $48,000 to politicians from coast to coast and to Democratic organizations. Non-Council member Jeffrey Katzenberg, then with the Disney conglomerate, had donated at least $63,000 in one way or another.
I saw at least $400,000 in Disney-related gifts—donations from top executives were just the start. Cook and Katzenberg on their own couldn’t sway the White House and Congress, nor even could all of Disney; but imagine what Hollywood and other rich industries could do en masse to influence copyright and telecommunications policies. What counted most wasn’t the person but the industry. At one recent gathering at Steven Spielberg’s mansion—in spring 1995, a time not covered by the laser-printed sheet—Bill Clinton had raised $50,000 per couple.
Whatever the case, the stray change added up. Over at MCA, Advisory Council member Alvin Teller gave at least $28,250 between early 1991 and late 1994, while Lew Wasserman, a nonmember, gave at least $87,000. Advisory Council member Jack Valenti, Hollywood’s big lobbyist in D.C., donated at least $56,250.
Advisory Council member Stanley Hubbard, chairman and chief executive of Hubbard Broadcasting in Minnesota, also made a good showing. He and relatives gave at least $74,000 to people on the Hill, political-action committees, and the Democratic Party. Confronted with $1,000-per-election limits on political gifts to members of Congress, Hubbard just spread his money around, as if using greenbacks like calling cards. His donations reached powers such as Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who, until the Republican victory in 1994, chaired the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance. Many saw Markey as one of the more progressive NII players. Just think, however, what such politicians could have done without the distractions of special-interest money—donations not only to them but also to colleagues who would be more susceptible to pressure.
Telephone executives made the NII sugar-daddies list, of course. Advisory Council member Bert Roberts Jr., MCI’s chairman and CEO, gave at least $28,000 to an MCI political-action committee and to politicians, ranging from Senator Bob Packwood to, yes, Edward Markey. A supporting cast came from the ranks of the MCI employees, including one of my techie heroes, Vint Cerf, “Mr. Internet,” who contributed at least $1,000 to the same PAC as Roberts.
Advisory Council member James Houghton of Corning Glass donated more than $50,000 to members of Congress across the country, and to party, presidential, and PAC funds. Corning, of course, was rooting for fiberglass cable—a rival in some ways to wireless technology, which some on the Internet considered the future.
No, the millionaires on the Advisory Council had not committed crimes or bribed anyone. Under the law, they had a right to give massive amounts to campaigns as long as each gift did not exceed the legal limits. To my knowledge no money had come from anyone’s corporate tills, just from individuals and the political-action committees to which they had lawfully contributed. Besides, just like Lehman, many other rich donors must have had the most heartfelt of reasons for personal donations, going far beyond copyright and telecommunications issues. Even though copyright holders had donated to many well-positioned politicians such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was active on intellectual property matters, that was hardly the only reason why Hollywood millionaires gave. The woman was a California Democrat. Many people at companies such as MCA were the same. If a Californian, I myself might have voted for her.
Likewise, the people of West Publishing must have had varied motives in contributing.[6.51] Vance Opperman was a former antiwar protester and probably still saw himself as a force for social good. I suspected, too, that he loved seeing his old friend Al Gore grow in power. At the 1992 Democratic Convention Opperman had described himself as a “political junkie” who enjoyed hosting political receptions for fun. “I don’t expect to get any political benefits out of them.”[6.52]
Replying on February 22, 1995, to questions from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Opperman’s company noted that all donations were legal and on record at the Federal Election Commission. “It appears that you believe the laws regarding these matters should be changed,” West said. “If so, the proper thing for you to do is to seek to change these laws rather than criticize those who carefully comply with existing law.” The company denied any efforts to influence officials improperly. West said that its employees, its political-action committee, and its counsel all had “long histories of being active in the political process. It is inaccurate to tie their donations over the past 20 years to any specific issue of legislation pending before a government body. Your inference that such donations have been made as one collective effort is also totally untrue.”[6.53]
West pointed out to the Star Tribune that people from rival information companies were also making contributions. But of course! Money always counted in politics. Vance Opperman had put it well several years ago as head of Opperman Heins & Paquin, a leading law firm notable for PAC gifts to Minneapolis politicians. “If we have those who oppose the interests of our clients,” he said, “we do not support them.” He said the law firm’s PAC ran under this philosophy: “Support your friends. Punish your enemies.”[6.54]
Presumably Bill Clinton and Al Gore would rather avoid punishment from the Oppermans of this nation. While almost ignoring librarians and educators, the Administration had appointed to its Advisory Council some members of the elite who were already over-represented in the political process. Did Vance Opperman, as a friend of Gore’s, really have to worry about the Vice President reading his letters? I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had Gore’s private e-mail address. Just how many electronic entreaties to the Hill, or to the Clinton-Gore area on the Web, would it take to neutralize the little fortune donated by friends of West Publishing? I couldn’t have agreed more with Cliff Stoll when he wrote that Washington often ignored citizens’ e-mail. It all figured. The Power People were too busy raising donations from millionaires and political-action committees—hardly the biggest champions of low-cost knowledge.
