In which I didn't get porn
But did understand censorship
Now that I have nearly 9,000 rescued AmiPro files to browse I can see just what I got wrong — and right — in the earliest days of the web. Here I was trying to think about free speech online thirty years ago, when instantaneous full colour graphics in every home (and phone) were pretty much unimaginable. I completely failed to foresee the web as an advertising medium. I had, though, already seen people go mad online, or, as we’d now say, self-radicalise. Written for the Independent on Sunday in April 1994
None of the colleagues who have come around to look at computer pornography on my screen has pretended to any interest in the subject. They are merely shocked at the technology which allows such scenes to be fitted on to a floppy disk and passed around in playgrounds. It is the silicon involved, and not the silicone, which impresses them. However, in one respect, they are at one with the most prurient and depraved viewers of this stuff. They are unduly impressed by the fact that these are moving pictures, visible on a computer screen. What they should be worrying about are words.
A few well-chosen words are worth an infinity of pictures. Compared to the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, or Mein Kampf, no video nasty ever made has had any effect on human behaviour worth noticing. The problems raised for freedom of thought and expression by simple electronic mail, have not begun to be addressed, it seems to me. What is one to do about controlling the Internet, a medium which treats censorship as a malfunction, and simply flows around it? Every state in the world censors some things.
There is much talk at the moment about the sort of information revolution that would bring moving pictures and sound to every home and desktop in the world on demand but it may never happen. At any rate, it will never happen until someone powerful sees ways of making big money from it, and there are difficulties to selling digitised information which are integral to its nature. It is so easy to steal that most people don't believe the act is theft at all. After all, when I steal your picture, I have done you an unequivocal wrong. When I make a perfect copy, I have done you less of an obvious wrong. If you make me a copy, and give me it, have you wronged the man who sold you the picture?
Digital information can be copied for ever without diminishing the original or losing any of its quality. Compact disks, which contain music in digital form, make commercial sense because the music on them is bound into a physical medium. If it were practicable to copy compact disks down the telephone line as easily as they can be taped, it is a safe bet that far fewer would be sold, and far fewer efforts would be made to sell them. But it is not practicable, yet.
The answer to this problem will probably be some form of encryption. The same1 advances in computer technology that make it possible to put the whole of the National Gallery onto a compact disk have made it possible to encrypt anything unbreakably in millions of different ways. Just as at present, people who appear to be seling information will in fact be selling access to information. Only instead of this access being limited by physical scarcity, as it is with books, it will be limited by codes and passwords, the way that access to your bank account is already protected from the thief who steals your cashpoint card.
In the mean time, the only form of information to circulate really freely in the great information bazaar will not be pictures or music or even grainy black and white videos of throbbing buttocks but words. And the implications of this for civil liberties are, I believe, immense, both in democracies and in dictatorships. Free speech — really free speech untrammelled by either social or legal restraints — is an extraordinarily corrosive intoxicant.
We have already seen a trivial foretaste of these in the Camillagate affair, when transcripts of the Prince Charles' phone calls to his alleged mistress which had not been printed in this country were printed by an Australian newspaper. Copies of these articles were faxed to hundreds of machines in the City of London, and from there all around the country. No money was involved: it was simply the universal human need to gossip. But the fax machine is cumbersome, slow and expensive compared to the electronic mail systems used in and between most modern offices. These make possible all kinds of mischief. There can hardly be an office in which people have not been caught conducting love affairs through this medium, 2and then been "eavesdropped'' upon by colleagues who have hacked into the correspondence and made copies for wider distribution. In one company I know of, a man who left for a job in another country had copies of his intimate correspondence faxed ahead by a jealous colleague to make him look ridiculous3.
These things, however painful and embarrassing to the victims, and however rewarding for their biographers, do not threaten the stability of society. Besides, anyone who really wants to protect their private correspondence on a computer can encrypt it. The programs to do so is freely available to anyone with a comuter and a modem. At least one of them, known as PGP, is probably unbreakable by the best efforts of the world's best codebreakers at the moment. And it is free, in principle as well as in practice4. So your billets-doux are quite safe from eavesdroppers if you want them to be. So for that matter are the private thoughts and instructions of the IRA, the Medellin Cartel and any international paedophile ring that wants to use the technology.
It is probably too late to put that genie back into the bottle, though the Clinton administration is making heroic efforts to do so by promoting an encryption technology known as "Clipper" which is unbreakable except by duly authorised Government agencies.
These are real and frightening threats to any democracy. But consider how much more frightening they must be to the old men who run China. Hitler and Stalin passed laws against the possession of short-wave radios to prevent ideological pollution from abroad. Under Brezhnev, unauthorised use of a photocopier was a criminal offence, to prevent citizens from corrupting each other. Computer networks unite both these possibilities for subversion; so the obvious answer would be to ban them, too. But this won't work. They are essntial to a modern economy, or so everyone believes.
They have already been used to subvert totalitarian ambitions: during the 1992 coup against Gorbachev, the university computer network in the Soviet Union was used to distribute detailed and accurate news reports from independent news agencies at a time when the traditional news media were under the control of the putschists, and when the only other true information available was coming from outside the country.
A Chinese law published in February5 and now being distributed widely around the networks of the free world, provides for the untramelled exercvise of control of all computer networks by the security police. Article six states: "The Ministry of Public Security shall be in charge of safeguarding computer information systems.
"The Ministry of State Security, the State Secrecy Bureau, and relevant State Council departments shall carry out work pertaining to safeguarding computer information systems within the lines of authority prescribed by the State Council."
Article 7 continues with a catch-all clause which prohibits anything that the government might take a dislike to. "No organization or individual may use computer information systems to engage in activities that endanger national or collective interests, as well as the legitimate interests of citizens; they may not jeopardize computer information systems."
No nonsense about the defense of privacy there. If any law could possibly quash the use of computers to promote freedom of thought and expression, this is it.
God knows what I was thinking here
One of whom went on to become a notable example of the problems with free speech.
I have no idea at this distance who I was thinking of, but presumably someone on the Independent.
It was and remained unusably complicated. But in those days I was hanging out with nerds who never considered that torture could extract passwords of infinite technical sophistication.
This may have been the first mention of what would become the Great Firewall in the mainstream British press.