Volume 7, Number 2 ---CONTENTS--- Spring 1991

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. MASTHEAD AND TABLE OF CONTENTS

2. MESSAGE FROM THE ENA PRESIDENT .......by Margaret Chambers

3. THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION MISSION STATEMENT

4. COMPUTERS, FREEDOM & PRIVACY - Part 1 .....by Steve Cisler

5. COMPUTERS, FREEDOM & PRIVACY - Part 2 ......by Steve Cisler

6. ELECTRONIC FREEDOM OF SPEECH ......... by Dave Hughes
Remarks prepared for the Computers Freedom & Privacy
conference March, 1991

7. A CURMUDGEON'S IMPRESSIONS .......by Dave Hughes
Reflections on the Computers, Freedom & Privacy
conference March, 1991

REPORT FROM THE ENA PRESIDENT

ENA91 CANCELED; ENA92 WILL BE IN BOSTON
ALTERNATIVE ACTIVITIES BEING PLANNED

by Margaret Chambers

In light of the war crisis, the downturn in the economy and the current stage of progress in conference planning and promotion, we proposed in the ported topic two weeks ago that the ENA91 conference be canceled. Now the decision has been made. The Executive Committee with input from the planning groups and many others asked Susan Valdez to cancel arrangements for the ENA91 conference in Seattle this spring.

We will refocus our energies on making ENA92 the best conference ENA has had. Joan Sweeney is the Conference Chair. She will need a month or so to digest this acceleration of planning and then will share the structure and directions for planning
activities. If you would like to get involved in the planning, contact Joan via e-mail: joan@tmn.uu.net

I want to thank Susan Valdez and the entire Seattle-based planning group for the tremendous efforts they made in setting up plans for the year's conference. For Susan it represents more than a year's commitment and volunteer activity. She had the guts to step forward and the drive to follow-through. Her efforts will not be wasted as they will help speed the planning of next year's meeting.

We hope that Bob Jacobson, Asst Director at the University of Washington's Human Interface Lab, can transport his virtual reality/telepresence demo into 92. Ray Gallon also has been great progress in setting up a ISDN demo between Paris and the US which we trust will still be fresh in 92. To all of you from all of us. THANKS!

Because the face-to-face conference has been ENA's most significant activity, we made this recommendation _very_ reluctantly. However there are ways in which ENA can benefit from other face-to-face conferences. In March we will piggyback
on the Conference on Computers, Privacy and Freedom, which ENA is co-sponsoring with the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (see other articles in this issue). We'll plan a working session for Friday morning, March 29, in the San Francisco Bay Area and we hope to attract conference attendees, local networkers as well as ENA members.

As we move through this year, we should ask ourselves three questions:

* Who are the people, organizations, and communities
we should serve? (vision and strategy)

* What can ENA offer to them? (organizational activities
and benefits)

* How can ENA attract them? (membership and recruitment)

We need to create a clearer, stronger organizational framework through which to network people and activities. I hope that this March meeting will be the first of a series of face-to-face meetings around the country in the next several months where ENA members and interested others can explore these questions. ENA members may want to suggest other meetings or conferences where ENA members might gather and "evangelize." Also we will discuss these questions online in this new conference.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Mission Statement


[editor's note: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
provided support for Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility to organize both the large conference on
"Computers, Freedom and Privacy" in San Francisco in March '91
and a public policy roundtable with 50 invited participants on
"Civil Liberties and the Electronic Frontier" in Washington,
D.C. in February '91.]


A new world is arising in the vast web of digital, electronic media which connect us. Computer-based communication media like electronic mail and computer conferencing are becoming the basis of new forms of community. THese communities without a single, fixed geographical location comprise the first settlements on an electronic frontier.

While well-established legal principles and cultural norms give structure and coherence to users of conventional media like newspapers, books, and telephones, the new digital media do not so easily fit into existing frameworks. Conflicts come about as the law struggles to define its application in a context where fundamental notions of speech, property, and place take profoundly enw forms. People sense both the promise and the threat inherent in new computer and communications technologies, even as they struggle to master or simply cope with them in the workplace and the home.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been established to help civilize the electronic frontier, to make it truly useful and beneficial not just to a technical elite, but to everyone; and to do this in a way which is in keeping with our society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication.

To that end, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will:

* Engage in and support educational activities which
increase popular understanding of the opportunities and
challenge posed by developments in computing and
telecommunications.

* Develop among policy-makers a better understanding of
the issues underlying free and open telecommunications,
and support the creation of legal and structural
approaches which will ease the assimilation of these
new technologies by society.

* Raise public awareness about civil liberties issues
arising from the rapid advancement in the area of new
computer-based communications media. Support
litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect,
and extend First Amendment rights within the realm of
computing and telecommunications technology.

* Encourage and support the development of new tools
which will endow non-technical users with full and easy
access to computer-based telecommunications.

For more information contact:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation
One Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 864-1550

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

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.

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.