Granted, some optimists hoped that the Internet itself could help turn around Washington. Aided by the Net, a group in Washington State had gathered $26,000 to help defeat Tom Foley, then the Democratic Speaker of the House. And NewtWatch, an anti-Gingrich effort on the World Wide Web, had registered as a political-action committee. Some members of both major parties were hoping to use the Net to raise money efficiently from small donors.[6.55]
That was far from a full answer, though. Even before I learned of all the campaign cash from some members of the Advisory Council, I had wondered about the group’s odd composition. Not everyone on the council was rich, of course, far from it. But why had business prevailed so brazenly over the general public and Al Gore’s little neighbor back in Tennessee, the one who was supposed to dial up books from the Library of Congress regardless of family income? Just one teacher and one librarian? In politer language I’d sent the question on to a White House staffer, and he had patiently explained to me that Washington had to serve the needs of the “stakeholders.”
I loved the word. It sounded so innocent, so natural, so philosophical. What if this were eighteenth-century France, the revolution were on, and Marie Antoinette looked like guillotine fodder? Armed with such a marvelous locution, she could forego all references to bread and cake and simply say, “Stop! I’m one of the stakeholders.”
Now having documented a nice flow of money from “stakeholders” to politicians, especially Democrats, I remembered how many Watergate-era ambassadorships had gone to the highest bidders. Wasn’t the same ethos at work here as Richard Nixon’s? I knew of no broken laws—but perhaps that was the trouble.
“I remember when I got on Energy and Commerce, everybody jumped for the Telecommunications Subcommittee first,” Peter Kostmayer, a former Democratic representative from Pennsylvania, said as quoted by veteran political journalist Martin Schram. “There was a member sitting next to me, and every time another member bid for that committee, he went ‘Ding!’—as if a cash register was going off.”[6.56] When politicians talked about the need for election reform and clean, ethical government, many were themselves superb examples of the need for action.
Maybe, I’d thought earlier, I could at least enjoy an open-minded hearing from a nonmillionaire on the Advisory Council. Bonnie Bracey was the only elementary school teacher. She should have loved TeleRead.
But during an official virtual conference organized on the Net by the Commerce Department, she went after not Opperman but me. “I am not the least interested in the TeleReader,” she said in a public message, “and I don’t have any money after trying to do this job to invest anyway.” I was and am a writer. Last I knew, I had not been selling computers. Bracey needed to scrutinize my proposal. Maybe she could then dismiss it as a nefarious writer’s plot. TeleRead did, after all, propose a massive shifting of resources from bureaucracy to various forms of knowledge, including—gasp!—electronic books.
At times, Bracey would e-mail me that my proposal intrigued her, but somehow she would never get around to study it, or at least to telling me that she had gone beyond summaries. She would repeat the usual clichés that citizens didn’t want to spend money on schools. Toward TeleRead’s cost-justification mechanisms, toward the support that it could win among frugal, business-oriented conservatives such as William Buckley, she was unresponsive. Granted, she wasn’t callous about the children TeleRead could help. At the personal level she had been exemplary, spending hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars on hardware and software that she could use in her classes. But TeleRead for her could have been a bother. Offensively, perhaps, it meant a national library online for all, regardless of whether they happened to be students anywhere.
TeleRead, however, was hardly antischool, given all the new possibilities it could open up online for teachers and students. Looking back, I just wished that Bracey had seen a note I received from a teacher in Illinois who had asked more than sixty magazines for permission to reprint articles for her small class at no profit. Only twenty-five publications had gone along. “We were ignored sometimes,” the woman had e-mailed me, “and once I was told, by phone, never to use any articles from that publication. That was Windows Magazine, and I didn’t renew my subscription.” Of her anthology, she had said: “It’s a better textbook because it’s more up to date.” Clearly we could never separate “educational” uses of the NII from the rest; an article from a commercial magazine could actually prove so much more valuable than an instantly obsolete textbook. TeleRead would make back issues of magazines available for free, make current ones easier to obtain, and, above all, allow free textbooks to be updated instantly, complete with hypertext links to the rest of the national library.
