WEBVTT 00:00:14.745 --> 00:00:20.643 Good morning, it's a pleasure to be here and an honor to be at re: publica. 00:00:20.643 --> 00:00:33.692 For the last thousand years, we, our mothers, and our fathers, have been struggling for freedom of thought. 00:00:33.692 --> 00:00:48.576 We have sustained many horrible losses and some imense vicroties and we are now at a very serious time. 00:00:48.576 --> 00:00:58.538 From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century, we began to be concerned primarially 00:00:58.538 --> 00:01:02.671 with access to printed material. 00:01:02.671 --> 00:01:10.240 The right to read and the right to publish were the central subjects of our struggle for freedom of 00:01:10.240 --> 00:01:15.767 thought for most of the last half milenium. 00:01:15.767 --> 00:01:32.067 The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of 00:01:32.067 --> 00:01:32.567 a free and uncensored will. 00:01:32.567 --> 00:01:46.649 The primary antogonist for freedom of thought in the beginning of our struggle was the universal Catholic 00:01:46.649 --> 00:01:53.987 church, an institution directed at the control of thought in the European world. 00:01:53.987 --> 00:02:06.317 Based around weekly surveillance of the conduct and thoughts of every human being. 00:02:06.317 --> 00:02:14.002 Based around the censorship of all reading material, and, in the end, based upon the ability to predict 00:02:14.002 --> 00:02:20.806 and to punish unorthodox thought. 00:02:20.806 --> 00:02:30.280 The tools available for thought control in early modern Europe were poor, even by 20th century standards 00:02:30.280 --> 00:02:32.439 But they worked. 00:02:32.439 --> 00:02:40.868 And for hundreds of years, the struggle primarially centered around that increasingly important first 00:02:40.868 --> 00:02:49.088 mass-manufactured article in western culture: the book. 00:02:49.088 --> 00:03:00.024 Whether you could print them, possess them, traffic in them, read them, teach from them without the permission 00:03:00.024 --> 00:03:10.404 or control of an entity empowered to punish thought. 00:03:10.404 --> 00:03:20.713 By the end of the 17th century, censorship of written material in Euopre had begun to break down. 00:03:20.713 --> 00:03:30.721 First in the Netherlands, then in the UK, then afterwards in waves throughout the European world. 00:03:30.721 --> 00:03:43.121 And the book became an article of subversive commerce and began eating away at the control of thought. 00:03:43.121 --> 00:03:52.525 By the late 18th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance 00:03:52.525 --> 00:04:07.803 of Christianity itself. 00:04:07.803 --> 00:04:17.370 And the European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind. It spoke of " Liberté, égalité, fraternité" 00:04:17.370 --> 00:04:18.020 but actually it meant freedom to think differently. 00:04:18.020 --> 00:04:26.008 The Ancien Régime began to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle 00:04:26.008 --> 00:04:36.132 for freedom of thought, which presumed the possibility of unothorodox thinking and revolutionary acting. 00:04:36.132 --> 00:04:43.725 And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes. 00:04:43.725 --> 00:04:46.627 that was then and this is now. 00:04:46.627 --> 00:04:57.215 Now we begin a new phase in the history of the human race. We are building a single nervous system which 00:04:57.215 --> 00:05:01.232 will embrace every human mind. 00:05:01.232 --> 00:05:12.239 We are less than two generations now from the moment at which every human being will be connected to a single 00:05:12.239 --> 00:05:23.199 network in which all thoughts, plans, dreams, and actions will flow as nervious impulses in the network. 00:05:23.199 --> 00:05:30.374 And the fate of freedom of thought, indeed the fate of human freedom all together, everything that we 00:05:30.374 --> 00:05:39.429 have fought for for a thousand years will depend upon the neuroanatomy of that network. 00:05:39.429 --> 00:05:49.553 Ours are the last generation of human brains that will be formed without contact with the net. 00:05:49.553 --> 00:05:57.518 From here on out every human brain, by two generations form now, every single human brain will be formed 00:05:57.518 --> 00:06:03.392 from early life in direct connection to the network. 00:06:03.392 --> 00:06:15.838 Humanity will become a super-organism in which each of us is but a neuron in the brain and we are describing 00:06:15.838 --> 00:06:24.499 now, now, all of us now, this generation, unique in the history of the human race, in this generation 00:06:24.499 --> 00:06:28.841 we will decide how that network is organized. 00:06:28.841 --> 00:06:32.766 Unfortunately, we are beginning badly. 00:06:32.766 --> 00:06:40.103 Here's the problem: we grew up to be consumers of media. That's what they taught us, we are consumers 00:06:40.103 --> 00:06:41.473 of media. That's what they taught us. 00:06:41.473 --> 00:06:49.646 Now media is consuming us. 00:06:49.646 --> 00:06:59.074 The things we read watch us read them. The things we listen to listen to us listen to them. 00:06:59.074 --> 00:07:08.431 We are tracked, we are monitored, we are predicted by the media we use. 00:07:08.431 --> 00:07:18.184 The process of the building of the network institutionalizes basic principles of information flow. 00:07:18.184 --> 00:07:25.498 It determines whether there is such a thing as anonymous reading. 00:07:25.498 --> 00:07:31.930 And it is determining against anonymous reading. 00:07:31.930 --> 00:07:42.193 20 years ago I began working as a lawyer for a man called Philip Zimmerman who had created a form of 00:07:42.193 --> 00:07:47.093 public key encryption for mass use called "Pretty Good Privacy". 00:07:47.093 --> 00:07:53.246 The effort to create Pretty Good Privacy was the effort to retain the possibility of secrets in the late 00:07:53.246 --> 00:08:00.258 20th century. Phil was trying to prevent government from reading everything. 00:08:00.258 --> 00:08:07.015 And, as a result, he was at least threatened with prosecution by the United States government for sharing 00:08:07.015 --> 00:08:12.727 military secrets, which is what we called public key encryption back then. 00:08:12.727 --> 00:08:18.022 We said you shouldn't do this, there will be trillions of dollars of electronic commerce if everybody 00:08:18.022 --> 00:08:21.899 has strong encryption. Nobody was interested. 00:08:21.899 --> 00:08:30.723 But what was important about Pretty Good Privacy, about the strugle for freedom that public key encryption 00:08:30.723 --> 00:08:39.361 in civil society represented, what was crucial, became clear when we began to win. 00:08:39.361 --> 00:08:48.370 In 1995 there was a debate at Harvard Law School. Four of us discussing the future of public key encryption 00:08:48.370 --> 00:08:50.924 and it's control. 00:08:50.924 --> 00:08:59.469 I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It is where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called 00:08:59.469 --> 00:09:06.273 Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making internet policy for the Obame Administration. 00:09:06.273 --> 00:09:14.167 On the other side was the, then deputy, Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private 00:09:14.167 --> 00:09:20.924 practice named Stuart Baker, who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, 00:09:20.924 --> 00:09:29.678 and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became latter 00:09:29.678 --> 00:09:35.994 on the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States, and has 00:09:35.994 --> 00:09:43.285 had much to do with what happened in our network after 2001. At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant 00:09:43.285 --> 00:09:50.692 hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party in the Harvard faculty 00:09:50.692 --> 00:09:56.335 club and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left 00:09:56.335 --> 00:10:03.278 on the table, Stuart said "Alright, among us, now that we are all in private, just us girls, I'll let 00:10:03.278 --> 00:10:11.358 our hair down" he didn't have much hair even then, but he let it down. "We're not going to prosecute 00:10:11.358 --> 00:10:20.391 your client, Mr. Zimmerman" he said, "public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing 00:10:20.391 --> 00:10:29.029 battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic." And then he looked around the room and he said 00:10:29.029 --> 00:10:34.857 "But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?" 