1 00:00:08,200 --> 00:00:11,200 Ok, so, it's time for the keynotes and we are very honoured to have 2 00:00:11,300 --> 00:00:14,700 Eben Moglen here as first keynote speaker 3 00:00:15,200 --> 00:00:20,500 He is a professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University. 4 00:00:21,300 --> 00:00:25,300 He is probably most known for his involvement in the FSF 5 00:00:25,400 --> 00:00:28,300 and for creating the Software Freedom Law Centre. 6 00:00:28,400 --> 00:00:33,700 He was also heavily involved in the creation of the GPL version 3 7 00:00:33,900 --> 00:00:39,300 and many other things of course and so he will give a talk here today about 8 00:00:39,400 --> 00:00:44,300 Why political liberty depends on software freedom more than ever. 9 00:00:44,500 --> 00:00:47,400 Eben Moglen, thank you. 10 00:00:54,500 --> 00:00:57,400 Thank you, good morning it's a great pleasure to be here. 11 00:00:57,500 --> 00:01:03,000 I wanna thank the organisers for the miracle that FOSDEM is 12 00:01:03,500 --> 00:01:05,400 You all know that only chaos 13 00:01:05,500 --> 00:01:10,900 could create an organisation of this quality and power 14 00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:17,300 and it's an honour for me to play a little bit of a role in it. 15 00:01:17,400 --> 00:01:21,400 I know how eager you are to deal with technical matters 16 00:01:21,500 --> 00:01:29,100 and I'm sorry to start with politics first thing in the morning, but it's urgent. 17 00:01:29,700 --> 00:01:36,400 You've been watching it all around the world the past several weeks haven't you? 18 00:01:36,500 --> 00:01:40,400 It's about how politics actually works now 19 00:01:40,700 --> 00:01:45,200 for people actually seeking freedom now 20 00:01:45,600 --> 00:01:49,400 for people trying to make change in their world now. 21 00:01:50,100 --> 00:01:56,100 Software is what the 21st century is made of. 22 00:01:56,700 --> 00:02:02,900 What steel was to the economy of the 20th century 23 00:02:03,100 --> 00:02:08,000 what steel was to the power of the 20th century 24 00:02:08,100 --> 00:02:14,700 what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. 25 00:02:14,900 --> 00:02:21,800 It's the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made. 26 00:02:21,900 --> 00:02:28,200 And when I speak of everything else I mean, of course, freedom. 27 00:02:28,500 --> 00:02:34,500 As well as tyranny, as well as business as usual 28 00:02:34,800 --> 00:02:40,200 as well as spying on everybody for free all the time. 29 00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:46,400 In other words, the very composition of social life 30 00:02:46,500 --> 00:02:50,800 the way it works or doesn't work for us 31 00:02:50,900 --> 00:02:54,800 the way it works or doesn't work for those who own 32 00:02:54,900 --> 00:02:59,700 the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress 33 00:02:59,800 --> 00:03:04,400 all now depends on software. 34 00:03:06,300 --> 00:03:11,600 At the other end of this hastening process 35 00:03:11,700 --> 00:03:17,100 when we started our little conspiracy you and me and everybody else 36 00:03:17,200 --> 00:03:19,000 you remember how it works, right? 37 00:03:19,100 --> 00:03:20,800 I mean it's a simple idea. 38 00:03:20,900 --> 00:03:27,800 Make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on, right? 39 00:03:27,900 --> 00:03:33,400 That was how the conspiracy was designed that's how the thing is supposed to work 40 00:03:33,700 --> 00:03:38,100 We did pretty well with it and about halfway through stage 1 41 00:03:38,200 --> 00:03:45,000 my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out what was going on for us 42 00:03:45,100 --> 00:03:48,400 and he wrote his first quite astonishing book "Code" 43 00:03:48,500 --> 00:03:56,700 in which he said that code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century. 44 00:03:56,800 --> 00:04:00,700 That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born 45 00:04:00,800 --> 00:04:05,200 including creative commons and a bunch of other useful things. 46 00:04:06,800 --> 00:04:11,600 The really important point now is that code does the work of law 47 00:04:11,700 --> 00:04:18,600 and the work of the state and code does the work of revolution against the state. 48 00:04:18,700 --> 00:04:22,800 And code does all the work that the state does 49 00:04:22,900 --> 00:04:28,300 trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations. 50 00:04:29,200 --> 00:04:34,800 But code also organises the people in the street. 51 00:04:35,100 --> 00:04:38,800 We're having enormous demonstration around the world right now 52 00:04:38,900 --> 00:04:42,400 of the power of code in both directions. 53 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:48,700 The newspapers in the United States this past month have been full of the buzz 54 00:04:48,800 --> 00:04:52,900 around the book called "The Net Delusion" by Evgeny Morozov 55 00:04:53,000 --> 00:05:02,800 A very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view of the political nature of the changes in the net 56 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:06,500 Mr. Morozov who comes from Belarus 57 00:05:06,600 --> 00:05:12,400 and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism 58 00:05:12,900 --> 00:05:17,600 sees the ways in which the institutions of the net 59 00:05:17,700 --> 00:05:27,400 are increasingly being co-opted by the state in an effort to limit control or eliminate freedom. 60 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:36,800 And his summary of half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book 61 00:05:36,900 --> 00:05:43,500 is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is 62 00:05:43,600 --> 00:05:49,800 about the nature of the net delusion that the net brings freedom. 63 00:05:50,100 --> 00:05:57,700 I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists because I do think the net brings freedom. 64 00:05:57,800 --> 00:06:01,200 I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however. 65 00:06:01,600 --> 00:06:05,600 The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom. 66 00:06:05,700 --> 00:06:10,400 This is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution 67 00:06:10,500 --> 00:06:13,700 that says "Stallman was right". 68 00:06:13,900 --> 00:06:17,500 The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny 69 00:06:17,600 --> 00:06:22,000 because it all depends on how the code works. 70 00:06:22,900 --> 00:06:24,600 All right, so we all know that. 71 00:06:24,700 --> 00:06:27,000 We've spent a lot of time making free software. 72 00:06:27,100 --> 00:06:29,800 We've spent a lot of time putting free software in everything 73 00:06:29,900 --> 00:06:33,700 and we have tried to turn freedom on. 74 00:06:33,800 --> 00:06:37,900 We have also joined forces with other elements 75 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:44,100 of the free culture world that we helped to bring into existence. 76 00:06:44,300 --> 00:06:55,400 I've known Jimmy Wales a long time and Julian Assange, and that changes the world. 77 00:06:55,500 --> 00:07:00,100 Wikipedia and Wikileaks are two sides of the same coin. 78 00:07:00,200 --> 00:07:05,000 They are the two sides of the same coin the third side of which is FOSDEM. 79 00:07:05,100 --> 00:07:10,700 It is the power of ordinary people to organise, to change the world 80 00:07:10,800 --> 00:07:13,800 without having to create hierarchy 81 00:07:13,900 --> 00:07:17,700 and without having to recapitulate the structures of power 82 00:07:17,800 --> 00:07:22,800 that are being challenged by the desire to make freedom. 