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From: Lawrence Garfield 
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.illuminati
Subject: The Crack in the Pyranoid
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 21:54:08 -0400
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This one just clobbers all the paranoia surrounding myths of
insidiously successful centralized hierarchical conspiracy orgs -- and
it feels fresh every time I read it.  I hope Bruce doesn't mind my
whole-some repost.

--- begin ---

 Bruce Sterling
 bruces@well.sf.ca.us

 LITERARY FREEWARE:  NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE

 Remarks at Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference IV Chicago, Mar
26, 1994

     I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the
topics of privacy threat raised by this panel.  And I don't.  One
reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be
large, monolithic bureaucracies (of whatever character, political or
economic)  that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way
surveillance of an unsuspecting populace.  I've come to feel that
computation just doesn't work that way.  Being afraid of monolithic
organizations especially when they have computers, is like being
afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.

     The threat simply doesn't concur with my historical experience.
None of the large organizations of my youth that compelled my fear and
uneasy respect have prospered.  Let me just roll off a few acronyms
here.  CCCP.  KGB.  IBM.  GM.  AEC.  SAC.

     It was recently revealed that the CIA has been of actual negative
worth -- literally worse than useless -- to American national
security.  They were in the pockets of the KGB during our death
struggle with the Soviet Union -- and yet we still won. Japanese
zaibatsus -- Japan Inc. -- the corporate monoliths of Japan -- how
much hype have we heard about that lately?   I admit that AT&T has
prospered, sort of -- if you don't count the fact that they've
hollowed themselves out by firing a huge percentage of their
personnel.

     Suppose that, say, Equifax, turned into an outright fascist
organization and stated abusing privacy in every way they could. How
could they keep that a secret?  Realistically, given current
employment practices in the Western economies, what kind of loyalty
could they command among their own personnel?  The low level temps
have no health insurance and no job security; the high level people
are ready to grab their golden parachutes and bail at any time.  Where
is the fanatically loyal army of gray flannel organization men who
will swear lifelong allegiance to this organization, or *any*
organization in this country with the possible exception of the Mafia?

     I feel that the real threat to our society isn't because people
are being surveilled but because people are being deliberately
ignored.  People drop through the safety nets.  People stumble through
the streets of every city in this country absolutely wrapped in the
grip of demons, groping at passersby for a moment's attention and pity
and not getting it.  In parts of the Third World people are routinely
disappeared, not because of high-tech computer surveillance but for
the most trivial and insane reasons -- because they wear glasses,
because they were seen reading a book -- and if they survive, it's
because of the thin thread of surveillance carried out by Amnesty
International.

     There may be securicams running 24 hours a day all around us, but
mechanical surveillance is not the same as people actually getting
attention or care.  Sure, rich people, like most of us here, are gonna
get plenty of attention, probably too much, a poisonous amount, but in
the meantime life has become so cheap in this society that we let
people stagger around right in front of us exhaling tuberculosis
without treatment.  It's not so much information haves and have-nots
and watch and watch-nots.

     I wish I could speak at greater length more directly to the topic
of this panel.  But since I'm the last guy to officially speak at CFP
IV, I want the seize the chance to grandstand and do a kind of
pontifical summation of the event.  And get some irrepressible
feelings off my chest.

     What am I going to remember from CFP IV?  I'm going to remember
the Chief Counsel of NSA and his impassioned insistence that key
escrow cryptography represents normality and the status quo, and that
unlicensed hard cryptography is a rash and radical leap into unplumbed
depths of lawlessness.  He made a literary reference to BRAVE NEW
WORLD.  What he said in so many words was, "We're not the Brave New
World, Clipper's opponents are the Brave New World."

     And I believe he meant that.  As a professional science fiction
writer I remember being immediately struck by the deep conviction that
there was plenty of Brave New World to go around.

     I've been to all four CFPs, and in my opinion this is the darkest
one by far.  I hear ancestral voices prophesying war.  All previous
CFPs had a weird kind of camaraderie about them.  People from the most
disparate groups found something useful to tell each other. But now
that America's premiere spookocracy has arrived on stage and spoken
up, I think the CFP community has finally found a group of outsiders
that it cannot metabolize.  The trenchworks are going up and I see
nothing but confrontation ahead.

