(Cory Doctorow) Thank you very much
So I'd like to start with something of a benediction or permission.
I am one of nature's fast talkers
and many of you are not native English speakers, or
maybe not accustomed to my harsh Canadian accent
in addition I've just come in from Australia
and so like many of you I am horribly jetlagged and have drunkenough coffee
this morning to kill a rhino.
When I used to be at the United Nations
I was known as the scourge of the simultaneous translation core
I would stand up and speak as slowly as I could
and turn around, and there they would be in their boots doing this
(laughter) When I start to speak too fast,
this is the universal symbol -- my wife invented it --
for "Cory, you are talking too fast". Please, don't be shy.
So, I'm a parent , like many of you and I'm like I'm sure all of you
who are parents, parenting takes my ass all the time.
And there are many regrets I have about the mere seven and half years
that I've been a parent but none ares so keenly felt
as my regrets over what's happened when I've been wandering
around the house and seen my daughter working on something
that was beyond her abilities, that was right at the edge of what she could do
and where she was doing something that she didn't have competence in yet
and you know it's that amazing thing to see that frowning concentration,
tongue stuck out: as a parent, your heart swells with pride
and you can't help but go over
and sort of peer over their shoulder what they are doing
and those of you who are parents know what happens when you look too closely
at someone who is working beyond the age of their competence.
They go back to doing something they're already good at.
You interrupt a moment of genuine learning
and you replace it with a kind of embarrassment
about what you're good at and what you're not.
So, it matters a lot that our schools are increasingly surveilled environments,
environments in which everything that our kids do is watched and recorded.
Because when you do that, you interfere with those moments of real learning.
Our ability to do things that we are not good at yet, that we are not proud of yet,
is negatively impacted by that kind of scrutiny.
And that scrutiny comes from a strange place.
We have decided that there are some programmatic means
by which we can find all the web page children shouldn't look at
and we will filter our networks to be sure that they don't see them.
Anyone who has ever paid attention knows that this doesn't work.
There are more web pages that kids shouldn't look at
than can ever be cataloged, and any attempt to catalog them
will always catch pages that kids must be looking at.
Any of you who have ever taught a unit on reproductive health
know the frustration of trying to get round a school network.
Now, this is done in the name of digital protection
but it flies in the face of digital literacy and of real learning.
Because the only way to stop kids from looking at web pages
they shouldn't be looking at
is to take all of the clicks that they make, all of the messages that they send,
all of their online activity and offshore it to a firm
that has some nonsensically arrived at list of the bad pages.
And so, what we are doing is that we're exfiltrating all of our students' data
to unknown third parties.
Now, most of these firms, their primary business is
in serving the education sector.
Most of them service the government sector.
The primarily service governments in repressive autocratic regimes.
They help them make sure that their citizens aren't looking at
Amnesty International web pages.
They repackage those tools and sell them to our educators.
So we are offshoring our children's clicks to war criminals.
And what our kids do, we know, is they just get around it,
because it's not hard to get around it.
You know, never underestimate the power of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor
to get around our technological blockades.
But when they do this, they don't acquire the kind of digital literacy
that we want them to do, they don't acquire real digital agency
and moreover, they risk exclusion and in extreme cases,
they risk criminal prosecution.
So what if instead, those of us who are trapped in this system of teaching kids
where we're required to subject them to this kind of surveillance
that flies in the face of their real learning,
what if instead, we invented curricular units
that made them real first class digital citizens,
in charge of trying to influence real digital problems?
Like what if we said to them: "We want you to catalog the web pages
that this vendor lets through that you shouldn't be seeing.
We want you to catalog those pages that you should be seeing, that are blocked.
We want you to go and interview every teacher in the school
about all those lesson plans that were carefully laid out before lunch
with a video and a web page, and over lunch,
the unaccountable distance center blocked these critical resources
and left them handing out photographed worksheets in the afternoon
instead of the unit they prepared.
We want you to learn how to do the Freedom of Information Act's requests
and find out what your school authority is spending
to censor your internet access and surveil your activity.
We want you to learn to use the internet to research these companies and
we want you to present this to your parent-teacher association,
to your school authority, to your local newspaper."
Because that's the kind of digital literacy
that makes kids into first-class digital citizens,
that prepares them for a future in which they can participate fully
in a world that's changing.
Kids are the beta-testers of the surveillance state.
The path of surveillance technology starts with prisoners,
moves to asylum seekers, people in mental institutions
and then to its first non-incarcerated population: children
and then moves to blue-collar workers, government workers
and white-collar workers.
And so, what we do to kids today is what we did to prisoners yesterday
and what we're going to be doing to you tomorrow.
And so it matters, what we teach our kids.
If you want to see where this goes, this is a kid named Blake Robbins
and he attended Lower Merion High School in Lower Merion Pennsylvania
outside f Philadelphia.
It's the most affluent school district in America, so affluent
that all the kids were issued Macbooks at the start of the year
and they had to do their homework on their Macbooks,
they had to bring them to school every day and bring them home every night.
And the Macbooks had been fitted with Laptop Theft Recovery Software,
which is fancy word for a rootkit, that let the school administration
scovertly (check) operate the cameras and microphones on these computers
and harvest files off of their hard drives
view all their clicks, and so on.
Now Blake Robbins found out that the software existed
and how it was being used because he and the head teacher
had been knocking heads for years, since he first got into the school,
and one day, the head teacher summoned him to his office
and said: "Blake, I've got you now."
and handed him a print-out of Blake in his bedroom the night before,
taking what looked like a pill, and said: "You're taking drugs."
And Blake Robbins said: "That's a candy, it's a Mike and Ike candy, I take them --
I eat them when I'm studying.
How did you get a picture of me in my bedroom?"
This head teacher had taken over 6000 photos of Blake Robbins:
awake and asleep, dressed and undressed, in the presence of his family.
And in the ensuing lawsuit, the school settled for a large amount of money
and promised that they wouldn't do it again
without informing the students that it was going on.
And increasingly, the practice is now
that school administrations hand out laptops, because they're getting cheaper,
with exactly the same kind of software,
but they let the students know and t hey find that that works even better
at curbing the students' behavior,
because the students know that they're always on camera.
Now, the surveillance state is moving from kids to the rest of the world.
It's metastasizing.
Our devices are increasingly designed to treat us as attackers,
as suspicious parties who can't be trusted
because our devices' job is to do things that we don't want them to do.
Now that's not because the vendors who make our technology
want to spy on us necessarily,
but they want to take the ink-jet printer business model
and bring it into every other realm of the world.
So the ink-jet printer business model is where you sell someone a device
and then you get a continuing revenue stream from that device
by making sure that competitors can't make consumables or parts
or additional features or plugins for that device,
without paying rent to the original manufacturer.
And that allows you to maintain monopoly margins on your devices.
Now, in 1998, the American government passed a law called
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
in 2001 the European Union introduced its own version,
the European Union Copyright Directive.
And these two laws, along with laws all around the world,
in Australia, Canada and elsewhere. These laws prohibit removing digital laws
that are used to restrict access to copyrighted works
and they were original envisioned as a way of making sure that Europeans didn't
bring cheap DVDs in from America,
or making sure that Australians didn't mport cheap DVDs from China.
And so you have a digital work, a DVD, and it has a lock on it and to unlock it,
you have to buy an authorized player
and the player checks to make sure you are in region
and making your own player that doesn't make that check is illegal because you'd have to remove the digital lock 9:13