http://snyside.sunnyside.com/cpsr/chapters/berkeley/cpsrberk.92.4 Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Berkeley Chapter Newsletter Fourth Quarter, 1992 cpsr-berkeley@csli.stanford.edu ****************************************************************** IN THIS ISSUE: 1. DENISE CARUSO ON SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE DIGITAL CONVERGENCE 2. CIRCUIT BOARD WORKERS STRIKE IN SUNNYVALE -- PROTESTING SWEATSHOP CONDITIONS IN SILICON VALLEY 3. CPSR FILES FOIA SUIT AGAINST FBI 4. CHAPMAN TO MEET WITH CLINTON TRANSITION TEAM 5. NEW CPSR MAIL GROUPS 6. IN THE NEWS... 7. CALENDAR 8. LOOKING FOR THAT SPECIAL GIFT? 9. WHO AM US ****************************************************************** 1. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE DIGITAL CONVERGENCE By Denise Caruso [Denise Caruso is the editor of Digital Media, a Seybold publication that tracks developments in multimedia. She appeared on the "Everything's Digital! Media Convergence -- Hell, Hype or Hope?" panel at the CPSR annual meeting last month. Her remarks did a good job of summarizing the issues in this rapidly developing field, and she graciously gave us permission to reprint them in the CPSR/Berkeley Newsletter. -- Editor] As far as this group is concerned, the forward march of digital technologies in all aspects of life and culture, and most especially into the media of communication, should be of utmost concern. Where the roots of CPSR were once sunk in the military-industrial complex and its misuse of computer and software technology, you all are now staring into the face of problems of much higher complexity and with much higher stakes for the rights and freedom of the people of the world. I don't have solutions. But I submit that the questions themselves are ones that should be elevated out of esoterica and into a larger debate. Otherwise, they're going to be decided by special interests -- just like everything is decided today -- and where the chips finally fall may not be much to our liking. 1. IS THE CONCEPT OF "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY" STILL VALID, OR DOES DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY DICTATE BY ITS NATURE THAT INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE? Digital technology has been a great source of empowerment for many people in the world. Desktop publishing technology, fax and email etc., has had much to do with the breakdown of totalitarian systems. People think this may be true with digital media technology as well. Give the people the means of production, and access to global distribution networks, and the kind of information you consume will be very different from what you get today from the networks and the national newspaper . Definitely possibly true (though most of us are already overwhelmed by the amount of information available to us). Online services like Peacenet and Econet are already proving that today. Desktop video production systems are plummeting in price, and the storage systems are coming down right with them. It won't be long before ordinary, non-technical people will be able to sit down at their desktop computers with raw video and audio and text, and walk away with a finished interactive CD-ROM in their hand that they can duplicate at will. But when you stick a camcorder into the hand of the average citizen, it won't be long before you hear a loud crash as the right to privacy collides with the right to free "speech." Do you really have the "right" to record my movements without my permission, and perhaps even to publish them? Can you "own" an image of me, or my house, or my car, or a representation of my voice? Do your rights to freedom of expression extend past your own skin and senses, feelings and thoughts, to what you capture of the outside world using cameras and tape recorders? Can you reproduce these "expressions" and make money off them if they include representations of objects or of me without paying me for them? These are certainly questions that are being raised now, but they will be made much more relevant as large-scale digital media systems allow infinite reproduction with no degradation of quality. 2. ENCRYPTION VS. THE RIGHT TO KNOW Sometimes it seems like the battle cry "Information wants to be free!" holds power because it is easier to "free" digital information than it is to protect it. But how free information should be is one of those issues that depends entirely on what side of the fence you're on. The biggest thing that's happening today is that digital information is becoming the inter-national, inter-industry, inter- personal, inter-everything form of communication. Most financial services, including international banking, rely on electronic data interchange and even the most unsophisticated PC owner can send email back and forth on one of the many online services available today. Video teleconferencing systems are finally starting to break into the business market, and include very sophisticated systems for synchronous data transfer and collaborative work. The bottom line is that within the next 10 years, all forms of commerce will be transacted over "the network," which will probably be a hybrid of all the separate networks today, including telephone, cable, Ethernet and other local nets, wireless and satellite. Even more than today, all of our personal information will be available in digital form, our phone calls will be digital, our electronic mail, our cash transfers, our vacation slides and movies, our health records, the movies we rent from