00:10:34.857 --> 00:10:39.803 And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought alright, Stuart, now I know, you're going to spend the 00:10:39.803 --> 00:10:47.047 next 20 years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I'm going to try and stop you and we'll 00:10:47.047 --> 00:10:49.485 see how it goes. 00:10:49.485 --> 00:10:52.875 And it is going badly. 00:10:52.875 --> 00:10:59.377 We didn't build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. 00:10:59.377 --> 00:11:02.280 Now we're paying for it. 00:11:02.280 --> 00:11:07.899 Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere. 00:11:07.899 --> 00:11:15.283 And we've taken the web and we've made Facebook out of it. 00:11:15.283 --> 00:11:19.764 We put one man in the middle of everything. 00:11:19.764 --> 00:11:27.473 We live our social lives, our private lives, in the web and we share everything with our friends, and 00:11:27.473 --> 00:11:38.363 also with our super-friend, the one who reports to anybody who makes him, who pays him, who helps him 00:11:38.363 --> 00:11:44.610 or who gives him the 100 billion dollar he desires. 00:11:44.610 --> 00:11:53.108 We are creating a media that consume us, and media loves it. 00:11:53.108 --> 00:12:02.907 The primary purpose of 21 first commerce is to predict how we can be made to buy. 00:12:02.907 --> 00:12:08.573 And the thing that people most want us to buy is debt. 00:12:08.573 --> 00:12:19.556 So we are going into debt. We're getting heavier, heavier with debt, heavier with doubt, heavier with 00:12:19.556 --> 00:12:26.777 all we need we didn't know we needed until they told us we were thinking about it. 00:12:26.777 --> 00:12:32.652 Because they own the search box and we put our dreams in it. 00:12:32.652 --> 00:12:39.989 Everything we want, everything we hope, everything we'd like, everything we wish we knew about is in 00:12:39.989 --> 00:12:44.958 the search box, and they own it. 00:12:44.958 --> 00:12:48.557 We are reported everywhere, all the time. 00:12:48.557 --> 00:12:56.382 In the 20th century you had to build Lubyanka, you had to torture people, you had to threaten people, 00:12:56.382 --> 00:13:05.508 you had to press people to inform on their friends. I don't need to talk about that in Berlin. 00:13:05.508 --> 00:13:08.968 In the 21st century, why bother? 00:13:08.968 --> 00:13:15.121 You just build social networking and everybody informs on everybody else for you. 00:13:15.121 --> 00:13:21.437 Why waste time and money having buildings full of little men who check who is in which photographs? 00:13:21.437 --> 00:13:27.845 Just tell everybody to tag their friends and bing, you're done. 00:13:27.845 --> 00:13:31.677 Oh, did I use that word, "bing?" You're done. 00:13:31.677 --> 00:13:39.525 There's a search box, and they own it, and we put our dreams in it, and they eat them. 00:13:39.525 --> 00:13:44.401 And they tell us who we are right back. 00:13:44.401 --> 00:13:47.327 "If you like that, you'll love this" 00:13:47.327 --> 00:13:50.508 And we do. 00:13:50.508 --> 00:13:55.593 They figure us out, the machines do. 00:13:55.593 --> 00:13:59.703 Every time you make a link, you're teaching the machine. 00:13:59.703 --> 00:14:05.671 Every time you make a link about someone else, you're teaching the machine about someone else. 00:14:05.671 --> 00:14:11.383 We need to build that network, we need to make that brain. 00:14:11.383 --> 00:14:19.347 This is humanity's highest purpose, we're fuilfiling it. But we musn't do it wrong. 00:14:19.347 --> 00:14:24.665 Once upon a time the technological mistakes were mistakes, we made them. 00:14:24.665 --> 00:14:34.069 They were the unintended consequences of our thoughtful behavior. That's not the way it is right now. 00:14:34.069 --> 00:14:37.946 The things that are going on are not mistakes, they're designs. 00:14:37.946 --> 00:14:49.510 They have purpose, and the purpose is to make the human population readable. 00:14:49.510 --> 00:14:54.061 I was talking to a senior government official in the United States a few weeks ago; 00:14:54.061 --> 00:14:58.961 our government has been misbehaving. 00:14:58.961 --> 00:15:09.154 We had rules, we made them after 9/11, they said "we will keep databases about people, and some of those people will be innocent. 00:15:09.154 --> 00:15:14.820 they won't be suspected of anything." The rules we made in 2001 said 00:15:14.820 --> 00:15:22.877 "We will keep information about people not suspected of anything for a maxium of 180 days, 00:15:22.877 --> 00:15:27.289 they we will discard it." 00:15:27.289 --> 00:15:37.157 In March, in the middle of the night, on a Wednesday, after everything shut down, when it was raining, 00:15:37.157 --> 00:15:42.266 the Department of Justice and the director of National Intelligence in the United States said "Oh, we're 00:15:42.266 --> 00:15:51.972 changing those rules. This small change: we used to say we would keep information on people not suspected 00:15:51.972 --> 00:15:59.634 of anything for only 180 days maximum, we're changing that a little bit to five years." 00:15:59.634 --> 00:16:02.003 Which is infinity. 00:16:02.003 --> 00:16:07.970 I joked with the lawyers I work with in NY, they only wrote five years in the press release because they couldn't get the 00:16:07.970 --> 00:16:12.103 sideways 8 into the font for the press release. 00:16:12.103 --> 00:16:16.492 Otherwise they'd have just said "infinity," which is what they mean. 00:16:16.492 --> 00:16:21.809 So I was having a conversation with a senior government official I have known all these many years who 00:16:21.809 --> 00:16:31.167 works in the White House and I said "You're changing American society" he said, "Well we realized that 00:16:31.167 --> 00:16:37.715 we need a robust social graph of the United States." 00:16:37.715 --> 00:16:42.289 I said "You need a robust social graph of the United States?" 00:16:42.289 --> 00:16:43.474 "Yes" he said. 00:16:43.474 --> 00:16:50.440 I said "You mean the United States government is, from now on, going to keep a list of everybody every 00:16:50.440 --> 00:16:59.170 American knows. Do you think by any chance that should require a law?" 00:16:59.170 --> 00:17:01.515 And he just laughed. 00:17:01.515 --> 00:17:08.830 Because they did it in a press release in the middle of the night, on Wednesday when it was raining. 00:17:08.830 --> 00:17:17.909 We're going to live in a world, unless we do something quickly, in which our media consume us and spit 00:17:17.909 --> 00:17:22.437 in the government's cup. 00:17:22.437 --> 00:17:28.567 There will never have been any place like it before. 00:17:28.567 --> 00:17:36.113 And if we let it happen, there will never ever be any place different from it again. 00:17:36.113 --> 00:17:46.516 Humanity will all have been wired together and media will consume us and spit in the government's cup. 00:17:46.516 --> 00:17:51.206 And the state will own our minds. 00:17:51.206 --> 00:17:59.890 The soon-to-be-ex president of France campaigned, as you will recall last month on the proposition that 00:17:59.890 --> 00:18:09.434 there should be criminal penalties for repeat visiting of jhiadi websites.That was a threat to 00:18:09.434 --> 00:18:14.774 criminalize reading in France. 00:18:14.774 --> 00:18:28.196 Well, he will be soon the ex-president of France, but that doesn't mean that that will be an ex-idea in France at all. 00:18:28.196 --> 00:18:33.652 The criminalization of reading is well advanced. 00:18:33.652 --> 00:18:41.361 In the United States, in what we call terrorism prosecutions, we now routinely see evidence of people's 00:18:41.361 --> 00:18:48.374 Google searches submitted as proof of their conspiratorial behavior. 