Keynote (HD 720p): Eben Moglen

good morning it's uh it's an honor uh to be here I uh I can't thank uh the organizers enough uh starting with Michael and and Steve and Sharie for their extremely persistent kind generous determined effort uh to bring me back I uh I found it uh a little difficult to believe that it had been 10 years uh it felt to me as though it were a week or two ago that I was floating in a hot air balloon over canbar with tridge and Jeremy Allison and it had indeed uh been a decade I think uh in part I found it hard to believe because I I haven't had uh much more than one or two days off uh since then we have all been very busy changing the world uh and it has been my pleasure to ride along but uh 10 years it has been and I am uh deeply deeply honored uh to be back uh I will also uh thank you in advance for putting up with my heavily accented English uh the uh the decade uh through which we have passed uh certainly involved an awful lot of making good software uh there's been no shortage of making good software in the last decade uh and it has involved uh at least some uh good enough lawyering uh in the sense that we are in way less trouble than we were back then uh except the trouble we have deliberately made for ourselves uh and we have fewer if any real devoted enemies and they are weaker than they were in almost every [Applause] respect the problem we were confronting 10 years ago with respect to patent law uh which uh we had been worrying about already for 15 years uh blossomed into the fullscale patent war that we have been warning industry for a generation now they were going to have uh and tens of billions of dollars in value have been burned up and thrown away uh and the process of innovating in our industry has been deeply and unhappily distorted uh by the attempts to use State created monopolies uh uh to slow down the path of innovation by incumbents who needed to slow the clock if not stop it alog together and yet at the same time uh precisely because uh industry found itself in the terrible conditions uh that we had warned them about uh we also acquired an awful lot of help and the worst of the law around the world began to change Richard stowman and I spent many years uh discussing various improbable and ultimately uh inoperable plans to create a free software proteced patent pool uh which would allow us uh to sit at the table uh with at least some chips uh and to perform the task of negotiating for Freedom's right to invent and freedom to operate uh and of course as tridge kept telling me the freedom to invent around which is the most important freedom of all if you're as good an inventor as he is uh so so so uh we we thought again and again about how to accomplish it uh but without the fear of God in Industry it could not be done and now the open invention Network provides very much the kind of community patent defense based around pooled assets to be used uh to defend friends in trouble that we had always hoped uh we would find a way to create similarly as the patent War went on judges began to figure out that there was something wrong with the patent system uh it was performing pathologically in the United States in precisely the pathological ways that we had warned everybody that it would and the judges began to lose their enthusiasm for the subject uh in the course of the last three years we have won three unanimous decisions in the United States Supreme Court significantly restricting the ability to patent algorithms and other forms of abstract ideas and so we find ourselves in the very extraordinary condition that although the patent war is still waging the the effort to create State created monopolies in the behavior of mobile devices is apparently inexhaustible in some people's view the likelihood that the most stressful patent systems in the world will ever be used against free software developers uh is is disappearing uh the tools of self-defense are not automatic uh we haven't arrived at a condition in which nobody tries uh to apply the patent law to the sort of stuff we invent uh but the playing field is much more level uh our uh community building activities across the uh space between uh profit making industrial parties and nonprofit making software experiment have tightened substantially in very good ways I'm not in a position to say that we have no problem I am in a position to say that the nature of the problem in those 10 years has altered because the world has altered I am much more interested this morning in talking about the ways in which the world has altered but as a sort of 10year catchup I will tell you what the next decade will present in the way of difficulty for us in this connection the largest economy in the world is not now the economy of the United States and in another 10 years the most important patent system in the world with respect to it Industries will be the patent system of the People's Republic of China which will contain enormous numbers of statutory monopolies in a society without the working rule of law unless we manage to achieve the rule of law in the People's Republic of China in the next 10 years which does not seem at present particularly likely this problem will afflict us that is to say the people who actually make the technology comparatively lightly it will affect our industrial Partners enormously and their strategic responses to the problem they will face will be the most interesting of our challenges with respect to the patent system in the next 10 years as was the case in the last round we are thinking more about the nature of their problems than they are are because they are dealing daytoday with the problems of running their businesses but if we are all lucky enough to be standing here 10 years from now if we are talking about the patent system and its effect on our work that's what we will be talking about in the next decade it will be very very risky probably too risky for a shark to come and try and bite my clients or their comrades and Friends throughout the community we do get bit I I won't tell you that we don't uh every year now we Face a couple of opportunities for patent assertion uh by parties who think that stopping