DaveNet: Monday, September 29, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Denise Caruso on Bill Gates (on Privacy)

From Denise Caruso, dc@technomedia.com, columnist at New York Times and visiting scholar at Interval; in response to Bill Gates on Privacy:

Denise Caruso

I'm very happy to hear that Bill Gates (or someone with access to his email address, at least) has gotten a wee tad of religion about privacy. I'm also really glad that he has written to you about it.

I'm a little less happy about the sentence, "Besides the issues of this making it very difficult for us to sell software ...there is a huge issue of privacy here." The sentence is perhaps more revelatory than he knows.

Gates goes on to say, "For some reason the public isn't hearing about this issue at all. I can't believe there isn't more of an outcry." Perhaps this is because virtually every corporate executive who speaks out about the encryption debate -- Gates and Barksdale at Netscape are the two that come most immediately to mind -- approaches it from the perspective of "weak encryption is bad for our business." Privacy issues, if mentioned at all, are always an afterthought.

The public at large really couldn't care less about whether companies can sell their software overseas. Why should they care whether Bill Gates or any other executive can increase their net worth? Although the industry's inability to sell encryption products abroad will certainly have an effect on the U.S. population at some point in time, for the majority of us this is a second-order effect.

As someone who in fact has been trying to bring the encryption debate into the public eye -- most recently in the New York Times, but really in every single publication and in every type of media I've touched for the past 10 years -- I have always found it sadly revealing that protecting corporate self-interest has consistently been more important than protecting civil liberties.

If Gates wants to put Microsoft's formidable marketing and advertising machine to work and raise public awareness about just how precarious our rights to privacy and security have become under the present U.S. administration, he would be providing a great and critical service not just to our citizenry, but to the rest of the world as well. I know a number of people who would line up to help in any way they can.