Our Founding Fathers Used Encryption... And So Should You

from the encrypt-all-the-things dept

While the FBI has apparently given up on trying to get a law passed to backdoor encryption, the ridiculous debate over "going dark" continues. Thankfully, at least some more knowledgeable folks in the government have been speaking up more loudly over the past few months. Just last week, the government's Chief Information Officer, Tony Scott, came out against backdooring encryption:

On this debate, CIO Scott is clear: “I think in the long run we are probably not well served by backdoors to encryption and in general we end up benefiting as a society by having very strong non-hackable encryption,” he said. “And I say that knowing that it will present some challenges for law enforcement and investigative agencies.”

And, now Seth Schoen and Jamie Williams, over at EFF, have put together a nice bit of history, showing how the US's founding fathers frequently used encryption themselves. Obviously it was a much earlier version of it, but it seems rather clear that the founding fathers would likely be big supporters of encryption if they were alive today.

• James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and the country’s fourth president, was a big user of enciphered communications—and numerous examples from his correspondence demonstrate that. The text of one letter from Madison to Joseph Jones, a member of the Continental Congress from Virginia, dated May 2, 1782, was almost completely encrypted via cipher. And on May 27, 1789, Madison sent a partially encrypted letter to Thomas Jefferson describing his plan to introduce a Bill of Rights.

• Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the country’s third president, is known to be one of the most prolific users of secret communications methods. He even invented his own cipher system—the “wheel cypher” as named by Jefferson or the “Jefferson disk” as it is now commonly referred. He also presented a special cipher to Meriwether Lewis for use in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

• Benjamin Franklin invented ciphers used by the Continental Congress and in 1748, years before the American Revolution, published a book on encryption written by George Fisher, The American Instructor.

• George Washington, the first president of the United States, frequently dealt with encryption and espionage issues as the commander of the Continental Army. He is known to have given his intelligence officers detailed instructions on methods for maintaining the secrecy of messages and for using decryption to uncover British spies.

• John Adams, the second U.S. president, used a cipher provided by James Lovell—a member of the Continental Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs and an early advocate of cipher systems—for correspondence with his wife, Abigail Adams, while traveling.

• John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, used ciphers for all diplomatic correspondence made while outside the United States. And John Jay’s brother, Sir James Jay, invited a special invisible ink, also known as sympathetic ink, and sent a supply from London to both his brother and then-General Washington.

If it was good enough for them... it's pretty ridiculous that we're still having this debate now. As I've mentioned in the past, I've heard from a few different folks who have insisted that there are bills sitting in drawers ready to go to "ban encryption" (not just backdoor it), and that's so ridiculous in a world where encryption is used all the time and is a key driver of how we all live. But it's even more ridiculous when you understand how often it's been used throughout history.

Filed Under: encryption, found fathers, james madison, jim comey, thomas jefferson

Apple Rejects Thomas Jefferson Book App, Claiming It's Just A Book... Even Though It's Not

from the this-is-not-a-book dept

Apple's legendary arbitrariness in keeping things out of its walled garden has struck again. As a bunch of folks have sent over, some professors at the University of Virginia have put together what sounds like a wonderful app for the iPad, which takes different early versions of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (the only full-length book he ever wrote) and allows users to compare the different versions, and to get a glimpse into Jefferson's writing process and how his thoughts changed over time. It sounds both fascinating and like a really excellent use of tablet app technology -- to do something that really would have been much more difficult to do in physical form. Except... Apple has rejected the app over and over again, claiming that it is merely "a book" not an "app" and thus needs to be formatted as an iBook, with all of the restrictions that entails. Unfortunately, those restrictions also mean that as an "iBook" it won't do what the app is supposed to do.

But when we submitted the app to Apple for approval, it was turned down. Why? The reason the App Review Team gave (again and again) was that our app was “simply” or “just a book” (their words), and that it therefore had to be formatted in Apple’s iBooks Author program in order to be distributed through the iBookstore. We decided to play along and make a good-faith effort to convert our app into an iBook, only it doesn’t work. We cannot reproduce all of the features of our app–including some of the ones that we think the app needs to be useful to anyone–and for reasons no one has been able to explain, the iBooks Author file seems to expand well beyond the maximum size for an iBook (currently 2 GB). We’re stuck with an app that does just about everything we envisioned, that has impressed the many people to whom we have shown it on our own iPads, that does something that no app or printed book out there does–but that Apple won’t allow to be listed in its App Store. So, yes, it is possible to download an app called “Burp and Fart Piano” that does pretty much what you’d expect such an app to do, but a free, edited edition of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that lets you compare Jefferson’s and Lafayette’s own copies and to zoom in on Jefferson’s handwritten corrections? No dice.

