 and welcome back to the Creative Life from the American Creativity Association. We're hosted by Hintek, Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece, on today's show, which will be discussing the question of how the internet is not Facebook. With our guest, Corinne McSherry. Corinne is the legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco, which specializes in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. We invite all of you into this world of cyberspace where creativity and innovation are thriving, and yet sometimes are thwarted. Corinne brings us up to date on current affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the leading nonprofit defending digital rights group, and it's promoting online civil liberties to make sure that technology serves freedom and justice around the world. In that regard, she'll be sharing early threats to the free flow of creativity, innovation, and knowledge that led to the creation of the EFF, and she will be giving examples of how publishing and copyright legal models both open or close the source of that information flowing through the internet. And you can send your questions to questions at hintekhawaii.com. So welcome, Corinne. Let me start with you. Oh, well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. I miss your lovely state. Well, that's good. And tell us a little bit about you, your state. I know that EFF was formed in where you're working now in San Francisco, and what got you involved? Tell us about this important nonprofit. Sure. So, yeah, so we are based in San Francisco, California, just a little bit north of Silicon Valley in the heart of a place that's sort of been a burgeoning center of technological development that, as everybody knows, has gone in many, many directions. And in the early days, EFF sort of at the very beginning started with a mission of a somewhat smaller mission, which was really to explain to judges and government officials and others how technology worked, because the concern of the founders of the organization was that way too many people were going to make rules and regulations and enforce old rules and regulations in ways that wouldn't really make sense because they didn't understand the technology. So early on, we were sort of a group of lawyers and advocates and technologists who came together to sort of, you know, speak tech to power, so to speak. But over time, our mission has evolved quite a bit from that. And now, as you described, our goal is to make sure that the Constitution makes it intact into the 21st century, that civil liberties and freedom of expression, privacy rights, and also creativity and innovation continue to thrive. The technology helps them thrive rather than going in the other direction. And just to give you a quick example of a way technology can go one way or another, the internet is a very powerful force. Email is a very powerful force for communication, but when governments take it upon themselves to surveil all your emails as the United States government has done, right, then we've got a problem, then we have a threat to civil liberties, and those communications can't really be free because it's very hard to freely communicate when you don't have a sense of privacy in those communications, especially if you're a journalist, an activist of some kind. And so one of the things we've done is twice we've taken the US government to court to challenge them for engaging in that kind of mass surveillance. And we've also been involved in efforts in Congress to try to limit that kind of mass surveillance. That's just one little piece of the kind of work that we do, but I think it exemplifies how we try to think of technology as a potential force for good, but also want to make sure that our laws and our practices make sure that it's a force for good and not actually a force to harm our civil liberties. And then of course, and it's tricky because I am passionate about the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and what it's doing to protect our liberties. At the same time, our particular focus with the American Creativity Association is to enlarge the scope of creativity and innovation. And the only way to do that is through a thriving communication marketplace where we can riff off of each other's ideas. So you're representing the rights of the vehicle that allows creativity and innovation to flourish if we just get out of the way and let it go. And with that in mind, I'm going to read a question that came in this afternoon from a 35-year-old millennial who spent all of his adult life working on the internet. He's been at some of the Fang companies. Space X isn't one of them, but Space X Tesla and now Google X. Here's what he said. He was just adored the internet and it was everything to him. He says, I used to be a card-carrying member of the EFF, but I think I am much more moderated in that view now that I see the other side. And personally, I really have no idea what's right. It's very complicated. I can envision many dystopias where the government spies on its citizens, but I can also imagine complete privacy and encryption making it very hard to catch and stop bad people. What is our what does our guests think? Yeah. So first of all, I hope that that person is watching and that I will be able to convince you to once again be a card-carrying member of EFF. And I say that because actually, we are very much a membership organization. We get some institutional support, but really, we rely on our members and we care deeply about them. At the same time, we have to do as an organization what we think is right. And with respect to things like encryption, I'll just pick off that piece of it. We have seen governments arguing, just that saying, look, if we have perfect encryption or perfectly strong encryption, then the bad guys can take advantage of that. And bad guys will take advantage of that to do horrible thing. And there's something to that. I'm not naive. No one here is naive to think that encryption will only be used by good people. The problem is