28th Chaos Communication Congress
Behind Enemy Lines
Speaker: Cory Doctorow

The coming war on general computation

The copyright war was just the beginning

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other "trust" mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.

Cory Doctorow:

It may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict.

The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create.

We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on ... we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.

Bruce Sterling:

This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it's gonna get worse for a long time.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Rebecca Solnit:

Everything changes. Sometimes you have to change it yourself.

Tony Judt:

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

Philip Hensher:

I wish there was some less feeble response to this constant, exhausting, draining surveillance we live under.

Robin Wauters:

You never know who's sniffing.

David Chavern:

It's nearly impossible to keep people out. The best thing you can do is have something that tells you when they get in.