Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the law the Telecom "Reform" Act of 1996, while Tipper Gore took digital photographs of the proceedings to be included in a book called "24 Hours in Cyberspace." I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor. After all, the Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms. It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though "the illiterate could tell you what to read." Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense. I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really don't. But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us. I give you... A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes >from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996

That no Past, Present, or Future Nation or Government shall transport any Internet Community members beyond Seas and National boundaries, which boundaries shall have been previously ascertained by law, to be tried for pretended offenses:

That no Past, Present, or Future Nation or Government shall take away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and alter fundamentally the Forms of our Independent Governments:

That no Past, Present, or Future Nation or Government shall suspend our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

That the People of all Nations shall be declared in the Protection and waging of War from any Power that may try to come against us.

That any Character of Government, whose every act which may define a Tyrant, will be determined unfit to be the ruler of a free people, and shall be deposed.

We must, therefore, submit to the necessity, which announces our Unity, as we all mankind, Friends in Peace.

Article I

No Government shall make Internet law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble in cyberspace, and to petition any government for a redress of grievances.

Article II

A well regulated Internet Security Force, being necessary for the protection of the free flow of information, the Right of the Children to keep themselves from information that has been determined by the Majority of People to be declared as offensive material by the Parents of said Children, shall not be infringed.

Article III

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, internet and/or digital transmissions, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Article IV

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land, sea, and air forces, or in the global security forces, when in actual service in time of war or public danger;

Article V

Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Article VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the governments and nations wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Article VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed the legal expenses determined by the People at Large, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the Internet Counsel, than according to the rules of the common law.

Article VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Article IX

The enumeration of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article X

The powers not delegated to the Internet Community, nor prohibited by it to the Nations, are reserved to the Nations respectively, and to the people.

Article XI

That unsolicited bulk-email and unauthorized cyber-spam will be eradicated from the Internet, and that the free flow of information will continue as long as the earth is in existence with respect to All People, All Nations, and All Beliefs.

Article XII

That a Butterfly placed within a Circle shall become the Symbol of Peace and Harmony throughout the World, signifying an all inclusive system, and that this Internet Declaration of Independence shall not be overthrown by any Past, Present, or Future Tyrant, Dictator, or Government; and that All Free People shall have the unalienable Right to freely express their thoughts; so long as their thoughts do not infringe upon the Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness of All.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the Internet Community, in General Congress, Assembled in Cyberspace, appealing to the Supreme Creator of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of the World, solemnly post, publish, and declare, that no boundaries shall exist in the Management and Administration of the Internet, and of our Right to be proclaimed as a Free and Independent People;

and that as Independent and Free-Thinking People, we have the Power to contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Free People have the Natural given right to do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature, and it grows by itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our gathering marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest and our commonwealth our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you are creating a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, deTocqueville and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole; the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authority of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the planet so no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8th, 1996

These are some webpages that think that the internet should be "tamed"

How grave is the threat from cyberspace? Are those electrons really "10 feet tall" or is information war being oversold?

We don't know. In particular, we don't know what groups, with what technical skills, might be able to manipulate or disrupt the flow of information on which our society and our armed forces depend. Nor do we fully understand what the consequences of such acts would be. Our reliance on information technology has grown much faster than our grasp of the vulnerabilities inherent in the networks, systems and core technologies that knit the nation together. Last, we don't know enough about what we can do to prevent or neutralize hostile acts in cyberspace. But we do know that we are vitally dependent upon information systems and networks in most important aspects of American life. So we have to take this problem very seriously even though we are not now able to estimate its magnitude.

Should we be more concerned about vulnerabilities on the battlefield or on the home front?

There is more uncertainty and more potential for disruption in the domestic and economic spheres than in the military arena. Our military commanders are accustomed to dealing with changing threats, battlefield confusion and degraded operational conditions. Thus, they should be more resilient and more able to work around damage done by information warfare. Also, in combat, the military has a wide range of responses to any sort of situation, including infowar attacks. By contrast, we at home are not well rehearsed in defending ourselves. Americans are accustomed to things working--whether it's telephones, light switches, automatic tellers or air traffic control--and we give little thought to what could go wrong until it does. If the systems we take for granted start going haywire because someone or some group is tampering with them, we could be in for some very rude shocks. RAND's research and games are designed to raise and clarify the problems before a real crisis occurs.

Is there a role for the federal government in safeguarding the civilian information infrastructure, or should the private sector be left alone to deal with the inevitable problems?

The main burden must rest on the private sector, with government in a supporting role. Private providers and users of information technology have their own strong reasons to reduce vulnerabilities in cyberspace, not the least being that vital business and financial transactions are increasingly conducted there. Moreover, the expertise needed to improve network and computer security lies with the designers, developers and operators of commercial systems. The government can't--and shouldn't try to--replicate that massive capability.

It's important to remember that there is a certain self-healing potential in information networks--remarkable flexibility and redundancy that allow a given system to be bypassed and functions to be rerouted in the event of an accident or attack. I believe cyberspace security should be robust, not fragile. But the private suppliers and users of information technology will decide that, not the government.

What the government can do is understand where public interests are likely to be affected by vulnerabilities in these systems and then offer its encouragement, resources and organizing genius to guide the private sector toward a solution. This role assumes a high order of importance where national security initiatives are concerned, of course.

Some argue that only by exploiting America's overwhelming advantage in information technology can a much smaller Army meet the many challenges to national security in the 21st century. That is an appealing argument in an era of sharply reduced resources, but is it realistic?

The military potential of information technology is best understood in the context of U.S. strategy, which relies on the ability to project power--massively if need be--to distant parts of the world. Flexibility, speed, mobility, the utilization of long-range weapons, the ability to take the battle wherever we want when we want--these are all crucially dependent on forms of information technology. Our information advantage enables us to maintain that overall superiority at an affordable cost. I cannot say that the more we invest in information technology the smaller our forces can be. But I will say that these technologies are the essence of how we have achieved and will preserve global military superiority.

Some go further and suggest that, with its "gee-whiz" technology, information war may be able to avoid some of the battlefield's lethal, bloody and dirty consequences. Is that a reasonable hope?

It's not reasonable to hope that war will become anything less than "hell," as Sherman put it, because of information technology. I don't believe the day will come that the United States or its adversaries will be conducting battles with electrons instead of deadly force.

Information war offices are being set up in the Army, Navy and Air Force. In the scramble for budget and turf to pursue this hot new concept, is there a danger that existing, information-related problems will be overlooked? Should we be concerned that the preoccupation with information warfare might distort thinking about broad U.S. military policy and strategy?

We should not be concerned about the recent excitement over information warfare. Frankly, I think it's healthy and very American for numerous people and institutions to take initiative, even if they do not always move in exactly the same direction.

That is typical of any attempt to understand a new problem. At this stage the more ideas the better, the more analysis the better, the greater the awareness the better. I don't see any of these activities as being wasteful or distorting our thinking about more mundane and immediate aspects of American defense policy. We should have a high tolerance for the willingness of offices and people throughout the Defense Department and other parts of the government to take up a new challenge. Far better this than have people so stuck in the rut of conventional thinking that they are unable to see a new threat that requires new approaches.

By working with our existing friends and allies--who happen to be the very countries that have the most to gain from such cooperation and the most to lose by refusing. What's more, they are the same countries with whom we have a tradition of successful cooperation on common security problems. This is probably not the time for a major U.S. initiative, but some consciousness-raising and quiet activity with our friends might be timely at this stage.