(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 drunk enough 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 isn't

serving the education sector.

Most of them service 
the government sectors.

They primarily service governments in
repressive autocratic regimes.

They help them ensure 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, now,
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 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 public 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,

and 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

covertly (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 he said: "You're taking drugs."

And Blake Robbins said: "That's a candy,
it's a Mike and Ike's candy, I take them

when I -- 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 
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 
import 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.

And that was the original intent,

it was to allow high rents to be 
maintained on removable media,

DVDs and other entertainment content.

But it very quickly spread 
into new rounds.

So, for example, auto manufacturers 
now lock up

all of their cars' telemetry
with digital locks.

If you're a mechanic 
and want to fix a car,

you have to get a reader 
from the manufacturer

to make sure that you can 
see the telemetry

and then know what parts to order 
and how to fix it.

And in order to get this reader, 
you have to promise the manufacturer

that you will only buy parts 
from that manufacturer

and not from third parties.

So the manufacturers can keep 
the repair costs high

and get a secondary revenue stream
out of the cars.

This year, the Chrysler corporation filed 
comments with the US Copyright Office,

to say that they believed that 
this was the right way to do it

and that it should be a felony, 
punishable by 5 years in prison

and a $500'000 fine,

to change the locks on a car that you own,
so that you can choose who fixes it.

It turned out that when they advertised

-- well, where is my slide here?
Oh, there we go --

when they advertised that 
it wasn't your father's Oldsmobile,

they weren't speaking metaphorically, 
they literally meant

that even though your father 
bought the Oldsmobile,

it remained their property in perpetuity.

And it's not just cars, 
it's every kind of device,

because every kind of device today 
has a computer in it.

The John Deer Company, the world's leading seller of heavy equipment

and agricultural equipment technologies,

they now view their tractors as 
information gathering platforms

and they view the people who use them

as the kind of inconvenient gut flora
of their ecosystem.

So if you are a farmer 
and you own a John Deer tractor,

when you drive it around your fields, 
the torque centers on the wheels

conduct a centimeter-accurate soil 
density survey of your agricultural land.

That would be extremely useful to you
when you're planting your seeds

but that data is not available to you

unless unless you remove the digital lock 
from your John Deer tractor

which again, is against the law 
everywhere in the world.

Instead, in order to get that data

you have to buy a bundle with seeds 
from Monsanto,

who are John Deer's seed partners.

John Deer then takes this data that they 
aggregate across whole regions

and they use it to gain insight 
into regional crop yields

That they use to play the futures market.

John Deer's tractors are really just 
a way of gathering information

and the farmers are secondary to it.

Just because you own it 
doesn't mean it's yours.

And it's not just the computers 
that we put our bodies into

that have this business model.

It's the computers that we put 
inside of our bodies.

If you're someone who is diabetic

and you're fitted with a continuous 
glucose-measuring insulin pump,

that insulin pump is designed 
with a digital log

that makes sure that your doctor 
can only use the manufacturer's software

to read the data coming off of it

and that software is resold 
on a rolling annual license

and it can't be just bought outright.

And the digital locks are also 
used to make sure

that you only buy the insulin 
that vendors approved

and not generic insulin 
that might be cheaper.

We've literally turned human beings 
into ink-jet printers.

Now, this has really deep implications
beyond the economic implications.

Because the rules that prohibit 
breaking these digital locks

also prohibit telling people 
about flaws that programmers made

because if you know about a flaw
that a programmer made,

you can use it to break the digital lock.

And that means that the errors,
the vulnerabilities,

the mistakes in our devices, they fester 
in them, they go on and on and on

and our devices become these longlife 
reservoirs of digital pathogens.

And we've seen how that plays out.

One of the reasons that Volkswagen 
was able to get away

with their Diesel cheating for so long

is because no one could independently
alter their firmware.

It's happening all over the place.

You may have seen -- 
you may have seen this summer

that Chrysler had to recall 
1.4 million jeeps

because it turned out that they could be
remotely controlled over the internet

while driving down a motorway 
and have their brakes and steering

commandeered by anyone, anywhere 
in the world, over the internet.

We only have one methodology 
for determining whether security works

and that's to submit it 
to public scrutiny,

to allow for other people to see 
what assumptions you've made.

Anyone can design a security system

that he himself can think 
of a way of breaking,

but all that means is that you've 
designed a security system

that works against people 
who are stupider than you.

And in this regard, security 
is no different

from any other kind of knowledge creation.

You know, before we had 
contemporary science and scholarship,

we had something that looked 
a lot like it, called alchemy.

And for 500 years, alchemists kept
what they thought they knew a secret.

And that meant that every alchemist
was capable of falling prey

to that most urgent of human frailties,
which is our ability to fool ourselves.

And so, every alchemist discovered 
for himself in the hardest way possible

that drinking mercury was a bad idea.

We call that 500-year period the Dark Ages

and we call the moment at which 
they started publishing

and submitting themselves 
to adversarial peer review,

which is when your friends tell you 
about the mistakes that you've made

and your enemies call you an idiot
for having made them,

we call that moment the Enlightenment.

Now, this has profound implications.

The restriction of our ability to alter 
the security of our devices

for our own surveillance society,

for our ability to be free people
in society.

At the height of the GDR, in 1989,

the STASI had one snitch for every 
60 people in East Germany,

in order to surveil the entire country.

A couple of decades later, we found out 
through Edward Snowden

that the NSA was spying 
on everybody in the world.

And the ratio of people who work 
at the NSA to people they are spying on

is more like 1 in 10'000.