this. And I think technologists especially will understand this and the ones that I talked to understand this. You can't build a special key to unlock encryption and ensure that it's only used by good guys. If you make it possible to break encryption, that is also going to be used by bad guys. It's also going to be used by governments to spy on dissidents and journalists and anyone else that they don't like. People who most desperately need to have encrypted communications in order to thrive and in order to go forward. So I wish, I wish very much that there was an easy path out of this dilemma, but there isn't one. And so what EFF, what we try to think about is weighing the different challenges and coming up with the best solution for the most people. And again, every time, we also try to pay attention to what technologists tell us. So we have security researchers on staff and we also talk to outside people and we say, is it possible to do this thing? Is it possible to really balance encryption and privacy? And the answer that we get over and over from the people who would know best is, no, this isn't a situation where you can nerd harder. If you build a backdoor into encryption, it will be taken advantage of by all kinds of people that you would not approve of. The US government disagrees with us, but I think they're wrong. Well, you know, I'm thinking we'll need two shows or three with you. We've just been through January 6. We've been through Twitter and Facebook closing down, you know, free speech. And when they close down political statements, they close down creativity and innovative statements. We have, like our millennial who said, I don't know what's right now. So another millennial has asked this question. My main question is about how the political and legal positions of EFF are determined, especially as digital technology evolved. There isn't a quote constitution of what the EFF positions are and the cost benefits of various positions do change over the years. Also, EFF has just had one of its co-founders. Perhaps part of this exact issue came on. They just left. The ACLU is a similar organization that has over the years changed some of its core positions. So, bottom line, I'm referring to what do you get when we donate to EFF? What is the politics? What are the legal positions? What are they doing for us as their members? Okay, well, that's a big question. We all came in at one drop. So, okay, let me pick off a couple pieces of that. So in terms of how does EFF sort of come to its position? Our core thing at EFF is we fight for the users. So that's our number one thing. And we try to figure out what is the best course for internet users because they are the ones who most often do not have a voice in the courts and do not have a voice in Congress and do not have a voice internationally. So for example, Facebook, Google, all the tech giants, they have a big voice. They can say many things, and I know they're under attack right now, but they can fight back on their own. They don't need us. Who needs us are all the users who need to make sure that we have an environment where they can continue to speak and thrive. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about here. There's some argument about how there need to be reforms to the law. And a lot of those proposed reforms are really about punishing Facebook, saying Facebook, you need to do more to make online speech the way I want it to be. Now, one problem with that is that it's actually very difficult to decide what the perfect online speech is in a way that everyone is going to agree on one problem. The second problem is that Facebook has been trying to do something like that for years and does it badly. And the third problem, the most fundamental problem, is that the changes to the law that are often being proposed, including by Facebook, their primary results in our estimation is going to make it very, very difficult for smaller alternatives to ever emerge. Now, for us, that's a problem. We think that's a problem because we don't think that people should be locked into one social media site or even just a few social media sites. People should have lots and lots of options. So we want lots of competition. We want lots of options because we think that's the best way to get to promote freedom of expression online and actually protect the rights of users. It's a complicated question. These are complicated issues, but that's kind of our starting point. That's what we try to do. And if you support EFF, you're supporting us doing that work for you. Now, this isn't obviously the forum for me to sort of be making a fundraising pitch. So I don't mean to be doing that, but in answer to the question, I think it's a fair question. You should know why you should support us and that's why. We don't always get it perfectly right, but we try very hard and we try very hard to make sure that our core values there are what's best for the internet and also trying to think long-term, not just short-term. Last thing I will say about that is that's also one reason that, for example, we will resist laws that seem to freeze technology in one way or another, that try to, for example, impose particular technological requirements that are very detailed. We don't like to do that because we think legislators, first of all, are often not technologists and not well positioned to make those decisions. And second of all, because again, we want to create an environment where technological developments can happen, new things can happen, unexpected things can happen. I'm old enough to remember a world without TikTok. I'm old enough to remember a world without YouTube. Now, those technologies and we're still talking here about social media and I don't want to talk about that all the time, but the point is different things emerge, different alternatives emerge and we want to make sure that there's space for that. And so that takes us to the title of today's show. The internet is not Facebook. So what I'm hearing from you is the internet is it is, I'm speaking for you. The