What happened to the stories of 2001?

This Tech Talk column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 33, No. 17 (January 24, 2002). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

Ever since September 11th, we’ve focused almost exclusively on the WTC attacks, the undeclared war in Afghanistan, speculation over possible future targets of the War on Terror, and, of course, Osama bin Laden. What about the stories that were big in the first three quarters of 2001? Chandra Levy has certainly fallen out of fashion. Bill Clinton hasn’t managed to attract much attention. No one even mentions the SSSCA any more.

SSSCA? Huh? Even with Huntsville’s heavy population of refugees (and current POWs) of government contracting—armed with gray-matter libraries of TLAs (that’s Three-Letter Acronyms for you novices)—there aren’t many folks in Huntspatch who know what SSSCA is or even stands for. That’s intentional. (No, the esteemed author won’t be advancing a new conspiracy theory.)

The SSSCA is the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, proposed legislation that is quietly snaking its way through the catacombs of the federal legislative process. As is common practice with legislation at all levels, the SSSCA has a nice-sounding summary: “To provide for private sector development of workable security system standards and a certification protocol that could be implemented and enforced by Federal regulations, and for other purposes.” The libertarian in me bristles at the phrase “Federal regulations,” but I’m also a computer scientist and a consumer, which means I’m very happy to think about improvements to the sorry state of software.

Marketing is all about peddling hope, and in these days of big government, even short titles of legislation market to us. Personal finance author and radio host Dave Ramsey writes about the ways that marketing seeks to create discomfort in the consumer and to make him think, “My life won’t be complete if I don’t have that.” Yes, that’s a cynical point of view, but it’s justified. Earlier, I mentioned that, as a computer scientist and a consumer, the idea of better software is very appealing. The SSSCA’s short title makes me—as citizens, we’re consumers of proposed legislation—think about how bad software is. Then (I’m happy to say) rationality takes over, and I realize that if legislating Utopia into existence were possible, the Democratic Party would be immensely more popular.

Dig into the text of the bill, and you’ll find that the panopticon is upon us. (“Panopticon” is the name for a prison design devised by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century in which it was possible to see what was going on everywhere inside the prison—with the interesting feature that at no time could prisoners ever be certain whether someone was watching.) The SSSCA would require manufacturers of consumer electronics (PCs, PDAs, DVD players, and so on) and the software inside them to use federally mandated “security measures” that are really copy-prevention measures. Those who would dare to disable the security measures or distribute copyrighted material without them would be guilty of a felony and could face up to five years in prison and a half-million dollar fine.

Yes, copyright violation is wrong, but it’s also wrong for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to attempt to subvert our fair-use rights, entire industries, and the federal government to cover for their mistakes. Our big-government parties, i.e., the Republicans and the Democrats, have combined for a deadly combination. The Democrats insist that we need new regulations to “curb the abuses of Corporate America,” and that usurpation of power gives the corporations the ability to codify Big Brother madness such as the SSSCA. Harry Browne likes to say, “Give the government the weapons to fight your enemy and it will use them against you,” and the proposed SSSCA is just another scrap of the preponderance of the evidence favoring the truth of his claim.