 So I'm now going to hand off to Robert Wright. He's a future tense fellow at New America. And he is one of the world's greatest moderators. And I was teasing him earlier today that he gets some of the toughest assignments. This morning I said, Bob, we have one panel that needs to provide us some of the background Science 101 on synthetic biology. And then you just got to weave towards the governance question. And if you could just cover it all and throw in some art and culture, that'd be great. And he did a wonderful job. And now we gave him another tough assignment, which is we want to have a very interesting discussion on WikiLeaks. But in a different conversation than the familiar one around WikiLeaks that we've been hearing for the last couple of months in terms of how this curious case plugs into these governance questions. Bob, as many of you know, in addition to being a New America fellow is the author of great books that have been mentioned by people throughout the day, The Evolution of God and Non-Zero and the Moral Animal. So Bob, it's all yours. Can people hear me? No. Now that's an answer I'm always suspicious of. When you say, can you hear me and someone says no? But OK, anyway, now the answer would be yes, right? OK, thank you. Thank you for that introduction, Andres. Yes, and I am a future tense fellow at the New America Foundation. And we're going to talk about WikiLeaks. And I just want to say a little bit about WikiLeaks from my point of view. I think there was a tendency right after the big document dump at the end of last year for America to kind of convince itself that it hadn't been such a big deal after all that, you know, the, well, in the end, these documents showed that our diplomats really did very good in candidate analysis and so on. And yes, there were some things we wish had not been said, maybe, but the world will get over. It will deal with them, I think. All along, there were ripples emanating across the world that we really weren't aware of. I know for a while Spain was preoccupied by the revelation that the United States had actually intervened in their judicial system in effect and strong armed their judicial branch into dropping a case that would have embarrassed the United States, it had to do with torture or something, and the Spaniards were not happy about that. But then more recently, when the unrest began in Tunisia, the, you know, if you read four or five paragraphs down, some of the reports said, and some people think that what may have pushed this thing over the top, what may have carried this simmering discontent to the boiling point were the revelations in WikiLeaks, which so vividly conveyed the corruption and self-aggrandizement of the Tunisian regime. And of course, Tunisia seems to have led to Egypt, which is unfolding even now. There are a couple of questions I'm interested in myself. I'm not sure this is exactly where we're going to head in the long run with this panel. But they have to do with how generic this is in a couple of senses. Is it the case that transparency of the sort that WikiLeaks brings is generically kind of inherently anti-authoritarian, that it undermines authority? That's an example of a generic question. And a second generic question is, is WikiLeaks a kind of more or less inevitable outgrowth of technological evolution? In other words, even if Julian Assange had not come along, would it be the case that governments were having to reckon sooner or later with the growing difficulty of keeping secrets? And would it indeed be a kind of inevitably growing difficulty, in other words, a truly growing transparency? So those are a couple of questions I'd like to start off pondering a little, assuming that the participation, the cooperation of my panelists, which I may or may not get, because I know they're all interested in different aspects of this. But in any event, we have three great people here, Rebecca McKinnon, who, first of all, runs a really interesting website called Global Voices Online, which maybe I'll ask you about later, because it's transparency-related, in a way. And you're a fellow here at New America as well, a senior Schwartz fellow, which I think outranks a future tense fellow, unless I'm mistaken, has seen you in it. Ask him twice. And you are a journalist and activist whose work focuses on the intersection of the internet, human rights, and foreign policy. Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer of some renown. Among his books are Skizz Matrix, Distraction, Black Swan. And you're also a professor at the European Graduate School. Is that true? Yeah. That wasn't very convincing. Are you sure it's true? It's not a very convincing school. But you're also co-founder of the Electronic Foundation? No, that's a complete internet rumor. That's a lie. An utter lie. And transparency has not caught up with it? No, certainly not. That'll pursue me to my grave. It's really a lie. That you are not a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Do you know Mitch Capil? I know them very well, and I wrote a book about them, but I had nothing to do with founding their group. I'm retracting that one thing that I just said, that he's the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I'm. Has that been removed from Wikipedia any number of times? I don't know how. It just creeps back in. I've got to work on my staff work. Anyway, Bruce wrote a meditation on WikiLeaks that had in the lead paragraph the assertion that the whole thing fills him with a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia, and I'm interested in kind of unpacking that a little. But first, I want to get to Don Cash, who I just learned is actually affiliated with Tsinghua University in China, where I was lucky enough to visit this summer, but is also Professor Emeritus at George Mason University and is an authority on complexity, as I understand it, which is good, because there's a lot of that around, and certainly on the internet, in the WikiLeaks case specifically. So let me start off, and I may totally strike out here. But do any of you have anything to say about the generic questions I started out with? Is WikiLeaks just a manifestation of a kind of naturally growing transparency that would have shown up sooner or later, regardless of Julian Assange? I'll handle that. WikiLeaks is six guys. They're basically six hacker activists. It's Julian and some of his pals, and they're some of the best people in the global computer underground, and they've been working for many, many years to create a massive scandal of the kind that recently erupted. So I think it does them a disservice to sort of say, oh, well, this would have happened anyway, and somehow he's not really responsible for doing this. They are, in fact, responsible for doing it. That's a clear answer. I would agree. I think the internet certainly makes exposure of secrets more likely. It makes it more likely that organizations that are not securing their information will get them leaked. It makes it more likely that employees of organizations that are maybe, their public actions and private actions aren't entirely consistent. There may be employees that decide for whatever reasons might want to leak that information, but the specific manifestation of WikiLeaks is the result of very specific people and very specific confluence of circumstances, including the fact that Bradley Manning's immediate supervisors disregarded the mental health assessment and sent him to Iraq anyway. It had, you know, I mean that very, the specific sort of WikiLeaks incident, as we know it, the exposure of American government documents is very much the product of very specific things. I mean, certainly the internet is, you know, generally with technology, it makes it harder to keep secrets, but I also think that