00:18:48.374 --> 00:18:57.012 The act of seeking knowledge has become an overt act in conspiricy prosecutions. 00:18:57.012 --> 00:19:03.606 We are criminalizing thinking, reading, and research. 00:19:03.606 --> 00:19:10.409 We are doing this in so called free societies. We are doing this in a place with the 1st Amendment. 00:19:10.409 --> 00:19:19.512 We are doing this despite everything our history teaches us because we are forgetting even as we learn. 00:19:19.512 --> 00:19:23.668 We don't have much time. 00:19:23.668 --> 00:19:34.976 The generation that grew up outside the net is the last generation that can fix it without force. 00:19:34.976 --> 00:19:45.448 Governments all over the world are falling in love with the idea of datamining their populations. 00:19:45.448 --> 00:19:52.948 I used to think that we were going to be fighting the Chinese Communit party in the third decade 00:19:52.948 --> 00:19:56.385 of the 21st century. 00:19:56.385 --> 00:20:02.724 I didn't anticipate that we were going to be fighting the United States government and the government 00:20:02.724 --> 00:20:07.716 of the People's Republic of China. 00:20:07.716 --> 00:20:17.167 And when Ms. Cruise is here on Friday, perhaps you'll ask her whether we're going to be fighting her too. 00:20:17.167 --> 00:20:21.021 Governments are falling in love with datamining because it really really works. 00:20:21.021 --> 00:20:26.153 It's good. It's good for good things as well as evil things. 00:20:26.153 --> 00:20:32.190 It's good for helping government understand how to deliver services; it is good for government to understand 00:20:32.190 --> 00:20:41.525 what the problems are going to be; it is good for politicians to understand how voters are going to think. 00:20:41.525 --> 00:20:48.235 But it creates the possibility of kinds of social control that were previously very difficult, very 00:20:48.235 --> 00:20:55.573 expensive, and very cumbersome, in very simple and efficient ways. 00:20:55.573 --> 00:21:03.467 It is no longer necessary to maintain enormous networks of informants, as I have pointed out. 00:21:03.467 --> 00:21:11.919 Stazi gets a bargin now, if it comes back, because Zuckerberg does its work for it. 00:21:11.919 --> 00:21:19.814 But it is more than just the ease of surveillance it is more than just the permanence of data, 00:21:19.814 --> 00:21:25.085 it's the relentless of living after the end of forgetting. 00:21:25.085 --> 00:21:30.286 Nothing ever goes away any more. 00:21:30.286 --> 00:21:37.647 What isn't understood today will be understood tomorrow. The encrypted traffic you use today in relative 00:21:37.647 --> 00:21:44.381 security is simply waiting until there is enough of it for the crypto analysis to work. 00:21:44.381 --> 00:21:47.609 For the breakers to succeed in breaking it. 00:21:47.609 --> 00:21:55.689 We're going to have to re-do all our security all the time forever because no encrypted packet is ever 00:21:55.689 --> 00:21:59.149 lost again. 00:21:59.149 --> 00:22:08.158 Nothing is unconnected infinitely, only finitely. Every piece of information can be retained and everything 00:22:08.158 --> 00:22:11.595 eventually gets linked to something else. 00:22:11.595 --> 00:22:18.514 That's the rationale for the government official who says we need a robust social graph of the social 00:22:18.514 --> 00:22:19.884 graph of the United States. 00:22:19.884 --> 00:22:21.719 Why do you need it? 00:22:21.719 --> 00:22:29.962 So the dots you don't connect today, you can connect tomorrow, or next year, or the year after next. 00:22:29.962 --> 00:22:38.553 Nothing is ever lost, nothing ever goes away, nothing is forgotten any more. 00:22:38.553 --> 00:22:48.631 So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them. 00:22:48.631 --> 00:22:57.454 Books that watch us read them; music that listens to us listen to it; search boxes that report what we 00:22:57.454 --> 00:23:04.374 are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn't know us yet. 00:23:04.374 --> 00:23:10.155 There is a lot of talk about data coming out of Facebook. 00:23:10.155 --> 00:23:16.077 Is it coming to me? Is it coming to him? Is it coming to them? 00:23:16.077 --> 00:23:20.744 They want you to think that the threat is data coming out. 00:23:20.744 --> 00:23:26.897 You should know that the threat is code going in. 00:23:26.897 --> 00:23:34.420 For the last 15 years what has been happening in enterprise computing 00:23:34.420 --> 00:23:42.663 is the addition of that layer of analytics on top of the data warehouse that mostly goes, in enterprise computing, 00:23:42.663 --> 00:23:46.077 by the name of "business intelligence." 00:23:46.077 --> 00:23:54.088 What it means is you've been building these vast data warehouses in your company for a decade or two now, 00:23:54.088 --> 00:24:01.239 you have all the information about your own operations, your suppliers, your competitors, your customers, 00:24:01.239 --> 00:24:08.879 now you want to make that data start to do tricks by adding it to all the open source data 00:24:08.879 --> 00:24:14.823 out there in the world and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn't know you had. 00:24:14.823 --> 00:24:17.958 That's business intelligence. 00:24:17.958 --> 00:24:23.438 The real threat of Facebook is the BI layer on top of the Facebook warehouse. 00:24:23.438 --> 00:24:26.874 The Facebook data warehouse contains the behavior, 00:24:26.874 --> 00:24:31.449 not just the thinking but also the behavior, 00:24:31.449 --> 00:24:35.907 of somewhere nearing a billion people. 00:24:35.907 --> 00:24:42.757 The business Intelligence layer on top of it, which is just all that code they get to run 00:24:42.757 --> 00:24:47.401 covered by the terms of service that say they can run any code they want 00:24:47.401 --> 00:24:51.487 for "improvement of the experience." 00:24:51.487 --> 00:24:58.546 The business intelligence layer on top of Facebook is where every intelligence service in the world wants to go. 00:24:58.546 --> 00:25:06.534 Imagine that you're a tiny little secret police organization in some not very important country. 00:25:06.534 --> 00:25:14.150 Let's put ourselves in their position, let's call them, I don't know what, you know Kyrgyzstan. 00:25:14.150 --> 00:25:21.000 You're secret police, you're in the people business. Secret policing is people business. 00:25:21.000 --> 00:25:28.871 You have classes of people that you want. You want agents, you want sources, you have adversaries, 00:25:28.871 --> 00:25:33.492 and you have "infulenciables," that is people that you can torture who are related to adversaries: 00:25:33.492 --> 00:25:38.786 wives, husbands, fathers, daughters, you know, those people. 00:25:38.786 --> 00:25:45.915 So you're looking for classes of people. You don't know their names but you know what they're like. 00:25:45.915 --> 00:25:51.279 You know who is recruitable for you as an agent, you know who are likely sources. 00:25:51.279 --> 00:25:55.714 You can give the social characteristics of your adversaries. 00:25:55.714 --> 00:25:59.940 And once you know your adversaries you can find the infulencables. 00:25:59.940 --> 00:26:04.398 So what you want to do is run code inside Facebook. 00:26:04.398 --> 00:26:07.254 It will help you find the people that you want. 00:26:07.254 --> 00:26:13.779 It will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want 00:26:13.779 --> 00:26:22.347 by way of agents, sources, what the adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them. 00:26:22.347 --> 00:26:26.921 So you don't want data out of Facebook, the minute you take data out of Facebook it is dead. 00:26:26.921 --> 00:26:32.169 You want to put code into Facebook, and run it there and get the results. 00:26:32.169 --> 00:26:35.327 You want to cooperate. 00:26:35.327 --> 00:26:38.647 Facebook wants to be a media company. 00:26:38.647 --> 00:26:40.760 It wants to own the web. 00:26:40.760 --> 00:26:44.778 It wants you to punch "like" buttons. 