New World War

Cancelbunny and Lazarus battle it out on the fontier of cyberspace--and suggest the limits of social contracts.

David Post from the April 1996 issue

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2. Anonymity changes everything. Many of the documents in question were posted to alt.religion.scientology attached to signed messages from identifiable individuals. Many, on the other hand, arrived in the Usenet feed bearing addresses like "[e-mail]," identifying them as having been transmitted through a well-known Finnish "anonymous remailer." Anonymous remailers like anon.penet.fi operate very simply: If Alice wants to send an anonymous message to Bob (or to alt.religion.scientology), she prepares the message and sends it not to the intended recipient but to the anon.penet.fi address (along with forwarding instructions); the remailer simply strips off all of the information from this message related to Alice (and the machines that Alice used to transmit the message), and it then forwards the message--now containing a "return address" indicating only the remailer from which it came--as instructed.

What kind of rules--copyright, trade secret, or any other--can be enforced in a world where individuals can so easily hide their identities? The significance of this question was not lost on CoS officials. In a move that sent shock waves across the Net, many of whose denizens believed that anonymous remailer technology was somehow foolproof, CoS representatives in early 1995 marched in to the offices of the Finnish police and managed to obtain a warrant authorizing the police to search the anon.penet.fi mail logs for the identification information pertaining to an144108.

But while the Finnish police were indeed able to obtain the information they sought from the remailer operator, the Scientologists' tactics here may, inadvertently, simply have speeded up the development of more sophisticated techniques to ensure the security of anonymous messages. By these actions, all Internet users have been made aware that they might want to avoid remailers like anon.penet.fi that retain copies of incoming identification information if they want more protection from the forces of the "real world" in Finland or elsewhere. More important, many of the documents arriving on alt.religion.scientology's doorstep these days--including those coming from the as-yet-unidentified "Scamizdat," an individual (or is it a group of individuals? an arm of some multinational organization?) responsible for a number of postings containing large chunks of the Scientology secret materials--have begun to arrive through a chain of multiple anonymous remailers. This makes it far more difficult to secure the necessary cooperation from local authorities that would be required to trace the messages back to their source(s). And by combining the use of multiple anonymous remailers with use of widely available cryptographic techniques for "scrambling" messages, obtaining identification information becomes even more difficult--approaching, many suggest, complete impossibility.

So now those possessing secret Scientology texts they wish to disseminate can, if they wish, avoid the unpleasant prospect of being hauled into court to be made answerable for their actions, while still accomplishing their goal. As Scamizdat him/her/itself was quoted as saying: "While the Net has its own perpetual struggles among its orthodoxy and revisionists, it strobes into immobility lawyers and money that darken the battles in the ordinary world." Whether or not lawyers are "strobed into immobility" (?), the day of the traditional lawsuit as a means to settle disputes of this kind may indeed be numbered.

3. Information can't be controlled. To be sure, even in the non-virtual world--what MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte has dubbed "the world of atoms"--information is a pretty slippery quantity. But at least there is a measure of possible control over its dissemination and distribution in a world where newsletters can be seized, printing presses impounded, and bookstores boarded up. Perhaps the most obvious implication of the Scientology War is that on the new global network that measure of control has all but vanished.

For example, the Scientologists have been able, on a number of occasions, to obtain court orders allowing them to seize and impound computers on which their allegedly proprietary material was stored. But whatever hardship such actions may impose on the individuals whose machines are taken, the information itself is blissfully undisturbed by assertions of control over physical hard drives and the like, as it continues to speed around the globe unimpeded. Indeed, shortly after the Scientologists were successfully able to impound a number of documents posted through a Dutch Internet Service Provider (known as XS4ALL), those documents--now dubbed the "Anti-Scientology Fact Kit"--appeared on several dozen sites on the World Wide Web, available to all for easy downloading. And if those machines could somehow be made to disappear, new ones would surely take their place. Once information crosses the border into cyberspace, it is uncontrolled and, at least with current technology, uncontrollable; if nothing else, our notion of what constitutes a "secret," trade or otherwise, in this kind of universe is likely to require substantial modification.

4. New weapons will arise. If the weapons that have worked in the past in the ongoing battle to control information flow prove ultimately toothless, the Scientology War has already given us a glimpse of what some of the new weapons might look like. Most primitive is the technique known on the Net as "spamming"--bombarding an area of the Net with an inordinately high number of messages. In the early days of the Scientology War, CoS staffer Elaine Siegel suggested in a memo flooding the Net with positive messages about Scientology as a counter to posted criticism. "Imagine 40 to 50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days; we'll just run the SPs" ["suppressive persons," in Scientology lingo] right off the system. It will be quite simple...to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into." The CoS has denied that this was ever official CoS policy, but in any event the church's critics quickly deployed countermeasures: software programs known as "kill files" that instruct their computers not to display any messages from particular e-mail addresses that may appear in the Usenet feeds, thus making it far more difficult for anyone to enlist an army of spammers trying to disrupt ongoing conversations.