it's dangerous to have sweeping statements about, okay, you know, secrecy is dead, everything now has to hang out in the open, otherwise it's illegitimate. I think that's also irresponsible. I think in order to run a democratic government in the public interest and to conduct diplomacy, you can't have everything hanging out at all times. Yet at the same time, you do need to have accountable governance. So there's a balance you need to achieve there. And I think every generation needs to kind of revisit the conversation based on existing technologies, how you have accountable governance, you know, based on the global geopolitical situation, based on technology, based on any number of factors, and we're kind of at a point now where we need to completely, you know, sort of revisit that, you know, we're in the process of revisiting that conversation. There's something of a trend here that is represented by WikiLeaks. I mean, only recently, you know, Al Jazeera, I guess, did this documents, the Palestine papers, which I guess didn't involve Julian Assange. I don't think it's a coincidence. I mean, it seems like there's something about the information infrastructure that makes it easy. I mean, I guess one thought experiment you could do is suppose you're a malcontent at an organization 30 years ago, even 50 years ago, when just copying the documents would have been a real challenge, okay? And you would have had to find, you know, you'd have a limited set of newspaper reporters that were your only ways to get this public, and they were bound by a certain code that might have constrained them and so on. Compare that to now, when this stuff almost copies itself without anybody asking, and you, and all you have to do is get it to someone who has access to a computer server, in fact, you know. I mean, there is, I'm not imagining this, right? Technology makes it much easier to be a leaker, but the specific phenomenon of WikiLeaks and how it's played out is very specific, and you use the phrase anti-authoritarianism, or anti-authoritarian tendencies. What's very interesting is that, you haven't seen Chinese diplomatic government documents leaked, I mean, you know, that actually the society or the governments that are most vulnerable to leaking of secrets are actually democratic governments. Well, it's their secrets that get leaked, but as it happens, the governments have paid the price where governments mentioned in these documents that are actually far from transparent. You know, that's among the people who paid the price, and one can argue that maybe that was a good price, and one can certainly argue that there are real issues with the way in which, you know, the diplomatic cable, there's any number of issues that need to be addressed which WikiLeaks reveals, which it's good that we're gonna have that conversation. I think, you know, there's a separate set of issues about whether WikiLeaks has a right to publish and First Amendment, which I feel, you know, Mika Sifery, a tech president, made a quote, said something not too long ago where he said, you know, I don't know how I feel about WikiLeaks, but I know I'm strongly anti-WikiLeaks, in other words, that the sort of calls to censor WikiLeaks material on the web, the calls to, you know, to disallow the publication of this material raises some really serious questions about due process and about free expression that are very, very serious. You've written about a specific technique that was used to complicate the life of Julian Assange, having to do it Amazon.com and I wanna get to that. First one is Don, do you have views on? Well, I'd like to try a different cut at this. WikiLeaks, for me, illustrates what happens and can happen regularly with complex systems. When I view the net and the internet and the web as a complex system, and complex systems give individual components in those systems a hell of a lot of leverage, an opportunity to get information, but also an opportunity to be very disruptive. And that's what happened in this case. But it is interesting that almost immediately with complex systems, you began to have all kinds of adaptations taking place. Mastercard quits allowing money to be contributed to the WikiLeaks folks and so on. I've gotten three communications in the last two days of consultants here in Washington who for 300 or $500 will train you how to protect against WikiLeaks. I suggest to you, however, that this is a system that is pervaded by leaks and people go into it and get information and use that. When you say this, you mean? This complex system called the net. The internet, okay. And that's really a characteristic of complex systems in almost all of their forms, it seems to me. And I would just take one step further. The discussion of synthetic biology, which went on here, I tended to talk about people in garages and 15 year olds and so on. But if that turns out to be important, it is when that stuff gets plugged in to agriculture and health and building materials and all other things. And pretty quickly, that's a very complex environment that you're dealing with. And my sense is that we don't know what to do with those things. We don't know how to govern them. If I forget about all of the discussions of democracy and say, I'm czar and I'm now omnipotent, but I'm not omniscient, how would I govern one of these systems? How would I govern a system that is moving so rapidly that I'm always behind it? By definition, if it's a complex system, you can't understand it. And so you're always late in getting there and about the only way you can govern systems of that kind is by trial and error, by patching afterwards. Does this reveal a need for governance? I mean, the WikiLeaks case specifically, is there something that governments should have been able to do that? I, you know, it never occurred to me before WikiLeaks came about that anybody would ever do this. I spend some time thinking about this stuff, never occurred to me. That they would leak in something other than the old fashioned way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they idea, look. You got a PFC off in the boondock someplace who is able to dump massive amounts of secret material from the diplomatic service. Who the hell would ever have thought that was possible? But I suggest to you, it's not the only case. Okay. Speaking of that PFC, here Bruce is your characterization of him and this is by way of moving to the question of is transparency usually good or inherently good or something? I think I can detect your view on this. Maybe when you say Bradley, referring to this PFC. Bradley, you characterize him as a, in quotes, spy whose espionage, in quotes, consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population. That sounds like support for the enterprise he was engaged in. Or did I read too much irony into? Well, that's not, I don't know. I mean, it's part of a, it's part of a snarl, a legal snarl that this particular form of activism is placed as in. I mean, that's what's gonna happen. I mean, Julian is, I think, now in a kind of ideal Julian Assange position. Obviously he didn't wanna be put up for rape charges in Sweden, but he is a dissident. And he's a member of a class of people who are internet activists, who are, you know, a disaffected global class. I mean, why would an Australian take it upon himself to out a bunch of American diplomatic cables? He's not particularly upset about the USA. I mean, obviously. You don't think so? No. And you call him Julian. Not at all. Whenever anyone refers to someone famous by their first name, I suspect that they may actually know more about them than I do and may actually know them. Do you, have you communicated with them? I've never run into him, but I know, you know, I wrote about computer crime a long time ago. And I knew