Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever

By Eben Moglen

We have come a very long way since the beginning of free software. GNU, Android, Linux, Open Solaris, X, Apache, Perl & other free software have changed & are changing the world.

But events happening now, like the Wikileaks investigation, and technologies of spying and control, like Facebook and iPad, are reminding us just how politically and socially unfree computers can make us if we're not careful. In this talk, I consider where we are now, and where we need to go

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a European event centered around Free and Open Source software development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source software. More info at http://fosdem.org

Ok, so, it's time for the keynotes
and we are very honoured to have

Eben Moglen here as first keynote speaker

He is a professor of Law
and Legal History at Columbia University.

He is probably most known
for his involvement in the FSF

and for creating the Software Freedom Law Centre.

He was also heavily involved
in the creation of the GPL version 3

and many other things of course
and so he will give a talk here today about

Why political liberty depends
on software freedom more than ever.

Eben Moglen, thank you.

Thank you, good morning
it's a great pleasure to be here.

I wanna thank the organisers
for the miracle that FOSDEM is

You all know that only chaos

could create an organisation
of this quality and power

and it's an honour for me
to play a little bit of a role in it.

I know how eager you are
to deal with technical matters

and I'm sorry to start with politics
first thing in the morning, but it's urgent.

You've been watching it all around the world
the past several weeks haven't you?

It's about how politics actually works now

for people actually seeking freedom now

for people trying to make
change in their world now.

Software is what the 21st century is made of.

What steel was to the economy of the 20th century

what steel was to the power of the 20th century

what steel was to the politics
of the 20th century, software is now.

It's the crucial building block,
the component out of which everything else is made.

And when I speak of everything else
I mean, of course, freedom.

As well as tyranny, as well as business as usual

as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.

In other words, the very composition of social life

the way it works or doesn't work for us

the way it works or doesn't work for those who own

the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress

all now depends on software.

At the other end of this hastening process

when we started our little conspiracy
you and me and everybody else

you remember how it works, right?

I mean it's a simple idea.

Make freedom, put freedom in everything,
turn freedom on, right?

That was how the conspiracy was designed
that's how the thing is supposed to work

We did pretty well with it
and about halfway through stage 1

my dear friend Larry Lessig
figured out what was going on for us

and he wrote his first
quite astonishing book "Code"

in which he said that code was going
to do the work of law in the 21st century.

That was a crucial idea
out of which much else got born

including creative commons
and a bunch of other useful things.

The really important point now is
that code does the work of law

and the work of the state and code does
the work of revolution against the state.

And code does all the work that the state does

trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations.

But code also organises the people in the street.

We're having enormous demonstration
around the world right now

of the power of code in both directions.

The newspapers in the United States
this past month have been full of the buzz

around the book called
"The Net Delusion" by Evgeny Morozov

A very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view
of the political nature of the changes in the net

Mr. Morozov who comes from Belarus

and therefore has a clear understanding
of the mechanism of 21st century despotism

sees the ways in which the institutions of the net

are increasingly being co-opted by the state
in an effort to limit control or eliminate freedom.

And his summary of half decade of
policy papers on that subject in his book

is a warning to the technological optimists,
at least he says it is

about the nature of the net delusion
that the net brings freedom.

I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists
because I do think the net brings freedom.

I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however.

The wrong net brings tyranny
and the right net brings freedom.

This is a version of the reason why
I still have the buttons for distribution

that says "Stallman was right".

The right net brings freedom
and the wrong net brings tyranny

because it all depends on how the code works.

All right, so we all know that.

We've spent a lot of time making free software.

We've spent a lot of time
putting free software in everything

and we have tried to turn freedom on.

We have also joined forces with other elements

of the free culture world
that we helped to bring into existence.

I've known Jimmy Wales a long time
and Julian Assange, and that changes the world.

Wikipedia and Wikileaks
are two sides of the same coin.

They are the two sides of the same coin
the third side of which is FOSDEM.

It is the power of ordinary people
to organise, to change the world

without having to create hierarchy

and without having to recapitulate
the structures of power

that are being challenged
by the desire to make freedom.