Blockbuster, the music we'll purchase by downloading it from the network, you name it. So obviously it is absolutely critical that both commercial interests and citizens be able to absolutely protect this information flow with some kind of encryption. The commerce of the 21st century will not move forward without this kind of protection. CPSR and the EFF have been right to pursue the FBI and other federal agencies as they try to curtail the use of encryption in commercial products. But again, the sword has two sides. We the People can hue and cry all we want, but if someone in the federal government encrypts a document he or she wants secret and doesn't want to release the key, that's it. No public access. It's gone. The question is, how do you decide what is to be private information, and what is to be public -- and how do you keep the two separate when it is just as easy to encrypt one data stream as another? Moving information out of the physical universe and into the ether is fraught with all kinds of problems like this, which must be addressed, and the sooner the better. 3. WHO OWNS THE CONTENT VS. WHO CONTROLS THE CONDUIT This is a central question as telephone companies move into information services. Should there be restrictions on who controls the physical infrastructure? Many people believe that allowing cable or phone companies to deliver their own information services is swinging open a door to monopolies that could crush small businesses trying to get started in the commerce of the next century. And with so much information flying around the nets, who on earth will be able to track them to make sure they aren't squashing the little guys? 4. INFORMATION ELITISM As we all know, none of this stuff is cheap -- not even the cheapest IBM clone -- if you can't afford to pay your rent or buy groceries. What can we do to make sure that society doesn't stratify along the haves vs. have-nots of the past? Most people believe this is unavoidable; telephones and television, after all, were once only for rich folks. But today it is much different. Television is the source of news and information to most of the U.S. population. Telephones are the main link most families have to vital services such as emergency medical care and police protection. As the digital convergence moves ahead, we're very likely to see segmentation into pay-per-view services on television which allow people with money access to a higher quality of information. Can democracy exist when different people receive different information based on their social strata? 5. DO WE WANT TO BASE MORE OF OUR LIVES ON THE TV METAPHOR? Entertainment in the 21st century is likely to be based more heavily on the TV paradigm than ever before: Interactive TV, pay- per-view movies, delivering adult education into the home through TV, and so on. Almost all digital media paradigms are based on a screen of some sort. It may not be the TV of today; instead it might be a flat panel device, small and portable. But still we will center more and more of our lives around a screen. Unless we're using our little Apple Newtons, the central idea is for us to spend more and more of our lives sitting at home in our living rooms -- experiencing life as someone has edited it for our consumption, instead of getting out there and seeing it ourselves. A few days ago, the New York Times ran a front page story about the sole survivor in the abandoned zoo in Sarajevo. This female bear has lost half her body weight, and one taxi driver risks his life as often as he can to bring her a loaf of bread and some grass. The photograph was unbelievably heartbreaking. I believe the plight of this bear is a metaphor for how we humans have become accustomed to living on the planet. We capture a beautiful wild animal and put it in a cage, and con ourselves into thinking we can thus observe what a bear is. But we cannot know what a bear is by looking at it through the bars of a cage, not any more than we can experience the pyramids in Egypt by watching a documentary of them on TV, or than we can experience what it is like to live in a toxic waste dump by watching a documentary on Love Canal. By framing these fake experiences as real, we lose respect for reality and when we don't want to face reality we abandon it as swiftly as we abandoned that bear, rendered helpless by the hand of man. We cannot afford to allow mediated experience to substitute for what is real, and this is the real struggle we face. We cannot make the world come to our living rooms, and it is a very foolish mistake to think that we can avoid the dangers of the outside world by doing so. John Naisbitt had the right idea when he said that high technology would be balanced by an increase in high touch, experiential things as well. But so far his "high tech, high touch" prediction is far from true (as are many of his predictions), because technology has become a very seductive panacea for us all. It is easier to believe we know something about the pyramids in Egypt because we've seen that documentary, or even read a book about them. It's very important that we strive to regain some kind of balance and EDUCATE about digital technology, and to get out there and touch and smell and feel the world. Remind yourselves and those around you that nothing you see or hear is comparable to your own experience. Though it is indeed computer technology that has delivered digital media to us on the cusp on the millennium, social responsibility dictates that someone provide the other side of the story. I hope you take up the challenge.