black day at Black Hat

Jennifer Granick, the lawyer who has represented both Michael Lynn (who quit his job at a previous Black Hat to give a talk on Cisco vulnerabilities that his employer tried to gag) and the late Aaron Swartz, gave the keynote speech at this year's Black Hat and warned us all of a dark future in which the web is watered down by corporate policies, government controls, and the whole "What's socially acceptable?" thing to the point where it is as worthlessly safe as television. One of her slides had a quote from "The Master Switch" by "Tim Wu" reading: History shows a typical progression of information technologies from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry, from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system. Jennifer predicts that, in IoT (the internet of things), anonymous cars that drive by themselves will prompt lawsuits when they crash and the age old loophole for escaping software liability wherein if you just don't misrepresent what the software does you're not accountable is going to be challenged as a bad standard and will be dissolved. Once this happens software liability is going to make the cost of doing business balloon, hurting startups. We'll find ourselves in a stagnant state where we cannot progress and the real innovators will run to a different space. Beyond what the future holds, Jennifer suggests legal troubles of the right now include:

1. CFAA is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and it makes it a crime to obtain information from a computer that is of a financial institution or the U.S. Government. Aaron Swartz of RSS fame was faced with violating this rule after he wrote a script that automated the process of downloading and analyzing internet articles as, I suppose, some articles resided in the hosting of the U.S. Government. Under the pressure of facing over three decades in prison for the act, he took his own life.
2. DMCA or Digital Millennium Copyright Act is copyright law that tries to keep trade secrets secret and makes it a crime for one to try to bypass a purposeful deterrent to reverse-engineering a technology to see how it works. If you buy an alarm clock at Wal-Mart you may take it home, beat it into pieces with a hammer, and then take a look at all the gears that spill out and muse and at how they behaved to begin with, but you can't break open software in a similar way, even if it's "yours" and you bought it.
3. USAPA is, yes, The Patriot Act. Once J. Edgar Hoover was dead it soon became illegal for America's government to spy on its own citizens as they spin up brouhaha political movements (think Martin Luther King, Jr., think Malcolm X) but now all that is back! In the name of fighting terrorists George W. Bush gives us... this! Many of the original previsions have been allowed to expire but others have been extended. The government may spy on your electronic communications.
4. FAA stands for FISA Amendments Act and it is, I guess, a piece of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It allows for warrantless surveillance of individuals with the one restriction that they must be overseas. Awesome! (that's sarcasm)

In circling back to the future from the right now, well, expect more of the same. Jennifer suggests the trend is not trending in the right direction. Expect more controls. In the book "The Black Box Society" Frank Pasquale suggests that our technology will reach a walled-off state where it might as well be magic because we won't know what is in it or what it really does and that is basically a pitfall of our legal situation. He sees us in life or death situations wherein we just shake the Magic 8 Ball, fingers-crossed. Please let this work! John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wrote: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. This "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" appeared on another of Ms. Granick's slides to take us out of both the right now and the dark future back to the 1990s to try to stir our sense of ideology about what the internet should be in contrast with what it has become. For all of the clapping the audience did, I still feel helpless. Realistically, how could we as a society reverse course? At least I typed up this article.