A Speech given by Eben Moglen at a meeting of the Internet Society's New York branch on Feb 5, 2010
It’s a pleasure to be here. I would love to think that the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night is that my speeches are so good. I actually have no idea why we’re all here on a Friday night but I’m very grateful for the invitation. I am the person who had no date tonight so it was particularly convenient that I was invited for now.
So, of course, I didn’t have any date tonight. Everybody knows that. My calendar’s on the web.
The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the web. Our location is on the web. You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.
But that’s the only reason we don’t know, because they haven’t told us. That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service — telephony. But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn’t know, like spying. That’s not a service to you but it’s a service and you get it for free with your service contract for telephony. You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail which means of course there’s another service behind which is untouched by human hands, semantic analysis of your email. I still don’t understand why anybody wants that. I still don’t understand why anybody uses it but people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.
And you get free email service and some storage which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage and you get spying all the time.
And for free, too.
And your calendar is on the Web and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night and you have a status — “looking” — and you get a service for free, of advertising “single: looking”. Spying with it for free. And it all sort of just grew up that way in a blink of an eye and here we are. What’s that got to do with open source? Well, in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with open source but it has a whole lot to do with free software. Yet, another reason why Stallman was right. It’s the freedom right?
So we need to back up a little bit and figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here and probably even more important, whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn’t a pretty story, at all. David’s right. I can hardly begin by saying that we won given that spying comes free with everything now. But, we haven’t lost. We’ve just really bamboozled ourselves and we’re going to have to un-bamboozle ourselves really quickly or we’re going to bamboozle other innocent people who didn’t know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever.
It begins of course with the Internet, which is why it’s really nice to be here talking to the Internet society — a society dedicated to the health, expansion, and theoretical elaboration of a peer-to-peer network called “the Internet” designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it.
That’s the design of the NET, which, whether you’re thinking about it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful improvement IPv6 which we will never use apparently, still assumes peer communications.
