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The danger of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA)
By Paul G. Allen
Before anyone remarks about this being Off Topic for the various mailing lists I’ve sent this to, please think about the effects this could have to Linux. In addition, even though many of you may not be US citizens, the recent happenings with international laws against cybercrime, copy protection and the like could make this US law relevant to you as well, not to mention the impact to your company should you not be able to do business in the US because of such a law. Therefore, it really is on topic, and the time to think about and act on such things is before they are written in stone, not after.
In case you haven’t heard, the SSSCA is before the Senate Commerce Committee, with a hearing earlier today (for the story and several links, including a draft of the bill). The SSSCA, if passed, would basically require that all interactive digital devices, including your PC, have copy protection built in. This protection would not allow digital media from being viewed, copied, transferred, or downloaded if the device is not authorized to do so. The bill also makes it a crime to circumvent the protection, including manufacturing or trafficking in anything that does not include the protection or that would circumvent it.
Even if there is no SSSCA, the entertainment industry as well as the IT industry both agree: we must have copy protection of some kind. While I do not disagree that many movies, songs, and other media are distributed illegally without their owners consent, and that copyright owners need some sort of protection, this is not the way to fight the problem, and doing so can, and probably will, have drastic and far reaching consequences for not only the IT industry, but the entertainment industry and the consumer as well.
Many of us have become increasingly involved with, and dependent upon, Free Software (as in GNU GPL or similar), especially the Linux operating system. This type of software is distributed with the source code, allowing anyone to modify it as they choose and need. Linux has become popular to the point that many companies, especially those that provide some kind of service on or for the Internet, rely upon it heavily. Because of the free nature of Linux, and other Free Software, it is extremely difficult to place actual numbers on how many systems are out there employing such software. Some of you, like me, can approximate the number of such systems in your own company or realm of knowledge. So how does this relate to the SSSCA?
As any programmer worth his/her salt will attest, given the resources, anything that can be programmed into a computer can be programmed out, or worked around. In the case of copy protection such as the SSSCA would require, the resources needed for circumventing it is simply the source code for the operating system of the computer, and/or other source code for applications used on the computer (such as one of the many free video/audio layers available). Now given the wording of the SSSCA, along with the DMCA and other supporting laws, it stands to reason that such Free Software would suddenly become a target for legislation. Such legislation logically may require such software to be judged illegal. Such a decision may have serious consequences to the IT industry as well as the entertainment industry and the consumer as well. Little may the consumer or entertainment industry know, but much of the technology they rely upon today is provided at low cost by Free Software. Take that software away, and suddenly doing business costs a lot more, and eventually the consumer just will not be willing to pay for it.
Now aside from the consequences to Free Software, what about the consequences to those who do not use such software. Imagine that home movie you shot last weekend on vacation. Now you wish to send that home movie to a relative, friend, whoever, over the Internet, or place it on your web site for all to download. Well, with many of the protection technologies suggested, this would not be possible, or would be extremely difficult. Some of these technologies require digital watermarks to be placed in the media, for one example. CD burners, digital cameras, etc. can not make these watermarks. The copy protection works by checking for such a watermark, and if it does not exist, the system either will not allow the media to be played, or will not allow it to be transmitted over the Internet as the case may be. So much for sending your cousin your latest home movie, or allowing your whole family to see it from your web site. An additional problem is all current media, including CDs and DVDs, you may currently legally own would not work on proposed new CD and DVD players with copy protection hardware. You would not be able to copy CDs, tapes, or anything else that you legally own in order to exercise your right to fair use, so as to listen to that CD on the cassette deck in your car.
I could go on, but I think this is long enough and has given some food for thought. Besides, I have work to do. Election time is near, so think about what that person you are voting for represents. Think about actually writing a letter to a congressman or other legislator, to a magazine (I actually had one published once, so its not beyond the realms of possibility), newpaper, etc. Many people have the attitude that they can do nothing and make no difference. Well, I say to them they are right, because there are so many people with that attitude, that none of them do anything and they make no difference in doing so. The ones that make the difference, are the ones taking a stance, and the ones taking the stance are the ones that are causing these ridiculous laws to be passed. Guess who those people are?…
Welcome to The United Corporations of America.
[Paul has been circulating this article among the various Open Source mailing lists and we at Samizdata felt it so important we’ve gotten his more than willing permission to reprint it in its’ entirety. What is happening should be of concern to all Libertarians and open source folk as well as civil liberties advocates of all stripes. The media industry is up to nothing less than buying congress so they may seize control of a resource (the Internet) they could not otherwise conquer. If they wished to build their own infrastructure from scratch, using their own money, we would have no complaints. That is not even remotely a picture of what they are attempting.
