OEB 2015 - Opening Plenary - Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow - Writer, Blogger, Activist - USA

The Opening Plenary session of OEB 2015 looked at the challenges of modernity and identify how people, organisations, institutions and societies can make technology and knowledge work together to accelerate the shift to a new age of opportunity.

More info: http://bit.ly/1lugQWX

(Cory Doctorow) Thank you very much

So I'd like to start with something of a
benediction or permission.

I am one of nature's fast talkers

and many of you are not
native English speakers, or

maybe not accustomed
to my harsh Canadian accent

in addition I've just come in
from Australia

and so like many of you I am horribly
jetlagged and have drunk enough coffee

this morning to kill a rhino.

When I used to be at the United Nations

I was known as the scourge of the
simultaneous translation core

I would stand up and speak
as slowly as I could

and turn around, and there they
would be in their boots doing this

(laughter)
When I start to speak too fast,

this is the universal symbol --
my wife invented it --

for "Cory, you are talking too fast".
Please, don't be shy.

So, I'm a parent , like many of you
and I'm like I'm sure all of you

who are parents, parenting takes my ass
all the time.

And there are many regrets I have
about the mere seven and half years

that I've been a parent
but none ares so keenly felt

as my regrets over what's happened
when I've been wandering

around the house and seen my
daughter working on something

that was beyond her abilities, that was
right at the edge of what she could do

and where she was doing something
that she didn't have competence in yet

and you know it's that amazing thing
to see that frowning concentration,

tongue stuck out: as a parent, your
heart swells with pride

and you can't help but go over

and sort of peer over their shoulder
what they are doing

and those of you who are parents know
what happens when you look too closely

at someone who is working
beyond the age of their competence.

They go back to doing something
they're already good at.

You interrupt a moment
of genuine learning

and you replace it with
a kind of embarrassment

about what you're good at
and what you're not.

So, it matters a lot that our schools are
increasingly surveilled environments,

environments in which everything that
our kids do is watched and recorded.

Because when you do that, you interfere
with those moments of real learning.

Our ability to do things that we are not
good at yet, that we are not proud of yet,

is negatively impacted
by that kind of scrutiny.

And that scrutiny comes
from a strange place.

We have decided that there are
some programmatic means

by which we can find all the web page
children shouldn't look at

and we will filter our networks
to be sure that they don't see them.

Anyone who has ever paid attention
knows that this doesn't work.

There are more web pages
that kids shouldn't look at

than can ever be cataloged,
and any attempt to catalog them

will always catch pages that kids
must be looking at.

Any of you who have ever taught
a unit on reproductive health

know the frustration of trying
to get round a school network.

Now, this is done in the name of
digital protection

but it flies in the face of digital
literacy and of real learning.

Because the only way to stop kids
from looking at web pages

they shouldn't be looking at

is to take all of the clicks that they
make, all of the messages that they send,

all of their online activity
and offshore it to a firm

that has some nonsensically arrived at
list of the bad pages.

And so, what we are doing is that we're
exfiltrating all of our students' data

to unknown third parties.

Now, most of these firms,
their primary business isn't

serving the education sector.

Most of them service
the government sectors.

They primarily service governments in
repressive autocratic regimes.

They help them ensure that
their citizens aren't looking at

Amnesty International web pages.

They repackage those tools
and sell them to our educators.

So we are offshoring our children's clicks
to war criminals.

And what our kids do, now,
is they just get around it,

because it's not hard to get around it.

You know, never underestimate the power
of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor

to get around our
technological blockades.

But when they do this, they don't acquire
the kind of digital literacy

that we want them to do, they don't
acquire real digital agency

and moreover, they risk exclusion
and in extreme cases,

they risk criminal prosecution.

So what if instead, those of us who are
trapped in this system of teaching kids

where we're required to subject them
to this kind of surveillance

that flies in the face
of their real learning,

what if instead, we invented
curricular units

that made them real first class
digital citizens,

in charge of trying to influence
real digital problems?

Like what if we said to them:
"We want you to catalog the web pages

that this vendor lets through
that you shouldn't be seeing.

We want you to catalog those pages that
you should be seeing, that are blocked.

We want you to go and interview
every teacher in the school

about all those lesson plans that were
carefully laid out before lunch

with a video and a web page,
and over lunch,

the unaccountable distance center
blocked these critical resources

and left them handing out photographed
worksheets in the afternoon

instead of the unit they prepared.