Wikileaks was being treated
everywhere around the world

in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time

and then events in Tunisia made it
a little more complicated.

As it became clear that what was
being reported on around the world

as though it was primarily a conspiracy
to injure the dignity of the US State Department

or to embarrass the United States military

was actually, really, an attempt
to allow people to learn about their world.

To learn about how power really operates
and therefore to do something about it.

And what happened in Tunisia was,
I thought, an eloquent rebuttal

to the idea that the Wikileaks
and free culture and free software

was primarily engaged in destruction,
nihilism or I shrink from even employing

the word in this context, terrorism.

It was instead freedom
which is messy, complicated,

potentially damaging in the short term
but salvational in the long term.

The medicine for the human soul.

It's hard, I know, because most
of the time when we're coding

it doesn't feel like
we're doing anything

that the human soul is directly
very much involved in

to take with full seriousness

the political and spiritual meaning
of free software at the present hour.

But there are a lot of Egyptians
whose freedom now depends

upon their ability
to communicate with one another

through a database owned
for-profit by a guy in California

who obeys orders from governments,
who send orders to disclose to Facebook.

We are watching in real time
the evolution of the kinds of politics

of liberation and freedom
in the 21st century that code can make

and we are watching in real time
the discovery of the vulnerabilities

that arise from the bad engineering
of the current system.

Social networking, that is the ability
to use free-form methods of communication

from many to many, now,
in an instantaneous fashion

changes the balance of power in society.

Away from highly organised
vehicles of state control

towards people in their own lives.

What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia

and what will happen in other
societies over the next few years

demonstrates the enormous political
and social importance of social networking.

But everything we know
about technology tells us

that the current forms
of social network communication

despite their enormous current value for
politics are also intensely dangerous to use.

They are too centralised

They are too vulnerable
to state retaliation and control.

And the design of their technology

like the design of almost
all unfree software technology

is motivated more by
business interests seeking profit

than by technological interests seeking freedom.

As a result of which, we are watching

political movements of enormous value

capable of transforming
the lives of hundreds of millions of people

resting on a fragile basis
like for example the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg

or the willingness of Google to resist the state

where the state is a powerful business partner

and a party Google cannot afford to insult.

We are living in a world
in which real-time information

crucial to people in the street
seeking to build their freedom

depends on a commercial
micro-blogging service in northern California

which must turn a profit
in order to justify its existence

to the people who design its technology

and which we know is capable
of deciding overnight all by itself

to donate the entire history
of everything, everybody said through it

to the library of Congress.

Which means, I suppose, that in some other place

they could make a different style of donation.

We need to fix this. We need to fix it quickly.

We are now behind the curve of the movements
for freedom that depend on code.

And every day that we don't fix the problems created
by the use of insecure, over-centralised

overcapitalised social network media
to do the politics of freedom

the real politics of freedom
in the street, where the tanks are.

The more we don't fix this,
the more we are becoming part of the system

which will bring about a tragedy soon.

What has happened in Egypt
is enormously inspiring.

But the Egyptian state was late
to the attempt to control the net

and not ready to be
as remorseless as it could have been.

It is not hard when everybody's just in one
big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg

to decapitate a revolution by sending an order
to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse.

We need to think deeply and rapidly
and to good technological effect

about the consequences of what
we have built and what we haven't built yet.

I pointed a couple of times
already to the reason why

centralised social networking
and data distribution services

should be replaced by federated services.

I was talking about that intensively last year

before this recent round
of demonstrations in the street

of the importance of the whole thing began.

And I want to come back
to the projects I have been advocating.

But let me just say here,
again, from this other perspective

that the overcentralisation of network services
is a crucial political vulnerability.

Friends of ours, people seeking freedom

are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured
and eventually killed somewhere on earth.

Because they're depending for their political
survival in their movements for freedom

on technology we know, is built to sell them out.

If we care about freedom as much as we do

and if we are as bright
with technology as we are

we have to address that problem.
We are actually running out of time.

