WEBVTT

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[David Isenberg] I've asked Doc Searls and Isaac Wilder to come up and sit with Eben and continue the discussion.

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Eben Moglen. Thank You. [Applause]

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[Eben Moglen] Thank you. it's a pleasure to be here, and to see so many friends.

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I'm very grateful to David for the invitation, it's a privilege to be here.

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I'm going to talk of mostly

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about a subject almost as geeky as the stuff we all talk about all the time,namely political economy.

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I'm going to try and make it less snooze-worthy than it sometimes seems to be,

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but you'll forgive me I'm sure for starting fairly far from OpenSSL,

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we'll get closer as time goes by.

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The developed economies around the world, all of them now,

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are beginning to experience a fundamentally similar and very depressing condition.

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They are required to impose austerity because levels of private debt have gummed up the works

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and the determination of the owners of capital to take vast risks with other peoples money

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have worked out extremely badly for the last half decade.

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And so austerity is the inevitable and politically damaging position for all the governments in the developed world,

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and some of those governments have begun to slip into a death spiral,

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in which the need to impose austerity and reduce public investment and welfare support for the young

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is harming economic growth, which prevents the austerity from having its desirable consequences.

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Instead of bad asset values being worked off and growth resuming,

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we are watching as the third largest economy in the world, the European Union,

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finds itself at the very verge of a currency collapse and a lost generation,

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which would have a profoundly depressing effects on the entire global economy.

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For the policy-makers

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--I recognize that few of them are here, they have of course, better things to do than to listen to us--

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for the policy-makers in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand,

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how do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity?

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They do not know the answer to this question

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and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.

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Marginal parties in several very highly developed and thoughtful societies

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are beginning to attract substantial numbers of votes,

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and threatening the very stability of the economic planners' capacity to solve,

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or to attempt to solve, the problem of innovation under austerity.

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This is not good news for anybody.

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This is not good for anybody.

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We have no opportunity to cheer for this outcome,

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which is largely the result of incompetence in those people who claim to be worth all that money because they're so smart,

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it is partly the result of the political cowardice that gave them too much room to swing their cats.

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It is not that we are glad to see this happen, but there is a silver lining to the cloud.

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There are very few people in the world who know how to have innovation under austerity.

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We are they.

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We have produced innovation under austerity for the last generation

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and not only did we produce pretty good innovation

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we've produced innovation that all the other smart rich people took most of the credit for.

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Most of the growth that occurred

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during this wild and wacky period in which they took other people's money and went to the racetrack with it,

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was with innovation we produced for them.

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So now, despite the really bad circumstances which we too can deplore,

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because the unemployment is my graduating law students, your children,

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and all those other young people whose lives are being harmed for good by current bad economic circumstances.

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The people beginning their careers now will suffer substantial wage losses throughout their lifetimes.

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Their children will get a less good start in life because of what is happening now,

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we cannot be pleased about this.

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But we have a very substantial political opportunity.

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Because we do have the answer

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to the most important question pushing all the policy-makers in the developed world right now.

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That means we have something very important to say and I came here this morning primarily

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to begin the discussion about precisely how we should say it.

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And I want to present a working first draft of our argument,

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I say "our" because I look around the room and I see it's us here this morning.

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Our argument, about what to do with the quandary the world is in.

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Innovation under austerity is not produced

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by collecting lots of money and paying it to innovation intermediaries.

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One of the most important aspects of 21st century political economy

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is that the process we call disintermediation,

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when we're begin jargony about it, is ruthless, consistent, and relentless.

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Television is melting.

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I don't need to tell you that, you know already.

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Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.

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Amazon's lousy little I-will-let-you-read-some-books-unless-I-decide-to-take-them-back machine

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is transforming publishing by eliminating the selective power of the book publishers,

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much as Mr. Jobs almost destroyed the entire global music industry under the pretense of saving it.

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A task his ghost is already performing for the magazine publishers as you can see.

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Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the net,

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is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy.

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It proves itself all the time.

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Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in economics for describing in formal terms the nature of disintermediation.

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The intermediaries who did well during the past 10 years, are limited to two sets:

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health insurers in the United States owing to political pathology, and the financial industry.

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Health insurers in the United States may be able to capitalize on the continuing political pathology

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to remain failing and expensive intermediaries for a while longer.

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But the financial industry crapped in it's own nest and is shrinking now and will continue for some time to do so.

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The consequence of which is that throughout the economic system, as the policy-maker observes it,

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the reality that disintermediation happens and you can't stop it

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becomes a guiding light in the formation of national industrial policy.

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So we need to say it's true about innovation also.

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The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web.

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An invention less than 8000 days old.

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That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.

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We will see more of it.

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The nature of that process, that innovation, both fuels disintermediation,

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by allowing all sorts of human contacts to occur without intermediaries, buyers, sellers, agents, and controllers.

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And poses a platform in which a war over the depth and power of social control goes on,

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a subject I'll come back to in a few minutes.

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For now what I want to call attention to is the crucial fact that the World Wide Web is itself

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a result of disintermediated innovation.

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What Tim first did at CERN was not the Web as we know it now,

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the Web as we know it now was made by the disintermediated innovation of an enormous number of individual people.

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I look back on what I wrote about the future of personal homepages in 1995,

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and I see pretty much what I thought then would happen happening,

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I said then those few personal homepages are grass seed and a prairie is going to grow, and so it did.

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Of course, like all other innovation there were unintended consequences.

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The browser made the Web very easy to read.

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Though we built Apache, though we built the browsers,

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though we built enormous numbers of things on top of Apache and the browsers,

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we did not make the Web easy to write.

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So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write,

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and created a man in the middle attack on human civilization,

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[Little Laughs]

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which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm.

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But that's the intermediary innovation that we should be concerned about.

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We made everything possible including, regrettably, PHP,

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and then intermediaries for innovation turned it into the horror that is Facebook.

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This will not turn out, as we can already see from the stock market result,

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to be a particularly favourable form of social innovation.

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It's going to enrich a few people.

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The government of Abu Dhabi,

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a Russian thug with a billion dollars already,

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a guy who can't wait to change his citizenship so he doesn't have to pay taxes to support the public schools,

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and a few other relics of 20th century misbehavior.

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But the reality of the story underneath is,

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if we'd had a little bit more disintermediated innovation,

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if we had made running your own web-server very easy,

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if we had explained to people from the very beginning how important the logs are,

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and why you shouldn't let other people keep them for you,

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we would be in a rather different state right now.

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The next Facebook should never happen.

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It's intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people.

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Which is not say that social networking shouldn't happen,

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it shouldn't happen with a man in the middle attack built into it.

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Everybody in this room knows that, the question is how do we teach everybody else.

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But as important as I consider everybody else to be right now, I want to talk about the policy-makers:

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how do we explain to them?

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And here we begin to divide the conversation into two important parts.

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One, what do we know about how to achieve innovation under austerity?

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Two, what prevents governments from agreeing with us about that?

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So let me present first my first draft of the positive case for innovation under austerity,

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it's called "We Made The Cloud".

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Everybody understands this in this room too.

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The very point about what's happening to information technology in the world right now,

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has to do with scaling up our late 20th century work.

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We created the idea that we could share operating systems and all the rest of the commoditizable stack on top of them.

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We did this using the curiosity of young people.

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That was the fuel, not venture capital.

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We had been at it for 15 years, and our stuff was already running everywhere,

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before venture capital or even industrial capital raised by IT giants came towards us.

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It came towards us not because innovation needed to happen,

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but because innovation had already happened,

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and they needed to monetize it.

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That was an extremely positive outcome, I have nothing bad to say about that.

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But the nature of that outcome, indeed the history as we lived it and as other can now study it,

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will show how innovation under austerity occurred.

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It's all very well to say that it happened because we harnessed the curiosity of young people,

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that's historically correct.

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But there's more than that to say.

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What we need to say is that that curiosity of young people could be harnessed

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because all of the computing devices in ordinary day to day use were hackable.

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And so young people could actually hack on what everybody used.

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That made it possible for innovation to occur,

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where it can occur, without friction, which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital.

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This is happening now elsewhere in the world as it happened in the United States in the 1980s.

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Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world hacking on laptops.

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Hacking on servers.

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Hacking on general purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their individual itches,

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technical, social, career, and just plain ludic itches.

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"I wanna do this it would be neat."

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Which is the primary source of the innovation which drove all

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of the world's great economic expansion in the last 10 years.All of it.

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Trillions of dollars of electronic commerce.

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Those of you old enough to remember when fighting Public Key Encryption tooth and nail,

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was the United States government's policy

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will remember how hard they fought,

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to prohibit 3.8 trillion dollars worth of electronic commerce from coming into existence in the world.

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We were (supposedly) proponents of nuclear terrorism and pedophilia in the early 1990s,

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and all the money that they earned

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in campaign donations and private equity profits and all the rest of it,

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is owing to the globalization of commerce we made possible,

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with the technology they wanted to send our clients to jail for making.

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That demonstrates neatly I think, to the next generation of policy-makers

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how thoroughly their adherence to the received wisdom

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is likely to contribute to the death spiral they now fear they're going to get into.

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And it should embolden us to point out once again that the way innovation really happens

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is that you provide young people with opportunities to create

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on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world, and share the results.

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When Richard Stallman wrote the call at the university in Suffolk??? for the universal encyclopedia,

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when he and Jimmy Wales and I were all much younger than we are now,

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it was (considered) a frivolous idea.

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It has now transformed the life of every literate person in the world.

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And it will continue to do so.

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The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons,

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by the Free Software Movement,

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by Free Culture,

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which is reflected in the Web in the Wikipedia,

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in all the Free Software operating systems now running everything,

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even the insides of all those locked-down vampiric Apple things I see around the room.

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All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way.

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Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent now completely.

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Increasingly, all around the world the actual computing artifacts of daily life

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for human individual beings are being made so you can't hack them.

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The computer science laboratory in every twelve year old's pocket is being locked-down.

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When we went through the anti-lockdown phase of the GPL 3 negotiations in the middle of last decade,

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it was somehow believed that the primary purpose for which Mr. Stallman and I were

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engaged in pressing everybody against lock-down had something to do with bootlegging movies.

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And we kept saying, this is not the Free Movie Foundation.

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We don't care about that.

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We care about protecting people's right to hack what they own.

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And the reason we care about it is, that if you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves,

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you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.

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That's still true.

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And it is more important now precisely because very few people thought we were right then,

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and didn't exert themselves to support that point of view,

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and now you have Microsoft saying we won't allow third-party browsers on ARM-based Windows RT devices.

