I attended the 2005 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Seattle, and was struck by a couple of things. First of all, the conference was fairly sedate — in many and perhaps most previous years of the 15-year-old conference, the week’s events have been punctuated by some external event that created lots of attention. (In 1994, for example, attending FBI representatives attempted to collar someone they thought was a computer-crime suspect and fugitive, but who turned out only to look like old pictures of said fugitive.) This year, there was nothing big and CFP-ish happening in the outside world to fire up discussions inside the conference. Sedate, of course, can be good — it’s a tribute to conference organizer (and privacy activist) Deborah Pierce that things mostly went off without a hitch.

The second thing I noticed was this: If I had a single criticism of the conference, it was that so many panels and events focused on privacy more than on, you know, computers and freedom. I think privacy is important, but there are many issues arising in our digital age that don’t implicate privacy — at least not directly — but that do implicate freedom and our use of digital technologies to exercise that freedom. In particular, we now see from various corners initiatives to impose content and copyright controls on computers and other digital tools that could seriously impact how well those tools work for us. In addition, they could result in the suppression of lawful speech including that content or commenting on it.

Fortunately, I’m going to be able to contribute to the shaping of next year’s conference, thanks to Microsoft’s Frank Torres, who will be organizing it and who has asked me to help in the planning. I hope the outcome will be that copyright and tech-policy concerns come more to the front and center at CFP 2006. (Not that we’ll stint on privacy either.)

The real value of CFP, of course, is not so much in the panels but in the quality of people you run into there. All of us who are obsessives about cyberliberties issue tend to show up at CFP, and so in that sense it remains the great communal gathering it was when first chronicled by Bruce Sterling in THE HACKER CRACKDOWN.

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