00:26:44.778 --> 00:26:50.675 "Like" buttons are terrific even if you don't punch them because they're web bugs, 00:26:50.675 --> 00:26:56.968 because they show Facebook every other webpage that you touch that has a "like" button on it, 00:26:56.968 --> 00:27:00.126 whether you punch it or you don't, they still get a record. 00:27:00.126 --> 00:27:09.205 The record is you read a page which had a "like" button on it and either you said yes or you said no, 00:27:09.205 --> 00:27:15.637 and either way you made data, you taught the machine. 00:27:15.637 --> 00:27:24.577 So media want to know you better than you know yourself and we shouldn't let anybody do that. 00:27:24.577 --> 00:27:28.152 We fought for a thousand years for the internal space, 00:27:28.152 --> 00:27:35.536 the space where we read, think, reflect, and become unorthodox, 00:27:35.536 --> 00:27:38.625 inside our own minds. 00:27:38.625 --> 00:27:44.035 That's the space that everybody wants to take away. 00:27:44.035 --> 00:27:46.519 Tell us your dreams. 00:27:46.519 --> 00:27:49.399 Tell us your thoughts. 00:27:49.399 --> 00:27:50.838 Tell us what you hope. 00:27:50.838 --> 00:27:52.278 Tell us what you fear. 00:27:52.278 --> 00:28:00.521 This is not weekly oricular confession, this is confession 24 by 7. 00:28:00.521 --> 00:28:03.098 The mobile robot that you carry around with you, 00:28:03.098 --> 00:28:07.371 the one that knows where you are all the times and listens to all your conversations. 00:28:07.371 --> 00:28:12.224 The one that you hope isn't reporting in at headquarters but it is only hope? 00:28:12.224 --> 00:28:19.933 The one that runs all that software you can't read, can't study, can't see, can't modify, and can't understand? 00:28:19.933 --> 00:28:20.792 That one. 00:28:20.792 --> 00:28:27.363 That one is taking your confession all the time. 00:28:27.363 --> 00:28:31.357 When you hold it up to your face from now on it is going to know your heartbeat. 00:28:31.357 --> 00:28:34.469 That's an Android app right now. 00:28:34.469 --> 00:28:39.507 Micro changes in the color of your face reveal your heartrate. 00:28:39.507 --> 00:28:44.801 That's a little lie detector you're carrying around with you. 00:28:44.801 --> 00:28:52.836 Pretty soon I'll be able to sit in a classroom and watch the blood pressure of my students go up and down. 00:28:52.836 --> 00:29:00.707 In a law school classroom in the United States, that is really important information. 00:29:00.707 --> 00:29:02.797 But it is not just me of course, it's everybody right? 00:29:02.797 --> 00:29:06.768 Because it's just data and people will have access to it. 00:29:06.768 --> 00:29:12.456 The inside of your head becomes the outside of your face, becomes the inside of your smart phone, 00:29:12.456 --> 00:29:21.512 becomes the inside of the network, becomes the front of the file at headquarters. 00:29:21.512 --> 00:29:27.782 So we need free media or we lose freedom of thought. It's that simple. 00:29:27.782 --> 00:29:30.034 What is free media mean? 00:29:30.034 --> 00:29:34.190 Media that you can read, that you can think about, that you can add to, 00:29:34.190 --> 00:29:40.199 that you can participate in without being monitored. 00:29:40.199 --> 00:29:47.147 Without being surveiled, without being reported in on. That's free media. 00:29:47.147 --> 00:29:57.016 If we don't have it, we lose freedom of thought, possibly forever. 00:29:57.016 --> 00:30:07.232 Having free media means having a network that behaves according to the needs of the people at the edge, 00:30:07.232 --> 00:30:14.802 not according to the needs of the servers in the middle. 00:30:14.802 --> 00:30:22.302 Making free media requires a network of peers, not a network of masters and servants, 00:30:22.302 --> 00:30:34.260 not a network of clients and servers, not a network where network operators control all the packets they move. 00:30:34.260 --> 00:30:40.994 This is not simple, but it is still possible. 00:30:40.994 --> 00:30:46.567 We require free technology. 00:30:46.567 --> 00:30:55.507 The last time I gave a political speech in Berlin it was in 2004. It was called "Die Gedanken sind frei." 00:30:55.507 --> 00:31:04.330 I said we need three things: free software, free hardware, free bandwidth. Now we need them more. 00:31:04.330 --> 00:31:09.230 It is eight years later; we've made some mistakes; we're in more trouble. 00:31:09.230 --> 00:31:14.199 We haven't come forward, we've gone back. 00:31:14.199 --> 00:31:20.143 We need free software, that means software you can copy, modify, and re-distribute. 00:31:20.143 --> 00:31:31.522 We need that because we need the software that runs the network to be modifiable by the people the network embraces. 00:31:31.522 --> 00:31:38.742 The death of Mr. Jobs is a positive event. I am sorry to break it to you like that. 00:31:38.742 --> 00:31:42.875 He was a great artist and a moral monster 00:31:42.875 --> 00:31:53.301 and he brought us closer to the end of freedom every single time he put something out because he hated sharing. 00:31:53.301 --> 00:31:55.855 It wasn't his fault, he was an artist. 00:31:55.855 --> 00:32:02.752 He hated sharing because he believed he invented everything, even though he didn't. 00:32:02.752 --> 00:32:07.326 Inside those fine little boxes with the lit up apples on them I see all around the room, 00:32:07.326 --> 00:32:13.526 is a bunch of free software, tailored to give him control. 00:32:13.526 --> 00:32:18.448 Nothing illegal, nothing wrong, he obeyed the licenses. 00:32:18.448 --> 00:32:23.232 He screwed us every time he could and he took everything we gave him, 00:32:23.232 --> 00:32:29.478 and he made beautiful stuff that controlled its users. 00:32:29.478 --> 00:32:36.003 Once upon a time there was a man here who built stuff in Berlin, for Alberst Spare(sp), 00:32:36.003 --> 00:32:41.227 his name was Philip Johnson and he was a wonderful artist and a moral monster. 00:32:41.227 --> 00:32:49.006 And he said he went to work building buildings for the Nazis because they had all the best graphics. 00:32:49.006 --> 00:32:53.046 And he meant it, because he was an artist. 00:32:53.046 --> 00:32:56.970 As Mr. Jobs was an artist. 00:32:56.970 --> 00:33:00.569 But artistry is no guaranty of morality. 00:33:00.569 --> 00:33:04.981 We need free software. 00:33:04.981 --> 00:33:11.576 The tablets that you use that Mr. Jobs designed are made to control you. 00:33:11.576 --> 00:33:18.774 You can't change the software. It's hard even to do ordinary programming. 00:33:18.774 --> 00:33:26.692 It doesn't really matter, they're just tablets, we just use them, we're just consuming the glories of what they give us. 00:33:26.692 --> 00:33:31.591 But they're consumming you too. 00:33:31.591 --> 00:33:38.580 We live, as the science fiction we read when we were children suggested we would, among robots not. 00:33:38.580 --> 00:33:45.918 We live commensally with robots. But they don't have hands and feet, we're their hands and feet. 00:33:45.918 --> 00:33:52.071 We carry the robots around with us; they know everywhere we go, they see everything we see; 00:33:52.071 --> 00:33:58.735 everything we say they listen to and there is no first law of robotics. 00:33:58.735 --> 00:34:05.067 They hurt us every day and there is no progamming to prevent it. 00:34:05.067 --> 00:34:08.209 So we need free software. 00:34:08.209 --> 00:34:16.707 Unless we control the software in the network, the network will, in the end, control us. 00:34:16.707 --> 00:34:18.403 We need free hardware. 00:34:18.403 --> 00:34:27.273 What that means is that when we buy an electronic something, it should be ours, not someone else's. 00:34:27.273 --> 00:34:32.102 We should be free to change it, to use it our way, NOTE Paragraph 00:34:32.102 --> 00:34:37.234 to assure that it is not working for anyone other than ourselves. 00:34:37.234 --> 00:34:41.646 Of course most of us will never change anything. 00:34:41.646 --> 00:34:48.588 But the fact that we can change it will keep us safe. 00:34:48.588 --> 00:34:56.437 Of course we will never be the people that they most want to surveil. 