Lessig: It’s Time to Rewrite the Internet to Give Us Better Privacy, and Security
By Lawrence Lessig;
Almost 15 years ago, as I was just finishing a book about the relationship between the Net (we called it “cyberspace” then) and civil liberties, a few ideas seemed so obvious as to be banal: First, life would move to the Net. Second, the Net would change as it did so. Gone would be simple privacy, the relatively anonymous default infrastructure for unmonitored communication; in its place would be a perpetually monitored, perfectly traceable system supporting both commerce and the government. That, at least, was the future that then seemed most likely, as business raced to make commerce possible and government scrambled to protect us (or our kids) from pornographers, and then pirates, and now terrorists.
But another future was also possible, and this was my third, and only important point: Recognizing these obvious trends, we just might get smart about how code (my shorthand for the technology of the Internet) regulates us, and just possibly might begin thinking smartly about how we could embed in that code the protections that the Constitution guarantees us. Because—and here was the punchline, the single slogan that all 724 people who read that book remember—code is law. And if code is law, then we need to be as smart about how code regulates us as we are about how the law does so.
There is, after all, something hopeful about a future that was smart about encoding our civil liberties. It could, in theory at least, be better. Better at protecting us from future Nixons, better at securing privacy, and better at identifying those keen to commit crime.
Think about this practically. Cyberanarchists notwithstanding, it was clear even in 1999 that there would be government and surveillance in cyberspace just as in real space. But the potential was that it could be better. Not just better only in finding the crook, but in not invading privacy. An FBI agent listening to a telephone call is always tempted to wander or misuse. S/he is human, and bad is in our blood. A computer sniffing for signals of crime only wanders as far as the code allows. And so the key is how and whether we regulate how far the code can wander—and do so both in law and in code.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/it-s-time-to-rewrite-the-internet-to-give-us-better-privacy-and-security.html