91av

IT IS January 1997. President Pat Buchanan’s inaugural speech paints a
vision of an America remarkably like Singapore or China: families are good,
pornography and left-wing views are bad, and the Internet is in need of
policing.

In one of those twists of fate that has made your life so much fun, he has
made you Tsar of the Internet, in charge of American policy on Cyberspace.
You’re told to wipe out racist and neo-Nazi “hate speech”, anything remotely
smutty, as well as any groups that attack family values or support
abortion.

China and Singapore are, admittedly, ahead of the game: Singapore’s
government already keeps watch for pornography on TechNet – the network that
gives the island’s academics and researchers access to the Net (“Culture clash
in cyberspace”, 91av , 25 March 1995, p 38). China, meanwhile, has
approved only one “service provider” through which its people can gain access
to the rest of the world via the Net. According to plans revealed in early
1996, this official gateway will use firewall software from Sun Microsystems
of California to keep out any “undesirable” information.

Indecent exposure

As Tsar, you still feel that you can make your mark as the person who
really cleaned up the Net. You already have the power, given to you by the US
Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act, which became
law in February 1996. The Decency Act started out as a Senate bill, proposed
by James Exon, a Democrat from Nebraska as a way to keep online pornography
out of the hands of children, but it ended up with sweeping powers. The act
prohibits, for example, “the transmission of any comment” that is “indecent
… with the intent to annoy”. It resurrects the long-dead 19th-century
Comstock Act, prohibiting any discussion of abortion, sex acts (which includes
details of safe sex), or of any immoral or illegal acts.

What’s more, the Act makes Net service providers criminally liable for
failing to enforce the rules. The people who run these organisations could
find themselves in prison simply for allowing prohibited material to pass
through their computers. With this kind of power, being Tsar should be
easy.

Your first action is to order every service provider to ban access to any
Net discussion groups – known as Usenet newsgroups – that you deem
undesirable. Extreme right-wing groups have been playing online games
involving neo-Nazi characters, organising, and even recruiting young people.
They are summarily chopped. So, too, are the paedophile groups that distribute
stories and pictures of sex with children.

Unfortunately, you quickly discover that this is not enough. It turns out
that all service providers have software called telnet, which allows their
users to leapfrog through cyberspace from one computer to another. Once
connected and assuming they have the right password, they can access files,
change data or write programs on a remote computer in, say, Belize, as if it
were their own. The organisers of the newsgroups know this, and soon find a
way around your restrictions. So you must also ban telnet.

But if you ban telnet, you’ll have every academic, stockbroker, and child
researching an essay after you. You ban it anyway. After all, you’re the
Tsar.

A little self-satisfied, you can begin to draw the Net tighter. Only “nice”
discussion groups are allowed – but then you discover that undesirables don’t
keep to their own newsgroups. The more you restrict them, the more they pop up
in other groups. Ban the newsgroup “alt.skinheads” and its denizens pop up in
“alt.politics”, still full of venom. Put a stop to “alt.drugs.pot.cultivation”
and the same people show up in “rec.gardening”. Your campaign is not going
well. How are you going to explain these problems at the next meeting with the
President?

But the game isn’t over. You press the Internet providers to install
software, similar to that developed by Sun Microsystems for China, to screen
all data sent across the Internet for key words. This way, you can spot the
authors of any racist, smutty or politically sensitive banter.

Foiled again. This time all the people who use your list of undesirable
words turn to euphemism and code words, and there is no decrease in hate-
mongering or smut. “Penis” becomes “asparagus” and smut-lovers use simple
software filters to turn this and all the vegetables back into body parts.

Now the level of complaints is rising from people you consider legitimate
users of the system: researchers, healthcare organisations and journalists. A
computer doing word searches, it turns out, has no idea of context and keeps
singling out legitimate newsgroups for execution.

The service provider America OnLine discovered this in early 1996: it
banned a list of forbidden words and inadvertently shut off the world’s
largest discussion group for breast cancer survivors. Does this stop you? Of
course not. You’re a crusader, and you have the law behind you. In a flash of
inspiration, you see the solution: human censors. Humans are good at picking
out nuances that would elude even the best software filters.

Costly crusade

But there is a price: it will inevitably make the Net slow and expensive.
Having a dialogue on the Net, which was once like arguing politics down the
pub, will now require infrastructure, staff prepared to check the data and
even lawyers to advise on borderline decisions.

And still the kind of information you are censoring is appearing all over
the place. People are finding it on World Wide Web sites, ftp sites, WAIS
sites and gopher sites – in fact, in all the computer environments designed to
make it easy for people to search sensibly through the vast amount of
information held on the Net. Such groups as Stop Prisoner Rape, and Human
Rights Watch have Web sites with graphic descriptions of rape and beatings.
Planned Parenthood distributes information about abortion and birth control,
and both the AIDS Education Global Information System and the Queer Resources
Directory carry graphic depictions of safe sex.

Cries of protest

Using the threat of prosecution, you order all American service providers
to boot such groups off their computers, and to refuse access to sites in
other countries that carry undesirable material. The Queer Resources
Directory, for example, lives not only on computers in Maryland, California,
and Michigan, but also in New Zealand, Britain and Israel.