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And you have the ghost of Mr. Jobs

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trying to figure out how to prevent even a free tool chain from existing in relation to iOS,

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and you have a world in which increasingly the goal of the network operators

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is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment

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that she can't learn from, can't study, can't understand, can't whet her teeth on,

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can't do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.

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And most of the so-called innovation in the world, in our sector,

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now goes into creating IT for network operators that improves no technology for users.

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Telecomms innovation in the world has basically ceased.

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And it will not revive so long as it is impossible to harness the forms of innovation that really work under austerity.

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This has a second-order consequence of enormous importance.

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Innovation under austerity occurs in the first-order

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because the curiosity of young people is harnessed to the improvement of the actual circumstances of daily life.

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The second-order consequence is (that) populations becomes more educated.

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Disintermediation is beginning to come to higher education in the United States,

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which means it is beginning to come to higher education around the world.

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We currently have two models.

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Coursera, is essentially the googlization of higher education, spun-off from Stanford as a for-profit entity,

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using closed software and proprietary educational resources.

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MITx, which has now edX through the formation of the coalition with Harvard University,

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is essentially the free world answer.

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Similar online scalable curriculum for higher education

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delivered over Free Software using free education resources.

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We have an enormous stake in the outcome of that competition.

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And it behooves all of us to put as much of our energy as we can

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behind the solutions which depend upon free courseware everybody can use, modify and redistribute,

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and educational materials based on the same political economy.

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Every society currently trying to reclaim innovation

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for the purpose of restarting economic growth under conditions of austerity needs more education,

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deliverable more widely at lower cost,

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which shapes young minds more effectively to create new value in their societies.

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This will not be accomplished without precisely the forms of social learning we pioneered.

00:24:14.740 --> 00:24:21.462
We said from the beginning that Free Software is the world's most advanced technical educational system.

00:24:21.878 --> 00:24:29.758
It allows anybody anywhere on earth, to get to the state of art in anything computers can be made to do,

00:24:29.758 --> 00:24:38.036
by reading what is fully available and by experimenting with it, and sharing the consequences freely.

00:24:38.575 --> 00:24:40.864
True computer science.

00:24:41.557 --> 00:24:49.553
Experimentation, hypothesis formation, more experimentation, more knowledge for the human race.

00:24:50.507 --> 00:24:55.256
We needed to expand that into other areas of culture,

00:24:55.256 --> 00:25:01.911
and great heroes like Jimmy Wales and Larry Lessig laid out infrastructure for that to occur,

00:25:02.003 --> 00:25:07.888
we now need to get governments to understand how to push it further.

00:25:10.442 --> 00:25:15.617
The Information Society Directorate of the European Commission issued a report 18 months ago,

00:25:16.325 --> 00:25:22.630
in which they said that they could scan 1/6th of all the books in European libraries

00:25:23.292 --> 00:25:26.373
for the cost of 100 km of roadway.

00:25:27.543 --> 00:25:33.104
That meant, and it is still true, that for the cost of 600 km of road,

00:25:33.643 --> 00:25:38.027
in an economy that builds thousands of kilometers of roadway every year,

00:25:38.027 --> 00:25:45.073
every book in all European libraries could be available to the entire human race, it should be done.

00:25:45.458 --> 00:25:49.792
[shout of "Copyright" from audience]

00:25:49.792 --> 00:25:57.766
Remember that most of those books are in the public domain, before you shout copyright at me.

00:26:00.259 --> 00:26:07.002
Remember that the bulk of what constitutes human learning was not made recently,

00:26:07.187 --> 00:26:10.575
before you shout the copyright at me.

00:26:12.776 --> 00:26:23.543
We should move to a world in which all knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available.

00:26:23.543 --> 00:26:30.020
If we don't, we will stunt the innovation which permits further growth.

00:26:30.728 --> 00:26:33.533
That's a social requirement.

00:26:34.210 --> 00:26:37.784
The copyright bargain is not immutable.

00:26:38.277 --> 00:26:41.087
It is merely convenient.

00:26:42.102 --> 00:26:47.250
We do not have to commit suicide culturally or intellectually

00:26:47.250 --> 00:26:53.027
in order to maintain a bargain which does not even relevantly apply

00:26:53.027 --> 00:26:58.456
to almost all of important human knowledge in most fields.

00:26:59.010 --> 00:27:02.407
Plato is not owned by anybody.

00:27:04.961 --> 00:27:12.954
So here we are, asking ourselves what the educational systems of the 21st century will be like,

00:27:13.662 --> 00:27:19.083
and how they will socially distribute knowledge across the human race.

00:27:19.545 --> 00:27:21.228
I have a question for you.

00:27:21.444 --> 00:27:26.666
How many of the Einsteins who ever lived were allowed to learn physics?

00:27:27.942 --> 00:27:29.055
A couple.

00:27:30.118 --> 00:27:34.774
How many of the Shakespeares who ever lived, lived and died without learning to read and write?

00:27:35.713 --> 00:27:37.291
Almost all of them.

00:27:38.276 --> 00:27:41.802
With 7 billion people in the world right now, 3 billion of them are children;

00:27:42.495 --> 00:27:44.680
how many Einsteins do you want to throw away today?

00:27:46.880 --> 00:27:49.529
The universalization of access to knowledge,

00:27:49.529 --> 00:27:56.580
is the single-most important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet.

00:27:56.996 --> 00:28:04.273
Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout "copyright".

00:28:07.397 --> 00:28:10.802
So we are now looking at the second-order consequence

00:28:11.079 --> 00:28:15.917
of an understanding of how to conduct innovation under austerity.

00:28:15.917 --> 00:28:21.316
Expand access to the materials that create the ability to learn,

00:28:22.163 --> 00:28:30.997
adapt technology to permit the scientists below age 20 to conduct their experiments and share their results,

00:28:31.490 --> 00:28:38.147
permit the continuing growth of the information technology universe we created,

00:28:39.778 --> 00:28:43.493
by sharing, over the last quarter century,

00:28:44.447 --> 00:28:52.248
and we'd begin to experience something like the higher rates of innovation available,

00:28:52.864 --> 00:28:59.254
despite massive decreases in social investment occurring because of austerity.

00:29:01.624 --> 00:29:07.795
We also afford young people an opportunity to take their economic and professional destinies

00:29:07.795 --> 00:29:09.899
more into their own hands,

00:29:10.469 --> 00:29:16.813
an absolute requirement if we are to have social and political stability in the next generation.

00:29:17.613 --> 00:29:19.647
Nobody should be fooled

00:29:20.432 --> 00:29:28.082
about the prospects for social growth in societies where 50 percent of the people under 30 are unemployed.

00:29:30.143 --> 00:29:35.937
This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs.

00:29:36.384 --> 00:29:37.850
Everybody sees that.

00:29:38.805 --> 00:29:44.766
Governments are collectively throwing up their hands about what to do about the situation.

00:29:45.397 --> 00:29:51.648
Hence, the rapidity with which, in systems of proportional representation,

00:29:51.648 --> 00:29:55.455
young people are giving up on established political parties.

00:29:56.639 --> 00:30:03.410
When the Pirates can take 8.3% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein,

00:30:04.949 --> 00:30:11.256
it is already clear that young people realize that established political policy-making

00:30:11.380 --> 00:30:16.085
is not going to be directed at their future economic welfare.

00:30:17.116 --> 00:30:25.198
And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist

00:30:25.198 --> 00:30:29.315
that internet freedom and an end to snooping and control

00:30:29.315 --> 00:30:35.042
is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.

00:30:36.673 --> 00:30:43.131
Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy

00:30:43.131 --> 00:30:46.236
with whom we are directly in touch.

00:30:46.498 --> 00:30:53.561
That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.

00:30:54.131 --> 00:30:59.160
Young people around the world whether they are my law students about to get a law license,

00:30:59.499 --> 00:31:02.581
or computer engineers about to begin their practices,

00:31:02.581 --> 00:31:06.599
or artists, or musicians, or photographers,

00:31:06.599 --> 00:31:15.921
need more freedom in the net, and more tools with which to create innovative service delivery platforms for themselves.

00:31:16.691 --> 00:31:23.039
A challenge to which their elders would not have risen successfully in 1955,

00:31:23.532 --> 00:31:31.866
but we are new generation of human beings working under new circumstances, and those rules have changed.

00:31:32.082 --> 00:31:38.880
They know the rules have changed. The indignados in every square in Spain know the rules have changed.

00:31:40.865 --> 00:31:42.662
It's their governments that don't know.

00:31:46.447 --> 00:31:53.432
Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal autonomy.

00:31:54.417 --> 00:31:58.417
One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people,

00:31:58.417 --> 00:32:02.001
at least the young people I teach, about privacy,

00:32:02.601 --> 00:32:07.959
is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things.

00:32:09.083 --> 00:32:12.002
Privacy means secrecy, sometimes.

00:32:12.433 --> 00:32:19.520
That is to say, the content of a message is obscured to all but it's maker and intended recipient.

00:32:20.751 --> 00:32:23.398
Privacy means anonymity, sometimes.

00:32:23.568 --> 00:32:31.711
That means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscured.

00:32:33.219 --> 00:32:38.842
And there is a third aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy.

00:32:39.519 --> 00:32:44.803
It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make

00:32:44.803 --> 00:32:51.719
are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communications.

00:32:54.504 --> 00:33:00.916
There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth.

00:33:02.101 --> 00:33:05.193
It isn't because bankers live there.

00:33:06.362 --> 00:33:10.656
Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth.

00:33:11.518 --> 00:33:16.959
The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer,

00:33:17.667 --> 00:33:22.490
is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being.

00:33:23.352 --> 00:33:30.729
Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village,

00:33:31.253 --> 00:33:34.246
and the social control of the farm.

00:33:35.354 --> 00:33:39.903
"How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?"

00:33:39.903 --> 00:33:47.324
was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States.

00:33:49.171 --> 00:33:54.894
The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity

00:33:54.894 --> 00:34:00.200
and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living.

00:34:01.185 --> 00:34:02.742
We are closing it.

00:34:07.219 --> 00:34:08.416
Some years ago,

00:34:09.370 --> 00:34:15.786
to wit, at the beginning of 1995 we were having a debate at the Harvard Law School about Public Key Encryption.

00:34:16.571 --> 00:34:17.565
Two on two.

00:34:18.258 --> 00:34:22.571
On one side Jamie Gorelick, then the Deputy Attorney General of the United States,

00:34:22.571 --> 00:34:24.586
and Stewart Baker, then as now

00:34:24.586 --> 00:34:30.818
at Steptoe & Johnson when he isn't in the United States government making horrendous social policy.

