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By Steven Levy
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Is your software friend or foe? It's getting harder and harder to tell. You paid for it and figure it's working for you, helping you produce documents, keeping you connected and entertaining you. But software is frequently a double agent. It tries to sell you things or keeps you from using competitors' programs. It acts as a copyright cop. And sometimes, it spies on you, exposing your secrets to corporations, advertisers or the United States government. "It's a transparency problem that just gets worse," says Temple University law professor David Post. "Software defines the way we interact with the world, but we don't know what's going on behind the scenes."
Such are the new politics of software, with more blind alleys and hidden agendas than a cold-war novel. At best, the political nature of computer systems is quite explicit, as in the case of free and transparent Open Source software, which derives glory not from the program, but from the egalitarian impulses behind it. Other software wear their allegiance on their sleeves, like cryptographic software that protects privacy and allows users to explore the Web anonymously.
But all too often your software's motives quietly diverge from your own. Owners of the flagship programs of Microsoft or AOL (respectively, Windows XP and AOL Version 7.0) are subjected to constant entreaties to use or download products created or endorsed by those media giants. While software "sharing" systems like Napster subversively urge redistribution of intellectual property, these are being litigated out of existence in favor of systems approved by the major record labels. The latter are designed around what users can't do; they constantly remind you that it's not your music, but someone else's bits on loan.
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And all sorts of "spyware" work behind the scenes to deprive people of their privacy, from bots that surreptitiously track Web activity for advertisers to the government's Carnivore program that has the ability to suck all your electronic activity--surfing to e-mails--into the hands of law enforcement. (In the wake of the Twin Towers attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft has extended his ability to use those tools.)
Then there are the terrorists of the software world: viruses, which hijacked computer systems as never before in 2001 and show no signs of being under control any time soon. But what's really shocking is that it's not only the traditional high-tech evildoers who want to plant intruders in our machines. The FBI reluctantly admitted the existence of Magic Lantern, a rogue program that penetrates computers to steal the password keystrokes that can defeat encryption. And the record industry even (unsuccessfully) attempted to jigger legislation to allow it to plant its own unwelcome software in consumers' systems, to sniff out unauthorized copying.
Is there any way to rein in software's politics? Different schools of thought have different answers. In a recent paper for the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, Microsoft's counsel Bradford Smith provides a breakdown: there are the "digital libertarians," who view the world of tech as a self-organizing, self-healing system where everything works out--as long as government keeps its fricking hands off it. On the other end of the spectrum are "digital structuralists," who bemoan the takeover of the Net by commercial forces and think that only wise government intervention restores power to the people. (Since Congress is generally ignorant on tech issues and easily manipulated by lobbyists, the structuralists are pessimistic.) Smith himself urges a middle path he calls "digital pragmatism," which involves self-policing with a threat of regulation.
The problem with all those approaches is that the key participants--the masses who must actually use the software--are still intimidated by the dazzling yet frustratingly dense technology. For users, the big news of 2001 was that Microsoft's new operating system promised fewer crashes. When you're worried about Blue Screens of Death, it's harder to get worked up about what secret agenda the program is plotting. Nonetheless, as our digital life increasingly becomes the center of our real lives, attention must be paid. The best way to rein in the politics of software is for people to get political about software. Maybe in 2002 we'll see that start to happen.
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