internet is the platform of the people and you're the people's advocate to keep it open and we don't, you don't want private actors like Facebook, Twitter to shut down our freedoms to use our platform and you don't want the government doing it either. And in while the ethics about what should be watched dog, that that question, actually, Corinne, I think it's a lot harder today to address the ethical issues because they're because people are so good at using the internet now, they can put on how to create bombs and how to assassinate and put those pictures up there where there was a time when the internet was probably more innocent. And I at your position in keeping all the freedoms available on behalf of us, the users is is profound and that's no doubt why you're a nonprofit organization because you're a 501c3 for the benefit of health, education, welfare of the people as as a nonprofit protecting the people's rights to the internet. So I get that and is that what the title means so the internet is not Facebook, Facebook may do a great job or it may do a bad job but it can't be the litmus test or the gatekeeper for the rest of us on the internet. Is that why you named it? I think the title for me is speaking to two different things. One is that at least in the United States, and this is not true unfortunately for every country but in the United States, the internet means many many things. The internet is email, the internet is messaging, the internet is a host of different kinds of technologies that we use every day and that we care about every day. But way too often the conversation about the internet ends up devolving into being a conversation about social media and most of all a conversation about Facebook and when we let that happen we lose really really important benefits of the internet and we make the internet smaller and really kind of uglier than it actually is. So that's a concern that I have and the other thing is that the other thing I want to speak to is that you know that the internet shouldn't be Facebook. I want alternatives to Facebook to emerge. I want people to have other options and one of the things that's really dangerous when you take an international perspective is that in many many countries for many many people actually the internet is Facebook for them because Facebook is available to them for free easily and so they take advantage of that and you can't blame them for that. But I don't think they should have to settle for that. I think they should get the whole internet all of it and including all of the technologies that are going to emerge next. There was a time when it seemed like MySpace was going to win the battle and it didn't. Facebook's number one. The third thing I will touch on is that particular companies have gobbled up a lot of the alternatives. And so Facebook's example, Google's an example, they're doing their very best to make it so that actually just a few companies control huge amounts of our conversation, huge amounts of our expression, huge amounts of our creativity and options for innovation. And I think we have to fight that. I don't want just a few companies to have that much power. I want to make it so we have lots and lots of options. I want to say one more thing because I think that when we think about threats to expression and creativity, I don't want us to be naive. Another danger that can happen is that people, the internet can be a wonderful vehicle for speech and communication and also storytelling and truth telling, reporting, really important. But there's a couple things that can thwart that. One is illegitimate copyright claims, illegitimate community standards claims that people use to try to take down speech. And the other thing that can happen, though, is that people can get drowned out because the other thing that people have gotten good at, unfortunately, on the internet is trying to stifle people by releasing information about where they live and then encouraging people to go and threaten those people. I think to be honest, the bomb building example, that's a thing people worry about. But there's also lots and lots of people, especially marginalized people who are trying to use the internet and feel like they're getting silenced through really aggressive and harmful activity. And I just want to acknowledge that because I think that's a really hard problem. And the best way is not to pretend it's not true, but trying to figure out how do we address that without resulting in the silencing of lots and lots of other speech. And it's not an easy answer. And I think anyone who tells you there's an easy answer to it is just deceiving you or themselves. Right. You know, I love the idealism that I read about the creation of the EFF. One of your early founders said that he was interviewed on that TED Talk and he said, I have a dream. I would like to learn how to keep the internet open for anybody anywhere to learn as much as they are intellectually capable of assimilating about any subject presently known to all of humanity. And that, that was a statement after my own heart. I'm sure it's a statement after your heart. And if the internet could, I guess what we're saying is when the internet is available to serve the good, the true, and the beautiful, it has to be wide enough to also, you know, other elements will come in and we're not the judges of those other elements. And that, that's a, that's a, that's a tough balance to manage. And I guess you're managing it every day. You wanted to talk today, I know maybe about your first case, maybe the Sony case and how that brought the issues, you know, brought them into conflict and up to the forefront. There's section 230 rules that I think a lot of people don't understand too much and they're afraid it's going to be that we're going to lose our rights if that gets narrowed or thrown out like it was suggested last year. It should sort of help us understand some of these things that we're asked to vote on and we're asked to be literate in. Sure. The internet open so everybody everywhere can learn anything