WEBVTT 00:00:08.200 --> 00:00:11.200 Ok, so, it's time for the keynotes and we are very honoured to have 00:00:11.300 --> 00:00:14.700 Eben Moglen here as first keynote speaker 00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:20.500 He is a professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University. 00:00:21.300 --> 00:00:25.300 He is probably most known for his involvement in the FSF 00:00:25.400 --> 00:00:28.300 and for creating the Software Freedom Law Centre. 00:00:28.400 --> 00:00:33.700 He was also heavily involved in the creation of the GPL version 3 00:00:33.900 --> 00:00:39.300 and many other things of course and so he will give a talk here today about 00:00:39.400 --> 00:00:44.300 Why political liberty depends on software freedom more than ever. 00:00:44.500 --> 00:00:47.400 Eben Moglen, thank you. 00:00:54.500 --> 00:00:57.400 Thank you, good morning it's a great pleasure to be here. 00:00:57.500 --> 00:01:03.000 I wanna thank the organisers for the miracle that FOSDEM is 00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:05.400 You all know that only chaos 00:01:05.500 --> 00:01:10.900 could create an organisation of this quality and power 00:01:11.800 --> 00:01:17.300 and it's an honour for me to play a little bit of a role in it. 00:01:17.400 --> 00:01:21.400 I know how eager you are to deal with technical matters 00:01:21.500 --> 00:01:29.100 and I'm sorry to start with politics first thing in the morning, but it's urgent. 00:01:29.700 --> 00:01:36.400 You've been watching it all around the world the past several weeks haven't you? 00:01:36.500 --> 00:01:40.400 It's about how politics actually works now 00:01:40.700 --> 00:01:45.200 for people actually seeking freedom now 00:01:45.600 --> 00:01:49.400 for people trying to make change in their world now. 00:01:50.100 --> 00:01:56.100 Software is what the 21st century is made of. 00:01:56.700 --> 00:02:02.900 What steel was to the economy of the 20th century 00:02:03.100 --> 00:02:08.000 what steel was to the power of the 20th century 00:02:08.100 --> 00:02:14.700 what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. 00:02:14.900 --> 00:02:21.800 It's the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made. 00:02:21.900 --> 00:02:28.200 And when I speak of everything else I mean, of course, freedom. 00:02:28.500 --> 00:02:34.500 As well as tyranny, as well as business as usual 00:02:34.800 --> 00:02:40.200 as well as spying on everybody for free all the time. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:46.400 In other words, the very composition of social life 00:02:46.500 --> 00:02:50.800 the way it works or doesn't work for us 00:02:50.900 --> 00:02:54.800 the way it works or doesn't work for those who own 00:02:54.900 --> 00:02:59.700 the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress 00:02:59.800 --> 00:03:04.400 all now depends on software. 00:03:06.300 --> 00:03:11.600 At the other end of this hastening process 00:03:11.700 --> 00:03:17.100 when we started our little conspiracy you and me and everybody else 00:03:17.200 --> 00:03:19.000 you remember how it works, right? 00:03:19.100 --> 00:03:20.800 I mean it's a simple idea. 00:03:20.900 --> 00:03:27.800 Make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on, right? 00:03:27.900 --> 00:03:33.400 That was how the conspiracy was designed that's how the thing is supposed to work 00:03:33.700 --> 00:03:38.100 We did pretty well with it and about halfway through stage 1 00:03:38.200 --> 00:03:45.000 my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out what was going on for us 00:03:45.100 --> 00:03:48.400 and he wrote his first quite astonishing book "Code" 00:03:48.500 --> 00:03:56.700 in which he said that code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century. 00:03:56.800 --> 00:04:00.700 That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born 00:04:00.800 --> 00:04:05.200 including creative commons and a bunch of other useful things. 00:04:06.800 --> 00:04:11.600 The really important point now is that code does the work of law 00:04:11.700 --> 00:04:18.600 and the work of the state and code does the work of revolution against the state. 00:04:18.700 --> 00:04:22.800 And code does all the work that the state does 00:04:22.900 --> 00:04:28.300 trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations. 00:04:29.200 --> 00:04:34.800 But code also organises the people in the street. 00:04:35.100 --> 00:04:38.800 We're having enormous demonstration around the world right now 00:04:38.900 --> 00:04:42.400 of the power of code in both directions. 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:48.700 The newspapers in the United States this past month have been full of the buzz 00:04:48.800 --> 00:04:52.900 around the book called "The Net Delusion" by Evgeny Morozov 00:04:53.000 --> 00:05:02.800 A very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view of the political nature of the changes in the net 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:06.500 Mr. Morozov who comes from Belarus 00:05:06.600 --> 00:05:12.400 and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism 00:05:12.900 --> 00:05:17.600 sees the ways in which the institutions of the net 00:05:17.700 --> 00:05:27.400 are increasingly being co-opted by the state in an effort to limit control or eliminate freedom. 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:36.800 And his summary of half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book 00:05:36.900 --> 00:05:43.500 is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is 00:05:43.600 --> 00:05:49.800 about the nature of the net delusion that the net brings freedom. 00:05:50.100 --> 00:05:57.700 I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists because I do think the net brings freedom. 00:05:57.800 --> 00:06:01.200 I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however. 00:06:01.600 --> 00:06:05.600 The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom. 00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:10.400 This is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution 00:06:10.500 --> 00:06:13.700 that says "Stallman was right". 00:06:13.900 --> 00:06:17.500 The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny 00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:22.000 because it all depends on how the code works. 00:06:22.900 --> 00:06:24.600 All right, so we all know that. 00:06:24.700 --> 00:06:27.000 We've spent a lot of time making free software. 00:06:27.100 --> 00:06:29.800 We've spent a lot of time putting free software in everything 00:06:29.900 --> 00:06:33.700 and we have tried to turn freedom on. 00:06:33.800 --> 00:06:37.900 We have also joined forces with other elements 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:44.100 of the free culture world that we helped to bring into existence. 00:06:44.300 --> 00:06:55.400 I've known Jimmy Wales a long time and Julian Assange, and that changes the world. 00:06:55.500 --> 00:07:00.100 Wikipedia and Wikileaks are two sides of the same coin. 00:07:00.200 --> 00:07:05.000 They are the two sides of the same coin the third side of which is FOSDEM. 