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| Every particle, even dark matter, can bend spacetime. |
Part of the reason policymakers are often confused about resistance to many of the items on their wishlist in the cyber domain is that they've already achieved the impossible: Copyright!
If you think about how amazing it is that nowhere on the Internet can you go get Avengers: Infinity Wars for free then it leads you to also ponder the vast array of international agreements, corporate pressure, and technological filtering that makes this possible. Nothing could be more inimical to the nature of the cyber domain than copyright. And yet: governments and industry have made it real.
To paraphrase Bruce, "Bits being copied is like water being wet" - and yet we have somehow made it so in cyberspace all waterfalls all run upwards, to make it possible to remove a single picture of Star Wars from the Internet. Why then, policy people ask, can we not just erase all information about computer exploitation and harmful code from the Internet? How much harder can it be?
Allan Friedman once said to me that he looks at his work at the Commerce Dept as correcting market failures. But the real market distortion is like a massive gravity well all around us. Copyright is what makes it so that a firewall vendor can hide the true nature of their weaknesses by making it illegal to write up a "performance comparisons" or "reverse engineer" their protocols. So many of the systemic vulnerabilities come from a system of our own making. And when we try to address them at the edges by regulating IOT device security or going on and on about vulnerability disclosure or revising the CFAA to add just one more exception it's like trying to chew away a piece of a black hole.
This post is a call for legislation more than my other posts are: We need to address the root of the problem. That means changing what an end-user-license can restrict. It is not just that everyone should be able to write about and patch the code running on their devices, but that we need to acknowledge that copyright has distorted who can even understand the depths of the risks we all face.
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