 Okay, so it's time for the keynotes and we're very honored to have Eben Moglen, here as first keynote speaker. He's a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University. He's probably most known for his involvement in the FSF and for creating the Software Freedom Law Center. He was also heavily involved in the creation of the GPL version 3 and many other things of course. And so he will give a talk here today about why political liberty depends on software freedom more than ever. Eben Moglen, thank you. Thank you, good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here. I want to thank the organizers for the miracle that FOSDEM is. You all know that only chaos could create an organization of this quality and power and it's an honor for me to play a little bit of a role in it. I know how eager you are to deal with technical matters and I'm sorry to start with politics first thing in the morning but it's urgent. You've been watching it all around the world the past several weeks, haven't you? It's about how politics actually works now for people actually seeking freedom now for people trying to make change in their world now. Software is what the 21st century is made of. What steel was to the economy of the 20th century. What steel was to the power of the 20th century. What steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It's the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made. And when I speak of everything else, I mean of course freedom as well as tyranny, as well as business as usual, as well as spying on everybody for free all the time. In other words, the very composition of social life, the way it works or doesn't work for us, the way it works or doesn't work for those who own, the way it works or doesn't work for those who oppress, all now depends on software. And of this hastening process, when we started our little conspiracy, you and me and everybody else, you remember how it works, right? I mean it's a simple idea, make freedom, put freedom in everything, turn freedom on, right? That was how the conspiracy was designed. That's how the thing is supposed to work. We did pretty well with it and about halfway through stage one, my dear friend Larry Lessig figured out what was going on for us. And he wrote his first quite astonishing book, Code, in which he said that code was going to do the work of law in the 21st century. That was a crucial idea out of which much else got born, including creative commons and a bunch of other useful things. The really important point now is that code does the work of law and the work of the state. And code does the work of revolution against the state. And code does all the work that the state does trying to retain its power in revolutionary situations. But code also organizes the people in the street. We're having enormous demonstration around the world right now of the power of code in both directions. The newspapers in the United States this past month have been full of the buzz around the book called The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, a very interesting book taking a more pessimistic view of the political nature of the changes in the net. Mr. Morozov, who comes from Belarus and therefore has a clear understanding of the mechanism of 21st century despotism, sees the ways in which the institutions of the net are increasingly being co-opted by the state in an effort to limit, control or eliminate freedom. And his summary of a half decade of policy papers on that subject in his book is a warning to the technological optimists, at least he says it is, about the nature of the net delusion that the net brings freedom. I am, I guess, one of the technological optimists because I do think the net brings freedom. I don't think Mr. Morozov is wrong, however. The wrong net brings tyranny and the right net brings freedom. This is a version of the reason why I still have the buttons for distribution that say Stolman was right. The right net brings freedom and the wrong net brings tyranny because it all depends on how the code works. All right, so we all know that. We've spent a lot of time making free software. We've spent a lot of time putting free software in everything and we have tried to turn freedom on. We have also joined forces with other elements of the free culture world that we helped to bring into existence. I've known Jimmy Wales a long time and Julian Assange and that changes the world. Wikipedia and WikiLeaks are two sides of the same coin. They are the two sides of the same coin, the third side of which is FOSDEM. It is the power of ordinary people to organize to change the world without having to create hierarchy and without having to recapitulate the structures of power that are being challenged by the desire to make freedom. WikiLeaks was being treated everywhere around the world in a semi-criminal fashion at Christmas time and then events in Tunisia made it a little more complicated as it became clear that what was being reported on around the world as though it were primarily a conspiracy to injure the dignity of the US State Department or to embarrass the United States military was actually really an attempt to allow people to learn about their world, to learn about how power really operates and therefore to do something about it. And what happened in Tunisia was I thought an eloquent rebuttal to the idea that the WikiLeaks end of free culture and free software was primarily engaged in destruction, nihilism or I shrink from even employing the word in this context terrorism. It was instead freedom which is messy, complicated, potentially damaging in the short term but salvational in the long term. The medicine for the human soul. It's hard I know because most of the time when we're coding it doesn't feel like we're doing anything that the human soul is directly very much involved in. To take with full seriousness the political and spiritual meaning of free software at the present hour. But there are a lot of Egyptians whose freedom now depends upon their ability to communicate with one another through a database owned for profit by a guy in California who obeys orders from