00:07:05.100 --> 00:07:10.700 It is the power of ordinary people to organise, to change the world 00:07:10.800 --> 00:07:13.800 without having to create hierarchy 00:07:13.900 --> 00:07:17.700 and without having to recapitulate the structures of power 00:07:17.800 --> 00:07:22.800 that are being challenged by the desire to make freedom. 00:07:24.900 --> 00:07:29.200 Wikileaks was being treated everywhere around the world 00:07:29.300 --> 00:07:35.400 in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time 00:07:35.900 --> 00:07:40.100 and then events in Tunisia made it a little more complicated. 00:07:40.700 --> 00:07:45.700 As it became clear that what was being reported on around the world 00:07:45.800 --> 00:07:52.700 as though it was primarily a conspiracy to injure the dignity of the US State Department 00:07:52.800 --> 00:07:56.000 or to embarrass the United States military 00:07:56.100 --> 00:08:03.000 was actually, really, an attempt to allow people to learn about their world. 00:08:03.900 --> 00:08:11.400 To learn about how power really operates and therefore to do something about it. 00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:18.400 And what happened in Tunisia was, I thought, an eloquent rebuttal 00:08:18.500 --> 00:08:23.900 to the idea that the Wikileaks and free culture and free software 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:35.000 was primarily engaged in destruction, nihilism or I shrink from even employing 00:08:35.100 --> 00:08:38.200 the word in this context, terrorism. 00:08:38.600 --> 00:08:43.700 It was instead freedom which is messy, complicated, 00:08:43.800 --> 00:08:49.800 potentially damaging in the short term but salvational in the long term. 00:08:49.900 --> 00:08:53.000 The medicine for the human soul. 00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:58.700 It's hard, I know, because most of the time when we're coding 00:08:58.800 --> 00:09:01.700 it doesn't feel like we're doing anything 00:09:01.800 --> 00:09:05.200 that the human soul is directly very much involved in 00:09:05.600 --> 00:09:08.800 to take with full seriousness 00:09:08.900 --> 00:09:15.900 the political and spiritual meaning of free software at the present hour. 00:09:17.800 --> 00:09:23.000 But there are a lot of Egyptians whose freedom now depends 00:09:23.100 --> 00:09:27.300 upon their ability to communicate with one another 00:09:27.400 --> 00:09:32.300 through a database owned for-profit by a guy in California 00:09:32.400 --> 00:09:40.400 who obeys orders from governments, who send orders to disclose to Facebook. 00:09:41.600 --> 00:09:47.600 We are watching in real time the evolution of the kinds of politics 00:09:47.700 --> 00:09:54.000 of liberation and freedom in the 21st century that code can make 00:09:54.100 --> 00:09:59.600 and we are watching in real time the discovery of the vulnerabilities 00:09:59.700 --> 00:10:05.000 that arise from the bad engineering of the current system. 00:10:06.300 --> 00:10:14.500 Social networking, that is the ability to use free-form methods of communication 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:22.000 from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion 00:10:22.100 --> 00:10:26.700 changes the balance of power in society. 00:10:26.900 --> 00:10:33.000 Away from highly organised vehicles of state control 00:10:33.100 --> 00:10:37.400 towards people in their own lives. 00:10:38.500 --> 00:10:43.800 What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia 00:10:43.900 --> 00:10:49.200 and what will happen in other societies over the next few years 00:10:49.300 --> 00:10:56.600 demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking. 00:10:56.800 --> 00:11:01.300 But everything we know about technology tells us 00:11:01.400 --> 00:11:05.000 that the current forms of social network communication 00:11:05.100 --> 00:11:14.100 despite their enormous current value for politics are also intensely dangerous to use. 00:11:14.200 --> 00:11:16.800 They are too centralised 00:11:16.900 --> 00:11:22.400 They are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control. 00:11:22.500 --> 00:11:25.400 And the design of their technology 00:11:25.500 --> 00:11:30.600 like the design of almost all unfree software technology 00:11:30.700 --> 00:11:35.700 is motivated more by business interests seeking profit 00:11:35.800 --> 00:11:40.100 than by technological interests seeking freedom. 00:11:40.200 --> 00:11:43.600 As a result of which, we are watching 00:11:43.700 --> 00:11:46.800 political movements of enormous value 00:11:46.900 --> 00:11:51.800 capable of transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people 00:11:51.900 --> 00:12:00.100 resting on a fragile basis like for example the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg 00:12:00.200 --> 00:12:05.000 or the willingness of Google to resist the state 00:12:05.100 --> 00:12:09.000 where the state is a powerful business partner 00:12:09.100 --> 00:12:17.200 and a party Google cannot afford to insult. 00:12:18.200 --> 00:12:23.000 We are living in a world in which real-time information 00:12:23.100 --> 00:12:27.800 crucial to people in the street seeking to build their freedom 00:12:27.900 --> 00:12:33.600 depends on a commercial micro-blogging service in northern California 00:12:33.700 --> 00:12:39.900 which must turn a profit in order to justify its existence 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:42.800 to the people who design its technology 00:12:42.900 --> 00:12:49.400 and which we know is capable of deciding overnight all by itself 00:12:49.500 --> 00:12:54.800 to donate the entire history of everything, everybody said through it 00:12:54.900 --> 00:12:57.200 to the library of Congress. 00:12:57.300 --> 00:13:00.500 Which means, I suppose, that in some other place 00:13:00.600 --> 00:13:04.300 they could make a different style of donation. 00:13:06.300 --> 00:13:14.700 We need to fix this. We need to fix it quickly. 00:13:14.800 --> 00:13:23.600 We are now behind the curve of the movements for freedom that depend on code. 00:13:23.800 --> 00:13:29.000 And every day that we don't fix the problems created by the use of insecure, over-centralised 00:13:29.100 --> 00:13:35.200 overcapitalised social network media to do the politics of freedom 00:13:35.300 --> 00:13:41.200 the real politics of freedom in the street, where the tanks are. 00:13:41.800 --> 00:13:47.800 The more we don't fix this, the more we are becoming part of the system 00:13:47.900 --> 00:13:52.000 which will bring about a tragedy soon. 00:13:53.200 --> 00:13:58.000 What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring. 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:05.000 But the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the net 00:14:05.100 --> 00:14:13.100 and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been. 00:14:14.100 --> 00:14:23.100 It is not hard when everybody's just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg 00:14:23.200 --> 00:14:32.800 to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse. 00:14:35.400 --> 00:14:45.600 We need to think deeply and rapidly and to good technological effect 00:14:45.800 --> 00:14:53.000 about the consequences of what we have built and what we haven't built yet. 00:14:53.800 --> 00:14:57.700 I pointed a couple of times already to the reason why 00:14:57.800 --> 00:15:02.000 centralised social networking and data distribution services 00:15:02.100 --> 00:15:06.000 should be replaced by federated services. 