83 00:07:24,900 --> 00:07:29,200 Wikileaks was being treated everywhere around the world 84 00:07:29,300 --> 00:07:35,400 in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time 85 00:07:35,900 --> 00:07:40,100 and then events in Tunisia made it a little more complicated. 86 00:07:40,700 --> 00:07:45,700 As it became clear that what was being reported on around the world 87 00:07:45,800 --> 00:07:52,700 as though it was primarily a conspiracy to injure the dignity of the US State Department 88 00:07:52,800 --> 00:07:56,000 or to embarrass the United States military 89 00:07:56,100 --> 00:08:03,000 was actually, really, an attempt to allow people to learn about their world. 90 00:08:03,900 --> 00:08:11,400 To learn about how power really operates and therefore to do something about it. 91 00:08:12,800 --> 00:08:18,400 And what happened in Tunisia was, I thought, an eloquent rebuttal 92 00:08:18,500 --> 00:08:23,900 to the idea that the Wikileaks and free culture and free software 93 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:35,000 was primarily engaged in destruction, nihilism or I shrink from even employing 94 00:08:35,100 --> 00:08:38,200 the word in this context, terrorism. 95 00:08:38,600 --> 00:08:43,700 It was instead freedom which is messy, complicated, 96 00:08:43,800 --> 00:08:49,800 potentially damaging in the short term but salvational in the long term. 97 00:08:49,900 --> 00:08:53,000 The medicine for the human soul. 98 00:08:53,100 --> 00:08:58,700 It's hard, I know, because most of the time when we're coding 99 00:08:58,800 --> 00:09:01,700 it doesn't feel like we're doing anything 100 00:09:01,800 --> 00:09:05,200 that the human soul is directly very much involved in 101 00:09:05,600 --> 00:09:08,800 to take with full seriousness 102 00:09:08,900 --> 00:09:15,900 the political and spiritual meaning of free software at the present hour. 103 00:09:17,800 --> 00:09:23,000 But there are a lot of Egyptians whose freedom now depends 104 00:09:23,100 --> 00:09:27,300 upon their ability to communicate with one another 105 00:09:27,400 --> 00:09:32,300 through a database owned for-profit by a guy in California 106 00:09:32,400 --> 00:09:40,400 who obeys orders from governments, who send orders to disclose to Facebook. 107 00:09:41,600 --> 00:09:47,600 We are watching in real time the evolution of the kinds of politics 108 00:09:47,700 --> 00:09:54,000 of liberation and freedom in the 21st century that code can make 109 00:09:54,100 --> 00:09:59,600 and we are watching in real time the discovery of the vulnerabilities 110 00:09:59,700 --> 00:10:05,000 that arise from the bad engineering of the current system. 111 00:10:06,300 --> 00:10:14,500 Social networking, that is the ability to use free-form methods of communication 112 00:10:14,700 --> 00:10:22,000 from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion 113 00:10:22,100 --> 00:10:26,700 changes the balance of power in society. 114 00:10:26,900 --> 00:10:33,000 Away from highly organised vehicles of state control 115 00:10:33,100 --> 00:10:37,400 towards people in their own lives. 116 00:10:38,500 --> 00:10:43,800 What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia 117 00:10:43,900 --> 00:10:49,200 and what will happen in other societies over the next few years 118 00:10:49,300 --> 00:10:56,600 demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking. 119 00:10:56,800 --> 00:11:01,300 But everything we know about technology tells us 120 00:11:01,400 --> 00:11:05,000 that the current forms of social network communication 121 00:11:05,100 --> 00:11:14,100 despite their enormous current value for politics are also intensely dangerous to use. 122 00:11:14,200 --> 00:11:16,800 They are too centralised 123 00:11:16,900 --> 00:11:22,400 They are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control. 124 00:11:22,500 --> 00:11:25,400 And the design of their technology 125 00:11:25,500 --> 00:11:30,600 like the design of almost all unfree software technology 126 00:11:30,700 --> 00:11:35,700 is motivated more by business interests seeking profit 127 00:11:35,800 --> 00:11:40,100 than by technological interests seeking freedom. 128 00:11:40,200 --> 00:11:43,600 As a result of which, we are watching 129 00:11:43,700 --> 00:11:46,800 political movements of enormous value 130 00:11:46,900 --> 00:11:51,800 capable of transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people 131 00:11:51,900 --> 00:12:00,100 resting on a fragile basis like for example the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg 132 00:12:00,200 --> 00:12:05,000 or the willingness of Google to resist the state 133 00:12:05,100 --> 00:12:09,000 where the state is a powerful business partner 134 00:12:09,100 --> 00:12:17,200 and a party Google cannot afford to insult. 135 00:12:18,200 --> 00:12:23,000 We are living in a world in which real-time information 136 00:12:23,100 --> 00:12:27,800 crucial to people in the street seeking to build their freedom 137 00:12:27,900 --> 00:12:33,600 depends on a commercial micro-blogging service in northern California 138 00:12:33,700 --> 00:12:39,900 which must turn a profit in order to justify its existence 139 00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:42,800 to the people who design its technology 140 00:12:42,900 --> 00:12:49,400 and which we know is capable of deciding overnight all by itself 141 00:12:49,500 --> 00:12:54,800 to donate the entire history of everything, everybody said through it 142 00:12:54,900 --> 00:12:57,200 to the library of Congress. 143 00:12:57,300 --> 00:13:00,500 Which means, I suppose, that in some other place 144 00:13:00,600 --> 00:13:04,300 they could make a different style of donation. 145 00:13:06,300 --> 00:13:14,700 We need to fix this. We need to fix it quickly. 146 00:13:14,800 --> 00:13:23,600 We are now behind the curve of the movements for freedom that depend on code. 147 00:13:23,800 --> 00:13:29,000 And every day that we don't fix the problems created by the use of insecure, over-centralised 148 00:13:29,100 --> 00:13:35,200 overcapitalised social network media to do the politics of freedom 149 00:13:35,300 --> 00:13:41,200 the real politics of freedom in the street, where the tanks are. 150 00:13:41,800 --> 00:13:47,800 The more we don't fix this, the more we are becoming part of the system 151 00:13:47,900 --> 00:13:52,000 which will bring about a tragedy soon. 152 00:13:53,200 --> 00:13:58,000 What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring. 153 00:13:59,000 --> 00:14:05,000 But the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the net 154 00:14:05,100 --> 00:14:13,100 and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been. 155 00:14:14,100 --> 00:14:23,100 It is not hard when everybody's just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg 156 00:14:23,200 --> 00:14:32,800 to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse. 157 00:14:35,400 --> 00:14:45,600 We need to think deeply and rapidly and to good technological effect 158 00:14:45,800 --> 00:14:53,000 about the consequences of what we have built and what we haven't built yet. 159 00:14:53,800 --> 00:14:57,700 I pointed a couple of times already to the reason why 160 00:14:57,800 --> 00:15:02,000 centralised social networking and data distribution services 161 00:15:02,100 --> 00:15:06,000 should be replaced by federated services. 