803 lines
67 KiB
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803 lines
67 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 1237
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Title: HPR1237: Cory Doctorow tribute to Aaron Swartz
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1237/hpr1237.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:07:37
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---
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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon, and several of you have contacted me to see if
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Hacker Public Radio could do anything to mark the passing of Arn Schwartz.
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In that period of time, I was listening to the commanderline.net where Thomas Gideon
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featured a speech by Corey Doctreau who was on a book tour for his new book, Homeland,
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and instead of talking about the book, give possibly one of the best and more moving speeches.
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Thanks to Corey and indeed Thomas for arranging the use of that clip here today.
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Links to the various different websites can be found in the show notes for this episode,
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but first a few moments of silence.
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So hi, I'm not going to read from the book because there's podcasts of me reading it in which all
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the places where I habitually make mistakes have been edited out, and so they will sound better
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than me reading it to a person. Instead, I will talk about what English teachers inevitably call
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the themes of the book, although the only book that can be properly said to have a theme is the
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novelization of Spider-Man, which has the Spider-Man theme. I'm going to talk instead about the ideas
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in the book and it takes the form of a recent history lesson that starts in February of 2010
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in a town called Lower Marion, Pennsylvania, which is an affluent suburb of Philadelphia,
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the kind of place where they can afford to give MacBooks to all the students. So all the students
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get free MacBooks and they take them home every night and they bring them back to school every
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morning. Their homework assignments are given to them over the network, they turn them in
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over the network, and this is the only device they're allowed to use at school. So it's kind of a
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mandatory laptop. And in February 2010, a student named Blake J. Robbins brought a lawsuit against
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the school district because his high school principal had called him in and said, Blake, you're
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taking drugs. And he said, I don't take drugs. And his principal said, well, can you explain this
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and show them a photo of himself the night before in his bedroom, taking what looked like a pill.
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And the young man said, well, that's not a pill. That's a Micah Nikes candy. I eat them all the time.
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And how did you get a picture of me in my bedroom? And that's where the lawsuit kicks in.
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What we found out is that the school, quite correctly, assumed that the students would have their
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laptops stolen or that they would lose them. And so they put some anti theft software on the laptops.
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Now in any other world, we would just call the software spyware because what it let them do
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was activate the camera over the internet and take a picture that they could see without the
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little green light going on. And you know, Anton Chekhov, he says, if you put a gun on the
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mantelpiece and act one, it'll go off by act three. If you give school disciplinarians the power
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to spy on students in September by February, they'll be a lawsuit as it turns out. And so there was
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this lawsuit. And as the lawsuit unwound, we found out that they had normally taken this picture of
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this one kid one time. But of course, they'd taken thousands of photos of many students that they
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suspected of being disciplined issues in some way, including photos when they were undressed
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photos when they were at home at school photos, when they were in the company of people who weren't
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students, their parents, other kids, their siblings. And in the wake of it, the school promised
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and all the laptop schools in America that were doing this were formed their ways such that
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they would no longer do this. They would no longer secretly install software that let them
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covertly take photos of kids in their schools. Instead, they announced that they had installed
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software on these laptops that they could use to take pictures of these kids. Because,
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as you'll know, if you've studied your Panopticon, you don't have to tell people that you don't
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have to hide the fact that you're spying on children in order to terrorize them into obedience.
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It actually works better if you tell them that they can be spied upon at any time because then
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they'll internalize the surveillance, right? The Germans they call the policemen inside.
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So, let's move to Germany, 10 months later, September of 2010, when a group of fun-loving,
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free-wheeling hacker troublemaker types called the Chaos Computer Club, who were the right kind
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of troublemakers, getting the right kind of trouble. They outed the government of Bavaria
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for secretly installing software spyware on the laptops of people that they suspected of being
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some kind of disciplinary issue. And this software, they call it the Bundes-Trojaner or State
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Trojan, like a Trojan horse. The Bundes-Trojaner, being 10 months more recent than the stuff they
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were using in Lormarian, could do video, could do audio, could grab screen grabs and keystrokes
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and plunder the hard drive. And moreover, a CCC show that once you reconfigured that machine,
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the infected machine so that it betrayed its owner, it presented many risks to the owner,
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because not only could agents of the state use the Bundes-Trojaner to spy on an infected
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computer's owner, but anyone else could too, you could go to a Starbucks or any other place where
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people gathered on a single wireless network, use your laptop to scan for infected systems,
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and then hijack those systems too, you could ride piggyback on the state intrusion.
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So, now we'll go to September 2012. In September 2012, the Federal Trade Commission
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settled with eight companies. Seven of these companies were in the rent to own business,
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they rented to own life's necessities to people who couldn't afford to buy them outright,
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and were willing to pay for them four or five times owner over in order to possess them,
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because they felt that they needed them to participate in society. And of course,
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the top suspect for that used to be cars, these days it's laptops. So, these seven companies,
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they rented to own laptops, the eighth company made laptop security software. They're called
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designerware. They were based in northeast Pennsylvania. You can probably tell where this is going
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to end up, right? So, the settlement with the FTC, the eight companies stipulated that they'd
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use designerware's product to spy on the customers of the rent to own companies, and that they'd
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not only taken stills of them, but they'd recorded video of them, and they'd recorded video of
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them having sex, they'd recorded video of their children in the nude, they'd intercepted lots of
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private communications emails and communications from doctors and HMOs, privileged communications
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from lawyers, stuff from their bank, their financial records, as well as their passwords,
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they'd audio bugged them, and they plundered their hard drives for any files that looked interesting.
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And the FTC, they settled with these eight companies, and they're the consumer watchdog agencies,
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so they did what you hope they would do. They forbade them from doing it anymore. They said,
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you can't do this anymore, you must stop it unless anyone would guess? You tell them, right? Yeah,
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if you disclose it in the long, gnarly, useless, hairball of legalese that you have to click through
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so many times a day to participate in 21st century society, you can basically do anything.
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Now, consumer union, they tell us that it would take 27 hours a day to read through this legalese,
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so you can be pretty sure that nobody reads all of it, but I think most of us read none of it,
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and there's a good reason that you never read it before you click I agree. The first reason not
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to read it before you click I agree is that if you've ever read one, the one thing you can be
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certain of is that you absolutely don't agree with anything in it, right? Because they all boil down
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to some version of, by being dumb enough to use this product, you agree that we're allowed to
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come over to your house and punch your grandmother in the mouth and wear your underwear and make long
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distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge, or a local equivalent, you know, insert the
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Twitter or Facebook or Gmail equivalent here, and so we don't read them because why bother,
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and we don't read them because the worst thing that they could do to us is what kick us off the
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service, make us get a different Gmail account, big deal, right? Well, maybe it's worse than that,
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because in 1986, Congress passed the first major anti-hacking law in this country,
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the Computer Broad and Abuse Act, and rather than list all the things you weren't allowed to do
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under the law, which would have been a long list and obsolete by 1986.5, instead they just said
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anytime you exceed your authorization on a computer that doesn't belong to you, you do something you
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haven't been permitted to do, everything not forbidden is mandatory, you are in violation of the law
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and you can go to jail, you're a felon. So, along comes federal prosecutors who put two and two
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together, they go well on the one hand, we've got this long list of stuff that you're forbidden
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from doing in the terms of service, and on the other hand, we have a statute that says when you
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do something that you're not authorized to do, you're a felon, and then we have these people who
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do things that we don't like, and we can bring felony charges against them for violating the
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terms of service, because everybody's always violating terms of service, and guess what?
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People plead guilty when you do that, because people plead guilty when you indict them period,
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97% of the people who are federally indicted in this country plead guilty and never argue their case.