00:15:06.100 --> 00:15:09.400 I was talking about that intensively last year 00:15:09.500 --> 00:15:14.300 before this recent round of demonstrations in the street 00:15:14.400 --> 00:15:17.400 of the importance of the whole thing began. 00:15:17.500 --> 00:15:21.800 And I want to come back to the projects I have been advocating. 00:15:21.900 --> 00:15:27.800 But let me just say here, again, from this other perspective 00:15:27.900 --> 00:15:34.900 that the overcentralisation of network services is a crucial political vulnerability. 00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:38.700 Friends of ours, people seeking freedom 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:46.600 are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured and eventually killed somewhere on earth. 00:15:46.800 --> 00:15:52.800 Because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom 00:15:52.900 --> 00:15:59.000 on technology we know, is built to sell them out. 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:07.200 If we care about freedom as much as we do 00:16:07.300 --> 00:16:10.400 and if we are as bright with technology as we are 00:16:10.500 --> 00:16:14.500 we have to address that problem. We are actually running out of time. 00:16:14.600 --> 00:16:18.700 Because people whose movements we care deeply about 00:16:18.800 --> 00:16:25.100 are already out there in harm's way using stuff that can hurt them. 00:16:26.800 --> 00:16:36.100 I don't want anybody taking life or death risks to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone. 00:16:36.800 --> 00:16:39.800 Because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him 00:16:39.900 --> 00:16:46.100 without our having any way to control it, stop it, help it or even know what's going on. 00:16:47.300 --> 00:16:53.200 We need to think infrastructurally about what we mean to freedom now. 00:16:53.800 --> 00:16:59.100 And we need to learn the lessons of what we see happening around us in real time. 00:16:59.800 --> 00:17:04.100 One thing that the Egyptian situation showed us 00:17:04.500 --> 00:17:08.700 as we probably knew after the Iranian situation 00:17:08.800 --> 00:17:15.500 when we watched the forces of the Iranian state buy the telecommunications carriers 00:17:15.600 --> 00:17:21.600 as we learnt when the Egyptians begin to lean on Vodafone last week. 00:17:21.700 --> 00:17:26.700 We learn again why closed networks are so harmful to us. 00:17:26.900 --> 00:17:31.900 Why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure 00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:36.200 by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers 00:17:36.300 --> 00:17:41.200 who must have a way of life with government in order to survive 00:17:41.300 --> 00:17:48.500 can harm our people seeking freedom using technology we understand well. 00:17:48.800 --> 00:17:56.400 Now, what can we do to help freedom under circumstances where the state 00:17:56.500 --> 00:18:01.500 has decided to try to clamp the network infrastructure? 00:18:01.800 --> 00:18:05.000 Well, we can go back to mesh networking. 00:18:05.200 --> 00:18:08.500 We've got to go back to mesh networking. 00:18:08.700 --> 00:18:12.800 We've got to understand how we can provide people 00:18:12.900 --> 00:18:19.300 using the ordinary devices already available to them or cheaply available to them 00:18:19.400 --> 00:18:25.600 to build networking that resists centralised control. 00:18:25.900 --> 00:18:30.700 Mesh networking in densely populated urban environments 00:18:30.800 --> 00:18:35.000 is capable of sustaining the kind of social action 00:18:35.100 --> 00:18:40.500 we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week. 00:18:40.900 --> 00:18:47.100 Even without the centralised network services providers 00:18:47.200 --> 00:18:54.700 if people have wireless routers that mesh up in their apartments, in their work places 00:18:54.800 --> 00:19:01.600 in the places of public resort around them they can continue to communicate 00:19:01.700 --> 00:19:07.000 despite attempts in central terms to shut them down. 00:19:07.700 --> 00:19:11.900 We need to go back to ensuring people 00:19:12.000 --> 00:19:17.000 secure end-to-end communications over those local meshes. 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:22.200 We need to provide survivable conditions 00:19:22.300 --> 00:19:27.400 for the kinds of communications that people now depend upon 00:19:27.500 --> 00:19:32.100 outside the context of centralised networking environments 00:19:32.200 --> 00:19:38.000 that can be used to surveil, control, arrest or shut them down. 00:19:39.900 --> 00:19:46.500 Can we do this? Sure. Are we gonna do this? 00:19:47.800 --> 00:19:54.200 If we don't, the great social promise of the free software movement 00:19:54.300 --> 00:20:00.100 that free software can lead to free society will begin to be broken. 00:20:00.200 --> 00:20:08.100 Force will intervene somewhere soon and a demonstration will be offered to humanity 00:20:08.200 --> 00:20:12.000 that even with all that networking technology 00:20:12.100 --> 00:20:16.700 and all those young people seeking to build new lives for themselves 00:20:16.800 --> 00:20:19.700 the state still wins. 00:20:19.900 --> 00:20:23.200 This must not happen. 00:20:25.400 --> 00:20:32.800 If you look at that map of the globe at night the one where all the lights on 00:20:32.900 --> 00:20:38.500 and imagine next time you look at it that you're looking instead at a network graph 00:20:38.700 --> 00:20:42.800 instead of an electrical infrastructure graph 00:20:42.900 --> 00:20:48.700 you'll feel like a kind of pulsing coming out of the North American continent 00:20:48.800 --> 00:20:54.100 where all the world's data mining is being done. 00:20:56.300 --> 00:20:59.600 Think of it that way, right? 00:20:59.900 --> 00:21:06.500 North America is becoming the heart of the global data mining industry 00:21:06.600 --> 00:21:12.800 Its job is becoming knowing everything about everybody, everywhere. 00:21:13.200 --> 00:21:19.200 When Dwight Eisenhower was leaving the presidency in 1960 00:21:19.300 --> 00:21:23.700 he made a famous farewell speech to the American people 00:21:23.800 --> 00:21:30.500 in which he warned them against the power of the military industrial complex 00:21:30.900 --> 00:21:35.100 a phrase that became so common place in discussion 00:21:35.200 --> 00:21:39.100 that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant. 00:21:40.700 --> 00:21:47.900 The general who had run the largest military activity of the 20th century 00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:50.900 the invasion of Europe. 00:21:51.000 --> 00:21:58.300 The general who had become the president of America at the height of the cold war 00:21:58.400 --> 00:22:04.500 was warning Americans about the permanent changes to their society 00:22:04.600 --> 00:22:07.000 that would result from the interaction 00:22:07.100 --> 00:22:13.000 of industrial capitalism with American military might. 