Other Big Brotherish urges have surfaced. While some Power People hope to be able to learn more about us by fighting PGP-style programs, they are stymieing our efforts to learn more about them. At the same time the Feds put online thousands of public documents and even the visage of Bill Clinton’s cat, some politicians on the Hill sought to weaken the Freedom of Information Act, which makes it easier to dig up dirt on public officials. Just as important, Clinton people in early 1995 were proposing new copyright laws that in effect would discourage the intelligent discussion of public issues on the Internet. It would be harder to share electronic newspaper clips. Even more disturbingly, Clinton’s copyright policy could menace our public library system in the future. Bruce Lehman, his czar of intellectual property, was coming across as Andrew Carnegie in reverse.
Carnegie is remembered as a Scot who grew rich off steel in the States and who encouraged people throughout the world to start libraries for all. He gave millions toward library buildings, with the understanding that the local taxpayers would finance their support. Carnegie wanted public libraries to be universities for the common man, and the metaphor holds up. Today, without paying for college or even for books, Americans[Americans] can educate themselves on subjects ranging from microcomputer chips to medieval history, to Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on democracy, to the case for or against feminism or abortion or public broadcasting or capital punishment. That is life in the era of paper books.
If Lehman had his wishes, however, Americans would not be able to dial up copyrighted electronic library books from home by way of the Internet Instead they would have to tote around CD-ROMs and floppy disks.
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that, in the era of the Internet, the Lehman vision would be “the equivalent of requiring everyone who listens to music to buy 78 rpm shellac records. What will the children dial in to read? The collected speeches of Vice President Al Gore? And believe it or not, there’s also talk of the Postal Service getting involved in local public libraries through information kiosks.”[[6.10]] In effect the White House approach would jack up the price of independent, privately originated information, while making it easier to obtain Washington-blessed information.
The information kiosks led some librarians to think of noses and camel’s tents. For the Postal Service at one point said it would let local librarians and citizens use the kiosks to retrieve only designated categories of information, as opposed to, say, everything on the World Wide Web. On a 1 to 10 scale of Big Brotherism, the kiosk idea as originally proposed was an 8.5 or worse.[[6.11]] If the postal bureaucrats weren’t trying to be Big Brother in the strictest sense—and no, they weren’t—then they at least were unwittingly paving the way for him.
Worse, the Postal Service has talked of issuing tens of millions of “U.S. Cards” that would “mediate all government services and controls over citizens,” while at the same time an Internal Revenue Service official has proposed a system that would file our tax returns for us.[[6.12]] I hate both ideas. Rather than compiling Orwellian dossiers on citizens, governments should help us computerize via TeleRead-style programs so we can more easily do the “paperwork” ourselves by way of electronic forms. Investigators could audit the forms, but only under appropriate circumstances. How much better this would be—not just e-books, but electronic empowerment against bureaucracy—than the vision that Washington and other governments have in mind for us.
Perhaps the Lehman idea and the Postal and IRS plans will have been beaten back or rendered harmless by now. Whatever happens, though, it is clear that new technology may harm both privacy and democracy if our vigilance lapses.
The threat of electronic oligarchy, stanching the free flow of facts that intelligent nonmillionaires demand, is hardly unique to the States. In the United Kingdom, for example, The Times Higher Education Supplement has warned against a copyright regime that would be a paradise for read-o-meter companies but a nightmare to people valuing free libraries. Just like Lehman’s proposal in the U.S., the wrong laws in the U.K. could lead to a Copyright Gestapo; let’s hope that neither country will criminalize one of the prerequisites for democracy: curiosity.
Given the global nature of both encryption technology and copyright law, the whole world should be watching Washington’s policies. The Clinton Administration, after all, hopes to internationalize the same mindset that could send Phil Zimmermann to jail; in fact, many of the American export controls are in effect in other countries, raising the possibility that an Australian or a British hacker could end up someday in the same predicament. In the pages that follow I’ll tell about the battles that Zimmermann and his allies have fought with Washington.
You’ll read, too, of my fight for an alternative to the Lehmanesque copyright law. My little case history suggests that the White House is not so eager to listen to ordinary mortals who speak up on the Net. Clinton’s people would rather pander to the usual campaign contributors. So far at least, pious rhetoric notwithstanding, they have basically neglected the need to put the public library system online with free or low-cost books from the private sector. Video just might end up reigning even more supreme than it does today—at the expense of abstract thought and democracy. Winston Smith would not be happy.