This guy should be killed, too!
Oh well, he already has one win under his belt, too! But he should shut up because people have died. BAHA!
High-tech activist takes on war against terrorism
Matthew Fordahl
Associated Press
Published Feb. 10, 2003 TECH10
As a millionaire high-tech entrepreneur and activist, John Gilmore ought to be jetting off to board meetings in New York, battling officials in Washington, D.C., or visiting his family in Florida.
Instead, he's grounded in Northern California, unwilling to fly because he believes the requirement to show identification before boarding a domestic flight violates his constitutional rights.
On its surface, a suit he's filed against Attorney General John Ashcroft and other federal officials seems unwinnable and frivolous. After all, there's that war against terror. Doesn't the hassle of showing an ID seem a small price for security at 35,000 feet?
But Gilmore, who made a fortune at server maker Sun Microsystems, sees Orwellian consequences in ID checks: Information culled from them can be stored in massive databases and mined to track innocent people.
John Gilmore
Marcio Jose Sanchez
Associated Press
Gilmore has launched other seemingly unwinnable crusades against restrictions on civil liberties in cyberspace, government control of cryptography and draconian corporate copy protection schemes.
As an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, he even proved that free software can be profitable despite Microsoft Corporation's monopoly. Cygnus, which was sold to Red Hat Inc. for $674 million in stock in 2000, made money by selling services that supported free and open-source software.
It's perhaps too easy to dismiss Gilmore, a soft-spoken 47-year-old with a long beard and receding hairline. At a recent hearing in which a judge heard the government's motions to dismiss his ID suit, he donned a suit but wore sandals and Dr. Seuss-themed socks.
'Astonishingly stubborn'
But friends and opponents said it would be a mistake to underestimate Gilmore. Though the Justice Department calls his latest suit baseless, Gilmore has the technical training and the checkbook to put up a prolonged fight.
"He can be astonishingly stubborn," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties group, with Gilmore in 1990. "Even though he will dig in to an extent that may not be tactically or strategically wise, he generally doesn't dig in unless he's right on the principle of it."
Gilmore's public battles focus on the supremacy of individual rights. He also opposes laws against drug use. But he's most frequently quoted describing the risks technology poses to liberty.
"People who build this technology have the responsibility to work to make sure society uses it for good things not for bad things, and we leave a better society to our descendants," Gilmore said. "My advocacy is informed by my technical expertise. I know what these systems are capable of."
Born in 1955 to a middle-class family that moved to Alabama while he was in high school, Gilmore was a math and science buff. He took a class on computers and gained access to an IBM 1401, the Model T of the computer business.
After learning the machine inside and out by reading its thick manuals, he jumped into the high-tech industry.
In 1982, he interviewed with Bill Gates at Microsoft, then a small Seattle company, for a job involving a version of the Unix operating system.
"I didn't see him as megalomaniac in training," Gilmore recalled. "He was just a good technical guy and a good businessman."
While researching the Microsoft job, he met some Stanford professors who were founding a company called Sun Microsystems. He ended up becoming Sun's fifth employee.
Individual rights
Gilmore's political development grew with his technical skills. He came of age during the Nixon administration and considered himself a liberal until he sent away for a free subscription to The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education.
"It turned out I agreed with them on most of it," he said. "That was how I found my political identity as a Libertarian. I actually cared more about the rights of individuals than the rights of collective society."
In the late 1980s, Gilmore decided that individual rights were being infringed as technology grew faster than law enforcement could keep up. Police who were confused about computers started investigating programmers engaged in behavior that lawmakers hadn't even contemplated.
Barlow, who was forming the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with ex-Lotus chief Mitch Kapor and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, got an e-mail from Gilmore offering to write a $100,000 check.
The EFF, an ACLU for the technologically savvy, was born.
"John made the connection that this stuff has First Amendment significance, law enforcement significance and whatever balances we strike as we adapt this new technology will be the balances we live with in the future," said Mike Godwin, the EFF's first chief counsel.
The EFF and other civil liberties groups have yet to support the airport ID case, which Gilmore said is simply a fight for the freedom to travel.
False sense of security
He took his stand on Independence Day last year.
Gilmore, who can't drive long distances because he has epilepsy, claims he wanted to fly to Washington, D.C., to personally petition his government. He was denied boarding in San Francisco and Oakland.
Gilmore says the ID checks create a false sense of security, which is more dangerous than no security at all. It's similar to his arguments against high-tech copy protection schemes that marketing departments refer to as "secure" and "trusted" computing.
In reality, the computer owner is the one who is less secure and trusted as much as a criminal, Gilmore maintains.
"The security measures are not to help you secure it against outsiders. The security measures are to help outsiders help secure your computer against you," he said.
The ultimate privacy protector, Gilmore maintains, is encryption, the technology in which information is scrambled and can only be unscrambled by the holder of a digital key.
In the 1990s, the U.S. government wanted to limit exports of high-grade encryption products, fearing they could block intelligence agencies from cracking coded messages. Critics, such as Gilmore, argued that the genie was already out of the bottle and that the only companies suffering would be those following the rules.
Cracking the code
Gilmore and a friend built a $220,000 supercomputer to crack the government's "gold-standard" encryption, another technology he says gave a false sense of security.
He also helped form a programmer group called "Cypherpunks" to challenge the rules and spread ways of ensuring privacy online, such as anonymous e-mail systems.
In 1992, Gilmore was threatened with arrest for attempting to share information on military encryption that had been checked out of a public library. The government later relaxed its controls in the mid-and late 1990s -- after a court case won by the EFF.
Dave Farber, a University of Pennsylvania telecommunications professor and EFF board member, praised Gilmore for using his financial resources to fight for his principles.
"You can be a lot more of an irritant to a system that needs an irritant," Farber said, "when you have the money to provide the irritation."
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