On Sunday, December 15, 2002, at 09:22 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
I met Marc for the first time at that CP meeting, held at the Alpine Inn (aka Rosotti's, from decades past) up in the foothills above Stanford. A great meeting. David Friedman showed up late in the day.On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 12:18:52AM +0000, David Wagner wrote:Declan McCullagh wrote:Also epic.org (not a cypherpunk-friendly organization, but it does try to limit law enforcement surveillance) [...]Is the cypherpunks movement truly so radicalized that it is not willing to count even EPIC among its friends?Perhaps I was being unfair to EPIC and typing too quickly. I count EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg as a friend, a principled person, and someone for whom I have a great deal of respect. Some folks may remember that Marc and I drove to a cypherpunks meeting south of Palo Alto last year.
I chatted with Marc for a while--the usual gossip and pleasantries. He made a remark along the lines of "You're not as bad as I expected" or "You don't sound as crazy in person as you do online." (I really don't remember what he said, but it was something along these lines.)
That I am different in person, exchanging low-bandwidth conversation, should not be surprising to anyone.
I mention his comments because he clearly shows that _his_ sort of people view _our_ sort of people, from our writings (or, pedantically, from _my_ writings) as being radical, weird, irrational, whatever. To mirror Declan's phrasing, I expect Marc R. would say "Cypherpunks is not an EPIC-friendly bunch."
Which is fair, as neither EPIC nor similar Beltway lobbying groups should be interesting or useful for us.
At best, they are not causing damage. At worst, they cut deals to steal our freedoms. More on this below.
EPIC and those other organizations (I don't even recall the name of that other one, not EFF, but the one roughly parallel with EPIC) represent the East Coast Defense.But EPIC sharply diverges with some cypherpunks over the question of what regulations should be imposed on private entities. It supports -- may even be the most vocal supporter -- of laws telling you, in Tim's words, you must forget someone's previous commercial interactions with you past a certain date. It supports broad and intrusive regulations aimed at companies' data collection and use practices. It would like to establish a European-style (not exactly the same, perhaps, but close) "data protection" regime in the U.S., despite all the free speech problems we've seen with it in Europe: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=palmeTo the extent cypherpunks care about those values and cherish limited government involvement in those areas, EPIC is not, as I wrote, a "cypherpunk-friendly" organization.
Cypherpunks is the West Coast Offense.
(NFL parallels intentional.)
(Note added: I'm not the first to point to the difference in culture between East and West. A long tradition of this, and "The Cowboy and Yankee War" by Carroll Quigley, fleshed out the differences in terms of the national security state. Both Kevin Kelly and Steven Levy noted it. One of them wrote descriptively of the West Coast way of doing things... Parallels with the development of high tech, Silicon Valley, and the economy in general are obvious. The California approach is clearly not the East Coast approach.)
The origin of the CP meetings, and always with the largest (by far) physical meetings, is the San Francisco Bay Area. I trust I don't have to elaborate on this point, even for the apparent newcomers.
The West Coast Offense is a "passing game." It's a rejectionist stance.
Having Sobel and Rotenberg and their sort lobbying Congress for laws to force disclosure of various kinds of private information held by non-government actors is statist. Declan cites one of my favorite examples: the Fair Lending Act or Truth in Lending Act (or whatever the precise name--something nice-sounding about "Fair Disclosure," natch). At first blush, it looks "reasonable," as it says that bad credit may be replaced by good credit after some number of years have passed. Blah blah. Most of the sheeple think it's part of the nature of the universe: ""But, but they can't turn you down for a loan after seven years!!"
Consider what this really means. Alice lent money to Bob. Bob skipped out on his debt. Alice remembers this. Alice tells her associates about this. (This is all that a "credit rating" is.)
Big Brother comes along and says "We have passed a law. After 7 years, and with other restrictions of various sorts, you, Alice, may not remember that Bob once screwed you. And you must not tell other people."
This is no different, really, from the government saying that a restaurant reviewer "must disclose all records" to restaurants being reviewed, "must not share reviews except in manners prescribed by the Fair Restaurant Review Act of 1998," must give restaurants "the opportunity to dispute the reviews they received," and, of course "no reviewer may make use of memories of past meals past a time limit prescribed by the FRRA."