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So, either our prosecutors are the greatest prosecutors in the history of the human race,
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and they're so psychically good at their job that they only get it wrong 3% of the time,
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or there's something rotten going on, or there's coercion going on, where the threat of extended
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sentences and a horrific and inhumane prison system that's so overcrowded, the Supreme Court has
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ordered California to start releasing prisoners who haven't served their sentences, because no matter
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what they've done, they don't warrant the kind of human rights abuses inherent to being shoved
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into a overcrowded prison system, that people are willing to plead out to three years in jail,
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rather than face 50 years in jail, and the prospect of bankrupting their families on the way to
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defending themselves. There are people going to jail now for computer fraud and abuse act violations,
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because they plead guilty. People whose crimes are things like adding one to the number at the long
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web address when they were looking at their AT&T customer record, discovering that if you did
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that, you were looking at someone else's AT&T customer record with lots of confidential information
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that could be used to compromise them, outing AT&T for bad security practices and finding
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themselves in the receiving end of a federal indictment for their trouble. But there is someone
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who didn't settle out, someone who was indicted under the CFA as well as other statutes,
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and we're going to talk about briefly tonight, someone who helped me write this book,
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someone you've heard a lot about lately, for reasons that are not very nice,
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an old friend of mine named Aaron Swartz. I met Aaron in around the year 2000 when he was just
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a little kid. He was 14, but he looked younger, and he was one of these prodigy kids,
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his parents didn't bother sitting into school. They kind of homeschooled him for certain values
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of homeschool, which just means like he was bright and they turned him loose and said go learn stuff,
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he's very curious. One of the things he got really interested in was how the internet worked.
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He got involved in internet standards bodies where they hammer out the technical
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specifications of the internet itself. Though the standard he was taken with was something called
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RSS 2.0 without getting into a lot of details is a way that computers and the internet can talk
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to each other, which is what every internet standard does approximately. There were many standards
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like it, but this one was Aaron's. Aaron got involved in this stuff and participated. So
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meaningfully on the mailing list, they didn't know he was a kid. They invited him down to the
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meetings. They started to say you should come out, we do face-to-face and San Francisco and the
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like, you should come on out. And he had to say you know what, I don't think my mom would let me
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because I just turned 14, right? And so after they got over their shock of the fact that this
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was a 13-year-old who've been helping them out, they really wanted them to come out, right?
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They wanted to meet them. And luckily for them, there was a reasonable facsimile of an adult
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on this mailing list, a woman named Lisa Ryan, who's terrific and was my girlfriend at the time.
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We're still great friends. And she offered to Shaperonum as kind of a representative from
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the standards body. And so his parents would put him on the plane in Chicago where he lived.
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And we'd pick him up in San Francisco where we lived. And we'd squire him around town. We'd
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take him to the meetings. We'd take him out for dinner. We'd introduce him to nice people.
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We'd marble at his horrific, horrific eating habits. Aaron only ate white food. French
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fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, pizza with nothing on it, boiled rice, but not fried rice,
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because it wasn't white enough, white toast. And you know, you'd hear him talking. You'd go like,
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this is a very bright kid. And if he doesn't die of scurvy, he's really going to go soon.
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2005, he joined the company Reddit. They gave him the title co-founder. He contributed some
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pretty important code to Reddit and made it the site that it are today. When Reddit got bought
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out by Wired and his parent company, Condé Nast, they moved him into the Wired magazine offices
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where he did not thrive. He was not meant for a desk job after a series of breathtaking and
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escalating acts of public disobedience. And in subordination, he was shown the door and wished
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all the best, which is precisely what he went on to do. In 2008, he got involved with a federal
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database called Pacer. Now, there's two kinds of law in this country. There's the Congressional
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Law, the statute books. You've seen the I'm just a Bill's Schoolhouse Rock video. You know how that
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works, right? And then there's the pointy end of the law, the judge law, which is the law that
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the judges make when you argue your case in front of them and they weigh your case in the balance
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and read what the other judges have written about other cases like yours and utter an opinion,
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issue an opinion in which they write down. Now, all the statute books are a couple of good-sized
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bookshelves, everything that Congress has passed in 1776, but the judge law is a couple of good-sized
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libraries. Everything judges have written since 1776. So historically, it's been hard to lay
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hands on it because there's a lot of it and it's expensive to reproduce. And yet, to know the law
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is to read the judge law. It's not enough to read the statute books. Those of you who are programmers,
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the statutes are the requirements document, the judge law is the source code. You need both,
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right, to understand the law. So in the 1980s, Pacer took the judge law online. It was an early
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federal database to put this online and they charged $0.7 a page to understand how antiquated
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this was. It was measured in pages. Somehow, they decided that there was a thing called a page
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of internet. And so they charged by the page, $0.7 a page, which, you know, given that you might
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have to look at hundreds of thousands of pages, especially in the 1980s, when $0.7 was $0.7
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could add up, right? And, you know, but they had to pay for the computers, which were big and
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bulky and stupid and expensive and the specialized skills that it took to administer and the enormous
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bails of hay that the Brontosaurus is that powered the wheels by going around and around eight day
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in and day out to keep the Pacer system running. But by 2010, 2011, 2012, it was kind of an
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anachronism, right? Because now computers are fast and cheap and small and you could run the
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whole thing off a DS, you know, you could you could seat it on on the pirate bay with a thousand
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seeds and let anyone download their own copy of it. But instead of making it cheaper, for some
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reason, they made it more expensive. It went up to 10 cents a page. So some people at Princeton,
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some activists, they decided that they would make Pacer public because there's a funny thing about
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the law, which is that it doesn't belong to anyone. It's not public property so much as it's
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no one's property. You can copy the law, you can share the law, you can make copies of the law,
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you can charge money for the law, you can do anything you want once you have the law. So they
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created a service called recap, Pacer backwards. And the way recap worked is you plugged it into your
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browser when you went to pay for a page of Pacer, first of a check to see whether that page was in
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recap. And if it was, you got it for free, you got the copy from recap. And if it wasn't, you paid
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your 10 cents and your page went into recap. Aaron liberated $1.5 million worth of federal law,
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the 20% of law most widely cited and put it and it ended up in recap, which we all thought was
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completely cool and amazing. The FBI did not think it was cool and amazing. They staked him out,
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they opened a file on him, they began surveillance. Then they brought him in for questioning without
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his lawyer present. And this is a public service announcement. If anyone from any law enforcement
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agency would like to speak to you, you should ask to have a lawyer present. I said this the other
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night when I was giving this talk in San Francisco, this is a 24-city tour. In San Francisco, I said this
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and a woman came up afterwards to get her book sign and she said, by the way, I work for the FBI.
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And I said, oh cool, what did you think of my advice that no one should talk to the FBI unless
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they have a lawyer present? She said that is excellent advice. So there you have it from the
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horse's mouth. Don't talk to the FBI with a lawyer present. Don't talk to law enforcement
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with that lawyer present. That's what Aaron did. He didn't talk to the FBI with that lawyer present.
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He got off and was fine. But it didn't end so well the next time. In February or in 2010,
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Aaron got involved in another big database project. This one was with a database called JStore,
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where we store all of the scientific and technical articles published in the journals. Most,
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if not all, but most of these things are publicly funded. They're either coming out of public
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universities, government agencies, public research institutions, or private institutions with
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public funding. So we paid for the science and the science is the truth of the world, right?
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It is our best understanding of how the world actually works. Scientists, mine crumbs of reality
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all day long and they publish it and it gets aggregated in these big databases. So if you want
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to know the truth of the world, like say when someone comes along and says, you should vote for me,
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I know the truth of the world and I can make it better. And you want to find out whether
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their theory of how the world works conforms to our best available evidence. You should be able
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to see the science, especially since you paid for it. And you should also be able to see the
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science because we never know who's going to make something cool out of science. Last week, I was
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listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as it happens that a young man from Baltimore
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on the radio who had been spolunking around JStore and found an article on carbon nanotubes that
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gave him an idea for detecting pancreatic cancer early. And you may know pancreatic cancer kills
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most people who get it because we detect it so late. It's too late to do anything about it.
