ELECTRONIC FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Dave Hughes

Prepared Remarks for the Computers, Freedom
and Privacy Conference, March 28th, 1991.

I have been online for probably 5 hours a day for the past 10 years. At my own expense, as an individual. I have read at least 20 million words online during that time, and have produced probably a million of my own. And have operated a series of online systems from free BBSs to my current globally interconnected subscription, as well as free, conferencing system.

While my body lives in a delightful small place called Old Colorado City at the foot of Pikes Peak, which this microcomputer helped build, my mind lives and works in many virtual communities around the world.

I use this technology for the serious work of building and defining the future. Personally, economically, politically, educationally, technologically, culturally. I am a Citizen of the Western Frontier of the Information Age. And from my 63 years of experience with the ways of the world and communications with those who live in it, I have formed a few strong opinions about how it should function. In the few minutes we all have here I will just stress one major point.

If you do not live in the future as I do, then read my cursor.

The first principle which I fiercely hold and will vigerously defend is that what I and others online are largely doing that is unprecedented in law, regulation or the general cultures of the past is speech.

Electronic speech. Dialogue. Electronic debate. Discourse. Whether on the simplist local bulletin board run by a hacker, the largest corporate telecommunications service like Prodigy or Compuserve, on my own systems owned as a small business, or through the Internet to Japan funded by the National Science Foundation. From my riding hard to the electronic assistance of one of my sons in China at the height of Tianamen Square by alligator clips, cursor, Kermit and Procomm, to the connecting up of my tiny grandaughters in Seattle to global Barbie Net, to determining the outcome of elections in Colorado Springs by acts of Electronic Democracy exercised from the 1st booth in Rogers Bar which is equipped with RJ11 jacks at the booths, or dialing into the Well here in California to take back the best ideas to apply to my neighborhood, while leaving the rest of this crazy state, insufferable congestion, amd wierd values behind.

And when this summer I am riding in the high country above Cody Wyoming with my western saddle, I am equipping with an LCD on the top of the roping horn, buttons on each side, and packet radio in the saddle bags, it will still be speech.

It may be the fingers of the tongue for the ear of the eye. But it is still speech.

Discussion. Not for the production of permanent records, or copyrighted material, or legal statements. But for mind to mind communication.

We had better think very clearly in applying those first political principles of this nation to the governance of virtual societies we all will living in.

When I think about the relationship of the future I live in, to the past of this nation it occurs to me that Benjamin Franklin would have been the first owner of a microcomputer - undoubtedly an Apple.

Thomas Jefferson would have written the Declaration of Independence on an IBM PC in Word Perfect 5.1.

But, by heavens, Tom Paine would have first published Common Sense on a pirate bulletin-board with a Commodore 64.

I don't want any Corporate or Government Kings George treading on my cursor.

We must have absolute freedom of electronic speech.

Legally we do not need to confuse data as speech, with data as property. Or confuse either of those with computers and networks as place, or premises.

We whose bodies may live in the disappearing physical frontiers of America, but whose ride out on the perpetual frontier of the electronic west, do not want to fenced in by regulation or law which prematurely tries to settle this territory. Or consolidate a political, economic, social, cultural revolution that has barely gotton started before we understand it.

I am uneasy about what seems to be an implicit assumption of this conference. Which is that we need to rush to legislation.

Some of us can take care of ourselves, using, believe it or not, our personal computers to defend ourselves.

Over 100 years ago my grandfather on the plains of Colorado used twin Colt .44s which were called the Great Equalizers.

In Old Colorado City, I use my laptop computer and modem as Great Equalizers to shoot it out on any political street with the most powerful interests in town. I haven't had to call the Marshal yet.

So while I appreciate much that I have heard here so far in this admirable effort to bridge the gap between the free spirited cowboy hackers and the marshals of authority, be careful about the assumption that we need to DO something, even before we know what the natural laws of electronic communities might be.

And while public human group activity will have to be redefined legally on account of the new technologies of the mind I am confident that we in America already have the precedences in, law, shared values, and daily practice for issues of property, publication, privacy and speech, in the Information Age so long as we concentrate on the activites, motivations and purposes of the people connected to these machines and not just the machines themselves, we can handle it.

That's enough for now. We can continue in the discussion. And I am always online somewhere in the world, singing my ascii songs.

But bring your cursor. For Gutenburg is dead and I am trying to bury the old bastard. I cannot be found on paper, only screens.

See ya online, pardner. Together we can make this new country work. Just beware of those suits from Washington or sandles from California.