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1994-01-25
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Opening Statement to the House Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and Finance, Washington DC, April 29, 1993
Hello everyone and thanks for inviting me here. My name is
Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer and sometime science
journalist. Since writing my nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN:
LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER, I have returned
to writing science fiction. And I've returned to that with some relief,
frankly, since the world of science fiction is in most ways rather less
strange and less bizarre than the contemporary world of
telecommunications policy.
I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I testify today as a
science fiction writer. It's one of the perks of my profession to write
about the future, or attempt to, and I thought you might like to meet
someone from the telecommunications future that you are so busy
creating.
With your kind indulgence for my novelist's whimsy then, the
rest of my brief presentation today will be given by a Mr. Bob Smith,
who is an NREN network administrator from the year 2015.
I present Mr. Smith.
"Thank you, Mr. Sterling. It's a remarkable privilege to talk to
the legislators who historically created my working environment. As
a laborer in the fields of 21st Century cyberspace I of course would
have no job without NREN, and my wife and small son and I are all
properly grateful for your foresight in establishing the Information
Superhighway.
"Your actions in this regard have affected American society
every bit as strongly as did the telegraph, the railroads, the
telephone, the highway system, and television. In fact, it's
impossible for me to imagine contemporary life in 2015 without the
Global Net; living without the Net would be like trying to live without
electricity.
"However, it's a truism in technological development that no
silver lining comes without its cloud. Today I'd like to mention two
or three trifling problems that have come up that were not entirely
obvious from the perspective of the early 1990s.
"First of all, this 'Research and Education' aspect. Since
communications *is* power in an Information Society, giving
fantastically advanced communications to the Research and
Education communities did in fact empower those communities quite
drastically by comparison with interest-groups lacking that
advantage. Today, one of the most feared political organizations in
the world is the multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the
Students for an Utterly Free Society.
"Of course, there have always been campus radicals, but thanks
to their relative lack of financial clout, and lack of even a steady
home address, these young fanatics once found it very difficult to
organize politically. Therefore, they were easy for the powers-that-
be to ignore, except during occasional spasms of violent campus
unrest.
"Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student unrest can now
spread like lightning across entire continents. Advanced AI
translation programs installed on the Net only made matters worse,
since in 2015 the global leaders of the student movements are not
only extremely radical, but French.
"Attempts by campus authorities to control this unrest have
failed miserably. In 2015, NREN sites are always the first buildings
occupied during a campus strike. Campus chancellors and faculty are
themselves so utterly dependent on NREN that they become quite
helpless off-line.
"A second major problem has been the growth of unlicenced
encryption, which has proved quite unstoppable. Today some
seventy-five percent of NREN archives are material that no one in
authority can read. Countries that attempted to control and monitor
network traffic have lost market share and service revenue as data
processing simply moves offshore.
"The United States has profited by this phenomenon to a great
extent as people worldwide have flocked to the relative liberty of
our networks. Unfortunately many of these electronic virtual
immigrants are not simply dissidents looking for free expression but
in fact are organized criminals.
"Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an enormous archive of
encrypted Iranian files, illicitly stored in an obscure NREN node in
North Dakota. Luckily the FBI was able to decrypt these files thanks
to an inside informant. Deciphering these archives revealed the
following contraband:
"Eighty percent graphic image files of attractive young women
without veils on, or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.
"Fifteen percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western pop
music and Western videos, still illegal to possess in Teheran.
"And, five percent text files in the Farsi language describing
how to build, deliver and park truck-bombs in major urban areas.
"I can't conclude my brief remarks today without a mention of
a particularly odd development having to do with *wireless*
computer telecommunications. Since it is now possible to transact
business entirely in cyberspace, including financial transactions,
many information entrepreneurs in 2015 have simply given up any
physical home. Basically, they have become stateless people, 21st
Century gypsies.
"A recent tragic example of this occurred in the small town of
North Zulch, Texas. There some rural law enforcement officers
apprehended a scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle in a high-speed
chase. Unfortunately he was killed. A search of his backpack
revealed a device the size of a cigarette pack. In searching the dead
man's effects, the police officers, who were not computer literate,
accidentally broke the device. This tiny device was actually a
privately owned computer bulletin board system with some 15,000
registered users.
"Many of the users were wealthy celebrities, and the apparent
outlaw biker was actually an extremely popular and nationally
known system operator. These 15,000 users were enraged by what
they considered the wanton destruction of their electronic
community. They pooled their resources and took a terrible
vengeance on the small town of North Zulch, which, by contrast, had
only 2,000 residents, none of them wealthy or technologically
sophisticated. Through a combination of harassing lawsuits and
sharp real-estate deals, the vengeful board users bankrupted the
town. Eventually the entire township was bulldozed flat and
purchased for parkland by the Nature Conservancy.
"Thanks in part to the advances that you yourselves set in
motion, violent conflicts between virtual and actual communities
have become a permanent feature of the cultural landscape in 2015."
Thank you for your patience in entertaining my speculations.
I'll be happy to take any questions -- though only in my real-life
persona. Thank you very much.