00:22:13.200 --> 00:22:17.800 And since the time of that speech, as you all know, 00:22:17.900 --> 00:22:25.000 the United States has spent on defence more than the rest of the world combined. 00:22:28.100 --> 00:22:37.000 Now, in the 21st century, which we can define as after the latter part of September 2001 00:22:37.900 --> 00:22:42.600 the United States began to build a new thing. 00:22:42.800 --> 00:22:47.000 A surveillance industrial military complex. 00:22:47.900 --> 00:22:56.000 The Washington Post produced the most important piece of public journalism in the United States last year 00:22:56.100 --> 00:23:00.800 a series available to you online called 'Top Secret America' 00:23:00.900 --> 00:23:08.200 in which the Washington Post not only wrote eight very useful, lengthy, analytic stories 00:23:08.300 --> 00:23:12.800 about the classified sector of American industrial life 00:23:12.900 --> 00:23:16.100 built around surveillance and data processing. 00:23:16.200 --> 00:23:22.100 The Post produced an enormous database which is publicly available to everyone 00:23:22.200 --> 00:23:26.900 through the newspaper of all the classified contractors 00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:29.800 available to them in public record 00:23:29.900 --> 00:23:32.800 what they do for the government, what they're paid 00:23:32.900 --> 00:23:35.400 and what can be known about them. 00:23:35.500 --> 00:23:39.600 A database which can be used to create all sorts of journalism 00:23:39.700 --> 00:23:42.700 beyond what the Post published itself. 00:23:42.800 --> 00:23:48.100 I would encourage everybody to take a look at 'Top Secret America'. 00:23:48.200 --> 00:23:53.400 What it will show you is how many goggles there are 00:23:53.500 --> 00:23:57.100 under the direct control of the United States government 00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:01.500 as well as how many goggles there are under the control of Google. 00:24:01.600 --> 00:24:06.400 In other words the vast outspreading web 00:24:06.500 --> 00:24:11.200 which joins the traditional post second world war US listening 00:24:11.300 --> 00:24:16.100 to everything everywhere on earth outside the United States 00:24:16.700 --> 00:24:21.900 to the newly available listening to things inside the United States 00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:27.600 that used to be against the law in my country as I knew its law 00:24:27.900 --> 00:24:32.700 to all the data now available in all the commercial collection systems 00:24:32.900 --> 00:24:36.700 which includes everything you type into search boxes about 00:24:36.800 --> 00:24:44.000 what you believe, wish, hope, fear or doubt as well as every travel reservation you make 00:24:44.100 --> 00:24:49.000 and every piece of tracking data coming off your friendly smartphone. 00:24:55.200 --> 00:25:00.000 When governments talk about the future of the net these days 00:25:00.800 --> 00:25:06.000 I have on decent authority from government officials in several countries. 00:25:06.700 --> 00:25:09.900 When governments talk about the future of the net these days 00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.100 they talk almost entirely in terms of cyberwar. 00:25:14.600 --> 00:25:19.300 A field in which I've never had much interest and which has a jargon all its own 00:25:19.400 --> 00:25:23.700 but some current lessons from inter-governmental discussions 00:25:23.800 --> 00:25:28.000 about cyberwar are probably valuable to us here. 00:25:31.100 --> 00:25:35.500 The three most powerful collections of states on earth 00:25:35.600 --> 00:25:40.300 the United States of America, the European Union and the People's Republic of China 00:25:40.400 --> 00:25:46.600 discuss cyberwar at a fairly high inter-governmental level fairly regularly. 00:25:47.100 --> 00:25:55.100 Some of the people around that table have disagreements of policy 00:25:55.200 --> 00:25:58.300 but there is a broad area of consensus. 00:25:58.400 --> 00:26:02.500 In the world of cyberwar they talk about exfiltration. 00:26:02.600 --> 00:26:10.600 We would call that spying, they mean exfiltrating our data off our networks into their pockets. 00:26:11.600 --> 00:26:17.200 Exfiltration, I am told by government officials here and there and everywhere 00:26:17.300 --> 00:26:22.700 exfiltration is broadly considered by all the governments to be a free fire zone. 00:26:22.800 --> 00:26:25.900 Everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time 00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:28.500 we don't believe in any governmental limits 00:26:28.600 --> 00:26:31.400 and the reason is every government wants to listen 00:26:31.500 --> 00:26:35.400 and no government believes listening can be prevented. 00:26:35.500 --> 00:26:38.400 On that latter point, I think they're too pessimistic 00:26:38.500 --> 00:26:41.500 but let's grant them that they've spent a lot of money trying 00:26:41.600 --> 00:26:43.000 and they think they know. 00:26:43.100 --> 00:26:46.000 Where the disagreements currently exist 00:26:46.100 --> 00:26:49.500 I am told by the government officials I talked to 00:26:49.600 --> 00:26:54.300 concerns not exfiltration, but what they call network disruption. 00:26:54.400 --> 00:26:57.700 By which they mean destroying freedom. 00:26:58.200 --> 00:27:07.100 The basic attitude here is of a two parties in balanced speech. 00:27:07.200 --> 00:27:11.900 One side in that conversation says what we want is clear rules. 00:27:12.000 --> 00:27:14.100 We want to know what we are allowed to attack, 00:27:14.200 --> 00:27:19.700 what we have to defend and what we do with the things that are neither friendly nor enemy. 00:27:19.800 --> 00:27:25.600 The other side in that conversation says we recognise no distinctions. 00:27:25.800 --> 00:27:28.400 Anywhere on the net where there is a threat 00:27:28.500 --> 00:27:31.800 to our national security or our national interests, 00:27:31.900 --> 00:27:35.100 we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat 00:27:35.200 --> 00:27:38.700 regardless of its geographical location. 00:27:39.000 --> 00:27:42.400 I need not to characterise for you which among the governments 00:27:42.500 --> 00:27:45.100 the United States of America, the European Union 00:27:45.200 --> 00:27:48.900 or the People's Republic of China take those different positions. 00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:52.800 And I should say that my guess is that within all those governments 00:27:52.900 --> 00:27:55.200 there are differences of opinion on those points 00:27:55.300 --> 00:27:58.700 dominant factions and less dominant factions 00:27:59.300 --> 00:28:02.400 but all parties are increasingly aware 00:28:02.500 --> 00:28:06.500 that in North America is where the data mining is. 00:28:06.600 --> 00:28:11.400 And that's either a benefit, a dubiousness or a problem 00:28:11.500 --> 00:28:16.400 depending upon which state or collection of states you represent. 