some free software project from doing something that it wants to do is in that business's interest uh but in the world in which we now live we have a baseball bat uh we can swing it at the nose of the shark uh and that does actually discourage biting quite substantially um like every other thing in this world it all happens in the dark under the surface of the water you can't see it occurring uh but the lawyers with whom I work and I we know and we can say that what used to feel radically unsafe to us thanks to the businesses and the communities which have pulled together over this last decade uh has made an enormous difference so in the last decade uh we made a lot of wonderful software uh and uh we did uh some good work around the world in abating nuisances that threatened us but more important I think uh than the software that we made uh the enormously important Innovations in politics and society which we were creating alongside the software began to take hold in the world of course it's true that everything from Ice Cream to Weaponry is now described as open source uh but if that's an indication of anything it's an indication as usual that stalman was right you should be careful what words you use because other people might borrow them uh and so I'm going to continue to talk about this stuff as free software here this morning if you don't mind you can translate it into anything you please but but but the but but the fact that people took some language and went and applied it to their products and certified themselves open source this or that what was really important was that people began to understand what distinguishes 21st century social organizations from 20th century once industrial society loved hierarchy it had to love hierarchy its metaphors the army of the unemployed or the industrial Workforce that hierarchy was intrinsic uh to 20th century organizations at their strongest as was secrecy or at least obscurity but the very forms of activ ity that we created the ways in which we have done what we have done came to be an important lesson to the world in how 21st century organizations work they are distinguished by three elements transparency participation and non-h hierarchical collaboration and these principles are not ones we imposed on the technical work they did there are conditions that grew out of the technical work we did the relationship between our activity and transparency is of course so intimate that you can't describe us without describing the concept of transparency we don't just let people see we enable them to learn and so our transparency is not merely that of a business with a big show window Rupert Murdoch puts a big glass wall on the front of the television studio in downtown Manhattan it's trans arent in Mr Murdoch's sense but not in ours transparency for us means more than just a free show you can look at it means a a porous community that you can join which is why participation is also not merely something that we have a value for but something that makes all the value that we make it is the ability to participate which is the outcome of the determination to be transparent in the deep sense in which we are transparent and it is of course the case that we don't merely do collaborative non-hierarchical structures we invented them a weekend project of lenus Tal's uh called git we need to remember the little tiff that created the need for git uh but we can but we but we can ask ourselves question 10 years having gone by where is bitkeeper now the the the onset of real distributed Version Control is the technology of non-h hierarchical collaboration it isn't merely that we said we like non-hierarchical collaboration or we believe in egalitarian access to technology the technology we made has taken over the making of software because has demonstrated that non-h hierarchical collaboration is how you have to make everything otherwise you are incurring inefficiency and setting up for failure so what we did over the past 10 years and for me that means not just canbar in 2005 but where I was in Berlin in the summer of 2004 talking about dead Duncans in Fry and the form of politics which we believe which isn't utopian Revolution it's proof of concept plus running code equals social and political progress that has taken over the world in the last decade sure the that nobody can live without using our software sure there isn't any longer a business on Earth that doesn't need us sure even Microsoft now recognizes that our way of software making one but what is [Applause] deeper but what is deeper is that our structures of social engagement our form of politics that is our question how do people live together in cities has also won it is now clear increasingly clear to States and massive industrial organizations and even the people people who hold all the gold bars and would love to hold all the Bitcoins it is now obvious to everybody that the particular structures of 21st century politics what makes the world of now and our human future different is the forms of social interaction and organization of Enterprise in the sense of human invention and self-improvement that we have stood for and this more than anything else I think is what we have done for our colleagues our communities the rest of the human race in the last 10 years if there has been good news about politics in the world in the last decade we did it and if there has been only bad news about politics in the last decade around the world it's not our fault we tried however however what what what has also happened because of the broad understanding that the root to better politics in the human future the root to better more efficient more Humane Enterprise lies in our form of sharing because precisely because of the breadth of our success we now also begin to understand what our common values are about we are after all an exceedingly diverse Community we Bridge the entire gap between VI and emac for example [Applause] uh we also as it happens speak every language and are part of every faith and play every sport and climb everything that can be climbed and dive under everything that can be dived under uh and we are cultur Al extremely