We agree wholeheartedly with law school professor Glenn Reynolds position. The media industry is ripe for a RICO. This is far more real than the so called Enron “scandal”. Enron failed to buy support. The market took its course and they are gone. The media industry is apparently much better at the bribery game and have a number of congressmen (Hollings and Stevens in particular) actively on their payroll. – Ed]
The British government feels it no longer even has to hide the fact it wishes to be the centre of a vast spider web of surveillance. Gone are the days of ‘no comment’ regarding Echelon and Carnivore. Now the state is demanding the ability to control all communications between British scientists and foreign colleagues on pretty much any subject the state deems appropriate.
The situation is little better in the USA and as the editorial in the latest print edition of New Scientist aptly puts it:
The government there is withdrawing thousands of technical papers that amount to cookbooks for chemical and biological weapons. It has also asked journal editors to leave out details from papers that would be essential for anyone replicating the work. This undermines the whole notion of ensuring that research results can be checked by others. It also raises a paradox: terrorists, it seems, are deemed smart enough to understand arcane science, but too dumb to fill in the gaps in research papers
The deadening effect this will all have on a vast swathe of scientific progress is not hard imagine. Inevitably some types of research will just migrate to places where the state does not impede its development resulting in more, not less, diffusion of critical knowledge and technologies. Rather than a narrowly targeted moderation of clearly weaponised technologies, the state has elected to implement an Orwellian oversight on all technical discussions on subjects to be determined by semi-qualified bureaucrats who will always have a presumption of the legitimacy of intervention. A disappointing response but hardly a unexpected one to someone such as myself who assumes the worst of states and is rarely surprised.
When The State watches you,
dare to stare back
Any one who migrates to Windows XP must be a very trusting soul. Pathologically trusting in fact. An excellent InfoWorld article (via Instapundit) demonstrates why if you have Win XP you are more or less granting Microsoft access to whatever they deem their business on your hard drive any time you connect that Windows XP machine to the Internet.
Use Linux, Unix, Macintosh, Windows 98 or Windows 2000…hell, use DOS if you must but for goodness sake stay away from Windows XP unless you think it is just fine and dandy for a company not known for its benevolence to have a access to your data in the pursuit of their interests. You will not even know when they are looking or what they have downloaded to your machine ‘for security’ (their security, not yours). Bill Gates already has quite enough money to live happily ever after, he does not need any more of yours. Friends don’t let friends buy Windows XP.
And while we are on the subject, don’t forget to regularly check out Privacy Digest if you happen to think your business is your business.
Just because we libertarians deplore the state’s intrusions does not mean we give the Mega-Corporations a free ride.
The Oracle of Delphi was the flip side of the ancient Greek culture that brought us the underpinning genius of modern western thought. The Oracle was the voice of superstition and irrationality. As a result I have always thought it appropriate that the name of the company founded by supporter of the Panopticon surveillance state Larry Ellison was ‘Oracle’.
Over on Matt Welch‘s blog, he reports the inane comments of my pet hate Ellison who, it turns out, is a great fan of Napoleon. Hold on to your tricorn hat for a trip into the history à la Larry:
Napoleon codified the laws for the first time in Europe. He was constantly limiting kings and other tyrants.
Quite right Larry. He constantly limited other tyrants as he insisted on being the only tyrant allowed. Military dictators generally don’t like political competition.
He opened the ghettos and stopped religious discrimination. He was an extraordinary man who wrote a lot of laws himself.
Indeed he did. He used the French Army to impose his own will on most of Europe. I wonder if Larry thinks when this was tried again in 1939, it was necessarily a bad thing?
He was incredibly polite, generous almost to a fault, a remarkable person who was vilified. By whom? The kings that he deposed. The kings of England, and the old king of France, and the kings of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia were all threatened by this man who was bringing democracy. […]
I see. So EMPEROR Napoleon, self-crowned military dictator of the French EMPIRE, conquered much of Europe and caused several million deaths during the Napoleonic Wars because he wanted to bring democracy to everyone? Including democratic Britain (that’s ‘England’ to you Larry)?
He was a liberator, a law-giver, and a man of incredible gifts. He never considered himself a soldier, he considered himself a politician, though he was probably the greatest soldier — the greatest general –perhaps in all history.
For a man who never considered himself a soldier that was quite some military career. Particularly the bits where he went to military school, joined the French army, gave some folks a ‘whiff of grapeshot’, hijacked the French Revolution and then led the French army on a war of aggression against most of Europe. My guess is that Larry Ellison has probably never considered himself a poorly educated jackass either. Other than the fact unlike Mussolini, Napoleon was indeed a great general and he had a more extravagant tailor, there is actually little to differentiate him from any number of brutal collectivist military despots. Today he would have been called a fascist. Of course as many of the political causes Larry Ellison backs are indeed aimed at turning nations into police surveillance states I am hardly surprised he admires Napoleon-the-lawbringer, albeit from the perspective of a historical ignoramus.
