In the early days of computing, almost all software was free. IBM's operating systems, for example, came with source code and the right to copy and modify it. This gradually changed as software became more independent from hardware. Richard Stallman realized the loss to the industry from the change, and formalized the issue with the GNU General Public License and his project to re-implement Unix freely in 1983.

I ported Richard's GNU Emacs to the Sun Workstation that year. I started archiving the free software posted to the Usenet in 1981, and continued through 1987 or so. I started a project to "sift the sands of Berkeley Unix", collaborating with UCB and other Unix hackers to sort the nuggets of original, nonproprietary code out from the background of AT&T-licensed code. Ultimately this resulted in the Berkeley "Networking 2" release which didn't require the recipient to have an AT&T license. In 1985 I wrote the "pdtar" program, which eventually became GNU Tar. In 1986 I tested pre-releases and each public release of the GNU C Compiler. I wrote GNU UUCP and hacked on the GNU Debugger and GNU Make in 1988 and 89. I ported most of Berkeley Unix through GCC in 1989 for UC Berkeley, so they could abandon the proprietary AT&T C compiler, as part of the effort to make BSD Unix freely available. In 1989 I co-founded Cygnus Support, the first company dedicated to supporting free software. Cygnus has made major contributions to free software, including better documentation, quality assurance, cross-compilation, many ports to new hardware and operating systems, and marketing help to get free software accepted by the computing mainstream. While at Cygnus I maintained the GNU Debugger (GDB) from 1990 through 1993. I worked on MIT's free Kerberos software for Cygnus from 1994 through 1995. I served on the Program Committee for the First Conference on Freely Redistributable Software in February 1996. Throughout 1996 I worked on the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon ("BIND"), the free software which holds the Internet together by mapping domain names to and from numeric Internet addresses. From 1996-2003 I've been sponsoring FreeS/WAN, which adds IPSEC (cryptographic security and privacy) to Linux's Internet support. In 2001 I co-created and sponsored GNU Radio, a framework for digital signal processing of radio-frequency signals. In 2005 I co-founded GNU Gnash with Rob Savoye (who is doing all the work). I still contribute occasional changes to various free software program.

In 2006 I sued the government to demand that it either publish the secret law that requires citizens to show ID in order to travel in the United States -- or to stop enforcing that secret law. This is part of my Freedom to Travel case. The FOIA does not apply to this secret law, because Congress specifically exempted airline security directives from the FOIA. Congress could not exempt them from the Constitution, which requires that citizens be given notice of what the law requires -- but the courts did exempt them from it, by refusing my case every step of the way.

The US government is deathly afraid of its own citizens (and non-US-citizens) having access to good encryption. This fear extends all the way up to the Vice President and the head of the FBI, who personally get involved in creating encryption policy. Everyone in government refuses to tell us why, saying it's classified and the national security is at stake. Rubbish! The security of the nation is already gone when its government violates the basic rights of its own citizenry, as these agencies do every day. They are "burning the Constitution in order to save it". (My own belief is that what's really at stake is a wiretap-based power base that J. Edgar Hoover and the classified spy agencies have built up for their own benefit.)

The most Byzantine set of laws, regulations, policies, departments, and practices you've ever heard of are employed by the National Security Agency and three or four other Executive Branch departments in an attempt to keep good crypto from bad guys. Unfortunately, they have also succeeded in keeping good crypto from good guys who have Constitutional rights. I instigated a lawsuit to correct this, with Dan Bernstein as plaintiff and the Electronic Frontier Foundation backing him up. I was a technical advisor to the lawyers in the case. On December 6, 1996, Judge Patel decided that the export regulations are unconstitutional. The government appealed, and on May 6, 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with her. The government appealed to an 11-judge panel in the 9th Circuit (an "en banc review"), which was granted, and then the government "voluntarily" changed the encryption export regulations so that most free software and academic research, and a lot of proprietary encryption software as well, can be easily published from the US. The "en banc review" of the old regulations became moot, and the case has been handed back down to Judge Patel, who ultimately ended it. The new regulations are even more complex than the old ones, and carry the same old harsh penalties for inadvertent violation. They need to not just be "reformed" but scrapped.

The government claims to retain the right to change those rules whenever it wants, and restrict encryption software again if it chooses. Congressman Judd Gregg announced support for doing so in the week of hysterical reaction after the World Trade Center was destroyed by hijacked airliners, but was shouted down by the people who'd spent a decade fighting this battle before he could gather any political support.

I have had an interest in encryption since childhood, and have spent a lot of time working on crypto export control issues.

