The Canary on the Computer

Steve Cisler
Apple Library

In Washington, D.C., at the entrance to Lafayette Park where tourists compose photographs that include the homeless and the White House in one shot, I met Robert Lansberry, an elderly man who was handing out a two page tract. The pamphlet consists of a single long paragraph of warnings about mind control, electronic surveillance, subliminal experiments, tooth filling implants, corporate conspiracies, and coverups by Congress. At the end is his address at a hotel for transients. He has been in the same place each time I passed by, patiently distributing his screed. Few people take him seriously (perhaps he should get a literary agent), but I think of him providing an early warning for the rest of us just as canaries were used to detect leaking gas in mines. Lansberry is a barometer of tension and anomie in a world of advanced technology used in oppressive ways:

"Electronic surveillance is everywhere. There is no way to escape it unless you seek wilderness. Almost all street lights and traffic lights are infrared TV cameras, as in George Orwell's 1984. TV sets survail whether they are on or off. Light bulbs in your home are TV cameras with silent radio voices. In prison, overhead light bulbs watch, talk, and hear all. Big brother is alive, controlling us, doing evil."[1]

His visions of the present are slightly reminiscent of William Burroughs' early work. His nightmare dystopia has driven him into isolation but not hopelessness. If he were without hope, he would not be sending out his long SOS in garbled code. About the same time that I took his broadside, I began reading less fevered, more traditional and scholarly works that question the effects of technology, the politics of automation, and even the philosophical bases for our beliefs in progress.

In The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch points out that many people believed that progress was a secularized version of the Christian belief in providence.[2] Lasch believes that what differentiates the modern view of progress from the Christian view was "not the promise of a secular utopia that would bring history to a happy ending but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at all."[3] The German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, writing a century ago, had a vision of the world as "one large city ... a single world republic, coextensive with the world market, which would be ruled by thinkers, scholars, and writers..."[4] Lasch writes about what he calls the "exhaustion of the progressive tradition" and states in his closing paragraphs:

"What is not so obvious is that equality now implies a more modest standard of living for all, not an extension of the lavish standards enjoyed by the favored classes in the industrial nations to the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, equality implies a recognition of limits, both moral and material, that finds little support in the progressive tradition.[5]

Most of the questions raised about technology and its consequences don't examine the idea of progress, per se. Instead, the critics say that everyone has to take part in the debate[6] and focus on the way that assumptions about technology are wrapped up in the objects. Langdon Winner says that the secondary and tertiary effects of technology are often more significant than those thought to be primary (saving labor, bringing a new product to market). The importance of the Industrial Revolution was the changes in society and not the individual changes in textile factories and rail transportation. He believes that much of technology can be anti-democratic.

"Many of the artifact/ideas prevalent in our time stand in flagrant contradiction to the ideology of modern democracy. That ideology holds that human beings flourish, achieving what is best in their potential, under conditions of freedom, equality, justice, and self-government. In that light, societies ought to create social conditions and political institutions that make it possible for each human being's potential to develop. ... To a considerable extent, the ideas embodied in material things stand in opposition to the central ideas that we believe describe and guide our political culture."[7]

Winner calls for

no innovation without representation
no engineering without political deliberation
no means without ends.[8]

A more extreme view is put forth by Jerry Mander, Senior Fellow in the Public Media Center in San Francisco. He thinks that there is such a lack of alternative visions of technology because most of us live so embedded in technology (cities, buildings, cars, factories, computers, and electronic networks) that we cannot imagine life without those constructs. I can make it an intellectual exercise to scrape away the effects of technology and imagine life before electronic mail, before the phone, the trash compactor, central heating, on back to a world without inclined planes or cutting tools. To be sure, the amount of our lives spent immersed in technology has grown from one generation to the next, but it is not as big a change as he would have us believe. Mander says that the idea that technology has no inherent bias confirms our "technological somnambulism". He criticizes both the political left and right for believing that the problem with technology is who uses it and how it is used. He claims that the real decisions about technology are made by corporations whose profit motives are antithetical to a democratic society.[9] He does not fully substantiate his claims, so his hand-waving has not convinced me, yet he does have a strong following in some circles, and the debate he has joined is important.

More moderate writers such as Winner, John Wicklein, and even Patricia Schuman[10] believe that technology can serve but that it needs watching, careful watching. Ten years ago, Wicklein published Electronic Nightmare[11], detailing present and future abuses of communications technologies: misuse of personal data, wiretaps, surveillance of workers, unrestricted transnational data flow, and other unforeseen consequences of interactive technologies.