This is not the only problem. Thousands of new Web sites pop up every day.
The groups interested in the information you’re trying to expunge always seem
to find the new sites faster than you. So what are your options? You can let
it go and give up, create a big bureaucracy to keep watch for new suspect
sites, or cut off access to all of them. The big bureaucracy sounds good, but
getting the budget for it won’t be easy. You could cut off access to sites
outside the US by stopping all requests for files located on computers with
addresses that end in a country designation such as “.de” for Germany, and
“.uk” for Britain.

But even as you ponder these options, things at home are getting worse. You
discover that banned newsgroups are reincarnating themselves as e-mail rings
called “listservs”. These rings, which bear a single address, carry the text
of a group of people, and to a computer on the Net look like a simple e-mail
message. These are going to be tricky to track down, but you are not giving
in.

You force the service providers to ban any e-mail that carries the address
of suspect listservs. But the addresses can be changed by the sender, simply
by moving the list of names to another Net provider with a different
address.

There is no option. To crack this one you will have to regulate all private
e-mail on the Net. Cries from human rights groups, advocates of privacy and
businesses which rely on e-mail are not going to stop you now. You force the
providers to hire people to read and censor all e-mail, from draft contracts
in the shipping business to love notes between happy couples. E-mail becomes
as slow or slower than the old postal system, much less private, and far more
expensive.

But even then, there is some e-mail that the censors cannot read. It is
encrypted using “public-key codes” (“Network confidential”, 91av, 8
October 1994, p 26) which are freely available throughout cyberspace and are,
for practical purposes, unbreakable. So you move to ban such encryption. All
e-mail must be clearly readable.

Once again, businesses scream. Encryption, they say, is the basis for
commerce in cyberspace. People will not send their credit cards numbers over
the Net if they cannot encrypt the numbers. The rapidly growing use of “e-
cash” would be impossible without encryption. No encryption, no online
commerce, they say.

But you do it anyway. Remember, you’re the Tsar. Success must surely now be
in sight. Then one day the hacker you hired to help track the dirt-dishers,
racists and subversives shows you a note from one friend to another. There is
a file attached, a graphics file that turns out to be an innocent picture of
the friend and a dog.

But then your hacker, using special software available for free over the
Internet, extracts another message from the tens of thousands of seemingly
random letters and numbers that made up the graphics file – a message of
racial hatred. There was no way to tell by looking at the picture that the
hidden message was encoded in it. This can be done, your hacker assures you,
with any sound or graphics files – which by their nature, must be encoded to
move through the Net. So you ban all graphics and sound files from the Net.
That means killing off much of the World Wide Web and all its offspring at a
stroke.

You’ve won. You’ve done what it takes to make every part of the Net safe
for a seven-year-old. Of course, in the process, you’ve reduced the Net to
what it was a decade before – an expensive method of communication used by a
few researchers – but with all the humans checking files it’s now a lot
slower. At the same time you have also put the brakes on the American
information technology industry; which had become one of the most dynamic
areas of the national economy.

This little exercise in role-play illustrates what would be needed to meet
the growing demands for control issued by a variety of governments in the
early months of 1996. The US Telecommunications Act is just one example. In
January, the German state prosecutors temporarily forced the global
conferencing system CompuServe to block access to 200 newsgroups they deemed
offensive. And earlier this year the French government proposed to its
European partners the idea of drafting laws to control the Net after a banned
book about President Mitterrand ended up on the Net.

It also resembles the kind of checks that the Chinese government is putting
in place to rein in the Net. The firewall software is being written and tested
now, and commercial information providers such as Reuters, which want to put
financial data on the Net in China, must register with the government news
agency Xinhua, pay whatever fees it demands, and submit to its censorship.

Out of control

Already, people in the US familiar with cyberspace argue that meeting their
new legal responsibilities will be impossible. Gail Williams, conferencing
manager of The Well conferencing system in San Francisco, describes the
Telecommunications Act as unenforceable. “Even with only 10 000 members, we
could not possibly screen and monitor the vast amount of material that comes
through our system every day,” she says.

William Giles, spokesman for CompuServe, agrees: “There is no way that we
could possibly monitor all the thousands of discussions on our system. We have
4.2 million members.” The new law, he says, raises “huge questions as to how
we could possibly comply … Where would we find the manpower?”

There are also examples of how easily regulations can be breached. While
CompuServe cut off access to more than 200 newsgroups (now reduced to five),
sources within the company made clear that users could still telnet through
its system and find the banned discussion groups at other sites.

This is the heart of the matter: the Net was designed to be uncontrollable
– to be headless. Its design rose out of Cold War fears that American and NATO
computer communications could be “decapitated” by a nuclear strike. The
solution: a network without a centre makes the Internet fundamentally
different from other media.

Censors and regulators think of the Internet as another kind of
broadcasting. But cyberspace is not like the broadcast world, in which
companies operate highly centralised and powerful stations to send information
out to billions of people. Cyberspace is made up of vast cities of
conversations – public discussions, tetes-a-tetes between lovers, anonymous
conversations, commercial exchanges, scientific data. There are no “audiences”
and no “broadcasters”. Almost all the information on the Net is put there by
its tens of millions of users, not by the companies that provide the
service.

Most of those who have helped to build cyberspace believe that it cannot be
sanitised, any more than we could sanitise private speech of all citizens.
Trying to clean up the Net will be the death of it.