discrepant including in the extent to which we self-consciously believe that what we do is political as well as technical a fact which some of us are immediately conscious of all the time and another equally important and powerfully inventive bunch of us tend to keep a little bit further at a distance but as I say it doesn't really matter how far you feel the political engagement that has been added to our work because the forms of political engagement which grow organically and necessarily out of our technology the way it works and what that means about how people interact with one another those principles of transparency participation non-h hierarchical collaboration they are themselves a social and political program and whether one thinks of it as free software free Society or not the challenges in which we now live are challenges which grow out of our own heal self-made homegrown DIY we hacked it together political aspirations for transparency for participation and for collaborative nonh hierarchical self-government we face now something we are fortunate enough to be able able to name in a word and the word is Snowden for those of us who live in the United States there is of course a complicated dual meaning concerning Mr Snowden because National Security is a thing that worries people one nation at a time and so although I live in a global environment in which the meaning of Mr Snowden is UN tramel by any question about who was he spying on and did he do a bad thing uh in my Home Society of course there is a lot of such discussion uh which is why when I want to write about Mr Snowden or the consequences of his activities I am so grateful to Alan rusbridger of the Guardian for giving me a place in which to do the work but outside the boundaries of my Home Society the meaning of Mr snowden's activities is far less complicated what we have learned as a result of what he has taught us in the past year and a half is that even in a very rare Society with strong legal controls or apparently strong legal controls over listening there is no longer any hope that we can directly prevent power whether it is private power or Public Power from turning the net into a procedure for totalitarianism we are now we are now living in the question for which people like my comrade Mr stalman and my former client Philip Zimmerman have been trying to prepare us for a generation I walked into Mr Zimmerman's life in an email message in the summer of 1991 I saw pgp appear on the net on a July evening on a pho bulletin board in New York City and I wrote him an email message and I said congratulations you've done a wonderful thing you're going to change the world you're also going to get in a shitload of trouble and when it happens I can help you here is who I am and it was because I was working uh for Mr Zimmerman and uh a story appeared in the New York Times by John marov about what I was doing that Richard stalman first got in touch with me and that was how Richard and I uh professionally met now let us take ourselves back to 1991 and let's imagine that Mr Zimmerman does not have adequate legal help uh and that pgp is intimidated out of uh existence by the United States government uh we now live in a world without pgp which means we also live in a world without SSH which means we also live in a world without my clients open SSL and etc etc etc uh and I think you would agree with me that if that's the world we lived in now uh we would be facing the irreversible movement towards irresistible despotism towards political power coming into existence in one or more places around the world that would have the power to predict the behavior of people uh and to prevent the coalesence of political descent decapitate movements and create a kind of immortality of unfreedom there are of course a lot of people who had nothing to do with making software to share who have helped us to prevent that from happening uh but we must I think understand that we now live in the world we were afraid of and that what stands between us and the things that we were most afraid of is ourselves our own inventions which we have now a responsibility not only to use our our elves and to improve and to keep vital but to spread as widely as we can and as effectively as we can we are required uh no question about it to have the wisdom of serpant if we are to use the Technologies we have invented in order to prevent the fastening on the human race of a despotism it will not be able to shake we are moving towards a single exoskeletal nervous system embracing the whole of humanity and the neuroanatomy of that system is constructed out of what we have called the internet and we will soon in another generation simply be able to call the nervous system of the human race whether it is built to be controlled at its end points by the things quaintly known as individuals uh or whether it is built to be directed from centers of scrutiny and data mining and prediction is the political decision we make for the future we in this room will not determine what happens to the climate of the planet but we will determine the physiology of the nervous system of humanity the functional behavior of the everything we are building and as was foreseen by some of our most wonderful crackpot Visionaries at the beginning of this process I need mention no names but as was foreseen by the most wonderful of our crackpot Visionaries Freedom itself depends upon how we make use of the Technologies we are creating if the politics that we think about as characteristic of the ways we work transparency participation enablement non-hierarchical collaboration are to survive the onset of the immense data Society with listeners inside everything if that set of values is to survive we must continue the process of building the political and social theory that emerges from our Tech I'm not going to say we all have to therefore become primarily aware of the political significance of what we do but it is part of the wisdom of every project it is part of the skills that we all bring together into every group of which we are a part that some of us are always thinking how do we turn this to the political Advantage the social