governments who send orders to disclose to Facebook. We are watching in real time the evolution of the kinds of politics of liberation and freedom in the 21st century that code can make. And we are watching in real time the discovery of the vulnerabilities that arise from the bad engineering of the current system. Social networking that is the ability to use free form methods of communication from many to many now. In an instantaneous fashion changes the balance of power in society. Away from highly organized vehicles of state control towards people in their own lives. What has happened in Iran, in Egypt, in Tunisia and what will happen in other societies over the next few years demonstrates the enormous political and social importance of social networking. But everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication despite their enormous current value for politics are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized. They are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control and the design of their technology like the design of almost all unfree software technology is motivated more by business interests seeking profit than by technological interests seeking freedom as a result of which we are watching political movements of enormous value capable of transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of people resting on a fragile basis like for example the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg or the willingness of Google to resist the state where the state is a powerful business partner and a party Google cannot afford to insult. We are living in a world in which real-time information crucial to people in the street seeking to build their freedom depends on a commercial microblogging service in Northern California which must turn a profit in order to justify its existence to the people who design its technology and which we know is capable of deciding overnight all by itself to donate the entire history of everything everybody said through it to the library of Congress which means I suppose that in some other place they could make a different style of donation we need to fix this we need to fix it quickly we are now behind the curve of the movements for freedom that depend on code and every day that we don't fix the problems created is over capitalized social network media to do the politics of freedom the real politics of freedom in the street where the tanks are the more we don't fix this the more we are becoming part of the system which will bring about a tragedy soon what has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been it is not hard when everybody's just in one big database controlled by mr. Zuckerberg to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse we need to think deeply and rapidly and to good technological effect about the consequences of what we have built and what we haven't built yet I've pointed a couple of times already to the reason why centralized social networking and data distribution services should be replaced by federated services I was talking about that intensively last year before this recent round of demonstrations in the street of the importance of the whole thing began and I want to come back to the projects I have been advocating but let me just say here again from this other perspective that the over centralization of network services is a crucial political vulnerability friends of ours people seeking freedom are going to get arrested beaten tortured and eventually killed somewhere on earth because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom on technology we know is built to sell them out if we care about freedom as much as we do and if we're as bright with technology as we are we have to address that problem we're actually running out of time because people whose movements we care deeply about are already out there in harm's way using stuff that can hurt you I don't want anybody taking life or death death risks to make freedom somewhere carrying an iPhone because I know what that iPhone can be doing to him without our having any way to control it stop it help it or even know it's going on we need to think infrastructurally about what we need to freedom now and we need to learn the lessons of what we see happening around us in real time one thing that the Egyptian situation showed us as we probably knew after the Iranian situation when we watched the forces of the Iranian state by the telecommunications carriers as we learned when the Egyptians begin to lean on Vodafone last week we learn again why closed networks are so harmful to us why the ability to build a kill switch on the infrastructure by pressuring the for-profit communications carriers who must have a way of life with government in order to survive can harm our people seeking freedom using technology we understand well now what can we do to help freedom under circumstances where the state has decided to try to clamp the network infrastructure well we can go back to mesh networking we've got to go back to mesh networking we've got to understand how we can provide people using the ordinary devices already available to them or cheaply available to them to build networking that resists centralized control mesh networking in densely populated urban environments is capable of sustaining the kind of social action we saw in Cairo and in Alexandria this week even without the centralized network services providers if people have wireless routers that mesh up in their apartments in their workplaces in the places of public resort around them they can continue to communicate despite attempts in central terms to shut them down we need to go back to ensuring people secure end-to-end communications over those local meshes we need to provide survivable conditions for the kinds of communications that people now depend upon outside the context of centralized networking environments that can be used to surveil control arrest or shut them down can we do this sure are we gonna do this if we don't that the great social promise of the free software movement that free software can lead to free society will begin to be broken force will