Can The Government's Black
Helicopters Fly in Cyberspace?

Did you ever take the cover off an antique machine to gaze in wonderment at the mechanical workings inside, the physical embodiment of the assumptions and limitations of a prior age?

I had an opportunity to do this with one of our venerable political institutions while participating in a panel last month on regulating the Internet, a forum organized by the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Titled "Visions and Frictions in the Information Age: Governance and Transnational Society," the event was billed as a dialogue between political scientists and policymakers to explore the challenges presented by the so-called Global Information Infrastructure.

By some fluke I got invited, the only technologist on a program dominated by Harvard professors, scholars, Washington bureaucrats and deputy directors-general of the European Commission.

It's hard to communicate the overwhelming sense of noblesse oblige ingrained in this articulate group. None of them had ever run for office, yet they collectively represented the "power behind the power" in public life. Every other sentence they spoke began with the word "we," as in, "We have a responsibility to protect (fill in the blank)." I had to keep asking, "Who's 'we'?"

Watching them struggle with the impact of a technology revolution they are ill equipped to understand, much less govern, I felt a little bit like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. What makes these people tick? What makes them think they're going to keep on ticking? Do they imagine that the technology community is going to break stride for one second and rush to obey their policies?

We came to the nub of things rather quickly. The mainspring of the governance machine is a concept called consensus, best ac hieved by learned deliberation. Resulting policies are then adjusted and legitimized by incumbent political institutions. Finally, the apparatus of state provides vigorous enforcement directed against anyone who disagrees.

The forum was ostensibly focused on how to achieve consensus, given what may or may not be a revolutionary shift in the locus of commerce. I couldn't help but bring their attention to the enforcement side of the process. Exactly how do national governments plan to assert extraterritorial control over acts of commerce committed in cyberspace?

Mike Nelson, former point man for the Clinton-Gore encryption-key escrow scheme, now an FCC policy wonk, perhaps said it best in his remarks at the opening reception. When asked how the government was going to enforce cyberspace edicts in a world of widely available strong encryption, anonymous network access and offshore data havens, he responded, "We'll just roll out the black helicopters."

The audience tittered nervously, yet this comment correctly highlighted the connection between government and coercive force. Most of these policymakers never dirty their hands with the business end of governing.

It would be quite instructive if every one of them were regularly required to whack someone over the head with a truncheon so they could experience the direct connection between their work and its impact on the citizenry. More important, it may help them realize how deeply the business of governance will be affected when the truncheons lose their sting--as they surely will in the emerging world of supranational economic communities.

Explain to me again how you're going to collect a value-added tax from an encrypted Java applet that was developed in Jakarta, downloaded by a Canadian living in Austria from a Web site in Bermuda and paid for with anonymous digital cash drawn on a bank in the Cayman Islands.

I'm not sure they get it. Then again, I'm not sure I want them to.

Bill Frezza is a general partner at A dams Capital Management. The opinions expressed here are his own. He can be reached at frezza@alum.mit.edu or techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.