advantage of the desire of the human race for each individual mind to grow and invent freely and we must understand that the forms of legal control the forms of government power that will now concern us most are not the handing out of real estate in the patent offices they're not the questions of how much copyright law you can have over interface declarations though I must say that now that the Supreme Court has delivered for another period the decision whether to take Google against Oracle we could find ourselves in that situation once the solicitor general of the United States is weighed in but but but these are these are lawyers work right we do lawyers work I I train people to do lawyers work in this world and and we will handle all of that but that is not where the real political social and legal action now is Mr Snowden did for us crucial work you see the numbers 61% of the part of the human race connected to the internet is aware of Mr Snowden and what he means and between 39 and 45% of that nearly 2third of the human race connected to the internet wants to do something to improve its privacy all right they do and that means they want to meet us more badly than they ever did before they didn't want to meet us before because people who make proprietary it showed them it was quote Convenient close quote and they went for it it was convenient we of course were not convenient I I don't remember why it was that we weren't convenient I think it was the command line or something but but but but but we weren't convenient okay so so lots of people their eyes glazed over they were our friends they were our brothers and sisters they were our par but their eyes glazed over when we talked about it no more no more no more no more everybody wants to meet us now and we need to put on our nice best and go out and politely explain to them how we save Freedom together it's very convenient to save Freedom we're going to tell them right if you give away your freedom for convenience we will have trouble getting it back for you but now would be an awfully convenient time to help us embed freedom in the network we are building your children will thank you we know about Network effects we don't mean everybody has to use office because everybody has to use office because otherwise how will you open the office documents we mean that it is hard to sustain freedom in a technological environment which has been engine to take it away and that there is strength in numbers we can make even people who love controlling their users decide to spoof Mac addresses right we can make people who used to be not on our side about crypto and crypt the stuff on the S on the the the the flash memory in the phone but what we cannot do without the universalization ation of the way we work is to prove to the rest of the human race that technology anyone can copy modify and share is technology which preserves privacy autonomy and freedom and that other software will not nobody in business is going to use cyber security they can't read anymore once again as usual it is not the expert opinion of the world that we can't reach when when when when Mr Snowden revealed the Bull Run program that is the effort by NSA uh to break commercially significant crypto um I I was having a conversation with an analyst who has been very much on the side of the three-letter agencies for decades and I said to him you know the problem with what Mr Snowden has not just taught us is not that he has proved that you were wrong for 20 years that's a tiny problem the problem Mr Snowden really poses for you is that he has proved that we were right for 20 years and that's a very different thing altogether we were the people who said you can't trust what you can't read we thought we were making an obvious point we didn't quite understand why it was hard for other people to figure out that you can't trust what you can't read but they figured it out out now if they're in the business of trusting on behalf of tens of millions of customers or users they're in the business now of not trusting what they can't read and security through obscurity in the real world of professional it is over but that doesn't mean that what has happened to the users those disempowered users whose technology sells them out all the time nothing has happened for them yet I said half a decade ago now that we needed the first law of Robotics and we needed it in a hell of a hurry because we're all carrying robots around with us everywh I go and they don't obey the first law at all they hurt us all the time and so I have to say again what I was saying there at Hope um if we don't make the first law of Robotics nobody's going to make it if we don't get it in the middle of everything it won't be there and big power in the world whether you think of it as big economic power or you think of it as big government power or you think of it as big listener power big Power in the world is fundamentally committed against the first law big Power in the world wants the devices to work for it and if it weren't for us they'd succeed and the human race would pay a price which might last for Generations so we have to take ourselves seriously that's hard for us because we're hackers and and intrinsically we don't take ourselves seriously anymore than we engage in hierarchical non-collaborative development right I mean a sense of irony about self is what makes it possible to do the technical work and I will tell you a secret it makes it possible to do the lawyering too when we sit around the conference table on Wednesday afternoon still having the firm lunch that Karen Sandler taught me I ought to have uh I tell the lawyers who work for me that the only only indispensable part of our law practice is irony because it's only irony which keeps us from doing stuff that's dumb like going and suing rich people and letting them grind us into powder regardless of the merits and things like that we have to hack our way to a form of legal engagement that works for us and only ironic ones will do so naturally we don't take ourselves terribly seriously I I'm probably the only one here who has the degree of of unselfconsciousness willingness to take