Computers, Freedom & Privacy Report
by Steve Cisler


The First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy
March 26-28, 1991,
SFO Airport Marriott Hotel, Burlingame, California

Theme: Pursuing Policies for the Information Age in the
Bicentennial Year of the Bill of Rights

In planning this conference the organizers wanted to open channels of communication between diverse interest groups in the online community.

There were about twelve organizations sponsoring the meeting including IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery, Apple Computer, Autodesk, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cato Institute, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Electronic Networking Assn., Portal Communications, Videotex Industry Assn., the WELL and numerous individuals who donated their time and energy over a six month period.

Jim Warren (jwarren@well.sf.ca.us) was the conference chair and helped make everything run smoothly and on time. Given the extremely full agenda, it was an amazing feat. To give you an idea of the diversity that is not evident by the sponsoring organizations, youd have to see the color codes each attendee could affix to his or her badge:

fluorescent green: freedom of electronic speech, assembly and press

green:freedom of information; library and information services

fluorescent yellow:computer security

yellow: email, bulletin boards, computer conferencing

fluorescent red: law enforcement, prosecution, criminal justice

red: legislation and regulation

fluorescent orange: personal information services; direct marketing

orange: privacy of personal information

light blue: Practice of civil law

dark blue: Practice of criminal law

pink: computing brown: computer hacker(and not a cracker)

black: (former) computer cracker or phone phreaque

Monday was devoted to tutorials on computer communications and the global matrix; computer related legislation in the U.S.; how computer crackers crack; impacts of the U.S. on European Privacy Initiatives.

I arrived Tuesday morning, March 26. Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School spoke on "The Constitution in the Information Age". In this keynote he tried to 'map the text and structure of our Constitution onto the topology of cyberspace' by examining a number of cases involving computer intrusion, Prodigy electronic mail controversies, copyright issues, government control of information, and the way new technology changes our institutions. One of his axioms was that the "accidents of technology" should not affect constitutional principles because "the framers were not just clever; they were astoundingly wise." For some reason he allowed no questions from the floor and after a break, the first of eleven panels convened. There was only one formal track, but after a few hours people began choosing either to stay in the formal session or discuss hot issues in the halls. There was almost no digital component to the whole conference except for a few of us taking notes on portables. All presentations were verbal with a few overheads and slides; all of it was video and audiotaped for later sale, transcription, and archiving.

The panels and a few highlights-- Trends in computers and networks: John Quarterman "The Matrix as Volksnet" David Farber "Will the Global Village be a Police State?" Peter Denning "Computers Under Attack" Martin Hellman "Cryptography and Privacy: The Human Factor"

International Perspectives and Impacts Personal Information and Privacy (two panels) Janlori Goldman, ACLU Project on privacy and technology John Baker, Equifax (supplied Lotus with data for Marketplace) Baker discussed attitudes toward privacy by the American people of whom 25% can be called Privacy Fundamentalists, 58% Privacy Pragmatists, 17% who don't care about the issues.

Marc Rotenberg, CPSR (helped stop Lotus Marketplace) and Alan Westin, Pr. of Public Law and Govt. Columbia U. had an interesting debate "Should individuals have absolute control over secondary use of their personal information?" What is the correct secondary use of personal information? For instance, should ALA have the right to sell its mailing list to exhibitors, or should you have to opt in before they can use your personal information? Rotenberg said you should have absolute control; Westin said that for research you should not need to get an okay, but he did predict that by 2000 we will only use consensual databases and the subjects will be compensated for that use. Most people agreed that personal preferences are valuable, and this could include buying patterns, magazine subscriptions, or reading tastes. The fact that companies are buying the mailing lists mean that each piece does have value. The computer tools to analyze and massage this information are filtering down past the direct marketing firms and big companies. This will present the library community with some quandaries: how much of this do you use for library marketing, for justifying your spending patterns for resources and services?

In a following panel Evan Hendricks of "Privacy Times" he recounted some abuses by government and industry including the secret Social Security matching program with TRW. They found that in two groups of names and SS numbers (150,000 and one million names) about 20% were inaccurate! He also detailed how the trend may be toward using human genetic information in hiring practices that will not focus on just you but also your ancestors.