Library organizations have tracked and wrestled with some of these issues, but I find the perspectives from groups outside of my profession to be even more valuable. Members of the following watchdog groups have been involved with ALA programs and legislation in this area because they constantly test the pulse of the technology machine in this country and abroad. Over the past year they have been involved in a number of issues of concern to the library community as well as some that should be of more interest to us. What follows is an edited version of the accomplishments of the EFF over the past twelve months, followed by those of CPSR which has been partially funded by the EFF as well as the Rockefeller Foundation.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Inspired and helped to organize and present the first Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference. CFP was a four day event that brought together, in search of knowledge and common ground, representatives from computer networking, law enforcement, and privacy advocate groups. Co-sponsored the 2d CFP Conference in March 1992.
Worked within Senator Leahy's Privacy Task Force in Washington, D.C. in order to advance the concerns of the computer networking community in the formation of legislation in this critical area.
Became a presence on the Internet with their node, eff.org, where they created an FTP archive on the net for documents on computer networking and privacy law.
Testified before the Federal Communications Committee concerning the public access and design needs of the National Research and Education Network.
Joined in an association with the ACLU and the Consumer Federation of America in order to plan and to act in the future to ensure broad public access to the information super-highways of the future.
Launched the Open Road program in order to make sure that the needs of the public in the building of the National Public Network are addressed at the beginning of the project.
Began research and development into creating the tools that will allow non-technical individuals using PCs to access the net over voice-grade telephone lines in a simple and straightforward fashion.
Defined the problems associated with the questions of protecting nodes and carriers from unwarranted risks and liabilities in providing information services from the producer to the consumer.

The overall optimism about the technological future is expressed in their closing statement:

"The issues that those of us in the computer, telecommunications, and computer networking fields of endeavor can see so clearly now will affect every American and most of the people of the entire world within the next ten years. The opportunities are immense and the potential for an increase in human knowledge, wisdom and well-being beyond our calculation."[12]

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Over the past year this group has become more decentralized with the head office in Palo Alto cutting back on staffing, the Washington office continuing its busy schedule, and the Cambridge office being established to direct the 21st Century Project.

"The 21st Century Project is a new national campaign to redirect science and technology policy in the United States to peaceful and productive uses. The 21st Century Project is a coalition of technologists, scientists, citizens, and policy makers dedicated to informing the public about alternatives in the deployment of science and technology in the modern world. The 21st Century Project is a challenge to the long-standing and continuing military dominance of science and technology in the United States. The 21st Century Project is an attempt to reassert a positive role for science and technology in the improvement of human life and the preservation of environmental quality. Gary Chapman, coordinator of The 21st Century Project, can be reached at 19 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Telephone (617) 497-7440. Internet address: chapman@saffron.lcs.mit.edu."

Marc Rotenberg heads the Washington office. Some of their activities have been run closely with the EFF; others follow a different path. Here are some of the more recent ones:

Caller ID and communications privacy
Oversight of computer security and national cryptography policy
Opposing poorly conceived computer crime legislation
Network meeting and political association: uncovered FBI policies regarding the monitoring of electronic bulletin boards on a case by case basis
Lotus Marketplace: helped force the withdrawal of the residential database while the business database spun off to another company
Efforts to control the misuse of the social security number: worked with states and some universities on alternate forms of identification
Support of international privacy efforts: helped coordinate the Privacy International group
Promotion of information access: continued efforts to increase access to government information
Public education: CPSR held three roundtables at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on civilizing cyberspace. CPSR organized the first public policy conference on cryptography policy in Washington, DC June 1991. CPSR also worked with Riley Information Services to host the first Electronic Democracy Conferences in Washington and Ottawa.
Litigation: this could be the topic of a separate paper. CPSR has filed Freedom of Information Act requests from the FBI, Secret Service, DOD, NIST and is involved in litigation in a number of cases related to the previously noted issues. For more information contact Marc Rotenberg, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 666 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20003 (202) 547-5482. Internet: rotenberg@washofc.cpsr.org.

Conclusion

What differentiates these groups from some others that question or oppose some or many uses of technology is that EFF and CPSR are immersed in the technology themselves. They make effective use of the computer networks within their own organization and in the research and industrial communities in the U.S. and abroad. Their offices are automated, and they share a common tongue with those who do make policy and effect changes in the high technology industries.

To return to Robert Lansbury, the electronic Paul Revere of Lafayette Park I mentioned at the beginning, his unfocused approach did reach me, but generally I would recommend trying to target efforts and activities through specific groups such as the ones I described. Whether ALA needs more activity in this area is up to the membership. As the end of the millenium approaches, there will probably be a greater irrational concern with the role of technology, but the number of reasoned treatises will grow as well as more fanciful science fiction titles. High tech advances and incursions into more and more lives will foment legislation, creative speculation, and action, as well as increased market activity. Librarians will continue to sort, save, disseminate, and generate some of this information.

Notes

Robert Lansberry, Subliminal Mind Control in 1991 (unpublished pamphlet).
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. (New York: Norton, 1991) 40.
Ibid. 47.
Ibid. 141.
Ibid. 532.
Linda Garcia, "Assessing the Impacts of Technology," Whole Earth Review (Winter 1991).
Langdon Winner, "Artifacts/Ideas and Political Culture," Whole Earth Review (Winter 1991).
Ibid. 21-22.
Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. (Sierra Club Books, 1991).
Patricia Glass Schuman, "Reclaiming Our Technological Future", Whole Earth Review (Winter 1991). This article was reprinted from the March 1990 issue of Library Journal. It would be interesting to hear how her views have changed over the last two years, during which she served as the President of the American Library Association and dealt with a number of high tech issues such as NREN.
John Wicklein, Electronic Nightmare: The New Communications and Freedom. (New York: Viking, 1979).
"About EFF," FTP archive ftp://ftp.eff.org/.

Steve Cisler is a Senior Scientist in the Apple Computer, Inc. corporate library where he works with the Apple Library of Tomorrow program, the Apple Library Users Group, and information retrieval projects within the company.

sac@apple.com