intervene somewhere soon and a demonstration will be offered to humanity that even with all that networking technology and all those young people seeking to build new lives for themselves the state still wins this must not happen if you look at that map of the globe at night the one where all the lights are and imagine next time you look at it that you're looking instead at a network graph instead of an electrical infrastructure graph you will feel a kind of pulsing coming off the North American continent where all the world's data mining is being done think of it that way all right North America is becoming the heart of the global data mining industry its job is becoming knowing everything about everybody everywhere when Dwight Eisenhower was leaving the presidency in 1960 he made a famous farewell speech to the American people in which he warned them against the power of the military industrial complex a phrase that became so commonplace discussion that people stopped thinking seriously about what it meant the general who had run the largest military activity of the 20th century the invasion of Europe the general who had become the president of America at the height of the Cold War was warning Americans about the permanent changes to their society that would result from the interaction of industrial capitalism with American military might and since the time of that speech as you all know the United States has spent on defense more than the rest of the world combined now in the 21st century which we can define as after the latter part of September 2001 the United States began to build a new thing a surveillance industrial military complex the Washington Post produced the most important piece of public journalism in the United States last year a series available to you online called top secret America in which the Washington Post not only wrote eight very useful lengthy analytic stories about the classified sector of American industrial life built around surveillance and data processing the post produced an enormous database which is publicly available to everyone through the newspaper of all the classified contractors available to them in public record what they do for the government what they're paid and what can be known about them a database which can be used to create all sorts of journalism beyond what the post published itself I would encourage everybody to take a look at top secret America what it will show you is how many Googles there are under the direct control of the United States government as well as how many Googles there are under the control of Google in other words the vast out spreading web which joins the traditional post Second World War U.S. listening to everything everywhere on earth outside the United States to the newly available listening to things inside the United States that used to be against the law in my country as I knew it's law to all the data now available in all the commercial collection systems which includes everything you type into search boxes about what you believe wish hope fear or doubt as well as every travel reservation you make and every piece of tracking data coming off your friendly smartphone when governments talk about the future of the net these days I have on decent authority from government officials in several countries when governments talk about the future of the net these days they talk almost entirely in terms of cyber war a field in which I've never had much interest and which has a jargon all its own but some current lessons from intergovernmental discussions about cyber war are probably valuable to us here the three most powerful collections of states on earth the United States of America the European Union and the People's Republic of China discuss cyber war at a fairly high intergovernmental level fairly regularly some of the people around that table have disagreements of policy but there is a broad area of consensus in the world of cyber war they talk about exfiltration we would call that spying they mean exfiltrating our data off our networks into their pockets ex filtration I am told by government officials here and there and everywhere exfiltration is broadly considered by all the governments to be a free fire zone everybody may listen to everything everywhere all the time we don't believe in any governmental limits and the reason is every government wants to listen and no government believes listening can be prevented on that latter point I think they're too pessimistic but let's grant them that they've spent a lot of money trying and they think they know where the disagreements currently exist I am told by the government officials I talk to concerns not exfiltration but what they call network disruption by which they mean destroying freedom the basic attitude here is of two parties in balanced speech one side in that conversation says what we want is clear rules we want to know what we're allowed to attack what we have to defend and what we do with the things that are neither friendly nor enemy the other side in that conversation says we recognize no distinctions anywhere in the net where there is a threat to our national security or our national interests we claim the right to disrupt or destroy that threat regardless of its geographical location I needn't characterize for you which among the governments the United States of America the European Union or the People's Republic of China take those different positions and I should say that my guess is that within all those governments there are differences of opinion on those points dominant factions and less dominant factions but all parties are increasingly aware that in North America is where the data mining is and that's either a benefit a dubiousness or a problem depending upon which state or collection of states you represent European data protection law has done this much it has put your personal data almost exclusively in North America where it is uncontrolled to that extent European legislation succeeded the data mining industries are concentrated outside the European Union largely for reasons of legal policy they operate as any enterprise tends to operate