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Sunday Times 23/7/2000: "Fixing the bugs in our democrac

------- Forwarded message follows ------- From: "Caspar Bowden" <cb@fipr.org> To: "FIPR News Archive \(E-mail\)" <news_archive@fipr.org>, "Ukcrypto \(E-mail\)" <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk> Subject: Sunday Times 23/7/2000: "Fixing the bugs in our democracy" Date sent: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 02:34:16 +0100 Send reply to: ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/07/23/stidordor02004.html Fixing the bugs in our democracy

There are moments when it's not easy being British in the US of A. My American hosts have been watching Mel Gibson fight King George's tyrannous redcoats in The Patriot, which I gather has just opened in Britain, and they hold me personally responsible. My only defence has been to sneak off to the search engines and try to dig up a few counterbarbs. My favourite is from our great man of letters Samuel Johnson, who thought it very odd at the time that the greatest "yelps for liberty" came from American slave drivers.

Be that as it may, one has to accord a grudging respect to the founding fathers: in many ways, they represent the finest tradition of the British gentleman amateur. The Declaration of Independence was written in an evening by a young man, Thomas Jefferson, in a small parlour rented from a bricklayer. The constitution was largely the work of Ben Franklin, a printer by trade - not at all the right sort to start hacking representative democracy into a parliament composed of nobility and gentry. One can only imagine what the experts at Westminster thought of this unprofessional refactoring of their grand traditions.

I got some idea, though, watching the reactions of their descendants, when the hackers of the internet set about the Blair government's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. Plenty has now been written about this horrendous bill; enough, one would think, to give pause to even the self-referential juggernaut of Labour. But no: despite the loud protests of practically anyone who uses the net, they assumed that, once the government declared its intent, its vast bureaucracy would steamroller over the squeaking objections of a bunch of nerds. Of course, the net users didn't know that. With no parliamentary experience to speak of, computer scientists are peculiarly unthreatened by our labyrinthine legislative process. After all, they're used to ploughing through pages of obscure computer code, and what else is a bill but a program for citizens to follow? Within a couple of days of the bill being published, Charles Lindsey, a retired computer scientist, had digested its gist and, as programmers do to help simplify the obscure, constructed a graphic flow chart illustrating the procedure that the police would follow in order to demand the private communications of a British citizen.

Computer scientists are good at finding bugs too: within a few weeks, Lindsey had uncovered a fistful of scenarios where the law would fail those it sought to protect, and where the judicial overview that Jack Straw had promised vanished.

Lindsey, naturally, e-mailed these bug reports - together with a series of patches - to the Home Office. One civil servant, in an accidental slip-of-the-click we all make, pressed Reply instead of forwarding the message. His mail went out to a mailing list of concerned net users, together with his own commentary at the top. "A bit sad, really," it said.

No matter how sad the source, the problems remained, and now they were published on the net for everyone to see. A thousand or so net users, many of whom had read Lindsey's analysis, faxed their MPs with their concern. The MPs, as a whole, were useless. Despite a great deal of noise in the Commons, few of them seemed to feel that time spent fighting the RIP was time well spent. Their chance to fix the bill quickly slipped away.

Instead, it was a strange alliance between the net activists and the House of Lords that brought the problems to the attention of the Home Office. There's something very 21st century about listening to earls and lords lecture the government on packet-switching, datagrams and hard-drive clusters. But, unlike the Commons and unlike, it seems, the civil service, our peers took the time to understand the technology they were legislating against - and turned to the net experts to learn about it. The bill set the gentleman amateurs of the world against the sleekest of career politicos, and in so doing woke up the government.

Faced with this unusually informed Lords rebellion, the government quickly introduced a stack of amendments that covered the most obvious flaws in the bill, even as they filled the remaining parliamentary time for fixing the rest. While you'll have a hard time persuading the Home Office to admit it, those amendments look very close to those that the sad "amateurs" of the net had proposed all along.

They don't fix all the bill's failings, not by a long chalk. The bill, if it passes, will remain one of the most invasive and antibusiness pieces of internet legislation in the world - but it could well have been much, much worse.

The RIP Bill has just received its final reading in the House of Lords. Barring any further Boston-style rebellions by our peers, it will receive royal assent soon. Blair and his executive talk a great deal about open government and the power of the internet, but now they may slowly be realising how those platitudes really work. The net is not some great semi-automatic democratic leveller; but if it's a question of publicising the truth, and pushing it in the face of those who pull the levers, it's unmatched.

For those who know a truth, the real work, to quote those American rebels, lies in making it self-evident. And when you make it so self-evident that even a British peer can understand it, then you're doing very well indeed.

Danny O'Brien is joint editor of Need to Know (www.ntk.net), an irreverent weekly e-mail newsletter

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