We want you to learn how to do the Freedom
of Information Act requests

and find out what your
school authority is spending

to censor your internet access
and surveil your activity.

We want you to learn to use the internet
to research these companies

and we want you to present this
to your parent-teacher association,

to your school authority,
to your local newspaper."

Because that's the kind
of digital literacy

that makes kids into first-class
digital citizens,

that prepares them for a future
in which they can participate fully

in a world that's changing.

Kids are the beta-testers
of the surveillance state.

The path of surveillance technology
starts with prisoners,

moves to asylum seekers,
people in mental institutions

and then to its first non-incarcerated
population: children

and then moves to blue-collar workers,
government workers

and white-collar workers.

And so, what we do to kids today
is what we did to prisoners yesterday

and what we're going to be doing
to you tomorrow.

And so it matters, what we teach our kids.

If you want to see where this goes, this
is a kid named Blake Robbins

and he attended Lower Merion High School
in Lower Merion Pennsylvania

outside f Philadelphia.

It's the most affluent public school
district in America, so affluent

that all the kids were issued Macbooks
at the start of the year

and they had to do their homework on
their Macbooks,

and bring them to school every day
and bring them home every night.

And the Macbooks had been fitted with
Laptop Theft Recovery Software,

which is fancy word for a rootkit, that
let the school administration

covertly (check) operate the cameras
and microphones on these computers

and harvest files off
of their hard drives

view all their clicks, and so on.

Now Blake Robbins found out
that the software existed

and how it was being used
because he and the head teacher

had been knocking heads for years,
since he first got into the school,

and one day, the head teacher
summoned him to his office

and said: "Blake, I've got you now."

and handed him a print-out of Blake
in his bedroom the night before,

taking what looked like a pill,
and he said: "You're taking drugs."

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

when I -- I eat them when I'm studying.

How did you get a picture
of me in my bedroom?"

This head teacher had taken
over 6000 photos of Blake Robbins:

awake and asleep, dressed and undressed,
in the presence of his family.

And in the ensuing lawsuit, the school
settled for a large amount of money

and promised that
they wouldn't do it again

without informing the students
that it was going on.

And increasingly, the practice is now

that school administrations hand out
laptops, because they're getting cheaper,

with exactly the same kind of software,

but they let the students know and
hey find that that works even better

at curbing the students' behavior,

because the students know that
they're always on camera.

Now, the surveillance state is moving
from kids to the rest of the world.

It's metastasizing.

Our devices are increasingly designed
to treat us as attackers,

as suspicious parties
who can't be trusted

because our devices' job is to do things
that we don't want them to do.

Now that's not because the vendors
who make our technology

want to spy on us necessarily,

but they want to take
the ink-jet printer business model

and bring it into every other realm
of the world.

So the ink-jet printer business model
is where you sell someone a device

and then you get a continuing
revenue stream from that device

by making sure that competitors can't make
consumables or parts

or additional features
or plugins for that device,

without paying rent
to the original manufacturer.

And that allows you to maintain
monopoly margins on your devices.

Now, in 1998, the American government
passed a law called

the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,

in 2001 the European Union
introduced its own version,

the European Union Copyright Directive.

And these two laws, along with laws
all around the world,

in Australia, Canada and elsewhere,
these laws prohibit removing digital laws

that are used to restrict
access to copyrighted works

and they were original envisioned as a way
of making sure that Europeans didn't

bring cheap DVDs in from America,

or making sure that Australians didn't
import cheap DVDs from China.

And so you have a digital work, a DVD,
and it has a lock on it and to unlock it,

you have to buy an authorized player

and the player checks to make sure
you are in region

and making your own player
that doesn't make that check

is illegal because you'd have
to remove the digital lock.

And that was the original intent,

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

DVDs and other entertainment content.

But it very quickly spread
into new rounds.

So, for example, auto manufacturers
now lock up

all of their cars' telemetry
with digital locks.

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

you have to get a reader
from the manufacturer

to make sure that you can
see the telemetry

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

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

that you will only buy parts
from that manufacturer

and not from third parties.

So the manufacturers can keep
the repair costs high

and get a secondary revenue stream
out of the cars.