00:34:32.003 --> 00:34:35.736
On the other side, Danny Weitzner, now in the White House, and me.

00:34:36.798 --> 00:34:42.388
And we spent the afternoon talking back and forth about whether we should have to escrow our

00:34:42.388 --> 00:34:44.654
keys with the United States government,

00:34:44.654 --> 00:34:48.368
whether the clipper chip was going to work and many other very interesting subjects

00:34:48.368 --> 00:34:50.591
now as obsolete as Babylonia.

00:34:52.053 --> 00:34:56.303
And after it was all over, we walked across the Harvard campus for dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club

00:34:56.303 --> 00:34:59.237
and on the way across the campus Jamie Gorelick said to me:

00:34:59.237 --> 00:35:03.604
"Eben, on the basis of nothing more than your public statements this afternoon

00:35:03.604 --> 00:35:07.721
I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations."

00:35:08.321 --> 00:35:10.440
In 1995 that was a joke.

00:35:11.071 --> 00:35:16.788
It was a joke in bad taste when told to a citizen by an official of the United States Justice Department,

00:35:16.788 --> 00:35:17.980
but it was a joke,

00:35:17.980 --> 00:35:21.512
and we all laughed because everybody knew you couldn't do that.

00:35:23.405 --> 00:35:24.666
So we ate our dinner,

00:35:25.605 --> 00:35:30.574
and the table got cleared and all the plates went away, and the port and walnuts got scattered around, and

00:35:31.021 --> 00:35:34.939
Stewart Baker looked up and said "alright, we'll let our hair down",

00:35:34.939 --> 00:35:36.371
and he had none then and he has none now,

00:35:36.371 --> 00:35:38.243
but "we'll let our hair down" Stewart said,

00:35:39.105 --> 00:35:41.729
"we're not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmerman.

00:35:42.560 --> 00:35:47.206
We've spent decades in a holding action against Public Key Encryption

00:35:47.206 --> 00:35:51.737
it's worked pretty well but it's almost over now, we're gonna let it happen."

00:35:52.844 --> 00:35:54.957
And then he looked around the table and he said,

00:35:55.573 --> 00:35:58.386
"but nobody here cares about anonymity do they?"

00:35:59.448 --> 00:36:01.617
And a cold chill went up my spine.

00:36:02.371 --> 00:36:04.898
And I thought, "OK, Stewart, I understand how it is.

00:36:05.222 --> 00:36:09.007
You're going to let there be Public Key Encryption because the bankers are going to need it.

00:36:09.838 --> 00:36:14.805
And you're going to spend the next 20 years trying to stop people from being anonymous ever again,

00:36:14.805 --> 00:36:17.484
and I'm going to spend those 20 years trying to stop you."

00:36:18.638 --> 00:36:24.156
So far I must say from my friend Mr. Baker has been doing better than I had hoped,

00:36:24.156 --> 00:36:27.189
and I have been doing even worse than I had feared.

00:36:27.882 --> 00:36:31.278
Partly because of the thug in a hoodie, and partly for other reasons.

00:36:32.770 --> 00:36:37.188
We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to be alone.

00:36:38.373 --> 00:36:41.956
We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to do your own thinking,

00:36:41.956 --> 00:36:45.382
in your own place, in your own way without anybody knowing.

00:36:47.706 --> 00:36:50.389
Somebody in this room just proved a couple of minutes ago

00:36:50.389 --> 00:36:56.222
that if he shops at a particular web-store using one browser, he gets a different price than on the other.

00:36:56.807 --> 00:36:59.768
Because one of the browsers is linked to his browsing history.

00:37:00.722 --> 00:37:06.922
Prices, offers, commodities, opportunities,

00:37:08.307 --> 00:37:13.253
are now being based upon the data mining of everything.

00:37:14.777 --> 00:37:20.490
A senior government official in this government said to me after the United States changed its rules

00:37:20.490 --> 00:37:25.323
about how long they keep information on everybody about whom nothing is suspected

00:37:25.323 --> 00:37:27.114
- you all do know about that right?

00:37:27.807 --> 00:37:32.457
Rainy Wednesday on the 21st of March, long after the close of business,

00:37:33.058 --> 00:37:37.358
Department of Justice and the DNI, that's the Director of National Intelligence,

00:37:37.358 --> 00:37:42.372
put out a joint press release announcing minor changes in the Ashcroft rules,

00:37:43.326 --> 00:37:49.065
including a minor change that says that all personally identifiable information in government databases

00:37:49.065 --> 00:37:57.266
at the National Center for Counter-Terrorism that are based around people of whom nothing is suspected,

00:37:57.790 --> 00:38:03.431
will no longer be retained as under the Ashcroft rules for a maximum of 180 days,

00:38:03.908 --> 00:38:09.093
the maximum has now been changed to 5 years, which is infinity.

00:38:10.278 --> 00:38:12.341
In fact I told my students in my classroom,

00:38:12.341 --> 00:38:16.791
the only reason they said 5 years was they couldn't get the sideways eight into the font [Laughs]

00:38:16.791 --> 00:38:20.041
for the press release,so they used an approximation.

00:38:22.241 --> 00:38:26.041
So I was talking to a senior official of this government about that outcome

00:38:26.041 --> 00:38:32.516
and he said well you know we've come to realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States.

00:38:33.870 --> 00:38:37.819
That's how we're going to connect new information to old information.

00:38:38.958 --> 00:38:43.369
I said let's just talk about the constitutional implications of this for a moment.

00:38:44.308 --> 00:38:48.055
You're talking about taking us from the society we have always known,

00:38:48.809 --> 00:38:51.631
which we quaintly refer to as a free society,

00:38:52.308 --> 00:38:57.786
to a society in which the United States government keeps a list of everybody every American knows.

00:38:58.910 --> 00:39:02.392
So if you're going to take us from what we used to call a free society

00:39:02.392 --> 00:39:09.727
to a society in which the US government keeps a list of everybody every American knows,

00:39:10.127 --> 00:39:12.933
what should be the constitutional procedure for doing this?

00:39:13.441 --> 00:39:16.456
Should we have, for example, a law?

00:39:17.610 --> 00:39:18.706
He just laughed.

00:39:19.891 --> 00:39:21.585
Because of course they didn't need a law.

00:39:22.309 --> 00:39:26.859
They did it with a press release on a rainy Wednesday night after everybody went home,

00:39:26.859 --> 00:39:28.361
and you live there now.

00:39:30.792 --> 00:39:37.210
Whether it is possible to have innovation under conditions of complete despotism

00:39:37.902 --> 00:39:39.557
is an interesting question.

00:39:40.727 --> 00:39:45.975
Right-wing Americans or maybe even center-right Americans,

00:39:45.975 --> 00:39:51.642
have long insisted that one of the problems with 20th century totalitarianism,

00:39:51.642 --> 00:39:54.569
from which they legitimately distinguish themselves,

00:39:55.016 --> 00:40:00.562
was that it eliminated the possibility of what they call free markets and innovation.

00:40:00.993 --> 00:40:03.443
We're about to test whether they were right.

00:40:05.843 --> 00:40:13.212
The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control.

00:40:14.489 --> 00:40:19.366
Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse,

00:40:20.043 --> 00:40:27.110
the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China

00:40:27.110 --> 00:40:30.578
have adopted essentially identical points of view.

00:40:30.578 --> 00:40:34.293
[Clapping]

00:40:34.293 --> 00:40:39.011
A robust social graph connecting government to everybody

00:40:39.011 --> 00:40:46.677
and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments fundamental policy

00:40:47.031 --> 00:40:55.136
with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as stability maintenance.

00:40:57.244 --> 00:41:02.394
It is true of course that they have different theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why,

00:41:02.394 --> 00:41:08.611
but the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.

00:41:09.826 --> 00:41:14.163
We need, we, who understand what is happening, need,

00:41:14.163 --> 00:41:16.445
to be very vocal about that.

00:41:18.984 --> 00:41:22.261
But it isn't just our civil liberties that are at stake,

00:41:22.261 --> 00:41:26.152
I shouldn't need to say that, that should be enough, but of course it isn't.

00:41:28.414 --> 00:41:36.713
We need to make clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and vibrancy

00:41:36.713 --> 00:41:39.720
of invention culture and discourse,

00:41:40.413 --> 00:41:44.612
that wide open robust and uninhibited public debate

00:41:44.612 --> 00:41:49.304
that the Supreme Court so loved in New York Times against Sullivan.

00:41:50.212 --> 00:41:56.713
And that freedom to tinker, to invent, to be different, to be non-conformist

00:41:56.713 --> 00:42:02.816
for which people have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity,

00:42:02.816 --> 00:42:07.942
and a chance to experiment with who they are, and what they can do.

00:42:08.896 --> 00:42:18.359
This more than anything else, is what sustains social vitality and economic growth in the 21st century.

00:42:19.914 --> 00:42:23.897
Of course we need anonymity for other reasons.

00:42:24.651 --> 00:42:30.380
Of course we are persuing something that might be appropriately described

00:42:30.380 --> 00:42:33.333
as protection for the integrity of the human soul.

00:42:35.595 --> 00:42:37.511
But that's not government's concern.

00:42:38.511 --> 00:42:45.175
It is precisely the glory of the way we understand civil society that that is not government's concern.

00:42:45.745 --> 00:42:53.524
It is precisely our commitment to the idea of the individual's development at her own pace,

00:42:54.078 --> 00:42:55.674
and in her own way,

00:42:56.028 --> 00:43:02.300
that has been the centerpiece of what we understood to be our society's fundamental commitment

00:43:02.300 --> 00:43:07.067
that means that the protection for the integrity of the human soul is our business,

00:43:07.067 --> 00:43:08.868
not the government's business.

00:43:10.715 --> 00:43:14.717
But government must attend to the material welfare of its citizens

00:43:14.717 --> 00:43:19.852
and it must attend to the long run good of the society they manage.

00:43:20.268 --> 00:43:24.133
And we must be clear to government that there is no tension

00:43:24.579 --> 00:43:30.427
between the maintenance of civil liberty in the form of the right to be let alone,

00:43:30.951 --> 00:43:36.881
there is no distinction between the civil liberty policy of assuring the right to be let alone,

00:43:36.881 --> 00:43:41.701
and the economic policy of securing innovation under austerity.

00:43:41.701 --> 00:43:44.065
They require the same thing.

