[00:00.000 --> 00:03.020]  After Kevin Mitnick, so, okay.
[00:04.520 --> 00:06.580]  Thank you for the opportunity to be able to speak with you today.
[00:06.880 --> 00:12.720]  My name is Joshua Ginsberg, and I serve as Senior Systems Administrator for the Free Software Foundation.
[00:13.560 --> 00:17.280]  In the world of free computing, the FSF is the orthodoxy.
[00:17.400 --> 00:35.160]  The ones who put their money where their mouth is and go out in the world to proclaim the gospel, the good news that our efforts have somehow progressed, the cause of freedom of information from restriction in general, but more specifically to software.
[00:35.620 --> 00:47.200]  As Senior Systems Administrator, I usually only present to talk shop about the complexities of systems infrastructure improvements, web application platforms, and other such black and white, zero and one developments.
[00:47.520 --> 00:50.660]  Today, I get the chance to speak with you today about the value of your liberty.
[00:51.180 --> 00:59.000]  Because while the GNU project may very well have succeeded in creating the free operating system we needed, the work for software and digital freedom is far from over.
[01:00.080 --> 01:04.700]  Well, as the title of my talk today suggests, we're going to talk about the hacker.
[01:05.180 --> 01:07.980]  Now, what exactly is a hacker?
[01:08.800 --> 01:15.560]  Well, I consider myself one, and I'm sure many of you consider yourselves to be the same, or at least have a vague conception of what one is.
[01:15.700 --> 01:23.000]  And if probed, our response is probably not unlike Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court, who in 1964 wrote for Jacob Ellis v. Ohio that, I shall not today attempt to further define the kinds of material I understand to be braced within that shorthand description, and I perhaps could never succeed in intelligibly doing so, but I know it when I see it.
[01:36.280 --> 01:39.160]  And if any of you are laughing, it's because you know what he was actually talking about.
[01:40.060 --> 01:51.600]  Much the same with a hacker, we probably should agree that whether a given person has this essence, the Zen of the hacker, we can't quite explain it perfectly what makes one a hacker, but we know it when we see it.
[01:52.340 --> 01:54.500]  So, I'd like to start with an example.
[01:55.660 --> 02:02.260]  This gentleman wanted to create a sort of commons for the intellectual and cultural enrichment of all man.
[02:02.740 --> 02:03.620]  Here's how it would work.
[02:03.960 --> 02:15.040]  Different people from a wide array of professions and social stature would use this common resource to discover answers to questions that they had on any topic of inquiry.
[02:15.740 --> 02:21.800]  In turn, when the opportunity arose for them to offer wisdom on subjects they were knowledgeable about, they could contribute back.
[02:22.360 --> 02:29.040]  He was concerned about personal differences and different social agendas, polluting the quest for the simplest and purest truth.
[02:29.040 --> 02:38.960]  So, we developed a set of rules for the community to be guided by to ensure that the end result of the discourse was a neutral point of view, faithful to empirical truth as possible.
[02:39.820 --> 02:46.560]  At this point, you're probably waiting for me to mention the name of Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia family of sites.
[02:46.560 --> 02:52.560]  However, the community I was referring to is far older, called the Leather Apron Club, and founded by Benjamin Franklin.
[02:53.180 --> 02:57.060]  The club's members would pose questions of intellectual, moral, or social interest.
[02:57.340 --> 02:59.960]  They would debate, discuss, and research the questions.
[03:00.080 --> 03:04.900]  And at the end of it, they would produce an essay composed describing the club's conclusions.
[03:05.760 --> 03:10.920]  Rather quickly, they discovered that between them, they owned relatively few books to use in their research.
[03:10.920 --> 03:17.220]  And this shortage could not easily be corrected because the availability of books was too low and their cost was too high.
[03:17.520 --> 03:26.460]  As a result, Franklin instigated a peer-to-peer sharing program, where members of the club would make available to the collective group the whole of their library.
[03:26.520 --> 03:32.160]  So, no member's intellectual and cultural enrichment was limited by scarcity of materials or financial resources.
