The News & TeleGraff

I spent some time on Friday with Larry Lessig, who is one of the internet's great thinkers. He's probably best known for his work on intellectual property and for his backing of movements like Creative Commons. I was most interested in talking with him about the disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington, but that subject morphed into a larger discussion about what will happen when our nation sees its first widescale digital attack.

The question, of course, is not if but when. As Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain pointed out during their speech at Google here in Washington on Thursday, there's no particularly good reason why the U.S. has not yet a major terrorist attack online already and so the question is really more: "Why not?" Luck appears to be the answer so far.

Zittrain (who is the only web-lebrity famous enough to be known by a single letter: "Z") and Lessig rightly pointed out that the 9/11 Patriot Act, which passed in such haste after the terrorist attacks, had been long sitting in a drawer at the Justice Department waiting for just such an occasion. There's no way such a major piece of legislation could have been written so quickly. Richard Clarke, a former national counterterrorism official best known for writing "Against All Enemies," has said that there is a similar document waiting in a drawer for the first digital attack. Lessig calls it the "i9/11 Patriot Act." After that attack—whether it shuts down the power grid, crashes Wall Street, or undermines the nation's air traffic control system—the government will argue that the attack demonstrates that privacy online comes at too great a cost and so the government must be able to access ALL information that passes online in whatever form—you know, to save us from ourselves.

The challenge inherent in that debate, though, is that the government so poorly understands technology and all of the various internets that such a law would be really the blind leading the blind. As Lessig told me Friday morning at Starbucks, "The i9/11 will be handled by people who have no idea."

I can't even imagine what a terrible piece of legislation it would be. One of the key reasons that technologists really do need to get involved in politics is so that there's some understanding of the process and the players before that while comes to the fore. In order to have any hope of stopping legislation that as Zittrain argues in his new book, "The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It," there need to be smart people involved very early on in the process of drafting it. Of course, there's the huge challenge: How to harness the nimble, entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley for the slow, tedious, and confusing corridors of power in Washington? As Lessig asked me, "How do you get people to understand the salience of process?"

One thing is clear: We can't allow this generative force that will have so much to do with the growth of the US and global economy over the next half-century to be arrested in the name of ill-conceived security measures.