CANDIDATE FOR DIRECTOR

John Gilmore

USENIX has collected and nurtured one of the great gatherings of technical people in the world. USENIX meetings aren't just fun; they help us find ourselves and our place in the world. Collectively, we are in positions where our research, development, deployment, and maintenance activities are changing the world. We are not only at the levers of power, we are forging new levers all the time.

I'm trying to get us to think more about the society we are building. You think I'm talking to someone else? Nope, this means you. Since I joined the USENIX board two years ago, some of the consequences of shortsighted work have become more obvious.

People steal music, so professors are threatened (and students are prosecuted) for publishing research results. Ways of publishing, reading, and looking for files are banned as tools of crime, putting Apache, Mozilla, Google, and NFS in the crosshairs next. Fanatics use airplane technology against innocent people, leading citizens to expect governments to wiretap and profile and track and search and identify everyone--using cellphones and networks and databases and chips and systems that we built. Our networks and computer systems could also hurt innocents, yet the government fights our efforts to secure them.

We technologists need to think together about these issues. The politicians and philosophers and lawyers and executives need to think together with the technologists who create and operate the underlying systems. I'm proud to have been part of USENIX's contributions to encryption policy, academic freedom, and free expression in the last few years. If we creators and operators make wise design choices, our architectures can become the firm foundations on which open societies with long-term social stability can be built.

Please re-elect me to the USENIX board if you want USENIX and its members to get even more involved in working out these social and philosophical issues.

Biography: John Gilmore is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early Sun employee, early open source author, and co-created Cygnus Solutions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Cypherpunks, the DES Cracker, and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He's spent thirty years doing programming, hardware and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy, and investment. He thinks the U.S. Constitution is not just a good idea, it's the law.

John's drug policy reforms aim to reduce the immense harm caused by attempts to control the mental states of free citizens. His advocacy on encryption policy aims to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies. His intellectual property policy effort seeks to create a healthy balance among the rights of creators, readers, middlemen, competitors, critics, and archivists.

John is a current board member of EFF, USENIX, CodeWeavers, ReQuest, and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. His first USENIX conference was in 1982.

There's more at his Web page, https://www.toad.com/gnu.

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