people who were cipher punks and were into these encryption systems. You know, when I said that it gave me a sense of melancholia because it had taken so long to happen, it has taken a long time to happen. I mean, the group of people who are involved in this, this kind of loose group of internet activists I don't, it's true what's said about the instability of the systems in which they're embedded and so forth, but it also robs them of agency. You wouldn't say that, oh, it was inevitable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write about, you know, the Gulag because there were millions of people in the Gulag and somebody was gonna have a typewriter. And, you know, therefore the whole thing was gonna be, you know, sooner or later, Glasnost and Perestroika was going to break out. Okay, yeah, but that doesn't mean that Solzhenitsyn's activity didn't matter and he thinks Solzhenitsyn had to go to jail. You know, he had to win the Nobel Prize and, you know, and Julian is a guy who's modeled himself on Solzhenitsyn. He really is a huge Solzhenitsyn fan and sees himself as a disaffected political dissident who hates nation-states. I mean, he doesn't just abide for transparency, he just thinks the world should be run on Wiki-style principles and that there should be an emergent class of people who are like himself, you know? Happy with the internet, keen to pick fights with Scientology, free expression guys, you know, no overhead. He doesn't belong to a particular group. He's not really in business. He's nobody ever elected him. He simply, you know, appointed himself. He's like a hovel or a Solzhenitsyn figure or that's how he sees himself in his own mind. And this is gonna go on a long time. 2% of those cables have been redacted and published. There's cable after cable after cable waiting to come out. And this guy's legal difficulties are gonna go on and on and on and on. They can't just shoot him. Actually, some people recommend it. Some people recommended that. Many people wanted to shoot him. That's the situation. But he is actually insulated himself against that by spreading an encrypted version of these all over the place. But as a technical, as a footnote, my impression on this little but not trivial point as far as what percentage of the documents have been gone through is that these major news organizations have had access to all of them. So I'm, but maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I'm assuming that they have gone through and given us what they think is the most important. Is it in fact the case that the ones that have been revealed have not been revealed just because they're the most important? I don't think they're leaking the ones that are most newsworthy. My impression was that the Guardian had them all. They're all newsworthy to somebody. Yeah, okay. So any more thoughts on the question of is, Trine? Let me speculate that having done this, other people will do it in lots of other areas. They're starting. That it's a pattern. And what you have is a system that lends itself to this. And if the issue here is an issue of how you deal with the governance item, you're not gonna deal with the governance item by putting massage in jail. That isn't gonna do any good, but companies are gonna have stuff dumped. It's open something up. That is my point, not to rob him of agency or any glamor that he's entitled to, but to establish that we have a governance issue here. It's not just one genius who happened to be born that there is something fundamental here. Yeah, just to add, there's a new organization called Open Leaks, which seeks to create a somewhat different model, but is also meant to be a vehicle through which people can securely leak documents. And then the documents are then Open Leaks partners with various other news organizations or NGOs or civil society organizations, academics, whoever they think is most relevant to work out how to release the documents in a way that's in the public interest. So it's a slightly different model. It's clearly, we've got a trend. WikiLeaks has created a trend, but I think Bruce brings up a really important point that actually one of the reasons I bought my laptop up is because I have some quotes from Carl Popper's book, Open Society and Its Enemies, because I've been thinking about these issues a bit in terms of agency and sort of what people like to call sort of technological determinism and sort of the assumption because we have certain technologies, society is going to naturally sort of go in a certain direction or we're sort of losing control over sort of this inevitable, inexorable force. And you saw debates about similar kinds of discussions when Hegel and Marx were in vogue and Carl Popper wrote this book as a critique of historicism and the whole idea that, society is inevitably, that human beings are inevitably going to improve and society is inevitably going to take a particular path because that is the inevitable inexorable path of history and Popper's argument was that kind of thinking is extremely dangerous and of course, Marxism led to some really nasty governments kind of utilizing this idealistic well-meaning thought philosophy but also that he says it robs people of the importance of conscience and instead of posing as prophets, we must become the makers of our fate. It basically gives people an excuse not to take responsibility for what's happening. And that's an extremely, I think we need, as we're thinking about technology and how it's affecting our future and our governance, we have to, I think, really do a reality check very often is are we succumbing to determinism that is giving people an excuse not to take responsibility for what they're doing? I guess I would say that even if you conceded that a view of history that sees trends to some extent do actually have an effect in a kind of directional way, even if you conceded that has the effect of robbing people of a sense of volition, that actually wouldn't mean the view was wrong, wouldn't mean it was an incorrect view. These are separate questions of whether the view is factually correct and whether it does or does not have an undesirable effect on people. And in any event, I mean, I actually think, notwithstanding all this stuff about agency, I think actually we're all kind of in agreement that there is something generic here with that indeed, as you said, anybody at any corporation, they have a new level of access when they want to get information out. Now it could be the countermeasures will be taken effectively in the long run by corporations and governments, but it seems to me that between WikiLeaks and now this Palestine papers thing via Al Jazeera, at the moment the countermeasures have not been taken. And I guess one thing that alarms me about the claim that this is not generic is I wonder like, what are we doing here and what are we gonna talk about it? If there isn't something here. I think you kind of agree with something here, okay? We needn't dwell on this. I mean, if it hadn't been for the printing press, the Protestant Reformation would have been a lot more difficult. But exactly what happened and exactly how everything played out. There is contingency in the world. It's been on all kinds of factors, like this king who wanted a bunch of wives and various other things. Pretty significant difference here. We are on a curve, an exponential curve in which the time of adaptation is pretty damn short. And it looks like, if I'm to believe most of these projections that I read that that may just go on for a very long period of time. Now, how do you think about governance when you're dealing with systems that you don't understand that are changing very rapidly? And I would ask the following question. Let's just assume we don't have to deal with the US government. And we