Seeing crucial computer-science work threatened, a Princeton professor takes on Congress
Edward W. Felten is a distinguished Princeton University computer scientist whose specialty is computer security and cryptography. So how come a Web log he created calls for the regulation of dog collars?
Mr. Felten’s message -- “Fight piracy! Regulate dog collars!” -- is part of what he calls Fritz’s Hit List, an irreverent inventory of devices that would be affected by a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat. The bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, would require manufacturers to add copy-control systems to computer hardware and software. The systems are intended to prevent duplication of copyrighted material such as songs and movies.
But Mr. Felten and others say the bill goes too far. For instance, a recording device in one kind of high-tech dog collar lets the finder of a stray dog listen to the dog’s owner reciting an address and phone number. Under the terms of the proposed legislation, however, the device would be required to include government-approved copy-restricting technology, according to Mr. Felten. He says the bill is so broadly written that it would also apply, for instance, to digital church bells and a doll called the Kung Fu Fighting Hamster.
Introduced to the public-policy arena when he testified as an expert witness for the government against the Microsoft Corporation four years ago, Mr. Felten now finds himself provoked by what he sees as egregious lawmaking. So he has taught himself to be media savvy, seeking out new ways to call attention to his message: that Congress’s approach to protecting intellectual property poses serious threats to researchers and consumers.
After taking on the recording industry in a high-profile lawsuit that he eventually lost, he spent the 2001-2 academic year at Stanford University, where he studied cyberlaw with help from Lawrence Lessig, the guru of the field and a master at using the news media to relay his message. Now Mr. Felten is writing a book, meant for both computer scientists and a general audience, about how tinkering is crucial to scientific discovery. And his Web log (at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com) calls attention to people’s opinions about the regulation of technology.
“It’s critical in the high-tech world that people be able to talk about this stuff, study it, take it apart, adapt it to their use,” says Mr. Felten. “Even if you’re not a technologist, it’s important that you be able either to get tools that can do this, or you can participate in the debate in the same way that you can participate in the debate about a political issue that has complicated facts behind it.”
Mr. Felten, 39, is among the most visible of a growing number of computer scientists in academe who are distressed by Congress’s venture into regulating digital technology and who are speaking out about it. Politicians say new laws are needed to thwart piracy of copyrighted material and encourage technological innovation, but scientists fear the bills may end up stymieing innovation by preventing researchers from studying and improving technology.
Being Heard
Whether Mr. Felten and his colleagues have enough clout to affect public policy is unclear. But lawmakers and the Bush administration are at least listening to their concerns and, in some cases, taking action.
For instance, Mr. Felten’s struggle with the recording industry last year inspired the research-friendly portion of a bill introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in October, a Congressional aide says. That bill would have, among other things, revised a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to free researchers to develop tools to bypass technologies protecting copyrighted works.
Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat who was a sponsor of the bill, introduced it after meeting with Mr. Felten. In that meeting, Representative Boucher heard about how recording-industry officials had threatened to sue the professor if he publicly discussed his research on breaking digital watermarks that protect music. The congressman didn’t want other researchers to have to confront similar intimidation, the aide adds.
Mr. Felten also has a sympathetic ear in the Bush administration. Richard A. Clarke, special adviser to the president for cyberspace security, said in October that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be clarified so that companies do not threaten researchers who study computer security.
Eventually, industry officials backed down from their threat against Mr. Felten, and he presented his research at a computer-security conference in August 2001. But Mr. Felten and his research team had already sued industry groups and the Justice Department in June of that year. The suit asked a judge to declare the digital-copyright law unconstitutional, and to grant the researchers immunity from prosecution under the law.
Federal District Judge Garrett E. Brown Jr. dismissed the suit in December 2001. He said there was no conflict between the litigants since the professor was able to present his findings without retribution.
Despite the setback for researchers, Edward D. Lazowska, a computer-science professor at the University of Washington at Seattle, says Mr. Felten’s suit was pivotal in highlighting the importance of “reverse engineering” to scientific progress. Reverse engineering, in which someone takes a product apart to figure out how it works, can also give researchers a chance to discover a product’s weaknesses and correct them. It is among the practices researchers say are threatened by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “The critical thing is that flawed public policy can keep us from doing our research. That’s one reason that more and more people are getting involved,” says Mr. Lazowska.
