*The European: Mr. Doctorow, are you a technology skeptic?*

Doctorow: I am skeptical of hypes. But I am not skeptical of what technology can produce. Take the cloud, for example: I like the idea of having servers where I can keep some of my data, especially when it is kept in a way that it is protected from other people looking at it.

*The European: But?*

Doctorow: The core idea of the cloud is that your computer should be a thing that you can only use if the phone company lets you. And the idea that you would take something as important to your life as your computer and put it at the mercy of the phone company when you don’t have to is just silly.

“Most of what we are talking about is horseshit”



*The European: But once access is guaranteed, a cloud full of data can hold data that isn’t physically close to you.*

Doctorow: Correct. But take the idea that the best way to manage music is to stick it all up into a cloud and then stream it to wherever you are. That ignores a couple of important facts: The first is that storage is so cheap that we’re not far from being able to store all the music ever recorded on our mobile phones. Secondly, that bandwidth is contentious. Our telecom infrastructure investment is lagging; spectral intensity is plateauing. So until we get new paradigms in wireless connectivity – and it is a ways off, not least because every phone company in the world hates that idea and every government is addicted to selling spectrum for huge amounts of money – then we are going to have huge problems in expanding our bandwidth.

*The European: There won’t be enough of it for a large-scale cloud?*

Doctorow: I believe that most of what we are talking about when we are talking about the cloud is horseshit. What makes a huge amount of sense on the cloud is stuff that is inherently collaborative. The killer feature in Google Docs is not the fact that it is a Word clone; it’s that multiple people can edit it from different parts of the world. The amazing thing about Google Drive is not that you don’t have to carry things on thumb drives – which are very cheap – it’s that you can work together on a spreadsheet without being in the same place.

*The European: Collaboration is hard to imagine without the cloud.*

Doctorow: How would you do Wikipedia? You can’t courier around thumb drives to everybody who wants to edit Wikipedia articles. You need the Internet for that! But much of what happens in the cloud is what’s called rent-seeking: Taking something you used to be able to buy for a certain price and then turning it into something you have to pay for over and over again.

“If Spotify survives, it is because something changes.”



*The European: Let’s stick with the music example. Back in the day, you would buy individual albums that you would then store on your computer. But if you are paying a subscription service, you have access to an infinite amount of music, more than you would ever be able to afford.*

Doctorow: (laughs) I suppose that there were hypothetical music listeners before Spotify who only listened to music that they bought. But they were a distinct minority and I don’t recognize them as part of the recent history of music consumption. To me, it seems like a revisionist fairy tale about how music worked and it doesn’t tell us anything about how we got to Spotify.

*The European: Spotify is a compromise to keep music piracy at bay.*

Doctorow: And Spotify is in tons of trouble because of the royalties it has to pay, because of server costs. Imagine it was running like Napster used to: Allowing for the same functions but putting all of the infrastructural costs into the hands of the users. They could still charge a subscription fee! In fact, that is what Napster tried to do during the Napster suit: They did a survey where they found out that the median Napster user was willing to pay $15 a month for Napster. And at the same time, the median American music consumer spends $2 a month on CDs per year. It was this incredible boom for the music industry, a check with as many zeros as you wanted at the end of it, but the record companies said no.

*The European: It is about control.*

Doctorow: That is what I mean. If Spotify survives, it is because something changes.

*The European: We have to let go of the notion that we can control everything?*

Doctorow: Look at Bittorrent’s peer-to-peer cloud backup, which is spectacularly fast, spectacularly cheap and does exactly what I am describing. You move your data among your peers and recover it when you need it.

“The universe wants us to have secrets”



*The European: How does the data stay safe in other peoples’ hands?*

Doctorow: We live in an age of wonders because cryptography works. The universe wants us to have secrets. We can encrypt information so thoroughly that if all the hydrogen atoms in the universe were computers and tried nothing but to crack our cyphers until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t be able to. Assuming we got the cypher right, this is an amazing thing. That doesn’t give us DRM (_Digital Rights Management_) – we don’t know how to give someone a key without them opening up the box. But if you don’t give someone a key but a cypher text, you can be pretty sure that they’re never going to get the cypher text into the clear. That is awesome and it is new.