Because people whose movements we care deeply about

are already out there in harm's way
using stuff that can hurt them.

I don't want anybody taking life or death risks
to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone.

Because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him

without our having any way to control it,
stop it, help it or even know what's going on.

We need to think infrastructurally
about what we mean to freedom now.

And we need to learn the lessons
of what we see happening around us in real time.

One thing that the Egyptian situation showed us

as we probably knew after the Iranian situation

when we watched the forces of the Iranian state
buy the telecommunications carriers

as we learnt when the Egyptians
begin to lean on Vodafone last week.

We learn again why
closed networks are so harmful to us.

Why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure

by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers

who must have a way of life
with government in order to survive

can harm our people seeking freedom
using technology we understand well.

Now, what can we do to help freedom
under circumstances where the state

has decided to try
to clamp the network infrastructure?

Well, we can go back to mesh networking.

We've got to go back to mesh networking.

We've got to understand how we can provide people

using the ordinary devices already available
to them or cheaply available to them

to build networking
that resists centralised control.

Mesh networking in densely populated urban environments

is capable of sustaining the kind of social action

we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week.

Even without the centralised network services providers

if people have wireless routers that mesh up
in their apartments, in their work places

in the places of public resort around them
they can continue to communicate

despite attempts in central terms to shut them down.

We need to go back to ensuring people

secure end-to-end communications
over those local meshes.

We need to provide survivable conditions

for the kinds of communications
that people now depend upon

outside the context of
centralised networking environments

that can be used to surveil,
control, arrest or shut them down.

Can we do this? Sure. Are we gonna do this?

If we don't, the great social promise
of the free software movement

that free software can lead
to free society will begin to be broken.

Force will intervene somewhere soon
and a demonstration will be offered to humanity

that even with all that networking technology

and all those young people seeking
to build new lives for themselves

the state still wins.

This must not happen.

If you look at that map of the globe at night
the one where all the lights on

and imagine next time you look at it
that you're looking instead at a network graph

instead of an electrical infrastructure graph

you'll feel like a kind of pulsing
coming out of the North American continent

where all the world's data mining is being done.

Think of it that way, right?

North America is becoming the heart
of the global data mining industry

Its job is becoming knowing everything
about everybody, everywhere.

When Dwight Eisenhower
was leaving the presidency in 1960

he made a famous farewell speech to the American people

in which he warned them against
the power of the military industrial complex

a phrase that became so common place in discussion

that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant.

The general who had run the largest
military activity of the 20th century

the invasion of Europe.

The general who had become the president
of America at the height of the cold war

was warning Americans about
the permanent changes to their society

that would result from the interaction

of industrial capitalism with American military might.

And since the time of that speech, as you all know,

the United States has spent on defence
more than the rest of the world combined.

Now, in the 21st century, which we can define
as after the latter part of September 2001

the United States began to build a new thing.

A surveillance industrial military complex.

The Washington Post produced the most important piece
of public journalism in the United States last year

a series available to you online called 'Top Secret America'

in which the Washington Post not only wrote
eight very useful, lengthy, analytic stories

about the classified sector
of American industrial life

built around surveillance and data processing.

The Post produced an enormous database
which is publicly available to everyone

through the newspaper
of all the classified contractors

available to them in public record

what they do for the government, what they're paid

and what can be known about them.

A database which can be used
to create all sorts of journalism

beyond what the Post published itself.

I would encourage everybody
to take a look at 'Top Secret America'.

What it will show you is how many goggles there are

under the direct control of the United States government

as well as how many goggles there are
under the control of Google.

In other words the vast outspreading web

which joins the traditional
post second world war US listening

to everything everywhere
on earth outside the United States

to the newly available listening
to things inside the United States

that used to be against the law
in my country as I knew its law

to all the data now available
in all the commercial collection systems

which includes everything
you type into search boxes about

what you believe, wish, hope, fear or doubt
as well as every travel reservation you make

and every piece of tracking data
coming off your friendly smartphone.

When governments talk about
the future of the net these days

I have on decent authority from
government officials in several countries.

