Eben Moglen returns to LCA

The last ten years

Eben started by saying that a lot has happened in the last ten years; a lot of great software has been created, and we have fewer enemies than we did then. He had warned us about software patents, and, in the last ten years, the full patent war that he had feared has come to be. It has cost billions of dollars and distorted the industry; companies have done their best to make use of patent monopolies to slow down their competitors. But, in the middle of this, the free software community got a lot of help, and the worst laws around the world began to change.

Some years ago, he had been discussing various ideas for patent pools and other defensive techniques with Richard Stallman; the idea was to be able to sit at the table with at least a few chips with which to negotiate some freedom to operate. They came up with "lots of inoperable plans" and, meanwhile, the business community put together some real patent pools.

But, importantly, during this time judges were starting to figure out that something is wrong with the patent system; they were "losing their enthusiasm for the subject." In the last year, Eben said, we have won three unanimous decisions in the US Supreme Court. That has put the community into an extraordinary position. The patent wars are still raging, but the possibility that the system will be used against free software developers is disappearing. We're not done yet, but the playing field is much more level.

The most interesting aspect of the patent situation in the coming decade will result from the fact that the largest economy in the world will no longer be the United States — it will be China. So the most important patent system in the world will be in China; we will be contending with lots of statutory monopolies in a society without the rule of law. The problem will affect us lightly, he said, but it will hit our industrial partners much more heavily; their response may be one of our most interesting challenges.

So, he concluded, in the last decade we have made a great deal of good software and managed to abate some serious nuisances. We have been at least partially successful in communicating our message; everything from ice cream to weapons is described as "open source" now. What we have done is to show how things will work in the 21st century. 20th century industrial society loved hierarchies; they were intrinsic to the organization of that society. We, instead, have shown the workings of a society based on transparency, participation, and non-hierarchical structures.

Our relationship to transparency is so intimate, he said, that you cannot describe the free software community without it. We are not a business with a big show window; we are a porous community that anybody can join. Participation is thus the outcome of our commitment to transparency. And we don't just do non-hierarchical projects; to a great extent, we invented them. We have taken over because we have shown that non-hierarchical collaboration is how you have to make everything. Nobody can live without our software; even Microsoft recognizes that we have won.

The threat to freedom

This is the structure that we need to face our next big threat: the all-seeing surveillance society that was spotlighted by the Snowden disclosures. It appears that there is little hope that we can prevent powerful interests from turning the net into a tool for totalitarians. We are living in the world, he said, that people like Richard Stallman and Phillip Zimmermann were trying to prepare us for.

Eben recounted how he stumbled across the first PGP posting on a FIDO board in 1991; he sent Phillip a message congratulating him for his work and for having changed the world. He also pointed out that Phillip was "in a shitload of trouble" and that he, Eben, would be there to help.

Try to imagine, Eben said, a world where PGP had been intimidated out of existence. We would have no PGP, no SSH, no OpenSSL. We would be facing "irresistible despotism" now. Even with those tools, we are facing powerful entities that can use surveillance to predict behavior and prevent the coalescence of dissent. We now live in the world that we are afraid of, and we now have a responsibility to improve our inventions and to spread them as widely as possible to fight that outcome.

We are moving toward the net as a single exoskeleton nervous system that embraces all of humanity. Will it be built to be controlled by its users at the endpoints, or will it be controlled from the center? This is the political decision that we will make for the future. We don't have any direct say over what will happen to the climate of the planet, but we can determine the physiology of its nervous system. As was foreseen by our various "crackpot visionaries," our freedom will depend on how we use our technologies. If our political ideas are to survive the surveillance society, we must continue the process of building our political and social theory. We must, he said, become more aware of the political implications of what we do.

Edward Snowden has done the important work, he said. Most people who are connected to the net want to do something to improve the situation; that means they want to meet us more than they did before. In the last decade, "our software was convenient, but we weren't." But "everybody wants to meet us now." We need to go out and explain how we can save freedom together. It would be a convenient time to build freedom into the net. But it is hard to sustain freedom in an engineering environment that is designed to take it away. Free software, instead, is software that preserves freedom, autonomy, and privacy. Nobody in their right mind will use security-oriented software that they can't read anymore.

In other words, Snowden proved that we were right. We had been saying that you cannot trust software that you cannot read; we thought it was an obvious point. Now everybody understands that point.

The first law

Even so, nothing has happened yet for users whose technology sells them out every day. What we need, he said, is a First Law of Robotics for software. If the free software community doesn't implement such a law, nobody will. Big power is committed against the First Law; it wants devices to work for it, not for their owners. If it succeeds, the human race could pay a price that lasts for generations.

So, he said, we have to start taking ourselves a little more seriously. What little has protected us from disaster already has been made in our community. We are why non-hierarchical modes of community exist, why it is possible at all. "Terrific!," he said, we did a great job. But we're not done.

Neither are we alone. When the Diaspora developers decided to try to fix social networking to make it ethical, it was surrounded by a huge community of supporters. But we have also had casualties, people like Aaron Swartz and Ilya Zhitomirskiy. We have to honor the sacrifices these people made.

In the current era, people are beginning to understand that the freedom of the net is the freedom of our society. Now is the time when we find out if we can use what we have done to keep humanity free. If we don't do it, it will not happen. We have narrowly escaped a few catastrophes in the last ten years, and we have gotten a lot of information from Snowden on what we did right. The unlimited resources devoted to breaking our view of the net have failed because of what we have made. We have demonstrated our vitality, and are now merging into the larger movement for freedom of the net. We will soon demonstrate whether we can carry this work forward.

Everybody's power, he concluded, runs on our plumbing. Whether it takes us toward freedom is up to us. We have a lot to do, and we will get lots of help. But, to start, there will be 1.6 billion people living in China without freedom, and the world's flagship democracy has abandoned the rule of law when it comes to surveillance. These forces are pushing us toward darkness. We have a lot to do to prevent that, but, if we don't do it, freedom stops. Free software is necessary for a free society, he said, and "we are playing for keeps now."

[ Your editor would like to thank linux.conf.au for funding his travel to the event. ]