in the part of the world where there is least control over their behavior there is no prospect that the North American governments particularly the government of the United States whose national security policy now depends on listening and data mining everything are going to change that for you no possibility no time soon when he was a candidate for president at the beginning in the Democratic primaries Barack Obama was in favor of not immunizing American telecommunications giants for participation in spying domestically inside the United States without direct public legal authorization by the time he was a candidate in the general election he was no longer in favor of preventing immunization indeed he as a senator from Illinois did not filibuster the legislation immunizing the telecoms giants and it went through as you are aware the Obama administration's policies with respected data mining surveillance and domestic security in the net are hardly different from the predecessor administrations except where they are more aggressive about government control we can't depend upon the pro-freedom bias in the listening to everybody everywhere about everything now going on profit motive will not produce privacy let alone will it produce robust defense for freedom in the street if we are going to build systems of communication for future politics we're going to have to build them under the assumption that the network is not only untrusted but untrustworthy and we're going to have to build under the assumption that centralized services can kill you we can't fool around about this we can't let Facebook dance up and down about their privacy policy that's ludicrous we have to replace the things that create vulnerability and lure our colleagues around the world into using them to make freedom only to discover that the promise is easily broken by a kill switch fortunately we actually do know how to engineer ourselves out of this situation cheap small low-power plug servers are the form factor we need and they exist everywhere now and they will get very cheap very quick very soon a small device the size of a cell phone charger running a low-power chip with a wireless nick or two and some other available ports and some very sweet free software of our own is a practicable device for creating significant personal privacy and freedom based communications think what it needs to have in it mesh networking we're not quite there but we should be open BTS asterisk yeah we could make telephone systems that are self-constructing out of parts that cost next to nothing federated rather than centralized micro blogging social networking photo exchange anonymous publication platforms based around cloudy web servers we can do all of that your data at home in your house where they have to come and get it facing whatever the legal restrictions are comma if any comma in your society about what goes on inside the precincts of the home encrypted email just all the time perimeter defense for all those wonky Windows computers and other bad devices that roll over anytime they're pushed that by a 12 year old proxy services for climbing over national firewalls smart tunneling to get around anti-neutrality activity by upstream ISPs and other network providers all of that can be easily done on top of stuff we already make and use all the time we have general purpose distributions of stacks more than robust enough for all of this and a little bit of application layer to work to do on the top yesterday in the United States we formed the freedom box foundation which I plan to use as the temporary or long-term as the case may be organizational headquarters for work making free software to run on small format server boxes free hardware wherever possible unfree hardware where we must in order to make available around the world at low prices appliances human beings will like interacting with that produce privacy and help to secure robust freedom we can make such objects cheaper than the chargers for smartphones we can give people something that they can buy at very low cost that will go in their houses that will run free software to provide them services that make life better on the ordinary days and really come into their own on those not so ordinary days when we're out in the street making freedom thank you for calling a Belarusian theater troop that got arrested and heavily beaten on after the so-called elections in Minsk this winter exfil traded itself to New York City in January did some performances of Tom Stoppard and gave some interviews I'm sorry of Harold Pinter and gave some interviews one of the Belarusian actors who was part of that troop said in an interview with the New York Times the Belarusian KGB is the most honest organization on earth after the Soviet Union fell apart they saw no need to change anything they did so they saw no need to change their name either and I thought that was a really quite useful comment we need to keep in mind that they are exactly the same people they always were whether they're in Cairo or Moscow or Belarus or Los Angeles or Jakarta or anywhere else on earth they're exactly the same people they always were so are we exactly the same people we always were too we set out a generation ago to make freedom and we're still doing it but we have to pick up the pace now we have to get more urgent now we have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now because we have friends in the street trying to create human freedom and if we don't help them they'll get hurt we rise to challenges this is one we've got to do it thank you very much thank you very much and I think there is enough time for a few questions so please raise your hand if you want to come in just wait for the microphone it's arriving thank you so the question was what does complete decentralization mean for identity because the state you may believe who you are but the state gives you a passport or some other legal document that allows you to identify yourself so in complete decentralization how do you identify yourself on that network I doubt that complete decentralization is the outcome of anything but let me tell