For if this is selling your soul, then trust that there are truly wonderful benefits to be had. Imagine a world where all your documents exist on the Internet in a “virtual private network,” accessible by you from any machine on the Net and perfectly secured by a biometric key.¹ You could sit at any machine, call up your documents, do your work, answer your e-mail, and move on—everything perfectly secure and safe, locked up by a key certified by the markings in your eye.

This is the easiest and most efficient architecture to imagine. And it comes at (what some think) is a very low price—authentication. Just say who you are, plug into an architecture that certifies facts about you, give your identity away, and all this could be yours.

There was an awful movie released in 1996 called Independence Day.The story is about an invasion by aliens. When the aliens first appear, many earthlings are eager to welcome them. For these idealists, there is no reason to assume hostility, and so a general joy spreads among the hopeful across the globe in reaction to what before had seemed just a dream: really cool alien life.

Soon after the aliens appear, however, and well into the celebration, the mood changes. Quite suddenly, Earth leaders realize that the intentions of these aliens are not friendly. Indeed, their intentions are quite hostile. Within a very short time of this realization, Earth is captured. (Only Jeff Goldblum realizes what’s going on beforehand, but he always gets it first.)

My story here is similar (though I hope not as awful). We have been as welcoming and joyous about the Net as the earthlings were about the aliens in Independence Day;we have accepted its growth in our lives without questioning its final effect. But at some point, we too will come to see a potential threat. We will see that cyberspace does not guarantee its own freedom but instead carries an extraordinary potential for control. And then we will ask: How should we respond?

I have spent many pages making a point that some may find obvious. But I have found that, for some reason, the people for whom this point should be most important do not get it. Too many take this freedom as nature. Too many believe liberty will take care of itself. Too many miss how different architectures embed different values, and that only by selecting these different architectures—these different codes—can we establish and promote our values.

Now it should be apparent why I began this book with an account of the rediscovery of the role for self-government, or control, that has marked recent history in post-Communist Europe. Market forces encourage architectures of identity to facilitate online commerce. Government needs to do very little—indeed, nothing at all—to induce just this sort of development. The market forces are too powerful; the potential here is too great. If anything is certain, it is that an architecture of identity will develop on the Net—and thereby fundamentally transform its regulability.

But isn’t it clear that government should do something to make this architecture consistent with important public values? If commerce is going to define the emerging architectures of cyberspace, isn’t the role of government to ensure that those public values that are not in commerce’s interest are also built into the architecture?

Architecture is a kind of law: it determines what people can and cannot do. When commercial interests determine the architecture, they create a kind of privatized law. I am not against private enterprise; my strong presumption in most cases is to let the market produce. But isn’t it absolutely clear that there must be limits to this presumption? That public values are not exhausted by the sum of what IBM might desire? That what is good for America Online is not necessarily good for America?

Footnotes

¹ On virtual private networks, see Smith, Internet Cryptography, chs. 6, 7; on biometric techniques for security, see Trust in Cyberspace, edited by Fred B. Schneider (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), 123–24, 133–34. Edit Delete