00:43:44.712 --> 00:43:46.571
We need Free Software,

00:43:47.018 --> 00:43:49.304
we need Free Hardware we can hack on,

00:43:49.551 --> 00:43:56.447
we need Free Spectrum we can use to communicate with one another,without let or hindrance.

00:43:57.001 --> 00:44:04.435
We need to be able to educate and provide access to educational material to everyone on earth

00:44:04.435 --> 00:44:07.633
without regard to the ability to pay.

00:44:08.202 --> 00:44:17.408
We need to provide a pathway to an independent economic and intellectual life, for every young person.

00:44:18.685 --> 00:44:21.629
The technology we need, we have.

00:44:23.153 --> 00:44:29.231
I have spent some time and many people in this room, including Isaac have spent more time now,

00:44:29.293 --> 00:44:39.964
trying to make use of cheap, power efficient compact server computers, the size of AC chargers for mobile phones,

00:44:40.657 --> 00:44:47.973
which with the right software we can use to populate the net with robots that respect privacy,

00:44:48.835 --> 00:44:54.654
instead of the robots that disrespect privacy which we now carry in almost every pocket.

00:44:56.854 --> 00:45:05.599
We need to retrofit the first law of robotics into this society within the next few minutes or we're cooked.

00:45:07.061 --> 00:45:10.427
We can do that. That's civil innovation.

00:45:11.674 --> 00:45:19.079
We can help to continue the long lifetime of general purpose computers everybody can hack on.

00:45:19.803 --> 00:45:24.399
By using them, by needing them, by spreading them around.

00:45:25.153 --> 00:45:32.053
We can use our own force as consumers and technologists to deprecate

00:45:32.053 --> 00:45:35.929
closed networks and locked-down objects,

00:45:37.053 --> 00:45:44.469
but without clear guidance in public policy we will remain a tiny minority,

00:45:45.654 --> 00:45:48.718
8.3% let's say.

00:45:49.903 --> 00:45:58.746
Which will not be sufficient to lift us out of the slough into which the bankers have driven us.

00:46:00.623 --> 00:46:04.371
Innovation under austerity is our battle-cry.

00:46:05.371 --> 00:46:11.070
Not a battle-cry for the things we most care about, but the ones the other people most care about.

00:46:11.070 --> 00:46:15.487
Our entrée to social policy for the next five years,

00:46:15.487 --> 00:46:20.747
and our last chance to do in government

00:46:20.747 --> 00:46:26.228
what we have not been able to do by attempting to preserve our mere liberties.

00:46:26.844 --> 00:46:33.616
Which have been shamefully abused by our friends in government as well as by our adversaries.

00:46:34.355 --> 00:46:39.021
We have been taken to the cleaners with respect to our rights,

00:46:39.021 --> 00:46:42.670
and we have been taken to the cleaners with respect to everybody's money.

00:46:43.455 --> 00:46:48.048
I wish that I could say that the easiest thing to do was going to be to get our freedoms back,

00:46:48.772 --> 00:46:49.450
it isn't.

00:46:50.189 --> 00:46:56.071
Nobody will run in the election this year on the basis of the restoration of our civil liberties.

00:46:56.733 --> 00:47:00.683
But they will all talk about austerity and growth.

00:47:01.221 --> 00:47:04.880
And we must bring our message where they are.

00:47:06.480 --> 00:47:07.923
That's my first draft.

00:47:08.739 --> 00:47:13.253
Inadequate in every way, but at least a place to start.

00:47:14.238 --> 00:47:15.972
And if we have no place to start,

00:47:17.588 --> 00:47:18.437
we will lose.

00:47:19.422 --> 00:47:21.506
And our loss will be long.

00:47:22.322 --> 00:47:24.073
And the night will be very dark.

00:47:25.181 --> 00:47:26.440
Thank you very much.

00:47:26.440 --> 00:47:57.436
[Applause]

00:47:57.436 --> 00:48:00.123
Thank you that's very kind of you, now let's talk about it.

00:48:00.585 --> 00:48:01.764
[Laughter]

00:48:28.581 --> 00:48:30.430
[Oh, yeah I'll I,m sorry]

00:48:30.430 --> 00:48:34.468
[Some Murmuring]

00:48:35.914 --> 00:48:36.834
[Ok Thank you]

00:48:43.818 --> 00:48:45.365
Ahh we should begin,

00:48:45.365 --> 00:48:46.062
yeah.

00:48:48.401 --> 00:48:51.074
Not yet... Aha, that on.

00:48:51.074 --> 00:48:55.447
[Doc Searls]I'd like to begin this because, I hope I speak for a lot of the people here.

00:48:55.724 --> 00:49:00.532
That was not just one of the best speeches that I have ever heard,

00:49:01.086 --> 00:49:02.883
it's one of the most important.

00:49:04.007 --> 00:49:08.108
And it won't be unless we follow up on it,

00:49:08.508 --> 00:49:09.885
we act on it.

00:49:10.209 --> 00:49:14.192
I felt like... actually Elliot that sitted next to be to says he felt like

00:49:14.192 --> 00:49:17.792
this is an I Have a Dream speech and I think that's what it is.

00:49:17.792 --> 00:49:20.916
But I think Eben ended it with the nightmare.

00:49:21.624 --> 00:49:25.954
And if you weren't moved by the speech your frog is boiled.

00:49:26.724 --> 00:49:29.959
And I think our frogs have been boiling for a long time.

00:49:29.959 --> 00:49:36.667
I along with everybody else we aquiesce to prevailing conditions, whatever those happen to be.

00:49:37.051 --> 00:49:42.910
And they have gradually worsened over time, and in ways that we don't fully understand,

00:49:42.910 --> 00:49:45.917
and our lives are busy so we go about what we have to do.

00:49:46.825 --> 00:49:48.992
So, what I want to do is

00:49:48.992 --> 00:49:55.292
test this audience with participating with the Free Everything Movement

00:49:55.292 --> 00:49:59.009
that Eben has laid out for us, now.

00:49:59.009 --> 00:50:05.010
So, I don't see that just as a Q&A session but as all of use freely contributing

00:50:05.010 --> 00:50:10.777
to the framework that Eben has laid out, and that we've been part of for a long time.

00:50:10.777 --> 00:50:14.141
I love the way he included us in this. This is --

00:50:14.141 --> 00:50:15.842
there is natural selection here.

00:50:15.842 --> 00:50:18.035
This is a select group.

00:50:18.682 --> 00:50:22.242
David has done an amazing job of pulling in the right people together.

00:50:22.242 --> 00:50:25.443
The name of this event begins with Freedom,

00:50:25.443 --> 00:50:27.909
and I think that needs to be our end as well.

00:50:27.909 --> 00:50:32.241
So... and I have nothing more to add to such a fabulous talk.

00:50:33.287 --> 00:50:35.135
[Isaac Wilder] Eben I would like to ask you a question.

00:50:37.075 --> 00:50:42.187
I see a tension between Freedom and Conveinience.

00:50:43.111 --> 00:50:50.428
And I wonder how you see that tension playing out?

00:50:51.244 --> 00:51:02.004
I think you urged us to focus on innovation but I wonder if....

00:51:03.081 --> 00:51:12.962
and I think that does -- that's compelling to this audience, perhaps the policy makers,

00:51:13.593 --> 00:51:19.283
but, to the average user, convenience is an issue.

00:51:19.760 --> 00:51:21.082
[Eben Moglen] Yeah, it's true,

00:51:21.944 --> 00:51:29.807
which is not only the relation between technology and society, it's true about lots of other things as well.

00:51:32.376 --> 00:51:40.678
The constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman wrote a lengthy multi-volume history of the Constitution in the US,

00:51:40.678 --> 00:51:48.245
on the basic premise that most of the time, most people don't want to engage in

00:51:48.245 --> 00:51:51.161
deep thinking about politics and society.

00:51:51.161 --> 00:51:57.043
It only happens very occasionally, and the Founders of the American Republic, Bruce said,

00:51:57.043 --> 00:52:02.988
tried in the Federalist structure to take advantage of those occasional moments,

00:52:02.988 --> 00:52:05.717
when people want to pay attention.

00:52:05.779 --> 00:52:12.644
But here again, and I focus on this because the demographics are so important,

00:52:12.844 --> 00:52:17.828
that sense, of convenience being more important than other values,

00:52:17.828 --> 00:52:21.625
moment by moment is more true of grown-ups than it is for children.

00:52:22.979 --> 00:52:26.195
I go all around the world, I talk to goverments about all sorts of things

00:52:26.195 --> 00:52:29.530
connected with technology of 21st century society,

00:52:29.530 --> 00:52:34.763
and I hear from people, from presidents to ministers, to local planning commitees,

00:52:34.763 --> 00:52:40.245
all sorts of stories about the terrible social problems their cultures and communities face.

00:52:40.245 --> 00:52:44.895
And I find my self often saying "Yes, you're right. This is a really really horrible problem.

00:52:44.895 --> 00:52:49.412
It's extraordinary difficult and it requiress immense amounts of energy to deal with.

00:52:49.412 --> 00:52:53.512
You need the strongest social force possible to deal with this.

00:52:53.512 --> 00:52:58.854
And the strongest social force ever, available, anywhere is the curiosity of children.

00:52:58.978 --> 00:53:00.928
You need to harness it."

00:53:00.928 --> 00:53:06.032
We have actually both lessons. The thing you call a tension, right?

00:53:06.032 --> 00:53:08.145
It's a tension indeed.

00:53:08.145 --> 00:53:14.680
Because it is true that grown ups in their busy lives find themselves willing to do anything that works,

00:53:14.680 --> 00:53:17.893
and if you hand them a box with an F-Button on it they'll push it,

00:53:18.263 --> 00:53:23.296
whether it costs them or not, and whether it connects them a great big

00:53:23.296 --> 00:53:26.114
man-in-the-middle-attack on their social lives or not,

00:53:26.114 --> 00:53:29.447
or whether their friends are ratting them out of the weekends to their employers,

00:53:29.447 --> 00:53:31.219
they pay very little attention.

00:53:31.219 --> 00:53:32.565
It's now.

00:53:33.181 --> 00:53:36.183
But you give a thing to an 8-year-old and it's not like that anymore.

00:53:36.614 --> 00:53:38.413
He's got plenty of time.

00:53:38.413 --> 00:53:41.896
You give a 12-year-old a thing like that and she's ready to take it apart.

00:53:41.896 --> 00:53:44.761
She's not thinking about convenience, she's thinking about learning.

00:53:45.115 --> 00:53:46.597
She's doing science.