162 00:15:06,100 --> 00:15:09,400 I was talking about that intensively last year 163 00:15:09,500 --> 00:15:14,300 before this recent round of demonstrations in the street 164 00:15:14,400 --> 00:15:17,400 of the importance of the whole thing began. 165 00:15:17,500 --> 00:15:21,800 And I want to come back to the projects I have been advocating. 166 00:15:21,900 --> 00:15:27,800 But let me just say here, again, from this other perspective 167 00:15:27,900 --> 00:15:34,900 that the overcentralisation of network services is a crucial political vulnerability. 168 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:38,700 Friends of ours, people seeking freedom 169 00:15:38,800 --> 00:15:46,600 are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured and eventually killed somewhere on earth. 170 00:15:46,800 --> 00:15:52,800 Because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom 171 00:15:52,900 --> 00:15:59,000 on technology we know, is built to sell them out. 172 00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:07,200 If we care about freedom as much as we do 173 00:16:07,300 --> 00:16:10,400 and if we are as bright with technology as we are 174 00:16:10,500 --> 00:16:14,500 we have to address that problem. We are actually running out of time. 175 00:16:14,600 --> 00:16:18,700 Because people whose movements we care deeply about 176 00:16:18,800 --> 00:16:25,100 are already out there in harm's way using stuff that can hurt them. 177 00:16:26,800 --> 00:16:36,100 I don't want anybody taking life or death risks to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone. 178 00:16:36,800 --> 00:16:39,800 Because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him 179 00:16:39,900 --> 00:16:46,100 without our having any way to control it, stop it, help it or even know what's going on. 180 00:16:47,300 --> 00:16:53,200 We need to think infrastructurally about what we mean to freedom now. 181 00:16:53,800 --> 00:16:59,100 And we need to learn the lessons of what we see happening around us in real time. 182 00:16:59,800 --> 00:17:04,100 One thing that the Egyptian situation showed us 183 00:17:04,500 --> 00:17:08,700 as we probably knew after the Iranian situation 184 00:17:08,800 --> 00:17:15,500 when we watched the forces of the Iranian state buy the telecommunications carriers 185 00:17:15,600 --> 00:17:21,600 as we learnt when the Egyptians begin to lean on Vodafone last week. 186 00:17:21,700 --> 00:17:26,700 We learn again why closed networks are so harmful to us. 187 00:17:26,900 --> 00:17:31,900 Why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure 188 00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:36,200 by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers 189 00:17:36,300 --> 00:17:41,200 who must have a way of life with government in order to survive 190 00:17:41,300 --> 00:17:48,500 can harm our people seeking freedom using technology we understand well. 191 00:17:48,800 --> 00:17:56,400 Now, what can we do to help freedom under circumstances where the state 192 00:17:56,500 --> 00:18:01,500 has decided to try to clamp the network infrastructure? 193 00:18:01,800 --> 00:18:05,000 Well, we can go back to mesh networking. 194 00:18:05,200 --> 00:18:08,500 We've got to go back to mesh networking. 195 00:18:08,700 --> 00:18:12,800 We've got to understand how we can provide people 196 00:18:12,900 --> 00:18:19,300 using the ordinary devices already available to them or cheaply available to them 197 00:18:19,400 --> 00:18:25,600 to build networking that resists centralised control. 198 00:18:25,900 --> 00:18:30,700 Mesh networking in densely populated urban environments 199 00:18:30,800 --> 00:18:35,000 is capable of sustaining the kind of social action 200 00:18:35,100 --> 00:18:40,500 we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week. 201 00:18:40,900 --> 00:18:47,100 Even without the centralised network services providers 202 00:18:47,200 --> 00:18:54,700 if people have wireless routers that mesh up in their apartments, in their work places 203 00:18:54,800 --> 00:19:01,600 in the places of public resort around them they can continue to communicate 204 00:19:01,700 --> 00:19:07,000 despite attempts in central terms to shut them down. 205 00:19:07,700 --> 00:19:11,900 We need to go back to ensuring people 206 00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:17,000 secure end-to-end communications over those local meshes. 207 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:22,200 We need to provide survivable conditions 208 00:19:22,300 --> 00:19:27,400 for the kinds of communications that people now depend upon 209 00:19:27,500 --> 00:19:32,100 outside the context of centralised networking environments 210 00:19:32,200 --> 00:19:38,000 that can be used to surveil, control, arrest or shut them down. 211 00:19:39,900 --> 00:19:46,500 Can we do this? Sure. Are we gonna do this? 212 00:19:47,800 --> 00:19:54,200 If we don't, the great social promise of the free software movement 213 00:19:54,300 --> 00:20:00,100 that free software can lead to free society will begin to be broken. 214 00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:08,100 Force will intervene somewhere soon and a demonstration will be offered to humanity 215 00:20:08,200 --> 00:20:12,000 that even with all that networking technology 216 00:20:12,100 --> 00:20:16,700 and all those young people seeking to build new lives for themselves 217 00:20:16,800 --> 00:20:19,700 the state still wins. 218 00:20:19,900 --> 00:20:23,200 This must not happen. 219 00:20:25,400 --> 00:20:32,800 If you look at that map of the globe at night the one where all the lights on 220 00:20:32,900 --> 00:20:38,500 and imagine next time you look at it that you're looking instead at a network graph 221 00:20:38,700 --> 00:20:42,800 instead of an electrical infrastructure graph 222 00:20:42,900 --> 00:20:48,700 you'll feel like a kind of pulsing coming out of the North American continent 223 00:20:48,800 --> 00:20:54,100 where all the world's data mining is being done. 224 00:20:56,300 --> 00:20:59,600 Think of it that way, right? 225 00:20:59,900 --> 00:21:06,500 North America is becoming the heart of the global data mining industry 226 00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:12,800 Its job is becoming knowing everything about everybody, everywhere. 227 00:21:13,200 --> 00:21:19,200 When Dwight Eisenhower was leaving the presidency in 1960 228 00:21:19,300 --> 00:21:23,700 he made a famous farewell speech to the American people 229 00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:30,500 in which he warned them against the power of the military industrial complex 230 00:21:30,900 --> 00:21:35,100 a phrase that became so common place in discussion 231 00:21:35,200 --> 00:21:39,100 that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant. 232 00:21:40,700 --> 00:21:47,900 The general who had run the largest military activity of the 20th century 233 00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:50,900 the invasion of Europe. 234 00:21:51,000 --> 00:21:58,300 The general who had become the president of America at the height of the cold war 235 00:21:58,400 --> 00:22:04,500 was warning Americans about the permanent changes to their society 236 00:22:04,600 --> 00:22:07,000 that would result from the interaction 237 00:22:07,100 --> 00:22:13,000 of industrial capitalism with American military might. 238 00:22:13,200 --> 00:22:17,800 And since the time of that speech, as you all know, 239 00:22:17,900 --> 00:22:25,000 the United States has spent on defence more than the rest of the world combined. 