myself seriously would cause me to get up in the morning and put on a suit for even that's too much for the the ironists in the room by and large um but we do have to take ourselves seriously we we have to take ourselves seriously we're we're not now in the Prelude to the Star Wars we foresaw what happen we're in it we're in it we we have made what little it is that protect us against disaster already we are why everything doesn't consist of x509 certificates issued by corrupt authorities we are why not just distributed Version Control but the web of trust right we are why non-h hierarchical modes of communicating safely and securely and protecting people's privacy against the data mongers we are why all of that is possible at all and that's terrific it's wonderful we did a great job and therefore we are now in the middle of what we really feared and we have to keep doing it when I read Jim dwi's wonderful book about the uh young men who started making diaspora called more awesome than money uh the part that I was interested in of course was not the part about me I I I knew the part about me um and it wasn't really about Elia and rafie and Max and because I knew them too it was about the understanding that when those four young men decided to try and go out there and fix social networking and make it behave ethically they were immediately surrounded by communities of spirit and material help it wasn't just Kickstarter money it wasn't just hacker space offering it wasn't n just the beauty of the Silicon Valley disruptor machine looking for young people to disrupt things with it was the whole social order around them but Ilia was a wonderful young man and his death must not have been in vain as Aaron schwarz's death must not have been in vain we have in 10 years had casualties we have let people hurt our people because we needed to and so we have to take ourselves seriously because we too now have gravestones to care for and young Heroes who gave their lives for stuff we care about whose sacrifices we have to honor as we have young people all around us who will need us soon there isn't a lot of public opinion data in any society about the young teenagers they're not voters so they're not ped and they don't buy enough in most societies to be worth marketing to but everywhere you look at public opinion data around the world attitudes about Mr Snowden in those under 18 years old are decisively more positive than those of older people in each Society our youngest kin are deeply affected by Mr Snowden and his message I kid my students by saying that this is in part because Edward Snowden Bears a wonderful resemblance to Harry Potter but it isn't only that of course young people are now inhabiting the planet who have watched what has happened to their older siblings they have watched the Facebook isation of human civilization they have watched the crossing the street while texting and letting everybody else take your text straight out of the air behavior and they're not absolutely happy with it and so we have a crowd coming towards us 10 years ago I said in Berlin that we were simply keeping dinner warm until the kids came home the ganu project was 30 years old last September September 24 uh 2013 and Edward Snowden was 30 years old in November of 2013 that was the first of our generation coming home the beginning of the meaning of guu now we are in the second era in which the larger world that does not make our software or understand why they should use our software has come to an understanding of the principle that the freedom of the net is the freedom of people and that the net is made of software and it works the way someone makes it work work this is our big moment okay this is what we struggled for I don't mean what we invented we When we struggle with code we're just struggling to make something neat but when we go beyond to making something neat this is what we're in it for we're in it for the ability to help the people around us we've known that since we started taking our own temperatures 15 years ago and we began asking why do we make what we make and it turned out that we make what we make in order to learn and do neat stuff and improve our skills and to help other people and this is the big moment where all the skill making and all the learning we have done and all the neat stuff we have made the rubber now meets the road with respect to whether we can use it to help Humanity stay free this is what the last 10 years did they brought us here to this intersection to the moment when we can figure out whether as the human race assembles its nervous system it works for the data miners or it works for the people this is the moment where we figure out out whether we can deliver not just for ourselves but for everybody whether we can turn the ability to have transparency participation non-h hierarchical collaboration whether we can turn that into not only a really good way of making software but a really good way of confronting problems that people in the world are now sure are there that they Now understand that they want help with that we we alone we are the people capable of delivering for them the freedom that they need if we don't it will not happen we through our own efforts have narrowly escaped a couple of catastrophes in the last 10 years we have received thanks to Mr snowden's efforts we have received a lot of information about what we did right we have received a lot of information about where even unlimited resources devoted to breaking our view of the net have failed because of what we made we have received an awful lot of encouragement about our ability to survive the onslaught of capitalist aggressions patent Wars the bollocking of copyright law by the ENT containment Industries and so on we have demonstrated our Vitality we need not demonstrate our inventiveness that we demonstrate every single day but we are now merging into the larger movement for the freedom of the net and we are about to demonstrate whether we can carry it not boss it not control it not even lead it from in front but we do have the opportunity to be the plumbing of the great internet Freedom Movement of the 21st century we have the