The war against evil forces in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan fought by Americans was won almost thirty years before I was born. Both of my parents’ fathers lived through and fought in World War II when they were only in their late teens. One was a US Army Ranger who scaled the cliffs of Point Du Hoc on D-Day. The other served in the Pacific Theater against Japanese forces. Both men returned home from World War II with scars of battle and settled down with their wives to start families. These four people were children of the Great Depression and members of the “Greatest Generation” who lived through four years of a terrible war on a global scale.

As a child I was interested in the military, but I did not really ask too much about the wartime experiences of my grandfathers and only had one or two conversations about the war with my maternal grandfather as an adult. One thing was clear: None of my four grandparents ever told me anything about how horrible it was living under “draconian laws and regulations” or “the police state” forced upon them by the politicians who wished to exert control over the frightened citizens of the United States in times of war.

This sentiment is widespread on the Internet in our Information Age. With the terrorist attack on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, DC by stealthy, fanatical, well-funded and coordinated murderers, the response of the American people was even more coordinated. The leadership under the George W. Bush Administration acted quickly and decisively to secure US cities and citizens. As one computer industry engineer in Austin told me the day of the attack: “By nine in the morning (Central Standard Time), everything was locked down and secured all over the country. You have to admit, that’s pretty good considering there are a couple of hundred million people here.”

On the Internet, the reaction was just as immediate. A few hours after the WTC was destroyed, “Internet technologist” Eric S. Raymond beat the civil liberties drum to drown the talk of war. Raymond is the author of several papers on the open source software development methodology and a cult hero amongst the “cyber liberties” crowd. Raymond has often claimed to be a paid “Linux advocate” who travels around the world to evangelize the “freedom” of open source software. Linux, the open source rip-off of the high-powered Unix operating system developed by Bell Labs scientists in the late 60s, is an “open source” system. According to Raymond, open source software programmers have the “freedom” to look at the source code that powers any software application that anyone else writes. This means that any programmer can see any other programmer’s method of writing any software app and copy it without breaking copyright laws. Raymond says that this will make programmers “more honest”, because software engineers can no longer hide their “sloppy code.” Most importantly, Raymond says that security is enhanced in the open source method, because “thousands” of programmers around the world on the Internet will find and fix bugs in software created via open source. To Raymond, the world would no longer endure the “security through obscurity” so many commercial software companies (like his hated enemies at Microsoft) use to stifle innovation in the tech industry. If everyone in the software industry had the freedom to look at everyone else’s source code, applications would almost never crash on you and be much more secure than today’s commercially developed software.

No, this is not a joke. Raymond literally thinks that if you are a software developer, you should “open source” your software so that competing programmers can have the “freedom” to steal your work and make it better for the world community.

Raymond said in a 2000 interview that “secrecy, and the kinds of closed intellectual properties that are bound up with secrecy, are not efficient” ways of creating software. If you have some C++ code that can make a better photo manipulation program than your competitors, you cannot keep that code secret because of the inefficiency those secrets create. By “closing” the code, you have effectively taken away another programmer’s freedom to steal your work and use it in his own program. Think about how much more efficient it would have been in your algebra class if the girl in front of you had given you the “freedom” to look over her shoulder during the pop quiz. Now that Eric Raymond has enlightened you, the realization that the smart girl was violating your civil liberties hits you.

In Raymond’s Decentralism Against Terrorism piece, he cautions that in the wake of September 11th, the US Government will enact “draconian ‘anti-terrorist’ laws and regulations” that will “further damage our Constitutional freedoms.” To Raymond, the “police-state-like impositions on freedom” at United States airports were useless against the terrorists. The last time I flew to Silicon Valley a couple of months ago, I put my bag on the X-Ray machine conveyor belt and handed my keys (with attached pocket knife) to an attendant who passed them back to me without eye contact as I walked through the metal detector. At the gate, I was asked if I had my ID and questioned by a monotone ticket agent if someone had given me any explosives. Flashing my driver’s license and answering “no” to the explosives question got me on the plane. Now that Raymond has enlightened me, I am going to get on the phone with the ACLU to find out if I should sue the airline, the airport or the US Government for the “police-state-like impositions” on my Constitutionally protected freedoms.

Raymond also points the finger at US Government “illegal” surveillance programs that track the emails and cell phone conversations of suspected terrorists (This is coming from the man that says: “security through obscurity” is ineffective but tells all visitors to his website to use the PGP encryption keys on all email. Maybe Raymond thinks America’s enemies should “open source” their next attack with terrorist cells via an un-policed Internet so as to have more freedom in planning their next target). The FBI and CIA computer surveillance programs are ineffective and unconstitutional to Raymond. It is the old “you say you’re watching the bad guys, but you’re also spying on Americans you don’t like” conspiracy theory garbage.

Such fantasy has made the producers of The X-Files multimillionaires, but it has also poisoned a generation to look for a conspiracy in everything. Can anyone just admit that a nut with a rifle murdered JFK, astronauts walked on the lunar surface and Princess Diana died in a car accident rather than attributing these things to a larger conspiracy?

Raymond’s answer to the WTC destruction sounds like “get planes flying again and act like nothing happened in order to defend the Constitution,” but that is not the case. Raymond’s solution calls for the US Government to step aside and have all private citizens in the United States arm themselves with concealed handguns used to shoot at terrorists and criminals. Where did he get this idea? He claims that the Israelis “have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons.” Is he kidding? Is it legal to throw rocks with the intent to kill in Israel? Why then are there so many Palestinian kids throwing rocks and no private Israeli citizen is shooting them dead? I will admit that I have never visited the Holy Land, but if any of my Israeli readers can confirm that the Israeli people all walk around with .45 caliber Desert Eagles under their shirts ready to blow away anyone that looks at them cross-eyed, please enlighten me.

In America’s coming war on terrorism, changes in the way Americans travel will have to be made. To be sure, those changes will not only include thorough baggage checks airports, but the scrutiny of the Internet communications between suspected terrorists or those in league with these terrorists. Each of these necessary actions to maintain wartime security will eat up valuable time (longer waits at the airport while checking in bags and longer waits as emails are scanned to see if it contains words like: “holy war,” “death to American pigs,” “can you send some more bullets for my AK-47?”). Just like when the Greatest Generation went to war, sacrifices will be made.

We are at war against fanatics. My hope is that Generation X can keep from listening to our civil liberties fanatics and elevate themselves to the noble level of their grandparents. <>

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