As they note, this is absolutely Apple's prerogative, just as it's their prerogative to point out how ridiculous this whole thing is. In the meantime, they've found another solution:

In the meantime, we’re looking for a programmer who can help us port our app to Android.

Filed Under: arbitrary, ebooks, ibooks, rejections, thomas jefferson, walled gardens
Companies: apple

Prometheus, Meet Thomas Jefferson: On Fire, Stealing And Sharing

from the an-xkcd-parable dept

Meet Prometheus:

Zeus... assigned Prometheus the task of forming man from water and earth, which Prometheus did, but in the process, became fonder of men than Zeus had anticipated. Zeus didn't share Prometheus' feelings and wanted to prevent men from having power, especially over fire. Prometheus cared more for man than for the wrath of the increasingly powerful and autocratic king of the gods, so he stole fire from Zeus' lightning, concealed it in a hollow stalk of fennel, and brought it to man.

Meet Thomas Jefferson:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

And... take it away xkcd: You cannot steal that which cannot be stolen.

Filed Under: ideas, prometheus, sharing, stealing, thomas jefferson, xkcd

Thomas Jefferson: Original Remixer

from the well,-at-least-it-was-public-domain dept

Thomas Jefferson, of course, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, our third President, and had tremendous influence on the early days of our country. While he did not write the Constitution, he was still hugely influential in what went into it. It's been noted plenty of times that Jefferson was extremely skeptical of the copyright/patent clause of the Constitution. He was among those who suggested that monopolies would almost always do more harm than good. He later relented, and indeed ran the first Patent Office, though even then he seemed to remain quite skeptical of the idea of ever locking up knowledge. Either way, Aaron DeOliveira points us to the news that Thomas Jefferson was a remix artist before such things were cool (he was always such a trendsetter). Apparently he literally cut up and remixed the bible, to create a version "he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper." Thomas Jefferson... a pirate?

Filed Under: remix, thomas jefferson

Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial)

from the sweet,-we're-puritans-again! dept

Flash mobs are an odd sort of creature in the internet age. They've resulted in some really cool public "performances", fun little comedic bits, and are now being used to raise protests quickly organized through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We saw what happened with the assistance of social media in the so-called Arab Spring, and the way some nations in the Middle East responded harshly to the protesters. But what about in America?

Warning: be prepared to be thoroughly pissed off.

It all started in 2008, when a flash mob was organized to dance silently (to music listened to by each individual with his or her own private headphones/music player) at the Jefferson Memorial to commemorate the 3rd American President's 265th birthday. Apparently, this flash mob of clearly dangerous and possibly terror-plot developing waltzers was asked to leave the memorial because...well...you know what? I can't think of a single good reason why a bunch of people silently dancing at the Jefferson Memorial on his birthday to celebrate his life should have to leave. Jefferson, a musician himself, once wrote that dancing "is a healthy exercise, elegant and very attractive for young people."

But one of the flash mob dancers was cuffed anyway. And when she sued on First Amendment grounds, she was twice told to go boogie because dancing at the memorial, even silently and respectfully, apparently was a "distraction" from the somberness of the memorial.

Upon this appeals court loss, a couple weeks ago, a group was started on Facebook to organize a protest of the ruling over Memorial Day weekend where members would waltz on over to the Jefferson Memorial and dance again, silently and respectfully, without music, so as not to disturb other tourists. It didn't take long for the police to two-step over and ask them to stop again. In one of the finest examples of why we need to be allowed to videotape law enforcement, police cuffed a couple basically slow dancing in silence, and then lindy hopped on a couple of gentlemen's heads, while horrified tourists looked on slack-jawed.