can start from scratch. How would you put in place a governance system? Or let's take it a step further. How would you put in place a system that both supported that development? Because if we don't support that curve, we're probably not gonna be a competitive. So there's a lot of reasons to try to hustle it like mad. On the other hand, WikiLeaks is only one instance of what happens in these rapidly changing, complex systems. All this discussion about synthetic biology. You know, I have to tell you, I'm not very concerned about 15-year-olds designing DNA or whatever it is they do in the basement on a computer. But I get very concerned when it reaches the point where this is being introduced into my healthcare system. I wanna know something more about that. Now, we have to make some choices in governance about what we do. And I suggest to you that what you need for governance is pretty different if you're using synthetic biology to make bricks versus putting it in my genetics so that I'm smarter. And I've been sitting here all day and thinking, God, I wish I had some synthetic biology that would deal with my posterior. Because Google is a wonderful place, but it's got the lousiest chairs I have ever been in. Now, my point is that I think we ought to try to talk about how the hell you deal with this situation. The first thing is, how would you deal with it if you didn't have the burden of this crazy democratic system which is all screwed up? I can't even think about how I would deal with that. But that would seem to me to be the first step. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right, that basically our entire notion of, you know, how do you build consent of the governed and have a system of governing the things that affect people's lives in a way that works, in a way that's accountable to public interest. Our current political, legal mechanisms, international systems completely don't work. How do we upgrade that? You're absolutely right. We haven't begun to figure it out. If we were up to me, I'd start in a town. I think, you know, a city-state that's governed on network principles that might actually work. I could sort of see maybe New York, Barcelona, Singapore, some small area where you can sort of like take some baby steps into it and get out of it. What do you mean governed on network principle? Well, I mean, outside the nation-state, you know. I mean, okay, let's just ask. It's like, what's the worst case scenario for leaks in a government? They're sex leaks. Obviously they're sex leaks. The Lewinsky leak is the precursor of WikiLeaks. And the successor of WikiLeaks is Berlusconi's Sexygate. I mean, these are leaks that actually paralyze government completely. They don't just embarrass the State Department to destabilize American allies or people who have been commented on. These are the ones that actually completely captivate the political class, lead the consent of the government to states of just mass hysteria and just devastate stuff. And these are the things I really fear. You know, there was a day when there was enough control over the media, say the Kennedy business. When everybody in Washington knew that Kennedy was having sex with every Swedish stewardess he could get his hands on. But it was not a destabilizing thing. You just didn't speak of it. Well, I think it was confined to the elite, but I think that's different. I think that's something that has changed. I think that knowledge was confined to the elite. I don't think people in Ohio knew that. People in Ohio knew about Bill Clinton. It didn't get out there. It didn't get into the newspapers. They knew about Bill Clinton because they had grassroots, you know, digital networks working at the time but I would say there's something, I mean, I'm glad you brought up sex, not just because there's people's attention. Well, sex in WikiLeaks, by the way, you may notice that it's all about the rape case. It's not actually all about what he did and what he started to do. The entire thing is clouded by the sex angle. But I would contend that, I mean, the phenomenon of WikiLeaks, the transparency in this realm is fundamentally the same as the problem that afflicts Tiger Woods. It is. Is that in an age when so much is documented in digital form and it's so easy to transmit, famous people like that just have to be more careful and way more careful. And I think these are generically the same. That's not gonna work. I mean, people are outing themselves on Facebook right now. We're all making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of attack. And you're also gonna see all kinds of different interest groups using these techniques to destabilize other situations. I mean, that's why I'm melancholy about it. That's something I've seen happen over an 18 or a 19 year period. And this is not the only dragon that's waiting for us here. I've got like a list of these. I follow them on my blog, these sex business things with the anonymous denunciations, the secret videos and so forth, I call them centipedes. They're fantastically effective scandals are very politically destabilizing. We've got things waiting that have been in the computer underground for years that there's botnets, botnet attacks, there's blacknets, there's piracy on areas we haven't seen. Just go out and read a book written by Arquilla and Ron Felt of Rand. It must be 17, 20 years ago, Advent of Netwar. Advent of Netwar is Cairo, Egypt. It's a completely prophetic document on that, the segmented polycephalus influence networks, the non-state actors, the whole nine yards is in that document. It's taken forever to get there. People are paralyzed by terrorist kid porn, organized crime in the mafia, the Four Horsemen of the Invocalypse and so forth. They're not looking into the deeper drivers of this. And I think you, sir, are absolutely correct in saying that we can't imagine how to take care of ourselves in this future circumstance. You're melancholy about it. What would you do? How would you deal with the system? I would start in a city state. I would start in an area where you could do some deliberate social innovations. I would put money in there. I would like to declare it sort of like a shangan-free enterprise. What would you know me? What problem would you be trying to solve? I like our earlier panel's thing on like, you judge it by whether people are better educated and whether they're living longer. Just like, okay, we're gonna start like the Wiki. I'm just gonna run your city state on Wiki principles and let's see if everybody gets healthier. I mean, we've really hit the point where we need a paradigm shift. We need a frontier. