True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (19 page)

Finally, many pointed out that commerce and networks were now global. What, they argued, would convince any foreign government, corporation, or individual to use cryptographic systems that they
knew
could be trivially tapped by the U.S. government? (Even worse, the legal restraints against tapping U.S. citizens would be absent for noncitizens.) Hence, foreign entities would not use Clipper—and U.S. communications would either be cut off to them, or would have to use something else anyway.

The Clipper proposal, doomed on all fronts, has for the most part dropped from public sight—though it is far from abandoned. And in parallel with that are a host of other efforts to ensure that the government can continue to spy on its citizens.

Take “Operation Root Canal,” the FBI name for a concerted public-relations campaign to convince Congress and the public, again via the “four bogeymen,” that modern telephone switches made it impossible for the FBI to do its job unless they were redesigned to be trivial to tap. It succeeded!

The success of Operation Root Canal was in the passage of the Digital Telephony Bill, which mandates that those who manufacture telephone switching systems must build in the ability to tap,
remotely,
the digital signal stream passing through the switch for any line desired. The cost of retrofitting existing switches was conservatively estimated at half a billion dollars (that's right, billion). The FBI, in bleating that it could no longer tap phone lines that went through digital switches (though—oddly—the
switch
has no problems with them), has now acquired the ability to tap from anywhere—whereas before they actually had to go to the switch and hang some cables. Of course, this means that any phone phreak who used to blue-box his way into calling around the world for free will presumably be able to do the same thing. Even worse, consider the fact that the U.S. is the major exporter of telephone switchgear to the rest of the world. Many governments have far fewer safeguards of their citizens' privacy than ours; many are simultaneously quite repressive yet are also trading partners with the U.S. Because all U.S.-made switches must now come tap-ready, we have given this ability, effectively for free, to these other governments as well, with no further R&D required of them. Is this really such a good idea?

To date, the FBI has consistently stonewalled FOIA requests to reveal exactly
why
it claims it needs phone switches to be modified. Such stonewalling is illegal, of course—FOIA requests have legally mandated time-to-respond criteria built into them (ten days from initial request, plus a possible additional ten days if the request requires an unusual number of documents to be inspected), but the FBI has no compunctions about ignoring them. For instance, on October 4, 1994, in answer to a lawsuit filed by EPIC, U.S. District Judge Charles Richey rejected an FBI claim that answering an FOIA request related to the Digital Telephony Bill would take
five years
—until June 1999—to process, saying to the government's attorney, “Call Director Freeh and tell him I said this matter can be taken care of in an hour and a half,” and said he was “stunned” by their request. Nonetheless, such rebukes are not in themselves sufficient to force agencies to comply with the legally-mandated timetables, since judges lack the necessary enforcement powers. One of the few FOIA requests to succeed so far (in 1993, by CPSR) revealed 185 pages of memos in which
not one
FBI office reported any problems doing tap interceptions due to modern phone switch technology. Yet the FBI maintains it needs to increase tappability radically, and is still stonewalling FOIA requests on the issue until 1999 at the earliest, despite Judge Richey's rebuke.

Records
do
indicate that the FBI does under a thousand wiretaps a year, nationwide. At half a billion dollars to make the modifications, this means that each completed wiretap is worth half a
million
dollars. Even ignoring the fact that the modifications, once in place, are permanent and do not need to be renewed yearly (hence dropping the effective “cost per tap”), this hardly seems cost-effective.

But the FBI isn't finished yet. It published in the Federal Register (October 16, 1995, Volume 60 Number 199) its plans to require that
one percent of all lines be simultaneously tappable
in major urban centers. After public outcry, it retrenched, claiming misquotation (in the
New York Times
article of November 2, 1995, page A1), and that it
really
wanted only one percent of all
calls in progress,
not lines—as if this factor-of-ten difference still really made a difference. If the FBI actually took advantage of the DT bill to enforce 1% (or even, as it said later, 0.1%) tappability, it could monitor a hundred million lines and billions of conversations yearly—for a
millionfold
increase in the number of intercepts currently being conducted. Computer-based keyword-spotting of speech has continued to improve (the author used to work on such systems, many years ago); combined with massive tappability, the FBI could scan millions of conversations a year for those talking about something it might want to follow up. If this isn't invasion of privacy on a heretofore unimaginable scale, what is it?

Conclusion—and how to stay informed

The plot of “True Names” depends on secure communications and secret identities against even the most determined of opponents—national governments. Some have compared the ability to have private discussions to the right to bear arms: the last-ditch defense against oppression. The ability to assemble and to speak privately has a long history in public policy debates; so does anonymity (the Federalist Papers were mostly written under pseudonyms, and the Supreme Court has upheld the values of anonymous speech). Yet current political trends show that Vinge's extrapolation, in which normal people have no privacy and no hope of fighting governmental excesses, is right on target—and these trends are making a mockery of one's True Name, and are subjecting citizens to a panopticon of unimaginable proportions.