As a result of these panels and previous meetings the U.S. Privacy Council was born, and the first brief meeting was held at the conference. It will be an umbrella group of organizations concerned with privacy issues in the U.S. (which is lagging behind other industrial countries in privacy protection).

Eli Noam, Columbia School of Business spoke that evening on "Reconciling Free Speech and Freedom of Association" saying that the model of a network as a common carrier would insure non-discrimination of content providers and greatly reduce censorship. The future problem for network users will be the absorption of information and how to get rid of unwanted information (filtering). We have about 11 million words per day flowing into homes, and there is much work to be done on the screening processes.

Wednesday The law enforcement panel was chaired by Glenn Tenney, a computer programmer and organizer of the annual Hackers Conference. Participating were personnel from the Columbus, Ohio, computer crime unit; U.S. Secret Service, the New York State Police, and Don Ingraham, Alameda County (CA) D.A.'s office. Ingraham addressed the crowd and said "We're a bunch of lions being thrown to the Christians" which brought a big laugh, but then he said the inhabitants of Cyberspace ought to grow up and realize that inhabitants of the frontier are usually displaced by newcomers. He also noted that in spite of the diversity of the gathering, the victims of computer crime were not present (though many were, of course).

The reports by the working cops were most interesting. Most are working without very strong support from the upper chain of command or without sufficient resources to become educated and support the growing number of reports or calls for help from other law enforcement agencies. However, Mike Gibbons (login id is 'gman') of the FBI said that Director Sessions considers computer crime extremely important and a very high priority.

The next panel included civil libertarians discussing the same issues facing the police. Mitchell Kapor said the frontier has NOT been settled, and that we still don't know how to extend the First Amendment to bulletin board systems. He noted that the law enforcement world is a lot more black and white than his world. He does not think that hackers fit into this set world. Protecting the rights of hackers is the same as protecting the rights of any individual, no matter who they are.

In another session Kapor announced two new initiatives for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

--Beyond NREN: involvement in the discussion about public
policies about the national information infrastructure: cost,
control, governance, and access issues.

--THE BIG DUMMY'S GUIDE TO THE NET, a guide for the non-expert
who wants to master the net. Part Whole Earth Catalog; part
John Muir guide to Volkswagen repair manual (a classic in the
60's).

Computer-Based Surveillance of Individuals
===========================================

There were a handful of librarians present from LITA, U.C. Davis, a U.C. Berkeley student, Freedom to Read Foundation, Berkeley Public Library, and Judith Krug, Office of Intellectual Freedom. She pinch hitted for another panelist and did a very persuasive re-telling of the various surveillance projects that have been directed at libraries especially the FBI Library Awareness Program.

Gary Marx from MIT discussed the technology which had "laser-like proficiency and sponge-like absorbency' and was being used in a variety of disturbing ways. The words 'chilling effect' were used far too often, but, indeed, that's what it is. One example that drew gasps from the audience: a kid's TV show has the clown asking the little viewers to hold the phone receiver up to the set. His program delivers signals to all an 800 number and the automatic number identification used on all 800 numbers, generates a database of interested children! Instant marketing!

While I am listing panel after panel, my time was spent sitting and listening, taking long breaks to drift in and out of interesting and bizarre discussions between writers, hackers, cops, anarchists, and lawyers. I talked about book preservation with Bruce Sterling the author of various good books published on bad paper, about data havens where rogue databases would be generated in places like Haiti or SE Asia and re-sold back to the developed world. There were libertarians skeptical of government involvement in NREN, in research, in supporting libraries.

There were law enforcement people dealing with the same information management problems that many of us have. Each night I went home exhausted with no time to do anything but sleep and compost some of the ideas and get ready for the next intellectual onslaught.