Look, I'm Irish, so I come from a lineage whose dance tradition basically consists of playing hacky sack without the sack, but perhaps bodyslamming silently dancing men and women onto the marble floor of a memorial for a patriot dedicated to preserving freedom and battling against needless government tyranny, not a hundred feet from the stenciled words "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these people are to be free" might not be the best use of law enforcement, the courts, or much of anything else. Let's not mince words -- this was a peaceful assembly in protest over a court ruling, and in celebration of a Founding Father of the United States. Their treatment by law enforcement was abhorrent.

I'm trying to inject some humor into this because, frankly, I find this whole thing really upsetting. And to be honest, my words alone can't really describe the level of what occurred here. That's why, again, I'm thankful that people have cameras on their phones and a platform like YouTube to share the videos, even if it's stomach-turning to watch the results.

Filed Under: dancing, free speech, jefferson memorial, thomas jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Decided The Hemp Brake Was Too Important To Patent

from the locking-stuff-up-isn't-a-very-good-thing dept

We've had plenty of discussions about Thomas Jefferson's views on the patent system. He is, clearly, the father of the patent system in the US. While he was incredibly skeptical of the idea of granting any monopolies originally, he did come around to accept patents in very limited circumstances, and when he oversaw the patent system, he was careful to make sure that the downsides of such monopolies were limited. Separately, for many years, I've heard the story of how Ben Franklin purposely decided not to patent his stove invention, stating:

"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

However, I had not heard of a similar story involving Thomas Jefferson refusing to patent certain inventions he came up with as well. Reader jprlk points us to a recent Straight Dope column, which is mostly about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson's exposure to marijuana, but there is one interesting part about how Jefferson refused to patent his "hemp brake" patent, because he found the invention to be "too important":

Jefferson invented a better "hemp brake" to separate the fibers from the stalks, something he thought was so important agriculturally that he refused to patent it.

Combined with the Franklin quote, this is quite telling. In both cases, they realized that the invention could be a lot more useful if it were not limited. This goes against claims by patent supporters that (1) an invention is not a "real invention" if it's not patented and (2) the patent system is necessary for better dissemination of ideas. It's nice to see (yet again) that Thomas Jefferson, despite overseeing the early years of our patent system, clearly was quite skeptical of the actual benefits of such a system.

Filed Under: hemp brake, patents, thomas jefferson

Putting Jefferson's Quote On Newspapers Into Context

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Earlier this year, we took on why journalists who were quoting Thomas Jefferson's famous line: "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter" were missing the point, noting that he really meant journalism not newspapers -- and journalism isn't going away at all. However, Jay Rosen points out that the quote is actually out of context. The full Jefferson quote even more clearly makes the point that it's not physical newspapers, he's concerned about:

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." -- Thomas Jefferson

From that quote, it seems likely that Jefferson would be quite a fan of the web and the fact that news on the web was free and widely available -- contrary to the point made by most old school news folks quoting it.

Filed Under: context, journalism, newspapers, quotes, thomas jefferson

Can Someone Give Michael Eisner A History Lesson On Copyright And Patents?

from the not-that-it-would-help dept

Michael Eisner gave an interview at SXSW on Tuesday (with Mark Cuban acting as the interviewer). While he discussed a variety of things, at one point he was asked about copyright issues and he responded with a strongly pro-copyright statement:

"I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright. I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work."

Eisner has been repeating this bizarre and near totally incorrect claim about Lincoln for years. In fact, in 2002 he wrote an editorial for the Financial Times with the bizarre claim that Abraham Lincoln would hate file sharing. Then, last year, in another interview he talked about how important intellectual property was in the US since the time of Lincoln. It certainly would appear that he has Lincoln on the brain when it comes to intellectual property. There are just a few problems with this, with the first one being that Lincoln had almost nothing to do with intellectual property laws in this country. While he is the only president to hold a patent, he didn't do much with that patent, and during his administration there was no major legislative changes to either patent or copyright law. Thus, it's not at all clear why Eisner seems to repeatedly be crediting Lincoln with setting up our modern copyright and patent law.