[03:33.340 --> 03:44.880]  Franklin habitually disregarded copyright laws of the day and earned the ire of the contemporary publishing industry, sparking a wildfire of American publishers republishing British works without their author's consent.
[03:45.700 --> 03:48.660]  When we continue to look at Franklin, our sense of deja vu repeats.
[03:49.240 --> 04:01.660]  Much like a modern visionary we know very well, Franklin said of copyright and patent, that, as we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.
[04:01.960 --> 04:04.040]  And thus, we should do freely and generously.
[04:04.660 --> 04:13.060]  And that, despite having inventive many products that would have fetched untold fortunes in the market, Franklin never made nor proposed to make the least profit by any of them.
[04:14.820 --> 04:16.120]  Franklin was a miscreant.
[04:17.760 --> 04:24.060]  As a taunt to an intellectual rival, Franklin predicted his rival's death in the poor Richard Almanac.
[04:24.520 --> 04:30.860]  Or as ambassador to France, he submitted fake articles to the French press, simply to see how ridiculous a story he could convince them to print.
[04:30.860 --> 04:38.860]  By comparison, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to build and sell boxes to place free long-distance phone calls, prior to founding Apple Computers.
[04:39.320 --> 04:45.540]  Richard Feynman, researcher on the Manhattan Project, would crack safes containing classified information, simply to see if he could.
[04:46.760 --> 04:48.120]  Franklin's inventions were hacks.
[04:48.740 --> 04:53.100]  He invented bifocals, because he was tired of switching between two pairs of glasses.
[04:53.580 --> 05:00.320]  Consider that his contemporaries worn themselves with indoor fireplaces, and as a side effect, they would often inadvertently burn their houses down.
[05:00.320 --> 05:09.040]  From observing these social ills, his solutions included the Franklin stove, a volunteer fire brigade, and the first fire insurance company.
[05:09.420 --> 05:13.760]  He hacked an odometer onto his carriage in order to make postal delivery more efficient.
[05:13.960 --> 05:20.940]  There was no end to his ability to devise creative and unique solutions to practical problems for the purpose of general social benefit.
[05:22.260 --> 05:37.660]  What these qualities of Franklin all have in common is unruliness, by which I do not mean standing perpetually as a dipole against the desires of authority, but instead a disposition in which rules, limitation, and barriers are not axiomatic and merely accepted.
[05:37.660 --> 05:45.540]  Instead, every lock is made to be picked, every law of nature designed to be questioned, and every problem an opportunity for a solution.
[05:47.020 --> 05:51.700]  Franklin, while certainly was the epitome, was not unique among the framers.
[05:52.160 --> 05:58.260]  The framers themselves were, in a sense, government hackers, bred of the cynical philosophies of Hobbes and Locke.
[05:58.800 --> 06:03.920]  It has been much noted that a hack is both a term for an elegant solution and an ugly one.
[06:04.220 --> 06:05.860]  But they both disregard rules.
[06:06.200 --> 06:13.900]  The framers hacked government modules together oriented in opposition to one another, so the excesses of one would be tempered by the other.
[06:14.500 --> 06:20.280]  For example, much like the shortly subsequent French Revolution, the framers believed government rules at the behest of the governed.
[06:20.960 --> 06:24.120]  And thus, democracy should guarantee the people's assent to its leaders.
[06:24.120 --> 06:31.120]  Yet, unlike the French, they thwarted democracy's whims and excesses with layers of republicanism.
[06:31.620 --> 06:39.020]  And the forms of state appointed senators, collegiately elected president, and presidentially appointed justices.
[06:39.280 --> 06:47.080]  They recognized that the majority's decision should guide the ship of state, but they tempered its power with civil liberties, strictly limiting the avenues of state power.
[06:47.080 --> 06:56.780]  In short, the American experiment as a constitutional, libertarian, democratic republic was in fact a government by hackers and for hackers.
[06:57.220 --> 06:57.980]  And the results?
[06:58.420 --> 07:06.540]  This culture of unruliness and refusal to accept the restrictions and limitations given to us has made the United States a mecca for hacker culture.