When governments talk about
the future of the net these days

they talk almost entirely in terms of cyberwar.

A field in which I've never had much interest
and which has a jargon all its own

but some current lessons
from inter-governmental discussions

about cyberwar are probably valuable to us here.

The three most powerful collections of states on earth

the United States of America, the European Union
and the People's Republic of China

discuss cyberwar at a fairly high
inter-governmental level fairly regularly.

Some of the people around
that table have disagreements of policy

but there is a broad area of consensus.

In the world of cyberwar
they talk about exfiltration.

We would call that spying, they mean exfiltrating
our data off our networks into their pockets.

Exfiltration, I am told by government
officials here and there and everywhere

exfiltration is broadly considered by all
the governments to be a free fire zone.

Everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time

we don't believe in any governmental limits

and the reason is every government wants to listen

and no government believes listening can be prevented.

On that latter point, I think they're too pessimistic

but let's grant them that
they've spent a lot of money trying

and they think they know.

Where the disagreements currently exist

I am told by the government officials I talked to

concerns not exfiltration,
but what they call network disruption.

By which they mean destroying freedom.

The basic attitude here
is of a two parties in balanced speech.

One side in that conversation
says what we want is clear rules.

We want to know what we are allowed to attack,

what we have to defend and what we do with
the things that are neither friendly nor enemy.

The other side in that conversation
says we recognise no distinctions.

Anywhere on the net where there is a threat

to our national security
or our national interests,

we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat

regardless of its geographical location.

I need not to characterise
for you which among the governments

the United States of America, the European Union

or the People's Republic of China take those different positions.

And I should say that my guess
is that within all those governments

there are differences of opinion on those points

dominant factions and less dominant factions

but all parties are increasingly aware

that in North America is where the data mining is.

And that's either a benefit, a dubiousness or a problem

depending upon which state
or collection of states you represent.

European data protection law has done this much.

It has put your personal data almost exclusively
in North America where it is uncontrolled.

To that extent, European legislation succeded.

The data mining industries
are concentrated outside the European Union

largely for reasons of legal policy.

They operate as any enterprise
tends to operate in the part of the world

where there is least control over their behaviour.

There is no prospect that
the North American governments

particularly the government of the United States

whose national security policy now depends
on listening and data mining everything

are going to change that for you.

No possibility. No time soon.

When he was a candidate for president, at the beginning

in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was in favour

of not immunising American telecommunications giants

for participation in spying domestically
inside the United States

without direct public legal authorisation.

By the time he was a candidate in the general election

he was no longer in favour of preventing immunisation

Indeed he, as a Senator from Illinois

did not fillibuster the legislation
immunising the telecomms giants and it went through.

As you are aware the Obama administration's policies

with respect to data mining,
surveillance and domestic security in the net

are hardly different from the predecessor administrations'

except where they are more
aggressive about government control.

We can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias

in the listening to everybody, everywhere
about everything now going on.

Profit motive will not produce privacy

let alone will it produce robust defence
for freedom in the street.

If we are going to build systems
of communication for future politics

we're going to have to build them under the assumption

that the network is not only untrusted, but untrustworthy.

And we're going to have to build under
the assumption that centralised services can kill you.

We can't fool around about this.

We can't let Facebook dance up and down
about their privacy policy. That's ludicrous.

We have to replace the things that create vulnerability

and lure our colleagues around the world into using them

to make freedom only to discover

that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch.

Fortunately we actually do know how
to engineer ourselves out of this situation.

Cheap, small, low power plug servers
are the form factor we need.

And they exist everywhere now

and they will get very cheap very quick very soon.

A small device the size of a cell phone charger

running a low power chip with a wireless NIC or two

and some other available ports

and some very sweet free software of our own

is a practical device for creating
significant personal privacy

and freedom based communications.

Think what it needs to have in it.

Mesh networking, we are not quite there, but we should be.

OpenBTS, asterisk, yeah,
we could make telephone systems

that are self-constructing
out of parts that cost next to nothing.

