Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. CT. Tea.

For people who take it for granted that the Internet's there and they're on it, and where it's become an integral part of their lives, I I I I came on the scene when the Internet was wasn't even there. We were it was really 1986 where I began to see, a fundamental shift in our in our technology when I worked on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act at the ACLU. And what we were doing is trying to ensure the privacy of new forms of communication, which included email and video transfer and not just speech, and telephone calls. And the the the congress, when they enacted wiretap legislation, put aside any discussion of text, they only dealt with phones and left for another day. So there was a little gap, in the statute, which became, a two year effort to try and fill that gap and cover new technologies. And so that was consciousness raising. When the the Internet came along and, in around 1992, a very big change happened. I was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They hired me as their first Washington officer and then executive director because they wanted to have an impact on civil liberties in the new digital media, and they were convinced that Washington just didn't understand it. And And they came to me at the ACLU, and I said, I've been working on these technologies. And let me tell you, Washington you you kind of disdain Washington. They don't understand how cell phones work and how the Internet works. But if you wanna make a difference, you better come to Washington because Washington may not understand your technology, but they certainly will not forbear from legislating all about it. And if they think it's a TV set, they'll treat it like a TV set. So, it's best to get out of your garage and come here. I think that message got through to some people, certainly to Mitch Capore, the founder of of EFF. And so we started a Washington effort really both to look at the this changing technology and also to address the policy issues that that technology presented to try and maximize its openness. The the key turning point was in 1992 when when Rick Baucher's congressman from Virginia took on the effort to allow commercial traffic over what had been a defense Mhmm. Research network. The Internet was transferred into the private sector. And for the first time, commercial traffic was allowed on the Internet. Researchers were unhappy about that, but that was a revolutionary step, that change. And so there, by allowing, anyone to get on the Internet, including corporations and the the product at that time, companies you don't even remember, Prodigy, CompuServe, early I remember the name of seem like I ever interacted with that. And AOL. They Yes. These are, they were the first adapters to try and build communities on the Internet to allow people to communicate, send email, talk to each other, and so on. There was the well I mean, there was the the the the the net nerds had it always had a network, from the beginning. Mhmm. Because what they when they discovered the biggest thing about the Internet when it was just a research network trying to connect supercomputers together was that email was the greatest application. Everyone wanted to send email, and everyone wanna have an email account. So communication was there from the beginning. Now some of the the the DARPA people, defense of applied research network people who who invented the Internet, thought, you know, it would transform our democracy, but that was a small voice there. The the commercialization of the Internet, is really a fundamental step. And what I saw and others saw, as I listened to the technologists, was here was a technology which applied across the telephone networks, would allow everyone to speak. Everyone could connect and communicate. Mhmm. This was very different than mainstream media. We were dominated by three networks. We didn't even have the cable networks. So here was a for me, I saw the democratic potential of this new technology because there was always a lot of, criticism of mass media and then and the difficulty of routing around mass media so that other people could speak to each other. They felt that that it was dominated by a set of gatekeepers. So here was a potential non gatekeeper network. And unlike cable and television or radio, it was not bounded by scarce spectrum. It was on it you could build out as as much as you wanted to. Mhmm. We're still in that transformation because the Internet in many places is still a very fast set of cars, call your computer that or your phone, running on dirt roads. Call that the infrastructure. That infrastructure is you build superhighways, but not not the superhighway that we used to talk about, 500 channels in two directions, kind of a huge cable network with nothing else on. Here was a multidirectional network that technology improved, it could become faster. You could get on it. It was an application platform. And for me, a student of political science and political philosophy at Berkeley, here was, something at Berkeley, here was, something that mirrored, America in eighteen thirties, which was when Alexis de Tocqueville, a famous philosopher, came to understand what what is this democracy about. He said it was certainly about equality. And what he saw equality is breaking down all the relationships that that a aristocratic society had and flattening out. What he was concerned about was that a potential of real tyrants to take over, benevolent dictators, because the people you you you had to worry about what he called the tyranny of the majority.

