More Awesome Than Money (3 page)

“The idea that the network was a network of peers was hard to perceive after a while, particularly if you were a, let us say, an ordinary human being,” Moglen said. “That is, not a computer engineer, scientist, or researcher. Not a hacker, not a geek. If you were an ordinary human being, it was hard to perceive that the underlying architecture of the net was meant to be peerage.”

Then, he said, the problem became alarming, beginning with an innocent, and logical, decision made by naïve technologists. They created logs to track the traffic in and out of the servers. “It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world,” Moglen said. “It's a very good idea.”

However, the logs had a second effect: they became a history of every inquiry that users made, any communications they had—their clicks on
websites to get the news, gossip, academic papers; to buy music or to stream pornography; to sign in to a bird-watchers' website or to look at the latest snapshots of the birth of the universe from NASA and of the outfit that Lady Gaga wore to a nightclub the night before. The existence of these logs was scarcely known to the public.

“We kept the logs, that is, information about the flow of information on the net, in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled, or thought they controlled, the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives,” Moglen said. “This was a recipe for disaster.”

No one making decisions about the architecture of the Internet, Moglen said, discussed its social consequences; the scientists involved were not interested in sociology or social psychology, or, for the most part, freedom. “So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse. Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused, and now we are getting the misuse that we set up.”

The logs created as diagnostic tools for broken computers were quickly transformed into a kind of CT scan of the people using them, finely scaled maps of their minds. “Advertising in the twentieth century was a random activity; you threw things out and hoped they worked. Advertising in the twenty-first century is an exquisitely precise activity.”

These developments, Moglen said, were not frightening. But, he warned: “We don't remain in the innocent part of the story for a variety of reasons.

“I won't be tedious and Marxist on a Friday night and say it's because the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in destructively reinventing and improving its own activities. And I won't be moralistic on a Friday night and say that it is because sin is ineradicable and human beings are fallen creatures and greed is one of the sins we cannot avoid committing. I will just say that as an ordinary social process, we don't stop at innocent. We go on. Which is surely the thing you should say on a Friday night. And so we went on.

“Now, where we went on—is really toward the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything. Because once you have the logs of everything, then every simple service is suddenly a gold mine waiting to happen. And we blew it, because the
architecture of the net put the logs in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the fallen state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble. And we got it.”

The locus of temptation, to dawdle with Moglen in the metaphysical, is not an actual place: the servers that held all this succulent data were not necessarily in a single physical location. Once the data was dragnetted from someone's Facebook entries, for instance, they could be atomized, the pieces spread across many servers, and then restored in a wink by software magic. The data was in a virtual place, if one that was decidedly not virtuous. The data was in the cloud, and thus beyond the law.

“You can make a rule about logs, or data flow, or preservation, or control, or access, or disclosure,” Moglen said, “but your laws are human laws, and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two, or three, or six, or poof! I just realized I'm subject to regulation, I think I'll move to Oceania now.

“Which means that, in effect, we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable.”

In 1973, at age fourteen, Moglen had gotten a job writing computer programs for the Scientific Timesharing Corporation in Westchester, north of New York City, work that he continued for one company and another for the next decade. By 1986, at age twenty-six, he was a young lawyer, clerking for the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and also working his way toward a PhD in history, with distinction, from Yale. His dissertation was titled “Settling the Law: Legal Development in New York, 1664–1776.” At midlife, his geeky side, his legal interests, his curiosity about how human history was shaped, had brought him to the conclusion that software was a root activity of humankind in the twenty-first century, just as the production of steel had been an organizing force in the twentieth century. Software would undergird global societies.

Software, then, was not simply a rattle toy for playpens filled with geeks, the skeleton of amusements for a naïve public, but a basic moral and economic force whose complexity had to be faced coolly, with respect, not fear.

In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, a British social theorist, conceived of a prison where all the inmates could be seen at once, but without knowing that they were being observed. He called it the panopticon and predicted it would be “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Beginning in the 1970s onward, the cypherpunks, many of them pioneers at leading technology companies, saw that dystopian possibilities were built into the treasures of a networked world.

Moglen said: “Facebook is the web with ‘I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?' It's a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

“And it shouldn't be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn't be allowed. That's a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at ‘spying all the time.' They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn't any other business model for them. This is bad.

“I'm not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We're technologists, we should
fix
it.”

The crowd roared. Moglen said he was glad they were with him, but he hoped they would stay with him when he talked about how to fix it. “Because then,” he said, “we could get it done.”

By now, Dan in his apartment, Ilya and Max in the auditorium, were mesmerized. His own students, Moglen said, comforted themselves that even though their Gmail was read by Google software robots for the purpose of inserting ads that were theoretically relevant to the content of their e-mails, no actual humans at Google were reading their correspondence. No one could entertain such a delusion about Facebook. News accounts based on various internal documents and sources suggested a streak of voyeurism on the premises.