Federated, rather than centralised, micro-blogging

social networking, photo exchange,

anonymous publication platforms
based around cloudy web servers.

We can do all of that.

Your data at home in your house
where they have to come and get it

facing whatever the legal restrictions are,

if any, in your society about

what goes on inside the precincts of the home.

Encrypted email, just all the time

perimeter defence for all those wonky Windows computers

and other bad devices that roll over any time
they're pushed at by a twelve year old

Proxy services for climbing over national firewalls.

Smart tunnelling to get around anti-neutrality activity

by upstream ISPs and other network providers.

All of that can be easily done on top of stuff
we already make and use all the time.

We have general purpose distributions of stacks
more than robust enough for all of this

and a little bit of application layer
work to do on the top.

Yesterday in the United States
we formed the Freedom Box Foundation

which I plan to use as the temporary
or long term as the case may be

organisational headquarters
for work making free software

to run on small format server boxes

free hardware wherever possible
unfree hardware where we must

in order to make available
around the world at low prices

appliances human beings
will like interacting with

that produce privacy
and help to secure robust freedom.

We can make such objects cheaper
than the chargers for smart phones.

We can give people something
that they can buy at very low cost

that will go in their houses
that will run free software

to provide them services that make
life better on the ordinary days

and really come into their own
on those not so ordinary days

when we are out in the street
making freedom thank you for calling.

A Belarussian theatre troupe
that got arrested and heavily beaten on

after the so called elections in Minsk this winter

exfiltrated itself to New York city in January

did some performances of
Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews

I'm sorry of Harold Pinter and gave some interviews

One of the Belarussian actors
who was part of that troupe

said in an interview to New York Times

the Belarussian KGB is the most
honest organisation on earth.

After the Soviet Union fell apart
they saw no need to change anything they did

so they saw no need to change their name either.

And I thought that was a really quite useful comment.

We need to keep in mind that they are
exactly the same people they always were

whether they're in Cairo or Moscow
or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta

or anywhere else on earth.

They're exactly the same people they always were.

So are we exactly the same people we always were too.

We set out a generation ago to make
freedom and we're still doing it.

But we have to pick up the pace now.

We have to get more urgent now.

We have to aim our engineering
more directly at politics now.

Because we have friends in the street
trying to create human freedom.

And if we don't help them they'll get hurt.

We rise to challenges, this is one.
We've got to do it. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much and I think
there is enough time for a few questions

so please raise your hand if you want to

The question was what does complete
decentralisation mean for identity

because the state, you may believe who you are
but the state gives you a passport

or some other legal document
that allows you to identify yourself.

So in complete decentralisation
how do you identify yourself on that network?

I doubt that complete decentralisation
is the outcome of anything

but let me tell you a story which
may help to explain how I feel about this.

We need to go back now by 16 years
to a time when there was a program called PGP

and there was a government in the United States
that was trying to eradicate it.

I know this will seem like ancient history
to many people, but it's my life so it doesn't to me.

We were having a debate at Harvard
Law School in January of 1995

two on two about PGP and the criminal
investigation and the future of secrecy.

The debators on my side
were me and Danny Whitesner

then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

later at the W3C and now
in the United States Department of Commerce.

And on the other side was the then
Deputy Attorney General of the United States

and a former General Counsel
of the National Security Agency.

We debated PGP and then encryption
and the clipper chip and various other,

now long dead, subjects for a couple of hours

and then we were all on an offered
little dinner at the Harvard faculty club.

On the way across the Harvard campus

the Deputy Attorney General
of the United States said to me

Eben, on the basis of your
public statements this afternoon

I have enough to order the interception
of your telephone conversations.

She thought that was a joke.

And back in 1995 you could sort of
get away with thinking it was a joke

as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States
because it was so clearly against the law.

So I smiled and we went off, we had our dinner

and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts
and the port had been strewn about

this former General Counsel
to the National Security Agency

I'm concealing names to protect
the not so innocent here

this former NSA lawyer,
he looked around the table calmly

and with that sort of plummy
through the port kind of look

and he said ok we'll let our head down
we agree we're not gonna prosecute your client

PGP will happen. We've fought
a long delaying action

against public key encryption
but it's coming to an end now.