240 00:22:28,100 --> 00:22:37,000 Now, in the 21st century, which we can define as after the latter part of September 2001 241 00:22:37,900 --> 00:22:42,600 the United States began to build a new thing. 242 00:22:42,800 --> 00:22:47,000 A surveillance industrial military complex. 243 00:22:47,900 --> 00:22:56,000 The Washington Post produced the most important piece of public journalism in the United States last year 244 00:22:56,100 --> 00:23:00,800 a series available to you online called 'Top Secret America' 245 00:23:00,900 --> 00:23:08,200 in which the Washington Post not only wrote eight very useful, lengthy, analytic stories 246 00:23:08,300 --> 00:23:12,800 about the classified sector of American industrial life 247 00:23:12,900 --> 00:23:16,100 built around surveillance and data processing. 248 00:23:16,200 --> 00:23:22,100 The Post produced an enormous database which is publicly available to everyone 249 00:23:22,200 --> 00:23:26,900 through the newspaper of all the classified contractors 250 00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:29,800 available to them in public record 251 00:23:29,900 --> 00:23:32,800 what they do for the government, what they're paid 252 00:23:32,900 --> 00:23:35,400 and what can be known about them. 253 00:23:35,500 --> 00:23:39,600 A database which can be used to create all sorts of journalism 254 00:23:39,700 --> 00:23:42,700 beyond what the Post published itself. 255 00:23:42,800 --> 00:23:48,100 I would encourage everybody to take a look at 'Top Secret America'. 256 00:23:48,200 --> 00:23:53,400 What it will show you is how many goggles there are 257 00:23:53,500 --> 00:23:57,100 under the direct control of the United States government 258 00:23:57,200 --> 00:24:01,500 as well as how many goggles there are under the control of Google. 259 00:24:01,600 --> 00:24:06,400 In other words the vast outspreading web 260 00:24:06,500 --> 00:24:11,200 which joins the traditional post second world war US listening 261 00:24:11,300 --> 00:24:16,100 to everything everywhere on earth outside the United States 262 00:24:16,700 --> 00:24:21,900 to the newly available listening to things inside the United States 263 00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:27,600 that used to be against the law in my country as I knew its law 264 00:24:27,900 --> 00:24:32,700 to all the data now available in all the commercial collection systems 265 00:24:32,900 --> 00:24:36,700 which includes everything you type into search boxes about 266 00:24:36,800 --> 00:24:44,000 what you believe, wish, hope, fear or doubt as well as every travel reservation you make 267 00:24:44,100 --> 00:24:49,000 and every piece of tracking data coming off your friendly smartphone. 268 00:24:55,200 --> 00:25:00,000 When governments talk about the future of the net these days 269 00:25:00,800 --> 00:25:06,000 I have on decent authority from government officials in several countries. 270 00:25:06,700 --> 00:25:09,900 When governments talk about the future of the net these days 271 00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:14,100 they talk almost entirely in terms of cyberwar. 272 00:25:14,600 --> 00:25:19,300 A field in which I've never had much interest and which has a jargon all its own 273 00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:23,700 but some current lessons from inter-governmental discussions 274 00:25:23,800 --> 00:25:28,000 about cyberwar are probably valuable to us here. 275 00:25:31,100 --> 00:25:35,500 The three most powerful collections of states on earth 276 00:25:35,600 --> 00:25:40,300 the United States of America, the European Union and the People's Republic of China 277 00:25:40,400 --> 00:25:46,600 discuss cyberwar at a fairly high inter-governmental level fairly regularly. 278 00:25:47,100 --> 00:25:55,100 Some of the people around that table have disagreements of policy 279 00:25:55,200 --> 00:25:58,300 but there is a broad area of consensus. 280 00:25:58,400 --> 00:26:02,500 In the world of cyberwar they talk about exfiltration. 281 00:26:02,600 --> 00:26:10,600 We would call that spying, they mean exfiltrating our data off our networks into their pockets. 282 00:26:11,600 --> 00:26:17,200 Exfiltration, I am told by government officials here and there and everywhere 283 00:26:17,300 --> 00:26:22,700 exfiltration is broadly considered by all the governments to be a free fire zone. 284 00:26:22,800 --> 00:26:25,900 Everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time 285 00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:28,500 we don't believe in any governmental limits 286 00:26:28,600 --> 00:26:31,400 and the reason is every government wants to listen 287 00:26:31,500 --> 00:26:35,400 and no government believes listening can be prevented. 288 00:26:35,500 --> 00:26:38,400 On that latter point, I think they're too pessimistic 289 00:26:38,500 --> 00:26:41,500 but let's grant them that they've spent a lot of money trying 290 00:26:41,600 --> 00:26:43,000 and they think they know. 291 00:26:43,100 --> 00:26:46,000 Where the disagreements currently exist 292 00:26:46,100 --> 00:26:49,500 I am told by the government officials I talked to 293 00:26:49,600 --> 00:26:54,300 concerns not exfiltration, but what they call network disruption. 294 00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:57,700 By which they mean destroying freedom. 295 00:26:58,200 --> 00:27:07,100 The basic attitude here is of a two parties in balanced speech. 296 00:27:07,200 --> 00:27:11,900 One side in that conversation says what we want is clear rules. 297 00:27:12,000 --> 00:27:14,100 We want to know what we are allowed to attack, 298 00:27:14,200 --> 00:27:19,700 what we have to defend and what we do with the things that are neither friendly nor enemy. 299 00:27:19,800 --> 00:27:25,600 The other side in that conversation says we recognise no distinctions. 300 00:27:25,800 --> 00:27:28,400 Anywhere on the net where there is a threat 301 00:27:28,500 --> 00:27:31,800 to our national security or our national interests, 302 00:27:31,900 --> 00:27:35,100 we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat 303 00:27:35,200 --> 00:27:38,700 regardless of its geographical location. 304 00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:42,400 I need not to characterise for you which among the governments 305 00:27:42,500 --> 00:27:45,100 the United States of America, the European Union 306 00:27:45,200 --> 00:27:48,900 or the People's Republic of China take those different positions. 307 00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:52,800 And I should say that my guess is that within all those governments 308 00:27:52,900 --> 00:27:55,200 there are differences of opinion on those points 309 00:27:55,300 --> 00:27:58,700 dominant factions and less dominant factions 310 00:27:59,300 --> 00:28:02,400 but all parties are increasingly aware 311 00:28:02,500 --> 00:28:06,500 that in North America is where the data mining is. 312 00:28:06,600 --> 00:28:11,400 And that's either a benefit, a dubiousness or a problem 313 00:28:11,500 --> 00:28:16,400 depending upon which state or collection of states you represent. 314 00:28:16,600 --> 00:28:21,300 European data protection law has done this much. 315 00:28:21,700 --> 00:28:28,700 It has put your personal data almost exclusively in North America where it is uncontrolled. 316 00:28:29,000 --> 00:28:33,100 To that extent, European legislation succeded. 317 00:28:35,500 --> 00:28:40,300 The data mining industries are concentrated outside the European Union 318 00:28:40,400 --> 00:28:43,400 largely for reasons of legal policy. 