Subsequently a more sophisticated series of weapons made its way onto this battleground. The software that allows the Usenet discussions to proceed has a built-in cancellation function, which allows any person posting a message to a Usenet discussion group to send out a subsequent cancel command that propagates around the Usenet network from machine to machine and instructs each participating machine to ignore the user's previously posted message. Designed to allow users to cancel their own postings, this command can be manipulated, by widely available procedures, to allow you to cancel someone else's message, i.e., to forge a cancel command to make it look as though it came from the original poster.

And thus it was that in late 1994, postings began to vanish from alt.religion.scientology, occasionally with an explanation that the postings had been "canceled because of copyright infringement." To this day, it is not known who was behind the deployment of these "cancelbots," as they are known. Again, the CoS disclaimed responsibility, and the anti-Scientology crowd began to refer to this anonymous participant simply as the "Cancelbunny," a tongue-in-cheek reference to both the Energizer bunny and to a well-known Net inhabitant, the Cancelmoose, who has taken it upon himself (itself? themselves?) to set up a cancelbot-issuing process to deal with other kinds of spamming incidents. But whoever or whatever the Cancelbunny may be, its efforts were quickly met by the development of yet another software weapon, appropriately dubbed "Lazarus," that resurrects canceled messages (or, more accurately, simply alerts the original poster, and all other participants in the newsgroup, that a specific message has been canceled, leaving it up to the original poster to reinstate the message if he or she was not the party that issued the cancel command).

What is happening here? Surely the center of gravity of our law-making and law-enforcement apparatus is shifting away from the familiar rules and instruments that have served us, whether for good or ill, in the world of atoms. That's the polite version. Less politely, cyberspace looks a lot like Hobbes's quasi-mythical construct, the state of nature, where the inhabitants have "no common Power to feare" and where there is "no government at all." Of course, law and an ordered society will emerge from out of the state of nature--or at least so Hobbes (and Locke, and most of the other Enlightenment philosophers) believed--by means of a "social contract" voluntarily entered into by the inhabitants. Indeed, only law that emerges from something resembling this process--only law as to which the "consent of the governed" has been obtained, in Jefferson's phrase --is a truly legitimate exercise of state power.

There has always been a strong fictional element to using this notion of a social contract as a rationale for a sovereign's legitimacy. When exactly did you or I consent to be bound by the U.S. Constitution? At best, that consent can only be inferred indirectly, from our continued presence within the U.S. borders--the love-it-or-leave-it, vote-with-your-feet theory of political legitimacy. But by that token, is Saddam Hussein's rule legitimate, as least as to those Iraqis who have "consented" in this fashion? Have the Zairois consented to Mobutu's rule? In the world of atoms, we simply cannot ignore the fact that real movement of real people is not always so easy, and that most people can hardly be charged with having chosen the jurisdiction in which they live or the laws that they are made to obey.

But in cyberspace, there is an infinite amount of space, and movement between online communities is entirely frictionless. Here, there really is the opportunity to obtain consent to a social contract. Virtual communities can be established with their own particular rule sets; power to maintain a degree of order and to banish wrongdoers can be lodged, or not, in particular individuals or groups; and those who find the rules oppressive or unfair may simply leave and join another community (or start their own).

That potential--not the availability of video on demand, or interactive games, or any of the other technological wonders--is what makes the emergence of cyberspace a truly extraordinary political event. The consent of the governed can move from a theoretical construct to a real principle of governance. No longer will we need to theorize about the content of the laws that people would choose if they were free to do so; the Net will reveal those preferences for us by means of the invisible hand of a worldwide open market for laws, with communities competing for our adherence. So if the inhabitants of alt.religion.scientology want to have a community where copyright is ignored, why should we interfere, since anyone who finds that notion unattractive can simply remain outside its borders and move to other communities--the Microsoft Network, say--where other, more protective rules are in place?

The answer, of course, is well illustrated by the Scientology War itself. After all, the Scientologists were not willing participants in this community. They did not choose to post their documents to alt.religion.scientology subject to this community's rules. In other words, each community's rules will have some spillover effects on the inhabitants of other communities, both within and without the boundary between cyberspace and the world of atoms. Sovereigns wielding power in the real world do not and cannot permit individuals from within other jurisdictions to lob explosives over their borders, and it is too facile to believe that they will permit these virtual communities to do so either.

Cyberspace may indeed be difficult for territorially based authorities to control, but we court danger, and put this remarkable experiment in political life at risk, if we assume that it is impossible to control from within the non-virtual world. We have managed to stave off the Orwellian nightmare up to this point, but it is by no means foreordained that we can continue to do so. Cyberspace must, in short, take its place among the community of nations. This will require the development of a degree of mutual recognition and respect on both sides of the border between the world of atoms and the world of bits.

Existing sovereigns must defer to the inhabitants of this new place regarding those matters in which the legitimate and unique interests of those inhabitants are paramount; it is the inhabitants of cyberspace, after all, who are in the best position to determine the varying shapes of a copyright law that can truly take account of the strange features of this new informational landscape. Any attempt to require slavish adherence to a copyright law designed for physical objects in an atom-bound world should be fiercely resisted. But the inhabitants of cyberspace, too, must develop mechanisms to recognize and respect the legitimate interests of individuals outside their borders. The challenge is clear and almost overwhelmingly complex, but we cannot fail to meet it lest we lose this opportunity, which may be unique in human history, to design a world in which people are finally free to live their lives as they see fit.