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like we've hit this Magna Carta moment, right? Where, you know, 800 years ago, a bunch of Barons in England said, you know, this divine right of King's thing, you know, the way everybody thinks the world should work doesn't work anymore for us. So let's come up with a new idea. So what do you mean by that? And it's sort of like you need a similarly, you know, large paradigm shift in terms of how people think about, you know, their relationship with power. But we haven't, I don't have an answer. If I had an answer, I'd be, you know. I'm not even totally clear on what the problem is here. I mean, I'm really not. I mean, you know, I'm a reasonably downbeat, depressed, pessimistic person, but you guys sound so much more distraught than I feel over this thing. I mean, what is the problem? We're trying to, okay, so Wiki leaks happened. Some horrible authoritarian governments got into trouble. We learned some things about what our government was lying to us about, like claiming that the role of our ground troops in Pakistan was confined to training Pakistanis who were training other troops when in fact our troops were with Pakistani combat forces on the ground, abetting the combat. So all of this stuff happened. And although some of it leads to instability, I'm not really feeling like I should condemn any of it. I mean, I can think of unfortunate consequences of this. And I think that ultimately diplomacy, like everyday life, does involve a certain amount of private communication. And it worries me if that cannot happen. But I don't, you guys haven't articulated that, so I'm really not clear on what you're so upset about. I'm upset because Wiki leaks to me as an existence proof of deeper factors that we're really not dealing successfully with. And in fact, we're putting, we're deliberately putting blinders in front of the cliff so that we can run. What are the ones we're not dealing with? Okay, read Richard Clark. I don't have time right now. Could you? Well, go out. You know, Richard Clark is telling the truth. Okay. He's telling the truth about cyber war. I mean, he coined the phrase electronic Pearl Harbor, which is a little bit difficult. In fact, the Americans won the electronic Pearl Harbor. But, you know, he writes about threats that are coming from the infrastructure that we built for ourselves. Okay, he happened to be, you know, involved in a kerfuffle during the Bush administration of a sideline by the neocons. But he was, in fact, he's very well informed about the various problems. What's an example of a threat he was talking about? Well, just... I mean, do you mean terrorists using this stuff? Well, you know, you call them terrorists. They don't need to be terrorists. I mean, you know, it's just that we become very dependent on systems that are unstable that we don't understand and that reveal vulnerabilities in our system that we don't know how to deal with. You could go out with a cocaine submarine out of Columbia and cut four, five underground cables and just black out the U.S. Egypt style. You could go, you could car bomb a Google Cloud Center without much trouble at all. Google's not heavily armored. And Google would go dark. Okay. You know, we don't have any backup plans for such things. Thank you, thank you for articulating a... That's clear. That is a clear scare scenario. Now, at some point I wanna get some audience input, but there's one thing that I know, Rebecca, that you're concerned about, which is ultimately kind of a governance issue. You were very upset about the episode where Amazon.com was kind of pressured, you might say, into evicting Assange's documents from their servers. And that's a governance issue, I guess, that you find... It relates to some of the issues we've been talking about all day. That in... And with the internet, of course, you have a situation where the public discourse and our politics and a lot of our freedoms are dependent on this digital layer of communications increasingly, which is owned and operated in large part, an increasing part by private sector companies, which, you know, their terms of service do not have to respect the First Amendment. They can kind of shut you down for whatever reason they want and you agreed in advance to let them do that when you clicked agree. But the problem is that we have this situation where the more that we're dependent on this layer for our politics, and you've got companies that at the first sign of trouble of a controversial customer aren't gonna wait for that person to be declared innocent in court, they're gonna dump them at the first sign of, you know, Lieberman calling up their office or whatever. And so controversial speech is increasingly going in a society where people are depending on these privately owned and operated platforms and networks to get their message out because that's where your audience is. And if the companies running these platforms and networks are not gonna wait for your First Amendment rights and your civil liberties to be defended in court or for you to be, you know, absolutely judged to be a criminal, but, you know, on the first whiff of possible criminality they're gonna dump you, then we have a situation where dissent, unpopular speech becomes more marginalized and that strikes me as the first step towards an erosion of our democracy. And so it's a kind of canary in the coal mine situation we need to really be thinking about. Can I give you some pushback? I mean, it seems to me that for a very long time private sector communications venues have been the primary means of mass expression, privately owned magazines, privately owned newspapers, privately owned books. It doesn't seem to me that that's actually new. PBS was new, the exception was new. I mean, basically this has been the way it's worked and the key to the system, it seems to me, has been a multiplicity of outlets so that sure, one given publisher could say I don't like your opinions, you don't get to talk here but there were alternatives and it seems to me that in the case of WikiLeaks that's what we saw happen. Amazon, and in fact it seems to me more than ever there are a multiplicity of outlets. All you really need is a server somewhere and Amazon kicked them off. That didn't come close to derailing Assange. Briefly you had to hunt around to different servers. I was doing that because I was writing about it at the time. But they were, you know, so it seems to me the system in that sense is at least as resilient as ever and in fact some people would turn this around and say that's the governance problem. Suppose somebody had something really dangerous, world destroying, that they could get out there. In the old days all you had to do was talk to publisher of the New York Times and the Washington Post into not publishing, you know, now it's hopeless. So some people would say that the governance problem is the exact opposite of the one you're talking about. I guess one of several pushbacks I could present to you is that the reason why our media, more traditional media, the extent to which it has enabled sufficient discourse, and you know there's a great deal of opinion about whether that's the case, is because people fight about the policy, they fight about the governance of laws, fight First Amendment cases, et cetera. And we need to kind of have the same fight I think for free expression on these private digital platforms. And you know, it's not guaranteed that we will win that fight, but we can't just assume that because we have the internet we're gonna be free. And again it comes down to agency of lots of individual actors that we're only going to maintain our civil liberties and free expression in this digital realm if we all take responsibility for having it and for maintaining it and for expanding it and protecting it in the digital realm. If we just say, oh it's the internet, free enterprise will take care of it, God help us all. Okay, I mentioned resilience. Did that lead you to want to say anything? You've written a lot about resilience. Do you have any? You know, it appears to me that the net is responding to this in a whole variety of ways at the present time. And I suggest to you that one of the things is people are gonna make a lot of money on advising people how to control their information. I mean, it's gonna create a new industry out there very quickly. But what I'm concerned about here is taking this as an instance and talking about a world in which most of our technologies are undergoing this process of quite rapid change. Synthetic biology being in some senses a scary case or a terribly optimistic case. And we really don't know how to deal with that at all. I think somebody suggested in the earlier panel that an OTA would be a good thing. When OTA was created, the idea was that you would develop a whole community of people whose business it was to look at second order consequences, things you didn't expect. And that that would