Extending the public
right-to-know into cyberspace will be a mighty battle.
It’s an old war, a war librarians are used to,
and I honor you for the free-expression battles you
have won in the past. But the terrain of cyberspace is
new terrain. I think that ground will have to be won
all over again, megabyte by megabyte. - 1992 ~~~Computer networks worldwide will
feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular
phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice,
and high-definition television. A multimedia global
circus! Or so it's hoped - and planned. The real
Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance
to today's plans. Planning has never seemed to have
much to do with the seething, fungal development of the
Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little
resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's
post-holocaust command grid. It's a fine and happy
irony. - 1993~~~The whole massive, lethal superpower
infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-century
cyberspace like some impossible fluid origami trick. The
Reserve guys from the bowling leagues suddenly reveal
themselves to be digitally assisted Top Gun veterans from
a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. And they go to
some godforsaken place that doesn't possess Virtual
Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army
in their rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off,
and then they kill it. Blood and burning flesh splashes
the far side of the glass. But it can't get through
the screen. - 1993~~~"Simulate before you
build." They want to make that a basic military
principle. Not just simulated weapons. Entire simulated
defense plants. Factories that exist only in digital
form, designed and prepared to build weapons that
don't even exist yet either, and have never existed,
and may become obsolete and be replaced by better ones,
before a nail is ever hammered. Nevertheless, these
nonexistent weapons will have entire battalions of real
people who are expert in their use, people who helped
design them and improve them hands-on, in the fields of
virtual war. - 1993~~~Can governments really exercise
national military power - kick ass, kill people - merely
by using some big amps and some color monitors and some
keyboards, and a bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi
"holodeck" stuff? The answer is yes. Yes, this
technology is lethal. Yes, it is a real strategic asset.
- 1993~~~The rise of computer networking, of
the Information Society, is doing strange and disruptive
things to the processes by which power and knowledge are
currently distributed. Knowledge and information,
supplied through these new conduits, are highly corrosive
to the status quo. People living in the midst of
technological revolution are living outside the law: not
necessarily because they mean to break laws, but because
the laws are vague, obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or
unenforceable. - 1994~~~There's something direly mean
spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and
then renting it out to other people to speak. There's
something unprecedented and sinister in this process of
creeping commodification of data and knowledge. A
computer is something too close to the human brain for me
to rest entirely content with someone patenting or
copyrighting the process of its thought ... I don't
think democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast
empires of data are encrypted, restricted, proprietary,
confidential, top-secret, and sensitive. I fear for the
stability of a society that builds sand castles out of
databits and tries to stop a real-world tide with royal
commands. - 1994~~~FBI people ... your idea of Digital
Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster ... you're
going to be filling out your paperwork in quintuplicate
to get a tap, just like you always do ... In the
meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United
States around the world with a terrible weapon ... raw
and tyrannical Digital Telephony. You're gonna be
using it to round up wise guys in street gangs, and
people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round
up democratic activists ...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 truck bombers these rogue governments are
sending our way after annihilating their own internal
opposition by using your tools. - 1994~~~Encrypted networks worry the hell
out of me ... The effects are scary and 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 ... 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. - 1994~~~You want an example of a
communication system that doesn't charge for
transport? The English language. Think of the Internet as
a language rather than a machine, and most of your
questions [about charging people to use it] become
irrelevant. I think the Internet is tougher than you give
it credit for. From now on, the struggle will not be over
mechanical control of the means of information, but over
spin- control of the zeitgeist. - 1994~~~Computers don't make any ... old
free-expression problems go away; on the contrary, they
intensify them, and they introduce a bunch of new
problems ... They're out there. They're out there
now. In the future, they're only going to get worse.
And there's going to be a bunch of new problems that
nobody's even imagined. - 1995~~~Countries that have offshore money
laundries are gonna have offshore data laundries.
Countries that now have lousy oppressive governments and
smart, determined terrorist revolutionaries are gonna
have lousy oppressive governments and smart determined
terrorist revolutionaries with computers. Not too long
after that, they're going to have tyrannical
revolutionary governments run by zealots with computers;
then we're likely to see just how close to Big
Brother a government can really get. Dealing with these
people is going to be a big problem for us. - 1995~~~Current trends in communications are
leading toward a head-on collision between global
networking and national governmental authority. At the
moment a "twilight of sovereignty" scenario
looks plausible and the situation definitely does not
favor governments. Given current political instability
worldwide, it's going to be a lot easier to make
governments look like computer networks than it is to
make the computer revolution the handmaiden of
traditional governments. I make no judgment as to whether
this is good or bad. After the revolution things will be
different - not better, just different. - 1995 |