     Senator Leahy at least had the elementary good sense to backpedal
and temporize, as any politician would when he saw the white-hot
volcano of technological advance in the direct path of a Cold War
glacier that has previously crushed everything in its way.

     But that unlucky flak-catcher the White House sent down here --
that guy was mousetrapped, basically.  That was a debacle!  Who was
briefing that guy?  Are they utterly unaware?  How on earth could they
miss the fact that Clipper and Digital Telephony are violently
detested by every element in this community -- with the possible
exception of one brave little math professor this high? Don't they get
it that everybody from Rush Limbaugh to Timothy Leary despises this
initiative?  Don't they read newspapers?   The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times?  I won't even ask if they read their email.

     That was bad politics.  But that was nothing compared to the
presentation by the gentleman from the NSA.  If I can do it without
losing my temper, I want to talk to you a little bit about how
radically unsatisfactory that was.

     I've been waiting a long time for somebody from Fort Meade to
come to the aid of Dorothy Denning in Professor Denning's heroic and
heartbreaking solo struggle against twelve million other people with
email addresses.  And I listened very carefully and I took notes and I
swear to God I even applauded at the end.

     He had seven points to make, four of which were disingenuous, two
were half-truths, and the other was the actual core of the problem.

     Let me blow away some of the smoke and mirrors first, more for my
own satisfaction than because it's going to enlighten you people any.
With your indulgence.

     First, the kidporn thing.  I am sick and tired of hearing this
specious blackwash.  Are American citizens really so neurotically
uptight about deviant sexual behavior that we will allow our entire
information infrastructure to be dictated by the existence of
pedophiles?  Are pedophiles that precious and important to us?  Do the
NSA and the FBI really believe that they can hide the structure of a
telephone switch under a layer of camouflage called child pornography?
Are we supposed to flinch so violently at the specter of child abuse
that we somehow miss the fact that you've installed a Sony Walkman
jack in our phones?

     Look, there were pedophiles before NII and there will be
pedophiles long after NII is just another dead acronym.  Pedophiles
don't jump out of BBSes like jacks in the box.  You want to impress me
with your deep concern for children?  This is Chicago!  Go down to the
Projects and rescue some children from being terrorized and recruited
by crack gangs who wouldn't know a modem if it bit them on the ass!
Stop pornkidding us around!  Just knock it off with that crap, you're
embarrassing yourselves.

     But back to the speech by Mr. Baker of the NSA.  Was it just me,
ladies and gentlemen, or did anyone else catch that tone of truly
intolerable arrogance?  Did they guy have to make the remark about our
missing Woodstock because we were busy with our trigonometry?  Do
spook mathematicians permanently cooped up inside Fort Meade consider
that a funny remark?  I'd like to make an even more amusing
observation -- that I've seen scarier secret police agencies than his
completely destroyed by a Czech hippie playwright with a manual
typewriter.

     Is the NSA unaware that the current President of the United
States once had a big bushel-basket-full of hair?  What does he expect
from the computer community?  Normality?  Sorry pal, we're fresh out!
Who is it, exactly, that the NSA considers a level-headed sober sort,
someone to sit down with and talk to seriously?  Jobs? Wozniak?
Gates?  Sculley?  Perot -- I hope to God it's not Perot. Bob Allen --
okay, maybe Bob Allen, that brownshoe guy from AT&T. Bob Allen seems
to think that Clipper is a swell idea, at least he's somehow willing
to merchandise it.  But Christ, Bob Allen just gave eight zillion
dollars to a guy whose idea of a good time is Microsoft Windows for
Spaceships!

     When is the NSA going to realize that Kapor and his people and
Rotenberg and his people and the rest of the people here are as good
as people get in this milieu?  Yes they are weird people, and yes they
have weird friends (and I'm one of them), but there isn't any
normality left for anybody in this society, and when it comes to
computers, when the going got weird the weird turned pro!  The status
quo is *over!*  Wake up to it!  Get used to it!