As we've been discussing, that job fell to two other former Presidents: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who clearly understood that copyrights and patents had both positive and negative impacts -- and were worried that the negatives could outweigh the positives. Eisner, on the other hand, has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's an absolutist: copyright should be ever strengthened and lengthened. It was, after all, under Eisner's watch that Walt Disney was the driving force behind the Bono Copyright Extension Act, designed solely to protect the copyright on Mickey Mouse for even longer. Apparently, since Eisner's history lesson on copyright and patents only goes back to Lincoln, he's not aware of the "for a limited time" part that's in the Constitution.

Furthermore, Eisner seems to have a total blind spot to the fact that much of Walt Disney's success was due to its widespread use of stories and concepts from the public domain (the very public domain he doesn't seem to want to exist any more). Even the beloved Mickey Mouse was originally a concept copied from a popular movie (which was still under copyright at the time Disney copied it). Eisner is no longer at Disney, but it's not a stretch to suggest that a big part of Disney's troubles, leading to his own ouster, had to do with his inability to adapt to the changing times and changing marketplace that wasn't so reliant on artificial scarcities.

The history of intellectual property is fascinating and long, but Abraham Lincoln barely deserves a footnote in it. If Eisner wants the full story, we're more than willing to educate him -- though, since he's such a believer in the idea that information requires property rights, I'm guessing he'd be appalled if we just gave them away. So, Mr. Eisner, if you'd like to pay for a lesson on the history of intellectual property, we're willing to sell one to you. To entice you, we'll even throw in an explanation for why it's also incorrect to claim that intellectual property laws separated the US from the rest of the world (and will even show examples of how the US actively ignored IP rights for many years in order to build up certain industries, including -- believe it or not -- the entertainment industry).

Filed Under: abraham lincoln, copyright, history, james madison, michael eisner, patents, thomas jefferson
Companies: disney

On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents

from the might-as-well... dept

Last week, when I wrote about Microsoft being the latest in a long line of companies or industry lobbying groups to try to put together a one-sided educational campaign, to try to convince young people that intellectual property was sacred, I suggested that it was about time that someone put together a contrasting "educational" campaign that wasn't biased by the companies providing it. A couple folks asked me to put together just such a campaign -- which, unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to do. However, I figured that I could at least use the blog to cover some of the key points that any such educational campaign should contain. With that in mind, I'll be running a short series of posts, like my earlier series on economics, that will look at some topics having to do with what, today, is called "intellectual property."

To kick it off, I wanted to discuss the very rationale for intellectual property rights in the US. While many people assume that there's always been strong support for things like copyright and patents in the US, that's not the case at all. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were the main players involved, were actually quite skeptical of the concept. Both talked at length about the subject, but a brief quote from each should give you a sense of their feelings. Thomas Jefferson's eloquent statement read thusly:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

He then goes on to note that there can be cases where society chooses to create monopolies "as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility," but also that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society." Clearly, he saw both the good and bad that such monopolies provide, and knew he was treading a fine line. James Madison felt equally so:

"But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good."

Yet, after discussing it back and forth in a series of letters, the two agreed to include the following in the Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

And with that, the basis of copyright and patents was born in the US. However, it was clearly done with ambivalence, and the recognition that such "exclusive" rights could have more downsides than advantages. Note, also, that they were clear in their language, that the sole purpose of granting these exclusive rights was "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." From that reading, it should be clear that any use of these types of monopolies in ways that do not promote the progress of science and useful arts is not covered by the Constitution at all.

These days, this language has been twisted. Supporters of stronger copyright and patent laws often point to this clause in the Constitution, claiming that it means that all of these types of monopolies, by their nature, "promote the progress." Yet, given Jefferson and Madison's own words, it is clear that this was not the intention at all -- and both were quite worried about how these rules could be twisted. For years, Jefferson was able to prevent that by managing the patent system himself. Yet, it didn't take all that long for problems to occur once he no longer was there to watch over the system.

Next up, I'll take a look at the "big three" categories that are often called "intellectual property": copyright, patents and trademarks.

---

Links to other posts in the series:

• On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents
• Patents, Copyrights And Trademarks, Oh My!
• If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?
• What Kind Of Progress Are We Promoting?
• Why Do Patents Tend To Cause More Harm Than Good?
• The Case For And Against Software And Business Model Patents

Filed Under: constitution, intellectual property, james madison, thomas jefferson