More Awesome Than Money Read Online Free PDF Page B

lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable.”
    In 1973, at age fourteen, Moglen had gotten a job writing computer programs for the Scientific Timesharing Corporation in Westchester, north of New York City, work that he continued for one company and another for the next decade. By 1986, at age twenty-six, he was a young lawyer, clerking for the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and also working his way toward a PhD in history, with distinction, from Yale. His dissertation was titled “Settling the Law: Legal Development in New York, 1664–1776.” At midlife, his geeky side, his legal interests, his curiosity about how human history was shaped, had brought him to the conclusion that software was a root activity of humankind in the twenty-first century, just as the production of steel had been an organizing force in the twentieth century. Software would undergird global societies.
    Software, then, was not simply a rattle toy for playpens filled with geeks, the skeleton of amusements for a naïve public, but a basic moral and economic force whose complexity had to be faced coolly, with respect, not fear.
    In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, a British social theorist, conceived of a prison where all the inmates could be seen at once, but without knowing that they were being observed. He called it the panopticon and predicted it would be “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Beginning in the 1970s onward, the cypherpunks, many of them pioneers at leading technology companies, saw that dystopian possibilities were built into the treasures of a networked world.
    Moglen said: “Facebook is the web with ‘I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?’ It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.
    â€œAnd it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at ‘spying all the time.’ They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.
    â€œI’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should
fix
it.”
    The crowd roared. Moglen said he was glad they were with him, but he hoped they would stay with him when he talked about how to fix it. “Because then,” he said, “we could get it done.”
    By now, Dan in his apartment, Ilya and Max in the auditorium, were mesmerized. His own students, Moglen said, comforted themselves that even though their Gmail was read by Google software robots for the purpose of inserting ads that were theoretically relevant to the content of their e-mails, no actual humans at Google were reading their correspondence. No one could entertain such a delusion about Facebook. News accounts based on various internal documents and sources suggested a streak of voyeurism on the premises.
    â€œFacebook workers know who’s about to have a love affair before the people because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y,” Moglen said. Any inferences that could be drawn, would be.
    Students “still think of privacy as ‘the one secret I don’t want revealed,’ and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff, of life, that they don’t think of as secret inany way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don’t want anybody to know,” Moglen said. Flecks of information were being used to create predictive models about them. It was simple to deanonymize data that was thought to be