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He spammed John Hopkins Cancer Research, sent it a thousand emails, 999 of them were unanswered.
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One of them came back from a researcher who said, this is not an entirely stupid idea. We should
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talk about it. The reason this kid was on the radio is because it worked. They're shipping, right?
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An early test for pancreatic cancer. And on the radio, he said, I don't know who's going to have
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the next great idea. And that's why I think what Aaron did was so important. So JStore,
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the journal articles are either free for you if you go, if you're in a big research institution
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or fancy private university or a well-funded public school or a very well-funded private school.
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But otherwise, you have to pay for every article, whatever the journal's charged, $10 to $50
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an article. And so it's kind of weird that we have to pay for our science. So what did Aaron do
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with this science? Well, by 2010, he was a fellow at Harvard and down on the road up Massachusetts
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Avenue, there was another big well-funded private institution, MIT. Aaron started going over to MIT
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where they have this very progressive policies. Anyone can hang out at MIT. You should. If you're
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ever in Cambridge, Mass, go hang out at MIT. It's great. It's like real genius, but real, right?
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You can use their Wi-Fi. They make it public. That's cool, too. And their Wi-Fi, best of all,
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hooked up to JSTOR. You can access JSTOR all you want when you're on campus at MIT. They pay for
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that. So here comes Aaron and he starts downloading thousands of articles on MIT's network.
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Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. The network administrators try to shut him down.
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He plays cat and mouse with them for a while, trying new ways to get around them. And then
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finally, I guess he figured enough was enough. So he broke into a wiring closet on campus at MIT.
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||
|
|
Now, when I say he broke into a wiring closet at MIT, you probably think he like defeated the
|
||
|
|
biometric locks on a level three biohazard containment facility. But it's not like that. The
|
||
|
|
closet that Aaron broke into, his nefarious breaking and entering method was turning the door knob.
|
||
|
|
And this wiring closet was one in which many people turned the door knob. A homeless guy kept his
|
||
|
|
clothes in it. Aaron went in and he plugged his laptop straight into the network and started
|
||
|
|
downloading articles by the million, which is when they caught him and when they charged him
|
||
|
|
with computer fraud and abuse act violations. And when they told him that they thought they could
|
||
|
|
put him in jail for 50 years. But Aaron didn't settle. He had money. He thought he was in the
|
||
|
|
right. After all, what had he done up into that point? He was entitled to the articles.
|
||
|
|
He just downloaded them automatically and he plugged his laptop into the network, right?
|
||
|
|
So are we really going to put someone in jail for taking too many books out of the library?
|
||
|
|
That's crazy. Plus, he knew some good lawyers. He was hanging out with Larry Lessig. He
|
||
|
|
fought it. But they fight dirty. They issued a press release. They said, we're going to put him in
|
||
|
|
jail for 35 years because stealing is stealing, whether you do it with a crowbar or a laptop,
|
||
|
|
suggesting that federal prosecutors not only don't understand laptops, they also have only a vague
|
||
|
|
understanding of crowbars. But they also started to bleed him out. They wouldn't give them the
|
||
|
|
documents to which he was entitled. His defense would go and request these documents that he was
|
||
|
|
supposed to get right after the indictment and the judge would order the prosecution to turn
|
||
|
|
them out and the prosecution wouldn't. And they'd send the lawyers back to do it again and again.
|
||
|
|
Running out of money, right? Starting to have to ask friends for money to continue his defense.
|
||
|
|
It was rough, especially considering that now he was looking at the 35-year indictment. It was
|
||
|
|
pretty, pretty hard. But he kept fighting. He fought a crappy internet copyright regulation
|
||
|
|
called SOPA, which you will all be familiar with. At least you'll know that there was a day
|
||
|
|
last year when none of the kids in America could do their homework because Wikipedia went black
|
||
|
|
in protest of SOPA. Remember this, right? So when I was in DC like a week before SOPA and I
|
||
|
|
talked to people and the general consensus inside the beltway was don't bother. There are enough
|
||
|
|
congressmen and senators who've taken enough money from the affected industries and who've been
|
||
|
|
told that they can, that they will get no more money the next election cycle that this thing is
|
||
|
|
going to pass. You can't beat it. Decide instead what you're going to do in a world in which this is
|
||
|
|
law. That was a crappy answer. And groups fought at groups here, New America and public knowledge and
|
||
|
|
CDT and ACLU and so on fought at the American Library Association. But all these little activist
|
||
|
|
groups across the country sprang up to do it too. There was the group Aaron had founded,
|
||
|
|
Demand Progress. There was another group out in Cambridge Mass fight for the future,
|
||
|
|
EFF, some of the usual suspects. And together all these different groups and ad hoc coalitions
|
||
|
|
beat SOPA. And they beat it through all kinds of groovy, cool new activist moves, right? Like not
|
||
|
|
just sending petitions to Congress. But you know SOPA, it had this provision that said if you have a
|
||
|
|
website where people are allowed to talk to each other, a message board for your little league team
|
||
|
|
where you talk about who's bringing the Gatorade and who's got the car pool, you were responsible for
|
||
|
|
policing it for copyright violations. So if someone posted something, you had to make sure it didn't
|
||
|
|
violate copyright. So somehow you, as some person who's like main expertise was coaching a
|
||
|
|
little league team, had to be able to understand the nuances of copyright law. But not only that,
|
||
|
|
you had to make sure they didn't link to a place where copyright infringement was going on.
|
||
|
|
So someone links to Tumblr. Now you somehow have to look at all the things on Tumblr and make
|
||
|
|
sure that it doesn't infringe copyright. If you do that, I'm here to tell you there are things on
|
||
|
|
Tumblr that you will never unseen no matter how hard you try, right? But it went in beyond that.
|
||
|
|
There was like wonder after this that said you are responsible for policing it so no one links
|
||
|
|
to places where they are linking to places where copyright infringement takes place. So as soon as
|
||
|
|
someone links from Facebook to the message board or message board to the Facebook, you have to make
|
||
|
|
sure nobody ever links from Facebook to the pirate bay. End of the internet as we know it. It becomes
|
||
|
|
the next generation of cable TV companies can talk to us. We can't talk to each other and we never
|
||
|
|
get to say we're back to them. So one of the groovy activist moves was to create a widget where if
|
||
|
|
you had a website that would be killed by this, a place where people could talk to each other,
|
||
|
|
you could put up a little piece of JavaScript and when people visited your website it would say,
|
||
|
|
hey, hi, you've heard of this soap thing? Yeah, I'm going to have to shut down if it passes.
|
||
|
|
What's your zip code? Oh, okay, well here's your congressman and here's your senator and here's
|
||
|
|
a button you can click to call them up right now. And we put 8 million phone calls through to congress.
|
||
|
|
And they realize that no matter how hard it is to get reelected without campaign funding for
|
||
|
|
major donors, it's much harder to get reelected without votes. And that was the end of SOPA.