319 00:28:43,500 --> 00:28:48,900 They operate as any enterprise tends to operate in the part of the world 320 00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:52,700 where there is least control over their behaviour. 321 00:28:53,200 --> 00:28:57,500 There is no prospect that the North American governments 322 00:28:57,600 --> 00:29:00,500 particularly the government of the United States 323 00:29:00,600 --> 00:29:06,300 whose national security policy now depends on listening and data mining everything 324 00:29:06,400 --> 00:29:09,300 are going to change that for you. 325 00:29:09,400 --> 00:29:13,900 No possibility. No time soon. 326 00:29:17,900 --> 00:29:21,800 When he was a candidate for president, at the beginning 327 00:29:21,900 --> 00:29:25,900 in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was in favour 328 00:29:26,000 --> 00:29:30,900 of not immunising American telecommunications giants 329 00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:35,800 for participation in spying domestically inside the United States 330 00:29:35,900 --> 00:29:38,600 without direct public legal authorisation. 331 00:29:38,700 --> 00:29:42,100 By the time he was a candidate in the general election 332 00:29:42,200 --> 00:29:46,300 he was no longer in favour of preventing immunisation 333 00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:49,700 Indeed he, as a Senator from Illinois 334 00:29:49,800 --> 00:29:56,800 did not fillibuster the legislation immunising the telecomms giants and it went through. 335 00:29:56,900 --> 00:30:00,400 As you are aware the Obama administration's policies 336 00:30:00,500 --> 00:30:04,800 with respect to data mining, surveillance and domestic security in the net 337 00:30:04,900 --> 00:30:08,700 are hardly different from the predecessor administrations' 338 00:30:08,800 --> 00:30:14,800 except where they are more aggressive about government control. 339 00:30:16,700 --> 00:30:23,100 We can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias 340 00:30:23,200 --> 00:30:29,800 in the listening to everybody, everywhere about everything now going on. 341 00:30:31,400 --> 00:30:35,800 Profit motive will not produce privacy 342 00:30:35,900 --> 00:30:41,700 let alone will it produce robust defence for freedom in the street. 343 00:30:44,500 --> 00:30:49,700 If we are going to build systems of communication for future politics 344 00:30:49,800 --> 00:30:53,700 we're going to have to build them under the assumption 345 00:30:53,800 --> 00:30:59,400 that the network is not only untrusted, but untrustworthy. 346 00:30:59,500 --> 00:31:07,800 And we're going to have to build under the assumption that centralised services can kill you. 347 00:31:08,200 --> 00:31:12,400 We can't fool around about this. 348 00:31:12,500 --> 00:31:20,300 We can't let Facebook dance up and down about their privacy policy. That's ludicrous. 349 00:31:20,400 --> 00:31:25,100 We have to replace the things that create vulnerability 350 00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:29,700 and lure our colleagues around the world into using them 351 00:31:29,800 --> 00:31:32,600 to make freedom only to discover 352 00:31:32,700 --> 00:31:37,700 that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch. 353 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:46,000 Fortunately we actually do know how to engineer ourselves out of this situation. 354 00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:55,800 Cheap, small, low power plug servers are the form factor we need. 355 00:31:55,900 --> 00:31:58,300 And they exist everywhere now 356 00:31:58,400 --> 00:32:02,900 and they will get very cheap very quick very soon. 357 00:32:03,800 --> 00:32:07,700 A small device the size of a cell phone charger 358 00:32:07,800 --> 00:32:13,100 running a low power chip with a wireless NIC or two 359 00:32:13,200 --> 00:32:17,000 and some other available ports 360 00:32:17,100 --> 00:32:21,900 and some very sweet free software of our own 361 00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:28,300 is a practical device for creating significant personal privacy 362 00:32:28,400 --> 00:32:31,300 and freedom based communications. 363 00:32:31,400 --> 00:32:35,300 Think what it needs to have in it. 364 00:32:35,500 --> 00:32:41,700 Mesh networking, we are not quite there, but we should be. 365 00:32:41,900 --> 00:32:47,300 OpenBTS, asterisk, yeah, we could make telephone systems 366 00:32:47,400 --> 00:32:52,000 that are self-constructing out of parts that cost next to nothing. 367 00:32:54,900 --> 00:32:59,100 Federated, rather than centralised, micro-blogging 368 00:32:59,900 --> 00:33:04,500 social networking, photo exchange, 369 00:33:04,900 --> 00:33:11,300 anonymous publication platforms based around cloudy web servers. 370 00:33:12,200 --> 00:33:14,800 We can do all of that. 371 00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:21,400 Your data at home in your house where they have to come and get it 372 00:33:21,500 --> 00:33:24,700 facing whatever the legal restrictions are, 373 00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:27,700 if any, in your society about 374 00:33:27,800 --> 00:33:31,000 what goes on inside the precincts of the home. 375 00:33:31,500 --> 00:33:36,200 Encrypted email, just all the time 376 00:33:36,300 --> 00:33:40,800 perimeter defence for all those wonky Windows computers 377 00:33:40,900 --> 00:33:46,600 and other bad devices that roll over any time they're pushed at by a twelve year old 378 00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:54,000 Proxy services for climbing over national firewalls. 379 00:33:54,900 --> 00:33:59,300 Smart tunnelling to get around anti-neutrality activity 380 00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:03,600 by upstream ISPs and other network providers. 381 00:34:03,800 --> 00:34:12,600 All of that can be easily done on top of stuff we already make and use all the time. 382 00:34:12,700 --> 00:34:19,800 We have general purpose distributions of stacks more than robust enough for all of this 383 00:34:19,900 --> 00:34:25,000 and a little bit of application layer work to do on the top. 384 00:34:26,900 --> 00:34:34,100 Yesterday in the United States we formed the Freedom Box Foundation 385 00:34:34,200 --> 00:34:41,100 which I plan to use as the temporary or long term as the case may be 386 00:34:41,200 --> 00:34:46,300 organisational headquarters for work making free software 387 00:34:46,400 --> 00:34:50,400 to run on small format server boxes 388 00:34:50,500 --> 00:34:55,600 free hardware wherever possible unfree hardware where we must 389 00:34:55,700 --> 00:35:01,400 in order to make available around the world at low prices 390 00:35:01,500 --> 00:35:05,900 appliances human beings will like interacting with 391 00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:12,000 that produce privacy and help to secure robust freedom. 392 00:35:22,800 --> 00:35:31,100 We can make such objects cheaper than the chargers for smart phones. 393 00:35:31,200 --> 00:35:38,100 We can give people something that they can buy at very low cost 394 00:35:38,200 --> 00:35:42,700 that will go in their houses that will run free software 395 00:35:42,800 --> 00:35:48,700 to provide them services that make life better on the ordinary days 396 00:35:48,900 --> 00:35:53,600 and really come into their own on those not so ordinary days 397 00:35:53,700 --> 00:35:58,000 when we are out in the street making freedom thank you for calling. 