Last night I listened with great interest to Peter Huber's talk here at Lake Tahoe on the technologies and markets of war. I describe here his analysis, leaving aside the details of the technologies he described. He distinguished the nature and import of the analog world--what might inelegantly be called "meat space"--where terrorists really kill you--from the telecosm, where they most certainly cannot. But nonetheless

the information and intelligence transmitted through the telecosm is essential to mediate the technologies of war, which otherwise offer raw, unfocussed destructive power. And this sort of unfocussed power is the stuff of wars of the past. Today the enemy is a) small (a single bomber, a small quantity of biological matter, a little bit of nuclear stuff) and b) everywhere, including within our borders. So since we cannot match extremist's political will to lose our sons to bloody conflict, we will have to use technology to win the new type of war by a) identifying and b) eliminating very small dispersed threats. He noted that technology can "infiltrate every corner of their homeland," and "properly deployed abroad will destroy every last vestige of privacy," in which they can plan attacks. And then "at home will safeguard civil liberties."

Since the sensors and information gathering devices that he describes are so often seen as a threat to civil liberties, this last statement might strike us as incredible. But from Ithiel de Sola Poole's Technologies of Freedom to Huber's own Orwell's Revenge to David Brin's work on privacy, we have seen that since the new technologies are owned and adopted by the private sector ubiquitously, not just by a central authority, they are likely to act as engines of freedom and individual rights. Not always, obviously, and not without the usual difficulties of belling the cat (remember Aesop's fable?). But I think this view is right.

Huber's analysis here helps explain: the new technologies will not be ubiquitous in the private sector as well as in defense not just because the private sector finds them useful, but because the military cannot afford the new tech unless economies of scale and scope in its production help bring down its cost. The military-industrial complex is just bookends on a massively complex network of private-sector technologies and defensive networks. Defense is at the cutting edge, but it needs the private economy to take R&D and make it economically viable for anyone. (A puzzle: why is the government on the cutting edge of anything, ever? Isn't this an institutional anomoly? Perhaps because in the military, unlike most of the rest of government, there are real consequences of failure; actual government employees will die. If the military screws up, soldiers are killed; if the FDA messes up... well, even the employees responsible aren't likely to suffer serious consequences).

One question is, what civil liberties will ubiquitous deployment of intelligent sensors and devices everywhere implicate? Obviously, privacy. Due process. But a) traditional concepts of these civil liberties might be inadequate to protect against new forms of abuse and b) citizens may want to abandon some traditional protections if
this is necessary to stop them from being gassed, infected, or blown up. I think the concept of freedom and due process is robust enough to survive some changes here. But this will be a hard constitutional road. What we have seen so far is an abandonment of aspects of due process for the sake of prosecuting an endless war, but no new measures taken to better protect accountability where those are due. The civil libertarian community is one the whole not given to innovating new liberties and due process, and neither is the state. The libertarian community is good at embracing technological change within the framework of traditional rules, but not changes (even very slight ones) to the framework itself. And yet because such frameworks of rules do in fact change (can anyone imagine a human community open to normal stresses where the rules could not or do not change?) one needs to think about future institutions as well as present ones.

Peter's talk raised another issue for me as someone with an interest in philosophical anarchy. I have never understood why it was not worth thinking about how to subject *every* government function, from policing to fire to road construction to education to the post office to lawmaking, to market forces, to privatize entirely. Public goods such as lighthouses can be provided by the private sector (a lot of policing already is, for example). But thinking about how to supply defense privately is very, very hard. And this is something that many anarcho-capitallists gloss over. I don't think this can be fairly glossed over. War is too much a part of human history. It is even "natural," in the sense that primates' physical struggles for dominance have been a sad part of our evolution. Competitive legal systems like those of the historic Icelandic commonwealth are rare--not by accident. Few peoples are so isolated that they can put off the need for a unified defense force against a common enemy, or to unify to end internal power struggles. The history of China is more typical than the history of Iceland. This defense problem shapes property rights (the size of holdings, their economic structure) as well as government institutions. So thus the theory of anarchies continues unsatisfying.

Finally, back to intellectual property. Peter distinguished the telecosm from the "real" analog world almost dismissively; in a sense, the problems of the physical world will always be more serious than the problems of the telecosm. Problems of processing information, blocking information, or sharing information pale in comparison to problems of famine, pestilence, and war. In a sense, telecosm problems are "made-up" problems--this is a world we created. Many of its features seem arbitrary. "Real" consequences are hard to trace, not like being wacked on the head with a club. And so the analogy between intellectual property and physical property remains a difficult one. Not perfect. It is tempting to think that ground rules are not meaningful or are not needed.

But they are. First, the world of information and the physical constantly mediate one another. Physical problems need information (whether the information about supply conveyed by rising and falling prices, or the blueprint of a machine) to be resolved. And the world of symbols, data, images, evaluations and analysis generates the same gains from trade as the world of physical property. Second, gains from trade, the value that individuals place on exchanges, are in a sense all mental. It is ironic that I find myself thinking of scholars who dismiss the analogy between physical and intellectual property as failing to grasp the extent to which humanity thrives on complicated abstractions, whether an easement in land or a patent. The telecosm cannot kill you, but it can make you rich. And anything that makes you rich does so because it is in a sense a part of the telecosm.

Enough philosophy. Now I recollect why I found my tenure with Peter Huber exhausting. Too much to think about.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 11:26 AM | Privacy and Security

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