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One thing we have to remember is that democracy is quite broken. It's broken, but, like--I'll talk about this with ICANN as well. It's broken, but it doesn't mean that there is something better, and I think that one of the things we have to think about is how can we change--how can we fix and deal with the current democracy? I know that Frank and Ropp are going to have this session at 7:00 o'clock today, which is a bit more pessimistic than mine, maybe, but they touch on this issue quite a bit, and I'm not going to go into the details. There's many different types of democracies, but I'll highlight some of the aspects of democracy are important and that we need to preserve, and I can give you some examples of why I think democracy is broken, but I won't do it right now.

One of the really key things about democracy and information society is the competition of ideas. This is the way things get decided, and competition of ideas requires free speech. It requires the ability to say what you want to say, to say your opinion, to question authority without fear of retribution, right? When you are in Zimbabwe, if you have more than 5 people together, talking about something, you can be arrested and thrown in jail. If you are a blogger in Iran, you are more--you are most likely if you speak up, you will get thrown in jail, and your family will get thrown in jail, and in these places, they do not have the ability to say what they mean without fear of retribution, and although things are getting pretty bad, we can still stand here and question authority, and so we have it better than many, many democracies, and this is one of the key things we have to preserve, because it's the competition of ideas that allows change, and I'm quite optimistic about democracy in a way, because I think that if you win the argument, you can change things, and people can disagree with me on that, but I think that the most important thing is to have an argument and to be able to win and allow the good ideas to come up.

One of the bad ideas which people keep talking about is free markets. People always kind of say, "Well, if we just made free markets--we made open markets"--I think that a lot of the people who are antiglobalization haven't focused on the key points about what's dangerous about globalization. One of the dangerous things about globalization is, free market sounds like a good idea, but the problem is free markets allow monopolies to exist, right? And traditionally--or not traditionally, the government is supposed to keep the monopolies in check. There's supposed to be fair trade commissions. There's supposed to be many ways to dismantle monopolies. Well, they don't work anymore. If you look at all the big democracies in the world, they're controlled by lobbies that are controlled by monopolies, and power aggregates, and one of the problems is that when we designed the democracies early on, like the American republican democracy, or like some of the direct democracies, we didn't anticipate how much power that a monopoly could get in the information age and how big they could get, and we didn't anticipate that companies would take the personalities of individuals, and so we don't have a very good design to deal with monopolies, but they can and have been flipped over in the past, but the current monopolies are getting stronger and stronger, and so one of the things you have to focus on is the fact that the free market doesn't help you with monopolies. I'm a proponent of the free market, but the monopoly is just an anomaly that you have to think about alot.

The other important thing which is very obvious but something that you have to talk about, and since we're talking about privacy, is that the correct balance is transparency of those that have authority and privacy of citizens. The problem is that the natural tendency, the law of physics of power is that people in power want secrecy, and they would like their subjects to be transparent, and it always goes this way. There's no reason it shouldn't go this way, and if you were in power and you had all the special privilege, of course you would want your secrecy, and i think that one of the things you have to remember is it's not that they're evil. It's not that they're some scheming conspiracy. It's just rational. If I'm George Bush, and I want to push through a bunch of things, I'm going to try to do it as secretly as possible and put in bills that are--it's just a normal thing, and so we have to think about how do you hack a system which--natural tendency is towards more power aggregation and more secrecy and transparency for those who don't have power. One of my friends is a Chinese guy, and his dad told me, "Money is lonely. It likes to go where other money is," and it's the same with power. It's just like a law of physics. It doesn't have ethics. It's just the way it is, and i think this is something you have to think about, because what the information age and the internet and all these other things is doing is it's increasing the ability and lowering the friction for power aggregation. It doesn't change the fundamental dynamics that have been around for a long time.

This is a strong statement, and I feel quite strongly about this. I think that voice is more important than votes, okay? So back when you didn't have a lot of information, and you would vote, and most of the votes were--you voted with your family. You voted with your company, but you know, like Arnold Schwartzenegger in California is like a vote button on your TV. It dpesn't matter that people got to vote if they don't have any information, right? The whole point is that if you win the argument in public in the media--when America went to war with Iraq, more than half of the Americans thought that 9/11 terrorism was caused by Iraq. So it doesn't matter if they can vote if they don't know the truth, right? And so I think that what's really important right now is to provide everyone with a voice, and the other thing about voice--this is something that I find on blogs is that people start writing on my blog, and it's like when you're in class. If you're sitting, and you're listening, and you know somebody's going to call on you, you listen harder, or if you know you have to explain this book that you're reading to somebody else, you read it more carefully, and giving people voice also switches on their brain, right? And I think that this is important not just in developed nations but also in developing nations, and to me--and--give you another example, ICANN board. You think that voting is really important? Well, everybody votes the way that they're convinced by the nonvoting liaisons, right? So if the guy from IETF is sitting on the board, John Klensin, he gives an eloquent speech about why this is too risky, or that's too risky, well, everybody votes that way, right? The chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank always votes with the majority. Voting is a process, and yes, it is important for--go talk to the Wikipedia guys. Voting is a last choice. It's only when there's no other choice. Whenever they can, they try to reach consensus, and with the internet and with a lot of the new tools we have, we can try to reach consensus more and more. So I think that the key is to provide voice, and in the same way, you know--I know that you have a lot of hate speech issues. People have a lot of hate speech issues. I would much rather argue with those people who have hate speech and beat them up in public than to censor them, because when you start censoring them, it gives them an excuse--you know, putting Al-Manar on--the Hezbollah channel--on the terrorist list by the United States, this is the stupidest thing you can do, because now they have an excuse.

