I'm a fairly left-of-center kinda guy. But at the recent O'Reilly P2P and Web Services conference, perhaps only Mark Lucovsky of Microsoft and Hillary Rosen of the RIAA were to my right. I found myself largely at odds with the larger P2P community (I'll hold up Fred von Lohmann of EFF as a convenient example).
The public perception is that anyone using a P2P network is a pirate and that anyone who encrypts electronic communication is a terrorist. Tim O'Reilly joked about renaming next year's conference The Pirates and Hackers Conference, but the rest of Washington isn't laughing. The DMCA in effect criminalizes publication of ways to circumvent copy protection mechanisms. This isn't just a proposed bill, it is the law. And it is the law because we are losing the PR battles that shape public opinion, the political battles that formulate laws governing technology, and the legal battles that put people like Dmitry Sklarov in jail for six weeks.
We have to jettison the losing arguments, such as that MP3 swapping is justified because evil record force musicians to sign lousy contracts. Instead, we have to focus on winnable arguments like the protection of fair use and the First Amendment. Mike Nelson of IBM said that we need better bumper stickers, and he is right.
The events of September 11th have created a pliable public convinced that limits must be placed on technology to catch child pornographers and terrorists. Congress wasted no time granting sweeping new powers to law enforcement, and the attorney general, Richard Ashcroft, shows no signs of letting up. It is up to the technology community to focus the public debate on facts rather than let passions, paranoia, and PR erode our First and Fourth Amendment rights.
A few weeks ago on NPR radio, there was a piece about trying to "profile" whoever sent the anthrax-laced letters. According to NPR, someone thought that the perpetrator was not just a programmer but a Perl programmer! Some thought that the leading zero in the month (09) indicated a programmer. Don't ask me how they reached the conclusion that it was a Perl programmer. If anyone can find a transcript of the NPR report or the story on which it was based, let me know.
My point is that software developers are increasingly viewed with the kind of jaundiced eye once reserved for unseemly artistic types. Although "Reefer Madness" now seems comical, it reflected some widely held views at the time it was made. The software community has to consciously craft a public image instead of letting someone else, like the RIAA, do it for us.
Get your Daily Bruce!
What do your non-geek friends think about electronic surveillance?
Categories
Web
Comments (3)
Read More Entries by Bruce A. Epstein.
Does anyone know of any illegal mnusic sites
electronic surveillance
I'm actually under the close eyes of GCSB, the New Zealand member of Echelon.
The information I have gathered indicates that all my email, faxes, internet, cellphone calls and cable TV are being monitered and censored by GCSB.
As a response to this, I am programming an operating system (KAOS) with an encryption component that exceeds US military spec for 100 years unbreakable weapons key commands code.
There is a filesharing protocol (samizdat) that is able to bypass any censor and any communications app can use samizdat.
Remember, if you have a cellphone, Echelon can tell where you are. If you use email, Echelon will read it, all faxes are scanned by Echelon and nobody has privacy or freespeech today.
DoubleSpeak and winning Propaganda Wars
We all know the Emperor's New Clothes and as much as we over-use that metaphor, it's surprising that this debate even exists considering that the definitions of the active terms are all very well known to the average 8-year-old:
A Pirate steals from the rich in order to make themselves richer. Piracy in the music business is not about swapping homespun cassettes of your fave bands to enlighten a buddy (that's called "viral marketing"). Piracy, at least during the many years I spent selling records, is all about foreign and organized crime syndicates pressing product they then present to the vendors at deep discounts. The home-made tapes are called boot-legs after the custom of smuggling a bottle in your boot to avoid high tavern prices for gin.
Now, someone who steals from the rich to give to the poor ... which characterizes P2P and forms the main complain of the RIAA ... well, isn't that another myth entirely?
Let's start using the correct terms, religiously, in every aspect of our publications, and maybe, like the way we redefined "geek" into a positive thing (distinct from "nerd") maybe we can get the public to understand the doublespeak they are being handed on this issue.