Freedom In the Cloud
Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing
It’s a pleasure to be here. I would love to think that the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night is that my speeches are so good. I actually have no idea why we’re all here on a Friday night but I’m very grateful for the invitation. I am the person who had no date tonight so it was particularly convenient that I was invited for now.
So, of course, I didn’t have any date tonight. Everybody knows that. My calendar’s on the web.
The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the web. Our location is on the web. You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.
But that’s the only reason we don’t know, because they haven’t told us. That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service — telephony. But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn’t know, like spying. That’s not a service to you but it’s a service and you get it for free with your service contract for telephony. You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail which means of course there’s another service behind which is untouched by human hands, semantic analysis of your email. I still don’t understand why anybody wants that. I still don’t understand why anybody uses it but people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.
And you get free email service and some storage which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage and you get spying all the time.
And for free, too.
And your calendar is on the Web and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night and you have a status — “looking” — and you get a service for free, of advertising “single: looking”. Spying with it for free. And it all sort of just grew up that way in a blink of an eye and here we are. What’s that got to do with open source? Well, in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with open source but it has a whole lot to do with free software. Yet, another reason why Stallman was right. It’s the freedom right?
So we need to back up a little bit and figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here and probably even more important, whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn’t a pretty story, at all. David’s right. I can hardly begin by saying that we won given that spying comes free with everything now. But, we haven’t lost. We’ve just really bamboozled ourselves and we’re going to have to un-bamboozle ourselves really quickly or we’re going to bamboozle other innocent people who didn’t know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever.
It begins of course with the Internet, which is why it’s really nice to be here talking to the Internet society — a society dedicated to the health, expansion, and theoretical elaboration of a peer-to-peer network called “the Internet” designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it.
That’s the design of the NET, which, whether you’re thinking about it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful improvement IPv6 which we will never use apparently, still assumes peer communications.
OF course, it never really really really worked out that way. There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it. Not at any rate in the technical design interconnection of nodes and their communication. There was a software problem. It’s a simple software problem and it has a simple three syllable name. It’s name is Microsoft. Conceptually, there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes but the OS which occupied the network in an increasingly — I’ll use the word, they use it about us why can’t I use it back? — viral way over the course of a decade and a half. The software that came to occupy the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers. It was called “server client architecture”.
The idea that the network was a network of peers was hard to perceive after awhile, particularly if you were a, let us say, ordinary human being. That is, not a computer engineer, scientist, or researcher. Not a hacker, not a geek. If you were an ordinary human, it was hard to perceive that the underlying architecture of the Net was meant to be peerage because the OS software with which you interacted very strongly instantiated the idea of the server and client architecture.
In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that. The thing called “Windows” was a degenerate version of a thing called “X Windows”. It, too, thought about the world in a server client architecture, but what we would now think of as now backwards. The server was the thing at the human being’s end. That was the basic X Windows conception of the world. it’s served communications with human beings at the end points of the Net to processes located at arbitrary places near the center in the middle, or at the edge of the NET. It was the great idea of Windows in an odd way to create a political archetype in the Net which reduced the human being to the client and produced a big, centralized computer, which we might have called a server, which now provided things to the human being on take-it-or-leave-it terms.
They were, of course, quite take-it or leave-it terms and unfortunately, everybody took it because they didn’t know how to leave once they got in. Now the Net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge. Clients had rather little power and servers had quite a lot. As storage gets cheaper, as processing gets cheaper, and as complex services that scale in ways that are hard to use small computers for — or at any rate, these aggregated collections of small computers for — the most important of which is search. As services began to populate that net, the hierarchical nature of the Net came to seem like it was meant to be there. The Net was made of servers and clients and the clients were the guys at the edge representing humans and servers were the things in the middle with lots of power and lots of data.
Now, one more thing happened about that time. It didn’t happen in Microsoft Windows computers although it happened in Microsoft Windows servers and it happened more in sensible OSs like Unix and BSD and other ones. Namely, servers kept logs. That’s a good thing to do. Computers ought to keep logs. It’s a very wise decision when creating computer OS software to keep logs. It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world. It’s a very good idea.
But if you have a system which centralizes servers and the servers centralize their logs, then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control and, unless they are experienced in the operation of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of, the meaningfulness of, will not understand the aggregatability of.
So we built a network out of a communications architecture design for peering which we defined in client-server style, which we then defined to be the dis-empowered client at the edge and the server in the middle. We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs — that is, info about the flows of info in the Net — in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or thought they controlled the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives. This was a recipe for disaster.