00:53:47.197 --> 00:53:48.793
She's playing around.

00:53:49.363 --> 00:53:54.023
And I have seen in more places in the world that I can think to name,

00:53:54.253 --> 00:53:59.394
that force of those children, fooling around with computers and doing amazing things.

00:53:59.871 --> 00:54:01.565
You see it everywhere you'd go.

00:54:02.319 --> 00:54:04.649
So I believe the tension is there.

00:54:04.649 --> 00:54:10.140
I believe usability is a crucial problem in building tools for privacy in Freedom.

00:54:10.140 --> 00:54:14.822
FreedomBox, the stack of software we need to make for all those little objects in the world,

00:54:14.822 --> 00:54:20.739
you know this even better than I do, it's partly about function, but it's mostly about integration and usability.

00:54:20.739 --> 00:54:25.240
We've done all the hard work. My laptop, your laptop, we're pretty safe.

00:54:25.240 --> 00:54:30.005
The problem is how do we make this work for real people with real, busy, daily lives.

00:54:30.005 --> 00:54:32.526
So the tension's there but the answer's there too.

00:54:32.526 --> 00:54:34.604
We need to empower children.

00:54:34.604 --> 00:54:40.342
And part of what is wrong with the technology is the extent to which they are becoming not inventors but consumers.

00:54:40.789 --> 00:54:43.788
If that process is completed, we really are sunk.

00:54:46.204 --> 00:54:49.036
[Doc Searls] Why don't we go back and forth with both sides over here, first .

00:54:49.390 --> 00:54:50.861
[Michael Nelson] Mike Nelson of Georgetown University.

00:54:51.723 --> 00:54:54.191
I have at least 15 different questions that I'd like to ask you,

00:54:54.638 --> 00:54:57.742
starting with encryptions as I was
[Eben Moglen]I remember...

00:54:57.742 --> 00:55:00.797
[Michael Nelson] Stuart Baker's best friend, from the White House.
[Eben Moglen] Yeah Yeah

00:55:01.013 --> 00:55:05.495
It made things very hard for me, Mike, I'm really glad it's not true anymore. It's isn't true anymore, right?

00:55:05.788 --> 00:55:06.910
[Laughter]

00:55:07.125 --> 00:55:09.389
[Michael Nelson] I would like to urge you to run for Congress,

00:55:09.389 --> 00:55:13.237
preferably by moving to Palm Springs and running against Mary Bono Mack,


00:55:15.144 --> 00:55:17.543
[Eben Moglen] [laughs] I don't think they would like me in Palm Springs, much.

00:55:18.190 --> 00:55:21.423
[Doc Searls] But the thing I hope you'll do after that speech,

00:55:21.423 --> 00:55:27.123
which I agree is sort of like the I Have a Dream speech, is to actually engage your critics.

00:55:27.123 --> 00:55:31.741
I mean the speech is great, and the YouTube video would be seen by thousands of people,

00:55:31.741 --> 00:55:33.559
mostly your friends and supporters.

00:55:33.943 --> 00:55:35.648
I think you need to engage your critics.

00:55:35.648 --> 00:55:41.673
And we need something like the federalists papers, where we have the two big questions debated from both sides,

00:55:41.673 --> 00:55:46.450
and we get both parties -- both viewpoints expressed.

00:55:46.450 --> 00:55:49.549
But I would like to ask one quick, very specific question.

00:55:50.057 --> 00:55:52.323
Because I really think the first part of your speech

00:55:52.323 --> 00:55:58.673
about general purpose computing and user-centric computing is really where we have to start.

00:55:58.673 --> 00:56:01.925
And I would like to have your assessment , and anyone else's assessment,

00:56:01.925 --> 00:56:08.322
as to why Nicholas Negroponte in the One Laptop Per Child which was based on the same principles...

00:56:08.507 --> 00:56:14.947
empowering the children, building open source, creating things from the ground up, why that didn't happen?

00:56:14.947 --> 00:56:19.349
Even though tens of millions of dollars were invested and lots of people bought it.

00:56:20.042 --> 00:56:24.571
Why didn't that... what was missing there? And how can we not have the same problem this time around?

00:56:24.925 --> 00:56:28.114
[Eben Moglen] Yeah, well, Nick has been my best friend too sometimes, um,

00:56:28.591 --> 00:56:31.147
which makes it a little hard to answer the question.

00:56:32.056 --> 00:56:36.175
Hardware is difficult, right? And software is easy.

00:56:36.175 --> 00:56:39.475
That's why the FreedomBox isn't a box, it's just some software,

00:56:39.475 --> 00:56:44.322
because we can make it better, quicker, cheaper and we don't have to bite off all the problems.

00:56:46.259 --> 00:56:49.391
Two things happened as a consequence of One Laptop Per Child.

00:56:49.391 --> 00:56:53.109
The IT industry around the world realized that there was a thing that was better

00:56:53.109 --> 00:56:56.726
to make the laptops with a higher profit margin and they started making them.

00:56:56.726 --> 00:57:02.275
So Nick in fact proved my point on that side pretty well., no failure there.

00:57:02.275 --> 00:57:05.189
He conducted innovation with tiny amounts of money,

00:57:05.189 --> 00:57:11.406
which capitalism in its biggest globules wasn't going to get to because it was too risk averse to try.

00:57:11.822 --> 00:57:17.079
So, in one sense it panned out, it's just that it panned out as more products for consumers.

00:57:17.326 --> 00:57:23.593
The second thing is that Nick tried to do something really really important with mesh networking,

00:57:23.593 --> 00:57:27.609
and it was as another friend of ours very close to the thing said:

00:57:27.609 --> 00:57:29.531
it was a wonderful failed experiment..

00:57:30.193 --> 00:57:31.376
It didn't work.

00:57:31.376 --> 00:57:36.716
It worked great in the lab but it didn't work real well in Montevideo and it worked even less well in Peru,

00:57:36.716 --> 00:57:39.260
and after a while everybody went back to:

00:57:39.260 --> 00:57:41.919
Well, let's have a classroom server and use Wi-Fi.

00:57:42.427 --> 00:57:49.790
And this -- and this is the part of the thing that I was really trying to talk about in the big broad general way, right?

00:57:49.975 --> 00:57:50.969
We need mesh.

00:57:51.708 --> 00:57:58.377
We need a way of doing communication which is not based around operater-centric architecture.

00:57:58.377 --> 00:58:00.910
Is the FCC going to do that for us? No.

00:58:00.910 --> 00:58:06.077
You want to engage my critics. They were bought decades ago, right?

00:58:06.077 --> 00:58:12.593
So now we are in a situation in which if there is one man in this room, Dwayne Hendricks,

00:58:12.593 --> 00:58:16.841
there is one man in this room who might help us to figure out what we're gonna do about this.

00:58:16.841 --> 00:58:22.029
We must have build-it-yourself networking that really works.

00:58:22.029 --> 00:58:24.678
Nick was a visionary and he tried.

00:58:24.678 --> 00:58:29.635
And if it had been ready then, we would be living in a different world now.

00:58:30.051 --> 00:58:31.260
But it wasn't.

00:58:31.260 --> 00:58:36.278
I think that's technical failure of an honorable and important kind.

00:58:36.278 --> 00:58:42.427
I think he conducted a vast innovative experiment and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams,

00:58:42.427 --> 00:58:45.925
but the other guys ran away with the profits as usual,

00:58:46.310 --> 00:58:48.897
and the one peace we really really needed

00:58:48.897 --> 00:58:54.911
which was communications technology that deprives the centralized network operator of power,

00:58:54.911 --> 00:58:56.446
we weren't ready for .

00:58:56.446 --> 00:59:00.162
Now we have more closed network than open network,

00:59:00.162 --> 00:59:06.278
more people using proprietary closed forms of somewhat like the Internet,

00:59:06.278 --> 00:59:07.631
than the Internet itself,

00:59:08.278 --> 00:59:11.318
and we've lost big in that process.

00:59:11.595 --> 00:59:14.429
Now it's a harder thing to deal with.

00:59:14.429 --> 00:59:15.298
I don't....

00:59:16.329 --> 00:59:19.211
I have the feeling, as in some any other ways in life,

00:59:19.211 --> 00:59:21.447
that I've been guided by my friend Lary Lessig,

00:59:22.184 --> 00:59:24.547
running for Congress is what I'm not going to do.

00:59:24.547 --> 00:59:25.411
[Laughter]

00:59:25.411 --> 00:59:30.412
Do you have another suggestion about how to engage critics, Mike?

00:59:30.412 --> 00:59:34.045
I would love to take one. But that's not one that I wanna take.

00:59:34.045 --> 00:59:36.972
[Michael Nelson] No, the Federalists papers analogy was a serious one.
[Eben Moglen]Allright.

00:59:37.388 --> 00:59:42.194
[Michael Nelson] It means something every week. With a critic who will point out your fallacies so you could point out their fallacies.

00:59:42.194 --> 00:59:46.312
[Eben Moglen] Alright. Let's do it. Let's find the ones who want to engage.

00:59:46.312 --> 00:59:51.959
[Doc Searls] We have 27 minutes left, so try to make it quick. It's not much time.

00:59:51.959 --> 00:59:56.397
[Audience member] My question would be, what do you mean by this wallwart that could serve as a server?

00:59:56.397 --> 00:59:59.729
And how close are we to the hardware? Why do you want to have it?

00:59:59.729 --> 01:00:05.263
Let me preface the question by saying that, in order to do the Onion router,

01:00:06.478 --> 01:00:09.746
you need to be able to have your own server.

01:00:09.746 --> 01:00:14.466
In order to do anonymization you need to have your own server ability.

01:00:14.466 --> 01:00:21.458
In order to build an network of our own within the network that is increasingly out of our control,

01:00:21.458 --> 01:00:25.862
we need to be able to upload and download from our own servers.

01:00:25.862 --> 01:00:31.881
I often wonder if the amount of energy being put into

01:00:31.881 --> 01:00:39.781
prevention of file sharing out of all proportion to the economic value of any copyright infridgement that's going on,

01:00:39.781 --> 01:00:47.330
is a sign that those in power understand that they must stop our ability to be our own nodes.

01:00:47.330 --> 01:00:49.610
Is that resonant with you? Thank you.

01:00:49.899 --> 01:00:52.076
[Eben Moglen] Why don't you talk about this

01:00:52.138 --> 01:00:55.731
[Isaac Wilder] So, there are two things in play here.