Mr. Lazowska is on the board of the Computing Research Association, a Washington, D.C.-based group of computing-research organizations in academe, industry, and government, which filed a court brief in support of Mr. Felten during the case. The Washington professor was also one of Mr. Felten’s two advisers when he was a graduate student at the University of Washington from 1989 to 1993. Mr. Lazowska says he remembers his protégé's impressive work in high-performance computing and his “intellectual maturity and independence.”
“With some students, the adviser has to think up the questions and even illuminate the path to the answers,” says Mr. Lazow-ska. “Ed not only finds the path to the answers, but thinks up the questions.”
A Broader Agenda
With his challenge to the digital-copyright law behind him, Mr. Felten is turning his attention to other proposed laws that seek to stop the pirating of copyrighted material.
The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, the target of Fritz’s Hit List, is among Mr. Felten’s concerns. In March he submitted written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that called the legislation “doomed to failure” because, he said, it falsely assumes that a general-purpose computer could be equipped to tell the difference between legal and illegal uses of data.
“The speed, power, and low cost of the Internet and PC’s are possible precisely because they are designed to operate without having to understand the content of the data they are handling,” he told the committee.
Senator Hollings’s spokesman, Andrew J. Davis, says Mr. Felten’s Hit List misses the point of the senator’s bill. The measure is a jumping-off point for discussions between copyright holders and high-tech companies about how best to protect copyrighted material so that broadband technology can be fully deployed, Mr. Davis says.
In September, in written testimony before a House of Representatives hearing, Mr. Felten criticized legislation drafted by Rep. Howard L. Berman, a California Dem-ocrat, that aims to thwart sharing of music through peer-to-peer networks. If it became law, Mr. Felten said, the measure could also interfere with legitimate Web activity because the Web itself is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. Researchers, for example, who post excerpts from copyrighted material to their Web sites without permission from the copyright holder could have their Internet service disrupted, even though such postings may be fair use.
Furthermore, he said, a provision in the bill that would allow copyright holders to launch denial-of-service attacks against peer-to-peer networks could prompt “an arms race” between the creators of the networks and copyright owners, with the network creators ultimately prevailing. Denial-of-service attacks attempt to overwhelm computers by sending them such huge amounts of information that they become incapable of responding to legitimate queries.
“The bill, as written, flatly authorizes ‘self-help’ attacks on the World Wide Web, and not just users of file-trading networks like KaZaA and Gnutella,” Mr. Felten said.
Scholars and Their Blogs
But he and other researchers who are challenging government efforts to regulate technology are expressing themselves more broadly through blogs, as Web logs are known. Besides Mr. Felten’s there are also Zimran Ahmed’s winterspeak.com, Maximillian Dornseif’s dysLEXia, and Frank R. Field’s FurdLog, to name a few.
Mr. Felten says Freedom to Tinker allows him to refine his thinking about technology and law without going through the traditional academic-publishing process. “I get a surprising number of really good, thoughtful comments from people I’ve never heard of,” he says. “I’ve access to these ideas ... which I never would have had otherwise.”
Sometimes he uses the blog to float ideas for regulating technology -- and then he debates those who respond.
In a recent blog posting, Mr. Felten said he was intrigued by a proposal that would allow people to freely gain access to music online, share it, and redistribute it. Under this “compulsory licensing” plan, a tax would be added to the cost of all computer and electronic devices that record and play music. The revenue then would be divided among musicians, songwriters, and others involved in making music.
Some of the responses he received assumed he was endorsing the plan, which Mr. Felten made clear he wasn’t. “Let me just reiterate that I am not advocating compulsory licensing,” Mr. Felten wrote in a follow-up. “The fact that it is getting any serious consideration says a lot about the magnitude of our current problems.”
Mr. Felten says he began to understand how to link broad policy goals with the details of crafting a law while he was a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford’s Law School.
Mr. Lessig, who is the center’s founder, describes as “almost clinical” Mr. Felten’s approach to intellectual inquiry. “Every conversation I’ve had with him, he is constantly trying to work out the right answer,” says Mr. Lessig. “He doesn’t have a particular view he’s trying to push. He’ll start a conversation where he has an intuition, and ... he’ll be working to resolve what the correct answer is to the problem.”