opportunity to set its technological conditions of success we have the opportunity to prevent it from achieving failure and of course since every sedman here knows that she and he really runs the business and without them it won't work we shouldn't be too unwilling to recognize that this isn't an unusual position for us right everybody's power runs on our plumbing whether it's Freedom running on our plumbing or unfreedom running on our plumbing isn't up to them it's up to us we have plenty to do we are going to gain plenty of help Indian Society is going to come very much in our Direction over the next several years and with it we are going to gain power of numbers and demographic Force beyond our previous wildest dreams but 1.6 billion people will still live in China under conditions of unfreedom in a world in which the net is assumed to be a system of social control and the world's most powerful constitutional democracy possessing more force of listening than everybody else put together has abandoned the rule of law over listening and has begun plunging Humanity towards darkness and the consumer economy has come to depend upon data mining for advertising which means it depends upon surveillance to make its living and it will do what it takes to make its living because that's its right its power and its Glory but not ours we have a great deal to do if we don't do it everything stops I don't mean everything doesn't run it runs just fine but Freedom stops you know what it will mean you know what it is to have a listener inside every device and everything in life inside every device and every child hooked up to the monitor all the time everywhere she goes everything she learns everything she reads everything she listens to all marked down and ready to be calculated and correlated and manipulated that's not the human race we meant to have that's not the way we meant the net to work that's not the way we run our own stuff and it mustn't be the way we let other people run it so here we are free software free Society for real We're Playing for Keeps now Humanity depends upon you thanks and good luck I I think we've time before morning tea for some questions and that would make me feel good I think we we you want to run a little late and do a few questions don't you yeah right hands in the air come on hello yes yes okay uh thank you very much this was a real challenge but I want to link one thing that you say at the early beginning with uh the patent systems of China and the institutions the regarding what you say that we have the opportunity to set out the conditions for the freedom for the 21st century and I see a contradiction because we understand the existing power but this is a new power that we are perhaps in need of more information well one of the things which I think it is most important to understand is that free software was born uh in societ societies with strong Civil Society rights and traditions we exist on the ability of small groups of people to form organizations without permission and without structure in order to do something they commonly want to do and under conditions which inhibit the development of civil society in which the state is fundamentally hostile to the formation of such organizations there are intrinsic troubles that we face that that our way of thinking and doing faces and that's not surprising the Roman Empire too Roman law was extremely hostile to non-governmental corporate organizations and it required for a thousand years the permission of the emperor to form one it turns out that the Roman Emperor the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire think very much alike about that question and so it isn't merely a matter of the rule of law it is the matter of the development of civil society and the permission of Civil Society to operate I I I'm about to publish in Chinese the new second edition of the GPL compliance guide uh I wrote it this time and maybe I'm therefore more eager to make sure that Chinese people can read it on their mobile phones but but but merely arranging to publish material in China at the present time which relates fundamentally to our legal and social understanding endings is already to cour controversy which is why it is particularly important for us to be extremely helpful to Chinese industry even where Chinese industry is highly in imbricated with the power of the Communist party because we need to create as we created elsewhere in the world allies who will help us to give Civil Society a chance because it benefits them in their business we're going to make a deep and Powerful engagement with the Chinese people and we're going to make a deep and Powerful engagement with the space within which the Chinese Communist party will allow us uh to operate but we can't do that with FSF China we can't do that in the ways that we have operated elsewhere in the world and therefore we must globalize our organizations and we must change the way we think and operate in order to do what we are going to need to do and what I've been talking about this morning I guess I would call the why so that we can get to the what uh what about um dealing with the claims that enabling incretion between individuals is supporting terrorism and child predation for me uh uh as a law professor uh working in the history of the law of the English-speaking people I'm not surprised to hear that freedom has consequences or or that bad people make use of Freedom as well as good people it's never been an argument against freedom for me before and it isn't now um the the controversy between Order and Chaos in the 21st century uh is not a controversy on which we have the side of chaos we're not in favor of chaos anym than we're in favor of inhumanity to man anywhere or for any reason but we will not tolerate the withdrawal of our freedom on the idea that it makes somebody else's computer more safe or that it prevents a man from committing murder at a newspaper we we we believe in peace we believe in order we believe in allowing every trial to grow up and learn and we don't believe uh in controlling that process but we are the people who should refuse to take fear seriously even if we take