[07:07.700 --> 07:18.880]  If this weren't true, if there weren't something so compellingly American about the Zen of the hacker, it would be simply for anyone anywhere to create a community in which we could see the symptoms of hacker culture.
[07:19.460 --> 07:22.820]  Paul Graham, venture capitalist, identifies several such symptoms.
[07:23.280 --> 07:24.860]  Innovative and competitive startups.
[07:25.620 --> 07:29.580]  Educational institutions that attract and develop the upcoming hacker generation.
[07:29.580 --> 07:35.480]  And a culture of compulsive creativity and irreverence driven by intellectual curiosity.
[07:35.840 --> 07:38.540]  But in practice, this doesn't happen elsewhere.
[07:39.160 --> 07:40.440]  What makes it work?
[07:41.180 --> 07:44.980]  Well, let's look at three American centers where the Zen of the hacker is found.
[07:45.620 --> 07:47.840]  Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay.
[07:48.280 --> 07:50.920]  The Route 128 corridor in Boston and Cambridge.
[07:51.260 --> 07:53.660]  And the Round Rock area near Austin, Texas.
[07:54.440 --> 08:01.740]  These cities have the magical combination which makes them havens for hackers, and by extension, centers of innovation and creativity.
[08:03.020 --> 08:05.480]  Graham's hacker center symptoms are all present.
[08:05.780 --> 08:09.620]  They all have universities that function as centers of free intellectual thinking.
[08:10.380 --> 08:16.340]  San Francisco's geeks flow freely from both Stanford University in Palo Alto and the University of California at Berkeley.
[08:16.920 --> 08:21.420]  In Boston, hackers find homes wedged between MIT and Harvard.
[08:21.920 --> 08:24.860]  And Austin draws hackers from the halls of the University of Texas.
[08:25.600 --> 08:33.720]  They all have plentiful and free-flowing capital, as well as a host of larger established corporations to absorb and market successful companies.
[08:34.400 --> 08:39.920]  And perhaps most importantly, they have a culture and history that draws hackers to stay.
[08:40.400 --> 08:45.600]  The cities are filled with young people and easy access to outdoor activities and a rich history.
[08:45.600 --> 08:51.860]  They developed organically, planned bit by bit, without large-scale developments to sterilize them.
[08:52.460 --> 08:54.980]  And within them, creative irreverence blooms.
[08:55.480 --> 09:03.000]  In San Francisco, the Beta Breakers race provides an annual showcase of creative absurdity through costumes, signage, and homemade vehicles.
[09:03.600 --> 09:11.280]  In Boston, MIT maintains a healthy tradition of encouraging each class to surpass the hacks of the students from the year before.
[09:11.280 --> 09:15.340]  And Austin prides itself on the weirdness of its local culture.
[09:15.620 --> 09:23.860]  So that when zombies marched on City Hall, demanding greater rights for the disenfranchised undead, a counter-protest was staged by a legion of pirates.
[09:25.680 --> 09:29.740]  Graham also notes that there have been many well-funded attempts to replicate Silicon Valley.
[09:29.980 --> 09:30.940]  But none have succeeded.
[09:32.340 --> 09:39.700]  Between Antibes and Nice in France lies Sophia Antipoli, a technology park the French established to rival Silicon Valley.
[09:40.020 --> 09:48.940]  But despite impressive investment and marketing, it has attracted established technology groups such as HP, Accenture, and Honeywell, with its low rent and plentiful bandwidth.
[09:49.220 --> 09:51.040]  But otherwise, it's just a technology park.
[09:51.160 --> 09:52.200]  It doesn't have hackers.
[09:52.960 --> 10:03.220]  In China, the Chinese have dumped billions of yuan into Zhongguancun in Beijing, hoping that Xinhua and Peking universities might anchor its development.
[10:03.520 --> 10:07.500]  But entrepreneurial developments continue within the lines drawn by the Chinese government.
[10:07.880 --> 10:12.000]  Hackers do not thrive in an environment where coloring outside the lines is a state offense.
[10:13.560 --> 10:17.620]  What these two examples and countless others lack is a cultural element.
[10:17.620 --> 10:24.900]  The personality of these cities is such that people say and do what they want, without top-down structure.