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

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

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

and a $500'000 fine,

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

It turned out that when they advertised

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

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

they weren't speaking metaphorically,
they literally meant

that even though your father
bought the Oldsmobile,

it remained their property in perpetuity.

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

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

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

and agricultural equipment technologies,

they now view their tractors as
information gathering platforms

and they view the people who use them

as the kind of inconvenient gut flora
of their ecosystem.

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

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

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

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

but that data is not available to you

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

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

Instead, in order to get that data

you have to buy a bundle with seeds
from Monsanto,

who are John Deer's seed partners.

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

and they use it to gain insight
into regional crop yields

that they use to play the futures market.

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

and the farmers are secondary to it.

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

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

that have this business model.

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

If you're someone who is diabetic

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

that insulin pump is designed
with a digital lock

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

to read the data coming off of it

and that software is resold
on a rolling annual license

and it can't be just bought outright.

And the digital locks are also
used to make sure

that you only buy the insulin
that vendors approved

and not generic insulin
that might be cheaper.

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

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

Because the rules that prohibit
breaking these digital locks

also prohibit telling people
about flaws that programmers made

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

you can use it to break the digital lock.

And that means that the errors,
the vulnerabilities,

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

and our devices become these longlife
reservoirs of digital pathogens.

And we've seen how that plays out.

One of the reasons that Volkswagen
was able to get away

with their Diesel cheating for so long

is because no one could independently
alter their firmware.

It's happening all over the place.

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

that Chrysler had to recall
1.4 million jeeps

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

while driving down a motorway
and have their brakes and steerings

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

We only have one methodology
for determining whether security works

and that's to subject it
to public scrutiny,

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

Anyone can design a security system

that he himself can think
of a way of breaking,

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

that works against people
who are stupider than you.

And in this regard, security
is no different

from any other kind of knowledge creation.

You know, before we had
contemporary science and scholarship,

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

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

And that meant that every alchemist
was capable of falling prey

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

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

that drinking mercury was a bad idea.

We call that 500-year period the Dark Ages

and we call the moment at which
they started publishing

and subjectig themselves
to adversarial peer review,

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

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

we call that moment the Enlightenment.

Now, this has profound implications.

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

for our own surveillance society,

for our ability to be free people
in society.

At the height of the GDR, in 1989,

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

in order to surveil the entire country.

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

that the NSA was spying
on everybody in the world.

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

is more like 1 in 10'000.

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

productivity gain in surveillance.

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

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

that are designed to treat us as attackers

and that gather an enormous
amount of information on us.

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

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

all of your movements,

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

and would make that
available to the state,

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

But the phone companies have
managed to convince us,

along with the mobile vendors,

that we should foot the bill
for our own surveillance.

It's a bit like during
the Cultural Revolution,

where, after your family members
were executed,

they sent you a bill for the bullet.

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

Because just as our kids have
a hard time functioning

in the presence of surveillance,
and learning,

and advancing their own knowledge,

we as a society have a hard time
progressing

in the presence of surveillance.

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

were doing something that
a generation ago

would have been illegal
and landed them in jail.

For example, you probably know someone

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

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

or if you live in the Netherlands.

And not that long ago, people
who undertook these activities

could have gone to jail for them,

could have faced enormous
social exclusion for them.

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

a place where people weren't surveilled,

in which they could advance
their interest ideas,

do things that were thought of as
socially unacceptable

and slowly change our social attitudes.

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

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

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

that in 2015, you got it all right,

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

Then you have to ask yourself
how in a world,

in which we are all
under continuous surveillance,

we are going to find a way
to improve this.

So, our kids need ICT literacy,

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

It's learning how to think critically

about how they relate
to the means of information,

about whether they are its masters
or servants.

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

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

The future of the internet is
way less important

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

the future of racial equity,

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

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

on the internet:
it's our most foundational fight

So weakened (check) computers
can make us more free

or they can take away our freedom.

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

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

and whose next generation
is beta-testing

the surveillance technology
that will be coming to us,

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

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

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

and how to be, above all, subversive

and how to use the technology around them.
Thank you.

(Applause)

(Moderator) Cory, thank you very much
indeed.

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

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

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

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

you stimulated thinking, which is great.
(Doctorow laughs)

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

And this, for example,
from Annika Burgess

"Is there a way for students
to protect themselves

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

I think this is probably a question
Ian Goldin (check) as well, as

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

this issue of privacy violations and trust.

