I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class explaining in detail why the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore because that’s Thursday night and who would do that on a Friday night? But the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll put the audio on the Net and the FBI and you can listen to it anytime you want.
We have to fess up if we’re the people who care about freedom, it’s late in the game and we’re behind. We did a lot of good stuff and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years. I helped people build those tools. I helped people keep those tools safe, I helped people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them and I’m glad the tools are around but we do have to admit that we have not used them to protect freedom because freedom is decaying and that’s what David meant in his very kind introduction.
In fact, people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom are also the people you will hear if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days that open source has become irrelevant. What’s their logic? Their logic is that software as a service is becoming the way of the world. Since nobody ever gets any software anymore, the licenses that say “if you give people software you have to give them freedom” don’t matter because you’re not giving anybody software. You’re only giving them services.
Well, that’s right. Open source doesn’t matter anymore. Free software matters a lot because of course, free software is open source software with freedom. Stallman was right. It’s the freedom that matters. The rest of it is just source code. Freedom still matters and what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.
Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.
All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience. You know this. You’ve stopped paying for things with cash. You use a card that you can wave at an RFID reader.
Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all the time because web servers are so terrible to run. Who could run a web server of his own and keep the logs? It would be brutal. Well, it would if it were IIS. It was self-fulfilling, it was intended to be. It was designed to say “you’re a client, I’m a server. I invented Windows 7, It was my idea. I’ll keep the logs thank you very much.” That was the industry. We built another industry. It’s in here. But it’s not in. Well, yeah it is kind of in here. So where isn’t it? Well it’s not in the personal web server I don’t have that would prevent me from falling…well, why don’t we do something about that.
What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a dangerous word - avatar — in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant.
And if you feel like moving your server to Oceana or Sealand or New Zealand or the North Pole, well buy a plane ticket and put it in your pocket. Take it there. Leave it behind. Now there’s a little more we need to do. It’s all trivial. We need some dynamic DNS and all stuff we’ve already invented. It’s all there, nobody needs anything special. Do we have the server you can put in your pocket? Indeed, we do. Off the shelf hardware now. Beautiful little wall warts made with ARM chips. Exactly what I specked for you. Plug them in, wire them up. How’s the software stack in there? Gee, I don’t know it’s any software stack you want to put in there.
In fact, they’ll send it to you with somebody’s top of the charts current distro in it, you just have to name which one you want. Which one do you want? Well you ought to want the Debian Gnu Linux social networking stack delivered to you free, free as in freedom I mean. Which does all the things I name — brings itself up, runs it’s little Apache or lighttpd or it’s tiny httpd, does all the things we need it to do — syncs up, gets your social network data from the places, slurps it down, does your backup searches, finds your friends, registers your dynamic DNS. All is trivial. All this is stuff we’ve got. We need to put this together. I’m not talking about a thing that’s hard for us. We need to make a free software distribution device. How many of those do we do?
We need to give a bunch to all our friends and we need to say, here fool around with this and make it better. We need to do the one thing we are really really really good at because all the rest of it is done, in the bag, cheap ready. Those wall wart servers are $99 now going to $79 when they’re five million of them they’ll be $29.99.
Then we go to people and we say $29.99 once for a lifetime, great social networking, updates automatically, software so strong you couldn’t knock it over it you kicked it, used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet doing a wonderful job. You know what? You get “no spying” for free. They want to know what’s going on in there? Let them get a search warrant for your home, your castle, the place where the 4th Amendment still sort of exists every other Tuesday or Thursday when the Supreme Court isn’t in session. We can do that. We can do that. That requires us to do only the stuff we’re really really good at. The rest of it we get for free. Mr. Zuckerberg? Not so much.
Because of course, when there is a competitor to “all spying all the time whether you like it or not”, the competition is going to do real well. Don’t expect Google to be the competitor. That’s our platform. What we need is to make a thing that’s so greasy there will never be a social network platform again. Can we do it? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if you don’t have a date on Friday night, let’s just have a hackfest and get it done. It’s well within our reach.
We’re going to do it before the Facebook IPO? Or are we going to wait till after? Really? Honestly? Seriously. The problem that the law has very often in the world where we live and practice and work, the problem that the law has very often, the problem that technology can solve. And the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law. That’s the free software movement. There’s software hacking over here and there’s legal hacking over there and you put them both together and the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. So, it’s not like we have to live in the catastrophe. We don’t have to live in the catastrophe. It’s not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.