|
||
|
|
And it was great and we celebrated and we partied and we were proud of ourselves and I think
|
||
|
|
Aaron was proud and pleased of himself too, but clearly this stuff weighed on him. They would
|
||
|
|
meet with the prosecutors and the prosecutors would say there was no deal on the table that doesn't
|
||
|
|
involve jail time, a million dollar fine and a felony conviction so you can't vote, you can't hold
|
||
|
|
off as you can't be a doctor or teacher or work with kids. In the congressional hearings that just
|
||
|
|
went on into the prosecutors intimated that one of the reasons they did this was that they felt
|
||
|
|
that it would be embarrassing having indicted him not to have him go to jail. They wanted to make
|
||
|
|
sure that they wouldn't lose face. So last January, about six weeks ago now, two years of the day
|
||
|
|
after Aaron's arrest, Aaron killed himself in his apartment in Brooklyn, which you probably already
|
||
|
|
know. So here I am going around with this book as I say, Aaron helped me write. And I'm trying to
|
||
|
|
figure out what to say about all of this stuff. And one thing I know is that Aaron did none of this
|
||
|
|
because information wants to be free. I had a long heart to heart with information and it confessed
|
||
|
|
to me that the only thing it wants is for us to stop anthropomorphizing it because information wants
|
||
|
|
nothing but people want to be free and you make people free with good information. You make people
|
||
|
|
free with the law. Knowing what the law says makes you more free than someone who doesn't know
|
||
|
|
what the law says. You make people free with science. Knowing the truth of the world makes you
|
||
|
|
freer than not knowing the truth. You make people free by letting them know what their devices are
|
||
|
|
doing so that they know that they're not betraying them or spying on them or doing something terrible
|
||
|
|
to them that compromises them. But in this country, we don't make laws that assist that. In this
|
||
|
|
country, we make laws that stand in the way of it. Like in 1998, we passed the Digital Millennium
|
||
|
|
Copyright Actor, DMCA. The DMCA is another parade of horrors that I could talk about all night,
|
||
|
|
but I'll just call your attention to the anti-circumvention provision. It says that if you make a device
|
||
|
|
that has a lock that the manufacturer put in it to stop you from doing something, kind of the
|
||
|
|
computer equivalent of selling you a fridge with a butter dish screwed closed because you didn't
|
||
|
|
pay for the butter dish feature. That removing the lock, changing the computer, the device,
|
||
|
|
so that it does the thing the manufacturer would prefer you not do, is illegal, even if doing
|
||
|
|
that thing isn't. And it's illegal to tell someone had removed the lock. And it's illegal to tell
|
||
|
|
someone what they need to know to figure out how to remove the lock. So you might have a phone
|
||
|
|
that's locked to the Apple store. It might have an iPhone or an iPad. And removing the lock is
|
||
|
|
illegal, right, so that you can install software that Apple hasn't put in the App Store. Maybe it's
|
||
|
|
the app that tells you every time a drone kills someone in Pakistan that Apple rejected because they
|
||
|
|
don't want people thinking about drones and people dying in Pakistan when they use Apple products.
|
||
|
|
Removing that lock is illegal, telling someone had to remove the lock is illegal. Well,
|
||
|
|
kind of. The copyright office every three years, it holds hearings into maybe we should have
|
||
|
|
some exceptions to this. So they made an exception to allow you to jailbreak phones but not tablets or
|
||
|
|
iPods, but that exception doesn't include to making circumvention tools to unlock your device
|
||
|
|
or telling someone how to make it or using them or sharing them. So if you can unlock your iPhone
|
||
|
|
without doing any of those things, it's legal now, but it might not be legal in three years. But,
|
||
|
|
but it's not totally illegal unless it's an iPad, right, or maybe you have an Nintendo 3DS, right,
|
||
|
|
and this is the device that lots of kids carry around. It's a game device. These are the devices
|
||
|
|
that are in their living rooms and that are in our pockets and have the potential to compromise us
|
||
|
|
in all kinds of ways and that are thousands of times more powerful than the computers you were
|
||
|
|
using 10 years ago. Maybe you've got an Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo 3DS has a little thing in it
|
||
|
|
that locks it so that you can only run software that Nintendo has put in its store and collected
|
||
|
|
some money for. And so if you want to play a homebrew game or a game that someone wanted to sell you
|
||
|
|
without having to give Nintendo a cut, you have to unlock it. Every time you turn on your 3DS,
|
||
|
|
it tries to connect to the internet and call the mothership to see if there's a new operating system
|
||
|
|
for it, even if you don't want it to. And having found it and downloads it and installs it,
|
||
|
|
even if you tell it not to. And once it's installed it, it reboots itself and checks for tampering.
|
||
|
|
And if you've tampered with it, it switches itself off and it never switches itself on again.
|
||
|
|
That's the end of your 3DS. And it's illegal to find out how that lock works, tell people
|
||
|
|
how that lock works or disable that lock. So security researchers, they go around and they find
|
||
|
|
out how our devices work. They find out about the bad stuff lurking in them that compromises
|
||
|
|
in a thousand ways. Because your phone fills your pocket and you take it with you into the most
|
||
|
|
intimate context and it knows who your friends are and knows what you say to them and it knows
|
||
|
|
where you've been and it knows every one of your secrets. And so to find out whether or not it's
|
||
|
|
an honest servant, you have to take it apart to see what it's doing. And researchers who do this
|
||
|
|
are quite rightly afraid that they'll get into trouble, like Trevor Eckhart, who found out that
|
||
|
|
the carriers had put spyware called carrier IQ on 141 million phones that they sold to the American
|
||
|
|
public. He found this out because he was looking at Android phones, which are legal to take apart
|
||
|
|
because they're not as locked as the Apple phones. And then he later found out that it was in the
|
||
|
|
Apple phones too by examining for the traces that he knew what to look for once he'd found this
|
||
|
|
in the Android phones. This spyware could capture all of your keystrokes, including your short
|
||
|
|
messages, your passwords and so on. It could plunder your files, including your photos and it
|
||
|
|
could know where you were and send all this to third parties. And when Eckhart went public,
|
||
|
|
he faced legal threats because he was embarrassing these companies that now paper over this by
|
||
|
|
putting it in their terms and conditions. So when I get this talk in Seattle at the start of the
|
||
|
|
tour, a woman put her hand up and said, you're scaring me, how will I make my devices secure?
|
||
|
|
And I said, you won't make your devices secure. I won't make my devices secure. No one of us can
|
||
|
|
make our devices secure. But if I just finished telling you about waterborne parasites, you wouldn't
|
||
|
|
say, how will I make my water supply secure? Where will I get the water filtration plant? How will I
|
||
|
|
inspect the sewer system and make sure that it's not going awry? Right? We regulate water with
|
||
|
|
gravitas. We regulate it like it's a matter of life and death because it is. But networks are
|
||
|
|
matters of life and death too. And yet we regulate them like they were fax machines attached to waffle
|
||
|
|
irons. Like they were the next version of cable TV, mobile phone 2.0. You know, the world's greatest
|
||
|
|
pornography distribution system, not like the nervous system of the 21st century, a time when
|
||
|
|
everything we do involves using the internet and at a time where shortly everything we do will
|
||
|
|
require using the internet. We fail to treat these with the respect that they deserve.
|
||
|
|
So why do we do this? Why is it so rotten? Well, the cliche, which is I think true, is that the
|
||
|
|
system is corrupted by money. If you are a lawmaker, your job is to get reelected and the way to get
|
||
|
|
reelected is by raising a lot of money and the way to raise money is by making rich people happy
|
||
|
|
and the way to make rich people and companies happy is by passing laws that make them richer and
|
||
|
|
with their additional riches they can give you more money to get reelected. Lather rinse repeat
|
||
|
|
for a few election cycles, throw in citizens united. And the next thing you know, it's a felony to
|
||
|
|
find out what your computer is doing. Right? So when I wrote this book, I wanted there to be in it
|
||
|
|
a election campaign that wasn't based on money. Where people use computers to figure out how to
|
||
|
|
get elected by people who liked their ideas rather than by people who thought that they would
|
||
|
|
make them richer. And so I asked all these different election strategists that I knew people who'd
|
||
|
|
worked on on Dean, on Obama, people who worked on Republican campaigns. What's your best shot at
|
||
|
|
using computers to get elected without a lot of money? And what they gave me was interesting,
|
||
|
|
but it was inside the beltway and inside the box. So I wrote to Aaron thinking, oh in a couple
|
||
|
|
of days he'll shoot me some bullet points, some stuff. I bet you he's thought about this.