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

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

depending on how they are configured.

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

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

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

from powerful people.

But with the computer in your pocket,
with that, [shows a smartphone]

you can encrypt a message so thoroughly

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

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

but try to guess what your key was,

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

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

The problem is that institutions
prohibit the use of technology

that allow you to take back
your own privacy.

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

"Your privacy is like your virginity:

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

Watch out what you're
putting on Facebook"

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

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

"Watch what you're putting on Facebook,

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

All good advice.

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

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

You know, if a parent says to a kid:

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

and the parent says it
while lighting a new cigarette

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

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

(Moderator) The point is deficit of trust.

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

this deficit of trust and privacy.

And there is another point here:

"Is the battle for privacy already lost?

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

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

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

peak indifference to surveillance, right?

The surveillance races on over by it
by a long shot.

There will be more surveillance
before there is less.

But there'll never be fewer people
who care about surveillance

than there are today,

because, as privacy advocates,
we spectacularly failed,

over the last 20 years, to get people
to take privacy seriously

and now we have firms that are
frankly incompetent,

retaining huge amounts of our personally
identifying sensitive information

and those firms are leaking
that information at speed.

So, it started this year with things like
(phone rings) -- is that me? that's me! --

It started this year with things like
Ashley Madison

(Moderator) Do you want to take it?

(Doctorow) No no, that was my timer going
off telling me I've had my 22 minutes

(Moderator) It may be someone who
doesn't trust my....

(Doctorow) No,that was --
that was my 22 minutes.

So, it started with Ashley Madison,
the office of personnel management,

everyone who ever applied for security
clearance in America

had all of their sensitive information,
everything you had to give them

about why you shouldn't have
security clearance,

everything that's potentially
compromising about you,

all of it exfiltrated by what's believed
to have been a Chinese spy ring.

Something like
one in twenty Americans now,

have had their data captured and
exfiltrated from the United States.

This week, VTech, the largest electronic
toy manufacturer in the world,

leaked the personal information of
at least five million children,

including potentially photos that
they took with their electronic toys,

as well as their parents' information,
their home addresses, their passwords,

their parents' passwords
and their password hints.

So every couple of weeks,
from now on,

a couple of million people
are going to show up

on the door of people who
care about privacy and say:

"You were right all along,
what do we do?"

And the challenge is to give them
something useful

they can do about privacy.

And there are steps that
you can take personally.

If you go to the Surveillance Defense Kit

at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's
website,

you'll find a set of tools you can use.

But ultimately, it's not an individual
choice, it's a social one.

Privacy is a team sport, because if you
keep your information private

and you send it to someone else
who is in your social network,

who doesn't keep it private, well, then
it leaks out their back door.

And so we need social movements
to improve our privacy.

We also need better tools.

It's really clear that our privacy tools
have fallen short of the mark

in terms of being accessible
to normal people.

(Moderator) Corey --
(Doctorow) I sense you want

to say something: go on
(Moderator) Yes.

Yes, but what I want to do is keep pushing
this down the route of education as well.

There are two or three questions here
which are very specific about that.

Could you tell us more about
how we help students

become digital citizens?

It links in important ways to the
German and Nordic pre-digital concept

of Bildung -
- that's from Gertrud Fullend -- (check)

and if you could give your daughter
just one piece of advice for living

in an age of digital surveillance,
what would it be?

(Doctorow) So, the one piece of advice
I would give her is

"Don't settle for anything less
than total control

of the means of information.

Anytime someone tells you that
the computer says you must do something,

you have to ask yourself why the computer
isn't doing what you want it to do.

Who is in charge here?"

-- Thank you --

In terms of how we improve
digital citizenship,

I think we are at odds with
our institutions in large part here

and I think that our institutions
have decreed that privacy

is a luxury we can't afford
to give our students

because if we do, they might do
something we wouldn't like.

And so, as teachers, the only thing that
we can do without risking our jobs,

without risking our students' education
and their ability to stay in school

is to teach them how to do judo,
to teach them

how to ask critical questions,
to gather data,

to demand evidence-based policy.

And ultimately, I actually think
that's better.

