[luau] News - Richard Stallman - Can you trust your computer?

[Warren Togami]

I normally disagree with Richard M. Stallman and think his views are
completely unrealistic, but this particular essay is dead right.  He
warns us about the dangers of Digital Rights Management (DRM),
Microsoft's Palladium and the Trusted Computer Platform Alliance
(TCPA).  Be sure to read the TCPA/Palladium FAQ linked within this
article.

And don't think it wont happen, Intel and AMD are already designing
Palladium into their future processors.

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/10/21/1449250.shtml?tid=19

Can you trust your computer?
Monday October 21, 2002 - [ 04:14 PM GMT ]   Print this Article
Topic - Advocacy

-By Richard Stallman -
Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their
computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call
"trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie
companies and record companies), together with computer companies such
as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them
instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features
before, but this plan would make it universal.

Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what
it does; you can't study the source code, or change it. It's not
surprising that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put
you at a disadvantage. Microsoft has done this several times: one
version of Windows was designed to report to Microsoft all the software
on your hard disk; a recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player
required users to agree to new restrictions. But Microsoft is not alone:
the KaZaa music-sharing software is designed so that KaZaa's business
partner can rent out the use of your computer to their clients. These
malicious features are often secret, but even once you know about them
it is hard to remove them, since you don't have the source code.

In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would
make it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name,
because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will
systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your
computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation
may require explicit permission.

The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer
includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are
kept secret from you. (Microsoft's version of this is called
"palladium.") Proprietary programs will use this device to control which
other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and
what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually
download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those
rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to
obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities
will automatically cease to function.

Of course, Hollywood and the record companies plan to use treacherous
computing for "DRM" (Digital Restrictions Management), so that
downloaded videos and music can be played only on one specified
computer. Sharing will be entirely impossible, at least using the
authorized files that you would get from those companies. You, the
public, ought to have both the freedom and the ability to share these
things. (I expect that someone will find a way to produce unencrypted
versions, and to upload and share them, so DRM will not entirely
succeed, but that is no excuse for the system.)

Making sharing impossible is bad enough, but it gets worse. There are
plans to use the same facility for email and documents -- resulting in
email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read
on the computers in one company.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something
that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use
the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in
writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing
ink.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is
illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit
documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move
forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the
activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read
the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous
computing becomes a paradise for corruption.

Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing
when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors
can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by
laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word
documents. If Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when
saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of
developing software to read them -- and if we could, such programs might
even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new
authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules
automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the U.S. government, does
not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new
instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that
document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new
instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive
erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.

You might think you can find out what nasty things a treacherous
computing application does, study how painful they are, and decide
whether to accept them. It would be short-sighted and foolish to accept,
but the point is that the deal you think you are making won't stand
still. Once you come depend on using the program, you are hooked and
they know it; then they can change the deal. Some applications will
automatically download upgrades that will do something different -- and
they won't give you a choice about whether to upgrade.

Today you can avoid being restricted by proprietary software by not
using it. If you run GNU/Linux or another free operating system, and if
you avoid installing proprietary applications on it, then you are in
charge of what your computer does. If a free program has a malicious
feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can
use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs
and tools on non-free operating systems; this falls short of fully
giving you freedom, but many users do it.

Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and
free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at
all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating
system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free
operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous
computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by
the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on
such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could
be a crime.

There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all
computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting
old computers to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But
Don't Try Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't
legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to
accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for
communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html). If only a
treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many
people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of
individual action (take it or leave it). To oppose treacherous
computing, we must join together and confront the situation as a
collective choice.

For further information about treacherous computing, see
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html.

To block treacherous computing will require large numbers of citizens to
organize. We need your help! The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(www.eff.org) and Public Knowledge (www.publicknowledge.org) are
campaigning against treacherous computing, and so is the FSF-sponsored
Digital Speech Project (www.digitalspeech.org). Please visit these Web
sites so you can sign up to support their work.

You can also help by writing to the public affairs offices of Intel,
IBM, HP/Compaq, or anyone you have bought a computer from, explaining
that you don't want to be pressured to buy "trusted" computing systems
so you don't want them to produce any. This can bring consumer power to
bear. If you do this on your own, please send copies of your letters to
the organizations above.

Postscripts:

1. The GNU Project distributes the GNU Privacy Guard, a program that
implements public-key encryption and digital signatures, which you can
use to send secure and private email. It is useful to explore how GPG
differs from treacherous computing, and see what makes one helpful and
the other so dangerous.

When someone uses GPG to send you an encrypted document, and you use GPG
to decode it, the result is an unencrypted document that you can read,
forward, copy, and even re-encrypt to send it securely to someone else.
A treacherous computing application would let you read the words on the
screen, but would not let you produce an unencrypted document that you
could use in other ways. GPG, a free software package, makes security
features available to the users; they use it. Treacherous computing is
designed to impose restrictions on the users; it uses them.

2. Microsoft presents Palladium as a security measure, and claims that
it will protect against viruses, but this claim is evidently false. A
presentation by Microsoft Research in October 2002 stated that one of
the specifications of Palladium is that existing operating systems and
applications will continue to run; therefore, viruses will continue to
be able to do all the things that they can do today.

When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with Palladium, they
do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine
from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on
your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in
the presentation listed several types of secrets Palladium could be used
to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets" -- but it
put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this is not what
Palladium is really designed for.

The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently
associate with the context of security, such as "attack," "malicious
code," "spoofing," as well as "trusted." None of them means what it
normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it
means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by
you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing"
doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling Palladium. And so
on.

3. A previous statement by the Palladium developers stated the basic
premise that whoever developed or collected information should have
total control of how you use it. This would represent a revolutionary
overturn of past ideas of ethics and of the legal system, and create an
unprecedented system of control. The specific problems of these systems
are no accident; they result from the basic goal. It is the goal we must
reject.

Copyright 2002 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted
without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

Editor's note: This article first appeared in Richard Stallman's new
book, "Free Software, Free Society." This is the first time the article
has appeared online, and Stallman has added some new material.