become a profession. And that still sounds to me like it might be a useful thing to have in the process. I just make my last comment. I've been puzzling over this for some period of time. And my proposal is that we create a new commission of people. It will be headed by Frank Fukuyama. And they'll be appointed for 15 years and they'll represent expertise across the spectrum. And they will have every year $20 billion. And they will have the authority to support whatever technologies they want to and to regulate those technologies rapidly. And they can then create specialized organizations to take care of the technologies. And when the technologies become obsolete, they can dismantle the organization. Somebody said something about it's a lot harder to create organizations in our society than it is to get rid of them. We had to figure out some way to be able to respond rapidly to the support of technologies and to respond rapidly when problems develop. But we're always going to respond. We're not gonna be able to anticipate. We're gonna have to figure out a way to rapidly muddle through. And maybe we ought to have a new constitutional amendment that commits us to making policy by muddling through. And I would predict. I mean, I hate to say that because we don't use the term predict. But my suspicion is you're gonna get WikiLeaks by a state actor pretty soon. Somebody, Russia will leak the archives of Georgia. Georgia will leak the archives of Armenia. The Chinese will leak the archives of the RAW in India. Because we know they've already spied on all these stuff. They've got the stuff. They've subverted people into government. You can walk out with a key full of very damaging material. And now that they've seen how much mayhem can be studied by one of these anonymous leaks, it's not gonna be six Australian hippies who are angry about Scientology. It's gonna be people who are like trying to use this for some kind of geostrategic advantage. Either that or actually just to add a footnote. Or you could have WikiLeaks by let's say, for instance, the Russian government leaks all the information about the sex lives of the, you know. They do that already. Yeah, but you could see. Seriously, they do. Just go up and look at the number of videotapes there are of Russian opposition figures who've been caught in frigrante delicto and had sex tapes leaked onto the internet. The way is to shut up people. It's gonna be professionalized and it's gonna be weaponized, because it works. The, by the way, after WikiLeaks broke, there was speculation that a state government was involved and Zbig Brzezinski actually speculated. I think this was before the full scope was evident, which I think now suggests this was a discreet, you know, archive, you know, clearly definable that was probably monolithic and came from a single source. But he was suggesting that just by which governments were embarrassed and which weren't, you could start speculating about that. Okay, open it up. Let's, two people right there in succession. No, no, yes, you in the red scarf and then you. You're lucky, ma'am. Yeah, I just think we're making a little bit too much out of that we don't know what to do. I don't think we've often known what to do. But so we didn't know what caused the plague. And the other part of that is that we're rapidly being able to educate ourselves at a much greater rate. And I think the whole education system is really also under strain for that. I learned two or three new programs a week and I don't think I'm working very hard. It just seems to me that the rate of ability to integrate and assimilate these changes is also very great. I'm not so sure we don't know what to do that we're so powerless in that way. Okay, and why don't you go ahead and let him make his? David Bain. I'm also a futurist and inventor at bump.com. One quick comment and a question. It seems to me that one of the important things that comes out of WikiLeaks is to look back on Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers that perhaps the important thing to look at here is what are the criteria by which we determine whether to support or what not. And with respect to Pentagon Papers, what's been shed light on is was the result ending the conflict sooner or not and what was the intention. So the intention and the result have our important things to consider. So my question is with respect to Bruce talking about how this phenomenon can be abused by state actors, even without a new disclosure, one of the things that Asanjah said is that should anything happen to him, this other shoe will drop, was that a really smart thing to do because people besides the United States could see that something happens to him and cause further damage to America. People who want that to happen. Do you want to? Well, I think Julian's a geek. And he's the kind of guy who can't pack books in a box while leaving any empty space. So I take the cyber thing of his as like an Asperger's thing. I mean, yeah, it was something he did because it sort of made him look cool and it's just a very unworldly thing to do. But it's also unworldly to think that other people's diplomats don't talk like diplomats or that it wouldn't hurt the national interests of Brazil should the Brazilian diplomatic cables be outed by whoever is ticked off at Brazil this particular moment. So it's true that we can get up to speed on this stuff a lot faster but the people who were doing it are also getting up to speed a lot faster. It's not like there's some group of people who doesn't read the internet and doesn't see Julian Assange has never heard of Monica Lewinsky or isn't transfixed by this fantastic spectacle in Italy where this guy is like built a private harem and then like walks out in public saying, oh, it'll all blow over. Come on, we'll get used to it. Okay, maybe we will get used to it but that's a very strange kind of world we're building and we might personally get used to it but our institutions can't handle it. We haven't come up with a method to bring any justice or happiness and my feeling about it is it's like, okay, if that was true, we should have gotten used to Monica Lewinsky after about three days because giving your boss a blow job is not like some kind of colossal violation of the national order. That thing went on for month after month after month after month and like hit the deepest levels of America constitution. There was an impeachment case and that's the kind of stuff we're risking here. It's not just about Julian even though I understand it to some extent sympathize with him because I know so many people like him and I know they've been struggling for years and years to assert their importance on the national stage or the international stage, the global stage and here he finally has and there's just a tumbling horde of skeletons behind that guy. He's like the first black crow of spring. Let's go all the way over to the other side. With a red tie, we had a red scarf, red tie. I think the key is to wear something red if you wanna be allowed to ask a question. My name's Neil Chulson. I am a telecommunications lawyer here in DC with Wilkinson Barker Nowher but I'm here totally on my own accord. One quick comment and then a question for the panel. It sounds like your proposal is like a really big venture capital fund so I was wondering if you could respond to that. Why does it need to be a government entity? My question for the panel actually comes off of Mr. Sterling's comment and it seems like all the harm here is to states and when we say it seems like the we up on the stage is what do we as a government entity do or what do we do to govern it? I think we as individuals know what to do. We find it fascinating. We find it interesting. We read it. We pass it along or we ignore it. So the risk