you a story which may help to explain how I feel about this we need to go back now by 16 years to a time when there was a program called PGP and there was a government in the United States that was trying to eradicate it I know this will seem like ancient history to many people but it's my life so it doesn't to me we were having a debate at Harvard Law School in January of 1995 two-on-two about PGP and the criminal investigation and the future of secrecy the debaters on my side were me and Danny Weitzner then at the Electronic Privacy Information Center later at the W3C and now in the United States Department of Commerce and on the other side was then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a former general counsel of the National Security Agency we debated PGP and the encryption and the clipper chip and various other now long-dead subjects for a couple of hours and then we all went off for a friendly little dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club on the way across the Harvard campus the Deputy Attorney General of the United States said to me Eben on the basis of your public statements this afternoon I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations she thought that was a joke and back in 1995 you could sort of get away with thinking it was a joke as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States because it was so clearly against the law all right so I smiled and we went off and had our dinner and after the plates were cleared and the walnuts in the port had been strewn about the deputy this former general counsel to the National Security Agency I'm concealing names to protect the not so innocent here this former NSA lawyer he looked around the table calmly and with that sort of plummy through the port kind of look and he said okay we'll let our hair down we agree we're not going to prosecute your client the PGP will happen we've fought a long delaying action against public key encryption but but but it's coming to an end now and then he looked around the table and he said but nobody here cares about anonymity do they and a cold chill went up my spine because I knew what the next 15 years were going to be about so I would like to turn around the thing you said to say what we're really talking about is whether there is going to be any preservation of anonymity at all where power on the other side made its peace in the mid 1990s was with the idea that there would be strong encryption and e-commerce but there would be no anonymity and in the course of the last decade they picked up a strong alliance with the global entertainment industries the things that now call themselves content companies which are also adverse to anonymity right because they want to know what you read and listen to and watch every single time so that you can increase their shareholders wealth for them the real problem of identity isn't the problem of are we going to decentralize past the point where we have identity we're not going to do that we're not going to be able to do that the real problem of identity is are we going to have any of our own or are we going to be the data cloud that everybody else is keeping about us which contains where we are what we do what we think what we read what we eat and everything else do as long as you send us opinion at a Mr. Zuckerberg who has the one big database in which you live your entire life I understand the idea that we might be thought of or satirically or even pointedly claimed to be trying to radically decentralize to the point at which identity gets lost but if you find yourself in an argument with people telling you you're trying to anarchy so far that there won't be any name in the passport anymore you can reassure them that meat space will stay pretty much the way it is right now we just want fewer people ripping fingernails off in meat space which is why we are busy building freedom boxes and helping people use them thank you very much the passport will remain pretty much the way it is right now with the RFID chip in it and the fingerprints and the retinal scan and everything I'm not worried that we're going to go too far friends it's the other folks who went way too far and our jobs to get back home if people end up I'm not controlling who hello I've been I'm here you here Jeremy from the Lakota Georginette first of all I want to thank you and I will never thank you enough for how inspiring you are for every one of us then by thanking you for inspiring us on the engineering perspective as I am both an engineering geek and a political activist but by what I do I wanted to stress that the ACTA the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement that deeply concern strengthening of DRMs and their legal protection and also turns every internet service provider every internet intermediates into private copyright police with deep consequence on our freedom of speech or privacy right to a fair trial and so on the ACTA will be coming to the European Parliament around next summer maybe before maybe after and it will be our ultimate chance to defeat the thing we won in the European Parliament before this is a battle we can win and everybody here can participate into it and I wanted to ask you Eben are those legislative fights worth fighting do we still have a chance and especially on the front of the net neutrality what are your insights what what do you think we can still win today no European citizen should need any introduction to the Chetanamese member right that's the future of the European Union speaking to you your question should we bother fighting in legislature seems to me a fair one yeah we should it's unpleasant work I worry about you I don't want your heart to burst I don't want people killing themselves over the strain of it it's ugly boring tedious work and the other side pays people to sit you out to wait until you go home to decide you give up think of Egypt as a place where that was what was done for 30 years along with torture everything stops moving if you read Claude Montserrat on the French Revolution or the coming of the French Revolution as he moves his thousands of men and women of