A weird path to the wired future Cyber-elite expound on privacy, plans
[FINAL Edition]
USA TODAY - McLean, Va.
Subjects: Conferences; Hackers; Computer privacy
Author: Weise, Elizabeth
Date: Apr 4, 2000
Start Page: 03.D
Section: LIFE
Document Text
e-world: Living with technology; eworld@usatoday.com; See also related article on 3D.

TORONTO -- Every spring for 10 years, about 400 hackers, crackers and cryptographers -- as well as cops, congressmen and journalists -- have met for a week to debate technology issues so cutting-edge that the rest of the world won't notice them for years. Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) is the most important computer conference you've never heard of.

Renowned for elite late-night discussions, quirky attendees and more Ph.D.s per square foot than in most computer science departments, CFP is "an invisible university," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson, the 1996 organizer.

It's "where the digital community gets to pick their heads up from their PalmPilots and their stock quotes and see what's going on," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, last year's conference chairman.

CFP also is where lurking FBI agents once took a startled (and innocent) computer programmer in for questioning because he looked like a "most wanted" hacker.

CFP 10 begins here today, chaired by Lorrie Cranor, a member of AT&T Labs' secure systems research department, and featuring such presenters as science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson and privacy commissioners from many countries. Among issues on tap:

* Privacy. The government used to be seen as the greatest threat to individual privacy, but the new contenders are corporate marketers, Abelson says. "If you talk to the Europeans, they say, 'You guys are nuts. You're worried about your government, but you let these corporations crawl all over you?' "

* Digital authentication. While laws are being written to give secure digital "signatures" the same weight as handwritten signatures on contracts, some think Congress is moving too fast.

* Broadband access. Current U.S. law declares phone lines to be common carriers, meaning a phone company may not block access to anyone else's signal. But those laws don't necessarily apply to the cable lines that will bring multimedia Internet content into U.S. homes in the coming years.

* Online voting. Will it further democracy? One session features an online voting firm, plus the Florida Division of Elections, a group that fights voter fraud and those who say the technology is not secure.

While the conference began as a way of getting police and hackers to sit down face-to-face, today it aims to air emerging issues in free speech, privacy and computer security. Speakers often are chosen for their contrarian views. An example this year will be culture critic Paulina Borsook, whose book Cyberselfish, out in May, is a critical rant on what she calls "the terribly libertarian culture" of the high-tech world. "She is a fearless bomb-thrower," says Bruce Koball, an engineering consultant and conference chairman five years ago.

Early on, attending CFP made for strange bedfellows. Koball remembers one classic hallway encounter in which John Draper (a.k.a. Capt. Crunch, who'd been convicted of counterfeiting subway cards) was chatting with government prosecutor Don Ingrahm. "Somebody comes up and says, 'Hey, John, how you doing?' " and he says, 'Fine. I'd like to introduce you to my prosecutor.' "

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TEXT OF INFO BOX BEGINS HERE

Public achievements

CFP often serves as an early warning system for important Net issues. Past milestones include:

* The organization of Privacy International, a London-based human rights group that monitors privacy and surveillance issues worldwide.

* The creation of the Congressional Internet Caucus, a bipartisan group of members of Congress interested in issues relating to cyberspace.

* A seminal 1996 encryption report by the National Research Council that helped sway the government to change its policies, allowing stronger legal encryption to bolster Internet security and online commerce. The report's authors attended a late-night CFP session in 1995.

"I heard from a number of the people at the NRC, and they were just awe-struck by the intelligence and quality of the comments they received and the information they got," says Carey Heckman, a Stanford law school professor who chaired the 1995 conference.

"They were pretty blunt about how they thought it gave them a lot of new directions and changed their thinking," Heckman says.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Abstract (Document Summary)

TORONTO -- Every spring for 10 years, about 400 hackers, crackers and cryptographers -- as well as cops, congressmen and journalists -- have met for a week to debate technology issues so cutting-edge that the rest of the world won't notice them for years. Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) is the most important computer conference you've never heard of.

Renowned for elite late-night discussions, quirky attendees and more Ph.D.s per square foot than in most computer science departments, CFP is "an invisible university," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson, the 1996 organizer.

CFP 10 begins here today, chaired by Lorrie Cranor, a member of AT&T Labs' secure systems research department, and featuring such presenters as science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson and privacy commissioners from many countries. Among issues on tap:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.