And then he looked around the table and he said
but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they?

And a cold chill went up my spine

because I knew what
the next 15 years were gonna be about.

So I would like to turn around
the thing you said to say

what we're really talking about is whether
there's gonna be any preservation of anonymity at all.

Where power on the other side
made its peace in the mid 1990s

was with the idea that
there would be strong encryption

and e-commerce but there would be no anomymity.

And in the course of the last decade
they picked up a strong alliance

with the global entertainment industries

the things that now call
themselves content companies

which are also adverse to anonymity, right?

cause they wanna know what you read
and listen to and watch every single time

so that you can increase
their shareholders' wealth for them.

The real problem of identity
isn't the problem of

are we gonna be decentralised
past the point when we have identity

we are not going to do that.
We are not going to be able to do that.

The real problem of identity is
are we gonna have any of our own?

or are we gonna be the data cloud
that everybody else is keeping about us

which contains where we are, what we do, what we think
what we read, what we eat and everything else too

as long as you send a subpoena

to Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database
in which you live your entire life.

I understand the idea that
we might be thought of or satirically

or even pointedly claim to be

trying too radically decentralise
to the point in which identity gets lost.

But if you find yourself
in an argument where people telling you

you are trying to anarchise so far that
there won't be any name in the passport anymore

you can reassure them that meat-space
will stay pretty much the way it is right now.

We just want fewer people
ripping fingernails off in meat-space.

Which is why we are busy building
Freedom Boxes and helping people use them.

Thank you very much, the passport will
remain pretty much the way it is right now

with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints
and the retinal scan and everything.

I'm not worried that we are
going to go too far friends.

It's the other folks who went
way too far and our job's to get back home.

Hello Eben, I'm here.

Jérémie from La Quadrature du Net

First of all I want to thank you
and I will never thank you enough

for how inspiring you are for everyone of us

By thanking you for inspiring us
under an engineering perspective

as I am both an engineering geek
and a political activist by what I do.

I wanted to stress that the ACTA,
the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

that deeply concern strengthening
of DRMs and the legal protection

and also turns every internet service provider

every internet intermediate
into private copyright police

with deep consequence on our freedom of speech,
our privacy, on right to a fair trial and so on.

The ACTA will be coming to the
European Parliament around next summer

maybe before maybe after and it will be
our ultimate chance to defeat the thing.

We won in the European Parliament before.

This is a battle we can win
and everybody here can participate into it

and I wanted to ask you Eben

Are those legislative fights worth fighting?
Do we still have a chance?

and especially on the front of the net neutrality,

What are your insights? What do you think?
Can we still win today?

No European citizen should need any
introduction to Jérémie Zimmermann, right?

That's the future of the
European Union speaking to you.

Your question: Should we bother
fighting in legislature

seems to me fair, oh yeah we should.
It's unpleasant work.

I worry about you.
I don't want your heart to burst.

I don't want people killing
themselves over the strain of it.

It's ugly, boring, tedious work

and the other side pays people to sit you out
to wait until you go home, to decide you give up.

Think of Egypt as a place where that
was done for thirty years along with torture.

Everything stops moving.

If you read Claude Manceron
on the French revolution

or the coming of the French revolution

as he moves his thousands
of men and women of freedom

towards the climactic events of the late 1780s

you see how deeply the feeling in France
at the end of the Ancien Régime

was of status beginning
to break up into movement.

The work you're talking about
is work that is largely defensive

to prevent harm from being done.

And as you say you are lucky when you win
after an enormous effort that nothing happens.

But the good news is in legislative politics
that there is a thousand ways to stop a thing

and only one way for it to get done.

And therefore the side that wants
to stop things has an inherent advantage.

Most of the time that's deeply
funded capital but sometimes it's us.

About ACTA, I think there is no question.
It's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time.

Because as you say it's really the concordat,
the treaty between the state and private power

for the control of the net
under 21st century conditions

in the mingled interests of
the listeners and the owners.