[10:25.220 --> 10:28.060]  But more importantly, where good ideas win.
[10:29.280 --> 10:33.280]  Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams that there is a natural aristocracy among men.
[10:33.560 --> 10:35.980]  The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
[10:36.680 --> 10:42.360]  America was built to be meritocratic, to ensure that good ideas win.
[10:42.680 --> 10:46.580]  Not necessarily the ideas sponsored by those with the most influence and power.
[10:47.500 --> 10:53.740]  And this cycle of power shift and dynamic of competition is, by definition, disruptive and impolite.
[10:54.700 --> 10:59.940]  But to the hacker, the greater sin would be to ignore an elegant solution for fear of stepping on somebody else's toes.
[11:00.520 --> 11:14.000]  And what we're really saying about this cultural element is that the maximal expression of libertarianism in America, the sanctity of the individual against the conformity or tyranny of the masses, requires a certain tolerance of disobedience and mischief.
[11:14.000 --> 11:21.340]  It was the same quality in Franklin that drove him to social hack the French, as it was that inspired him to reduce property loss by fire.
[11:21.740 --> 11:28.580]  It was the same quality in Feynman that compelled him to crack safes that earned him the Nobel Prize.
[11:28.580 --> 11:35.440]  It was the same quality in MIT that drove its students to turn building one into R2D2 that was to incubate the GNU project.
[11:35.780 --> 11:39.040]  If you suffocate one, the other dies as collateral damage.
[11:39.400 --> 11:50.480]  When you have the liberty to be disobedient, healthy tolerance for nonconformity, and society in which good ideas win, there you have a place where hackers will collude to do truly amazing things.
[11:51.960 --> 11:57.700]  And that, perhaps, is the most valuable element of the American experiment has to export, the liberty of the individual.
[11:58.880 --> 12:10.840]  Fareed Zakaria, a respected political scientist, studied the relation between wealth, libertarianism, and democracy, and found that it was the presence of libertarianism that determined the ability of wealth and democracy to thrive.
[12:10.840 --> 12:24.700]  Where democracy and wealth thrive, he finds a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.
[12:25.100 --> 12:30.320]  He claims the Western model is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite, but by the impartial judge.
[12:31.380 --> 12:39.020]  It is disobedience and unruliness, the hearty laughter in the face of a problem, that allegedly cannot be solved.
[12:39.020 --> 12:45.940]  This is the Zen of the hacker, and its natural habitat is a culture of liberty, tolerance, and meritocracy.
[12:47.080 --> 12:56.200]  So having posited that liberty and tolerance for nonconformity are necessary catalysts for the preservation of the hacker, we now consider how America today is doing.
[12:58.520 --> 13:00.980]  U.S. Code Title 17, Section 1201.
[13:01.120 --> 13:07.600]  No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
[13:07.600 --> 13:14.560]  No doubt there isn't a person in this room unfamiliar with the anti-circumvention clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
[13:15.260 --> 13:22.840]  A shareholder, a legislator, or a media mogul sees this provision as about the horrendously awful term they use called intellectual property.
[13:23.280 --> 13:38.640]  Awful, incidentally, because not only does it obfuscate three completely separate areas of law that have different intents and goals, but it is an insidious attempt to graft our natural attitudes toward the natural right of property onto something which lacks the requisite element of scarcity.
[13:39.340 --> 13:48.660]  Senator Joseph Biden, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, claims that the federal government's vigilance in shielding intellectual property rights remains essential.
[13:49.080 --> 13:55.860]  Innovation would slow, business would suffer, and jobs would dissolve if technological advances were left unprotected.
[13:57.180 --> 14:01.460]  To contrast the modern statement's viewpoint with those of the framers is remarkable.
[14:02.280 --> 14:11.500]  The framers recognize that hackers and hacking the current generation of technologies plant the seeds of ideas that form the next generation of technologies.
[14:12.100 --> 14:19.500]  That hacking and innovation are both subversive and disruptive, because when good ideas win, they come from the outside.
[14:19.500 --> 14:25.320]  The current generation of statesmen strangles the subversion, ironically in the name of innovation.