Now aside from being basically statist, this is a slam-dunk violation of the First Amendment: Alice is being told what she may say to Charles, Dora, Ed, and others. She is being told that the Fair Lending Act limits what information she may store, share, or even use in her lending decisions.
The East Coasters, and the Europeans, would say that the FLA is about "fairness" and "second chances."
(I would respond by saying that Alice may indeed decide to lend to Bob, even with his actions of 2 years ago or of 10 years ago. The point is, it's _her_ decision about how she uses the information. Likewise, those who talk to her and learn of her experiences, may also use the information in various ways. This is the essence of a free society.)
Now the West Coasters don't argue for more laws to try to patch this Frankenstein monster of gibberish about "commerce clauses" and how and why the First Amendment may be limited by the state (gee, what part of "Shall make no law" was unclear?). The West Coasters go for the long bomb.
Yep, these are all reasons why most Cypherpunks are libertarian. This point has been made too many times and in too many different ways for me to regurgitate here.Also, I haven't thought this through that much, but it seems to me that if you value privacy _qua_ privacy as an end goal, it makes sense to start looking at not the symptoms, but the cause: Large government that consumes perhaps nearly half of the GDP is necessarily privacy-invasive. There are even some reasonable justifications for it: Social Security creates an SSN to limit fraud. The IRS collects an incredible amount of detail to limit tax cheating. If you want gun control, you'll probably want to collect info on gun owners.
The nanny state, the mommy state, the Big Brother state. When the state runs health care, it's going to use state power to make people pee in bottles, to control doctor information, to "reduce fraud through total information awareness." When the state controls licensing of professions, ditto. When the state....well, you see where this is going.
So now we have the East Coasters trying to fix the intrusions with even more intrusions: regulation of hospital records, control of insurance information. Hopeless, and it will ultimately make things worse.
(The fix for medical abuse is to have people pay for their own medical care or contract with insurance companies and HMOs on their own: this incentivizes them to find the best deal for the least money. Having state-funded health care is like having state-funded buffet meals and then wondering why there are so many fat people, such lousy food, and so many people standing in long lines. Not a perfect analogy, but it captures the dangers of the "to each according to his need" problem with unmetered usage.)
You see them as an ally...perhaps because you are there in Washington. Out here, I never, ever, encounter EPIC or EFF or any other such organization. Except at parties.Anyone who values privacy as an end goal (Jim Harper of privacilla has written about this too) should start questioning the trappings of the welfare state and find alternatives. Could Social Security be privatized? Could we move to a flat tax or sales tax, or even (gasp) reduce taxes? EPIC is a left-of-center civil liberties group and it does not ask those questions, to the best of my knowledge. I suspect the majority of folks at EPIC support UK-ish gun control, which explains why the group has never made a point of highlighting the privacy problems of some of the state and federal anti-gun laws. This does not mean EPIC isn't a valuable ally -- it is and will continue to be -- but perhaps only on an issue-by-issue basis.
Technology is the main thing altering policy in directions we favor. The VCR changed policy through technological means...the Court in Disney v. Sony (the Betamax case) only provided a fig leaf ("fair use, time-shifting") for the horse already being irreversibly out of the barn. The wide use of networks, SSH, crypto in general, made any crackdown on crypto in the U.S. a hopeless case, hence the retreat on Clipper, export laws.
The invention of the printing press gave the "pirates" of that age the ability to subvert state-granted ownership of information. This "long pass" altered the ground truth in ways that law spent the next several hundred years dealing with.
Yes, I am unabashedly a technological determinist. I was talking in terms of knowledgequakes changing the environment long before Lessig neatly summarized the ideas (independent of me, by the way) in his "tripod" of custom vs. tools vs. law. (he has since expanded this to four legs, IIRC, but I favor the simpler version, the version which matches my own analysis from the early 90s.)
This is why Cypherpunks have no use for Washington.
--Tim May
"That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David Thoreau