398 00:36:02,900 --> 00:36:08,800 A Belarussian theatre troupe that got arrested and heavily beaten on 399 00:36:08,900 --> 00:36:14,400 after the so called elections in Minsk this winter 400 00:36:14,500 --> 00:36:20,200 exfiltrated itself to New York city in January 401 00:36:20,300 --> 00:36:25,200 did some performances of Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews 402 00:36:25,300 --> 00:36:28,700 I'm sorry of Harold Pinter and gave some interviews 403 00:36:29,100 --> 00:36:35,600 One of the Belarussian actors who was part of that troupe 404 00:36:35,700 --> 00:36:38,100 said in an interview to New York Times 405 00:36:38,200 --> 00:36:44,000 the Belarussian KGB is the most honest organisation on earth. 406 00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:52,100 After the Soviet Union fell apart they saw no need to change anything they did 407 00:36:52,200 --> 00:36:56,600 so they saw no need to change their name either. 408 00:36:57,900 --> 00:37:02,800 And I thought that was a really quite useful comment. 409 00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:09,000 We need to keep in mind that they are exactly the same people they always were 410 00:37:09,100 --> 00:37:14,800 whether they're in Cairo or Moscow or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta 411 00:37:14,900 --> 00:37:16,300 or anywhere else on earth. 412 00:37:16,400 --> 00:37:19,500 They're exactly the same people they always were. 413 00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:23,500 So are we exactly the same people we always were too. 414 00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:28,500 We set out a generation ago to make freedom and we're still doing it. 415 00:37:28,700 --> 00:37:31,800 But we have to pick up the pace now. 416 00:37:31,900 --> 00:37:34,900 We have to get more urgent now. 417 00:37:35,000 --> 00:37:40,900 We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now. 418 00:37:41,900 --> 00:37:47,700 Because we have friends in the street trying to create human freedom. 419 00:37:47,800 --> 00:37:52,000 And if we don't help them they'll get hurt. 420 00:37:52,700 --> 00:38:02,000 We rise to challenges, this is one. We've got to do it. Thank you very much. 421 00:38:29,100 --> 00:38:35,000 Thank you very much and I think there is enough time for a few questions 422 00:38:35,100 --> 00:38:38,000 so please raise your hand if you want to 423 00:39:02,200 --> 00:39:07,200 The question was what does complete decentralisation mean for identity 424 00:39:07,300 --> 00:39:13,300 because the state, you may believe who you are but the state gives you a passport 425 00:39:13,400 --> 00:39:16,800 or some other legal document that allows you to identify yourself. 426 00:39:16,900 --> 00:39:22,500 So in complete decentralisation how do you identify yourself on that network? 427 00:39:22,900 --> 00:39:27,100 I doubt that complete decentralisation is the outcome of anything 428 00:39:27,200 --> 00:39:32,000 but let me tell you a story which may help to explain how I feel about this. 429 00:39:32,100 --> 00:39:39,100 We need to go back now by 16 years to a time when there was a program called PGP 430 00:39:39,200 --> 00:39:43,200 and there was a government in the United States that was trying to eradicate it. 431 00:39:43,300 --> 00:39:49,300 I know this will seem like ancient history to many people, but it's my life so it doesn't to me. 432 00:39:49,900 --> 00:39:55,700 We were having a debate at Harvard Law School in January of 1995 433 00:39:55,800 --> 00:40:02,500 two on two about PGP and the criminal investigation and the future of secrecy. 434 00:40:02,600 --> 00:40:06,900 The debators on my side were me and Danny Whitesner 435 00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:09,900 then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center 436 00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:14,800 later at the W3C and now in the United States Department of Commerce. 437 00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:18,900 And on the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States 438 00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:23,500 and a former General Counsel of the National Security Agency. 439 00:40:23,600 --> 00:40:28,200 We debated PGP and then encryption and the clipper chip and various other, 440 00:40:28,300 --> 00:40:30,800 now long dead, subjects for a couple of hours 441 00:40:30,900 --> 00:40:34,500 and then we were all on an offered little dinner at the Harvard faculty club. 442 00:40:34,600 --> 00:40:37,200 On the way across the Harvard campus 443 00:40:37,300 --> 00:40:39,900 the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said to me 444 00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:43,100 Eben, on the basis of your public statements this afternoon 445 00:40:43,200 --> 00:40:47,800 I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations. 446 00:40:48,800 --> 00:40:51,800 She thought that was a joke. 447 00:40:52,900 --> 00:40:57,200 And back in 1995 you could sort of get away with thinking it was a joke 448 00:40:57,300 --> 00:41:01,700 as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States because it was so clearly against the law. 449 00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:06,200 So I smiled and we went off, we had our dinner 450 00:41:06,300 --> 00:41:11,100 and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts and the port had been strewn about 451 00:41:11,200 --> 00:41:15,300 this former General Counsel to the National Security Agency 452 00:41:15,400 --> 00:41:18,900 I'm concealing names to protect the not so innocent here 453 00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:22,800 this former NSA lawyer, he looked around the table calmly 454 00:41:22,900 --> 00:41:25,800 and with that sort of plummy through the port kind of look 455 00:41:25,900 --> 00:41:31,100 and he said ok we'll let our head down we agree we're not gonna prosecute your client 456 00:41:31,200 --> 00:41:34,900 PGP will happen. We've fought a long delaying action 457 00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:39,500 against public key encryption but it's coming to an end now. 458 00:41:39,600 --> 00:41:45,500 And then he looked around the table and he said but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they? 459 00:41:45,600 --> 00:41:48,200 And a cold chill went up my spine 460 00:41:48,300 --> 00:41:51,600 because I knew what the next 15 years were gonna be about. 461 00:41:51,700 --> 00:41:55,700 So I would like to turn around the thing you said to say 462 00:41:55,800 --> 00:42:00,700 what we're really talking about is whether there's gonna be any preservation of anonymity at all. 463 00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:05,700 Where power on the other side made its peace in the mid 1990s 464 00:42:05,800 --> 00:42:08,600 was with the idea that there would be strong encryption 465 00:42:08,700 --> 00:42:11,300 and e-commerce but there would be no anomymity. 466 00:42:11,400 --> 00:42:15,000 And in the course of the last decade they picked up a strong alliance 467 00:42:15,100 --> 00:42:17,400 with the global entertainment industries 468 00:42:17,500 --> 00:42:20,300 the things that now call themselves content companies 469 00:42:20,400 --> 00:42:22,400 which are also adverse to anonymity, right? 