“Facebook workers know who's about to have a love affair before the people because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y,” Moglen said. Any inferences that could be drawn, would be.

Students “still think of privacy as ‘the one secret I don't want revealed,' and that's not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that's the cruft, the data dandruff, of life, that they don't think of as secret in
any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want anybody to know,” Moglen said. Flecks of information were being used to create predictive models about them. It was simple to deanonymize data that was thought to be anonymized, and to create maps of their lives.

The free-software movement could be proud of the tools it had created and protected from being absconded. It was not enough. “We have to fess up: if we're the people who care about freedom, it's late in the game, and we're behind,” Moglen said. “I'm glad the tools are around but we do have to admit that we have not used them to protect freedom because freedom is decaying.”

An illusion of convenience had eroded freedom, he said. “Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all the time because web servers are so terrible to run. Who could run a web server of his own and keep the logs? It would be brutal!” The crowd laughed: so many there actually did run web servers.

“What do we need?” Moglen asked.

“We need a really good web server you can put in your pocket and plug in anyplace. It shouldn't be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it into any power jack in the world, and any wire near it, or sync it up with any Wi-Fi router that happens to be in its neighborhood.” Inside the little box would be software that would turn itself on, would collect stuff from social networks, and would send a backup copy of vital stuff—encrypted—to a friend's little box.

It all might have sounded far-fetched, except that the plug-in computers were already being made; they cost ninety-nine dollars, a price that was sure to drop, and needed only the right collection of free software to run them. He ran through the requirements: a program for social networks, for blogging, streaming music, and so forth. The servers of the world were already running on the free software of GNU/Linux. “The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us,” Moglen noted. “The re-architecture is, too. If we have one copy of what I'm talking about, we'd have all the copies we need. We have no manufacturing or transport or logistics constraints. If we do the job, it's done. We scale.”

That is: one copy of a piece of free software, and everything afterward is distributed over the air.

“It's a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous
social payoff for exploring. The payoff is plain because the harm being ameliorated is current and people you know are suffering from it.”

He reflected for a moment on the history of the free-software movement in meeting such challenges, and then moved back to the case in point. “Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy,” and the crowd applauded.

“Let's give it to him.”

A voice shouted from aisles: “For free!”

“For free,” Moglen agreed.

This effort was not about Facebook. The architecture of the web provided scaffolding for “immense cognitive auxiliaries for the state—enormous engines of listening for governments around the world. The software inside the plug-in computer could include special routing devices that disguise the digital traffic, making it harder to trace any individual on the Internet. “By the time you get done with all of that, we have a freedom box. We have a box that actually puts a ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are.”

All this from free software. “The solution is made of our parts. We've got to do it. That's my message. It's Friday night. Some people don't want to go right back to coding, I'm sure. We could put it off until Tuesday, but how long do you really want to wait? You know every day that goes by, there's data we'll never get back.”

The first critical problem was identifying a way to attack it. “The direction in which to go is toward freedom—using free software to make social justice.”

Someone shouted, “Yeah,” and the applause washed across the room.

“But you know this,” Moglen said. “That's the problem with talking on a Friday night. You talk for an hour and all you tell people is what they know already.”

—

As the applause petered out, Max and Ilya felt like gongs that had been struck. They had arrived early for the talk, prodded by two teachers important to them: the adviser to the campus computer club, Evan Korth, who was also an officer of the New York division of the Internet Society; and Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who studied hacker culture and was Max's senior paper adviser. Now they did not budge. The moment, the
possibility, the necessity of what Moglen had mapped out was nothing less than an alternative universe. It called to their idealism, and held the transgressive promise of, maybe, subverting a powerful institution. Its gravity absorbed them. So, yes, Friday would be spent in the math and computer science building. They had plenty to explore right there and then.

“Max,” someone said from behind them.

Fred Benenson, who had graduated from NYU a few years earlier, had met Max at meetings of the campus branch of Students for Free Culture, a movement to ease copyright restrictions on the use of creative material.

Benenson could see that Max had been roused by Moglen's talk, and he could not resist playing devil's advocate. It was fine to talk about anonymity and privacy, he said, but in the real world, online retailers like Amazon and Netflix collected data from their customers, and used it to make recommendations on books, music, and movies.

“It's incredible how powerful those recommendation engines are,” Benenson said. He had recently started at a job where he did research on just this kind of information gathering.

“You need data in aggregate form, even if it's anonymized, to make these interesting features that the users expect,” he said.

“I know,” Max said.

Yet they both knew that even if the records were kept anonymously, it was possible to match them up with other data, and identify people who had not realized how vulnerable they were to being easily deanonymized through reverse engineering, often by comparing anonymous and public databases. One famous example involved movies people watched and rated on Netflix. In 2007,
two researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, showed they could easily figure out a person's supposedly private Netflix movie-viewing history by using other publicly available data.