Free The Network

If there’s any silver lining to the outrageous FISA bill that the Democrats rammed through congress today, it’s this: we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government doesn’t give a shit about our privacy. That doesn’t go for everyone in government, of course¹, but the don’t-give-a-shit contingent is almost always larger than the give-a-shits, and they almost always win.

The bad guys here are split into two basic camps: (1) the ones who consider the right to free, unmonitored communications a fairly trifling thing, easily sacrificed on the altar of political expediency; and (2) the ones who consider that right an existential threat that must be suppressed at all costs.

We saw both of those forces at work today, I think: thuggish Bush/Cheney sycophants deathly afraid of the notion of free, unfettered networks, and craven opportunists who don’t much care either way, but will happily throw our rights overboard in exchange for perceived political safety (I’m looking at you, Stenny). Either way, the effect is the same. A network that grows more regulated, and less free, every year. The original, anarchic promise of the internet stillborn. It’s depressing as hell.

But at least we know. The only way we get a free internet is if we wrest it from the hands of the government that regulates it, and the corporations that run it². This country was founded on a fundamental mistrust of power, and a clear-eyed understanding of the monster that power will always become if it’s left to its own devices. The system the founders put in place to keep that monster at bay seems to be unraveling, though, with its three co-equal branches often acting more like chummy old golf buddies than the checks and balances they’re supposed to be.

So, basically, the network needs to be a force of nature — an irreducible, uncontrollable constant, like gravity. It’s possible to use gravity to do bad things, of course — drop pianos on people, say, or throw them off of buildings — but you can’t control it. You can’t suspend gravity, you can’t bend it to your will. And that’s the key. A free internet will still be subject to many of the same outrages that we see today — the RIAA monitoring P2P networks and issuing automated lawsuits against hapless grandmothers; criminals sniffing packets off of wireless streams; corporations spying on employee email — but it won’t be vulnerable to the ultimate outrage, total control. It won’t be possible to install snoops in data centers that filter all incoming traffic, or shut down access to sites that your ideology rejects, or build a surveillance wall around an entire country.

I don’t know if it’s possible to create a free network — and, if it is, whether it’s at all feasible any more. But one thing is abundantly clear — without it, the entire notion of privacy is a farce.