00:28:16.600 --> 00:28:21.300 European data protection law has done this much. 00:28:21.700 --> 00:28:28.700 It has put your personal data almost exclusively in North America where it is uncontrolled. 00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:33.100 To that extent, European legislation succeded. 00:28:35.500 --> 00:28:40.300 The data mining industries are concentrated outside the European Union 00:28:40.400 --> 00:28:43.400 largely for reasons of legal policy. 00:28:43.500 --> 00:28:48.900 They operate as any enterprise tends to operate in the part of the world 00:28:49.000 --> 00:28:52.700 where there is least control over their behaviour. 00:28:53.200 --> 00:28:57.500 There is no prospect that the North American governments 00:28:57.600 --> 00:29:00.500 particularly the government of the United States 00:29:00.600 --> 00:29:06.300 whose national security policy now depends on listening and data mining everything 00:29:06.400 --> 00:29:09.300 are going to change that for you. 00:29:09.400 --> 00:29:13.900 No possibility. No time soon. 00:29:17.900 --> 00:29:21.800 When he was a candidate for president, at the beginning 00:29:21.900 --> 00:29:25.900 in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was in favour 00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:30.900 of not immunising American telecommunications giants 00:29:31.000 --> 00:29:35.800 for participation in spying domestically inside the United States 00:29:35.900 --> 00:29:38.600 without direct public legal authorisation. 00:29:38.700 --> 00:29:42.100 By the time he was a candidate in the general election 00:29:42.200 --> 00:29:46.300 he was no longer in favour of preventing immunisation 00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:49.700 Indeed he, as a Senator from Illinois 00:29:49.800 --> 00:29:56.800 did not fillibuster the legislation immunising the telecomms giants and it went through. 00:29:56.900 --> 00:30:00.400 As you are aware the Obama administration's policies 00:30:00.500 --> 00:30:04.800 with respect to data mining, surveillance and domestic security in the net 00:30:04.900 --> 00:30:08.700 are hardly different from the predecessor administrations' 00:30:08.800 --> 00:30:14.800 except where they are more aggressive about government control. 00:30:16.700 --> 00:30:23.100 We can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias 00:30:23.200 --> 00:30:29.800 in the listening to everybody, everywhere about everything now going on. 00:30:31.400 --> 00:30:35.800 Profit motive will not produce privacy 00:30:35.900 --> 00:30:41.700 let alone will it produce robust defence for freedom in the street. 00:30:44.500 --> 00:30:49.700 If we are going to build systems of communication for future politics 00:30:49.800 --> 00:30:53.700 we're going to have to build them under the assumption 00:30:53.800 --> 00:30:59.400 that the network is not only untrusted, but untrustworthy. 00:30:59.500 --> 00:31:07.800 And we're going to have to build under the assumption that centralised services can kill you. 00:31:08.200 --> 00:31:12.400 We can't fool around about this. 00:31:12.500 --> 00:31:20.300 We can't let Facebook dance up and down about their privacy policy. That's ludicrous. 00:31:20.400 --> 00:31:25.100 We have to replace the things that create vulnerability 00:31:25.200 --> 00:31:29.700 and lure our colleagues around the world into using them 00:31:29.800 --> 00:31:32.600 to make freedom only to discover 00:31:32.700 --> 00:31:37.700 that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch. 00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:46.000 Fortunately we actually do know how to engineer ourselves out of this situation. 00:31:47.000 --> 00:31:55.800 Cheap, small, low power plug servers are the form factor we need. 00:31:55.900 --> 00:31:58.300 And they exist everywhere now 00:31:58.400 --> 00:32:02.900 and they will get very cheap very quick very soon. 00:32:03.800 --> 00:32:07.700 A small device the size of a cell phone charger 00:32:07.800 --> 00:32:13.100 running a low power chip with a wireless NIC or two 00:32:13.200 --> 00:32:17.000 and some other available ports 00:32:17.100 --> 00:32:21.900 and some very sweet free software of our own 00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:28.300 is a practical device for creating significant personal privacy 00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:31.300 and freedom based communications. 00:32:31.400 --> 00:32:35.300 Think what it needs to have in it. 00:32:35.500 --> 00:32:41.700 Mesh networking, we are not quite there, but we should be. 00:32:41.900 --> 00:32:47.300 OpenBTS, asterisk, yeah, we could make telephone systems 00:32:47.400 --> 00:32:52.000 that are self-constructing out of parts that cost next to nothing. 00:32:54.900 --> 00:32:59.100 Federated, rather than centralised, micro-blogging 00:32:59.900 --> 00:33:04.500 social networking, photo exchange, 00:33:04.900 --> 00:33:11.300 anonymous publication platforms based around cloudy web servers. 00:33:12.200 --> 00:33:14.800 We can do all of that. 00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:21.400 Your data at home in your house where they have to come and get it 00:33:21.500 --> 00:33:24.700 facing whatever the legal restrictions are, 00:33:24.800 --> 00:33:27.700 if any, in your society about 00:33:27.800 --> 00:33:31.000 what goes on inside the precincts of the home. 00:33:31.500 --> 00:33:36.200 Encrypted email, just all the time 00:33:36.300 --> 00:33:40.800 perimeter defence for all those wonky Windows computers 00:33:40.900 --> 00:33:46.600 and other bad devices that roll over any time they're pushed at by a twelve year old 00:33:49.800 --> 00:33:54.000 Proxy services for climbing over national firewalls. 00:33:54.900 --> 00:33:59.300 Smart tunnelling to get around anti-neutrality activity 00:33:59.400 --> 00:34:03.600 by upstream ISPs and other network providers. 00:34:03.800 --> 00:34:12.600 All of that can be easily done on top of stuff we already make and use all the time. 00:34:12.700 --> 00:34:19.800 We have general purpose distributions of stacks more than robust enough for all of this 00:34:19.900 --> 00:34:25.000 and a little bit of application layer work to do on the top. 00:34:26.900 --> 00:34:34.100 Yesterday in the United States we formed the Freedom Box Foundation 00:34:34.200 --> 00:34:41.100 which I plan to use as the temporary or long term as the case may be 00:34:41.200 --> 00:34:46.300 organisational headquarters for work making free software 00:34:46.400 --> 00:34:50.400 to run on small format server boxes 00:34:50.500 --> 00:34:55.600 free hardware wherever possible unfree hardware where we must 00:34:55.700 --> 00:35:01.400 in order to make available around the world at low prices 00:35:01.500 --> 00:35:05.900 appliances human beings will like interacting with 00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:12.000 that produce privacy and help to secure robust freedom. 00:35:22.800 --> 00:35:31.100 We can make such objects cheaper than the chargers for smart phones. 00:35:31.200 --> 00:35:38.100 We can give people something that they can buy at very low cost 00:35:38.200 --> 00:35:42.700 that will go in their houses that will run free software 00:35:42.800 --> 00:35:48.700 to provide them services that make life better on the ordinary days 00:35:48.900 --> 00:35:53.600 and really come into their own on those not so ordinary days 00:35:53.700 --> 00:35:58.000 when we are out in the street making freedom thank you for calling. 