The Right To Keep And Bear Code

Slashdot has been conducting a Q&A between readers and Neal Stephenson. Despite his disappointing last novel, Anathem, Stephenson is always worth paying attention to. This is the first question he fielded, with his response:

Q: Do you think that hacking tools should be protected (in the United States) under the second amendment?

A: Such is the intensity of issues like this that I can’t tell whether this is a troll. I’m going to assume it’s not, and answer the question seriously.

I’m no constitutional scholar but I’m pretty sure that the Founding Fathers were thinking of flintlocks, not perl scripts, when they wrote the Second Amendment. Now you can dispute that and say “No, anything that enables citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government is covered by the Second Amendment.” There might be something to such an argument. But pragmatically, the question is whether you can get nine (or at least five) non-hacker Supreme Court Justices to see it that way. I suspect the answer is no. It’s just too easy for them to say “it is not a weapon.” To me it seems a lot easier simply to invoke the First Amendment.

Also, remember that there might be unwanted side effects to classifying code as weapons. In the U.S., where the right to bear certain weapons is written into the Constitution, it might seem like a clever way to secure access to such code. But authorities in other countries might say “look, even the U.S. Government defines this string of bits as a weapon—so we are going to outlaw it.”

It’s difficult to form an intelligent opinion on issues like this without doing a lot of work. One has to learn a lot about the issues and then think about them pretty hard. I haven’t really done so, and so I’m inclined to trust people who have, like Matt Blaze. At crypto.com he has posted some interesting material that is germane to this topic.

See http://www.crypto.com/masterkey.html and especially http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html.

To make a long argument short, what I have learned from Matt’s writings on the topic is that (1) it’s not a new issue, (2) it’s a First Amendment issue, and (3) it’s best in the long run, for all concerned, if vulnerabilities are exposed in public.

A really interesting interview. Read Neal’s thoughts on the Beowulf/Dante novelist dichotomy, Gibson-Stephenson deathmatches, the Singularity, programming, money as constant not variable, data havens, spaceflight and publishing models. Best quote award goes to:

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.