Preserving our freedoms

FRIGHTENED, WEAK PEOPLE do stupid things. That, at least, is my current explanation for why both Britain and the US - countries with traditions of openness, fairness, and civil liberties - have gone mad with legislation designed to remove all those things. Bush wants suspected terrorists tried in military tribunals; Blair wants to hold them indefinitely without trial. The shadowy advisors and civil servants behind them want things like mass retention of online user data and to eavesdrop on any and all communications at will.

Most people, such as the Economist's editorial on the subject, attribute all this to a legitimate, but misguided, response to the attacks of September 11. I think it's arguable that the roots go back much further, and that September 11 has merely provided the best opportunity our governments have had for some time to try to get through Parliament and Congress a regime they wanted anyway.

The battles over the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in the UK ( here) and the Clipper Chip and ITAR in the US are the most obvious example. But there are plenty of others: the Criminal Justice bill which not so long ago dented the right to silence in the UK for one. The national ID card scheme proposed for Britain, for example, wasn't created out of nothing as the twin towers tumbled; it was already there, waiting for a chance to poke its head out. Meanwhile, many US governmental agencies have removed information from the Web ( List of governmentally removed information ) that they now deem to be too much of a risk, despite the fact that terrorists as well organised as the ones who carried out the September 11 attacks will surely have downloaded everything they thought they were likely to want before the event.

This latest backlash against civil liberties seems to me to be part of a sweep that goes all the way back to the 1960s, when the then younger generation rebelled against the rather authoritarian, conformist society they had been brought up in. We have a lot to to thank them for, primarily the increased freedom to live as we choose, rather than as our parents expected us to. Not that we should blame the older generation (although we did).

Living through a world war must have been a horrifying thing, and although the world of the 1950s can't possibly be as safe as the way we think we remember it, it would be understandable if those generations wanted a predictable world after the hell they'd just experienced. No one can doubt the massive social changes since then, nor the logical backlash against them.

In its earliest days, a large percentage of the Net's population was exactly those baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s. Many of the most significant early contributions to Net.freedoms - PGP, the founding of the EFF and its backing of important legal cases, to name two examples - were made by people in their 40s to whom the notion of a hostile government was all too real. It should be no surprise that they saw the Net as a kind of green field in which the ideal world they had hoped to achieve politically as teens could be realised. The upshot was a lot of rhetoric about how the Net could wash away traditional power structures and empower "the little guy."

Certainly, some "little guys" have been empowered, though much of the rhetoric was absurd hype. (The most significant invention since the discovery of fire? Come on, what were they smoking?) But the hype also doubtless fuelled some of the political panic about the Net. There's a whole world of people out there to whom the statement that the Net is uncontrollable is both terrifying and a challenge.

Lawrence Lessig, whose book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace explored the way that assumptions embedded in technology design can make an end run around both freedoms and the law, has been writing and speaking pessimistically about the survival of not only Net freedoms but the Net itself, as the physical infrastructure is changed by the relatively small number of people who now own it ( Here).

Proposals like the ones to make all of the Net tappable will certainly be more easily carried out if the Net itself is owned by a relatively small group of large, commercial interests. Small providers had their vulnerabilities, too, of course (you could load all of Demon into the back of a van in the early days), but there was a certain security in numbers and international spread.

It was common in the early days of the Net to believe that the reason politicians made such God-awful laws concerning the Net was that they didn't understand the technology. That last was true: they didn't. But the international attempt to crack down on ordinary individuals in the name of safety from terrorism tends to show they understood all too well thefreedoms they wanted to curtail. In the immediate, shocked aftermath, more people agreed with them than in ordinary times. As sad as those events were, we must keep our sense of balance.

Previous Columns
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
n et.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.