if you had this this platform, what what Tocqueville saw in terms of of what was exciting about about democracy in our early stages was the the proliferation of newspapers. People commit there were hundreds, thousands of newspapers and pamphlets, and people were using the printing press, in an early way to to reach everybody else, and there were many voices. So, like, a communications medium that allowed many voices to speak was possible again when the Internet came along. Everything had been concentrated. Newspapers were in small hand group of hands. Media was concentrated because of scarce spectrum. The Internet was a revolutionary potential to break out of that and allow everyone to have that platform. And, it would also, in my mind, facilitate what is crucial to the exercise of liberty and citizen empowerment, which is the ability of and the willingness of citizens to get together when there's a problem to solve and find a solution. The ability to come together and solve problems, reach your community, form new communities was also part of the Internet potential. So that's everyone speaking, everyone equal, lots of potential liberty. Yeah. That's the vision. And the Internet, when it was commercialized, offered that potential. And what we said at CDT, which I founded in 1994, over the dispute about how much time do you spend working on policy in Washington, how much time do you just spend saying, god, they don't get it right. It was very difficult for the for some of the people at EFF, in the early days. Not talking about EFF today, but to say we're gonna work on policy because it requires you to compromise. It requires you to talk to the FBI and to the Congress and all they got not a pretty game. It's not a pretty game. Someone said, you know, Jerry likes making sausage making, and that's what it's all about. But we just don't like it. It's ugly. And I said, if then I'm gonna have to form my own organization. I took some of the staff from EFF left with me, and we founded an organization that was gonna get right in the middle of a battle. Because the third part of it is that, okay, we have a flat platform. It's a new medium. We have to break out of the policy vision that the Internet was gonna be like a television set that you could control what was on at one end and regulate it in that way. So we had to persuade, policymakers that that's not the way the Internet was designed. And if they tried to regulate it that way, they would stifle its potential. So that required involvement, and CDT was involved. And it also required something else, which is if there is no center to this thing, then you had to bring communities together and make policy within the community. So we, from the beginning, we took some corporate money. We took foundation money. We never took from any one interest, and it's been our principle for all along to involve as a diversity of funders that represented the the the community itself to get together and try and solve problems. And we solved a number of problems. Let me continue down this point. The where CDT has made a difference, I think, and a profound difference is trying to frame the policy architecture of the Internet, beginning with getting commercial traffic to run across the Internet. That was number one. Number two is if we're all gonna communicate, we needed privacy. So the early effort, even though it was just pre Internet to create privacy protections for email so that it had the same protection as first class mail was a revolutionary step because of the open nature of email at that time. Mhmm. Yeah. I don't wanna go too deep, but email didn't go from one one end to the other immediately. It went through a medium step and would stop at MCI or and then be forwarded to you. And it looked like a telegram. Telegrams don't have much protection under law. But if you could create the idea that email was as protected as as first class mail, that was good for privacy. And I would argue it was also good for industry because do you want a product that wasn't worth anything to anybody? If you wanted to have a really good product, it is in your self interest to get behind our effort to reform those laws. And so I could build a coalition that included everyone from the ACLU to IBM. And when we ran into problems about why, god, you're gonna this is gonna be bad for law enforcement. And at that time, Ronald Reagan was the president. Ed Meese was the attorney general. We had to figure out how do you talk to Ed Meese. Well, the ACLU is not gonna call Ed Meese, a very conservative attorney