I can certainly understand admiring Napoleon-the-General, but to praise him for authoring the world’s first truly global war in order to impose his will, his Code Napoleon on everyone at bayonet point? It is rather like admiring Heinz Guderian not because he was a brilliant general but because he was a Nazi.
Lots of good but wrong stuff…
…In Kevin Holtsberry’s blog. I would like to join battle with the redoubtable Mr Holtsberry on several issues, but can I start with just this one. I am as he is of sick of e-mails headed “heya…” and “hi?” that turn out to be porn. These e-mails disgust me when I see them, waste my time while I delete them, and mean that my children cannot be let out even for a moment from the kiddie-ghetto of Kids’ AOL. I don’t deny there is a problem. His proposed solution is to have a law. I have to point out that there probably are laws already, dozens of them. How long does a new one take to come in? How effective will enforcement be? Is there any special reason to suppose that it will be any more effective than the laws prohibiting drugs?
Slowly, imperfectly, but definitely, the market has provided solutions to related problems before. We first hooked up to Compuserve in 1995. At that time you paid for every message you received. We received a lot of junk, got sick of it, and quit. (Our family would be classified in advertiser’s jargon as not so much “early adopters” as “early rejecters”.) When we came back five years later the payment structure problem had been solved, and the quantity of junk mail much decreased. (Yes, really.) It’s an arms race. At the moment the attackers are winning – but who is going to be more motivated to research on means of defence: AOL, who are going to lose my custom one of these fine days if they don’t get a move on, or the government?
It’s not the case that I deny any role for law in this issue. Separate contracts, enforceable in law, between ISP and users as to what could and could not be sent by the ISP’s services, would be fine by me. Different ISP’s could compete on their various brand contracts. “We always prosecute pornographers who send unsolicited mail!” some would boast. Others could proudly say, “You choose: this service is completely unrestricted and unsupervised.” Contrast that with the obvious dangers of blanket supervision by not just the present government but all future ones. But the law is always likely to trail behind the power of angry customers (like me) with the right of exit. The lowlife that Mr Holtsberry rightly describes as being “creative and dishonest” in evading the software barriers that Internet Service Providers try to put up against them are scarcely likely to be less creative and more honest in evading legal barriers.
We received an e-mail from Samizdata reader Kevin Connors asking why we do not focus more on the dire state of civil liberties in Britain and pointing us at an article in Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (aptly known as RIP) is one of the most draconian Big Brother surveillance laws of its type in the western world and that came into effect in October 2000. Not only is it intentionally worded as to be largely unintelligible (thus providing ‘wiggle room’ for whatever the state wishes to do), but it reverses the burden of proof when the state demands crypto-keys. The key holder, not the state, is required to prove they do not have access to them if they are demanded or face two years in jail.
Whilst on the subject of surveillance, Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in closed circuit television (CCTV), with more per capita than that ‘bastion’ of civil liberties, Israel, which at least has the excuse of a genuine and demonstrable daily security threat.
This government is also attempting to restrict the automatic right to trial by jury. This is one of the fundamental ancient bedrocks of British liberty and yet it is under attack for reasons of crude utility. Although there is opposition to this astonishing assault, it is a testament to British apathy that people are not rioting on the streets at the mere prospect of such a huge diminution of a basic underpinning of liberty.
And civilian gun ownership in Britain? Oh, don’t get me started on that monstrous tale of confiscation and repression. That deserves an article of it’s own.
Now I realise that the concept of an Objectivist-with-a-sense-of-humour (or even humor) might be straining the bounds of credulity for some readers of the Samizdata, but I beg to differ. After all, if you listen to just about anything Leonard Piekoff has said since September 11, it indicates a man with immense comedic talent and superb comic timing. He even keeps a straight face whilst indulging in collectivist whimsy like advocating lobbing nuclear weapons at various unspecified Middle Eastern cities. See what I mean? Now is that man a jolly funster or what?
And so in that spirit, take a look at Modern Humorist (ignore their ghastly American spelling for a moment… there is a u shortage over there), and read ATLAS SHR: A glimpse into alternate universes where Ayn Rand’s books are all 400 pages shorter.
I particular liked:
ALAN GREENSPAN finished reading Ayn Rand’s complete works seven years earlier. He advanced more quickly into Rand’s inner circle, began his career as an economist in the mid-1960s, and became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1971. Thanks to his earlier leadership, there was no oil crisis or recession in the 70s. As a result, widespread vilification of Arab culture by working class Americans never came to pass, and the professional wrestling scapegoat known as The Iron Sheik was never created. This allowed wrestler Bob Backlund to retain the WWF championship belt in 1983.
Excellent.
Cheers and a funny handshake to the sinister Matt Drachenberg for pointing the Samizdata at Modern Humorist.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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