is, it seems like the risk is completely to the state and the harm is completely to the state and maybe that's Julian's point. It sounds like you guys almost agree with him. I'd like a response. Do you want me to go first or? Sure, I mean a technical point is that I think Assange is making noises as if he has the whole cache of documents from a major bank and people think it's Bank of America in which case the harm, in that case at least, wouldn't be confined to a state but. My point in making that preposterous proposal was that if you are going to both support and regulate rapidly moving state of the art complex technologies, the only people who are appreciative of what is going on are the people who are at the state of the art. And you've got this terrible dilemma that we like to have people who don't have a vested interest in the process except the people that don't have a vested interest don't know what's going on. So my notion was that if you could create organizations that had this dual responsibility but could somehow also assure that those organizations could be killed quickly. That it's something like that that we have to have if we're going to have meaningful governments. These broad generalizations about making policy for synthetic biology, synthetic biology is going to go into so many different sectors and that's where the policy is going to be made. And I just seems to me that we really have to think about this in rather different ways. I must say that the WikiLeaks thing is a serious situation but I really think the system will deal with it. I think it's not just states that are at risk. It's states that are easy to talk about when they're at risk. But in fact, if you've got a police informant in any kind of informal group, a mafia, a hacker group, any of these segmented polycephalus influence networks and so forth and you can find out who's really behind that organization and expose that, it can cripple the organization. I mean that's how the Ku Klux Klan was defanged in the 1920s simply by mentioning the proper names of people under the hood. And I would point out that WikiLeaks has suffered more than the United States. WikiLeaks wanted to be a gigantic organization as big as Wikipedia and WikiLeaks right now is basically a name for a guy who's in deep legal trouble and his stuff has been outed. I mean people on WikiLeaks, they wouldn't got be not a subpoena but they just got the email addresses of the 60,000 people who follow WikiLeaks on Twitter. Okay, that's like a leak on WikiLeaks. Were they happy about that? I was like oh yes, here on WikiLeaks we want to be transparent. Let me mail in a postcard to the Justice Department. No, they don't like that kind of transparency and in fact it causes informal organizations that kind of shrivel. I mean just talk to anybody who's a political activist about what it means to have a state informant in your group leaking on people or companies who work endlessly to try and stave off industrial espionage, et cetera, et cetera. Or even banks, Jerome Curvill, board guys, kind of the bank equivalent of Bradley Manning, sort of stole 70 billion euros. Not because he got any of it, just because he had the capacity. So it's organizations that keep secrets. They have things they don't want disclosed. They don't even have to be particularly secret. I mean I could like, you know, if you happen to be the minority group in some particular area and I can redline you, it's not like it's secret what your skin color is but I can just, you know, if I can come up with data mining areas that like reveal something so that I could take an action against you that you can't counter because you can't see it. Rebecca, you want to? Just to pick up on your comment. I mean the release of the cables and its implications was all about states. It was about the legitimacy of the United States government's behavior and the behavior of the governments that its diplomats were interacting with and sparked all kinds of conversations in many countries about just how legitimate their government was and in some cases had a lot of real consequences for a great deal of individuals and will continue to have huge consequences for many individuals. But, you know, it definitely brings into the whole question of what is the legitimate function of a legitimate state or are states legitimate at all? Now I don't know Julian Assange but Bruce asserted earlier that he felt that Assange is probably, you know, doesn't believe in the legitimacy of state governments, you know, national governments generally and has a more sort of stateless kind of vision. I don't know if that's true or not. But, you know, I myself tend to think that we do need governance of some kind. To protect minorities, you know, but how do you have accountable governance so that you can have a genuine league, you know, so that people can prosper and be safe and not be attacked in their homes by criminals and so on. How do you do this legitimately in the internet age? I mean, it's just prompting a huge rethink of the relationship between individuals, technology and the state. And I don't think we have a lot of good answers about where to take that. But, I mean, I certainly stand on the side who feel that, you know, it's not about no governance, it's about accountable governance and we need to figure out how to achieve that. Well, if we don't have answers, maybe we can get more questions. I'm determined to call on someone who's not wearing red, so sir, I'm afraid your red tie just completely disqualifies you. We'll maybe we'll get back to you once I've balanced out the color spectrum here. Sir, in the kind of a check shirt that has no evident red. Thanks. I was wondering about, I guess I'm a little bit skeptical that the whole WikiLeaks operational plan is really going to have the long-term effects that some people fear because one of the things that I, that the points that I see that's very sensitive in their organization is that they're dependent right now at least and probably for the foreseeable future on having the press as a megaphone to enhance the importance of their leaks. I mean, otherwise it would be stuff that was on the internet that some people would read about but you wouldn't hear about it and it wouldn't become part of the national conversation. So it seems to me that there are a lot of vulnerabilities there that have to do with their credibility as an organization, not just Julian, but also their vulnerability to sort of false flag operations or disinformation that's purposely planted and then leaked and then once different countries get involved in sort of tit for tat diplomatic retaliations of leaking everything on WikiLeaks, you know. At that point, doesn't it become too chaotic for people to actually process the information that they're getting and doesn't that discredit the whole notion of WikiLeaks and in the sort of public mind? Yeah, I think WikiLeaks is a primitive organization and really wasn't even an organization at all. It basically just a club of six guys who were Psypher Punk, hobbyist guys and Julian and some idealists but I don't think the mechanism of that's gonna go away. On the contrary, I think people are gonna start WikiLeaks style organizations using other backbones like say Facebook, Twitter, encrypted, cell phone conversation, whatever it is that's grown out of this particular crackdown in Egypt and watching Egypt try to fend off news organizations and seeing them sort of reformat themselves in real time as kind of bizarre underground style things. That's what's happening. You know, it's, I mean, Julian is an important figure in the way that like Solzhenitsyn is an important figure. It's kind of an oak in the calf kind of figure, you know, the calf goes and butts the oak with his head again and again until the