general, and say, hi, Ed. We'd really like to have this law passed. But when IBM called and said to the attorney general, this is really important to us, that was a kind of self interest rightly understood coalition building that had to come together to form a part of the architecture. So we we passed legislation in the privacy space. The same thing happened. The the most immediate challenge to the Internet, fundamental challenge was the whole battle over pornography on the Internet. CDT played a leading role in what became this landmark case called ACLU v Reno. The ACLU they filed a case to challenge legislation that would have regulated speech on the Internet and required the the the intermediaries at that time, whether it was AOL or Prodigy, to monitor what was coming across the network and make sure that there was no pornography. That would have really required them to to monitor every piece of of what was a huge stream and a growing stream of communications and would have crippled it. Also, we had to convince people it was gonna be very effective because you stop one stream, there's another stream coming. It's coming from overseas. It's coming we can't you can't regulate that stream that way. And the most effective way to deal with some problems on the Internet is to empower users to do it themselves, give them the tools to to block pornography at at their home, make their own choices. And so that became a a public policy battle in Congress. And some of the civil liberties community waited and said, we're just gonna sue because this is really unconstitutional. CDT took the position that we're going to fight to try and win in Congress because it's really important how that legislation is passed. And one of the second most important successes, well, not that that lawsuit, but when the senate passed a very, regulatory bill that would have stifled speech. The House of Representatives took a very different position. It said, we're we're going to try and build a statute here that empowered the intermediaries to monitor themselves, but not be responsible for everything that's coming across their network. Be good Samaritans. Mhmm. And that became called section two thirty, which was written into the statute on the house side. When the when as sausage making goes Mhmm. When Congress reconcile those two bills, which are unreconcilable, the Newt Gingrich, deregulatory bill and the James Exxon big regulatory senate bill, when they came together, the the conference decided to put them together. They don't fit, but they did. We'll pass your bill. We'll pass this bill. We'll put them all together. Then it became a a legal challenge. The ACLU brought together a set of of plaintiffs, who were the the the gay community, the health care clinic, someone distributing AIDS information, they could be swept up and regulated in the effort to get at pornography. And they said, this law is too vague. It's unconstitutional. We made a very different art. We filed a second lawsuit with the, American Library Association, AOL, and CDT. We formed a coalition of citizens, Citizens Internet Empowerment Association of we had thousands of of netizens join in the lawsuit, and we went to court with a very different argument. Yes. It was unconstitutional. But when Congress regulates speech, it has to look for the least restrictive means to doing something. And we made the argument that empowering users to filter their own content was the least restrictive, most effective way to deal with this problem. That, for some, in the civil leaders community, they did not like that argument. They did not want filters and censorship filters out there. They thought that would threaten the Internet. But we made that argument in court. And when it when we did two things which are always important to remember as you think about the Internet. You get involved if you're an Edison. If you're in the policy space, you go in and educate whatever whatever policy making body you're dealing with. When this law passed, it went to it was there was an immediate challenge under the statute. And we went to Philadelphia, which was the the court case, and And we wired the court. I remember that picture. We have it hanging in the new offices. We put computers on every desk of every of every judge, and they learn how the Internet worked. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's part of our DNA Yeah. Is teaching people how the how the the technology works as part of any policy solution. I don't care where you are on a on a problem. If you don't understand the technology,

