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There’s No Avoiding Politics


By Allen Holub
August 1, 2006 — 
My esteemed colleague Larry O’Brien has opined that it’s usually not a good idea for techies to talk about politics, but I beg to differ. Politics affects all of us, both in our day-to-day lives and in our technical lives, and as such it behooves us to talk about it in technical circles. Programmers who pretend to be beyond the fray are really ostriches with their heads in the sand. I’m planning on ruminating about politics in this column, so if you agree with O’Brien, you may want to skip over to Windows & .NET Watch. I’m sure that many of you will disagree with me, but that’s fine. The discussion is, itself, valuable.

Two news stories brought my ruminations to the fore. The first was Bill Gates’ move into full-time philanthropy.

A reader wrote that it was somehow wrong-headed for a wealthy individual to step into what the reader saw as the purview of government. I strongly believe that if a governmental solution to a real problem isn’t happening, then it’s the responsibility of the rest of us to solve the problem in spite of the government. A democracy is a means for individuals to band together to solve problems that can’t be addressed by a single person. I see nothing wrong with an individual who has the resources to solve a real problem stepping up to the plate and providing the solution.

In fact, saying that certain classes of problems are a purview only of government is a shirking of our individual responsibility. Frankly, I deeply respect and admire what Gates has done here, and wish that others who have became wealthy in our industry would join him.

The second story is more troubling.

Last month AT&T announced that it has no intention of upholding its customers’ privacy rights should the government come a-courting. Not only will it release your name, address and other information, but it will give up all your passwords, track all your clicks and keystrokes (at least on Yahoo sites), pass on your e-mail, and give up pretty much any information that flows across its wires or through its machines. I find AT&T’s policy dubious at best.

AT&T’s stated policy just clarifies something that we all should consider whenever we write a public-facing application: The Internet is not safe when it comes to information transmittal. Here, the hacker effectively owns the infrastructure. There’s little practical difference between a hacker staging a man-in-the-middle attack and a service provider doing the same thing.

The free market solution to this problem is to take your business elsewhere, but if you haven’t noticed, AT&T is very close to re-establishing the monopoly that it held back in the 1970s, when it was broken up by the antitrust folks.

In the San Francisco area, where I live, it’s pretty much the only game in town if you need a high-speed push. (If you’re just pulling, you can use so-called broadband service provided by the local cable company.) Even the third-party DSL providers (one of which I use) lease their wires from AT&T, which is to say that the traffic that goes across those wires goes through AT&T computers, and is subject to AT&T policies.

Even if you can avoid AT&T at the carrier level, you’ll also have to avoid all online stores that are based at Yahoo, because all activity at those stores is subject to monitoring at the click-and-keystroke level. I’m sure the owners of those stores will be upset if they lose business as a consequence, but truth to tell, most people won’t understand these issues, and they’ll assume their transactions are private, even when they aren’t.

Which brings us to the technical side of this issue. Our customers expect a level of privacy that we’re bound to provide to keep their custom. Even if we come down on the government-needs-this-information side of the equation, we can’t permit sensitive information like customer buying habits to be freely available to just anyone, because our customers won’t like it. AT&T’s policies really just force us to do something that we should be doing anyway: building secure sites that are simply not accessible to snoops.

Returning to politics, I majored in school in both computer science and history, and the historian in me is troubled by the notion that AT&T says motivates its privacy policy: that national security concerns override privacy concerns. I believe that if our reaction to terrorism is to create a secret police that spies on our own citizens, then the terrorists have won. As programmers, we can come down either for or against this monitoring, but we can’t be neutral, because our day-to-day work exposes our point of view. Either we build sites that are monitorable, or we don’t. There’s no in between. So, here’s politics right in the middle of our code, so to speak. There’s no avoiding it.

Allen Holub is an architect, consultant and instructor in C/C++, Java and OO Design. Reach him at www.holub.com.


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