00:36:02.900 --> 00:36:08.800 A Belarussian theatre troupe that got arrested and heavily beaten on 00:36:08.900 --> 00:36:14.400 after the so called elections in Minsk this winter 00:36:14.500 --> 00:36:20.200 exfiltrated itself to New York city in January 00:36:20.300 --> 00:36:25.200 did some performances of Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews 00:36:25.300 --> 00:36:28.700 I'm sorry of Harold Pinter and gave some interviews 00:36:29.100 --> 00:36:35.600 One of the Belarussian actors who was part of that troupe 00:36:35.700 --> 00:36:38.100 said in an interview to New York Times 00:36:38.200 --> 00:36:44.000 the Belarussian KGB is the most honest organisation on earth. 00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:52.100 After the Soviet Union fell apart they saw no need to change anything they did 00:36:52.200 --> 00:36:56.600 so they saw no need to change their name either. 00:36:57.900 --> 00:37:02.800 And I thought that was a really quite useful comment. 00:37:04.400 --> 00:37:09.000 We need to keep in mind that they are exactly the same people they always were 00:37:09.100 --> 00:37:14.800 whether they're in Cairo or Moscow or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta 00:37:14.900 --> 00:37:16.300 or anywhere else on earth. 00:37:16.400 --> 00:37:19.500 They're exactly the same people they always were. 00:37:19.600 --> 00:37:23.500 So are we exactly the same people we always were too. 00:37:23.600 --> 00:37:28.500 We set out a generation ago to make freedom and we're still doing it. 00:37:28.700 --> 00:37:31.800 But we have to pick up the pace now. 00:37:31.900 --> 00:37:34.900 We have to get more urgent now. 00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:40.900 We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now. 00:37:41.900 --> 00:37:47.700 Because we have friends in the street trying to create human freedom. 00:37:47.800 --> 00:37:52.000 And if we don't help them they'll get hurt. 00:37:52.700 --> 00:38:02.000 We rise to challenges, this is one. We've got to do it. Thank you very much. 00:38:29.100 --> 00:38:35.000 Thank you very much and I think there is enough time for a few questions 00:38:35.100 --> 00:38:38.000 so please raise your hand if you want to 00:39:02.200 --> 00:39:07.200 The question was what does complete decentralisation mean for identity 00:39:07.300 --> 00:39:13.300 because the state, you may believe who you are but the state gives you a passport 00:39:13.400 --> 00:39:16.800 or some other legal document that allows you to identify yourself. 00:39:16.900 --> 00:39:22.500 So in complete decentralisation how do you identify yourself on that network? 00:39:22.900 --> 00:39:27.100 I doubt that complete decentralisation is the outcome of anything 00:39:27.200 --> 00:39:32.000 but let me tell you a story which may help to explain how I feel about this. 00:39:32.100 --> 00:39:39.100 We need to go back now by 16 years to a time when there was a program called PGP 00:39:39.200 --> 00:39:43.200 and there was a government in the United States that was trying to eradicate it. 00:39:43.300 --> 00:39:49.300 I know this will seem like ancient history to many people, but it's my life so it doesn't to me. 00:39:49.900 --> 00:39:55.700 We were having a debate at Harvard Law School in January of 1995 00:39:55.800 --> 00:40:02.500 two on two about PGP and the criminal investigation and the future of secrecy. 00:40:02.600 --> 00:40:06.900 The debators on my side were me and Danny Whitesner 00:40:07.000 --> 00:40:09.900 then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center 00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:14.800 later at the W3C and now in the United States Department of Commerce. 00:40:14.900 --> 00:40:18.900 And on the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States 00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:23.500 and a former General Counsel of the National Security Agency. 00:40:23.600 --> 00:40:28.200 We debated PGP and then encryption and the clipper chip and various other, 00:40:28.300 --> 00:40:30.800 now long dead, subjects for a couple of hours 00:40:30.900 --> 00:40:34.500 and then we were all on an offered little dinner at the Harvard faculty club. 00:40:34.600 --> 00:40:37.200 On the way across the Harvard campus 00:40:37.300 --> 00:40:39.900 the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said to me 00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:43.100 Eben, on the basis of your public statements this afternoon 00:40:43.200 --> 00:40:47.800 I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations. 00:40:48.800 --> 00:40:51.800 She thought that was a joke. 00:40:52.900 --> 00:40:57.200 And back in 1995 you could sort of get away with thinking it was a joke 00:40:57.300 --> 00:41:01.700 as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States because it was so clearly against the law. 00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:06.200 So I smiled and we went off, we had our dinner 00:41:06.300 --> 00:41:11.100 and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts and the port had been strewn about 00:41:11.200 --> 00:41:15.300 this former General Counsel to the National Security Agency 00:41:15.400 --> 00:41:18.900 I'm concealing names to protect the not so innocent here 00:41:19.000 --> 00:41:22.800 this former NSA lawyer, he looked around the table calmly 00:41:22.900 --> 00:41:25.800 and with that sort of plummy through the port kind of look 00:41:25.900 --> 00:41:31.100 and he said ok we'll let our head down we agree we're not gonna prosecute your client 00:41:31.200 --> 00:41:34.900 PGP will happen. We've fought a long delaying action 00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:39.500 against public key encryption but it's coming to an end now. 00:41:39.600 --> 00:41:45.500 And then he looked around the table and he said but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they? 00:41:45.600 --> 00:41:48.200 And a cold chill went up my spine 00:41:48.300 --> 00:41:51.600 because I knew what the next 15 years were gonna be about. 00:41:51.700 --> 00:41:55.700 So I would like to turn around the thing you said to say 00:41:55.800 --> 00:42:00.700 what we're really talking about is whether there's gonna be any preservation of anonymity at all. 00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:05.700 Where power on the other side made its peace in the mid 1990s 00:42:05.800 --> 00:42:08.600 was with the idea that there would be strong encryption 00:42:08.700 --> 00:42:11.300 and e-commerce but there would be no anomymity. 00:42:11.400 --> 00:42:15.000 And in the course of the last decade they picked up a strong alliance 00:42:15.100 --> 00:42:17.400 with the global entertainment industries 00:42:17.500 --> 00:42:20.300 the things that now call themselves content companies 00:42:20.400 --> 00:42:22.400 which are also adverse to anonymity, right? 