September 2005
Something's bugging me...
Bill Gates comes to Munich to launch his latest wheeze
Earlier this year, Bill Gates briefly uploaded himself to Munich to pitch a project initiated by Microsoft and supported by SAP, T-Online, eBay and the German Department of Trade and Industry, among others. The goal of the effort, “Securing the Internet in Germany,” according to Mr. Gates is to make the Internet as secure as our electrical or water supplies. I have been waiting patiently for months for the establishment press to poke fun at the project: to beat it, as they say in Arkansas, like a rented mule. Looks as if it’s not going to happen. So, I’ve decided to quit loitering around my son’s cold, dead, choked-to-death-by-some-virus-or-another computer and write something myself.
The presentation of the security initiative took place at the Pinakothek der Moderne with the usual cast of politicians and media operatives. The Viktualienmarkt or Systems, a fair being held this month in Munich, where vendors traditionally hack their wares, would have been a more appropriate venue. Reports on the event by the “free press,” amounting to nothing more than the stale air whistling out of corporate press releases, should have been clearly marked as advertising, and the Geek-in-Chief’s lovable denseness when it comes to non-virtual reality should have been addressed.
Now, either mainstream journalists have been muzzled by the multi-million dollar advertising payouts of MS, eBay, T-Online and others, or they have been living under a rock and haven’t seen how the project’s conception of computer security has been run through profit filters and public-relations shredders that masterfully invent, exaggerate and exploit the current “security crisis.”
For MS and their commercial and political partners, “crisis” means it’s time for the industry to take charge. “Crisis,” as they use it, evokes an ominous but tractable threat against which technology, money and management can be rallied. That threat, my friend, is the computer user. Eventually the big players want to sell us security devices that cannot be manipulated by buyers. Whether or not buyers trust the products they are forced to use seems to be an insignificant issue. In the near future, we may have to give blood—“ouch”— and undergo a body scan—“whoopee”—before we can log on. “Crisis” understood as the necessity for more corporate control goes hand in hand with an Internet security that only profit-making companies can love: whereby security devices function less to establish safety than to secure profits.
Don’t you think that MS’s overriding goal should be to eliminate the need for anti-virus and anti-spam products, not simply to buy security companies so they can enter the market with look-alike products at reduced prices? And yet all the companies involved in the project will measure their success by how well it allows them to increase stockholder value, extort more privileges and to bounce between their global havens exempt from accountability and responsibility for the mess they have helped create.
The turning point that is evoked by the original Greek notion of the word “crisis” has no place in their definition of things. The initiative’s Website is an enshrinement of the smug, the snug and the superficial, where the arc of alternatives is flatter than an autobahn frog kill.
The following possibilities are not mentioned. Wonder why not?
• Replace MS software with more
secure operating systems and application programs.
• Avoid online providers whose
nets have the highest percentages of machine infections (AOL, T-Online, Wanadoo).
• Use auction sites that are trustworthier than the likes of eBay.
• Force businesses to secure data and levy fines against those that don’t.
• Insist that companies encrypt all sensitive customer information.
• Eliminate all coding errors within two years.
• Pass the responsibility for overseeing the Internet’s root servers to an international body.
• Secure Munich before you secure Germany.
Internet security stinks, but “Securing the Internet in Germany” is the information technology’s equivalent of a clump in the litter box lying around smelling up the place. The project will not wipe out thousands of viruses in millions of different possible variations, eliminate the threat of ID theft or clean up the raw sewage—spam, porn and blatantly racist sites—coursing through the pipes.
The dirty reality is that the Internet can never be secured like water supplies and the power grid. It’s not a public utility; it’s a hyper social world in which physical givens, like space, time and material objects, are less stable than in the real world. It’s a sphere in which social-psychological and cultural controls are more important than technological ones. The longer the companies, politicians and journalists behind “Securing the Internet in Germany” ignore this fundamental fact and suppress dissent of their narrow approach the dumber and lazier they become and the greater their chance of failure.