This screed has given a taste of what it's like out there in the politics of cryptography, and perhaps where we're going. I've made a number of assertions, mostly without references. You can find all of these—and many more—in the online reference libraries of a number of organizations. Prominent among them are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Voters Telecommunications Watch, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, all of which have vast numbers of pages available on the World Wide Web, and all of which also operate newsgroups, announcement lists, and discussion lists on these issues. Despite the recent success of the Communications Decency Act (which tries to mandate that, if one happens to be viewing bits instead of ink smeared on paper, adults may read only what is fit for small children), these archives and lists are still accessible and are the first place to turn for comprehensive coverage of these issues.

A great deal of the information regarding many of the proposals discussed above was obtained via FOIA requests. Most of them required lengthy legal battles and multiple lawsuits to obtain—neither NIST, nor the NSA, nor the FBI have any sort of record of responsiveness on these issues, despite the clear wording of the Act that such unresponsiveness is illegal. EFF, VTW, et al. have expended a great deal of money in court fighting such delaying tactics on the part of numerous federal agencies.

In addition to these explicit advocacy groups, a number of other Internet discussion groups cover these issues extensively, and all of them are archived, too. The major players here are the RISKS Digest moderated by Peter Neumann (which discusses risks and benefits of computer systems more generally), the Privacy Forum Digest moderated by Lauren Weinstein, and the Computer Underground Digest.

Of the numerous conferences devoted to these issues, one can hardly do better than the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, founded in 1991. Every year, it brings together law enforcement, computer professionals, and journalists on all sides of the issues in a lively debate about civil liberties, access to technology, and the interaction of computers and society.

If you care about your True Name, it's time to get informed—and to take action.

Habitat: Reports from an Online Community

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat
Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer

The public at large views the Internet as a variety of things: an opportunity for commerce, a means of communication, a bulletin board … and sometimes a community. But before the public at large was aware of the Internet, there were already online communities, and one of the most intriguing early experiments was Habitat, sponsored by Lucasfilm. Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer offer the true insiders' view of the problems and solutions they discovered in designing and then implementing this fascinating, exciting entity, as co-creators of Habitat. Randy Farmer, who was “Oracle” for the project, also shares observations he made while interacting with the members of the developing, emerging community. Though Habitat was a project of the late 1980s, his anecdotal reportage is still compelling in its snapshots of a living social organism.

“True Names” is set in “cyberspace” (though the word cyberspace hadn't yet been coined when “True Names” was published), but that was a work of fiction. Habitat is an example of a virtual community that uses some of the tropes found in “True Names” and makes them real. The first two of these articles appeared in the early 1990s; the final one appeared on the Web in the mid-1990s.

 

 

 

Introduction

Lucasfilm's Habitat was created by Lucasfilm Games, a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, in association with Quantum Computer Services, Inc. It was arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large-scale commercial multi-user virtual environment. A far cry from many laboratory research efforts based on sophisticated interface hardware and tens of thousands of dollars per user of dedicated computer power, Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive—some would say “toy”—home computer to support user interaction. In spite of these somewhat plebeian underpinnings, Habitat is ambitious in its scope. The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.

The Habitat project proved to be a rich source of insights into the nitty-gritty reality of actually implementing a serious, commercially viable cyberspace environment. Our experiences developing the Habitat system, and managing the virtual world that resulted, offer a number of interesting and important lessons for prospective cyberspace architects. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of these lessons. We hope that the next generation of builders of virtual worlds can benefit from our experiences and (especially) from our mistakes.

The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented. While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies—DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on—both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can't help having a nagging sense that it's all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, is a peripheral concern.

What Is Habitat?

Habitat is a “multi-player online virtual environment” (its purpose is to be an entertainment medium; consequently, the users are called “players”). Each player uses his or her home computer as a frontend, communicating over a commercial packet-switching data network to a centralized backend system. The frontend provides the user interface, generating a real-time animated display of what is going on and translating input from the player into requests to the backend. The backend maintains the world model, enforcing the rules and keeping each player's frontend informed about the constantly changing state of the universe. The backend enables the players to interact not only with the world but with each other.

Habitat was inspired by a long tradition of “computer hacker science fiction,” notably Vernor Vinge's novella
True Names,
as well as many fond childhood memories of games of make-believe, more recent memories of role-playing games and the like, and numerous other influences too thoroughly blended to pinpoint. To this we add a dash of silliness, a touch of cyberpunk, and a predilection for object-oriented programming.

The initial incarnation of Habitat uses a Commodore 64 for the frontend. One of the questions we are asked most frequently is “Why the Commodore 64?” Many people somehow get the impression that this was a technical decision, but the real explanation has to do with business, not technology. Habitat was initially developed by Lucasfilm as commercial product for QuantumLink, an online service (then) exclusively for owners of the Commodore 64. At the time we started (1985), the Commodore 64 was the mainstay of the recreational computing market. Since then it has declined dramatically in both its commercial and technical significance. However, when we began the project, we didn't get a choice of platforms. The nature of the deal was such that both the Commodore 64 for the frontend and the existing QuantumLink host system (a brace of Stratus fault-tolerant minicomputers) for the backend were givens.