freedom towards the climactic events of the late 1780s you see how deeply the feeling in France at the end of the Ancien Régime was of status beginning to break up into movement the work you're talking about is work that is largely defensive to prevent harm from being done and as you say you're lucky when you win after enormous effort that nothing happens but the good news is in legislative politics that there's a thousand ways to stop a thing and only one way for it to get done and therefore the side that wants to stop things has an inherent advantage most of the time that's deeply funded capital but sometimes it's us about act I think there is no question it's a fight worth fighting everywhere all the time because as you say it's really the concordat the treaty between the state and private power for the control of the net under 21st century conditions in the mingled interests of the listeners and the owners if we do beat it water it down force withdrawal of particularly offensive premises or significantly expose it to disinfecting daylight we will help ourselves we're not going to achieve everything by any means we need to turn the international trade conversation in the direction of direct support for freedom my line with the trade negotiators around the world has become governments have a right to share the sharing economy has as much right to support in the international trade system as the owning economy my colleague Mishie Chalbury who directs SFLC India was in Beijing making a speech on that point earlier this year we will be reiterating that point in various places around the world where strong states with which we have other difficulties meet with us in recognizing that the world trade system is now overwhelmingly tilted in favor of ownership based production which is only one part of the world's economic production we need to press hard against ACTA and other pro ownership trade law but we also need to begin to roll out an affirmative strategy of our own demanding protection for sharing based economic activities in the global trade system that effort will take 20 years to begin to show fruit but we need to begin that too now on network neutrality I will say this we are going to have to establish counterforce to the various oligopolists of telecommunications the regulators believe a lot of things they have been told by industry I was at RCEP myself in September to discuss wireless network neutrality in Paris with regulators who are well educated shrewd thoughtful and capable but who believe something which isn't true namely that it costs enormous monetary investments to build wireless networks and I said to the RCEP regulators do you know about open BTS do you know that I can take a coat hanger and a laptop and make a GSM cell phone base station out of it using some free software do you know about asterisks I suggested that maybe they would like to give us a small French city say Grenoble we're using the extraordinary high quality wired harness that they built around the hexagon that is France we will create cell phone companies out of nowhere using cheap commodity hardware and existing handsets and provide service to everybody and then I say it will be possible to have a realistic fact-based discussion about whether the enormous investment necessities of wireless network build out require non-neutrality in network routing practices well the regulator course nods and smiles and thanks me very much for all that information and forgets at the minute I leave because he still believes what orange that used to be France telecom tells him about how you can't make wireless networks without immense monetary investments we will begin to gain on network neutrality when we have a box in everybody's apartment that can offer free telephone service over tunneling around non-neutrality and talk to GSM handsets oh that would be the freedom box see that's what I want to do I want to build a ring of engineering around the idea of non-neutral network management I want to have a box in your house that senses the upstream and says oh my god he's stopping port 655 I think I'll route that through my friend's apartment then I think we will get some interesting network neutrality conversation going you for your when you call for decentralization aren't you really going against the trend of history as we've seen it for example we used to have use net which was decentralized that has that's moved much more to web-based forums or likewise we in geekdom may love IRC we may go to free node but the general public all know about Twitter which is moving into that space and I think you know there are many reasons why this could be happening but I think the primary reason is perhaps mindshare the journalists who report this to the general public outside geekdom know about websites they know about Twitter they never knew about use net so only geeks know about that if we take this point perhaps the mindshare you need to be going for is the journalists who report on the net get them to report on decentralized networks and get the public to start using them crucial part of the activity that's right we're going to talk to people some of those people are going to be journalists and some of them are going to be our friends and some of them are going to be other engineers and some of them are going to be people who when they're wireless router breaks they can go out and buy a freedom box because it's cheaper and neater and cooler and does more good stuff and some of them are going to be people go by because they need it we just have to make the software the hardware guys will make the hardware and everything will happen I don't know how long I don't know with what degree of certainty but I don't think it's about going against the flow of history I think it's about pushing the pendulum back the thing is the general public have to know that these options exist and will serve their needs yes the Apple will always advertise more than we will but the general public knows about Firefox so they can know about the freedom box to think we have to stop in order to allow the conference to go on thank you very much for your time