Another thing--I'm going to talk about privacy for a second, because i think that a lot of people think that privacy is about some kind of personal vulnerability. "I don't want people to know that I read all this porn." Or, "I don't want people to know this. I don't want people to know that." That's not the primary risk of privacy. The primary risk of privacy is a systemic profiling that can cause a chilling effect and cause behavior change, and so what I mean by profiling is I'll use some Japanese examples. I'm sure there are some examples in Germany. There's a left-wing newspaper called Akahata, and if you are a subscriber of the left-wing newspaper, they have you on a list, and you can't get a job in a big public company, and you can never be promoted above certain ranks in certain companies. If your father was an Akahata subscriber, you can never become a public prosecutor or a judge, okay? And they sometimes do this for grandchildren, and so this list goes around. It's a common practice. Same thing if your arrest record--even if you weren't convicted or tried or charged, if you were arrested, you're on the arrest list, and so when somebody's trying to hire your or somebody's trying to marry you, they get this thing that says, "Oh, well, this guy's been arrested," and if you think of it from the perspective of somebody who's profiling, it makes total sense. Statistically speaking, people who have been arrested are more likely to be arrested again than people who aren't. Statistically speaking, people who subscribe to the left-wing newspaper are probably more likely to blow something up than if they're not, and the thing about profiling which is really important--again, I'll get back to this point. It's not about being evil or anything like that. It's--if I can have as much information as possible, what would I do to make it statistically better for my organization when I'm hiring people, when I'm letting people into my country, when I have to beat the shit out of somebody, what do I look at to make this effect? And so now you think about, okay, well, if the United States government came to the Japanese government and said, "Okay, we--we are going on high terror alert. We want the list of likely-to-be-terrorist Japanese, and so this would mean that people who had hung out with these groups, people who have gone to school with these people, people who spend more money on this kind of thing, people who rent this kind of movie, and then--and then you create a profile, and they would put--make a list, and they would not let them in the United States, and maybe they would arrest the top one hundred of them or something, but for them, if they can catch one bad guy and maybe piss off a million Japanese, maybe that makes sense, and it's the cost of false positives. It's also a lot cheaper when they're not your own countrymen, but the thing that's really risky here is, if you think about it, for instance, Donatella, who spoke here last year about Arab media, well, I don't want her sending me SMSes anymore, you know? It's--I don't--you know, I have to be careful about what I say. Maybe next year, I have to worry about coming to this conference, because every single, little thing that I do that--maybe this will start--they will start harassing me going into the United States. Maybe this will hurt my children's ability to get into a good school, and this chilling effect on what you say and what you do damages this whole concept of competition of ideas, the ability to speak freely, the ability to behave freely, and the ability to be--the hacking, open thing, and I think that that cost, you know, I don't--a lot of people say, "I don't need privacy because I don't do anything that bad." You know, maybe none of the people say that, but--but the thing is that that's a stupid excuse, because what if you come up on something that you find out. You're a whistle blower, or you find some fact that needs to go out that will get you on some list. These profiles will prevent you from trying to do that.

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Anonymity, this, I think, people probably agree, but i would just say it very strongly, is--I actually sat in the airplane with the head legal guy from the FBI and had a long, 15-hour conversation about this, and he kept arguing that because of things like whois and these databases, he was able to actually save some woman who was kidnapped, because they could trace the email, and they saved the woman's life, and because of that, he argued that it's good that we can trace people, but for every woman in Florida that gets saved because she's kidnapped, you know, hundreds of people in Zimbabwe and Iran are being killed and we think about developing nations and we think about the ability to think without retribution, anonymity is essential, and it has a lot of costs, and people will argue all kinds of things, but i think we really need to protect it. One other thing, because you're all hackers, I bet everyone here knows how to be anonymous no matter what kind of technology they make. You can--right now, you can spoof your MAC address. You can do whatever you want. So anyone who has enough money can be anonymous anyway. It's like my ID thing, and so what you're going to get is you're going to get the lay people who don't know how to be anonymous, the average citizens who are fighting for their human rights, but you won't get the professional terrorists and the professional criminals. They will always be anonymous, and so that's the other thing is it actually doesn't really work. It--technically. That's a hard argument to make. I was arguing with an American senator the other day, and to him--he just said no. He pointed and shook his finger and said, "The days of the lawless internet are over," and he was really passionate about it, and--

[applause]

And I found out he doesn't even have a computer, and he was serious, and the problem was he's getting lobbied by Hollywood. He's getting lobbied by law enforcement. He's getting lobbied by everybody who says that anonymity is a problem. If you solve the anonymity problem and force people to have licenses to use the internet, we'll all be safe, and everything points to that. So it's something that's being chopped away at.

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