[14:25.640 --> 14:30.300]  When laws outlaw hacking, those laws guarantee that good ideas will lose.
[14:32.280 --> 14:37.380]  Equally dangerous to laws outlawing hacking are laws that outlaw the raw materials hackers feed upon.
[14:38.080 --> 14:40.240]  Hackers are compulsive creators.
[14:40.540 --> 14:43.100]  They are compulsive problem solvers.
[14:43.280 --> 14:45.360]  And they are compulsive tinkerers.
[14:45.360 --> 14:51.480]  To deny them access to the media they use to satisfy their compulsion will guarantee that new hackers are not made.
[14:51.660 --> 14:53.500]  And that old hackers lose their ways.
[14:54.120 --> 14:57.380]  The epitome of this removal of raw materials is the chemistry set.
[14:59.660 --> 15:05.240]  In 1918, A.C. Gilbert packaged glass tubes and common chemicals together for the first childhood chemistry set.
[15:05.580 --> 15:11.240]  Providing curious children the opportunity to experiment and to tinker, nurturing their natural hacker essence.
[15:12.020 --> 15:16.960]  Some of these sets included sodium cyanide, radioactive samples with a Geiger counter.
[15:17.200 --> 15:22.040]  And compounds from which one could derive free chlorine gas or even nitroglycerin.
[15:22.600 --> 15:24.620]  Today, our chemistry sets have been sterilized.
[15:25.100 --> 15:29.260]  For some chemicals, an FBI criminal background check is required to purchase them.
[15:29.680 --> 15:35.000]  For others, because of their use in manufacturing amphetamines, they are illegal to purchase in their elemental form.
[15:35.820 --> 15:41.460]  Even model rocket engines are being monitored and restricted for fear of the use of their explosive propellant.
[15:42.180 --> 15:50.100]  The effect of this trend is not only a chemistry set that contains little more than salt and water, but it creates an official discouragement against learning to hack.
[15:50.720 --> 15:54.960]  The higher you raise that bar, the more hackers may decide it's just not worth it.
[15:55.780 --> 15:58.960]  As much as raw materials, hackers need other hackers.
[15:59.360 --> 16:05.600]  We need to surround ourselves with other hackers, both to challenge our limits, but to bring us back when we've gone too far.
[16:06.160 --> 16:06.540]  The danger?
[16:07.520 --> 16:09.740]  Ted Kaczynski was a hacker who hacked alone.
[16:10.520 --> 16:14.440]  And by sheer probability, most hackers are not born in the United States.
[16:14.700 --> 16:17.200]  But many decide rather quickly that this is where they belong.
[16:18.000 --> 16:21.860]  It stands to reason that America benefits from having the pick of the world's hackers.
[16:21.860 --> 16:32.160]  Indeed, the National Venture Capital Association reported two years ago that 40% of all American public technology companies were founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs.
[16:32.680 --> 16:36.320]  But due to more stringent visa policies, foreign hackers are studying elsewhere.
[16:39.360 --> 16:45.040]  In 2004, 90% of U.S. graduate schools reported a decrease in international applications, most strikingly in engineering and natural science.
[16:46.140 --> 16:51.680]  Furthermore, of those already with advanced degrees, fewer are able to complete their pilgrimages to America's hacker meccas.
[16:52.260 --> 17:00.880]  The United States issued only 65,000 H-1B visas for 2007, and the demand for them was so great that by August 2006, they had all been claimed.
[17:02.200 --> 17:08.940]  To compensate for our hesitation to accept foreign hackers into our midst, we would have to ramp up our domestic cultivation of the species.
[17:09.140 --> 17:15.380]  But when the need is greatest, our society has steadily reduced its tolerance for nonconformity and creative mischief of hackers.
[17:16.040 --> 17:18.780]  For those of us who live in Boston, we know this all too well.
[17:19.400 --> 17:35.540]  In January of 2007, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested in Boston on charges of placing a hoax device for attaching magnetically-backed LED light displays featuring characters from the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the Boston University and Longfellow Bridges,
[17:35.680 --> 17:41.620]  prompting the city to shut down the bridges, the MBTA Red Line, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
[17:41.620 --> 17:46.740]  The city was unapologetic about having erroneously identified these devices as malevolent.