I led the team that built the world's first publicly announced DES Cracker, a machine that finds the secret key used to encrypt messages in the government's favorite encryption scheme, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The National Security Agency intervened when the scheme was being standardized in the early 1970s, shortening the secret keys so that they could build their own DES Crackers. But they spent the next 25 years lying to us about how secure the scheme is, to encourage everyone to use it -- and we did. This left NSA able to secretly eavesdrop on anyone who used DES, which includes the entire financial community, and most computer and network security systems. Technology has advanced to where anyone with $200,000 can break the code, leaving all of our DES-protected infrastructures at risk. Thanks NSA! By 2002 much of the older DES-based software has been replaced, though there are numerous places that still use it, and its use is an option in many new protocol implementations even though it is known to be insecure. NIST has standardized a new algorithm with much longer keys, which has not been studied nearly as long as DES, but which has resisted all attacks so far. Smart people have stopped designing DES into new systems. Triple-DES or AES seem to be the preferred replacements.

The US policy on "illegal drugs" has been a terrible, hurtful sham for my entire life. Today there are more than 2,000,000 people in prison in the United States -- supposedly the freest country in the world. One quarter of the world prison population is imprisoned in the US. We have imprisoned a larger number AND a larger percentage of our citizens than in every single other country. Minorities are imprisoned at large multiples of their actual incidence of criminal behavior.

458,000 of those people are in prison for non-violent mind-altering drug charges. Many of them are otherwise law-abiding people, making families and pulling their weight in society. The vast majority of them are black. The policy that locks them up, and makes their drug-using friends fear their own government, is wicked and racist. It damages our citizens' respect for the law, it encourages corruption in our government institutions, it has been responsible for major losses of our Constitutional rights, and has wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. It has also cost millions of people their time and money to fight the criminal justice system. It encourages violent resolution of commercial disputes with drug sellers, by denying recourse to courts, harming not only those people but their families, neighborhoods, and innocent bystanders. This policy has been forced down the throats of countries all over the Earth, vastly multiplying the misery and injustice it creates. And it artificially raises the prices of these substances, feeding our citizens' money to many violent and irresponsible suppliers. At least 68 million people have used illegal drugs, including our own Presidents, but the madness persists. The obvious lies that the government tells in furthering its drug policy make every thinking citizen doubt other statements -- even true ones -- from such an obviously corrupt government.

Besides the practical issues, there are fundamental rights involved. The right to speak freely is irrelevant if the citizenry does not have the right to think freely. Our government's control of drugs is really intended to control our citizens' mental states. The substances themselves are not important unless they affect human minds (and some, such as nitrous oxide, are freely sold for non-mind-altering uses, but controlled when people wish to influence their own mental states).

These drugs appear to be prohibited by the government because they permit users to see that the world is not composed of a single point of view, a single concrete reality shared by all. The way each of us interacts with the world is a function of our internal brain chemistry, which is unique to each of us, and can be altered by our own choice or by imposed choices. The government seeks to impose its answer to the choice of whether or not to view reality in certain ways. These altered ways have clearly been useful in religion, art, music, medicine, and recreation for millennia. These government attempts to control the minds of its citizens are a direct violation of the basic Constitutional freedoms that the government is designed to secure for ourselves and our posterity.

I have known many people throughout my life who are able to use drugs in appropriate settings without harm to themselves or to others. I have known a few who were unable to control their use, and abused drugs. Today's policy does not "cure" these drug abusers, nor successfully remove them from society. The huge number of harmless users swept up in the gears of "justice" swamp the system, preventing the real troublesome people from being reformed or isolated.

Just as adults keep immature children away from matches and hot objects, though there is no law prohibiting the possession of matches by children, parents and social feedback should be used to teach children how to handle drugs responsibly. The War on Drugs has certainly not kept children from being able to get drugs! By eliminating the black market and the threat of prison, and allowing straightforward talk from people who know the dangers first-hand, children can learn the real reasons why some drugs are best avoided, and learn the line between use and abuse of other drugs. Today's situation teaches children that it's best to sneak and lie about what they're doing -- both because they are afraid of prosecution, and because they see drug-using parents doing the same thing.

I believe that mind-altering drugs should be usable and sellable under the same rules and the same taxes that apply to substances like flour, sugar and coffee. If the label says it's pure Humboldt County marijuana of 18% THC content, then it had better really contain that, or the seller is in legal trouble. Otherwise, no restrictions, no special taxes, no more black markets. If someone consumes a drug in a way that damages people around them (or seriously threatens to), they should be held responsible -- whether the drug is coffee, alcohol, or cocaine.

No matter who you are, you know someone who uses illegal drugs. Talk with these people about the real effects and the real dangers of the drugs they use, compare what they tell you to what the government tells you, and ask them about how the current drug laws and policies affect their life. If you think you don't know any drug users, think again of who you know. Are you really sure about all of them? If you still can't think of anyone, ask your friends in private whether they have ever used illegal drugs. You'll be surprised at what some of them have been afraid to tell you. Learn from what they know, but learn especially from the paranoia and fear they have had to live in. Then work with me for a peaceful end to the Drug War and a sane policy for how to treat our fellow citizens.

I've been helping around the edges with introductions, strategy, specs, testing, Secure Digital hardware, and little bits of programming.