If we do beat it, water it down, force
withdrawal of particularly offensive premises

or significantly expose it
to disinfecting daylight

we will help ourselves.

We are not going to achieve everything by any means.

We need to turn the international trade conversation
in the direction of direct support for freedom.

My line with the trade negotiators
around the world has become:

Governments have a right to share

the sharing economy has as much right to support
in the international trade system as the owning economy.

My colleague Mishi Choudhary
who directs SFLC India

was in Beijing making a speech
on that point earlier this year.

We will be re-iterating that point
in various places around the world

where strong states with which
we have other difficulties

meet with us in recognising
that the world trade system

is now overwhelmingly tilted
in favour of ownership based production

which is only one part
of the world's economic production.

We need to press hard against ACTA
and other pro-ownership trade law

but we also need to begin to roll out
an affirmative strategy of our own

demanding protection for sharing based
economic activities in the global trade system.

That effort will take 20 years
to begin to show fruit

but we need to begin that too now.

On network neutrality I will say this

We are going to have to establish counterforce
to the various oligopolists of telecommunications.

The regulators believe a lot of things
they have been told by industry.

I was at ARCEP myself in September
to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris

with regulators who are well educated,
shrewd, thoughtful and capable

but who believe something which isn't true.

Namely that it costs enormous monetary
investments to build wireless networks.

And I said to the ARCEP regulators
Do you know about OpenBTS?

Do you know that I can take
a coat hanger and a laptop

and make a GSM cell phone base station
out of it using some free software?

Do you know about Asterisk?

I suggested that maybe they would like
to give us a small French city, say, Grenoble.

where using the extraodinary
high quality wired harness

that they built around the hexagon that is France

we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere

using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets
and provide service to everybody.

And then I say it will be possible
to have a realistic fact-based discussion

about whether the enormous investment
necessities of wireless network build out

require non-neutrality in network routing practices.

Well, the regulator of course nods and smiles
and thanks me very much for all that information

and forgets it the minute I leave.

Because he still believes what Orange,
that used to be France Télécom, tells him

about how you can't make wireless networks
without immense monetary investments.

We will begin to gain on network neutrality

when we have a box in everybody's apartment
that can offer free telephone service over tunnelling

around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets.
Oh, that would be the Freedom Box.

See, that's what I wanna do.
I wanna build a ring of engineering

around the idea of
non-neutral network management.

I wanna have a box in your house
that senses the upstream and says

oh my God he's stopping port 655

I think I'll route that
from my friend's apartment.

Then I think we will get some interesting
network neutrality conversation going.

When you call for decentralisation

aren't you really going against
the trend of history as we've seen it?

For example we used to have
Usenet which was decentralised

that's moved much more to web based forums.

Or likewise we in geekdom may love IRC.
We may go to Freenode

but the general public all know about
Twitter which is moving into that space.

And I think there are many reasons
why this could be happening

but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare.
The journalists who report this to the general public

outside geekdom know about websites,
they know about Twitter.

They never knew about Usenet
so only geeks know about that

If we take this point perhaps the mindshare
you need to be going for is the journalists

who report on the net, get them
to report on decentralised networks

and get the public to start using them.

Yes, it's a crucial part
of the activity, that's right.

We're going to talk to people.

Some of those people are gonna be journalists
and some of them are gonna be our friends

and some of them are gonna be other engineers
and some of them are gonna be people who

when their wireless router breaks
they can go out buying a Freedom Box

cause it's cheaper and neater
and cooler and does more good stuff.

And some of them are gonna be
people who buy because they need it.

We just have to make the software.

The hardware guys will make
the hardware and everything will happen.

I don't know how long.
I don't know with what degree of certainty.

But I don't know if it's
about going against the flow of history.

I think it's about pushing the pendulum back.

The general public have to know that this
option exists and will serve their needs.

Yes, Apple will always advertise more than we will.

But the general public knows about Firefox
so they can know about the Freedom Box too.

I think we have to stop
in order to allow the conference to go on.

Thank you very much for your time.