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SAN FRANCISCO -- Strict digital copyright laws risk turning the information age into digital dark ages, the war against spam is faltering, and the nation verges on a revolution over health-information privacy--but it's not all bad news at the tenth Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference here this week.

The annual gathering of civil libertarians, free speech advocates, and legal specialists turned to concerns about how today's decisions on how to treat digital information will change the future.

Unexpected Hazards

"If a researcher or historian, 20 or 30 or 100 years from now, can't study our time because of [Digital Rights Management] technology, then there will simply be no knowledge about this time," warned Karen Coyle, a library technology expert. Proposed hardware controls to protect copyrights today could prevent access to today's discs by future devices, she suggests.

She raised the issue during debate about future effects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and harsh digital rights management controls on intellectual property.

Data records could become securely entombed in their own protective technology, agreed John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many of the attendees decried the incompatibility of the DMCA, DRM technologies, and "fair use" rights. These precepts have clashed in several circumstances, such as when academic researchers were discouraged from presenting scientific research detailing weaknesses in encryption schemes to protect digital music.

U.S. policies are gaining an international reputation, noted an EFF attorney. Robin Gross cited last year's arrest of programmer Dmitry Sklyarov for distributing software in violation of the DMCA.

"The state of Russia has issued a travel advisory about the dangers of travel to the United States, especially computer programmers, who may be arrested," Gross said.

Diverse Concerns

The only people charged under the DMCA have been easy targets, noted Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University. "So far the targets they've gone after haven't been pirates," she said. "The MPAA sued people who posted or linked to a tool that let you watch a movie, and the scientists and the journalists who write about them--that's hardly the kind of act we think of as piracy."

Discussion of the chilling effect of laws like the DMCA and the more recent Patriot Act dominated the sessions at the four-day conference. Attendees noted the delicate balance between national security and individual privacy in the wake of September 11. They also considered how international data collection helped in the war crimes case against former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act may (or may not) protect privacy, and the challenges faced by election officials charged with developing more fraud-resistant, less failure-prone voting technology.

Among the "celebrity" government representatives addressing attendees were Timothy J. Muris, chair of the Federal Trade Commission; Larry Irving, former head of the National Technology Infrastructure Administration; and two of California's most pro-privacy political figures, attorney general Bill Lockyer and state Senator Jackie Speier.

Muris described recent federal efforts to enforce existing antispam laws and craft new restraints.

"A lot of spam is deceptive, and it's a good thing we're going after [spammers], but we're never going to eliminate all the bad ones," Muris said after his speech.

Pioneers Applauded

In addition to speakers and conference debates, the conference hosts two annual awards ceremonies that acknowledge noteworthy individuals and groups for their work for (or against) privacy and freedom issues.

The EFF Pioneer Awards recognized three individuals whose work furthered the cause of privacy or freedom in the public interest: Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse site; San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor; and Jon Johansen, creator of the DeCSS program, which deconstructed DVD encryption.

Johansen, who has been charged in his native Norway with violating antihacking laws, was warned by EFF attorneys not to come to the United States to accept the award lest he be charged under the DMCA. Instead, the teenager sent a digital video acceptance speech, prerecorded in his living room with his desktop computer humming in the background.

The assembled crowd, many of them wearing special EFF "secret decoder rings" distributed at the door, listened to the Scandinavian teenager briefly recount how he wrote the program. Johansen had bought a DVD drive and movies for his PC, then realized he couldn't play them under Linux. He wrote the program to enable Linux users to view DVD movies on their PCs.

Villains Acknowledged

At the other end of the privacy scale, the 20th Big Brother Awards sponsored by Privacy International skewered the people, companies, officials, and programs considered to have damaged civil liberties, freedom, and privacy.

"These are really the unsung villains of the corporate world," said Jason Catlett of Junkbusters, an antispam activist and presenter. This year's ceremony featured one fewer award, however. "We had to give up the people's choice category because it kept coming up Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft," Catlett said. "Microsoft truly monopolized the category and so we had to give it up."

The award itself is a stylized sculpture of a man's head, on its side, with an army boot pressed against the upward side of the face. "Winners" are encouraged to attend, though none has ever accepted the award at the ceremony--including this year.

Attorney General John Ashcroft was recognized as Worst Government Official, and an actor dressed as Darth Vader accepted the award on his behalf. The CAPPS airline passenger profiling system won the Worst Government Program prize.

In the Worst Corporate Invader category, Oracle and CEO Larry Ellison took the prize.

"In the tradition of the loud-mouthed billionaire, we have Larry Ellison, who said in a recent interview in The New York Times, 'Privacy is already gone,'" Catlett said. Ellison volunteered to donate Oracle database technology (but not upgrades or consulting services) to the United States to develop a national ID system as an antiterrorism effort.

The Lifetime Menace Award went to Admiral John Poindexter, former defense department official convicted of felonies for shredding documents in the Iran-Contra scandal, and credited with coining the term "plausible deniability."

Poindexter, recipient of a presidential pardon from former president Bush, recently reemerged as head of the Defense Department's Project Genoa, described by Privacy International's David Banisar as "an Echelon for all corporate computer databases."

"He was just a real star," Banisar added, "and if we had Big Brother awards back in the '80s, we'd have given him one back then."

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