|
||
|
|
Now an hour later he shot me back a full-fledged design document for what he called the machine
|
||
|
|
for getting votes. A way to use social media and networks to put votes into a campaign based only
|
||
|
|
on the candidate's integrity and the voters wish to see that candidate in office. And it was so good,
|
||
|
|
it was shovel ready. I pasted it straight into the book. All except for the last two sentences,
|
||
|
|
which were got to go. I'm going to go do this now. And the last Cody checked into GitHub before he
|
||
|
|
died was clearly related to it. So we get to decide. Here we are making the future and we get to
|
||
|
|
decide. Are we going to have a future where the computers listen to us? Were there default
|
||
|
|
posture as yes master? Are we going to have a future where the computers boss us around? Were
|
||
|
|
there default posture as I'm sorry I can't let you do that Dave? We get to choose. Are we going
|
||
|
|
to use free systems where it's legal for people to figure out what's going on in them so
|
||
|
|
the shenanigans can be detected and corrected or are we going to use systems that are locked
|
||
|
|
where nobody is allowed to tell us if they find something rotten going on in them where they
|
||
|
|
might compromise us in a thousand ways because the world is made of computers. Remove the computer
|
||
|
|
for most of our buildings and those buildings become uninhabitable. What that tells you is that
|
||
|
|
buildings are in fact specialized cases for computers that we happen to live in. Your car is a
|
||
|
|
computer that hurdles down the road at 50 miles an hour with you in it surrounded by other humans
|
||
|
|
trapped in computers likewise hurtling at 50 miles an hour. The 747 I flew from London where I
|
||
|
|
led to Seattle where I started this tour a couple of weeks ago. That is a flying Sun Solaris
|
||
|
|
workstation in a fancy custom aluminum case connected to some badly secured Scota controllers.
|
||
|
|
So not only do we live with our bodies inside of computers we're putting our computers inside of
|
||
|
|
our bodies now. So some of you like me are Walkman generation some of you are iPod generation.
|
||
|
|
We will all log so many punishing earbud hours that there will come a day when we'll need hearing aids.
|
||
|
|
When we get those hearing aids they will probably not be retro hipster beige plastic analog transistor
|
||
|
|
numbers. They're going to be computers that we insert into our bodies that will know what we hear
|
||
|
|
that will be able to stop us from hearing things that will be able to make us hear things that
|
||
|
|
aren't there and to tell people what we're hearing so we have to get this right we have to know
|
||
|
|
we can trust our computers unless that sounds futuristic and far fetched. Let me tell you that
|
||
|
|
it's actually a tone down version of what's already here because last November just a few months ago
|
||
|
|
a researcher named Barnaby Jack gave a presentation at an Australian security conference on implanted
|
||
|
|
defibrillators to our amazing technology if you have a heart condition in the doctor thinks that
|
||
|
|
your heart is going to lose the rhythm and you'll die as a result she can anesthetize you and
|
||
|
|
cut you open and reach into your chest cavity spreading your ribs and attach a computer to your
|
||
|
|
heart with its own little battery and the computer will listen to your heart beating and if your heart
|
||
|
|
misses the beat it will give you a little shock that brings you back right and doctors well they
|
||
|
|
want to know what this thing is doing after they put it in your chest cavity and attaching a
|
||
|
|
wire to something that is inside your test cavity is messy and so it's got a wireless interface
|
||
|
|
and that's where Barnaby Jack comes in because from 30 feet away he can detect your defibrillator
|
||
|
|
and reprogram it so it seeks out other defibrillators to reprogram and he can cause them to seek
|
||
|
|
out other defibrillators defibrillators to reprogram and then either at some random time or at a set
|
||
|
|
moment in the future they can deliver lethal shocks to their owners so this is not something that will
|
||
|
|
become a matter of life and death this is a matter of life and death now I asked Adam for some
|
||
|
|
Aaron for some other help with this both this and the book that came before a little brother
|
||
|
|
have a series of afterwards two afterwards each the first one has an afterward by the
|
||
|
|
cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneider who explains why our bad security thinking
|
||
|
|
means that we get nonsense security measures that make us less free and less safe the other one was
|
||
|
|
by a hacker a hardware engineer named Bunny Huang who when he was a grad student and MIT broke
|
||
|
|
the security on the Xbox and made it so you could boot the Linux operating system can new Linux
|
||
|
|
operating system on it so that you could run your own programs on it use it as a computer
|
||
|
|
he wrote a great book about it that you can download for free or buying stores it's called the
|
||
|
|
hacking the Xbox great title says does what it says on the tin and it explains how to be a reverse
|
||
|
|
engineer how to think like a reverse engineer for this one I got Jacob Applebaum to write one
|
||
|
|
of the afterwards and you may know Jacob as a volunteer for the WikiLeaks project he's also
|
||
|
|
a volunteer on the tour project which is a project that builds censorship resistance surveillance
|
||
|
|
resistant network tools that are used by dissidents by radicals by people who work in fortune 100
|
||
|
|
companies where they block Boeing Boeing by students to get around sensorware and to get around
|
||
|
|
surveillance he wrote a great editorial or great afterward about you make writing code that makes
|
||
|
|
us more free using technology that makes us more free and then Aaron wrote me an afterward and he
|
||
|
|
wrote me an afterward that's a letter to someone who is thinking about how to make the world better
|
||
|
|
explaining the mindset that went into defeating sopa and what you can do to fix it and in the end of
|
||
|
|
it he writes it wasn't supposed to happen this way a rag tag bunch of kids typing on their laptops
|
||
|
|
is not supposed to be able to stop one of the most powerful forces in dc but we did it and we
|
||
|
|
can do it again but it only works if you take part which is really the message of this talk and
|
||
|
|
only works if you take part we get to choose what future we are going to live in you can choose
|
||
|
|
to use free and open source code and free and open source devices but you can also choose to
|
||
|
|
help us understand the public health issue that is networks so you can join organizations like
|
||
|
|
the electronic frontier foundation and creative commons and you can give money and energy and time
|
||
|
|
and join the mailing list of organizations like the campaign for democracy and technology
|
||
|
|
like the like the new america foundation like demand progress errands group like the fight for
|
||
|
|
the future coalition they all need your help they all need your time they all need just your name
|
||
|
|
on a mailing list so you call your senator at the moment when it does the most good all of those
|
||
|
|
are ways that you can substantially help and what's amazing is that there are so many of these
|
||
|
|
groups that I could write all their names off all night because 15 years ago there was a bear
|
||
|
|
handful of them and now this is proliferated because everybody is starting to understand that
|
||
|
|
this stuff matters because everybody is starting to see that networks matter in ways that go beyond
|
||
|
|
cable tv or the profit maximization strategies of the internet or the wiretapping fantasies of
|
||
|
|
the security apparatus and so people are joining the struggle every day and it's what makes me
|
||
|
|
hopeful for it and I hope you'll take part two but before I finish the talk and move on to
|
||
|
|
questions there's one more thing I'm going to talk about it's a very short bit a coda and the
|
||
|
|
reason is short is it's not a subject on any kind of expert on but it's something I told errands
|
||
|
|
family I would talk about when I told them I was going on the road with this book and it's suicide
|
||
|
|
and depression so people do get depressed and sometimes it's easy to tell why you're depressed
|
||
|
|
sometimes you're under a 35 year indictment sometimes you are have money problems or romantic
|
||
|
|
problems or job problems sometimes you've got problems with abuse or alcohol or substances
|
||
|
|
sometimes it's something in your past you can't exactly recall sometimes you may not even be able
|
||
|
|
to put your finger on it because maybe it's just bad chemicals it's hard to tell sometimes but
|
||
|
|
whatever it is people get low and you can get so low that you may think you'll never get up again
|
||
|
|
you may find yourself in a place that's so dark you think you'll never see the light again
|
||
|
|
you may feel like the world would be a better place if you weren't in it and people feel that way
|
||
|
|
more than we talk about I felt that way we don't talk about it our world allows us to connect
|
||
|
|
with one another in ways that we've never seen before we know so much about each other I can look
|
||
|
|
at your four square check-ins and see where you are I can look at your Facebook page and see what
|
||
|
|
you're talking about I can look at your Instagram and see what you're eating but unless I ask you
|
||
|
|
and unless I listen very carefully I might never find out what you're feeling it's easy to look
|
||
|
|
at all those check-ins to look at that stream of information that comes off of all of us and
|
||
|
|
assume that everything's okay but you have to take an affirmative step you have to do something
|
||
|
|
we can use our networks to take care of each other in ways that we've never dreamt of there's a
|
||
|