00:34:56.437 --> 00:35:04.750 The man who will not be president of France, for sure, but who thought he would, now says that he was 00:35:04.750 --> 00:35:11.530 trapped and his political career was destroyed, not because he raped a hotel housekeeper, 00:35:11.530 --> 00:35:17.288 but because he was setup by spying inside his smart phone. 00:35:17.288 --> 00:35:21.213 Maybe he's telling the truth and maybe he isn't. 00:35:21.213 --> 00:35:24.092 But he's not wrong about the smart phone. 00:35:24.092 --> 00:35:28.596 Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, but it will. 00:35:28.596 --> 00:35:32.033 We carry dangerous stuff around with us everywhere we go. 00:35:32.033 --> 00:35:35.028 It doesn't work for us, it works for someone else. 00:35:35.028 --> 00:35:39.719 We put up with it, we have to stop. 00:35:39.719 --> 00:35:42.319 We need free bandwidth. 00:35:42.319 --> 00:35:46.801 That means we need network operators who are common carriers, 00:35:46.801 --> 00:35:50.354 whose only job is to move the packet from A to B. 00:35:50.354 --> 00:35:56.275 They're meerly pipes, they're not allowed to get involved. 00:35:56.275 --> 00:35:59.386 It used to be that when you shipped a thing from point A to point B, 00:35:59.386 --> 00:36:04.587 if the guy in the middle opened it up and looked inside it, he was committing a crime. 00:36:04.587 --> 00:36:07.002 Not any more. 00:36:07.002 --> 00:36:10.810 In the United States, the House of Representatives voted last week 00:36:10.810 --> 00:36:17.892 that the network operators in the United States should be completely immunized against lawsuits 00:36:17.892 --> 00:36:27.807 for cooperating with illegal government spying so long as they do it "in good faith." 00:36:27.807 --> 00:36:32.916 And capitalism means never having to say you're sorry; you're always doing it in good faith. 00:36:32.916 --> 00:36:37.838 In good faith all we wanted to do was make money, your honor, let us out. 00:36:37.838 --> 00:36:40.323 Ok, you're gone. 00:36:40.323 --> 00:36:43.434 We must have free bandwidth. 00:36:43.434 --> 00:36:48.566 We still own the electromagnetic spectrum; it still belongs to all of us. 00:36:48.566 --> 00:36:54.650 It doesn't belong to anyone else. Government is a trustee, not an owner. 00:36:54.650 --> 00:37:01.082 We have to have spectrum we control, equal for everybody. 00:37:01.082 --> 00:37:09.928 Nobody's allowed to listen to anybody else, no inspecting, no checking, no record keeping. 00:37:09.928 --> 00:37:12.668 Those have to be the rules. 00:37:12.668 --> 00:37:18.961 Those have to be the rules in the same way that censorship had to go. 00:37:18.961 --> 00:37:24.162 If we don't have rules for free communication, we are re-introducing censorship, 00:37:24.162 --> 00:37:28.226 whether we know it or not. 00:37:28.226 --> 00:37:31.082 So we have very little choice now, 00:37:31.082 --> 00:37:39.696 our space has gotten smaller, our opportunity for change has gotten less. 00:37:39.696 --> 00:37:48.497 We have to have free software. We have to have free hardware. We have to have free bandwidth. 00:37:48.497 --> 00:37:53.373 Only from them can we make free media. 00:37:53.373 --> 00:37:56.949 But we have to work on media too, directly. 00:37:56.949 --> 00:38:01.639 Not intermitently, not off-hand. 00:38:01.639 --> 00:38:10.858 We need to demand of media organizations that they obey primary ethics, a first law of media robotics: 00:38:10.858 --> 00:38:12.854 do no harm. 00:38:12.854 --> 00:38:19.778 The first rule is: "do not surveil the reader." 00:38:19.778 --> 00:38:24.441 We can't live in a world where every book reports every reader. 00:38:24.441 --> 00:38:31.059 If we are, we're living in libraries operated by the KGB. 00:38:31.059 --> 00:38:35.169 Well, amazon.com 00:38:35.169 --> 00:38:40.161 Or the KGB, or both, you'll never know. 00:38:40.161 --> 00:38:47.174 The book, that wonderful printed article, that first commodity of mass capitalism, 00:38:47.174 --> 00:38:48.729 the book is dying. 00:38:48.729 --> 00:38:51.585 It's a shame, but it's dying. 00:38:51.585 --> 00:38:58.644 And the replacement is a box which either surveils the reader or it doesn't. 00:38:58.644 --> 00:39:01.849 You will remember that amazon.com decided 00:39:01.849 --> 00:39:08.559 that a book by George Orwell could not be distributed in the United States for copyright reasons. 00:39:08.559 --> 00:39:14.016 They went and errased it out of all the little amazon book reading devices 00:39:14.016 --> 00:39:18.399 where customers had "purchased" copies of Animal Farm. 00:39:18.399 --> 00:39:25.324 Oh, you may have bought it but that doesn't mean that you're allowed to read it. 00:39:25.324 --> 00:39:28.041 That's censorship. 00:39:28.041 --> 00:39:30.757 That's book burning. 00:39:30.757 --> 00:39:36.725 That's what we all lived through in the 20th century. 00:39:36.725 --> 00:39:40.997 We burned people, places, and art. 00:39:40.997 --> 00:39:42.391 We fought. 00:39:42.391 --> 00:39:49.960 We killed tens of millions of people to bring an end to a world in which the state would burn books. 00:39:49.960 --> 00:39:53.095 And then we watched as it was done again and again. NOTE Paragraph 00:39:53.095 --> 00:39:58.366 And now we are preparing to allow it to be done without matches. 00:39:58.366 --> 00:40:02.267 Everywhere, any time. 00:40:02.267 --> 00:40:08.838 We must have media ethics, and we have the power to enforce those ethics 00:40:08.838 --> 00:40:11.764 because we're still the people who pay the freight. 00:40:11.764 --> 00:40:18.474 We should not deal with people who sell surveiled books. 00:40:18.474 --> 00:40:24.767 We should not deal with people who sell surveiled music. 00:40:24.767 --> 00:40:33.521 We should not deal with movie companies that sell surveiled movies. 00:40:33.521 --> 00:40:39.442 We are going to have to say that, even as we work on the technology, 00:40:39.442 --> 00:40:48.428 because otherwise capitalism will move as fast as possible to make our efforts at freedom irrelevant 00:40:48.428 --> 00:40:54.837 and there are children growing up who will never know what freedom means. 00:40:54.837 --> 00:40:57.646 So we have to make a point about it. 00:40:57.646 --> 00:41:00.665 It will cost us a little bit. 00:41:00.665 --> 00:41:02.917 Not much, but a little bit. 00:41:02.917 --> 00:41:11.253 We will have to forgoe and make a few sacrifices in our lives to enforce ethics on media. 00:41:11.253 --> 00:41:13.645 But that's our role. 00:41:13.645 --> 00:41:17.012 Along with making free technology, that's our role. 00:41:17.012 --> 00:41:23.467 We are the last generation capable of understanding directly what the changes are 00:41:23.467 --> 00:41:28.320 because we have lived on both sides of them and we know. 00:41:28.320 --> 00:41:31.455 So we have a responsibility. 00:41:31.455 --> 00:41:35.634 You understand that. 00:41:35.634 --> 00:41:38.514 It's always a surprise to me, though it is deeply true, 00:41:38.514 --> 00:41:44.411 that of all the cities in the world I travel to, Berlin in the freeist. 00:41:44.411 --> 00:41:48.034 You cannot wear a hat in the Hong Kong airport any more, 00:41:48.034 --> 00:41:52.376 I found out last month trying to wear my hat in the Hong Kong airport. 00:41:52.376 --> 00:41:58.436 You're not allowed, it disrupts the facial recognition. 00:41:58.436 --> 00:42:03.057 There will be a new airport here. Will it be so heavily surveiled 00:42:03.057 --> 00:42:08.955 that you won't be allowed to wear a hat because it disrupts the facial recognition? 00:42:08.955 --> 00:42:12.763 We have a responsibility. We know. 00:42:12.763 --> 00:42:16.478 That's how Berlin became the freeist city that I go to. 00:42:16.478 --> 00:42:19.729 Because we know. Because we have a responsibility. 00:42:19.729 --> 00:42:26.765 Because we remember, because we've been on both sides of the wall. 00:42:26.765 --> 00:42:30.085 That must not be lost now. 00:42:30.085 --> 00:42:35.054 If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. 00:42:35.054 --> 00:42:37.121 Everything will be remembered. 