Surveillance States are Bound to Collapse

Louis Pouzin, Project Director of EUROLINC and the inventor of CYCLADES, talks to Newsclick about his motivation behind creating CYCLADES, a packet switching network developed as an alternative to ARPANET, and the reasons due to which it couldn't grow out of France. He also talks about the role of EUROLINC in countering the domination of English on the Internet, by promoting local languages. With regard to the current issues of Internet governance, he says the democratisation of Internet is fast becoming a myth since power groups have started monopolising it for their gains. However, the emergence of Wikileaks shows that opponents of surveillance states are catching up and it is these people from within, who will ensure that such an empire crumbles.

Transcript

Rishab Bailey (R.B): Hello and welcome to Newsclick. We are honoured to have with us today Louis Pouzin who is an expert in computer communications and networks and is internationally recognised as one of the pioneers of the Internet, having created the first packet communications system known as CYCLADES. He has received numerous awards and distinctions including the French Legion of Honour and is currently project director with EUROLINC, an association promoting the use of native languages over the internet.

Hello Mr. Pouzin. Thank you for being with us today. My first question of course goes back to some work you did many years ago. What was your motivation for developing CYCLADES?

Louis Pouzin (L.P): Well the first motivation was that i liked computing. When i was initially working for a French company in Paris which was partially bought by the Americans, i discovered that i didn't speak English and i didn't know programming at that time even though i had 50 engineers working for me because it was not appropriate for a chief to do programming. So i decided to change that and asked for a leave of absence to go to MIT and work in the Cray Time Sharing System (CTSS), where i learnt programming and English. 

When i returned to France, i was already well-known, especially in the university circles. Usually in France there is a certain distance between universities and industries. Since i was from the industry and had been to MIT, i had a reasonably good understanding with the universities. So i began to give lectures on Time Sharing and so on and that lasted for a few years and then i developed a system for the French Meteorology. Then the French government decided that they wanted to have some independence and autonomy in having computers. So they created a company which was supposed to build French computers. They looked at what was going on in the world and found out that there was something corporate in the U.S which was starting to develop.

It was in 1969 or so. So they started a study group to find out what should be done in France to keep up with that and in 1971 they decided they would build something like ARPANET. Then they called me and asked whether i would take the direction of that network and i said, 'okay'. There was no particular requirement. It had to be something like ARPANET, supposedly to be used by the French administration but also as a prototype for the French computer company so that they could make a product out of that.

R.B: Now what exactly happened to that system? How come it never actually grew out of France?

L.P: What happened is that the government had created a special agency which reported directly to the Prime Minister not only to foster the use of computers in France but also to strategically build a European group with Phillips, with Plessey in U.K, Siemens in Germany and Olivetti in Italy. Within that group there was Siemens which was the major competitor of another French group which was not a part of the consortium created by the agency. The group was the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité (CGE) who was also into telecommunications and they did not like this consortium. Then the French President Pompidou died and a new one was elected and since CGE had financed his elections, he did a revolt. It was to stop all activities around networking and that included our project. It was sought of a consequential decision, not directed against us, but directed against the fact that Siemens was part of the consortium.

R.B: Now moving on a few decades to the problems we see in today’s Internet environment. I mean there is a common view amongst the public that the Internet is a great tool of democratisation and of participation. Do you agree or disagree with this view and why?

L.P: I think the term ‘democratisation’ has a lot interpetations. Usually there are dominant groups in democracies and initially the Internet was only known by either technical people or those who were in a way explorers and wanted to learn something new. For a number of years there was a great opportunity for people to use Internet to do innovative things or spread their ideas, writings, music and so on. But gradually the usual groups came back and started to take the Internet over which has been going on for about 40 years now. It means that the Internet now, is no longer democratic. It is mainly in the hands of a few potential, powerful international lobbies, most of them American.

R.B: So what do you see as the most pressing problems, from a technincal perspective, with current systems of Internet governance and how would you say that these affect the global south in particular?

L.P: Well, almost always the more powerful dominate and get richer and the less powerful get poorer and that includes the South.

R.B: Fair enough. So given this, how can young techies, geeks, members of civil society be enthused to fight against these overwhelmingly powerful forces at play here?

L.P: Probably not very easily because they are now under surveillance. It is difficult to escape the police and information systems which are tracking them all the time. So it would be a hard battle but usually those massive systems built by powerful states are not very ideal. They build something, they use it, not really understanding that the environment is changing and the opponents are getting faster to circumvent the system. That is already beginning to happen and I think will hapeen more and more. So the powerful lobbies and the states wil react. There will be a fight which will probably last for about 5 to 10 years.

Not an easy fight but I think in the end those empires will begin crumbling from the inside because they have a huge beauracracy. There would be more and more people who won’t be doing the right thing. For example, the leaks about the way the systems work, there will be more and more of them. Moreover there will be more and more corruption based on selling the information of the surveillance systems and at some time the country will reject that.

R.B: Let’s hope that happens sooner rather than later. Moving on to the work you are currently doing, could you tell us more about EUROLINC, especially given that a country like India has so many diverse languages? We know that the Internet tends to be standardised in English. So how would you think that the work you are currently doing could affect the diversity of languages that we enjoy in India for instance?

L.P: Back in 2001, a few colleagues and I were studying to find out ways to counteract the dominance of English within the Internet. So we started a non-profit group called EUROLINC to promote the use of native languages. The preparation meeting started in 2002 and immediately we were asked by the French Foreign Affairs Ministry to participate in those meetings. Most of the people we met from different countries were diplomats, very smart people but not knowing anything about the internet. So we began finding ways to make them interested.

Diversity of languages was obviously a point they could understand very well. Based on that we told them that there was no technical difficulty in introducing foreign languages. They were in favour of that and then started an opposition from many countries against the standardisation of English within ARPANET. We ended up with what we call now IDN (Internationalized Domain Name). It had been a long fight between the Americans and the proponents of using native languages. The better activists for that were a group of Singaporean academics of Chinese origin. They worked within the constraints imposed by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and finally they came up with schemes that are presently used for Indian languages, Arabic and so on. It was a long fight.

R.B: Excellent. Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time we have today. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure.

L.P: My pleasure.