Thursday began with a very lively session on Electronic Free Speech, Press & Assembly. One of the Prodigy protesters who did not have a seat on the main panel disrupted the session (which included George Perry, general counsel for Prodigy Services Co.). He was told to shut up and sit down, but a separate meeting room was provided for people who wanted to discuss that issue only. During the panel session many people talked about Prodigy, but it did not dominate the threads of discussion.

Jack Rickard, Editor, Boardwatch Magazine, 5970 S. Vivian St., Littleton, CO (303-973-4222) impressed me with his knowledge of the grass roots electronic publishing scene: electronic bulletin boards. His magazine is print and electronic and well worth following if you are tracking trends and innovative use of small systems for delivering information. He calls the people running these systems "native librarians" because they have an incredible amount of information about narrow subjects whether it is child abuse, Superman ephemera, cockatiels, or any other subject. He estimates that there are 32,000 systems and these will increase to 60,000 by the end of 1991. Most are self-funded and not protected in the way librarians are when we make available all sorts of information to our clients. Rickard said the costs of defending innocence were becoming so great that BBS liability is discussed by most system operators.

David Hughes, Old Colorado City Communications, Colorado Springs, CO gave a rousing call to modems that brought a standing ovation and cheers. His thoughts may be shared this summer at the LITA president's program in Atlanta, so I won't give it all away in this report. Don't miss it!

Access to Government Information included Harry Hammitt, Editor of Access Reports; Katherine Mawdsley, U.C. Davis Library (kfmawdsley@ucdavis.edu) discussed the depository library model and access issues. She outlined the ALA statement of principles in her fine presentation.

Robert Veeder, OMB, substituted for Ken Allen of the Information Industry Association. He discussed how difficult it was to develop a dissemination policy for government. The OMB used to reflect the pro-privatization bias of the Reagan administration, but now it is more neutral. The current policy will be framed within the Paperwork Reduction Act negotiations. Note that there was a March 4 Federal Register notice about information dissemination bills, and that by the end of May there will be a proposal. He said he would make sure that it is disseminated electronically on the networks represented in the room. He has been telling the agencies to stay in touch with the user communities. Veeder was surprised at how many people in the audience went to the library to get government information, about 150 out of 200 present, yet all of them want to get it electronically from a node in the library or from their home.

David Burnham, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 666 Pennsylvania Ave SE, #303, Washington, DC 2003 (202 544 8722) talked about the use of very large data sets from different government agencies (IRS, DEA) and the kinds of information that is generated by the skillful massaging of data. It is still a major effort to get the data, work with it, and come out with something an interested party can understand. After talking with him in his office and at this conference I am convinced that once we have the structured and free text database retrieval interfaces usable by average users, it will be time to tackle the same thing for large data sets.

The final panel was on Ethics and Education and included a very strong speech from John Gilmore, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and now a partner in Cygnus Support (gnu@cygnus.com). He believed that personal privacy and an open society were attainable, and he believes that an open society outperforms a closed one. He felt our society was being 'nibbled to death by ducks' and implied that there were too many laws and regulations seeking to control this or that behavior. When he asked who, in the past month, had not broken a law, the only person to raise a hand was a librarian! Gilmore said we needed true financial privacy and anonymity when we interact. His talk will be available electronically after he transcribes it. I'll post a pointer at that time.

In the Where-do-we-go-from-here wrap-up it was stated that a second conference will be held in 1992 in Washington, DC, and will be chaired by Pr. Lance Hoffman, EE/CS Dept., George Washington U., Washinton, DC. Everyone went back with different action items for various communities. Law enforcement people were revising search and seizure laws; computer crime consultants were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of more billable hours; information users understood the role of the library as part of the process; librarians understood that nobody was waiting for us to solve information dissemination problems, so it's time for us to mix even more with these disparate user communities to discuss the many issues raised at this landmark conference.

Published proceedings from Springer Verlag will be available for $29.95, no later than 9/91. CFP Proceedings, 345 Swett Road, Woodside, CA 94062. fax: 415-851-2814. They may not be prepared to hand P.O.'s so ask before sending one. This will also be the address to inquire about videos of the sessions.

Steve Cisler
Apple Library
sac@apple.com