470 00:42:22,500 --> 00:42:25,500 cause they wanna know what you read and listen to and watch every single time 471 00:42:25,600 --> 00:42:29,300 so that you can increase their shareholders' wealth for them. 472 00:42:29,500 --> 00:42:32,800 The real problem of identity isn't the problem of 473 00:42:32,900 --> 00:42:36,700 are we gonna be decentralised past the point when we have identity 474 00:42:36,800 --> 00:42:39,900 we are not going to do that. We are not going to be able to do that. 475 00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:43,900 The real problem of identity is are we gonna have any of our own? 476 00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:48,800 or are we gonna be the data cloud that everybody else is keeping about us 477 00:42:48,900 --> 00:42:54,900 which contains where we are, what we do, what we think what we read, what we eat and everything else too 478 00:42:55,000 --> 00:42:57,500 as long as you send a subpoena 479 00:42:57,600 --> 00:43:01,900 to Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database in which you live your entire life. 480 00:43:02,100 --> 00:43:07,800 I understand the idea that we might be thought of or satirically 481 00:43:07,900 --> 00:43:11,000 or even pointedly claim to be 482 00:43:11,100 --> 00:43:16,200 trying too radically decentralise to the point in which identity gets lost. 483 00:43:16,300 --> 00:43:19,800 But if you find yourself in an argument where people telling you 484 00:43:19,900 --> 00:43:23,900 you are trying to anarchise so far that there won't be any name in the passport anymore 485 00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:28,300 you can reassure them that meat-space will stay pretty much the way it is right now. 486 00:43:28,400 --> 00:43:33,300 We just want fewer people ripping fingernails off in meat-space. 487 00:43:33,400 --> 00:43:38,800 Which is why we are busy building Freedom Boxes and helping people use them. 488 00:43:38,900 --> 00:43:43,800 Thank you very much, the passport will remain pretty much the way it is right now 489 00:43:43,900 --> 00:43:49,400 with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints and the retinal scan and everything. 490 00:43:49,500 --> 00:43:52,400 I'm not worried that we are going to go too far friends. 491 00:43:52,500 --> 00:43:56,000 It's the other folks who went way too far and our job's to get back home. 492 00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:08,700 Hello Eben, I'm here. 493 00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:15,100 Jérémie from La Quadrature du Net 494 00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:19,500 First of all I want to thank you and I will never thank you enough 495 00:44:19,600 --> 00:44:23,100 for how inspiring you are for everyone of us 496 00:44:29,100 --> 00:44:34,700 By thanking you for inspiring us under an engineering perspective 497 00:44:34,800 --> 00:44:40,100 as I am both an engineering geek and a political activist by what I do. 498 00:44:40,200 --> 00:44:46,500 I wanted to stress that the ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 499 00:44:46,600 --> 00:44:52,600 that deeply concern strengthening of DRMs and the legal protection 500 00:44:52,700 --> 00:44:56,600 and also turns every internet service provider 501 00:44:56,700 --> 00:45:00,800 every internet intermediate into private copyright police 502 00:45:00,900 --> 00:45:06,800 with deep consequence on our freedom of speech, our privacy, on right to a fair trial and so on. 503 00:45:07,000 --> 00:45:11,800 The ACTA will be coming to the European Parliament around next summer 504 00:45:11,900 --> 00:45:18,100 maybe before maybe after and it will be our ultimate chance to defeat the thing. 505 00:45:18,200 --> 00:45:21,600 We won in the European Parliament before. 506 00:45:21,700 --> 00:45:27,600 This is a battle we can win and everybody here can participate into it 507 00:45:27,700 --> 00:45:29,400 and I wanted to ask you Eben 508 00:45:29,500 --> 00:45:35,400 Are those legislative fights worth fighting? Do we still have a chance? 509 00:45:35,500 --> 00:45:38,400 and especially on the front of the net neutrality, 510 00:45:38,500 --> 00:45:42,800 What are your insights? What do you think? Can we still win today? 511 00:45:42,900 --> 00:45:49,400 No European citizen should need any introduction to Jérémie Zimmermann, right? 512 00:45:49,500 --> 00:45:53,800 That's the future of the European Union speaking to you. 513 00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:59,300 Your question: Should we bother fighting in legislature 514 00:45:59,400 --> 00:46:03,300 seems to me fair, oh yeah we should. It's unpleasant work. 515 00:46:03,400 --> 00:46:08,000 I worry about you. I don't want your heart to burst. 516 00:46:08,800 --> 00:46:14,200 I don't want people killing themselves over the strain of it. 517 00:46:14,300 --> 00:46:18,300 It's ugly, boring, tedious work 518 00:46:18,400 --> 00:46:26,900 and the other side pays people to sit you out to wait until you go home, to decide you give up. 519 00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:32,600 Think of Egypt as a place where that was done for thirty years along with torture. 520 00:46:32,700 --> 00:46:35,400 Everything stops moving. 521 00:46:35,500 --> 00:46:39,100 If you read Claude Manceron on the French revolution 522 00:46:39,200 --> 00:46:41,500 or the coming of the French revolution 523 00:46:41,600 --> 00:46:45,000 as he moves his thousands of men and women of freedom 524 00:46:45,100 --> 00:46:49,000 towards the climactic events of the late 1780s 525 00:46:49,100 --> 00:46:53,800 you see how deeply the feeling in France at the end of the Ancien Régime 526 00:46:53,900 --> 00:46:58,400 was of status beginning to break up into movement. 527 00:46:58,600 --> 00:47:03,300 The work you're talking about is work that is largely defensive 528 00:47:03,400 --> 00:47:06,600 to prevent harm from being done. 529 00:47:06,700 --> 00:47:12,400 And as you say you are lucky when you win after an enormous effort that nothing happens. 530 00:47:12,500 --> 00:47:17,900 But the good news is in legislative politics that there is a thousand ways to stop a thing 531 00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:20,400 and only one way for it to get done. 532 00:47:20,500 --> 00:47:25,800 And therefore the side that wants to stop things has an inherent advantage. 533 00:47:25,900 --> 00:47:32,300 Most of the time that's deeply funded capital but sometimes it's us. 534 00:47:32,400 --> 00:47:38,800 About ACTA, I think there is no question. It's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time. 535 00:47:38,900 --> 00:47:46,200 Because as you say it's really the concordat, the treaty between the state and private power 536 00:47:46,300 --> 00:47:50,300 for the control of the net under 21st century conditions 537 00:47:50,400 --> 00:47:55,100 in the mingled interests of the listeners and the owners. 538 00:47:55,400 --> 00:48:03,500 If we do beat it, water it down, force withdrawal of particularly offensive premises 539 00:48:03,600 --> 00:48:08,300 or significantly expose it to disinfecting daylight 540 00:48:08,400 --> 00:48:10,400 we will help ourselves. 541 00:48:10,500 --> 00:48:13,900 We are not going to achieve everything by any means. 542 00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:21,900 We need to turn the international trade conversation in the direction of direct support for freedom. 543 00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:26,700 My line with the trade negotiators around the world has become: 544 00:48:26,800 --> 00:48:29,000 Governments have a right to share 545 00:48:29,100 --> 00:48:38,700 the sharing economy has as much right to support in the international trade system as the owning economy. 