*The European: And yet cryptography is far from taking off in the mainstream.*

Doctorow: That is changing pretty fast. Three months after the Snowden leaks, the Pew Internet Life Project determined that a majority of Americans had taken some affirmative step to be private on the Internet.

*The European: And?*

Doctorow: Almost everything they had done was totally useless. Without any demand for it, nobody was keen on building a tool that anyone except the nerds would use. Now that demand is here, it is shifting everything. It is shifting legislation, because people are caring about their privacy before it has been ruptured, not just afterwards. We are having a completely different regulatory debate about what technology should and shouldn’t do.

*The European: In what ways?*

Doctorow: Just look at all the companies that have turned on perfect forward secrecy. SSL by default, SSL between their data centers, and encrypted storage for their data. Users have started to actually go out and seek this stuff out, and venture capitalists have started funding it. There are a ton of for-profit entities and a ton of non-profit NGOs that are funding security and cryptography research. Even things like “Snapchat” represent different thinking…

*The European: Ephemerality?*

Doctorow: Yes. And with it, a different kind of security. It took me a long time to understand what “Snapchat” was. I thought it was voodoo: “I don’t trust you not to share my photos, so I am going to send it to you in a wrapper that your phone will then delete after thirty seconds.” What I then realized was that it means “I trust you not to deliberately share this by making a screenshot. But I don’t trust you not to lose your phone or lose control of it or have it hacked.”

“Computers count, humans decide”



*The European: Giving up control again.*

Doctorow: It is an incredibly powerful security model, and I have completely come around to it. That model actually represents a really great piece of low-hanging fruit in the security world. Because that use case is really widespread. Tons of times I am wary of sending someone something. Not because I don’t trust them, but because I think their operational security is less than perfect – just like mine. And that is what computers should be doing: Taking the requirement of eternal vigilance and monotonic perfection in your operational approach out of imperfect, wet human hands and putting it into the dry, abstract realm of a CPU where it can just happen every time the cloud takes over.

*The European: The rationality of the machine?*

Doctorow: That’s what computers do. Computers count, humans decide.

*The European: You said that after the Snowden leaks, people started putting a larger focus on security. Is it still a problem that you have to be an expert to understand these kinds of things?*

Doctorow: If you go to the settings of any app on your computer, none of those checkboxes add any security. That is not because there is no theoretical checkbox that could add security; it is because there is no business model for adding security. In fact, there is often a business model for not having security. Almost every checkbox you could conceivably check in your Facebook privacy dashboard will not add privacy. (laughs)

*The European: You don’t have to be an expert to be private; you need companies to value privacy.*

Doctorow: Must you be a nerd to be private? No, but we must live in a time in which companies are interested in creating genuine privacy options in their products. Luckily, things like the Heartbleed bug have made a lot of companies interested in what it takes to increase their robustness. It has also shifted some of the discussions about cyber security. A lot of states are now talking about it in their digital agendas.

“Security is a matter of context”



*The European: But governments have mostly made headlines with their secret surveillance apparatuses.*

Doctorow: Spies have driven a lot of the discussions about cyber security. Their vision of cyber security is that it is horrible for you to have security. They want to spy on you to make sure you don’t do anything that could threaten security. I take the view that real cyber security is the ability to have security. Because whatever it is that your spies can see, those are the same things that identity thieves can see. And crooks can see. And other spies can see. And voyeurs can see.

*The European: You mention that true security often requires concrete business interests.*

Doctorow: Security is a matter of context. You being secure from the police is often the state being less secure from you. If they can’t get you after you have committed a bank robbery, you are secure from the police, but the state is less secure from you. There are lots of companies whose financial security depends on your privacy and security. But it isn’t inherent – it’s not like there are no business models that are privacy-positive. It is just that it was so easy to confiscate your privacy, to zero out the value of your security on the balance sheet, that we have optimized on these business models. If you look at Facebook’s market capitalization and you divide it by the number of users that they have…

*The European: Yes?*

Doctorow: You find that the dossier of every intimate detail of your life is worth pennies. Nothing. It shows that they never had to internalize the costs of violating your privacy. It’s like being able to sell cars without having to worry about climate change. You internalize all the benefits; you socialize all the costs and make profits.