[wordup] Geeks in government: A good idea?

[Adam Shand]

Isn't this a lovely heart warming quote ...

 "I wouldn't say it's wise for the technology industry to ignore
  government. But individual tech people are probably better off
  spending their energy writing code than being part of the political
  process." 

I need to find something happy to report.  Will someone find me some
good news please?

Adam.

From: http://news.com.com/2010-1071-949275.html?tag=politech

Geeks in government: A good idea?
By Declan McCullagh
August 12, 2002, 4:00 AM PT

WASHINGTON--There's a lot for a politically aware geek to be alarmed
about nowadays.

Big companies are wielding copyright threats to stifle legitimate
security research. Hollywood is itching to hack your PC. Your privacy is
vanishing as fast as Al Gore's 2004 presidential hopes. And the merry
band of technophobes in Congress is just getting started.

Too often, though, programmers, system administrators and other IT pros
become understandably outraged by the latest attempts to restrict
technology--and react by doing precisely the wrong thing. They set up
irate Web sites, launch online petition drives and tell all their
friends to write to their congressional representatives.

Here's the bitter truth: These efforts are mostly a waste of time. Sure,
they may make you feel better, but they're not the way to win. 

 Take the widely reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Even
though Slashdotters have spent years buzzing around in circles over DMCA
lawsuits brought by the Justice Department against Dmitry Sklyarov, and
the big movie studios against 2600 magazine, Congress simply doesn't
care.

Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee
on intellectual property, says the law is "performing the way we hoped."
No bill has been introduced in Congress to rescind the DMCA for one
simple reason: Official Washington loves the law precisely as much as
hackers and programmers despise it. Some of Washington's most powerful
insiders even gathered in May to toast the DMCA with glasses of
champagne.

Things aren't getting better. The House of Representatives voted 385-3
last month to approve life prison sentences for malicious computer
hackers. The Senate approved the USA Patriot Act, which expanded police
ability to perform Internet surveillance without a court order, by a
98-1 vote last fall.

Trust me, a few--even a few thousand--peeved e-mail messages won't
change vote totals that lopsided. (Did you know the Senate approved the
DMCA unanimously?) Washington's political class is used to ignoring
frenzied yowls from far more organized and well-funded groups than
"geektivists" can hope to emulate anytime soon. 

 Instead, technologists should be doing what comes naturally: inventing
technology that outpaces the law and could even make new laws
irrelevant.

"They're much better off doing what they do best, writing code," says
Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think
tank in San Francisco. "That's where their competitive advantage lies."

Put another way, who made a bigger difference: Yet another
letter-scribbling activist or Phil Zimmermann, who wrote the Pretty Good
Privacy (PGP) encryption software? How about Shawn Fanning, the man who
created Napster? Or the veterans of the Internet Engineering Task Force,
which oversees the fundamental protocols of the Internet?

It's true that such an approach isn't for everyone. Tech companies, of
course, need to take a defensive stance. "There's a difference between
geeks and the technology industry," Arrison says. "I wouldn't say it's
wise for the technology industry to ignore government. But individual
tech people are probably better off spending their energy writing code
than being part of the political process."

Adam Back, an encryption researcher living in Canada, says that he tries
to ignore day-to-day developments in the news. "What's the point?" Back
asks. "You know whatever they are working on will be pretty much
exclusively damaging to Net freedoms and personal liberty. New laws are
almost exclusively damaging to personal freedoms these days."

"By participating in the lobby process, you're effectively giving money
to the political system," Back says. "It's effectively a favor-trading
system where the politician wins and the geek loses...You're better of
spending time writing code and influencing Internet protocols to work
towards making the politicians irrelevant in the future."

That's the motto of the Cypherpunks, a group of
programmers-turned-activists who first met in Silicon Valley a decade
ago and graced the second cover of Wired magazine. They recognized that
technology is a more effective tool than the political process to stop
governments from overreaching. (An example: Unlike Supreme Court
justices who may change their views on privacy, the algorithms embedded
in encryption software won't stop working because of political
pressure.)

Lance Cottrell is a former Cypherpunk who founded Anonymizer.com, a San
Diego company that announced an improved fee-based anonymous browsing
service last week.

"I'm of two minds," Cottrell says. "On one hand, I think it's important
that the (technologist) perspective be aired. But I think that rather
few geeks are temperamentally suited for lobbying. I think there's a
cultural tendency toward bluntness and directness, which is not the
bread and butter of politics."

Before starting his company, Cottrell wrote the free mixmaster software
that allows people to send e-mail anonymously." People can sit around
saying, 'Is it a good idea to have anonymity or not?'" Cottrell said.
"But if you actually implement it, you can say, 'How do you want to deal
with this reality?' It's not that my writing the code created the
reality. The possibility was always there. But my writing the code made
it impossible to ignore."