|
thing I would have said to Aaron if I thought to if I thought to ask if I'd known what was going
|
||
|
|
on and I'm sure all of his friends would have said things like this I never said it to him I'm
|
||
|
|
gonna say it to you because maybe you'll get a chance to say it to someone else or maybe you'll
|
||
|
|
need to hear it sometime and it's this whatever problems Aaron was facing killing himself didn't
|
||
|
|
solve them whatever problems Aaron was facing his problems are now unsolved forever if he was
|
||
|
|
lonely he will never again be embraced by his friends if he was despairing at the fight he will
|
||
|
|
never again rally his comrades with his strategy and leadership if he was sorrowing you will
|
||
|
|
never again be lifted up into joy so it's kind of a low note to end this on but the high note is
|
||
|
|
we get to choose we get to choose if we're going to have technology that makes us more free or
|
||
|
|
takes freedom away we get to choose if we're going to use that technology to atomize us and
|
||
|
|
alienate us from one another or to take care of each other we get to choose and like Aaron said
|
||
|
|
it only works if you take part thank you
|
||
|
|
so now we have some time for questions I'll remind you that a long rambling statement
|
||
|
|
followed by what do you think of that is technically a question but not a good one
|
||
|
|
and there's a microphone going around so if you want to give it to this gentleman here
|
||
|
|
or in fact why don't you take it there I'll just repeat his question you you work your way back
|
||
|
|
there go ahead I can speak pretty loud okay thanks for coming I saw your webcast
|
||
|
|
it framed that last year but we had a misconnection so thank you for trying and thank you for coming
|
||
|
|
today also it framed connects last year Aaron gave an amazing speech I heard you all look it up
|
||
|
|
statement connects Aaron's words amazing video about you know the end speech I do very good one
|
||
|
|
yeah yeah that was a great conference and one of the subjects that was net neutrality can you
|
||
|
|
want to talk a bit about sure the question is what about net work neutrality so let me define
|
||
|
|
network neutrality really quickly for you using a very sharp example that I like I first heard it
|
||
|
|
from Craig from Craig's list he says it came from someone else so who knows where the credit is
|
||
|
|
but here's the thing imagine you picked up the phone you called Tony's pizzeria on the corner
|
||
|
|
which makes the best pizza in town and their phone wasn't engaged it was sitting there no one's
|
||
|
|
talking on it but instead of ringing in Tony's pizzeria you got a message this is AT&T Tony's
|
||
|
|
pizzeria has not paid for premium carriage you can wait five seconds and talk to Tony or press
|
||
|
|
one to be connected to dominoes right net neutrality or the absence of network neutrality is the
|
||
|
|
idea that if you are running a network service that you can slow down or block services that compete
|
||
|
|
with the ones that you've been bribed to carry right that's that's the basic tenet of it and when
|
||
|
|
you talk to the carriers about it you talk to the telecoms about it they say well it's a free
|
||
|
|
market what do you expect we paid for those lines we put them in the in the ground and we need the
|
||
|
|
money from them to build more networks and better networks if you don't like it build your own
|
||
|
|
network and running however the heck you want but here's the thing the carriers didn't pay to make
|
||
|
|
those networks oh sure they paid for the copper but the right of way right imagine if every time
|
||
|
|
you wanted to run a cable through someone's basement or stick a telephone pole on their front
|
||
|
|
lawn imagine if you had to pay for the privilege pay lawyers to negotiate it contract it paper it
|
||
|
|
over keep up you know the next person who owns the house decides to change their mind and tells
|
||
|
|
you to move your telephone pole or get your wires out of their dirt imagine where you would end up
|
||
|
|
right it would cost trillions to run that it would exceed the GDP of the planet to build a phone
|
||
|
|
network like that so the phone companies are the beneficiaries of an enormous public subsidy and if
|
||
|
|
they don't want to run the network that we let them put in our dirt they should get their wires out
|
||
|
|
of our dirt right they will give them 60 days if they haven't got our wires out of the dirt by then
|
||
|
|
we'll pay them the scrapage fee copper is up and we'll find someone who's willing to take this
|
||
|
|
titanic public gift and run the network in the public interest and if they want to run their
|
||
|
|
networks however they want let them build private enterprise networks where every foot of right
|
||
|
|
of way has to be paid for at the market rates right and that's what I think about network neutrality
|
||
|
|
um someone in the back who has the mic there you go yeah thanks um two question
|
||
|
|
uh what about pacer what about jaystor what about pacer and what about jaystor yeah what about
|
||
|
|
pacer what about jaystor but what about pacer being it's a pacer wool because the the federal government
|
||
|
|
claimed from the vast majority of pacer users uh it's not a propensity for the service because if you
|
||
|
|
use you know uh what it deems and it's interesting to be a reasonable number of pages of legal
|
||
|
|
documents i think it's something like eight or a hundred pages of money uh baseball you know
|
||
|
|
that's really one of three right uh second question is i think the amount of information it's something
|
||
|
|
about they they instructed agencies to they get the one yeah yeah we need to make a public
|
||
|
|
sure for sure so the first one was was what about pacer so first of all it's kind of a
|
||
|
|
tutology to say that the people who use pacer don't have a problem using pacer right uh like
|
||
|
|
like everybody who uses pacer doesn't have a problem using pacer doesn't tell you anything about
|
||
|
|
all the people who aren't using pacer and particular doesn't tell you about any of the things you
|
||
|
|
could find out about the law if you could download the whole sucker and start doing analysis on it
|
||
|
|
which which is pretty important and we've seen lots of you know if we believe in the human genome
|
||
|
|
project we should bring it we should believe in the american law big data mining project too so
|
||
|
|
that's that's the first thing uh... about uh... j store uh... so yes the feds say that they're
|
||
|
|
gonna and and and the nh already requires research to go uh... into the uh... into uh... open access
|
||
|
|
or something like open access after a set period but uh... there's all the stuff that's that's
|
||
|
|
already locked away in there and we can't get access to that now there's another proposal for
|
||
|
|
getting access to this that i've heard from uh... a friend of a friend who's working on law review
|
||
|
|
article about it and i'll tell you about it because i think it's pretty cool
|
||
|
|
and those of you who are i know some of your lawyers in the in the audience maybe you'll maybe
|
||
|
|
you'll run with this uh... so if you produce a copyrighted work in the course of your normal
|
||
|
|
employment duties in the absence of any all other agreement that work uh... the copyrighted
|
||
|
|
network best with your employer it's called a work made for hire so if your job is to write research
|
||
|
|
papers at your university by default unless you sign another agreement with your university your
|
||
|
|
university holds the copyrights to those and it's arguable that academics who work for universities
|
||
|
|
and write research papers those research papers are the copyrights of their universities but
|
||
|
|
when the journal publishers hand you the take it or leave it copyright deal for publishing your
|
||
|
|
article which you have to publish in order to advance up the academic later later which says you
|
||
|
|
assign all rights to the journal publishers and and don't have any rights to the to the to the
|
||
|
|
article after you after it's published um... they don't send that contract to the university's legal
|
||
|
|
department they sent it to the academic who wrote it so here's where it gets interesting what if
|
||
|
|
you could find ten universities m it uses some favors at this point to run a class action suit
|
||
|
|
in which they said to all the journal publishers that you owe us a half-tillion dollars in DMCA
|
||
|
|
statutory damages that hundred and fifty thousand dollars per download per article and since you
|
||
|
|
don't have that much will just settle for you making it all open access and what we really
|
||
|
|
interesting is we put the publishers in the position of arguing that when people produce works
|
||
|
|
for corporations that they don't belong to the corporations which i don't think they're going to
|
||
|
|
want to argue so well-designate yeah yeah so it'd be very funny to see well-designate following
|
||
|
|
the amicus brief on behalf of the open access uh... it's it's one of those things like the pirate
|
||
|
|
bay uh... uh... in finland uh... uh... suing the fin this finish anti-piracy group for copying the
|
||
|
|
source code for their website into uh... a finish parity website anti-piracy website uh... and
|
||
|
|
finland doesn't have a parity exemption copyright because the companies that that took the source code
|
||
|
|
lobbied against a parity exemption so they're gonna they're gonna say they're gonna fight
|
||
|
|
the uh... the charge of copyright infringement by arguing that they made a parity and if they lose
|
||
|
|
well the pirate bay gets to take down this anti-piracy site and if they win they get a priority exemption
|
||
|
|
and finish law so there's it's kind of uh... it's a bit of a kobi ashi alternative
|
||
|
|
uh... yeah uh... go ahead
|
||
|
|
hi i'm my
|
||
|
|
um... um... um... i'm my romantic type of human rights and public bay um...
