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A L S O__T O D A Y [ 2 1 S T__F E A T U R E S ] Royal treatment for game reviewers By Mark Glaser From boot camp to Versailles, gaming industry junkets send critics to the strangest places - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is the Net doomed to be a white village? Weigh in on race and the Web in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Gun mad By Andrew Leonard While the oldest, nastiest debate online remains deadlocked, gun rights activists on the Net get organized (04/20/98) Black and white and Web all over By Janelle Brown African-Americans aren't flocking online -- a new study puts the numbers together (04/17/98) 21st Challenge No. 8 By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Phony Microsoft support letters (04/16/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg For Microsoft's PR machine, "innovate or die" becomes "innovate or buy" (04/15/98) Let my software go! By Andrew Leonard Netscape was desperate for a new strategy against Microsoft. Eric Raymond had one (04/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST BOOKS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

This is just between us, right? [ 2 1 S T__B O O K S ] NEITHER A NEW "GUIDE" TO ONLINE RIGHTS NOR A REPORT FROM THE NET BATTLEFIELD ARE CLEAR ON JUST WHAT PRIVACY IS. "PROTECTING YOURSELF ONLINE: THE DEFINITIVE RESOURCE ON SAFETY, FREEDOM & PRIVACY IN CYBERSPACE" | BY ROBERT B. GELMAN WITH STANTON MCCANDLISH AND MEMBERS OF EFF | HARPEREDGE | 190 PAGES "NET.WARS" | BY WENDY M. GROSSMAN | NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS | 236 PAGES - - - - - - BY MATTHEW DEBORD | These two very different yet somehow eerily similar books take as their primary drums to thump the "Three Ps" currently dominating discussions of cyberspace's rapidly evolving future: privacy, protection and pornography. Both are dispiritingly tainted by a troubling series of misconceptions about what privacy really means. "Protecting Yourself Online," apart from arrogantly labeling itself the "definitive resource" on anything other than its own agenda, carries an additional designation as an Electronic Frontier Foundation "guide" (there will, presumably, be more). "Primer" might be a more accurate way of assessing what its committee of authors has cooked up under the guise of practical tips. A real troublemaker would go a step further and call it "agitprop." Peppered with boxed comments gleaned from the EFF digerati ("We're not left-wing or right-wing, we're up-wing," exults EFF co-founder John Gilmore in a sunny piece of ideological frippery) and sentences that conclude with exclamation points or hum with italics, Gelman & co.'s effort operates on two levels. Writing of the relationship between individuals and innovation, the authors point out that if "consumers" want to fully enjoy the good stuff just around the technological bend, they'll "want to be sure that the 'keys' that give access to sensitive personal data belong to us alone and are in our control." That sounds dandy, but -- like almost everything else about this insipid little meta-manifesto -- its innocuousness and seeming self-evidence forges the support that the book's superstructure requires: a re-engineering of the public's understanding of privacy and the protection of information. Cyberpunditry has perhaps done more to promulgate hooey about the meaning of privacy than any other enterprise ever. The most common error, undergirding much of "Protecting Yourself Online's" apparently benign recommendations, is that privacy is a natural right, closely allied with freedom and personal liberty, and solidified, at least in the United States, by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The worst thing about this narrative isn't that it's flat wrong, but that it will seem accurate to many of the people who will achieve their false grasp of privacy from the EFF book. The truth is that privacy was "discovered" by the Supreme Court and given its fullest articulation through Justice William O. Douglas' famous majority opinion in 1965's Griswold vs. Connecticut. Douglas argued that while the sacred documents of the Republic were silent on the matter of privacy, they emanated certain legal "penumbras" that permitted the establishment of zones of privacy. Many critics have jeered this ruling since, but the activist thinking that spurred it remains: Though privacy isn't recognized in the basic texts, it must be there because it needs to be, in order for modern life to function. This doesn't change the fact, however, that privacy is a legal afterthought, divined not naturally but established through representative government -- a cumbersome bureaucracy the EFF would like to expel from the debate. The EFF's general distaste for all vestiges of centralized control -- "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a Peeping Tom to install your window blinds," quips cowboy cyberguru John Perry Barlow, EFF's resident libertarian -- leads the organization conveniently to forget that American democracy is not, as the authors would have it, "true" but representative, and therefore diluted. It was not the people themselves who plucked privacy from the ether, but a court assembled by elected presidents; privacy is not, therefore, the natural state of information, but an established right, an artifice requiring government maintenance. This confusion leads the authors to promote some bogus affinities, such as one between anonymity -- another absolute right, in their view, dictated by privacy -- and the writers of the Federalist Papers, who were of course American history's first great boosters of central government, as well as men who published anonymously, but who were hardly unknowns themselves. "We do want rules," EFF chairwoman Esther Dyson argues in her introduction, "we just don't want rules imposed by centralized powers that tend to flout their own values, at times in secret." Anonymous individuals are OK, but anonymous institutions are inherently harmful. - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T__P A G E .|. Updating the obscenity test for the Internet era