I think that teaching kids
how to evade firewalls

is way less interesting than
teaching them how to identify

who is providing that firewall,

who made the decision
to buy that firewall,

how much they're spending,

and what the process is
for getting that person fired.

That's a much more interesting
piece of digital citizenship

than any piece of firewall hacking.

(Moderator) But Corey, you're telling
kids to get hold of their information,

but picking up on your analogy
with the auto

where there's very clear lock-on,
so much which has to be done

has to be done through the manufacturers
-- Martin Siebel (check) picking up --

How busy is the hacker community
with breaking digital locks?

In other words, digital locks
are being put on so much,

can the next generation, can the kids
work out where these locks are,

to keep control of their information?

(Doctorow) So, getting the digital locks
off of our devices

is not just a matter of technology,
it's also a matter of policy.

Laws like the EUCD and new treaty
instruments like TTIP

and the Transpacific Partnership

specify that these digital locks
can't be removed legally,

that firms can use them to extract
monopoly ransom, to harm our security.

And these treaties will make it impossible
to remove these locks legally.

It's not enough for there to be
a demi-monde, in which

people who are technologically savvy
know how to break their iPhones.

The problem with that is that it produces
this world in which you can't know

whether the software that you're using
has anything bad lurking in it, right?

to say to people who have iPhones that
they want it reconfigured

to accept software from parties that
aren't approved by Apple,

well, all you need to do is find a random
piece of software on the internet

that claims it will allow you to do it,
get it (check) on your phone,

and then run this software on it
is like saying to people:

"Well, all you need to do is just
find some heroin lying around

and put it in your arm: I'm sure
it'll work out fine." Right?

The ways in which a phone that is
compromised can harm you

are really without limits, right?

If you think about this, this is a
rectangle with a camera and a microphone

that you take into the bedroom
and the toilet.

and the only way you know whether
that camera or microphone are on or off

is if the software is doing
what it says it's doing, right?

So, I think that we have this policy
dimension that's way more important

than the technical dimension,

and that the only way we're going to
change that policy

is by making kids know what they can't do

and them making them know
why they're not allowed to do it,

and then set them loose.
(Moderator) Two final points then,

building on that: Ian ...........(check)

but what do you think of recent laws,
say, in the Netherlands,

allowing police to spy on criminals
and terrorists with webcams

on their own laptops?

In other words, the extension implicit
in this question is,

what about keeping an eye on others,
including the next generation coming up,

and this from Peter Andreesen (check),
which is slightly connected:

But when the predominant management
tool in our business is still based

on the assumption of control, how do we
change that psychology and that mindset?

And David is nodding for those views
you can see it at the back.

(Doctorow) You know, there's not an
operating system or suite of applications

that bad guys use, and another set
that the rest of us use.

And so, when our security services
discover vulnerabilities

in the tools that we rely on, and then
hoard those vulnerabilities,

so that they can weaponize them
to attack criminals or terrorists

or whoever they're after,

they insure that those vulnerabilities
remain unpatched on our devices too.

So that the people who are
our adversaries,

the criminals who want to attack us,

the spies who want to exfiltrate
our corporate secrets to their countries,

the griefers, the autocratic regimes
who use those vulnerabilities

to spy on their population --

at Electronic Frontier Foundation,
we have a client from Ethiopia,

Mr. Kadani, who is dissident journalist

-- Ethiopia imprisons more journalists
than any other country in the world --

he fled to America, where the Ethiopian
government hacked his computer

with a bug in Skype that they had
discovered and not reported.

They'd bought the tools to do this from
Italy, from a company called Hacking Team,

they hacked his computer, they found out
who is colleagues were in Ethiopia

and they arrested them and
subjected them to torture.

So, when our security services take a bug
and weaponize it

so they can attack their adversaries,
they leave that bug intact

so that our adversaries can attack us.

You know, this is -- I'm giving a talk
later today,

no matter what side you're on in the war
on general-purpose computing,

you're losing,

because all we have right now
is attack and not defense.

Our security services are so concerned
with making sure that their job is easy

when they attack their adversaries,
that they are neglecting the fact

that they are making their adversaries'
job easy in attacking us.

If this were a football match,

the score would be tied
400 to 400 after 10 minutes.

(Moderator) Corey,
I've got to stop you there.

Thank you very much indeed.
(Doctorow) Thank you very much.

(Applause)