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Bruce Sterling on Geeks and Spooks
apsmith writes: "Bruce Sterling's
latest Viridian piece is a written version of a talk on why we're in such a mess with crypto, why the computer industry is going nowhere for the next few years, and what Lawrence Lessig, the NSA, Echelon, Oliver North and Abdullah Catli have in common. Thought-provoking stuff, even if you might not agree with quite everything ("Why don't you geeks just sit down with your cheap, crappy plastic boxes, and shut up? Here in the TV biz, our boxes look nicer anyway!")." This is a lunch-time talk, and it's meant to be entertaining, and it is. :)
The point of this device would be to arm the population in surveilling and recording acts of unconventional warfare.
Now, if you turn the entire population into anonymous snoops and peeping Toms, it's a nation of snitches, which is very destabilizing. I'm not suggesting that.
This is the civilian militia Minuteman version of surveillance.
How does Bruce distinguish this from a lynch mob or posse of surveillance?
I read through those paragraphs several times, and I really can't figure out how Bruce gets around the destabilization problem that he himself points out. Somehow the fact that these are really sophisticated, cool devices is supposed to make them immune to mis-use.
OSS projects as centers of power? Are you kidding me? The manager at your local K-Mart has more power than Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman combined.
What you're missing, is that the "code artists" are the serfs. Writing code is low-level labor--to the information age what plowing fields was to the age of agriculture. The only way you can cease to be a serf, is to cease writing code. Code is just a commodity, like wheat. Useless in and of itself. Useful if you can make money off its sale. The management class is the one that structures deals and creates wealth. That's the way it always has been and always will be.
Bruce decided that our government should be the primary distributors of crypto, and that it should arm private citizens with secure transmitting devices. At first, this sounds like a great idea: the masses rise up in defense of their great nation and take the evil barbarians by storm! The intelligence agencies would love it because they would now have information streaming in, and they would not have to go through the trouble of getting a warrant for a wiretap or bugs. However, the problem arises when you consider the government presumably giving the worlds most powerful crypto to Joe and Jane Citizen These are the people who the government would not trust with conventional military hardware, much less something with the capability to destroy people's lives by ultimately providing their closest held secrets to Washington, free of charge. It brings to mind several scenes from Orwell's 1984, where it was the 'private' citizen who turned in his fellows to Big Brother.
I suppose I should be proud to have someone like Bruce Sterling making any kind of comments about me... (I wonder if he'd show up if I invited him to a party?)
Actually, our quality of life out on Sealand is pretty high. Any geek thing which fits in 5k square feet of dedicated-to-accomodations space, for a fairly small number of people, we have. Gig-e, dvd library, 5 TB of mp3s (and divx), wavelan throughout, on-site anonymizing proxies and mixmaster remailers, a pool of laptops, IEC 320 outlets on the walls, and about 16L of diet coke per person per week. It's really no different from a big house in the middle of nowhere, except in 2 hours I can be in London, or 4 hours in Amsterdam, or 11 hours in San Francisco, LA, etc. Admittedly, I'd far prefer living in one of the 5 interesting cities in the world, but this makes money. And, most of the people living here are security/maintenance, not geeks. The big drawback is our no-drug/no-alcohol policy, and the lack of random unplanned social interaction; friends of mine from SF fly out and visit, but nothing really happens spontaneously or serindipitously. Again, much like living on a farm or something.
No one really promotes Sealand as a tourist destination or place to live; it's effectively a big colocation facility at present, and likely to remain so indefinitely.
I *do* agree with his fundamental point there, though -- if I were going to be living in isolation with a small number of people, I don't know if people who are dedicated to bringing down governments and complete individual liberty are the best companions. Although *bland* people are probably the "easiest" to get along with, if I were picking some people to spend long amounts of time with in a remote location, once basic skills were taken care of, people interested in science, art, literature, etc. would be a lot more interesting than "glee club" or debating society or politicians or lawyers or the others Sterling mentions as the most interesting. A lot of the "hacker" conferences attract a good cross-section of people; I think of all the 5000-person subsets of the world, the people at events like HAL, nanotech conferences, Burning Man, etc. would be some of the better ones.
As for his overall point about the rate of cypherpunk progress; I don't know. A lot of the things we want already exist -- ssh is *widely* deployed (to the point that anyone sending passwords in the clear over the net is a fucking moron, and widely recognized as such); SSL web pages are common; anonymization through mixmaster or proxies is understood and deployed. HavenCo provides a small piece of the puzzle by making it easy to anonymously, reliabily, and security host servers. The only thing we're missing is true blinded ecash, but progress is still being made on that front, and almost-as-good alternatives, like e-gold, paypal, etc., already exist. I'd say we've done a pretty good job on the datahaven front, given that it's been discussed in sci-fi for 20-30 years, and most of the pieces are there now; how long were they discussing space travel, biotech, wide area networks, etc. before they were deployed to a similar degree? The dotcom collapse is certainly a setback for everyone, but the underlying trend of decentralization and individual control which started before the dotcom boom is still going strong.
There's already too much information, code, hardware, people, you name it to keep track of. Your average feudal lord didn't have to keep track of a gazillion different people doing a gazillion different things. You don't need Sealand or Grenada to make an Island in the Net; all you really need is relative obscurity and the ability to quickly shut it down and set it up somewhere or somehow else. He makes the mistake of regarding anarchists as these in-your-face kind of people who are out on the streets raising hell, when I bet most of them are just quietly going about their business keeping a low profile. He also makes the mistake of regarding the spooks as these omnipotent, omnipresent gods; the events of 9/11 alone disproves that idea. High profile people like Dimitri and that Finnish kid get the heat while shadowy crackers and sharers continue on, barely being noticed by anyone. We've got a brand new spanking Homeland Sercuity department and a Justice Department that's wanting to wiretap and spy all over the country, but neither of them can stop that kid downloading MP3s or knocking off the corner liquor store. Remember the war on drugs? Last time I checked, drugs were winning.
If one looks at the technology and software that's out there, it can be easy to conclude that there's little real innovation out there. It would seem that we're in a period of small refinements to old hat stuff. But isn't it the social innovation that really makes the internet unique?
Part of the problem with science fiction writers is they tend to write novels where one person single-handedly saves the world or changes it in opposition to some monolithic oppressive entity. I'm afraid Sterling's fallen prey to that - he's looking at the people who want to be big players and what they're doing, while all the time, the bit actors are stealing the show by sheer force of numbers. Yeah, great, the government's going to have a number on everyone and observe everything they do - but how in the hell are they going to keep track of it all? How many words are created on the internet a day and how many people would you need to keep track of them all? People argue about anomynity all the time, but there's a simple truth - if you are one of millions, you are anomynous unless you do something very obvious to draw attention to yourself or get very unlucky.
What he's done here is the equivalent of judging the ocean by what he can see looking down on it. He sees the first few surface feet and meanwhile, 99.99% of the water goes uninspected.