00:42:37.121 --> 00:42:42.020 Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, 00:42:42.020 --> 00:42:46.200 everything you watched, everything you searched for. 00:42:46.200 --> 00:42:53.560 Surely we can pass along to the next generation a world freeier than that. 00:42:53.560 --> 00:42:56.091 Surely we must. 00:42:56.091 --> 00:42:58.599 What if we don't? 00:42:58.599 --> 00:43:08.096 What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years 00:43:08.096 --> 00:43:12.392 of struggling for freedom of thought, at the end. 00:43:12.392 --> 00:43:19.126 When we had almost everything we gave it away. 00:43:19.126 --> 00:43:23.654 For convenience. For social networking. 00:43:23.654 --> 00:43:28.205 Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. 00:43:28.205 --> 00:43:33.150 Because we couldn't find a better way to talk to our friends. 00:43:33.150 --> 00:43:40.558 Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. 00:43:40.558 --> 00:43:46.525 Because we didn't really care about the future of freedom of thought. 00:43:46.525 --> 00:43:50.240 Because we considered that to be someone else's business. 00:43:50.240 --> 00:43:52.168 Because we thought it was over. 00:43:52.168 --> 00:43:55.767 Because we believed we were free. 00:43:55.767 --> 00:43:59.250 Because we didn't think there was any struggling left to do. 00:43:59.250 --> 00:44:01.177 That's why we gave it all away. 00:44:01.177 --> 00:44:03.940 Is that what we're going to tell them? 00:44:03.940 --> 00:44:07.400 Is that what we're going to tell them? 00:44:07.400 --> 00:44:13.298 Free thought requires free media. 00:44:13.298 --> 00:44:19.498 Free media requires free technology. 00:44:19.498 --> 00:44:29.714 We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen, and to watch. 00:44:29.714 --> 00:44:38.445 Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. 00:44:38.445 --> 00:44:43.368 Because, if we don't, something else will die, 00:44:43.368 --> 00:44:50.473 something so precious that many many many of our fathers and mothers gave their lives for it. 00:44:50.473 --> 00:44:56.278 Something so precious that we understood it to define what it meant to be human. 00:44:56.278 --> 00:45:00.713 It will die if we don't keep those politics for the rest of our lives. 00:45:00.713 --> 00:45:09.049 And if we do, then all the things we struggled for, we'll get. 00:45:09.049 --> 00:45:15.434 Because everywhere on earth, everybody will be able to read freely. 00:45:15.434 --> 00:45:21.634 Because all the Einsteins in the street will be allowed to learn. 00:45:21.634 --> 00:45:27.973 Because all the Stravinskys will become composers. 00:45:27.973 --> 00:45:31.735 Because all the Saulks will become research physicians. 00:45:31.735 --> 00:45:37.308 Because humanity will be connected and every brain will be allowed to learn 00:45:37.308 --> 00:45:43.159 and no brain will be crushed for thinking wrong. 00:45:43.159 --> 00:45:46.619 We're at the moment where we get to pick. 00:45:46.619 --> 00:45:52.075 Whether we carry through that great revolution we've been making 00:45:52.075 --> 00:45:57.393 bit by bloody bit for a thousand years, 00:45:57.393 --> 00:46:02.501 or whether we give it away for convenience, 00:46:02.501 --> 00:46:07.424 for simplicity of talking to our friends, for speed in search, 00:46:07.424 --> 00:46:12.904 and other really important stuff. 00:46:12.904 --> 00:46:19.847 I said in 2004, when I was here, and I say now, we can win. 00:46:19.847 --> 00:46:28.182 We can be the generation of people who completed the work of building freedom of thought. 00:46:28.182 --> 00:46:35.079 I didn't say then, and I must say now, that we are also potentially the generation that can lose. 00:46:35.079 --> 00:46:42.347 We can slip back into an inquisition worse than any inquisition that ever existed. 00:46:42.347 --> 00:46:49.731 It may not use as much torture, it may not be as bloody, but it will be more effective. 00:46:49.731 --> 00:46:53.167 And we mustn't mustn't let that happen. 00:46:53.167 --> 00:46:57.695 Too many people fought for us. Too many people died for us. 00:46:57.695 --> 00:47:02.432 Too many people hoped and dreamed for what we can still make possible. 00:47:02.432 --> 00:47:05.737 We must not fail. 00:47:05.737 --> 00:47:06.577 Thank you very much. 00:47:06.577 --> 00:47:59.561 [Applause] 00:47:59.561 --> 00:48:03.196 Let's learn how to take questions here. 00:48:03.196 --> 00:48:08.227 It's not going to be simple but let's set a good example. 00:48:08.227 --> 00:48:20.828 [pause] 00:48:20.828 --> 00:48:21.794 [Questioner 1] Thank you. 00:48:21.794 --> 00:48:26.136 [Questioner 1] You put forward a very gruesome picture of the possible future. 00:48:26.136 --> 00:48:29.154 [Questioner 1] Could you name some organizations or groups 00:48:29.154 --> 00:48:35.586 [Questioner 1] in the United States that put forward actions in your way, 00:48:35.586 --> 00:48:40.764 [Questioner 1] in your positive way of transforming society? 00:48:40.764 --> 00:48:44.503 Not only in the United States, but around the world we have organizations 00:48:44.503 --> 00:48:48.032 that are concerned with electronic civil liberties. 00:48:48.032 --> 00:48:51.353 The EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States. 00:48:51.353 --> 00:48:53.760 La Quadrature du Net in France 00:48:53.760 --> 00:48:57.274 Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands and so on. 00:48:57.274 --> 00:49:01.593 Electronic civil liberties agitation is extraordinarily important. 00:49:01.593 --> 00:49:05.229 Pressure on governments to obey rules that came down from 00:49:05.229 --> 00:49:09.559 the 18th century regarding protection of human dignity 00:49:09.559 --> 00:49:14.729 and the prevention of state surveillance are crucially important. 00:49:14.729 --> 00:49:20.393 Unfortunately, electronic civil liberties work against governments are not enough. 00:49:20.393 --> 00:49:26.047 The free software movement, the FSF, the Free Software Foundation in the United States, 00:49:26.047 --> 00:49:29.224 and the Free Software Foundation Europe, headquartered in Germany, 00:49:29.224 --> 00:49:35.607 are working in an important way to maintain that system of 00:49:35.607 --> 00:49:41.520 the anarchistic creation of software which has brought us so much technology we can control. 00:49:41.520 --> 00:49:43.850 That's crucially important. 00:49:43.850 --> 00:49:48.099 The Creative Commons movement, which is strongly entrenched, 00:49:48.099 --> 00:49:52.991 not only in the United States and Germany, but in more than 40 countries around the world 00:49:52.991 --> 00:49:59.732 is also extraordinarily important because Creative Commons gives to creative workers 00:49:59.732 --> 00:50:05.977 alternatives to the kind of massive over control in the copyright system 00:50:05.977 --> 00:50:10.916 which makes surveillance media profitable. 00:50:10.916 --> 00:50:15.342 The Wikipedia is an extraordinarily important human institution. 00:50:15.342 --> 00:50:21.132 and we need to continue to support the Wikimedia Foundation as deeply as we can. 00:50:21.132 --> 00:50:26.479 Of the 100 most visited websites in the United States, 00:50:26.479 --> 00:50:29.357 in a study conducted by the Wall Street Journal, 00:50:29.357 --> 00:50:32.917 of the 100 most visited websites in the United States, 00:50:32.917 --> 00:50:36.826 only one does not surveil its users. 00:50:36.826 --> 00:50:40.600 You can guess which one it is, it's Wikipedia. 00:50:40.600 --> 00:50:47.681 We have enormously important developments now going on throughout the world of higher education 00:50:47.681 --> 00:50:54.232 as universities begin to realize that the costs of higher education must come down. 00:50:54.232 --> 00:50:57.624 and that brains will grow in the web. 00:50:57.624 --> 00:51:04.324 The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya the walk is the most extrodinary 00:51:04.324 --> 00:51:07.850 online only university in the world right now. 00:51:07.850 --> 00:51:13.500 It will soon be competing with more extraordinary universities still. 00:51:13.500 --> 00:51:19.113 MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new program 00:51:19.113 --> 00:51:24.111 for web education will provide the highest quality technical education on earth 00:51:24.111 --> 00:51:30.343 for free to everybody everywhere all the time, building on existing MIT OpenCourseWare. 