The poet said, come let us be true, but I don't trust these words from you. You've broken my heart so many times. I think you're dating to a desolate island on a river of doubt and sorrow that flows from here to sun tomorrow. And silent prophets never show me a song, only trees of smoke. On this shoreline, the poet sang. Times are a changin', times are a changin'. God's on our side. Only words now since our feet turn to clay.

are based on what you did. Well, it That But now now you're not gonna find Jerry Berman's lawsuit or CDT's lawsuit. Because in order to organize the community on behalf of our lawsuit, we merged into a we created a Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition that allowed many organizations to come together and no one be king of the mountain. Yeah. Organizations together. We also got the industry, even though they were kind of protected or mishmashed into the legislation that it passed to say, this is really going to cripple you ultimately. You've gotta stand up here. It's pornography. No. But if you we are going to frame this lawsuit as educating the courts and policymakers and the press that this is a different technology. And so if you look at the way we frame the the the the ALA CDT lawsuit, which was joined with the ACLU lawsuit, our plaintiffs were the industry. Every Internet provider was there. Telephone companies Yeah. Were not there. We did not allow or did not reach out to any media that would confuse the courts about whether this was a continuation of what went before. So it was the new industry. Yeah. So that was the presentation. And we we had also had to persuade everybody that our lawyer, Bruce Ennis, now passed away, was the best lawyer. He was to argue this case before the Supreme Court, and he argued the case. And we won nine to zero Wow. But said, you can't regulate speech this way. The Internet is this new, wonderful, vibrant technology. It's a, you know, it's a a a conversation across the globe. Yeah. A lot the the the view of the Internet, I think, may be drafted by the clerks of some of those judges and the judges themselves, but they understood that this is something big, and they wanted to protect it. So it was nine zero with with some caveats on and, on the corners of the judges. But that was a major decision, And so policy architecture, privacy, commercial, anybody on, free speech for everyone were and, also, because we struck down the major statute, the court did, it left standing section two thirty as constitutional,

Democracy Act by, in the end, leaving that section alive, which said intermediaries, they carry everything, but they are not responsible for the libel, the slander. Those, they can try and regulate it, but if they regulate it, they can't be held as, oh, you're regulating, then you must be responsible for all of it. We're not. You're not. And that that forbearance has allowed all everything from Facebook to Twitter, to the future to to be part of that platform. So that architecture, a couple of changes, no no victory in that suit, no privacy legislation, no commercialization, and you can take the most wonderful technology in the world and it would have been stranded. So it was a really exciting thing. And as your as I think the history of CDT has learned, it is always under challenge because we we can go through the battle over CALEA and telephones and encryption and whether you're gonna have an encryption key in your phone that the government principle of of keeping the platform open. Some people say, Jerry Berman and CDT, they they work with the FBI to to enact the the law enforcement, act, which which required companies to design their networks, to allow for wiretapping. If you're post all wiretapping, this was a terrible thing to do. It was authorizing wiretapping. But but in the scheme of politics, you have five votes in congress for no wiretapping. You had to find a solution that was in the middle and protected privacy, but also gave law enforcement some access to the to, the telephone network or to cell phones. But one of the most amazing things that people have discovered recently is that in that regulatory scheme over law enforcement technology designs, it didn't apply to the Internet. Somebody was in the room and said, don't do the Internet. Somebody. I think I think it was people like CDT were in that room. Like CDT. We were in that room. And I remember senator Lee saying, okay,