     Where in hell does a crowd of spooks from Fort Meade get off
playing "responsible adults" in this situation?  This is a laugh and a
half!  Bobby Ray Inman, the legendary NSA leader, made a stab at
computer entrepreneurism and rapidly went down for the third time.
Then he got out of the shadows of espionage and into the bright lights
of actual public service and immediately started gabbling like a
daylight-stricken vampire.  Is this the kind of responsive public
official we're expected to blindly trust with the insides of our
phones and computers?  Who made him God?

     You know, it's a difficult confession for a practiced cynic like
me to make, but I actually trust EFF people.  I do; I trust them;
there, I've said it.   But I wouldn't trust Bobby Ray Inman to go down
to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.

     You know, I like FBI people.  I even kind of trust them, sort of,
kind of, a little bit.  I'm sorry that they didn't catch Kevin Mitnick
here.  I'm even sorry that they didn't manage to apprehend Robert
Steele, who is about one hundred times as smart as Mitnick and ten
thousand times as dangerous.   But FBI people, I think your idea of
Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster, and I'll tell you
why.

     Because you're going to be filling out your paperwork in
quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do, because you don't
have your own pet court like the NSA does.  And for you, it probably
is going to seem pretty much like the status quo used to be.  But in
the meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United States
around the world with a terrible weapon.  Not your court-ordered,
civilized Digital Telephony -- their raw and tyrannical Digital
Telephony.

     You're gonna be using it to round up wiseguys in streetgangs, and
people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round up
democratic activists and national minorities.  You're going to
strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and then you're
going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported truckbombers
these rogue governments are sending our way after annihilating their
own internal opposition by using your tools.  You want us to put an
axe in your hand and you're promising to hit us with only the flat
side of it, but the Chinese don't see it that way; they're already
licensing fax machines and they're gonna need a lot of new hardware to
gear up for Tiananmen II.

     I've talked a long time, but I want to finish by saying something
about the NSA guy's one real and actual argument.  The terrors of the
Brave New World of free individual encryption.  When he called
encryption enthusiasts "romantic" he was dead-on, and when he said the
results of spreading encryption were unpredictable and dangerous he
was also dead-on, because people, encryption is not our friend.
Encryption is a mathematical technique, and it has about as much
concern for our human well-being as the fact that seventeen times
seventeen equals two hundred and eighty-nine.  It does, but that
doesn't make us sleep any safer in our beds.

     Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me and they have since
the mid 1980s.  The effects are very scary and very unpredictable and
could be very destabilizing.  But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn,
Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as
totalitarian governments.  It's been a long century, and we've had
enough of them.

     Our battle this century against totalitarianism has left terrible
scars all over our body politic and the threat these people pose to us
is entirely and utterly predictable.   You can say that the devil we
know is better than the devil we don't, but the devils we knew were
ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and blow up the
world.  How much worse can that get?  Let's not build chips and wiring
for our police and spies when only their police and spies can reap the
full benefit of them.

     But I don't expect my arguments to persuade anyone in the NSA. If
you're NSA and I do somehow convince you, by some fluke, then I urge
you to look at your conscience -- I know you have one -- and take the
word to your superiors and if they don't agree with you --*resign.*
Leave the Agency.  Resign now, and if I'm right about what's coming
down the line, you'll be glad you didn't wait till later.

     But even though I have a good line of gab, I don't expect to
actually argue people out of their livelihood.  That's notoriously
difficult.

     So CFP people, you have a fight on your hands.  I'm sorry that a
community this young should have to face a fight this savage, for such
terribly high stakes, so soon.   But what the heck;  you're always
bragging about how clever you are; here's your chance to prove to your
fellow citizens that you're more than a crowd of net-nattering MENSA
dilettantes.  In cyberspace one year is like seven dog years, and on
the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, so I figure that makes you CFP
people twenty-eight years old.   And people, for the sake of our
society and our children you had better learn to act your age.

     Good luck.  Good luck to you.  For what it's worth, I think
you're some of the best and brightest our society has to offer.
Things look dark but I feel hopeful.  See you next year in San
Francisco.

--- end ---