|
||
|
|
i'm a great question to the police
|
||
|
|
sure
|
||
|
|
one why do you think your audience has as we now
|
||
|
|
or the parents of questions like who your audience is and make up and what do you find out
|
||
|
|
um... um... to what advice would you give for an individual person with a blog
|
||
|
|
action against an individual in the government?
|
||
|
|
sorry what was the second question?
|
||
|
|
what specific advice would you just try to provide for an individual who is pursuing
|
||
|
|
the following action?
|
||
|
|
oh against the government
|
||
|
|
oh not about how to whistle blow effectively but what to do about the mental health issues
|
||
|
|
uh... uh... so how does it look like?
|
||
|
|
right
|
||
|
|
all right so why do i think my audience is mostly male? well i guess when you write books with male
|
||
|
|
protagonists uh... people tend to uh...
|
||
|
|
especially i think young adults tend to empathize with the character and find
|
||
|
|
it easier to empathize with with same gender stuff
|
||
|
|
i think the other thing though is i'm the beneficiary of a weird trend in young
|
||
|
|
adult publishing which is that uh... there is a story in publishing that only uh...
|
||
|
|
girls read uh... young adult novels and so uh... publishers reject
|
||
|
|
boy books pretty pretty roundly and and uh... make them bigger
|
||
|
|
effort to publish girl books and promote them whatever that means i mean some of them are very
|
||
|
|
obviously gendered they're they're they're gendered in a way that makes me feel creepy about
|
||
|
|
the idea that my daughter might read them because they're about uh... they're about kind of uh...
|
||
|
|
performing femininity in literature as a kind of training document books about girls who like
|
||
|
|
shopping and sort of things some of them are just have female protagonists but are
|
||
|
|
marketed primarily girls and uh... and so as a result
|
||
|
|
there's not uh... a lot of books aimed at boys and one of the things i hear a lot from teachers
|
||
|
|
librarians and teacher librarians is oh my my boys are quote reluctant readers um... and uh...
|
||
|
|
what i tell them is here's a book that boys will like and so i'm on the beneficiary for in in
|
||
|
|
some ways of there being a fairly restricted field right there's not much competition
|
||
|
|
in the world of books for boys who want to read but are going through this period of self definition
|
||
|
|
where they feel awkward about reading a quote girl book um... so i think there's that i mean for
|
||
|
|
the record i've been to lots of schools and libraries that were packed with young women
|
||
|
|
as well as young men and who are very enthusiastic about the book so i don't know if the people who
|
||
|
|
turn up at a at a at a bookstore on a school night at six thirty are representative of the audience
|
||
|
|
as a whole or what it's hard to say it's hard to get a a handle on i mean one of the things
|
||
|
|
about publishing that differentiates it from sort of new media is publishing knows very little about
|
||
|
|
who its customers are relative to something like say amazon or or google or or facebook which kind
|
||
|
|
of knows what color underwear they wear and who all their friends are right in terms of uh... what
|
||
|
|
advice but i give people who want to do whistle blowing well if somebody emailed me about wanting
|
||
|
|
to do whistle blowing i would probably uh... if they so assuming they did so in an unencrypted
|
||
|
|
way from like a webmail account i would send them a very brief email that said uh... here's a
|
||
|
|
phone number that you should call me from a phone that isn't your work phone uh... and uh... you
|
||
|
|
should delete this email and then and the email you sent me and i would delete their email and then
|
||
|
|
i would talk to them about who at the electronic frontier foundation or who it's ccc or whatever they
|
||
|
|
should talk to about good security protocol and maybe try and hook them up with jake apple balm
|
||
|
|
or someone like that to get them using tour otr which is the off the record forward secrecy
|
||
|
|
in internet chat you can download tour button which is a uh... browser uh... that that pops up uh... and
|
||
|
|
is by default secure and then it has a chat mode that allows you to chat in a way so that um...
|
||
|
|
even if the chat is intercepted and the keys are later known it still can't be decrypted uh... which
|
||
|
|
is pretty cool uh... that there's a book came out recently that jake apple balm contributed to
|
||
|
|
called cipher punks and in it jake says um... the universe likes secrets right that there is a
|
||
|
|
a weird thing about math which is that you can you can make a secret you can decipher a message
|
||
|
|
trillions of times more easily than you can decipher it quadrillions of times more easily than
|
||
|
|
you can decipher it there is buried somewhere in the deep mathematical structures of our universe
|
||
|
|
a penchant for secrecy which is cool if you know how to use it and so i would basically kind of
|
||
|
|
introduce them around individually i don't think that there is yet the one great document about
|
||
|
|
whistleblowers i mean eFF has some of these and other places have some of these it'd be great to see
|
||
|
|
it it'd be great to see it produced and and with good links to tour hidden services where you could
|
||
|
|
download binaries of good tools and so on but i don't think that's there yet
|
||
|
|
uh... how about the gentleman in the eFF shirt they're always good for
|
||
|
|
they're always good for a laugh not a rigger i promise you yes sir who i've never had any
|
||
|
|
communication with so it feels to be like a lot of our legislative battles what the world
|
||
|
|
do you feel there are areas that are particularly like where we could actually gain some rights
|
||
|
|
so how can we gain some rights well you know i i'm going to give you the larry less against her to
|
||
|
|
this because larry you'll know is one of the the parents of the modern copyright reform movement
|
||
|
|
and he's given it up he no longer cares about copyright erin didn't care about copyright erin
|
||
|
|
had forced sworn fighting about copyright he said it was a waste of time because every time
|
||
|
|
you uh... stomped a stupid copyright law three more popped up it's like it's like it's like
|
||
|
|
baba yaga and so um... larry has devoted himself instead to corruption uh... you know he points out
|
||
|
|
i think correctly that that uh... the money in politics has made politics worse and that it's
|
||
|
|
made politics iridimably corrupt so that we never get good policy policy that's in the public
|
||
|
|
interest and so he said we need to solve this and being a a constitutional scholar he looks for
|
||
|
|
solutions that may be a little bit weird on their face but that don't involve uh... having to
|
||
|
|
get a constitutional amendment through or are are often three the supreme courts to get uh... to get
|
||
|
|
uh... citizens united repeal so he uh... he proposed a system of vouchers that use it or lose it
|
||
|
|
vouchers that you could give to political candidates that all americans would get
|
||
|
|
and the political candidates who took those vouchers would have to for swear uh... private funding super
|
||
|
|
packed funding so you can have all your citizens united money but this would dwarf the citizens united
|
||
|
|
and it would make the optimal strategy for any lawmaker to get elected to uh... uh... please voters
|
||
|
|
right that's how you could get elected and reelected to make voters happy make the largest number of
|
||
|
|
voters happy which is kind of a cool idea and he's got a group called root strikers like as
|
||
|
|
in striking at the root instead of the branches called root strikers dot org and they need your help to
|
||
|
|
so that's how i would try to advance an affirmative agenda because otherwise we're fighting the
|
||
|
|
holding action i think the advantage of things like soba even though as soon as we kill soba
|
||
|
|
three more pop up is that it builds a movement right there's you know there it builds the
|
||
|
|
consciousness that we can change things go ahead
|
||
|
|
there's a lot of content on board what about the uh...