If I was talking to my son this morning. I said, you know, I'm going to do an interview about the the Internet. And I said, why is it important to you? Well, it's the access to information. It's there, like in no other medium. So and that continues to to grow. I mean and as I get older, it's great to have Google to to click on a movie and find out who that actor is because I've forgotten their name. So it's I've got the information at my fingertips. I've got more information at my fingertips. Second of all, my son can reach people that are interested in what he's interested in that he couldn't before. And communities, whether they're gay communities or or women trying to empower themselves in businesses or they're working on some issue, it it mirrors that that vision of allowing people to get together to solve problems. So it it is an empowering tool politically. That's the that's the the and third and most important, I've been working on this issue too on in the intellectual property area, Teaching young people that ripping off music is really not a good idea because it's it's not in your self interest because you are part of the creative community. Don't think of the, you know, the big studios, taking all the money in the world so you will take their music. It's your music that you're putting up on YouTube. It's your music that your your poetry, your book, your ebook creation. There is a creative explosion which the Internet allows, but if anyone can rip it off, you have no protection. So it is in your interest to protect, the creative potential of the Internet. So for for my son, his ability to put his photography up on Facebook Yeah. Is something I said, NBC wasn't gonna put up your your your your your photography. Unless he's amazing. The the unless you're amazing. You can fight your way into a museum, but you're you're not gonna get on on on the evening, cable network or at Fox or at MSNBC, but you can be up on the Internet. Us to organize to fight for civil rights and someone else to to reach a gay community and and say, let's empower ourselves together and let's work on this or let's don't feel bad about yourself. Feel strong. We're here here together, it also allow it since it's a flat platform, everyone else can also organize. So you're passionate about gay rights or civil rights. Well, someone else is passionate about getting rid of every Muslim in this country and restoring white America, and that that we ought to purify the race, or that that, we ought to kick all these people out of school, or we ought to elect candidates who will take us back to 1950. They have the same legitimacy on the Internet. They have the ability to organize. They have the right ability to use it, and they're finding ways to use it. They they mimic first adapters who use the Internet to win this the Communications Decency Act. They can organize to defeat the Communications Decency Act. They learn the tools, and they learn how to crowdsource, hate. Yeah. And and so what we see in our politics is, sometimes with with with horror that that views that shouldn't be part of our dialogue are being mainstreamed, that what the what we used to worry about mainstream media being filters, they were at least arbiters of something called fairness, and and they could maybe articulate the facts and had some trust. Because there's no gatekeepers anymore, there's no trusted sources. That means, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a great senator, from New York, once said everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not everyone's entitled to their own facts. Right. Well, we are breaking through that. We are beginning to overturn that. People are saying, not only am I entitled to my own opinion, I can get the facts that fit that opinion, and then I can communicate it to someone else and feel empowered that those facts are true. In when I was a young person, someone who thought some of the things that are being said today would be write them cut out stuff in a in a magazine and paste it on a news in in a news in a letter and mail it to the editor of the newspaper, and we put in a junk bin. Now that person puts up a website with very little effort and can make it look just like the Washington Post website, communicate, empower, And they're

it's actually pretty different. Sets of well, the the the other challenge is that while the Internet promotes, everyone having a voice, it it has shown a weakness in promoting anything like a public square and deliberative democracy. The idea when I think about democracy, well, everyone will have their opinion, then we will have a debate over the same facts. And we will it might get contentious sometimes, but then we can reach a compromise, and that's how policies make That's what's in the phones. Yes. But that is not how the Internet works. It works in terms of segmentation. Everyone is going into their own silo. Everyone's got their own opinions and their own facts and their own echo chamber, and they're and that's how the Internet's working. Now that's an Internet problem, but it's a bigger problem than that because the Internet is so powerful, a cultural tool of of empowerment brains. Is that more and more, our congress looks like the Internet. It's everyone in their own silos. Even within parties, they're into different silos, and they they they talk to the camera. They talk to their constituency. They talk to their base, and they don't talk to anyone else. So the the the view of the of everyone down in the senate while debating whether we should go into Iraq, which happened in the first in the first Gulf War, doesn't happen anymore. So if Congress runs like the Internet and it promotes lots of speech but no deliberation and no dialogue, and everyone's got different facts on each side of the aisle. There's no coming together. It took us two years to pass the Electronic Communications Privacy Act because Republicans and Democrats deliberated, came together. Together. There were moderate Republicans, and they felt an obligation to listen and find solutions. Those moderate Republicans are gone, and they've been taken out by by the way politics runs in our primaries. The Internet plays a big role in that, and it and it happens on our side too because we have lots of democratic districts. But if you look at the redistricting battles, it it's a deal between two parties. You create some safe seats, I'll recreate

