Freedom In the Cloud

My friend and colleague Bradley Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradley’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.

And as you know, that’s true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.

So, where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say about anything that it isn’t known. If you are pretty widely known in the Net and all of us for one reason or another are pretty widely known in the Net. We want to live there. It is our neighborhood. We just don’t want to live with a video camera on every tree and a mic on every bush and the data miner beneath our feet everywhere we walk and the NET is like that now. I’m not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in Usenet news. This is not an aesthetic judgment from 1995 about how the neighborhood is now full of people who don’t share our ethnocentric techno geekery. I’m not lamenting progress of a sort of democratizing kind. On the contrary, I’m lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I’m lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. We all know that it’s hostile to human freedom. We all understand it’s despotic possibilities because the distopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction that we read when we were children. The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention of where we live now and it’s hard for us to accept that but it’s true. Fortunately, of course, it’s not owned by the government. Well, it is. It’s fortunate. It’s true. It’s fortunate that it’s owned by people that you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are. If you’re the government you have easy ways of doing it. You fill out a subpoena blank and you mail it.

I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class explaining in detail why the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore because that’s Thursday night and who would do that on a Friday night? But the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll put the audio on the Net and the FBI and you can listen to it anytime you want.

We have to fess up if we’re the people who care about freedom, it’s late in the game and we’re behind. We did a lot of good stuff and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years. I helped people build those tools. I helped people keep those tools safe, I helped people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them and I’m glad the tools are around but we do have to admit that we have not used them to protect freedom because freedom is decaying and that’s what David meant in his very kind introduction.

In fact, people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom are also the people you will hear if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days that open source has become irrelevant. What’s their logic? Their logic is that software as a service is becoming the way of the world. Since nobody ever gets any software anymore, the licenses that say “if you give people software you have to give them freedom” don’t matter because you’re not giving anybody software. You’re only giving them services.

Well, that’s right. Open source doesn’t matter anymore. Free software matters a lot because of course, free software is open source software with freedom. Stallman was right. It’s the freedom that matters. The rest of it is just source code. Freedom still matters and what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.

Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.

All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience. You know this. You’ve stopped paying for things with cash. You use a card that you can wave at an RFID reader.