[17:47.280 --> 17:52.160]  Police Commissioner Davis said the stunt was, quote, unconscionable in a post-9-11 era.
[17:53.440 --> 18:09.940]  Eight months later, a 19-year-old MIT engineering undergraduate named Star Simpson was arrested at gunpoint by state police after wearing into Boston Logan International Airport a homemade name tag consisting of a breadboard with LED lights and a battery she had created for MIT career day.
[18:09.940 --> 18:13.440]  She was arrested on charges of possession of a hoax device.
[18:14.040 --> 18:21.340]  Again, the police were unapologetic, stating that they were, quote, shocked and appalled that she wore it to an airport in a post-9-11 era.
[18:22.200 --> 18:30.220]  A major in the state police unhesitatingly explained that had she not followed the assault team's instructions to the T when they held her at gunpoint, she would have been killed.
[18:31.820 --> 18:38.020]  A month earlier in New Haven, Connecticut, a social running club called the Hash House Harriers ran afoul of police.
[18:38.500 --> 18:45.460]  The tradition of this club is to have their runs marked out by two members who run in advance of the pack carrying ordinary baking flour.
[18:46.660 --> 18:51.780]  And they left a trail of it behind them for others to follow as they ran through the local IKEA parking lot.
[18:52.160 --> 19:02.300]  When a customer reported two men sprinkling white powder in the parking lot, the IKEA was shut down and evacuated, while police and bomb squad officials determined the nature of the white powder.
[19:02.300 --> 19:09.220]  When the two lead runners returned and informed police that it was baking flour and that they had left it, they were charged with a felony.
[19:09.660 --> 19:15.140]  A city spokeswoman explained they acted irresponsibly in doing something they knew could have instilled fear.
[19:16.740 --> 19:17.960]  The pattern is this.
[19:18.460 --> 19:22.360]  In this post-9-11 era, citizens are asked to be ever vigilant.
[19:22.400 --> 19:25.860]  If you see something, say something, as the maxim goes.
[19:26.100 --> 19:31.400]  And when you have amateurs on your security front lines, it naturally follows the security reports you receive are amateurish.
[19:32.040 --> 19:38.840]  The government agents, in receipt of an ill-informed security assessment, has the choice of disregarding it or escalating it.
[19:39.140 --> 19:44.240]  As it stands, he is incentivized to escalate, as are his immediate superiors, and so forth.
[19:44.800 --> 19:59.260]  At the end of the incident, after ridiculous quantities of money and man-hours have been spent to determine that there was no threat to begin with, the blame falls upon the nonconformist, who acted in an unexpected manner for having the temerity to confound and trick the system.
[19:59.960 --> 20:03.820]  Security analyst Bruce Schneier refers to this pattern as the war on the unexpected.
[20:04.200 --> 20:11.140]  It is part of a culture of fear, of poorly calculated risk assessments, and as well-known advice is to refuse to be terrorized.
[20:14.950 --> 20:18.670]  Star Simpson will probably go on to become a brilliant engineer with a magnificent career.
[20:19.150 --> 20:20.350]  But she is censored now.
[20:20.730 --> 20:22.810]  She colors inside the lines a little bit more.
[20:23.270 --> 20:28.010]  She hacks a bit less, because she wouldn't want her hack to be confused as a bomb, again.
[20:29.170 --> 20:35.250]  If we culturally smother an environment in which creative nonconformity is celebrated, we will smother the joy of the hacker.
[20:35.490 --> 20:37.750]  And again, if you get rid of one, you get rid of the other.
[20:38.290 --> 20:42.670]  And again, if you provide enough official discouragement, a hacker may just decide to give up hacking.
[20:44.730 --> 20:46.790]  The hacker is now an endangered species.
[20:47.130 --> 20:50.090]  Its habitat is being threatened, and the zen is fading.
[20:51.150 --> 20:55.990]  John Adams wrote that a constitution of government once changed from freedom can never be restored.