01:00:55.731 --> 01:00:58.896
There's logical peer to peer, overlay networks,

01:00:59.359 --> 01:01:04.354
and there is what we call material peer to peer, physical material networks.

01:01:04.847 --> 01:01:08.814
And there is a complex interplay between those forces.

01:01:09.014 --> 01:01:16.539
So the FreedomBox tends to be a tool that participates in that logical network,

01:01:17.063 --> 01:01:20.058
no matter what its connection to Internet is,

01:01:20.797 --> 01:01:25.442
and can serve as a seed of a material physical network.

01:01:25.781 --> 01:01:29.765
Now your question was, how close are we? What needs to be done?

01:01:29.765 --> 01:01:34.576
As Eben said, the basic tools are there.

01:01:34.915 --> 01:01:36.823
We know how to build overlay networks.

01:01:36.823 --> 01:01:44.759
There's been incredible advances over the last decade in distributed computational systems.

01:01:45.698 --> 01:01:53.074
So that's there. It really at this point is a matter of integrating those tools in a way that makes them usable.

01:01:53.782 --> 01:01:59.865
And, as developers, that's something, we are not always great at.

01:02:00.050 --> 01:02:09.838
But it's certainly tractable, and we are at the point where these pieces just need to be fit together.

01:02:10.085 --> 01:02:17.150
The hardware is in production, and the software is in

01:02:18.166 --> 01:02:22.317
not quite alpha stage, I guess you would say, but there are building blocks there.

01:02:22.733 --> 01:02:26.584
[Eben Moglen]The world is gonna fill up over there in the next 6 or 7 years

01:02:26.584 --> 01:02:30.933
with small, very inexpensive, very powerful servers,

01:02:30.933 --> 01:02:36.032
which are based around ARM chips and fit in a thing that fits in your hand,

01:02:36.032 --> 01:02:41.711
and uses small amounts of power that you could really run of a battery array.

01:02:41.835 --> 01:02:50.194
The FreedomBox project, which we started talking about in early 2010 and got serious about in early 2011,

01:02:50.671 --> 01:02:55.979
is basically a pro-privacy router stack based on Debian

01:02:56.194 --> 01:02:59.119
that fits in servers like that.

01:02:59.596 --> 01:03:02.714
James Vasile of the Open Internet Tools Project,

01:03:02.714 --> 01:03:06.113
who used to work for me at Software Freedom Law Center, and who just left the room,

01:03:06.113 --> 01:03:09.482
has one with him this morning he told me.

01:03:09.806 --> 01:03:13.528
Isaac and hundreds of other, really good people around the world,

01:03:13.528 --> 01:03:17.632
including Jacob Appelbaum of Tor, are working on FreedomBox.

01:03:17.632 --> 01:03:21.948
The Tor project would be developing on FreedomBox stack in future.

01:03:23.024 --> 01:03:30.047
Our goal is to put a small cheap object that replaces your wireless router

01:03:30.047 --> 01:03:36.400
in as many places, homes, and businesses, and safe-deposit boxes in the world as we can get,

01:03:36.507 --> 01:03:40.413
running software which makes secure peer to peer connections

01:03:40.413 --> 01:03:47.714
between people whose identities have been assured in a civil society web of trust-like way,

01:03:47.914 --> 01:03:54.814
and which can provide a soft migration away from centralized social networking tools

01:03:54.814 --> 01:03:59.020
like Facebook and Flickr and so on,

01:03:59.282 --> 01:04:05.232
towards systems which actually share only with the people you really mean to share with,

01:04:05.232 --> 01:04:09.999
and which resist the effort of other people to see what's going on.

01:04:09.999 --> 01:04:17.532
Some of that work is work we all use all the time based around Tunneling VPNs, and other simple stuff.

01:04:17.532 --> 01:04:21.083
Some of this is the Onion routing infrastructure we are building.

01:04:21.083 --> 01:04:27.948
Some of it is efforts to increase our meshablity by spreading a lot of stuff

01:04:27.948 --> 01:04:31.285
which is both base station and client around the world.

01:04:31.285 --> 01:04:38.482
Some of it is efforts to take advantage of skunkworks projects now inside the large IT vendors,

01:04:38.482 --> 01:04:44.998
who also know that small ARM-based servers are gonna replace the heavy iron they've been selling,

01:04:44.998 --> 01:04:49.716
but the real net of it, the bottom seed of it is --

01:04:49.716 --> 01:04:52.365
Control your own server. Keep your own logs,

01:04:52.365 --> 01:04:59.584
Do it in a a way which resists tampering from external parties who aren't working in your interest.

01:04:59.584 --> 01:05:04.967
Create some robots who really do have the first law of robotics inside them,

[Doc Searls] [chuckles]

01:05:04.967 --> 01:05:10.806
[Eben Moglen] And put them at the portals between private networks and the open public net.

01:05:10.883 --> 01:05:18.366
If we do that, we begin, as Isaac says, to interleave the virtual peer to peerage of the net

01:05:18.366 --> 01:05:23.376
with some actual hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions,

01:05:23.376 --> 01:05:28.933
ultimately billions of peers, that run in the interests of the people who own them.

01:05:28.933 --> 01:05:29.812
[David Isenberg] Isaac and

01:05:29.966 --> 01:05:37.591
[Terry Nelson] I would like to introduce my self. I'm Terry Nelson, no relation to Mike Nelson [unintelligible]

01:05:38.899 --> 01:05:44.217
[David Isenberg]Guys, Isaac and Eben, do you know Tim Shepard?

01:05:44.217 --> 01:05:45.617
[Isaac] We met last night.

01:05:45.617 --> 01:05:54.685
Ok, good. The reason that I put these kinds of things together is that people like you can meet people like Tim.

01:05:54.685 --> 01:06:01.951
Tim's MIT PhD thesis was on the practical,

01:06:03.074 --> 01:06:06.845
the applied mathematics, and for that matter the physics

01:06:06.845 --> 01:06:14.376
of Mesh Networking, and he is an early pioneer, this was 1990-what?.

01:06:15.437 --> 01:06:16.840
[Tim Shepard] 1995

01:06:16.840 --> 01:06:22.530
[David Isenberg] 95 ok. With David Clark at MIT. You guys really ought to talk.

01:06:22.884 --> 01:06:25.634
[Eben Moglen] I still have location-based routing. I wish it could work.

01:06:25.634 --> 01:06:27.151
[Small Laugh]

01:06:27.920 --> 01:06:32.093
[Preston Ray] Hi Eben, my name is Preston Ray, I'm with the Open Technology Institute.

01:06:32.093 --> 01:06:37.036
You mentioned towards the interview speech, about how the community people in this room, and the people,

01:06:37.036 --> 01:06:42.919
the community we are part of, has the knowledge, understands the technology, grasps,

01:06:42.919 --> 01:06:46.400
appreciates and evangelizes the philosophy that you are talking about,

01:06:46.400 --> 01:06:49.719
to make free collaborative education to all,

01:06:49.719 --> 01:06:55.345
to solve our world's problems of economic stagnation, innovation stagnation, austerity.

01:06:56.499 --> 01:07:00.668
You know, we should recognize that we are also very much a community of privilege

01:07:00.668 --> 01:07:06.846
in many ways, not only of our grasp of knowledge, and not only of our grasp, you know,

01:07:06.846 --> 01:07:12.057
of the tools and everything that makes these things work, but the backgrounds we come from,

01:07:12.057 --> 01:07:16.679
we are able to afford this conference, and many other privileges that I won't go into.

01:07:17.140 --> 01:07:21.694
What do you feel our responsibility, a role is in,

01:07:22.926 --> 01:07:25.617
bringing about the world you are talking about,

01:07:25.617 --> 01:07:32.170
if we are indeed only 8,3% of the world we can't assume to represent the entire world,

01:07:32.170 --> 01:07:35.369
but what is our role in that entire ...

01:07:35.369 --> 01:07:37.269
[Eben Moglen] I doubt that we are 8.3% of the world.

01:07:37.269 --> 01:07:40.868
What supprises we are 8.3% of Schleswig-Holstein [Laughs].

01:07:40.868 --> 01:07:44.502
But let me say a little bit about.

01:07:44.502 --> 01:07:52.202
I'm been engaged for several years now, with a community computing center located in a slum in Bangalore,

01:07:52.202 --> 01:07:58.770
the original center was located in a cluster of people who have been living in that spot,

01:07:58.770 --> 01:08:03.619
first as a untouchable people, now as merely poor people for very long time,

01:08:04.326 --> 01:08:06.501
-2200 people with only one toilet-

01:08:07.808 --> 01:08:12.828
Where some young communists working for the big IT firms in Bangalore,

01:08:12.828 --> 01:08:19.064
fished out computer out of the garbage, put free software open, and opened a computer center in that slum.

01:08:19.725 --> 01:08:26.863
And what came out was not so much people who wanted to learn how to use an office suite and get an office job.

01:08:27.371 --> 01:08:33.420
It turned out they were painters using the GIMP to paint the pictures one pixel at a time,

01:08:33.420 --> 01:08:36.856
and they were singers, and they were writers.

01:08:37.287 --> 01:08:45.488
They were people whose communities had never had so much as the possibility of dreaming of any of those things,

01:08:45.488 --> 01:08:47.959
but that didn't matter the kids, because they were kids.

01:08:48.022 --> 01:08:52.762
They just did whatever and it was it has changed many people's lives.

01:08:54.501 --> 01:08:57.745
My financial support for that activity has been rather minor,

01:08:57.745 --> 01:09:02.910
because they'd not take more money that they can use in order to avoid corruption.

01:09:03.772 --> 01:09:09.272
And my moral support has been, I'd say, grossly inadequate.

01:09:09.703 --> 01:09:15.403
But nonetheless, working together, we've achieved some quite interesting things

01:09:15.403 --> 01:09:20.287
which have changed dozens of lives and which have produced some teachers,

01:09:20.287 --> 01:09:23.891
so they can go out and change a bunch of lives more.

01:09:23.891 --> 01:09:28.722
I try to work really quite heavily in my classroom

01:09:28.722 --> 01:09:35.638
to remind American Law Students who are genuinely sagging at an ease a little bit with all their debt,

01:09:35.638 --> 01:09:40.750
to think of themselves as privileged in the way you say, and it's important to do.

01:09:40.750 --> 01:09:45.246
But even more important maybe that recognizing our difference

01:09:45.246 --> 01:09:50.208
from the other people in the world who have so much less is recognizing our similarity.

01:09:51.131 --> 01:09:56.654
When given the opportunity, those Einsteins in the street are just like our Einsteins.

