Transdisciplinary Design

Unwelcome Reality: Open Source and Ethics

Posted on October 26, 2017

I’m in the Special Collections section of NYU’s library, preparing to commit a crime. Well, that’s an overstatement, though not much of one. I expect to leave the library equipped to commit a crime, even if I lack the intent.

I’m here for 15 Lombard St. by artist Janice Kerbel.¹ Amid all the pomp of the Special Collections, the book is remarkably unremarkable in appearance: a simple brown cover, roughly a hundred pages, softcover. Inside are a smattering of photos, blueprints, and timetables. 15 Lombard St. is the address of a bank in London, and Kerbel’s book is a painstakingly researched plan to rob it. Though the illustrations are sedate, in context they feel almost like a treatment for a Hollywood blockbuster. After cutting the phone lines and disabling the hidden cameras Kerbel has uncovered for you, you can expect narrow getaways down alleyways, explosions, and a ride into the sunset. That last bit is no exaggeration — the book suggests a charming beach town in Andalusia to lay low after the heist.

It’s a brilliant provocation. Kerbel broke no laws and had no special access in her research; all the information in the book is available to anyone with the time and patience to gather it. But there’s something about having it immediately accessible in one place that seems morally questionable. Is there logic in this? And what if society does find the work unethical?

15 Lombard St. was completed in 2000, when the internet was far less ubiquitous and resilient. New technology has only complicated questions around ethics, knowledge, and what should and should not be public. Simultaneously, the open source philosophy has spread beyond the realm of programming, and there are pushes to “open” everything from government² to agriculture³. This environment is practically a machine for manufacturing moral quandaries. I’d like to examine some of them and what they say about the future of “open everything.”

DeCSS

DVDs are encrypted by a proprietary algorithm called the Content Scramble  System (CSS), designed in 1996.⁴ In order to legally play DVDs, hardware and software vendors are obliged to pay an annual licensing fee to the DVD Copy Control Association (currently $15,500).⁵ Even after paying, the details of the algorithm are subject to a strict non-disclosure agreement. Obviously, this would not stand, especially not in the Linux world. Who would pay the fee in an ecosystem of volunteers? Moreover, the NDA means the algorithm could not be distributed in any GPL code. Even with a license, legal open source DVD software was a nonstarter.

In October 1999, a bootleg application for playing DVDs appeared on a Linux mailing list. The encryption had been reverse-engineered and DeCSS was born. By early November, the Copy Control Association had filed suit, and by January 2000 an injunction was issued against the replication of the DeCSS algorithm.⁶ The code was plainly in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits circumventing copy protection.⁶

The open source community was horrified that a few dozen lines of C code could be banned. Programmers began a campaign to mirror the DeCSS source code in as many places as possible — personal websites, email signatures, forum posts, and so on. Soon there was a DeCSS song, a dramatic reading, several t-shirts, and a haiku.⁷ Eventually the algorithm was even encoded in a prime number with over a thousand digits.⁸ Was the Justice Department willing to declare all of these renditions illegal? Would they attempt to scrub the code from the thousands of websites now inadvertently hosting it? Does it even make sense to outlaw a prime?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is no. There is no simple means for a government to reach into cyberspace and enact its will. The internet is a distributed, redundant system designed precisely to avoid such intervention. By 2004, all legal battles in the case were either dropped or ended in acquittals.⁶

Open Medicine

The price of epinephrine auto-injectors (epipens), a life-saving treatment for severe allergies, recently increased by 500%.⁹ Though lawsuits have brought the price back down, the fluctuation is worrisome in itself. Purely to increase their profit, pharmaceutical companies were willing to put lives at risk.

In 2016, a group of hackers called Four Thieves Vinegar released instructions for making an alternative they call the epipencil.¹⁰ Using a few parts from Amazon and instructions from a Youtube video, the intrepid home chemist can synthesize the epinephrine and construct the pen for about $30. Yes, the device violates copyright, but Four Thieves asks, “if the choices presented to you are to die, because you cannot afford medication, or violate a copyright, which would you choose?”¹⁰

A similar project is afoot in MIT Media Lab’s Design Fiction group. Mary Tsang, in Open Source Estrogen, imagines a world in which it is possible to make estrogen in a home kitchen¹¹. What are the implications for gender, self-determination, and the patriarchy?

Here again we see the tension between the old and the new. On one hand, open medicine initiatives free people from the hegemonic forces of pharmaceutical companies and medical infrastructure. On the other, personal safety is obviously at risk if a synthesis is not sanitary and precise, or if a drug is used inappropriately. From a purely legal standpoint, copyright is plainly being violated in the case of the epipencil. But just like DeCSS, the plans are so widely distributed now that a ban would have no real effect.

The Future

So, what can we glean from these examples?

Traditional legislation and forms of control have little power in cyberspace. Real censorship of information on the internet is exceedingly difficult. If states are truly motivated to end something, it requires a huge investment of resources and time. Consider the recent high-profile black market takedowns: these required international cooperation and untold computing resources.¹² And after all that, alternative markets sprung up to fill the void almost instantly.

This is an arms race, and the deck is heavily stacked against governments.

There’s an accelerationist undercurrent in pushing these boundaries. The message from those fomenting these quandaries is, in a series of clichés, this: Wake up, old timers. The genie is out of the bottle. Information wants to be free, and you’re standing in the way.

In the #Accelerate Manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek put it like this: “the true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific research remain unexploited, filled with presently redundant features […] that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capitalist socius, can become decisive.”¹³

 

— Tim Clem

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Further Conundrums

• The Liberator, the first 3D-printable firearm
• A neural network trained to recognize the faces of homosexuals
• Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine, who chose not to patent it
• Vulnerabilities in closed-source voting machine software
• Accusations of bias in closed-source teacher rating software

References

1. Kerbel, Janice. 15 Lombard St. Bookworks, 2000.
2. See, for instance, the Open Government Partnership
3. See, for instance, Open Agriculture at MIT
4. Content Scramble System. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
5. DVD Copy Control Association. Content Scramble System (CSS). http://www.dvdcca.org/css.aspx. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
6. DeCSS. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
7. Touretzky, D. S. Gallery of CSS Descramblers, 2000. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
8. Touretzky, D. S. Steganography Wing of the Gallery of CSS Descramblers, 2000. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/index.html. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
9. Epinephrine autoinjector. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinephrine_autoinjector. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
10. Four Thieves Vinegar. FAQ. https://fourthievesvinegar.org/faq. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
11. Tsang, Mary. Open Source Estrogen, 2017. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/open-source-estrogen/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.
12. For a good account of the AlphaBay takedown, see this Wired article.
13. Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek. #ACCELERATIONIST MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics, 2013. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.