they possibly would like to learn. Let me talk about a case that I'm working on right now that I think illustrates some of the, the tensions. So I, one of EFF's clients is an organization called the Internet Archive that perhaps some of you might have heard of. They are created the Wayback Machine. Their mission is to make, you know, all knowledge available to everyone around the world. And they've been working on that mission for 25 years. They just had an anniversary. One of their projects is a controlled digital lending project. And what they do is they partner with libraries around the United States and where the libraries have bought a copy of a book. The Internet Archive will work with them to digitize that copy of the book and then lend it out electronically on what's called an own-to-lone basis. So you only loan out one copy that corresponds to a physical copy that you purchased one at a time. And they use technology to make the end of the loan period. It disappears. And this has been tremendous, made books available all over the place and especially during the height of the pandemic when libraries were closed, right? You couldn't get books. The Internet Archive was a crucial resource to people, patrons all over the United States and especially educators who were trying to get books to their kids and they couldn't get them there. And it's this fabulous public resource. And I'm very proud to represent them. But right now, they're in the middle of litigation against four publishers. We're suing them for doing this and saying, this is copyright infringement and you don't have permission to do this and you're not allowed to do this. And so we want to shut you down, shut down the whole project despite the obvious massive public benefit to all these people. That's the kind of situation where you think, well, and we don't need to get in the details because we only have five minutes left, but the point is there are very strong legal arguments for why the archive is allowed to do what it does. But there's also sort of more fundamental thing, which is what kind of world do we want? Do we want a world in which it's possible to have these amazing projects and get knowledge out to people? Or do we want a world in which every library has to go hat and hand for permission for every individual book and bankrupt themselves, paying fees? But again, and the authors don't see a penny of this. Okay. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about in the tensions right now. You have a world where there are people who are trying to take advantage of the internet to do amazing things to make knowledge available, make books available, to make creativity available. And then there are people who just have to think in old ways and in ways that don't benefit the public. Thank you very much. That I mean, for all of us who do use the Wayback Machine and the Digital Library, this is our daily, sort of our daily bread of how we think, how we play and how we work. I, I, we've all heard the statement that what separated the rich from the poor for generations with the rich that was at the rich had access to information and the poor had none. And we've had this gigantic reversal where now everybody can get information that that used to be just a few could do. And so there's a great leavening and equalizing effect of this information that's out there. And, and yet we're now we're down, I know we only have about three minutes, we're down to what, what it will take to self, I guess there's attention around self regulating, which is a different point from whether or not someone's intellectual property is being used without paying them back. You know, the copyright issue goes really to, I think Dr. Thomas Jefferson, he set up copyright and patent, so that inventors and founders would have a fair amount of time to get their sweat equity back before everybody else copied it and used it. So that, so we have the creators to get compensated, that's really important, otherwise they can't do the work. No question about it. Absolutely. Right. And, and then there's this other tough nut crack is, is how do we, how do we legislate morality through self governance and self restraint on what we might post so that we don't have the government or our private contractors editing us. And that, you know, I, I think about this a lot and I, I, but let me just, I'm gonna have to close this out. You're, you've been so kind to sit in with us. You're doing, you're at the heartbeat right now at the EFF. I think for the, I had two people talk to me about you're being our guest today. You said you were the plumbers of the internet. Other, my, you know, this millennial said he's been a card-carrying member forever and another, another millennial that knew I was talking to you. Oh, oh, they're like the ACLU for the internet. I mean, it's been a really good deal to have you and to feature the electronic frontier on today's show. So is, we didn't get to section 23 in like 30 seconds. What would you like to say before I round this out? Well, I would just say thank you very much for having me. I think that the, you know, the questions that we're grappling with are not easy questions. You know, it seems like the, the mission of the EFF has grown because our use of technology and our use of the internet has grown. And, you know, it's not, none of these questions is going away anytime soon. But I will tell you one thing. It's, to be honest, it's a lot of fun to be out here trying to figure it out with, with all of you and other people. So thank you for having me. Thank you. And so my wrap up will be that we'll leave it here to our watchers. You've been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii. Today I've been discussing how the internet is not Facebook. And we hope you found out how we got here and where we go next with our guest, Corinne McSherry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And thank you for participating. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Blyse, and we'll be back in two weeks on The Creative Life. Aloha.