01:09:56.654 --> 01:10:03.029
There are better than us. Smarter, stronger, more capable of ferreting out the mysteries of the universe.

01:10:03.721 --> 01:10:08.473
We really need to begin at the stage of life that we are pretty equal. That is when we are children.

01:10:08.473 --> 01:10:11.725
And we really need to make possible for those children

01:10:11.725 --> 01:10:17.605
to experiment and learn and grow, regardless of their state of economic deprivation.

01:10:17.605 --> 01:10:21.771
The beauty of the zero marginal cost revolution in human affairs,

01:10:21.771 --> 01:10:26.507
is we can put all knowledge, all culture, all music, all art,

01:10:26.507 --> 01:10:31.208
all everything that matters to the development of the human mind, everywhere, all the time.

01:10:31.655 --> 01:10:40.015
In the Sudharshan Layout in Bangalore, 2200 people, one toilet, 1700 children and 914 mobile phones.

01:10:40.323 --> 01:10:45.558
- Everyone of these mobile phone which is carried by the poorest of the poor in many societies,

01:10:45.558 --> 01:10:49.198
and which it would be carried by everybody in the human race by 2050 -

01:10:49.198 --> 01:10:52.672
Everyone of those devices can have every book, and every play,

01:10:52.672 --> 01:10:57.511
and every piece of music, every equation, every experiment on it.

01:10:57.665 --> 01:10:59.773
And every brain will grow.

01:10:59.773 --> 01:11:04.632
Try that and we can worry less about deprivation and more about progress.

01:11:07.216 --> 01:11:10.603
[Little Applause]

01:11:12.141 --> 01:11:18.301
[Isaac Wilder] The will of humanity towards total connectedness is at manifest at this point.

01:11:19.040 --> 01:11:24.751
And I said it before and I'll say it again, the fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this.

01:11:26.290 --> 01:11:29.601
Will we be enslaved by our technology, or liberated by it?

01:11:30.525 --> 01:11:37.867
As technologists, as those privileged enough to understand what exists now and what is coming,

01:11:39.437 --> 01:11:43.951
I viewe our responsibility as to making it sure that is liberation technology

01:11:43.951 --> 01:11:45.864
instead of enslavement technology?

01:11:46.033 --> 01:11:50.429
And I think everyone in this room understands that but,

01:11:51.644 --> 01:11:53.752
the priviledge does come with responsibility.

01:11:54.060 --> 01:11:57.059
And it's to sound that alarm.

01:11:59.705 --> 01:12:01.462
[Doc Searls] Very god. Over here.

01:12:01.462 --> 01:12:03.774
[Nick Grossman] Hi, Nick Grossman from MIT Media Lab.

01:12:03.774 --> 01:12:09.875
At first, I thought your thoughts about why cities are innovative and why interesting thing happen,

01:12:09.875 --> 01:12:15.675
why people go there and how autonomy.... What autonomy is and why that matters.

01:12:15.675 --> 01:12:21.076
Very compelling, super-relevant Internet, and I think it's a metaphor that will only gain in momentum.

01:12:21.076 --> 01:12:23.615
So, I thank you for laying that out. And I also agree...

01:12:23.615 --> 01:12:29.023
So getting back to how we convince our governments to go in this general direction.

01:12:29.023 --> 01:12:35.108
I agree that innovation is a very powerful frame.My question is the...

01:12:36.031 --> 01:12:39.992
the line between full truly open innovation , you are talking about it,

01:12:39.992 --> 01:12:41.673
and sort of semi-open innovation as new-ons???.

01:12:41.673 --> 01:12:44.158
I think everyone in this room gets it.

01:12:44.158 --> 01:12:45.292
But it's easy to say:

01:12:45.292 --> 01:12:47.860
Look at how many apps you can build on the facebook platform,

01:12:47.860 --> 01:12:52.045
or look at how many, you know, how many things on the iPhone platform, and that's innovation.

01:12:52.492 --> 01:12:57.365
And when you are talking to Ś whoever, you know that Ś there is a distinction there.

01:12:57.365 --> 01:13:04.959
And so, what do you see is the best way illustrate that and try and walk the line between Ś

01:13:05.557 --> 01:13:11.614
you know ... fully open and kind of open and is that Ś is possible to do that?

01:13:11.614 --> 01:13:14.877
[Eben Moglen] Well you know we went down this road before.

01:13:14.877 --> 01:13:19.674
Because as The Free Software Movement was gaining strength,

01:13:19.674 --> 01:13:26.461
Microsoft was creating that enormous ecosystem of Windows Developers, of which it was justly proud.

01:13:27.015 --> 01:13:30.632
They were justly proud because they gave them control of the API,

01:13:30.632 --> 01:13:33.683
but the developers were justly proud of the software they wrote.

01:13:33.683 --> 01:13:37.232
They were only two things Ś [Laugher]

01:13:37.232 --> 01:13:40.713
One was it was totally dependent on the Microsoft Ecosystem,

01:13:40.713 --> 01:13:43.649
which as ???Richard Claxer said was K-Mart software.

01:13:44.433 --> 01:13:48.940
And the other was that they were hampered by the fact that they have to invent everything themselves.

01:13:49.464 --> 01:13:53.853
In order to get in, you had to buy the SDK and then you were alone in your garage,

01:13:53.853 --> 01:13:55.865
trying to make something great.

01:13:55.865 --> 01:14:01.665
But the whole system have been biased in such a way that you couldn't share and you couldn't learn.

01:14:01.665 --> 01:14:09.105
And so it didn't turn out to be as good as the C shell, that created a generation of computer scientists.

01:14:09.105 --> 01:14:14.915
So they got us a bunch of Windows developers, they made a bunch of stuff and we went fine.

01:14:14.915 --> 01:14:19.222
And now the Microsoft is closing the code museum and freezing them out.

01:14:19.775 --> 01:14:23.265
That's the problem, isn't, it with proprietary innovation.

01:14:23.265 --> 01:14:27.051
It runs according to the strength of the business model and then it fails.

01:14:27.051 --> 01:14:32.417
The reason we beat Microsoft was (that) we were even less subject to evolutionary data,

01:14:32.417 --> 01:14:34.189
and they were and they knew it.

01:14:34.235 --> 01:14:38.560
That's what the strength was of the GPL, and I'm not so happy

01:14:38.560 --> 01:14:44.565
if ??? decides that it doesn't need to keep some copyleft stuff at the middle of it.

01:14:44.565 --> 01:14:48.434
Because it closes the end on innovation.

01:14:48.434 --> 01:14:50.265
The important thing about innovation,

01:14:50.265 --> 01:14:55.306
-and we say it when we are in places which I have the grandeur of MIT to say it in -

01:14:55.306 --> 01:14:59.000
is, it's a long run business. Not a short run business.

01:14:59.185 --> 01:15:02.767
Proprietary software development whether for the Windows Ecosystem

01:15:02.767 --> 01:15:06.809
or the iOS Ecosystem is a game of base hits, not home runs.

01:15:07.117 --> 01:15:10.884
You can put a neat app on a thing and it's neat and we really love it,

01:15:10.884 --> 01:15:13.825
and why don't you share it with us so we can do better?

01:15:13.825 --> 01:15:15.796
Oh, the SDK terms this,

01:15:15.796 --> 01:15:19.300
and the App Store terms that and no sharing allowed

01:15:19.300 --> 01:15:21.934
because Steve Jobs slept here once,

01:15:21.934 --> 01:15:27.402
and nobody else can sleep in any bed he ever slept in, unless they have his permission and all that stuff.

01:15:27.402 --> 01:15:32.117
It's OK, it's B+ innovation, but we can do better.

01:15:32.117 --> 01:15:36.734
And the point of being at experts or inspirers of innovation

01:15:36.734 --> 01:15:41.552
is to help those bright young people to do stuff that lasts for the long term.

01:15:41.706 --> 01:15:44.585
And you can explain in that frame,

01:15:44.585 --> 01:15:47.653
why the political economy of closed end innovation

01:15:47.653 --> 01:15:51.324
isn't really where you want to put your good idea when you are 17.

01:15:51.324 --> 01:15:55.867
If Jimmy Wales have gone to work for Encyclopedia Brittanica or Compton,

01:15:55.867 --> 01:16:02.687
I'm sure they'd be paying him a decent salary , and that's become what innovation was supposed to be.

01:16:02.687 --> 01:16:04.114
It gets you a job.

01:16:04.668 --> 01:16:08.491
That's when we are really in trouble. Thomas Edison didn't want a job.

01:16:08.491 --> 01:16:11.218
[comment in background]

01:16:11.218 --> 01:16:12.062
Fair Enough.

01:16:12.386 --> 01:16:15.591
I'm not going to speak in favor of Mr. Edison as an individual.

01:16:15.591 --> 01:16:16.939
I'm no in speak...[Laugh]

01:16:16.939 --> 01:16:23.334
I'm only going to speak in favor of the idea of innovation is for the long run, and that's what counts.

01:16:23.334 --> 01:16:29.768
And if you go to a guy who sells you your life back in return for your idea, that's not long run.

01:16:33.335 --> 01:16:37.088
[Doc Searls] So we had 10 minutes here, and we've got I think five people left, so John quick.

01:16:37.504 --> 01:16:41.255
[Joe Plotkin] I'll be quick as I see Chris Savage and Harold. I want to hear their questions as well.

01:16:41.379 --> 01:16:47.058
John Plotkin from NYC Wireless, once again, Eben, great talk, always I enjoy it here when you talk.

01:16:47.058 --> 01:16:49.151
A couple unrelated points.

01:16:49.151 --> 01:16:54.403
One, when we talked about convenience vs control,

01:16:54.403 --> 01:16:56.487
you know, everybody is using the wireless microphone,

01:16:56.487 --> 01:17:02.351
they come out of that is spectrum, everyone should be aware of in this room at least.

01:17:02.351 --> 01:17:07.835
But more, I want to give you a chance to talk and end in more of an optimistic note.

01:17:07.835 --> 01:17:15.451
I see that the Maker Movement and all the hardware hacking that's going on, as tremendously optimistic for the future.

01:17:15.451 --> 01:17:18.504
I see... you are in a maker fair and you see kids,

01:17:19.504 --> 01:17:22.131
doing exactly what you described, playing around.

01:17:22.485 --> 01:17:25.875
How can we get your message sort of...

01:17:26.737 --> 01:17:28.836
you don't want to mess with that fooling around,

01:17:28.836 --> 01:17:35.139
but somehow direct it to understanding the larger ecosysstem that they eventually gonna live in,

01:17:35.139 --> 01:17:36.529
with those innovations.