They've achieved a two and a half 
order of magnitude

productivity gain in surveillance.

And the way that they got there 
is in part by the fact that

we use devices that 
we're not allowed to alter,

that are designed to treat us as attackers

and that gather an enormous 
amount of information on us.

If the government told you that you're 
required to carry on

a small electronic rectangle that 
recorded all of your social relationships,

all of your movements,

all of your transient thoughts that
you made known or ever looked up,

and would make that 
available to the state,

and you would have to pay for it,
you would revolt.

But the phone companies have 
managed to convince us,

along with the mobile phone vendors,

that we should foot the bill 
for our own surveillance.

It's a bit like during 
the Cultural Revolution,

where, after your family members 
were executed,

they sent you a bill for the bullet.

So, this has big implications, as I said, 
for where we go as a society.

Because just as our kids have 
a hard time functioning

in the presence of surveillance,
and learning,

and advancing their own knowledge,

we as a society have a hard time 
progressing

in the presence of surveillance.

In our own living memory, people who are 
today though of as normal and right

were doing something that 
a generation ago

would have been illegal 
and landed them in jail.

For example, you probably know someone

who's married to a partner 
of the same sex.

If you live in America, you may know 
someone who takes medical marijuana,

or if you live in the Netherlands.

And not that long ago, people 
who undertook these activities

could have gone to jail for them,

could have faced enormous 
social exclusion for them.

The way that we got from there to here
was by having a private zone,

a place where people weren't surveilled,

in which they could advance 
their interest ideas,

do things that were thought of as
socially unacceptable

and slowly change our social attitudes.

And in ........ (check) few things 
that in 50 years,

your grandchildren will sit around 
the Christmas table, in 2065, and say:

"How was it, grandma, 
how was it, grandpa,

that in 2015, you got it all right,

and we haven't had 
any social changes since then?"

Then you have to ask yourself 
how in a world,

in which we are all 
under continuous surveillance,

we are going to find a way 
to improve this.

So, our kids need ICT literacy,

but ICT literacy isn't just typing skills
or learning how to use PowerPoing.

It's learning how to think critically

about how they relate 
to the means of information,

about whether they are its masters 
or servants.

Our networks are not 
the most important issue that we have.

There are much more important issues
in society and in the world today.

The future of the internet is 
way less important

than the future of our climate,
the future of gender equity,

the future of racial equity,

the future of the wage gap 
and the wealth gap in the world,

but everyone of those fights is going
to be fought and won or lost

on the internet:
it's our most foundational fight

So weakened (check) computers
can make us more free

or they can take away our freedom.

It all comes down to how we regulate them 
and how we use them.

And it's our job, as people who are 
training the next generation,

and whose next generation 
is beta-testing

the surveillance technology 
that will be coming to us,

it's our job to teach them to seize 
the means of information,

to make themselves self-determinant
in the way that they use their networks

and to find ways to show them 
how to be critical and how to be smart

and how to be, above all, subversive
and how to use the technology around them.

Thank you. (18:49)

(Applause)

(Moderator) Cory, thank you very much 
indeed.

(Doctorow) Thank you
(Moderator) And I've got a bundle

of points which you've stimulated 
from many in the audience, which sent --

(Doctorow) I'm shocked to hear that 
that was at all controversial,

but go on.
(Moderator) I didn't say "controversial",

you stimulated thinking, which is great.

But a lot of them resonate around
violation of secrecy and security.

And this, for example, 
from Anneke Burgess (check)

"Is there a way for students 
to protect themselves

from privacy violations by institutions
they are supposed to trust."

I think this is probably a question
William Golding (check) as well,

someone who is a senior figure
in a major university, but

this issue of privacy violations and trust.

(Doctorow) Well, I think that computers
have a curious dual nature.

So on the one hand, they do expose us
to an enormous amount of scrutiny,

depending on how they are configured.

But on the other hand, computers 
have brought new powers to us

that are literally new 
on the face of the world, right?

We have never had a reality in which
normal people could have secrets

from powerful people.

But with the computer in your pocket,
with that,

you can encrypt a message so thoroughly

that if every hydrogen atom in the 
universe were turned into a computer

and it did nothing until 
the heat death of the universe,

but try to guess what your key was,

we would run out of universe 
before we ran out of possible keys.

So, computers do give us 
the power to have secrets.

The problem is that institutions 
prohibit the use of technology

that allow you to take back 
your own privacy.

It's funny, right? Because we take kids
and we say to them:

"Your privacy is like your virginity:

once you've lost it, 
you'll never get it back.

Watch out what you're 
putting on Facebook"

-- and I think they should watch
what they're putting on Facebook,

I'm a Facebook vegan, I don't even --
I don't use it, but we say:

"Watch what you're putting on Facebook,

don't send out dirty pictures 
of yourself on SnapChat."

All good advice.

But we do it while we are taking away 
all the private information

that they have, all of their privacy
and all of their agency.

You know, if a parent says to a kid:

"You mustn't smoke 
because you'll get sick"

and the parent says it 
while lighting a new cigarette

off the one that she's just put down
in the ashtray,

the kid knows that what you're doing
matters more than what you're saying.

(Moderator) The point is deficit of trust.

It builds in the kind of work that 
David has been doing as well,

this deficit of trust and privacy.

And there is another point here:

"Is the battle for privacy already lost?

Are we already too comfortable 
with giving away our data?"

(Doctorow) No, I don't think so at all.

In fact, I think that if anything, 
we've reached

peak indifference to surveillance, right? (21:25)