But predictably the NII Advisory Council ignored TeleRead and more or less green-lighted the Green Paper. The council for the most part came out in favor of publishers enjoying control over transmission rights. In effect these people were kissing off the idea of a comprehensive, cost-justified library that all Americans could afford to use online, whether for school or for self-improvement. As I was concluding this book, it wasn’t certain that the Green Paper would slither its way into law in more or less the original form. But the news from Capitol Hill didn’t cheer me. The Republican Congress appeared to be at least as skewed in favor of copyright holders as were the Democrats.
Even diluted (and renamed the White Paper in the final version), the Green Paper might well be a disgrace. I worried about the rest of the world. Imagine the Australians or Europeans looking to the United States for leadership in Net-related copyright matters. To me, the Green Paper bore the stains of greenbacks. People around D.C. had a polite little word, “access.” It didn’t mean legal violations, but rather purchases of policymakers’ ears. Information magnates had access. I wondered if the little child in Al Gore’s hometown gave so faithfully to major politicians, flew Supreme Court justices to Hawaii, and doled out $15,000 “justice” awards.
The Green Paper, alas, was just one indication of many big shots’ willingness to work against the citizenry. Again and again the denizens of Capitol Hill bragged about Americans being able to dial up the text of proposed legislation through a service called Thomas. And yet some Congress members still hoped to work out deals before the public saw the results on the Net. Friends of West Publishing used exactly such tactics on the Hill to try to reduce the amount of information that the government released for free. West and similar companies wanted to be able to profit off public data. So their congressional allies were hoping to cancel out the Freedom of Information Act in cases where federal contractors had created records.
Any weakening of the act would make me very grouchy; it had opened up many kind of government information for free or at affordable costs. I had benefited. Two decades ago the General Services Administration had tried unsuccessfully to charge me $20,000 to learn details about the government’s office-leasing program. Using this first-class muck, I had shown that then-Senator Abraham Ribicoff secretly owned a stake in a building that the GSA leased for the Central Intelligence Agency. I had learned, too, of a friend of Spiro Agnew who had been able to avoid building a half-million-dollar cafeteria required by the lease for the headquarters building of the Environmental Protection Agency. Because of the Information Act, I had been able to report both stories and get them out in the press and on network television. I had spent months camped out at the GSA, perusing documents; imagine what I could have done with a computer to ferret out digitized muck. And so I was dismayed to learn that some in Congress wanted to weaken the Information Act—this in an era when the Internet supposedly would open up Washington. If not fully Orwellian, such hypocrisy didn’t promote democratic alternatives to Big Brother.
Uppity activists used the Net to thwart West at least for the moment. A bill introduced by Representative William Clinger, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was to be heard in a subcommittee and rushed through a committee edit in just a few days with West-friendly provisions. But James Love of the Taxpayer Assets Project caught wind of the shenanigans; Jim Warren pitched in with his own jeremiads in Government Access, his online newsletter; and furious Netfolks called and faxed the Hill. West may have really lost when the Republicans found out through the Internet about the firm’s generosity toward the Democratic Party, to which its executives gave far more than to the competition. “Why are we doing this?” the Republicans, in effect, may have wondered.
Only because of some extraordinary diligence by Love and allies did the public win here. Newt Gingrich could talk all he wanted about the Net putting citizens and lobbyists on an equal footing, but without a constant watch on the Hill, scene of so many crimes, the same power cliques would keep winning again and again, banana-republic fashion. West might yet succeed.
Around this same time, Sally Katzen, a top bureaucrat with Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget had asked Congress to make certain that the Feds could charge more for information in some cases than the cost of spreading it. They would be able to do this after posting notices in the Federal Register. And then, if insufficient protests ensued, the info-gouges could begin. Katzen’s proposal didn’t fly, but its very existence was bothersome enough. The idea hardly jibed with all the nice rhetoric from the White House about using the Net to promote open government. So much for freedom of information, Clinton style.