01:17:36.698 --> 01:17:38.490
[Eben Moglen] I don't know. I'll learn from you.

01:17:39.506 --> 01:17:43.764
[Doc Searls] Actually I would like to touch a??? point and a prior point.

01:17:43.764 --> 01:17:48.487
I was remembering, when Eben was talking about, kids.

01:17:48.487 --> 01:17:55.758
You know, what I did when I was a kid was I loved radio and I loved to ??? screwdrivers, and I was a Ham radio operator.

01:17:56.220 --> 01:18:02.319
You know, there was no computing in 1961 that a kid could do, but I hacked on radios.

01:18:02.319 --> 01:18:07.548
And I just wanna call Dwayne Hendrix to the mike for a second to talk about,

01:18:08.087 --> 01:18:13.450
what we were talking about at the Hall about opportunities with amateur radio that still exist.

01:18:16.972 --> 01:18:20.177
[Dwayne Hendrix] Thanks. Amateur radio has been around for about 100 years now.

01:18:20.470 --> 01:18:26.602
And by treaty, it's in most countries on the planet.

01:18:27.156 --> 01:18:30.242
I can take my amateur radio privileges from the US

01:18:30.242 --> 01:18:33.681
and go to all those countries, and operate just like I was here.

01:18:35.020 --> 01:18:40.628
Eben talked about (the) need to have free access to spectrum with no middle man, ok?

01:18:40.936 --> 01:18:44.885
The amateur radio service is just that, ok?

01:18:45.270 --> 01:18:47.114
There is no FCC in the middle.

01:18:47.638 --> 01:18:53.582
You can create wireless devices, you self certify them, ok?

01:18:53.998 --> 01:18:59.850
And as I said, you can take them to other places on the planet and operate them without asking anybody.

01:19:00.389 --> 01:19:04.623
In fact, with the licence class I have, I can put a

01:19:04.623 --> 01:19:10.186
communications platform in orbit without asking permission of the FCC.

01:19:10.432 --> 01:19:11.840
That is powerful.

01:19:12.516 --> 01:19:18.907
So there is a lot of misapprehensions and misunderstandings about what amateur radio is about,

01:19:18.907 --> 01:19:22.983
perpetrated by organizations like American Radio Relay League.

01:19:23.522 --> 01:19:27.508
It's all about innovation under your own control.

01:19:27.755 --> 01:19:32.940
Gives you complete access to spectrum, as long as you don't use it for commersial purposes.

01:19:33.371 --> 01:19:35.250
So let me just leave you with one thought.

01:19:35.789 --> 01:19:41.685
Ten years ago, I was working for a company called COM21 the founder of which was Paul Baran,

01:19:41.855 --> 01:19:44.885
who is sort of known as the Grand Father of the Internet, right?

01:19:45.192 --> 01:19:53.280
Paul basically said: Look what I've learned is that I look at all these people around building proprietary radios, ok?,

01:19:53.603 --> 01:19:54.947
and they come and go.

01:19:55.409 --> 01:20:00.039
If you gonna create a business look at mass produced radios.

01:20:00.546 --> 01:20:03.425
And use those and more of them to your own needs.

01:20:03.887 --> 01:20:05.780
There is two mass produced radios today.

01:20:06.057 --> 01:20:08.056
WiFi and Cable modems.

01:20:08.672 --> 01:20:11.278
With a little construct called a transverter,

01:20:11.740 --> 01:20:13.907
-a transverter also known as a linear translator-

01:20:13.907 --> 01:20:18.040
you could take the inputs and outputs of a cable modem or any wifi device

01:20:18.040 --> 01:20:20.891
and put it anywhere in the radio spectrum.

01:20:21.614 --> 01:20:24.938
And couple that with an amateur radio licence

01:20:24.938 --> 01:20:32.717
and now you have cheap hardware that you can go anywhere and not ask permission of anybody, ok?

01:20:33.271 --> 01:20:40.379
So, look into this. I mean, Amateur radio, basically output devices that

01:20:41.056 --> 01:20:43.463
.... you don't have to have an amateur licence to use it.

01:20:43.463 --> 01:20:51.758
I mean, under my amateur radio authority I can have as many transmitters operating in the US territory without...

01:20:51.758 --> 01:20:53.840
and have people just like you use them,

01:20:53.840 --> 01:20:57.448
all I have to do is to be able to turn on and off the device,ok?

01:20:57.772 --> 01:21:03.534
When I was working at COM21 we littered the bay area with cable modems that have transverters

01:21:03.534 --> 01:21:07.190
and have a wireless Internet network, ok?,

01:21:07.974 --> 01:21:11.574
(and) that we had a lot of people use it, ok?,

01:21:11.758 --> 01:21:15.507
so we didn't get any money for it, we didn't charge anybody for Internet access,

01:21:15.799 --> 01:21:19.342
but we provided innovation of a different nature.

01:21:19.558 --> 01:21:20.391
That's it.

01:21:20.899 --> 01:21:22.304
[Doc Searls] Also thanks, thanks Dwayne.

01:21:22.304 --> 01:21:23.417
[Applause]

01:21:23.417 --> 01:21:25.405
[Doc Searls]Yeah. Go.

01:21:25.929 --> 01:21:28.457
[Harold Phelp]Harold Phelp ??? with public knowledge.

01:21:30.734 --> 01:21:34.575
First of all, I have to say that maybe I'm alone in this

01:21:34.575 --> 01:21:40.097
but I tend to think of this more as the ???? speech rather than the I have a dream speech.[Laughs]

01:21:41.974 --> 01:21:50.352
And in those small part, because I'll notice who kicked butt on the field of Ozonecorp ???.

01:21:51.522 --> 01:21:58.706
But the one thing that I did want to raise and ask is if you have seen

01:21:58.706 --> 01:22:03.264
Corry Doctorow's recent pissed on the failure of geek politics.

01:22:03.741 --> 01:22:05.056
And this is a Ś

01:22:07.641 --> 01:22:14.553
I'll confess to my own self interest as Washington Insider focused on the FCC,

01:22:14.553 --> 01:22:20.376
but I just wanna to stress and ask folks like you who are out there

01:22:20.376 --> 01:22:27.237
to encourage engagement in these processes,

01:22:28.176 --> 01:22:34.962
and especially when the temptation to despair about getting productive results is so high.

01:22:35.809 --> 01:22:39.283
But also point out the posiv aspect of this is Ś

01:22:39.807 --> 01:22:41.009
-Dwayne actually focused this-

01:22:41.501 --> 01:22:47.204
there are actually a lot of opportunities that are here and around us,

01:22:47.204 --> 01:22:51.851
and I really think that there is a lot that could be done,

01:22:53.389 --> 01:23:03.411
as has been done now already with a number of folks who in trying to organize a more focused agenda,

01:23:04.427 --> 01:23:10.746
that would be a positive, legislative and regulatory agenda, rather than a defensive one.

01:23:11.577 --> 01:23:15.062
And I just wanna put that out there,

01:23:15.062 --> 01:23:24.776
as well as any interest in working with anybody who is interested in taking up arms here.

01:23:29.608 --> 01:23:36.560
Hi, ???? .

01:23:36.560 --> 01:23:39.039
Thanks for bringing up the Ham radio issue.

01:23:39.039 --> 01:23:42.053
That's really very very interesting field right now,

01:23:42.053 --> 01:23:48.816
especially since we got ten box STRs in the form of TVB-T receivers.

01:23:49.525 --> 01:23:52.085
Just take them out and reprogram them. It's very interesting.

01:23:53.301 --> 01:23:56.311
And one other thing for Eben Ś

01:23:56.787 --> 01:24:00.729
when you were talking about OLPC, sort of I had a small dejavu.

01:24:01.699 --> 01:24:05.389
I was there at that time, when they were doing their mesh research,

01:24:05.928 --> 01:24:10.507
I was flying from Boston to Europe, and I was couple of time was telling them,

01:24:10.923 --> 01:24:14.150
we got these huge networks there we got it already done,

01:24:14.535 --> 01:24:19.562
and they were still working on the specific ???? implementation which just failed.

01:24:19.946 --> 01:24:24.002
So I would like to deposit the thought that we should cooperate more closely,

01:24:24.002 --> 01:24:30.190
because we have quite some experience, and it might save us 8 years of R&D. Thanks.

01:24:32.283 --> 01:24:36.119
[Doc Searls]OK. We have 2 minutes and 33 seconds left and the musicians are here so here's Chris...

01:24:37.058 --> 01:24:38.346
[Chris Savage]Chris Savage, Random Medicine.

01:24:39.962 --> 01:24:45.137
I agree with Harold. This was not quite a I have a Dream Speech was more like Saint Christmas Day

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[Little Laugh]

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and I would like to ask you and the folks would ask themselves the following question.

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Assuming that you've laid down the battlelines correctly,

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what would Gandhi do?

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[Doc Searls]Would Gandhi battle?

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[Backround speech]

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[Eben Moglen] Well, then I'm in total agree with you.

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I'm uncomfortable with all the comparisons.

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So let me put them aside and say that

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my part of this work ugly??? enough is just making lawyers. Right?

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[Laughs]

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That's what I actually do for a living.

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And before we all get grunt about it, what that really means is,

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teaching young people who have enormous opportunities to change society,

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that they shouldn't go and take jobs pushing corporate finance paper instead.

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I'm not actually trying in my earnest suggestions to the contrary of what I'm standing,

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I'm not trying to wield any power.

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I do want to talk to people,

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and I admit that bad happens when you talk to people in large groups for long periods of time,

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which is actually not terribly productive,

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but what I think we are trying to do,

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and here you question about Mahatma Gandhi seems relevant to me,

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I'm trying to make the people to believe that they are the solution to the problem.

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I'm trying to get people to believe that it's in their hands, not in hands of some mysterious power far away.

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We got to win this close up.

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You must have to AsianCorp motiv then that's the one to have.

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This is not going to be dealt with at a distance.

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This is actually done in those muddy slipping and falling places where all this goes on.

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If Harold thinks that we can do it at the FCC, that's great.

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I'm not sure that I believe him, but he can, if I can.

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What I'm really asking is for all of us to recognize,

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we are gonna have to talk to language of political economy and government policy for a while.

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We've talked the language of licencing and how to make Free Software, and that has run out.

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So now the time has come to talk about how we save societies itches,by scratching them with freedom.

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And if we can do that, then we'll win.

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Thanks everybody.

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[Applause]