I was I was speaking more generally as a citizen, not a not I'm sorry. Not I was not representing CDT. I know. That's horrible. Side. I've used that CDT. I'm just saying our side, their side. Sometimes it's it you know, I can I can go

sometimes, I think the, the conservative side has the right argument. Yeah. But the liberal side isn't gonna listen to it, and they're figuring out a way to defeat you, and they're figuring out a way to use the Internet. Last big point. When when Madison and helped to write the constitution and wrote the Federalist Papers in order to justify our our democracy, they were talking about representative government. It was a republic, not a democracy. And today, there's this growing opinion that all of these these the the the way that they design things is a rigged system. They rig the small states get as many votes in the senate as big states. That sounds unfair. Why are nine people making decisions about the constitution? Why aren't we making decisions about the constitution? And, the old idea that con we'd have a big fight over an election, then congress would go and work, and the people would go back to work and get out of the arena. That's not happening anymore. We have the people in the room with their representatives on a daily basis, and I believe this is not CDT's opinion. My belief is that we are heading for closer and closer to plebiscitic democracy, which is that there are no intermediaries anymore. There's just the citizens, no get rid of political parties, get rid of closed primaries, just let one side or two sides or three sides reach their citizens, worry about you know, let's, I think senator Cruz proposed changing how the Supreme Court runs so that they're elected more often, so they don't have lifetime appointments. There are proposals to change the senate back in a way that would allow local legislators. We could get in a lot of details, but the but the what the the public is coming along with maybe not a civics lesson anymore and bringing their own facts and bringing and empowering themselves. But our democracy is facing a challenge where, the the idea of intermediary institutions or or any kind of filter in politics is is being questioned. And I do not think that we are well served if if we are voting online about whether or not to go to war in Syria or Sure.

I think I detached for for two reasons. One is there are other things in life besides politics. And you you ought to you ought to experiment with those and do those things, while you can. The idea of every day that you're going to live forever is really a bad proposition. You shouldn't live with the prophecy you're gonna die today or tomorrow, but you should really think about what you're doing. Two, it's really important to allow a younger generation to come in with new ideas. They they may, I hope, have the same DNA at CDT and and to to to frame decisions, but they keep up with the technology. They have different interests and different needs, and they and we ought to promote change. And an institution that that doesn't have a strong succession, is an institution which is which is doomed. And the it's one of the problems of many institutions is, the founders pick a weak successor, and I did not do that. I picked people who are better than me to run the place. And, you know, Leslie Harris did a great job, and Nula O'Connor is doing a great job. And so that's that's good for the institution. But for me, I've gone far enough away in West Virginia that I cannot telecommute my politics. I you cannot lobby from a distance. You can you can get angry at what's going on, and sometimes I wanna be back in the arena. But a good part of me is enjoying different forms of expression. And, also, by being in West Virginia, which has gone from a blue state to a red state and which has a lot of angry people, what you learn at the local level in working in my county is that you're you really do have to listen to people. And my biggest message to anyone in Washington is, believe it or not, get out of Washington. You are not the center of the universe. And one of the problems that people have out in the world is they do not feel that Washington listens to them, that it runs on its own internal clock and and networking and makes decisions for people and assumes what they're thinking. And that is really disrespectful to people, particularly when they they they have now have the same technology, and they have the same ability to organize, an organization and build coalitions that that you might find and I might find really distressing, but they're there. And some of their anger is is absolutely justified, and you better find out what it's about. And we're gonna have to learn how to talk to each other. And I don't know whether that begins just with the Internet. It begins offline, and it begins in communities. And it begins and and that dialogue and I think that that CDT should be promoting a dialogue that has people coming together, not just clicking on on their on their mouse, which they don't do anymore. Mhmm. But but coming together and talking about, at least for the Internet, what is a a code of of conduct that we ought to adopt as responsible, virtuous members of a medium to keep to keep it alive? Because I think the greatest threat to this open medium is gonna come from the inability of the users to translate into a responsible, way of communicating and finding a way to deliberate. So, promoting dialogue in communities, getting using this technology to get people to come together, debating almost as we did in days I was talking to you last night, Brian, in the days when we we put together the constitution, really having a dialogue across the country where people come together face to face and talk about what they think those five or six principles we ought to have that would make the Internet work for people and so that we are listening to each other. And how do we do that? And so it's can we use the Internet and flip this flat platform into building, intermediaries that that work in this rebuild? Yeah.

to be among you.