Ramblemuse Touch Points

Years ago, I became fascinated by James Burke’s series Connections. Burke had the ability to string a chain of interrelations from the problem of pumping water out of silver mines in medieval Czechoslovakia to the construction of the atomic bomb. This post runs in that tradition, going from RIAA lawsuits to a potential consequence of making the dissemination of child porn easier.

For anyone who follows RSS feeds on technical sites such as Ars Technica or slashdot, it’s hard to avoid encountering news releases on RIAA lawsuits and resulting countersuits. A top slashdot entry for today, for example, links to a blog post by Wired’s David Kravets covering RIAA statements made during the Jammie Thomas trial. Robert Scoble has some comments on immediate side-effects of RIAA actions in moving us altogether away from CDs. The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides comments and cases in opposition to RIAA actions. RIAA Radar points people to RIAA-free music.

There are strong parallels between the approach taken by the RIAA and the military concept of rapid domination called shock and awe. It is basically a strategy to create sufficient fear and terror that an opponent’s resistance crumbles quickly.

The objectives of this example are to achieve Shock and Awe and hence compliance or capitulation through very selective, utterly brutal and ruthless, and rapid application of force to intimidate. The fundamental values or lives are the principal targets and the aim is to convince the majority that resistance is futile by targeting and harming the few. — Ullman & Wade, Chapter 2

The side-effect is to engender civilian animosity and tacit support within the population for any subsequence insurgency, something we have become all to familiar with in Iraq. The RIAA policy of trying to shake several thousand dollars out of parents of students is one that makes it easy, even for people like myself who want to see musicians get their just payments, to have a feeling of hostility. I’d as soon spit on the sidewalk and cross to the other side of the street than share a sidewalk with a person from the RIAA. Such feelings often have a long half-life; one counted in decades. Parents may form a disparate clan, but a clan easily united in viewing the RIAA as a force of occupation. Once again taking a page from John Sterman’s Business Dynamics, actions often have unintended consequences that become more problematic than the original situation. Shock and awe may intimidate for the moment, but the hostility generated is for the long-term. For the upcoming generation the RIAA won’t stand for music, but for malevolence. There’s a precept in neurolinguistic-programming (NLP) that the meaning of the message is how it’s received, not how it’s transmitted. Now we just need a few Flash-adept cartoonists such a Mark Fiore, to make the point in the way that Fiore does for politics and double-talk on torture.

In contrast to the RIAA’s shock and awe approach, one can consider French Officer David Galula’s experiences in counter-insurgency and Pacification in Algeria. I had mentioned that in a prior blog. There’s a big emphasis on winning the trust and good-will of the locals. Galula essentially created a business model that was far more beneficial for villagers to work within than to resist.

Apart from the prospect of lots of social ill-will and increasing legal counter-challenges, the RIAA lawsuits will only spur more bright people to make it technically more difficult for the RIAA. The same path of technical developments are already interesting to those seeking catastrophe resistant distributed storage and censor-resistant information distribution. The NY Times had an article on Cleversafe, a secure, distributed-storage implementation. Yochai Benkler wrote an extensive article reviewing Peer Production of Survivable Critical Infrastructures. Some of the encryption concepts are based on threshold secret-sharing algorithms, including a 1979 paper by Adi Shamir on How to Share a Secret. The implementation steps in this direction, designed for censor-resistant distribution of information, already exist in technologies such as Freenet and GNUnet. If it is necessary for information to be anonymous, even to those who provide the storage for it, then it can and is being accomplished. Much as Iraq insurgents responded to shock and awe with better and better IEDs, we can expect better and better anonymous networks.

One can only be sad that the use of such technology becomes as necessary in the United States as in places more usually considered to be dangerous for sharing information. We also, in the manner of James Burke, complete the trip. A network that is censor-resistant is also information neutral. As noted in the Freenet FAQ, the expansion of storage capability dedicated to such a facility also expands the capabilities of those wishing to anonymously store less savory information, such as child-porn. Another nice piece of work for which the RIAA may become remembered as a driving force.