[20:56.170 --> 20:58.430]  Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
[20:59.310 --> 21:04.150]  Because of this, the Free Software Foundation has reinvented itself to fill the...
[21:04.460 --> 21:10.270]  to fill the... to join the ranks of the array of organizations defending the beleaguered hacker and its fragile environment.
[21:11.210 --> 21:17.750]  Digital restrictions management technologies steal from hackers the raw materials they need for cultural and technological innovation.
[21:18.050 --> 21:21.090]  And these digital raw materials feed and nourish the hacker intellect.
[21:21.390 --> 21:24.630]  And so the Free Software Foundation launched the Defective by Design campaign.
[21:24.970 --> 21:32.950]  We injected into the public discourse this term, this concept, that a product with DRM is fundamentally defective and broken by intent.
[21:34.030 --> 21:35.490]  The fix is freedom.
[21:35.670 --> 21:39.950]  And the foundation joins a coalition of partners in the quest to end software patents.
[21:39.950 --> 21:50.870]  Pat... for patenting the fundamental building blocks of our trade and limiting their exercise to be empowered and established ensures an environment in which bad ideas and bad software products will win.
[21:51.350 --> 21:57.530]  And the FSF rallied to show the world that Microsoft Windows Vista restricted freedom even more unnecessarily than previous versions.
[21:57.910 --> 22:00.130]  The Free Software offered a different path.
[22:00.430 --> 22:05.210]  Through... and through our efforts, even average customers have been refusing to purchase computers running Windows Vista.
[22:06.570 --> 22:10.650]  There will be more campaigns to come and more fights for the Free Software Foundation to lead.
[22:11.070 --> 22:15.330]  And across the world, we will continue to lead the defense of the hacker in the most ethical and active of manners.
[22:15.910 --> 22:21.410]  What is required of us, we hackers on planet Earth, is to refuse to be terrorized.
[22:21.630 --> 22:25.090]  To hack as if it is natural and divine to do so.
[22:25.430 --> 22:32.330]  To find ever more creative ways to resist and parody the culture of fear and intolerance that threatens to eradicate our species.
[22:33.770 --> 22:38.650]  Thank you for coming, thank you for hacking, and thank you for your time.
[22:45.180 --> 22:55.280]  I think that I was given a much larger time slot than I expected, so if we can bring up the lights, I'd be more than happy to take any questions if anybody has any, or criticisms, or anything of the sort.
[22:56.500 --> 22:57.200]  God bless you.
[23:06.700 --> 23:07.100]  Maybe.
[23:10.420 --> 23:10.820]  Ah!
[23:10.980 --> 23:11.340]  There we go.
[23:11.620 --> 23:11.780]  Okay.
[23:12.420 --> 23:16.440]  Does anybody have any questions, comments, criticisms, flames, trolls, what have you?
[23:19.440 --> 23:21.480]  If not, please enjoy the...oh, no, please.
[23:21.860 --> 23:22.540]  I was going to start with
[23:26.990 --> 23:27.650]  Naomi Wolf.
[23:27.850 --> 23:28.350]  I have not.
[23:28.350 --> 23:33.030]  She is a social scientist who studied, among other things, fascist shifts.
[23:33.250 --> 23:36.630]  That is, how democracies become fascist governments.
[23:37.250 --> 23:40.470]  Using numerous examples throughout the 20th century.
[23:41.170 --> 23:47.990]  And things like making people afraid, making people know that they're being watched, are among the...
[23:47.990 --> 23:50.890]  She has 10 steps that can happen in the fascist shifts.
[23:51.090 --> 23:54.170]  These are by design, piece by piece.
[23:54.370 --> 24:00.470]  And she can actually, and has predicted, exactly the steps the government is doing, piece by piece, to do that.
[24:00.590 --> 24:04.330]  And one of the other things is to construct an alternative judicial system...
[24:04.330 --> 24:04.770]  Okay.
[24:04.910 --> 24:08.170]  ...by which a person can be put in prison without judicial review.
[24:09.630 --> 24:11.330]  These are all piece by piece.