Freedom seriously people have been made afraid that if you allow Communications to be secure the villains will win I must tell you that I heard a lot of that in the early 90s over pgp too in fact when the United States government was still actively building the prosecution of Mr Zimmerman I had a bet with a reporter who covered the circuit as I went around on it I had a bet of a nickel whether it was going to be pedophilia or nuclear terrorism of which I was first going to be accused in every public meeting the the the manipulation of our determination to have technological Freedom by fear of crime whatever crime it is Terrorism larsy counterfeiting it's a move and we have to reject that move we have to not believe that move not because we don't believe in peace or because we like terrorism but because we have to remind people that if Freedom has costs we have to pay them the 20th century knew that we sacrificed tens of millions of lives in the 20th century in order to avoid living in societies where the state kept track of everybody you knew and listened to every phone call we called that totalitarianism and we thought it was okay to ask young people to go out and die to keep it from happening I don't want to kill millions of young people but I sure don't want to give up on the cause for decades open source and software Freedom have been enabled by the Antiquated technology of email and mailing list there on um do you have a legal or Freedom perspective on reent efforts to secure a replacement for email to both for privacy and securing a metadata thereon and how we can get other people to use it this time yeah I'm I I I of course I'm very old school you know I use flux boox and um you can't take Emax away from me and I like email um I think there are many good things about email uh including uh as a matter of fact that it's really easy to encrypt and really obvious if you don't encrypt it then anybody can read it I think that's helpful right one of the great problems we have is a whole bunch of just plain Sham in the world on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is everybody's friend but you're not supposed to know that um that one of the Beauties about email is that it's transparent in that sense and I'm in favor of keeping it um in the in the third of the Snowden lectures uh in in November of 2013 uh I said that Google could help us create endtoend secure email by building strong encryption around the web of trust into Gmail uh and I'm really quite heartened by how far down that road Google has gone as I am heartened by the discovery that even Apple has figured out that the Mac addresses shouldn't remain the same from moment to moment and boot to boot um uh we are we are gaining infrastructural Advantage I think for using old simple means of communication that are good and I do not want to give up email in particular because email is the world's most obviously inherently Federated service and I like Federated services and I like encouraging people to use them what we actually need is a $10 object that is your email server that sits inside your house and does everything you need done with the simplest and most elegant form of communication including key management and and it's a device so cheap that if it stops working you throw it away and get another one and it autoc configures and you're done I I I wanted that from 2010 I I called it Freedom box and we're still working because software is hard to make and because Bale is busy [Applause] but but but we will get there right so so right now I'm not interested in creating so much complexity at layer seven that we need an eighth layer to handle it I'm actually interested in keeping it simple stupid and moving down and federating everything and encrypting it end to end using the simplest stuff you can you know uh technology for us has always been the fact that you could take some and repurpose it hacker isly and suddenly gave you a lot more we have not squeezed in my personal opinion the end out of the great protocol BS of the early net uh I I'm not bringing back pop three I will admit but uh but but but there's a lot of good stuff left in our simple technology and I hope that we will use it let me get serious about that for just a minute by pointing out also that we're about to have the most important changes in Hardware architecture in the last half century I'm with my friend and Bell's uh uh General in the field Martin think about this we're going to change how computers work between now and 2020 the most important part of that is that we're going to give up on the difference between fast memory and slow memory because we are inventing our way out of some fundamental physics traps and as we do that we are going to create what Martin calls in relation to hp's the machine project memory faster than RAM and denser than Diss and when we move to a world where processors address petabytes of you know bite addressable memory all of it at equal speed we're going to change the way things fundamentally work I do not want to get all complex again in the closing hours of the architectures we now use I want to watch us change how computers work underneath in a way which makes it simpler and easier for us to invent new things paradigms of high inherent complexity that we have depended upon for a generation like the relational database are about to go away way and I don't want to start building new complexity on top of that I would actually like Facebook to be the last relational database application ever designed because as we get away from that we get away from other stuff that right there's nothing wrong with relational databases there's just wrong with some kid keeping all of us in one of his and and as we move to a world of flatter data and graph problems instead of relation problems in everything we do uh we'll get better Replacements than the ones we are now meditating sorry to go so long let's take some more questions I'm afraid that's going to be it for now um Professor moglin you're going to be with us for the week aren't you I am I'll be around um be around and he is lovely to talk to and I'm sure that he would love to talk to you thank you thank you than