bark falls off and the tree dies and I think Julian sees himself as that kind of martyr figure. So, you know, I give him every kind of credit for that. I think he's a real moral actor and he believes in what he's doing with fierce determination. But what really concerns me is not that, okay, he goes away and then WikiLeaks goes away and then we don't have to worry about what the State Department said. On the contrary, there's gonna be a constant, a consistent acid drip leak of the rest of those State Department things until every last one of them has been released one way or another and there's gonna be more from other people's State Departments and there's gonna be more provocations. They used to Twitter, Facebook and other kinds of situations that used the tactics that WikiLeaks did of unexpected destabilization, surprising news, uprising in the left elbow that you least expected. I mean, we're really coming into the genuine 21st century here. This is not like a guy who shows up and you like step on him like a Coke can and it goes away. He's a precursor of something with deep roots that's lasted for a long time and he's managed to capture the public imagination and other people are gonna adapt his tactics and his methods. Yeah, I agree. Although you're on the verge of depriving him of agency when you say that, I think. But, Well, that is what's interesting. I think without offering an answer, I think it's an interesting question whether it's true that if he hadn't given these to the newspapers, it wouldn't get out there at all. I think some people would argue that part of the modern global information processing system is you have so many of these niche bloggers scouring the earth for the information that's of interest to them is that if you just put the data dump out there, actually it would ultimately get to the people who are most interested in it and the really important stuff would get amplified. Although it's true that news organizations will make a bigger deal of something when it's an exclusive. That's true. But I think it's an open question whether he needs, it's a really crucial question because it gets at how generic this thing is. If they don't need major news organizations, did Don or Rebecca want to say anything in response to that particular question? I think, there is an amplification and curation process. I mean, one of the reasons why I started this, I don't really run it anymore, other people run it, but the global voice is online, was that Ethan Zuckerman and I found that there were a lot of really amazing people in Africa and the Middle East and around Asia and Eastern Europe and so on who are writing fascinating things online and nobody was finding it. And that we needed to create a site that would curate this and amplify it and contextualize it and call attention to it for it to end up having an impact. And for the people who were trying to speak out to get heard in the way that we thought they deserved. So, there's certain, just kind of throwing stuff out there on the internet. Sometimes it's kind of hit and miss and obviously if it gets discovered by somebody famous and influential, then it has an impact, but it has to get discovered. Okay, I've been given a five minute warning. What I would, there's in front of the man who unwisely wore the red tie is a man who wisely wore no tie at all. If you could very quickly ask your question and then I think we actually should close with someone wearing a red tie since this is Washington after all and you can just hand the microphone back to him when you're done and then we'll need real quick responses because we have about four minutes left. Okay, good. To Bruce, actually, in formal life I used to design and deploy networks for a US based tier one ISP in South America and all over Europe and all over Asia and all over Australia. I can assure you it would take a very large fleet of cocaine submarines to do what you suggest. I would further say that the countries where that are most at risk of being cut off like that, the cutting off party has not been government but rather private actors pursuing, they basically kind of mercantile local profiting things, proffered opportunities. So it's a real risk, but I think that the mechanism is slightly different. Maybe I'll just leave it there. Go ahead. Let it be said that my body is rejecting this tie. And while I was sitting on this thought provoking chair, it did occur to me that the case of WikiLeaks and the passing of Benoit Mandelbrot occurred approximately at the same time. What are those two have to do with one another? Maybe not much, but WikiLeaks in terms of governance of information presents you with almost the simplest case. That information was copied off SIPRANET, that stuff was classified. That can be fixed. The government will straighten out its process, so on and so forth. Looking at the governance of synthetic biology on the other hand, there you really do have complexity. And what Mandelbrot of course provided us was fractal analysis and some promise of governing complexity and chaos. And I'm wondering if anybody sees the promise of tools within the science of complexity, the science of chaos for governing what is a much, much more difficult situation. That sounds like a Don question, and then you two can choose which question if either you want to respond to it, but we are in the lightning round, so you each have about 38 seconds. There are a bit of efforts to deal with this, and almost everyone says that you really have to deal with it after the problems develop and you need to be able to react quickly. And we haven't figured out what kind of institutional mechanisms have that characteristic, certainly in the American governmental system. Now you each have 41 seconds. That was very concise. I recommend reading risks digest if you're into risks from computers and related systems, but these infrastructures that we build, that we call web and cloud and so forth, they do have physical components and those are frail and they can be attacked. And yes, we have invented tools to defeat things like botnet DDoS attacks that's kind of handled, look really bad. It's not a permanent mess, but yeah, we built a favela and it doesn't hold together real well. It's young, it's young. Yeah, there's so many possible things to say. I'm not enough of an expert on biological sciences to really comment on that, but I mean, one of the things that Mr. Crow said in an earlier session was the importance if we're gonna figure out governance, the solutions to these government's problems to get more citizen involvement, which requires a lot more education. And how do we rethink the way in which we educate the public, educate our children about what is civic responsibility? What is civic involvement? Is it more than just voting? Do you have to have more of an understanding about how your information environment works? How biology, is biology becoming part of civics? I don't know. Certainly it seems that there are a lot of issues related to how the internet works that should be part of civics. That's something I know more about. And increasingly, I feel that's the case. And media education should also be part of civics. But just what it means to be an engaged citizen to ensure that the various institutions that are gonna impact your health, your freedom, to ensure that they're held accountable, how to be engaged in that, I think we need much broader public involvement and kind of understanding of what citizens should be doing. I want my three seconds. 45 years of being a professor, she's got a hell of a lot more faith in education than I do. We will leave it at that. And then we might have a good reason to be pessimists. Just when we were gonna end on a happy note. Thank you very much now. Thank you all very much for that.