A Curmudgeon's Impressions
from the Computers, Privacy and Freedom Conference

by Dave Hughes

Since I was one of the panel participants (and so had to spend some time thinking about and preparing my own remarks on the scene), and arrived only on the second day, I won't pretend this is objective or complete. I am *really* looking forward to the online verbatim transcripts of what every speaker said. The older I get the less satisfactory - for me at least - is the face to face 'conference' format for absorbing, thinking about, and discussing these ever more complex, elusive, and intractable issues raised by technology.

I was pleased to see that, in spite of the cost to attendees and circumstances of the conference, there was enough attendence by grass roots hackers that the whole affair wasn't dominated by corporate and government suits. I had feared that representatives by the very computer culture and values being most discussed as 'problems' (hackers) would not be present to defend their point of view and bring a little real-grass-roots computer world to the proceedings. They were - and well beyond expected Crunch and Phiber Optik.

Equally suprising was that they behaved themselves. I guess they have so established their hacker reputation by now they don't have to act it out everywhere. The Hacker Establishment was there just like the Law Enforcement, Academic, Press, Corporate, Organizational, Government and California Establishments. Oh a few yo yo's were in evidence from time to time, but not enough to send the gathering into ritual adulation rites for the aging counter-culture.

It was pretty well balanced, and so was nicely collegial. Best evidenced at the breaks, and large lunches and dinners, where there was far less grouping up by profession. Everybody mixed. So I have to congratulate the organizers for achieving a friendly mix of very disparete elements of the computer culture. With non-uniformed computer crime-busting cops talking easily with the indicted and indictable. Not an easy thing to accomplish. And obviously a lot of professional gaps were bridged during the informal discussion times.

The panels were well organized, with everyone giving their 10 minute pieces before questions and discussions.

The law enforcement types made really effective presentations, from street cops to probably the most impressive professional there - Don Ingraham, Alameda County Assistance District Attorney, who demonstrated that professional law enforcers are just about as computer and telecom-culture savy as anyone in the room, and know their place in the Information Society. On the whole they managed to make credible the reality that computer criminals have and are hurting a lot of computer-innocent people, including small ma and pa businesses. There was as much appeal by them to sympathy for the harmed 'little guy' and the pro-hacker advocates appealed to sympathy for the harmed innocent BBS operator. They also revealed the problem they have even investigating reported computer crimes, given the extensive law-enforcement, rules of evidence, legal rights, rules they have to thread their way through, the time it takes to explore the innards of computer disks without damaging anything, the level of computer competance of the investigators, the lack of systematic training of cops in computers for lack of law enforcement resources.

One thing I had not really thought of was that cops are as bedeviled by half-computer literate victims - who can't even report alleged crimes accurately - as they are by the challenges of dealing with technical crime. I began to wonder how many false computer-crimes must be reported, when a paranoic businessman reports a crime when in fact a clumsy operator simply reformmated the disk improperly.

One really tough problem for the cops was made evident when the whole issue of legal 'jurisdiction' arose, especially when telecommunications was involved.

The problems of Privacy by a parade of speakers underscored the intense competing pressures between the commercial need for using lists to reach their advertising targets with a competitive edge with the desire by individuals not to be so targeted - or listed, or tracked by computer.

Nothing I heard - in terms of the problems or solutions offered, or especially the underlying assumptions about the future functioning of this society - was particularly new - but it underscored the sheer complexity which computer and communications technologies have brought to American society. While everyone seemed to feel that - if everyone just understood their viewpoint, laws or the Constitution were revised, regulations changed, mutual understanding achieved - that the problems of computers, privacy, and freedom would be largely addressed. The west coasters seem to be pleading for change of values, east coasters for a change in laws, middle Americans for changes in procedures - education, regulation, training.

I frankly doubt that any of these approaches are going to work. I think everyone is underestimating the extent of the 'power shift' which is occuring by the spread of cheap, powerful 'personal' digital machines and 'personal' global communications. I recall the question Toffler posed 20 years ago when he asked, in an age when everyone can do their own thing (which the inherent economics of small computers and telecommunications are making possible) what is it which will hold us together?

By Thursday morning after hearing all this in one form or another, I decided to make a different point in the 10 minutes I was alloted out of the 25 hours of presentations. And that was that given the accelerating rush of technology and application of it in society - resort to more laws, rules, macro-solutions for the whole society, all typically Industrial Age 'massification' approaches during a time when everything is being de-massified - that the original ideal of this nation - individuality, individual freedom, individual responsibility, individual defense of ones own cyberspace, is the only practical solution.

I just think we are hurtling into the future so fast on the tsumni of technology that laws will never catch up. At which point one stops relying on better laws as the solution.

Of course I made it as colorfully as differently as possible from other speakers - to underscore and personify the reality of the 'individuality' of the information age (as differentiated from the collectivity and homogoniety of society which the industrial age of the past 200 years in America imposed on us which, in another 200 years would have had me wearing unisex clothes and living in some techno-commune somewhere and working for some benevolent and 'humane' mega-corp somwhere, which Apple started out to be, and the entire nation of Singapore is now trying to become).

And I am sure many missed my intellectual points entirely while watching the theater of it. (There are as many intellectual constructs behind my cowboy poetry, fig, as instincts, believe it or not. As I said - read my cursor). But I am long past worrying about what others may think about the value-implications from the past or the future in my Stetson.

Its only that I believe technology is making us all more different from each other - and for all the 'connecting up' it is permitting, as here on the Well - I see no evidence that it leading toward a more peaceful, lawful, tolerant, shared-value society of the future, even in Cyberspace. I think it is just as likely it is leading toward Chaos.