At Stanford, Mr. Felten helped broaden students’ and faculty members’ understanding of what constitutes protected free speech, says Mr. Lessig. He says Mr. Felten pushed the argument that the First Amendment should not only govern free speech, but should also concern the right to take apart and study technological devices. It was an idea that many Stanford legal scholars were slow to accept, Mr. Lessig adds.
“The free-speech people around the law school beat up on Ed a lot because his conceptions don’t come from a traditional free-speech perspective,” Mr. Lessig says. “He helped many people around the law school see what’s different about digital objects that require maybe a new type a thinking about the kind of freedom the Constitution should be protecting.”
A Moderate Figure
“One of the reasons why Mr. Felten is such an appealing figure is that he’s a very, very reasonable person,” says Pamela Samuelson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who co-directs the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. “He’s not a wide-eyed, radical lunatic.”
That moderation has served Mr. Felten well. He says he believes that it is one reason the Justice Department chose him as the lead computer-science expert in the antitrust case against Microsoft. Unlike many of his colleagues, Mr. Felten says, he wasn’t prone to Microsoft bashing.
Mr. Felten helped the government bolster its argument that Internet Explorer and Windows 98 were separate products that Microsoft illegally linked to control the browser market and maintain the company’s Windows monopoly. He testified in January 1999 that he could remove the Internet browser from Windows without degrading the operating system.
The Microsoft case sparked Mr. Felten’s interest in cyberlaw. “I saw the interplay between law, economics, and technology,” he says. But what really got him fired up was seeing a draft of the digital-copyright law.
“The possibility that someone would try to outlaw what I considered to be traditional, legitimate research was a real eye-opener,” he says. He and other computer-security researchers wrote a letter to a group of senators advising them that the bill could hinder their work.
Although Mr. Felten later lost his suit to overturn the law, the battle was beneficial to him and other cryptographers.
In court briefs, government lawyers said Mr. Felten’s research did not violate the digital-copyright law since his goal is not to circumvent technologies that restrict access to digital works but rather to strengthen research into computer security.
The government’s position was “significant,” says Ms. Samuelson of Berkeley, since it “narrowed the scope” of the digital-copyright law’s anticircumvention provision.
Cindy Cohn, a lawyer who represented Mr. Felten, says his suit emboldened scientists to forge ahead with their research into computer security, while it made technology companies more timid about going after them. Ms. Cohn is the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that promotes civil liberties in cyberspace.
“There was a lot of concern ... by the academic community, after what happened to Ed, that this could start happening to them,” says Ms. Cohn. “The fact that both the entertainment companies and the government backed down has created ... some breathing space.”
Indeed, Andrew S. Huang, a partner of Xenatera, a San Diego computer-consulting company, says the outcome of Mr. Felten’s case gave him the freedom to publish a paper in August about how he took apart and discovered a flaw in the security system of the Microsoft Xbox video-game system. At the time of his research, he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his advisers warned him that publishing his findings might violate the digital-copyright law.
The book Mr. Felten is working on, Freedom to Tinker, builds on some of the ideas expressed in his blog.
“A lot of computer scientists, including me, had difficulty really putting their finger in a precise way on what the problem is other than, ‘They shouldn’t mess around with our stuff,’” says Mr. Felten. “What I try to do is ... talk about the importance of having technology that people can tinker with.”
Mr. Felten recalls that he was about 13 years old when he started playing with the computers that his father had in the house for his business. The machines fascinated him. “Somehow, I had more aptitude for the abstract computer than I had for more-physical things.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1985 from the California Institute of Technology, Mr. Felten received a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Washington before joining Princeton’s faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor. He is now a tenured associate professor and director of the university’s Secure Internet Programming Laboratory, which studies problems in computer security.
Mr. Felten also serves on corporate advisory boards and continues to study computer security. His latest project involves figuring out how to use cryptography in a network so that people who are communicating with each other are assured that outsiders will not be able to identify them. The research is applicable to wireless networks where, even if content is protected, outsiders can still figure out who is communicating with whom.
Such research reflects Mr. Felten’s sense of the importance of technology to a growing number of human interactions. “More and more of the world that we live in is in danger of turning into a black box that we can’t understand,” he warns.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 14, Page A27