Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

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Eben Moglen is usually an inspiring speaker, and his keynote at FOSDEM 2011 did not disappoint. Free software remains, as always, at the core of his talks, but he has adopted a wider political vision and thinks that the community should do the same. Our freedom, he said, depends on reengineering the network to replace vulnerable, centralized services with alternatives which resist government control.

The publication of Larry Lessig's Code, Eben said, drew our attention to the fact that, in the world we live in, code increasingly functions as law. Code does the work of the state, but it can also serve revolution against the state. We are seeing an enormous demonstration of the power of code now, he said. At the same time, there is a lot of attention being paid to the publication of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, which makes the claim that the net is being co-opted to control freedom worldwide. The book is meant to be a warning to technology optimists. Eben is, he said, one of those optimists. The lesson he draws from current events is that the right net brings freedom, but the wrong net brings tyranny.

We have spent a lot of time making free software. In the process, we have joined forces with other elements of the free culture world. Those forces include people like Jimmy Wales, but also people like Julian Assange. Wikipedia and Wikileaks, he said, are two sides of the same coin. At FOSDEM, he said, one could see "the third side" of the coin. We are all people who have organized to change the world without creating new hierarchies in the process. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks was seen mainly as a criminal operation. Events in Tunisia changed that perception, though. Wikileaks turns out to be an attempt to help people learn about their world. Wikileaks, he said, is not destruction - it's freedom.

But now there are a lot of Egyptians out there whose freedom depends on the ability to communicate through commercial operations which will respond to pressure from the government. We are now seeing in real time the vulnerabilities which come from the bad engineering in the current system.

Social networking, he said, changes the balance of power away from the state and toward people. Events in countries like Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt demonstrate its importance. But current forms of social communication are "intensely dangerous" to use. They are too centralized and vulnerable to state control. Their design is motivated by profit, not by freedom. As a result, political movements are resting on a fragile foundation: the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg or Google to resist the state - the same state which can easily shut them down.

Likewise, real time information for people trying to build freedom currently depends on a single California-based microblogging service which must turn a profit. This operation is capable of deciding, on its own, to donate its entire history to the US Library of Congress. Who knows what types of "donations" it may have made elsewhere?

We need to fix this situation, he said, and quickly. We are "behind the curve" of freedom movements which depend heavily on code. The longer we wait, the more we become part of the system. That will bring tragedy soon. Egypt is inspiring, but things there could have been far worse. The state was late to control the net and unready to be as tough as it could have been. It is, Eben said, not hard to decapitate a revolution when everybody is in Mr. Zuckerberg's database.

It is time to think about the consequences of what we have built - and what we have not built yet. We have talked for years about replacing centralized services with federated services; overcentralization is a critical vulnerability which can lead to arrests, torture, and killings. People are depending on technology which is built to sell them out. If we care about freedom, we have to address this problem; we are running out of time, and people are in harm's way. Eben does not want people who are taking risks for freedom to be carrying an iPhone.

One thing that Egypt has showed us, like Iran did before, is that closed networks are harmful and network "kill switches" will harm people who are seeking freedom. What can we do when the government has clamped down on network infrastructure? We must return to the idea of mesh networks, built with existing equipment, which can resist governmental control. And we must go back to secure, end-to-end communications over those networks. Can we do it, he asked? Certainly, but will we? If we don't, the promise of the free software movement will begin to be broken. Force will intervene and we will see more demonstrations that, despite the net, the state still wins.

North America, Eben said, is becoming the heart of a global data mining industry. When US President Dwight Eisenhower left office, he famously warned about the power of the growing military-industrial complex. Despite that warning, the US has, since then, spent more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Since the events of September 11, 2001, a new surveillance-industrial complex has grown. Eben strongly recommended reading the Top Secret America articles published by the Washington Post. It is eye-opening to see just how many Google-like operations there are, all under the control of the government.

Europe's data protection laws have worked, in that they have caused all of that data to move to North America where its use is uncontrolled. Data mining, like any industry, tends to move to the areas where there is the least control. There is no way that the US government is going to change that situation; it depends on it too heavily. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was against giving immunity to the telecom industry for its role in spying on Americans. That position did not even last through the general election. Obama's actual policies are not notably different from those of his predecessor - except in the areas where they are more aggressive.

Private industry will not change things either; the profit motive will not produce privacy or defense for people in the street. Companies trying to earn a profit cannot do so without the good will of the government. So we must build under the assumption that the net is untrustworthy, and that centralized services can kill people. We cannot, he said, fool around with this; we must replace things which create these vulnerabilities.

We know how to engineer our way out of this situation. We need to create plug servers which are cheap and require little power, and we must fill them with "sweet free software." We need working mesh networking, self-constructing phone systems built with tools like OpenBTS and Asterisk, federated social services, and anonymous publication platforms. We need to keep our data within our houses where it is shielded by whatever protections against physical searches remain. We need to send encrypted email all the time. These systems can also provide perimeter defense for more vulnerable systems and proxy servers for circumvention of national firewalls. We can do all of it, Eben said; it is easily done on top of the stuff we already have.

Eben concluded with an announcement of the creation of the Freedom Box Foundation, which is dedicated to making all of this stuff available and "cheaper than phone chargers." A generation ago, he said, we set out to create freedom, and we are still doing it. But we have to pick up the pace, and we have to aim our engineering more directly at politics. We have friends in the street; if we don't help them, they will get hurt. The good news is that we already have almost everything we need and we are more than capable of doing the rest.

[Editor's note: as of this writing, the Freedom Box Foundation does not appear to have a web site - stay tuned.]

[Update: Added link to The FreedomBox Foundation]

