I’m right up there with Evgeny in Slate, until page 2:
[ed: Context: Heap blamed, Media Blamed … ]
But I don’t think that Heap’s deceptive advertising and the media’s poor watchdogging are the main culprits here. What made Haystack possible was the U.S. government’s urge to embrace the power of the Internet to democratize the world—and to do so as fast as possible, without first designing appropriate procedures and regulations to guide its digital operations.
Haystack had to leap several bureaucratic hurdles to become operational. Because of U.S. sanctions on Iran, any American entity—such as Heap’s Censorship Research Center—that wants to export goods to the country is supposed to go through a rigorous review process. The exporter also must be granted a special license by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the U.S. Treasury Department, with the Departments of State and Commerce often having a part to play as well. According to that August Newsweek article, Haystack “caught the attention of the State Department, and it was fast-tracked for speedy approval.” While a State Department official told me no such “fast-tracking” took place, it seems impossible that any government agency examined Haystack’s claims closely or that anyone with knowledge of computer security scrutinized the software. […]
I find this statement appalling in two distinct ways:
- The parochiality of “What made Haystack possible was the U.S. government’s urge…” – I haven’t seen such subtext of “all technology comes from America and for the good of the world the US Government should regulate it and only let the good stuff out” since the midst of the Crypto Wars, back when various three-letter-agencies were trying to foist Clipper and Skipjack upon the world. For sure you don’t want American (or any) companies sending thumbscrews to Tehran, but this is software and thus a form of “speech” – had Haystack been fully open-source and ideally hosted outside the USA there would not have been a regulatory issue in the first place.
- Secondly – for me, more ominous – is that Evgeny seems to be suggesting that a Government department with some finite amount of resources and rigour is capable of distinguishing between good software and bad software. That’s not how it works – the metric applied is “is this something we’re willing to permit?”
For the sake of innovation a pro-regulation attitude is something of which the Internet needs to see less – regulation is a bad proposition for the software industry, especially for open-source; Haystack/Heap was foolish to embrace both closedness and regulatory oversight in pursuit of credibility, but having sought one that he was given a license should be irrelevant in so very many ways.
And I believe Evgeny would do well to do some background reading, starting with DJB vs USA.
Leave a Reply