00:51:30.343 --> 00:51:35.902 Stanford is about to spin off a proprietary web learning structure 00:51:35.902 --> 00:51:39.933 which will be the Google of higher education if Stanford gets it lucky. 00:51:39.933 --> 00:51:44.493 We need to support free higher education on the web. 00:51:44.493 --> 00:51:49.166 Every European national ministry of Education should be working on it. 00:51:49.166 --> 00:51:56.658 There are many places to look for free software, free hardware, free bandwidth, and free media. 00:51:56.658 --> 00:52:02.419 There's no better place to look for free media right now on earth than this room. 00:52:02.419 --> 00:52:06.299 Everybody knows what they can do, they're doing it. 00:52:06.299 --> 00:52:11.811 We just have to make everybody else understand that if we stop, or if we fail, 00:52:11.811 --> 00:52:16.284 freedom of thought will be the causality and we will regret it forever. 00:52:17.641 --> 00:52:21.751 [Organizer] We've had three more questions in the meantime. 00:52:21.751 --> 00:52:23.701 [Organizer] The gentleman with the microphone over here will begin. 00:52:23.701 --> 00:52:26.998 [Organizer] And then one, two, I'm sure there are more of you in the back 00:52:26.998 --> 00:52:28.902 [Organizer] so raise your hands high. 00:52:28.902 --> 00:52:32.153 [Organizer] We'll take maybe your first please. 00:52:32.153 --> 00:52:35.683 [Questioner 2] Thank you very much, I just wanted to ask a short question. 00:52:35.683 --> 00:52:42.161 [Questioner 2] Can Facebook, can iPhone, and free media coexist on a long range? 00:52:42.161 --> 00:52:44.065 Probably not. 00:52:44.065 --> 00:52:46.596 But we don't have to worry too much. 00:52:46.596 --> 00:52:52.587 iPhone is just a product and Facebook is just a commercial version of a service. 00:52:52.587 --> 00:52:56.139 I said recently to a newspaper in New York that I thought Facebook 00:52:56.139 --> 00:53:00.087 would continue to exist for somewhere between 12 and 120 months. 00:53:00.087 --> 00:53:02.153 I still think that is correct. 00:53:02.153 --> 00:53:05.915 Federated social networking will become available. 00:53:05.915 --> 00:53:10.791 Federated social networking in a form which allows you to leave Facebook 00:53:10.791 --> 00:53:14.623 without leaving your friends, will become available. 00:53:14.623 --> 00:53:19.801 Better forms of communication without a man in the middle will become available. 00:53:19.801 --> 00:53:22.494 The question will be will people use them? 00:53:22.494 --> 00:53:26.883 FreedomBox is an attempt to produce a stack of software 00:53:26.883 --> 00:53:31.434 that will fit in a new generation of low power, low cost hardware servers 00:53:31.434 --> 00:53:34.545 the size of mobile phone chargers. 00:53:34.545 --> 00:53:37.355 And if we do that work right, we will be able to give 00:53:37.355 --> 00:53:40.281 billions of web servers to the net. 00:53:40.281 --> 00:53:44.530 Which will server the purpose of providing competting services 00:53:44.530 --> 00:53:49.754 that don't invade privacy and are compatible with existing services. 00:53:49.754 --> 00:53:54.213 But mobile phones get changed very frequently so iPhone goes away 00:53:54.213 --> 00:53:55.792 it's no big deal. 00:53:55.792 --> 00:53:58.230 and web services are much less unique 00:53:58.230 --> 00:54:00.459 than they appear right now. 00:54:00.459 --> 00:54:03.802 Facebook's a brand, it's not a thing that we need to worry about 00:54:03.802 --> 00:54:05.381 in any great particular. 00:54:05.381 --> 00:54:08.191 We just have to do it in as quickly as possible. 00:54:08.191 --> 00:54:10.397 Co-existence? 00:54:10.397 --> 00:54:12.463 Well all I have to say about that is that is 00:54:12.463 --> 00:54:15.621 they're not going to co-exist with freedom 00:54:15.621 --> 00:54:18.013 so I'm not sure why I should co-exist with them. 00:54:18.013 --> 00:54:25.536 [Applause] 00:54:25.536 --> 00:54:27.603 [Questioner 3]Hi, I'm Trey Gulalm(sp) from Bangladesh. 00:54:27.603 --> 00:54:32.108 [Questioner 3]Thank you for that wonderfully lucid, sintilating, 00:54:32.108 --> 00:54:35.358 [Questioner 3] and hugely informative presentation. 00:54:35.358 --> 00:54:39.120 [Questioner 3]I was involved in introducing email to Bangladesh 00:54:39.120 --> 00:54:43.718 [Questioner 3] in the early 90's and, at that time connectivity was very expensive 00:54:43.718 --> 00:54:46.829 [Questioner 3]we were spending $0.30 US cents per kilobyte 00:54:46.829 --> 00:54:51.380 [Questioner 3]so a megabyte of data would be $100, $300. 00:54:51.380 --> 00:54:55.119 [Questioner 3]It's changes from them but it is still very tightly constrained 00:54:55.119 --> 00:54:59.159 [Questioner 3]by the regulatory bodies. So we on the ground find it 00:54:59.159 --> 00:55:01.156 [Questioner 3]very difficult because the powers that be, 00:55:01.156 --> 00:55:05.150 [Questioner 3]the gate keepers have a vested interest in maintaining that. 00:55:05.150 --> 00:55:09.515 [Questioner 3]But in that gatekeeper nexus there is also a nexus 00:55:09.515 --> 00:55:13.625 [Questioner 3]between governments in my country and governments in yours, 00:55:13.625 --> 00:55:18.919 [Questioner 3]and right now the largest biometric data in the world 00:55:18.919 --> 00:55:21.589 [Questioner 3]is the census of Bangladesh 00:55:21.589 --> 00:55:25.119 [Questioner 3]and the company that's providing it is a company 00:55:25.119 --> 00:55:27.719 [Questioner 3]that's directly linked to the CIA. 00:55:27.719 --> 00:55:30.227 [Questioner 3]So what do we as pracatitioners do 00:55:30.227 --> 00:55:33.222 [Questioner 3]to overcome very very powerful entities? 00:55:33.222 --> 00:55:38.958 This is why I began by speaking about the United States Government's recent behaviors. 00:55:38.958 --> 00:55:43.718 My colleagues at the Software Freedom Law Center in India 00:55:43.718 --> 00:55:48.803 have been spending a lot of time this past month trying to get a motion 00:55:48.803 --> 00:55:51.613 through the upper house of the Indian Parliment 00:55:51.613 --> 00:55:56.628 to nullify Department of IT regulations on the censorship of the Indian net. 00:55:56.628 --> 00:56:00.320 And of course the good news is that the largest biometric database in the world 00:56:00.320 --> 00:56:04.082 will soon be the retinal scans that the Indian government 00:56:04.082 --> 00:56:07.542 are going to require if you want to have a propane gas cylinder, 00:56:07.542 --> 00:56:10.885 or anything else like energy for your home. 00:56:10.885 --> 00:56:16.992 And the difficulty that we've been having in talking to Indian government officials this month 00:56:16.992 --> 00:56:22.008 is that they say "Well if the Americans can do it, why can't we?" 00:56:22.008 --> 00:56:25.003 Which is, unfortunately true. 00:56:25.003 --> 00:56:29.392 The United States government has this winter lowered the bar around the world 00:56:29.392 --> 00:56:35.359 on internet freedom in the sense of datamining your society to the Chinese level. 00:56:35.359 --> 00:56:37.426 They've fundamentally agreed. 00:56:37.426 --> 00:56:40.514 They're going to datamine the hell out of their populations 00:56:40.514 --> 00:56:45.042 and they're going to encourage ever other state on earth to do the same. 00:56:45.042 --> 00:56:49.012 So I'm entirely with you about the definition of the problem. 00:56:49.012 --> 00:56:54.771 We are not now any longer living in a place, in a stage in our history 00:56:54.771 --> 00:56:58.231 where we can think in terms of a country at a time. 00:56:58.231 --> 00:57:01.365 Globalization has reached the point at which these questions 00:57:01.365 --> 00:57:05.292 of surveillance of society are now global questions 00:57:05.292 --> 00:57:09.993 and we have to work on them under the assumption that no government 00:57:09.993 --> 00:57:14.660 will decide to be more virtuous than the super powers. 00:57:14.660 --> 00:57:17.958 I don't know how we're going to deal with the Chinese Communist Party. 00:57:17.958 --> 00:57:19.978 I do not know. 00:57:19.978 --> 00:57:22.230 I know how we're going to deal with the American government. 