Meanwhile I forged ahead with my TeleRead efforts, perhaps not for this Congress and this White House, but maybe for those in the future—once enough voters understood that we mustn’t replicate online the “savage inequalities” of our schools and libraries. TeleRead if nothing else was a handy litmus test to find out which policymakers were sincere when they talked about the need for true public libraries in cyberspace, as opposed to just digital storefronts with links to publishers. Good people could disagree with me. But when politicians and their flunkies did not bother to hear me out despite my idea’s credentials, I was reminded of how democratic Washington was toward Power People and how oligarchic it was toward the rest of the cosmos. Sometimes I felt that my location, in Alexandria, Virginia, was metaphorical. My apartment was just inside the Washington Beltway.
The question of the moment wasn’t just one of copyright. It was also one of democracy itself, both the decision process and the aftermath. What about the Copyright Gestapo? In the future might the Feds monitor the activities of Republicans more closely than they would those of Democrats? Would Republicans be more susceptible to charges of intellectual piracy when they did the inevitable and tried to share old newspaper clips over the Net? Or vice versa? Would the Democrats suffer discrimination? What about Italy, where the machine-gun-toting cops had invoked software piracy laws against leftist bulletin boards but not against conservative ones? But the Clintonians, so eager to serve their political friends, were just as cavalier toward these possibilities as toward the civil liberties risk of Clipper.
Ultimately the copyright-holders’ victory just might be Pyrrhic. Someday the political terrain could shift and millions of children might grow up on free, government-commissioned books. Or, perhaps instead, videos in too many cases would replace text. So we were better off if, as soon as possible, we used networks to spread privately originated books through a free, well-stocked library system. TeleRead could indeed help many in the information industry. From Lexis-Nexis to Random House, companies could turn profits off dial-up fees, either from works they commissioned directly or from rights they bought from authors. TeleRead wasn’t a threat to information companies if they truly added value such as editing or marketing. Even West could benefit. TeleRead would let Opperman’s company reap many millions off dial-up rights—not only to legal writings but also to other kinds—if the market favored it.
No, the real losers would be the bureaucrats, whose work, after all, would be less in demand in an era of electronic forms in mass use. And even they could have a soft landing. TeleRead would hardly take place instantly, and it would remove much of the scut work from the remaining jobs in government. TeleRead was anti-bureaucracy, not anti-bureaucrat. For the moment, however, as shown by the obtuseness of the GSA man at the hearing, the resistance was there.
Some lessons were emerging. Hundreds of people had e-mailed me for copies of TeleRead. “Even anti-taxers like me would be willing to foot the bill for something so practical and knowledge infectious,” a home schooler in Illinois had said. The head of the Digital Publishing Association, an organization consisting mostly of small publishers and writers, had loved TeleRead. “Instead of flooding the young mind with yet another sitcom or soap,” he had said, “TeleRead would allow video to present them with quality reading materials.” And yet our wishes had not meant squat.
David Lytel, the White House staffer, may have pressed his delete key almost as soon as the TeleRead proposal reached him over the Net. He and his colleagues at the Lehman hearings hadn’t followed up my official testimony with a single question in person or by phone or e-mail. The hearings had been a big farce, a caricature of a public relations exercise. I might as well have been Winston Smith deviating from the plot and making a few friendly suggestions to one of Big Brother’s TV cameras. No one would shoot or torture me for saying the wrong things, but on the major NII issues the Clinton people were about as open as Big Brother to ideas from below, Net or no Net.
I wasn’t the only writer with a few feelings on the subject of Executive listening skills in this networked era. A New York Times columnist later told how cavalier the White House crowd had been toward the e-mail from her. I’d actually gotten farther than she had. At least Gore had sent me a higher class of boilerplate. Perhaps that was because I had actually used conventional rather than electronic mail, and had enclosed a photocopy of a TeleRead article from the Washington Post. Article or not, however, the White House had thumbed its nose at me. While Clinton and Gore couldn’t reply to every citizen, the composition of the citizens’ advisory council had made clear what the NII priorities were, even in the age of Cyber Socks: Big Government serving Big Business.
Clinton-Gore had better change if they wanted my vote in ’96. Rather than just sharing Sock’s meows and feeling ever so smug about high-tech democracy, they needed to spend time more listening to us nonlobbyists and a little less time keeping Vance Opperman happy. Democracy should not mean just a dialogue between the White House and the usual “stakeholders.”
As is obvious by now, intrusive government officials love to fixate on net.sex. But something else is happening as shown in the next chapter: net.love. Let’s hope that Exon and company can tell the difference.