[24:11.810 --> 24:17.970]  It's, you know, they may not even be exactly aware that they're doing it, but they're basically shifting the position.
[24:17.970 --> 24:19.050]  of the country towards fascism.
[24:19.370 --> 24:20.210]  And she's...
[24:20.210 --> 24:26.890]  Her current belief is that we're basically one large series of arrests away from the completion of a fascist shift.
[24:27.250 --> 24:38.510]  Well, I would suggest that, at least with the strength of the Constitution that we've been founded with, we probably have a pretty good bulwark against a complete and total fascist shift.
[24:38.690 --> 24:40.030]  But the designs...
[24:40.030 --> 24:48.310]  Part of her book is the designs that were put in there by our founding fathers are slowly being deconstructed and systematically being deconstructed.
[24:48.430 --> 24:54.670]  I think that hackers necessarily are probably in an excellent position to help reverse that trend.
[24:54.870 --> 24:59.550]  Mostly because we have the ability to lampoon things better than other people.
[25:01.070 --> 25:16.910]  And any sort of clever and visible demonstration that whatever the current trends that we are in disagreement with, that restrict our abilities to express ourselves and to create the culture that we want to create.
[25:17.290 --> 25:23.510]  If we can point out their ridiculousness in a visible and creative way, it tends to be a lot more effective.
[25:25.290 --> 25:39.330]  Definitely our culture, our particular culture, has grasped onto some of the examples that I outlined as perfect demonstrations of where good sense failed to do the right thing.
[25:39.490 --> 25:48.710]  Where extreme amounts of overreaction and paranoia and fear were the incentivized reaction by the system.
[25:48.710 --> 25:51.750]  That we want people to overreact.
[25:51.870 --> 26:01.270]  And that if they underreact and try to show sense or try to show restraint or try to show temperance, that our system actually punishes them for having done so.
[26:03.390 --> 26:15.970]  So definitely through a groundswell from the hacker community, I think it's probably possible to re-engineer that system so that the incentive is for thought rather than gut reaction.
[26:15.970 --> 26:19.930]  There's a lot of things that are being revived like culture jamming.
[26:20.270 --> 26:28.330]  And even a style of comedy originated in France in the 60s, Détournement, in which you turn your enemies' communication against them.
[26:28.510 --> 26:28.830]  Yes.
[26:29.290 --> 26:31.190]  Because France is being practiced by Stephen Colbert.
[26:31.890 --> 26:35.410]  He's literally turning their own weapons against them.
[26:35.670 --> 26:38.910]  He is definitely a master of that particular form of comedy.
[26:39.130 --> 26:41.710]  In France, Détournement was considered a revolutionary act.
[26:42.910 --> 26:45.270]  Because you destroy your enemies' communication media.
[26:45.930 --> 26:48.270]  I think it is definitely an excellent way to do that.
[26:48.510 --> 26:48.910]  Please.
[26:49.230 --> 26:52.070]  Is the trend of global?
[26:52.410 --> 26:53.330]  I'm sorry, say that again?
[26:53.410 --> 26:56.330]  Is the trend of the terrorists or the global?
[26:56.450 --> 27:04.750]  I think the United States has a unique originating point in terms of providing a culture which supports the creativity of hackers.
[27:04.750 --> 27:21.110]  And I think that the status quo over the last 20 years, 25 years, that the sheer quantity of innovation and development has happened in the centers that the United States culture has created.
[27:21.110 --> 27:26.430]  I think that the dangers the United States is facing right now are shared by everybody.
[27:26.650 --> 27:36.710]  But I think that the United States, particularly because it started from such a high plateau of freedom, any sort of deviation from that plateau is far more visible and far more troubling.
[27:40.310 --> 27:41.040]  Anyone else?
[27:42.050 --> 27:43.330]  Well, thank you very much for your time.
[27:43.480 --> 27:44.380]  Enjoy the rest of the conference.
[27:44.380 --> 27:44.400]  People should have people tomanych and get that fun, but they're when I finished up.
[27:44.400 --> 27:45.420]  I know that everything's perfect because of that part of government is immediately coming, it feels... June-to-bund So it feels good news.