00:42:22.500 --> 00:42:25.500 cause they wanna know what you read and listen to and watch every single time 00:42:25.600 --> 00:42:29.300 so that you can increase their shareholders' wealth for them. 00:42:29.500 --> 00:42:32.800 The real problem of identity isn't the problem of 00:42:32.900 --> 00:42:36.700 are we gonna be decentralised past the point when we have identity 00:42:36.800 --> 00:42:39.900 we are not going to do that. We are not going to be able to do that. 00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:43.900 The real problem of identity is are we gonna have any of our own? 00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:48.800 or are we gonna be the data cloud that everybody else is keeping about us 00:42:48.900 --> 00:42:54.900 which contains where we are, what we do, what we think what we read, what we eat and everything else too 00:42:55.000 --> 00:42:57.500 as long as you send a subpoena 00:42:57.600 --> 00:43:01.900 to Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database in which you live your entire life. 00:43:02.100 --> 00:43:07.800 I understand the idea that we might be thought of or satirically 00:43:07.900 --> 00:43:11.000 or even pointedly claim to be 00:43:11.100 --> 00:43:16.200 trying too radically decentralise to the point in which identity gets lost. 00:43:16.300 --> 00:43:19.800 But if you find yourself in an argument where people telling you 00:43:19.900 --> 00:43:23.900 you are trying to anarchise so far that there won't be any name in the passport anymore 00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:28.300 you can reassure them that meat-space will stay pretty much the way it is right now. 00:43:28.400 --> 00:43:33.300 We just want fewer people ripping fingernails off in meat-space. 00:43:33.400 --> 00:43:38.800 Which is why we are busy building Freedom Boxes and helping people use them. 00:43:38.900 --> 00:43:43.800 Thank you very much, the passport will remain pretty much the way it is right now 00:43:43.900 --> 00:43:49.400 with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints and the retinal scan and everything. 00:43:49.500 --> 00:43:52.400 I'm not worried that we are going to go too far friends. 00:43:52.500 --> 00:43:56.000 It's the other folks who went way too far and our job's to get back home. 00:44:06.000 --> 00:44:08.700 Hello Eben, I'm here. 00:44:13.000 --> 00:44:15.100 Jérémie from La Quadrature du Net 00:44:15.400 --> 00:44:19.500 First of all I want to thank you and I will never thank you enough 00:44:19.600 --> 00:44:23.100 for how inspiring you are for everyone of us 00:44:29.100 --> 00:44:34.700 By thanking you for inspiring us under an engineering perspective 00:44:34.800 --> 00:44:40.100 as I am both an engineering geek and a political activist by what I do. 00:44:40.200 --> 00:44:46.500 I wanted to stress that the ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 00:44:46.600 --> 00:44:52.600 that deeply concern strengthening of DRMs and the legal protection 00:44:52.700 --> 00:44:56.600 and also turns every internet service provider 00:44:56.700 --> 00:45:00.800 every internet intermediate into private copyright police 00:45:00.900 --> 00:45:06.800 with deep consequence on our freedom of speech, our privacy, on right to a fair trial and so on. 00:45:07.000 --> 00:45:11.800 The ACTA will be coming to the European Parliament around next summer 00:45:11.900 --> 00:45:18.100 maybe before maybe after and it will be our ultimate chance to defeat the thing. 00:45:18.200 --> 00:45:21.600 We won in the European Parliament before. 00:45:21.700 --> 00:45:27.600 This is a battle we can win and everybody here can participate into it 00:45:27.700 --> 00:45:29.400 and I wanted to ask you Eben 00:45:29.500 --> 00:45:35.400 Are those legislative fights worth fighting? Do we still have a chance? 00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:38.400 and especially on the front of the net neutrality, 00:45:38.500 --> 00:45:42.800 What are your insights? What do you think? Can we still win today? 00:45:42.900 --> 00:45:49.400 No European citizen should need any introduction to Jérémie Zimmermann, right? 00:45:49.500 --> 00:45:53.800 That's the future of the European Union speaking to you. 00:45:54.000 --> 00:45:59.300 Your question: Should we bother fighting in legislature 00:45:59.400 --> 00:46:03.300 seems to me fair, oh yeah we should. It's unpleasant work. 00:46:03.400 --> 00:46:08.000 I worry about you. I don't want your heart to burst. 00:46:08.800 --> 00:46:14.200 I don't want people killing themselves over the strain of it. 00:46:14.300 --> 00:46:18.300 It's ugly, boring, tedious work 00:46:18.400 --> 00:46:26.900 and the other side pays people to sit you out to wait until you go home, to decide you give up. 00:46:27.000 --> 00:46:32.600 Think of Egypt as a place where that was done for thirty years along with torture. 00:46:32.700 --> 00:46:35.400 Everything stops moving. 00:46:35.500 --> 00:46:39.100 If you read Claude Manceron on the French revolution 00:46:39.200 --> 00:46:41.500 or the coming of the French revolution 00:46:41.600 --> 00:46:45.000 as he moves his thousands of men and women of freedom 00:46:45.100 --> 00:46:49.000 towards the climactic events of the late 1780s 00:46:49.100 --> 00:46:53.800 you see how deeply the feeling in France at the end of the Ancien Régime 00:46:53.900 --> 00:46:58.400 was of status beginning to break up into movement. 00:46:58.600 --> 00:47:03.300 The work you're talking about is work that is largely defensive 00:47:03.400 --> 00:47:06.600 to prevent harm from being done. 00:47:06.700 --> 00:47:12.400 And as you say you are lucky when you win after an enormous effort that nothing happens. 00:47:12.500 --> 00:47:17.900 But the good news is in legislative politics that there is a thousand ways to stop a thing 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:20.400 and only one way for it to get done. 00:47:20.500 --> 00:47:25.800 And therefore the side that wants to stop things has an inherent advantage. 00:47:25.900 --> 00:47:32.300 Most of the time that's deeply funded capital but sometimes it's us. 00:47:32.400 --> 00:47:38.800 About ACTA, I think there is no question. It's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time. 00:47:38.900 --> 00:47:46.200 Because as you say it's really the concordat, the treaty between the state and private power 00:47:46.300 --> 00:47:50.300 for the control of the net under 21st century conditions 00:47:50.400 --> 00:47:55.100 in the mingled interests of the listeners and the owners. 00:47:55.400 --> 00:48:03.500 If we do beat it, water it down, force withdrawal of particularly offensive premises 00:48:03.600 --> 00:48:08.300 or significantly expose it to disinfecting daylight 00:48:08.400 --> 00:48:10.400 we will help ourselves. 00:48:10.500 --> 00:48:13.900 We are not going to achieve everything by any means. 00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:21.900 We need to turn the international trade conversation in the direction of direct support for freedom. 00:48:22.000 --> 00:48:26.700 My line with the trade negotiators around the world has become: 00:48:26.800 --> 00:48:29.000 Governments have a right to share 00:48:29.100 --> 00:48:38.700 the sharing economy has as much right to support in the international trade system as the owning economy. 