546 00:48:38,800 --> 00:48:42,300 My colleague Mishi Choudhary who directs SFLC India 547 00:48:42,400 --> 00:48:46,900 was in Beijing making a speech on that point earlier this year. 548 00:48:47,000 --> 00:48:51,700 We will be re-iterating that point in various places around the world 549 00:48:51,800 --> 00:48:55,900 where strong states with which we have other difficulties 550 00:48:56,000 --> 00:49:00,400 meet with us in recognising that the world trade system 551 00:49:00,500 --> 00:49:06,100 is now overwhelmingly tilted in favour of ownership based production 552 00:49:06,200 --> 00:49:10,300 which is only one part of the world's economic production. 553 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:16,700 We need to press hard against ACTA and other pro-ownership trade law 554 00:49:16,800 --> 00:49:22,200 but we also need to begin to roll out an affirmative strategy of our own 555 00:49:22,300 --> 00:49:28,700 demanding protection for sharing based economic activities in the global trade system. 556 00:49:28,800 --> 00:49:32,900 That effort will take 20 years to begin to show fruit 557 00:49:33,000 --> 00:49:36,500 but we need to begin that too now. 558 00:49:36,600 --> 00:49:39,800 On network neutrality I will say this 559 00:49:39,900 --> 00:49:49,800 We are going to have to establish counterforce to the various oligopolists of telecommunications. 560 00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:56,300 The regulators believe a lot of things they have been told by industry. 561 00:49:56,400 --> 00:50:04,100 I was at ARCEP myself in September to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris 562 00:50:04,200 --> 00:50:09,700 with regulators who are well educated, shrewd, thoughtful and capable 563 00:50:09,800 --> 00:50:13,300 but who believe something which isn't true. 564 00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:20,000 Namely that it costs enormous monetary investments to build wireless networks. 565 00:50:21,000 --> 00:50:28,000 And I said to the ARCEP regulators Do you know about OpenBTS? 566 00:50:28,100 --> 00:50:31,700 Do you know that I can take a coat hanger and a laptop 567 00:50:31,800 --> 00:50:37,600 and make a GSM cell phone base station out of it using some free software? 568 00:50:37,700 --> 00:50:40,400 Do you know about Asterisk? 569 00:50:40,500 --> 00:50:46,700 I suggested that maybe they would like to give us a small French city, say, Grenoble. 570 00:50:47,300 --> 00:50:53,400 where using the extraodinary high quality wired harness 571 00:50:53,500 --> 00:50:56,500 that they built around the hexagon that is France 572 00:50:56,600 --> 00:51:00,500 we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere 573 00:51:00,600 --> 00:51:06,500 using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets and provide service to everybody. 574 00:51:06,600 --> 00:51:11,700 And then I say it will be possible to have a realistic fact-based discussion 575 00:51:11,800 --> 00:51:17,200 about whether the enormous investment necessities of wireless network build out 576 00:51:17,300 --> 00:51:22,600 require non-neutrality in network routing practices. 577 00:51:22,700 --> 00:51:27,200 Well, the regulator of course nods and smiles and thanks me very much for all that information 578 00:51:27,300 --> 00:51:29,300 and forgets it the minute I leave. 579 00:51:29,400 --> 00:51:35,400 Because he still believes what Orange, that used to be France Télécom, tells him 580 00:51:35,500 --> 00:51:41,600 about how you can't make wireless networks without immense monetary investments. 581 00:51:41,700 --> 00:51:45,000 We will begin to gain on network neutrality 582 00:51:45,100 --> 00:51:50,800 when we have a box in everybody's apartment that can offer free telephone service over tunnelling 583 00:51:50,900 --> 00:51:58,000 around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets. Oh, that would be the Freedom Box. 584 00:51:58,500 --> 00:52:02,800 See, that's what I wanna do. I wanna build a ring of engineering 585 00:52:02,900 --> 00:52:06,600 around the idea of non-neutral network management. 586 00:52:07,000 --> 00:52:10,900 I wanna have a box in your house that senses the upstream and says 587 00:52:11,000 --> 00:52:14,100 oh my God he's stopping port 655 588 00:52:14,200 --> 00:52:17,000 I think I'll route that from my friend's apartment. 589 00:52:17,700 --> 00:52:23,500 Then I think we will get some interesting network neutrality conversation going. 590 00:52:29,300 --> 00:52:34,000 When you call for decentralisation 591 00:52:34,100 --> 00:52:38,200 aren't you really going against the trend of history as we've seen it? 592 00:52:38,300 --> 00:52:42,400 For example we used to have Usenet which was decentralised 593 00:52:42,500 --> 00:52:46,000 that's moved much more to web based forums. 594 00:52:46,600 --> 00:52:53,500 Or likewise we in geekdom may love IRC. We may go to Freenode 595 00:52:53,700 --> 00:52:59,000 but the general public all know about Twitter which is moving into that space. 596 00:52:59,200 --> 00:53:03,300 And I think there are many reasons why this could be happening 597 00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:09,300 but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare. The journalists who report this to the general public 598 00:53:09,400 --> 00:53:12,600 outside geekdom know about websites, they know about Twitter. 599 00:53:12,700 --> 00:53:18,000 They never knew about Usenet so only geeks know about that 600 00:53:19,700 --> 00:53:26,100 If we take this point perhaps the mindshare you need to be going for is the journalists 601 00:53:26,200 --> 00:53:32,000 who report on the net, get them to report on decentralised networks 602 00:53:34,200 --> 00:53:38,900 and get the public to start using them. 603 00:53:39,100 --> 00:53:42,200 Yes, it's a crucial part of the activity, that's right. 604 00:53:42,300 --> 00:53:44,300 We're going to talk to people. 605 00:53:44,400 --> 00:53:47,600 Some of those people are gonna be journalists and some of them are gonna be our friends 606 00:53:47,700 --> 00:53:51,400 and some of them are gonna be other engineers and some of them are gonna be people who 607 00:53:51,500 --> 00:53:54,500 when their wireless router breaks they can go out buying a Freedom Box 608 00:53:54,600 --> 00:53:58,000 cause it's cheaper and neater and cooler and does more good stuff. 609 00:53:58,100 --> 00:54:01,000 And some of them are gonna be people who buy because they need it. 610 00:54:01,100 --> 00:54:03,800 We just have to make the software. 611 00:54:03,900 --> 00:54:06,800 The hardware guys will make the hardware and everything will happen. 612 00:54:06,900 --> 00:54:10,400 I don't know how long. I don't know with what degree of certainty. 613 00:54:10,500 --> 00:54:13,400 But I don't know if it's about going against the flow of history. 614 00:54:13,500 --> 00:54:17,000 I think it's about pushing the pendulum back. 615 00:54:19,900 --> 00:54:26,000 The general public have to know that this option exists and will serve their needs. 616 00:54:26,100 --> 00:54:30,000 Yes, Apple will always advertise more than we will. 617 00:54:31,900 --> 00:54:38,100 But the general public knows about Firefox so they can know about the Freedom Box too. 618 00:54:44,900 --> 00:54:48,400 I think we have to stop in order to allow the conference to go on. 619 00:54:48,500 --> 00:54:51,000 Thank you very much for your time.