00:57:22.230 --> 00:57:26.154 We're going to insist on our rights. 00:57:26.154 --> 00:57:30.496 We're going to do what it makes sense to do in the United States. 00:57:30.496 --> 00:57:32.145 We're going to litigate about it. 00:57:32.145 --> 00:57:33.283 We're going to push. 00:57:33.283 --> 00:57:34.560 We're going to shove. 00:57:34.560 --> 00:57:38.786 We're going to be everywhere, including in the street about it. 00:57:38.786 --> 00:57:43.035 And I suspect that's what's going to happen here too. 00:57:43.035 --> 00:57:46.147 Unless we move the biggest of the societies on earth, 00:57:46.147 --> 00:57:49.839 we will have no hope of convincing smaller governments 00:57:49.839 --> 00:57:53.368 that they have to let go of their controls. 00:57:53.368 --> 00:57:55.272 So far as bandwidth is concerned, of course, 00:57:55.272 --> 00:57:58.337 we're going to have to use unregulated bandwidth. 00:57:58.337 --> 00:58:01.449 That is, we're going to have to build around 802.11 and wifi 00:58:01.449 --> 00:58:06.836 and any other thing that the rules don't prevent us from using. 00:58:06.836 --> 00:58:10.621 And how is that going to reach the poorest of the poor? 00:58:10.621 --> 00:58:13.987 When the mobile phone system can be shaped to reach 00:58:13.987 --> 00:58:16.913 the poorest of the poor? I don't know. 00:58:16.913 --> 00:58:20.837 But I've got a little project with street children in Bangalore trying to figure it out. 00:58:20.837 --> 00:58:22.347 We have to. 00:58:22.347 --> 00:58:24.065 We have to work everywhere. 00:58:24.065 --> 00:58:30.149 If we don't, we're going to screw it up for humanity and we can't afford the risk. 00:58:30.149 --> 00:58:32.308 [Organizer]Thank you. The gentleman over here please. 00:58:32.308 --> 00:58:35.373 [Questioner 4]Yes, Professor Moglen,I also want to thank you. 00:58:35.373 --> 00:58:40.063 [Questioner 4]I can tell you that I from transformingfreedom.org in Vienna 00:58:40.063 --> 00:58:45.311 [Questioner 4]and some years ago I saw you talking on a web video 00:58:45.311 --> 00:58:48.817 [Questioner 4]at FOSDEM, and there I saw you pointing out 00:58:48.817 --> 00:58:54.019 [Questioner 4]the role of Zimmerman, Fredrick, and we tried to help him as well. 00:58:54.019 --> 00:58:58.709 [Questioner 4]But listening to you today, I see that this is just too slow, 00:58:58.709 --> 00:59:04.189 [Questioner 4]too little, and I'm a bit amazed at two things. 00:59:04.189 --> 00:59:08.717 [Questioner 4]The first is the academic system, let's say the European one 00:59:08.717 --> 00:59:12.502 [Questioner 4]was founded by Plato and was closed down by force 00:59:12.502 --> 00:59:15.590 [Questioner 4]about a thousand years after. 00:59:15.590 --> 00:59:20.164 [Questioner 4]The second start of the European University was 00:59:20.164 --> 00:59:23.392 [Questioner 4]around the last few century and let's see if we get there, 00:59:23.392 --> 00:59:28.477 [Questioner 4]to have it running as long as a thousand years. 00:59:28.477 --> 00:59:32.355 [Questioner 4]So my question is why is it not deeply in the cell structure 00:59:32.355 --> 00:59:36.859 [Questioner 4]of academia to help the cause that you have talked about today 00:59:36.859 --> 00:59:41.875 [Questioner 4]and why don't we have philanthropists helping 00:59:41.875 --> 00:59:46.077 [Questioner 4]our little projects, running for three or five 00:59:46.077 --> 00:59:49.281 [Questioner 4]thousand euros here and there, much more let's say 00:59:49.281 --> 00:59:53.159 [Questioner 4] efficiently, like maybe you would agree that Mr. Soros 00:59:53.159 --> 00:59:56.131 [Questioner 4]tries to do? 00:59:56.131 --> 01:00:01.704 Some years ago, at Columbia, we tried to interest Faculty 01:00:01.704 --> 01:00:07.361 in the state of preservation of the libraries and I saw 01:00:07.361 --> 01:00:13.476 more distinguished scholars at my own university than at any other time 01:00:13.476 --> 01:00:17.493 in my 25 years there, engaged politically. 01:00:17.493 --> 01:00:22.393 Their primary concern was the aging of the paper 01:00:22.393 --> 01:00:26.154 on which were printed the 19th century German Docterate 01:00:26.154 --> 01:00:32.099 that conserved more philological research than any other literature on earth 01:00:32.099 --> 01:00:33.190 right? 01:00:33.190 --> 01:00:36.511 But it was 19th century books that they needed to preserve. 01:00:36.511 --> 01:00:40.946 The problem with academis life is that it is inherently conservative 01:00:40.946 --> 01:00:44.011 because it preserves the wisdom of the old. 01:00:44.011 --> 01:00:45.752 And that is a good thing to do 01:00:45.752 --> 01:00:48.237 but the wisdom of the old is old, 01:00:48.237 --> 01:00:52.904 and it doesn't necessarily embrace the issues of the moment perfectly. 01:00:52.904 --> 01:00:56.456 I mentioned the walk because I think it is so important 01:00:56.456 --> 01:01:02.192 to support the university as it maneuvers itself towards the net 01:01:02.192 --> 01:01:06.279 and away from the forms of learning that have characterized 01:01:06.279 --> 01:01:10.063 the matriculatry university of the past. 01:01:10.063 --> 01:01:15.543 For the last thousand years mostly we moved scholars to books, 01:01:15.543 --> 01:01:19.142 and the university grew up around that principle. 01:01:19.142 --> 01:01:22.068 It grew up around the principle that books are hard to move 01:01:22.068 --> 01:01:23.461 and people are easy. 01:01:23.461 --> 01:01:25.505 So you bring everybody to it. 01:01:25.505 --> 01:01:28.546 Now we live in a world in which it is much simplier 01:01:28.546 --> 01:01:30.915 to move knowledge to people. 01:01:30.915 --> 01:01:36.697 But the continuance of ignorance is the desire of businesses that sell knowledge. 01:01:36.697 --> 01:01:39.878 What we really need is to being ourselves to help 01:01:39.878 --> 01:01:42.943 to turn the university system into something else. 01:01:42.943 --> 01:01:45.822 The something which allows everybody to learn 01:01:45.822 --> 01:01:49.746 and which demands unsurveiled learning. 01:01:49.746 --> 01:01:52.347 The commissioner for Information Society will be here; 01:01:52.347 --> 01:01:56.546 she should speak to that. 01:01:56.546 --> 01:02:00.590 That should be the great question of the European Commission. 01:02:00.590 --> 01:02:03.516 They know, they printed a report 18 months ago, 01:02:03.516 --> 01:02:06.256 that said for the cost of 100km of road you 01:02:06.256 --> 01:02:10.273 can scan 1/6 of all the books in European libraries. 01:02:10.273 --> 01:02:14.824 That means for the cost of 600km of road we could get 'em all. 01:02:14.824 --> 01:02:17.424 We built a lot of roads in a lot of places, 01:02:17.424 --> 01:02:19.328 including Greece, in the last 10 year, 01:02:19.328 --> 01:02:22.068 and we could've scanned all the books in Europe at the same time, 01:02:22.068 --> 01:02:28.407 and made them available to all humanity on an un-surveiled basis. 01:02:28.407 --> 01:02:31.960 If Ms. Cruise wants to build a monument to herself, 01:02:31.960 --> 01:02:35.815 it isn't going to be as a feif a day politician. 01:02:35.815 --> 01:02:38.601 She's going to do it this way, and you're going to ask her. 01:02:38.601 --> 01:02:41.109 I'm going to be on a plane on my way back across the Atlantic, 01:02:41.109 --> 01:02:43.593 or I promise you I'd ask her myself. 01:02:43.593 --> 01:02:45.637 Ask her for me. 01:02:45.637 --> 01:02:50.745 Say "It's not our fault, Eben want's to know. If you want to hurt somebody, hurt him. You should be changing 01:02:50.745 --> 01:02:55.993 the European University. You should be breaking it up into un-surveiled reading. You should be putting 01:02:55.993 --> 01:03:04.027 Google books and Amazon out of business. That's some North American, Anglo-Saxon, elbow capitalism thing. 01:03:04.027 --> 01:03:07.185 Why aren't we making knowledge free in Europe 01:03:07.185 --> 01:03:10.273 and assuring that it's un-surveiled?" 01:03:10.273 --> 01:03:15.648 That would be the biggest step possible and it is within their power. 01:03:15.648 --> 01:03:27.933 [Organizer] Thank you so much. [Applause] Brilliant. thank you.