00:48:38.800 --> 00:48:42.300 My colleague Mishi Choudhary who directs SFLC India 00:48:42.400 --> 00:48:46.900 was in Beijing making a speech on that point earlier this year. 00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:51.700 We will be re-iterating that point in various places around the world 00:48:51.800 --> 00:48:55.900 where strong states with which we have other difficulties 00:48:56.000 --> 00:49:00.400 meet with us in recognising that the world trade system 00:49:00.500 --> 00:49:06.100 is now overwhelmingly tilted in favour of ownership based production 00:49:06.200 --> 00:49:10.300 which is only one part of the world's economic production. 00:49:10.400 --> 00:49:16.700 We need to press hard against ACTA and other pro-ownership trade law 00:49:16.800 --> 00:49:22.200 but we also need to begin to roll out an affirmative strategy of our own 00:49:22.300 --> 00:49:28.700 demanding protection for sharing based economic activities in the global trade system. 00:49:28.800 --> 00:49:32.900 That effort will take 20 years to begin to show fruit 00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:36.500 but we need to begin that too now. 00:49:36.600 --> 00:49:39.800 On network neutrality I will say this 00:49:39.900 --> 00:49:49.800 We are going to have to establish counterforce to the various oligopolists of telecommunications. 00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:56.300 The regulators believe a lot of things they have been told by industry. 00:49:56.400 --> 00:50:04.100 I was at ARCEP myself in September to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris 00:50:04.200 --> 00:50:09.700 with regulators who are well educated, shrewd, thoughtful and capable 00:50:09.800 --> 00:50:13.300 but who believe something which isn't true. 00:50:13.400 --> 00:50:20.000 Namely that it costs enormous monetary investments to build wireless networks. 00:50:21.000 --> 00:50:28.000 And I said to the ARCEP regulators Do you know about OpenBTS? 00:50:28.100 --> 00:50:31.700 Do you know that I can take a coat hanger and a laptop 00:50:31.800 --> 00:50:37.600 and make a GSM cell phone base station out of it using some free software? 00:50:37.700 --> 00:50:40.400 Do you know about Asterisk? 00:50:40.500 --> 00:50:46.700 I suggested that maybe they would like to give us a small French city, say, Grenoble. 00:50:47.300 --> 00:50:53.400 where using the extraodinary high quality wired harness 00:50:53.500 --> 00:50:56.500 that they built around the hexagon that is France 00:50:56.600 --> 00:51:00.500 we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere 00:51:00.600 --> 00:51:06.500 using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets and provide service to everybody. 00:51:06.600 --> 00:51:11.700 And then I say it will be possible to have a realistic fact-based discussion 00:51:11.800 --> 00:51:17.200 about whether the enormous investment necessities of wireless network build out 00:51:17.300 --> 00:51:22.600 require non-neutrality in network routing practices. 00:51:22.700 --> 00:51:27.200 Well, the regulator of course nods and smiles and thanks me very much for all that information 00:51:27.300 --> 00:51:29.300 and forgets it the minute I leave. 00:51:29.400 --> 00:51:35.400 Because he still believes what Orange, that used to be France Télécom, tells him 00:51:35.500 --> 00:51:41.600 about how you can't make wireless networks without immense monetary investments. 00:51:41.700 --> 00:51:45.000 We will begin to gain on network neutrality 00:51:45.100 --> 00:51:50.800 when we have a box in everybody's apartment that can offer free telephone service over tunnelling 00:51:50.900 --> 00:51:58.000 around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets. Oh, that would be the Freedom Box. 00:51:58.500 --> 00:52:02.800 See, that's what I wanna do. I wanna build a ring of engineering 00:52:02.900 --> 00:52:06.600 around the idea of non-neutral network management. 00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:10.900 I wanna have a box in your house that senses the upstream and says 00:52:11.000 --> 00:52:14.100 oh my God he's stopping port 655 00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:17.000 I think I'll route that from my friend's apartment. 00:52:17.700 --> 00:52:23.500 Then I think we will get some interesting network neutrality conversation going. 00:52:29.300 --> 00:52:34.000 When you call for decentralisation 00:52:34.100 --> 00:52:38.200 aren't you really going against the trend of history as we've seen it? 00:52:38.300 --> 00:52:42.400 For example we used to have Usenet which was decentralised 00:52:42.500 --> 00:52:46.000 that's moved much more to web based forums. 00:52:46.600 --> 00:52:53.500 Or likewise we in geekdom may love IRC. We may go to Freenode 00:52:53.700 --> 00:52:59.000 but the general public all know about Twitter which is moving into that space. 00:52:59.200 --> 00:53:03.300 And I think there are many reasons why this could be happening 00:53:03.400 --> 00:53:09.300 but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare. The journalists who report this to the general public 00:53:09.400 --> 00:53:12.600 outside geekdom know about websites, they know about Twitter. 00:53:12.700 --> 00:53:18.000 They never knew about Usenet so only geeks know about that 00:53:19.700 --> 00:53:26.100 If we take this point perhaps the mindshare you need to be going for is the journalists 00:53:26.200 --> 00:53:32.000 who report on the net, get them to report on decentralised networks 00:53:34.200 --> 00:53:38.900 and get the public to start using them. 00:53:39.100 --> 00:53:42.200 Yes, it's a crucial part of the activity, that's right. 00:53:42.300 --> 00:53:44.300 We're going to talk to people. 00:53:44.400 --> 00:53:47.600 Some of those people are gonna be journalists and some of them are gonna be our friends 00:53:47.700 --> 00:53:51.400 and some of them are gonna be other engineers and some of them are gonna be people who 00:53:51.500 --> 00:53:54.500 when their wireless router breaks they can go out buying a Freedom Box 00:53:54.600 --> 00:53:58.000 cause it's cheaper and neater and cooler and does more good stuff. 00:53:58.100 --> 00:54:01.000 And some of them are gonna be people who buy because they need it. 00:54:01.100 --> 00:54:03.800 We just have to make the software. 00:54:03.900 --> 00:54:06.800 The hardware guys will make the hardware and everything will happen. 00:54:06.900 --> 00:54:10.400 I don't know how long. I don't know with what degree of certainty. 00:54:10.500 --> 00:54:13.400 But I don't know if it's about going against the flow of history. 00:54:13.500 --> 00:54:17.000 I think it's about pushing the pendulum back. 00:54:19.900 --> 00:54:26.000 The general public have to know that this option exists and will serve their needs. 00:54:26.100 --> 00:54:30.000 Yes, Apple will always advertise more than we will. 00:54:31.900 --> 00:54:38.100 But the general public knows about Firefox so they can know about the Freedom Box too. 00:54:44.900 --> 00:54:48.400 I think we have to stop in order to allow the conference to go on. 00:54:48.500 --> 00:54:51.000 Thank you very much for your time.