People living in the midst of technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague, obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable.
Predictor: Sterling, Bruce
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 essay that is included on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Web site as a reprint from Science Fiction Eye #10, author and cyberspace commentator Bruce Sterling writes: ”I just wrote my first nonfiction book. It’s called ‘The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier.’ Writing this book has required me to spend much of the past year and a half in the company of hackers, cops and civil libertarians. I’ve spent much time listening to arguments over what’s legal, what’s illegal, what’s right and wrong, what’s decent, what’s despicable, what’s moral and immoral, in the world of computers and civil liberties. My various informants were knowledgeable people who cared passionately about these issues, and most of them seemed well-intentioned. Considered as a whole, however, their opinions were a baffling mess of contradictions … Knowledge is power. The rise of computer networking, of the Information Society, is doing strange and disruptive things to the processes by which power and knowledge are currently distributed. Knowledge and information, supplied through these new conduits, are highly corrosive to the status quo. People living in the midst of technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague, obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. Hackers break laws as a matter of course, and some have been punished unduly for relatively minor infractions not motivated by malice. Even computer police, seeking earnestly to apprehend and punish wrongdoers, have been accused of abuse of their offices, and of violation of the Constitution and the civil statutes. These police may indeed have committed these ‘crimes.’ Some officials have already suffered grave damage to their reputations and careers – all the time convinced that they were morally in the right; and, like the hackers they pursued, never feeling any genuine sense of shame, remorse, or guilt.”
Biography:Bruce Sterling, a writer, consultant and science fiction enthusiast, wrote or co-wrote “Schismatrix,” “The Hacker Crackdown” and “The Difference Engine” and edited “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.” In the 1990s, he wrote tech articles for Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review and Wired, where he was a contributing writer from its founding. He published the nonfiction book “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” in 2002. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: September 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Jurisdiction/Control
Name of publication: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Title, headline, chapter name: A Statement of Principle
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/doc/eegtti/eeg_266.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Uhlfelder, Evelyn C.