|
||
|
|
a lot of times with with e-books uh...
|
||
|
|
they don't understand what you're about but uh...
|
||
|
|
to say a few words about our official skill city
|
||
|
|
like for example if you want to check some of the e-book out of the library
|
||
|
|
right well
|
||
|
|
so here's the thing right uh...
|
||
|
|
the fact that
|
||
|
|
uh...
|
||
|
|
you can't check a book out of the library while someone else has got to check out
|
||
|
|
is in the context of the grand sweep of human history and the human project
|
||
|
|
that is a bug and not a feature right
|
||
|
|
the the universal access to all human knowledge is is a dream as old as as
|
||
|
|
infinite life extension and alchemy and so on it's it's it's a it's a utopian
|
||
|
|
vision that actually kind of lies within our grasp in ways that it's never
|
||
|
|
light lane before
|
||
|
|
and yet um...
|
||
|
|
publishers treat it like a bug instead of a feature and we you know there's
|
||
|
|
something funny going on now where you could never open on uh... you could
|
||
|
|
never invent libraries today right if you if you went out
|
||
|
|
assume there were no libraries if you proposed libraries
|
||
|
|
the the industry would never let you get away with it right if there are
|
||
|
|
they're an historical anomaly
|
||
|
|
and so uh...
|
||
|
|
uh... they they don't want there to be library like rights to e-books instead
|
||
|
|
they want e-books that are somehow restricted harper call-ins
|
||
|
|
has e-books that disintegrate after twit twenty six uses
|
||
|
|
so used to work in library so i was i was a lowly page
|
||
|
|
in and the business in urban affairs department of the north here central
|
||
|
|
uh... library where nalohawkinson also used to work
|
||
|
|
and uh...
|
||
|
|
my job is the page in addition to other things
|
||
|
|
was taping up the newspapers taping them back together
|
||
|
|
because we have to keep them for thirty days before the microfeesh came in
|
||
|
|
and i could run a newspaper
|
||
|
|
through a hundred sets of hands in thirty days
|
||
|
|
but harper call-ins says that it's
|
||
|
|
i have to say very well made books that my british publisher they were until
|
||
|
|
recently
|
||
|
|
uh... that it's but very well made books their digital analog
|
||
|
|
should should fall apart after only twenty six circulations
|
||
|
|
which is just observed
|
||
|
|
and i think that you know the fact that we have uh... universal dr m in e-books
|
||
|
|
makes them unsuited for libraries uh... and and i think that libraries
|
||
|
|
should just stop
|
||
|
|
buying
|
||
|
|
d-r-m-e-books publishing
|
||
|
|
is is worried it's running scared it's facing huge pressure from amazon and so on
|
||
|
|
and it's bullying libraries which are it's evergreen solid gold customers
|
||
|
|
and so i think that librarians don't understand the cars that they hold
|
||
|
|
it's true that in the age of austerity we started eating each other and so
|
||
|
|
sometimes you'll hear people talking smack about librarians
|
||
|
|
but honestly
|
||
|
|
is there anyone who can with a straight face a
|
||
|
|
big library
|
||
|
|
all of those librarians they got into it for the money
|
||
|
|
i mean we know
|
||
|
|
why libraries exist they exist because people are public-minded they are public
|
||
|
|
spirited right that's that's they represent that
|
||
|
|
part of our of our culture
|
||
|
|
maybe we'll do uh... one more question
|
||
|
|
while we're doing that question
|
||
|
|
you can get your non-disruptible book
|
||
|
|
right at the book store and get a couple more for you know that you know it
|
||
|
|
really is the best way to get to some of the different issues
|
||
|
|
uh... and this is an independent progressive bookstore
|
||
|
|
don't you think you can order later tonight on that they were placed
|
||
|
|
independent bookstores have this
|
||
|
|
uh...
|
||
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it has to be an awesome
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uh...
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uh...
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right
|
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right
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thank you
|
||
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right
|
||
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right
|
||
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right
|
||
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right
|
||
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how can i
|
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approach that in a mindset that would be
|
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and how can we as
|
||
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you know
|
||
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|
future
|
||
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|
right
|
||
|
|
how do you how do you archive
|
||
|
|
rich data rich data format metadata so that it lasts forever that's a really
|
||
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really hard question i don't know that i have an answer for it
|
||
|
|
except that the thing that i'm i'm somewhat sang went about is that because
|
||
|
|
computers
|
||
|
|
show no sign of slowing down in their park in their progress
|
||
|
|
that new computers run thousands of times faster than old computers which means
|
||
|
|
that new computers can just emulate older computers
|
||
|
|
so in some ways we have a certain degree of future proofing
|
||
|
|
in that
|
||
|
|
whatever environment you build that rdf stuff in
|
||
|
|
presumably you could run that environment inside the
|
||
|
|
computers of tomorrow
|
||
|
|
like a ship in a bottle right
|
||
|
|
in terms of in terms of
|
||
|
|
metadata i mean i miss something about metadata skeptic
|
||
|
|
i wrote an essay called metacraft
|
||
|
|
which is actually apparently trotted out in a lot of library schools
|
||
|
|
it is yeah
|
||
|
|
and so i'm slightly skeptical about this is an area where i totally differed
|
||
|
|
from errand this was errands big thing was was rdf
|
||
|
|
he loved the idea
|
||
|
|
that you could say show me articles by errand that are thirty days old or less
|
||
|
|
about tractors and the internet could understand what you meant by all of those things
|
||
|
|
i just think that there's like some inherent problems to that
|
||
|
|
like you know your librarian you know the dewey decimal system
|
||
|
|
melvin dewey was weird he had strange ideas about the structure of knowledge
|
||
|
|
right and it privileges some kinds of things and not others
|
||
|
|
and there's whole dewey numbers for countries that don't exist anymore
|
||
|
|
and no dewey numbers are very deep decimal numbers for countries
|
||
|
|
that have sprung into existence but are nevertheless very important today
|
||
|
|
and you know there's there are inherent problems to future proofing this stuff
|
||
|
|
and so i don't know that i have a great answer
|
||
|
|
i like david wineberger's book everything is miscellaneous
|
||
|
|
as a kind of approach to understanding the difficulty of the metadata problem
|
||
|
|
i think it's a really really good book about what happens when you can
|
||
|
|
shelve a book everywhere in the library rather than pretending that it has one true place
|
||
|
|
so anyway thank you all for coming tonight
|
||
|
|
you have been listening to hacker public radio
|
||
|
|
we are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday on dewey friday
|
||
|
|
today's show like all our shows was contributed by a hbr listener like yourself
|
||
|
|
if you ever consider recording a podcast then visit our website to find out how easy it really is
|
||
|
|
hacker public radio was founded by the digital dog pound and near the phenomenon computer globe
|
||
|
|
hbr is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com
|
||
|
|
all binref projects are crowd sponsored by linear pages
|
||
|
|
from shared hosting to custom private clouds go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs
|
||
|
|
unless otherwise stasis today's show is released under a creative commons
|
||
|
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