What’s more, TeleRead would respect diversity and freedom of expression in other ways. Publishers could gamble fees up front to bypass librarians and qualify for royalties, and if censored from the national library, they could post on the Net itself. I took it for granted that Washington would try to censor TeleRead. That was the reason I envisioned a whole network of many librarians, in many places, together with long-range funding. Besides, my plan reflected the old wisdom from hackers: When censorship arises, just route around it. Private companies could make some nice money off officially banned books. Imagine the promotional opportunities; “Nixed by Washington” could be the new “Banned in Boston.” What’s more, since TeleRead was public and involved many librarians, not just a tiny D.C. elite, any censorship would probably be much more conspicuous than in the world of corporate publishing.
In other ways, too, TeleRead would be anti-Big Brother. Americans would not have to make private companies privy to their reading habits. The national library could track dialups for the purpose of paying writers and publishers—you couldn’t retrieve books without reporting past accesses. But TeleRead would include protections. Records associated with individual users could be temporary, just a way to prevent information providers from abusing the system with repeated dialups. People could buy controversial books by way of anonymous digital money. In fact, with sophisticated enough fraud controls, the same techniques might eventually be used to prevent names from being associated with dialup records even for a short time. If nothing else, people could entrust TeleRead records to certified private companies that reported accesses without revealing identities.
TeleRead, then, could provide even more safeguards than public library records in the paper era—significant, since librarians by habit had respected privacy much more than had other government officials. “There was a case back in Nixon’s era,” Phil Zimmermann would eventually remind me, “where Nixon tried to find out what some of his enemies were reading at the library, and the librarians were, of course, up in arms about being asked to supply a list of books that had been checked out by a particular person or a list of people that had checked out a particular book. They were able to resist the efforts by the government to obtain that information. I think that we need to have the same kind of controls in place for future libraries that are on the Net.” I couldn’t have agreed more.
Even the hardware could serve to thwart Big Brother by promoting free expression and democracy. TeleRead would let people talk back to bureaucrats and among themselves; the machines would work with keyboards, and someday they might even serve in part as wireless digital telephones, not just computers. TeleRead would let Americans all be more uppity. The information in the national library would enrich public debate; it would at least somewhat blur distinctions between the wealthy and those who otherwise couldn’t afford top-quality information.
This needn’t be just a dream. The United States had a $6-trillion-plus economy, and if just some of us used electronic forms for government and commercial transactions, we eventually would save tens of billions in time and money. As noted earlier in this book, the same pen interfaces that were ideal for reading would be great for forms. E-forms could help flag errors in tax returns and other documents, “interview” users quickly, and just as quickly narrow down questions to the essentials. And so the saving in time and money could easily justify a well-stocked national library. No magic was involved here, just an old principle of information management. Two applications (smart forms and the electronic books) made more sense than just one (the books). In fact, the American Society for Information Science would later approach me to do a chapter on electronic libraries for an ASIS book from MIT Press, and I would oblige. Clearly TeleRead was a logical link between Gore’s plans for reinventing government and his oft-claimed desire to drive down the cost of knowledge.
I was a writer, not an attorney or information scientist, but a number of well-credentialed people understood the logic of TeleRead, even when I showed them a version somewhat less refined than the one just described. At the urging of a distinguished Washington lawyer, I applied to testify at the interagency hearings on intellectual property law in the digital age. But he warned me some bizarreness was afoot. Experts from the Library of Congress would not run the hearings; nowadays electronic books would be more within the domain of the Commerce Department. A Commerce bureaucrat instead would be the main player here—Bruce Lehman. That should have been my tip-off that the proceedings would be big and furry and jump, and come with a pocket for joeys; but I went ahead just the same. The lawyer organizing the hearing seemed friendly, alert, intelligent, receptive. She said each witness would testify just a few minutes, and that after the hearings the Feds would carefully examine our words.
My optimism grew. I expected at least a modicum of electronic democracy, Gore-style, just as promised. So in November 1993 I joined some thirty other witnesses in Crystal City, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington. Bill Clinton wanted his presidential cabinet to look like America, and, in fact, a black man was secretary of the Commerce. Gazing around the room, however, I saw a sea of white lawyers in dark suits, along with a scattering of women in power clothes. I could have been in California at an elite convocation of the software and entertainment industries.
I ran into one of the members of the intellectual property group, a minor White House advisor named David Lytel, who had promised to read my proposal as sent to him on the Internet. Mr. White House didn’t waste a nanosecond. “This is like Hollywood,” Lytel said. “Not everyone can be a star. We can’t use everyone’s idea.”
“I’m not here to star,” I said, “just to testify. Have you read my proposal?”
He said he had seen the prepared testimony I had left at the entrance to the auditorium.