[p2p-research] meeting john gilmore

[Michel Bauwens]

I met John and his partner human rights activist Ann Harrison in Bogota ...
an amazing couple,

see http://www.toad.com/gnu/

 Things I've Said (That People Sometimes Remember) "The Net interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it." This was quoted in Time
Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation in Cyberspace", by Philip
Elmer-DeWitt. It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then,
including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October
2000, and CACM 39(7):13.

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves
messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship
because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their
subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other
route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the
Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections
or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do
recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have
proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating
information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now
consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and
their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society. They may
be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. But the job of building a
surveillance database and populating it with information about us is
happening largely without our awareness and without our consent." I said
this to Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima, and she reported it in a
front-page story on September 22, 2007 as Collecting of Details on Travelers
Documented: U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously
Known<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102347.html>.


"If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody." The essence of
"watching" or "looking" is focusing your attention. If you diffuse your
attention to encompass everything, you end up missing everything. This is
exactly what the US Government is doing with its police-state tactics
(searching everyone who travels; fingerprinting every foreigner who is
stupid enough to arrive; etc). I said this in a
message<http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00429.html>to
Declan McCullagh's "Politech" list in March 2003.

"Reducing the transaction costs of co-operation" This is what free software
does. When the published copyright terms of intellectual property permit
anyone to modify or improve it and re-distribute it, there is no transaction
cost for people to do so. When the terms disallow these things, anyone who
wants to do them must negotiate with the owner. This takes energy and time;
most people never bother, so most improvements never get made. Often the
improvement is small, like a corrected paragraph in a book, a bug-fix in
software, or smoothing out a user interface glitch. Transaction costs must
be very low for these kind of cooperative improvements. But the impact of
hundreds of small improvements is a substantial increase in quality and
function, which is quite hard and expensive to duplicate in uncooperative
environments.

Books are more frequently updated by their readers this way than software,
because books arrive with their "source code" -- the text -- visible to and
correctable by the reader. A short note back to the author suffices. The
Whole Earth Catalog was regularly improved this way.

"How many of you have broken no laws this month?" There are too many laws,
and the wrong things are illegal. Drugs, sexual publications, hiring a
housekeeper and not paying Social Security, jaywalking, loitering,
nontraditional sex or marriage, paying someone less than a government-set
wage, not wearing motorcycle helmets, owning or wearing guns, choosing your
own medicines, designing or constructing your own house, owning software
that can copy DVDs, exporting cryptography, driving at the same speed as the
rest of the traffic; all these things should be legal. What laws have YOU
broken this month?

Any country that makes every citizen a felon is heading for real trouble. We
need to reform the legislative system that keeps producing too many of the
wrong laws. I first said this in a
speech<http://www.toad.com/gnu/cfp.talk.txt>to the First Conference on
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in 1991.

"That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee -- with
physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real
privacy of personal communications." Another memorable part of my
speech on Privacy,
Technology and the Open Society <http://www.toad.com/gnu/cfp.talk.txt> from
the First Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy.

"We make free software affordable." This is the slogan on the back of the
first Cygnus Support T-shirt.

"Drug prisoners are the Japanese-Americans of the War on Drugs." In World
War II, the United States imprisoned thousands of American citizens of
Japanese descent, simply because of their Japanese heritage. In the drug
war, the United States is currently imprisoning more than a million
citizens, solely because they choose to alter their own or their customers'
state of mind with physical substances.

I believe that within fifty years *we will stand shamed*, in our own opinion
and in world opinion, for this travesty of justice and civil rights. We will
offer recompense to our citizens unjustly deprived of their liberties due to
this spasm of paranoia. Whether we can ever repair the Bill of Rights, or
restore public trust in honest government, is a much harder problem.
"When the X.500 revolution comes, your name will be lined up against the
wall and shot." Some people in love with hierarchy developed a naming system
for everything in the world -- including email addresses and such. It was
called X.500. Unfortunately it didn't interoperate with anything we already
had -- like email addresses and domain names. This didn't stop these
profoundly stupid people from embedding it into HTTPS certificates and a few
Internet standards that failed, like PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail).

I made this remark in an email message on
2/26/1993<http://www.toad.com/gnu/name-shot.txt>to the PEM-DEV at TIS.COM
mailing list, complaining that I couldn't use the PEM
encryption software because the fascists who ran the naming hierarchy
wouldn't give me the name I chose. I wanted a name like
"O=gnu(_at_)cygnus(_dot_)com". The main objection to this sort of "easy and
obvious" name is, (the quote above). That is, when the X.500 hierarchy takes
over the world, "bad" names like that one won't work any more. I switched to
using PGP, which didn't impose any craziness on the names people could use.


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