A conference on computers, freedom, and privacy might be the last place one expects to find the deepest expressions of the quest for meaning in our lives, yet there it was, all over the place.

So was evidence of new possibilities for what I call the human-computer symbiot, that new kind of community generated by our symbiotic relationship to our electronic sensory extensions and intelligent networks.

The choices we make now as we take the reins of our own evolution more securely in our hands -- with fear and trembling at the perilous task before us -- will determine the kind of world we bequeath to our children.

The quest for meaning would not be an issue if our lives were obviously meaningful. Every foreground is defined by a background. The threat of meaninglessness posed by an entropic universe headed toward heat death makes us ask if the evolution of complexity of form and consciousness is evidence of consciousness that is the source as well as the goal of evolution -- or merely something that happened to happen. Either way, the existential choices are the same, and the fact that they exist is the definition of freedom.

The battle for freedom is not being fought in wars far from home but in the policies and decisions we make personally and professionally about how we will live in a wired world. If those decisions are conscious, deliberate, and grounded in our real values and commitments, we will build communities on-line and off that are open, evolving, and free. If we are manipulated into fearing fear more than the loss of our own power and possibilities, then our communities will be constricted, rigidly controlled, over-determined.

Privacy is key to these choices.

There is no such thing as a guaranteed private conversation any more. We used to be able to walk out behind a tree and know we could not be overheard. Now the information that is broadcast by everything we say and do is universally available for cross-referencing and mining for hidden patterns. Those patterns, as Solveig Singleton of the Cato Institute observed, are in the eye of the beholder, determined by their needs and ultimate intentions -- an eye that half-creates and half-perceives, as Wordsworth said, constructing reality in accordance with its wishes and deepest beliefs.

What we deeply believe, and how we allow others and our intentional communities to reinforce our beliefs and values, determines our actions and commitments. The choices we make downstream will emerge upstream when the river widens.

In a conversation with a career intelligence officer about the actions of various US agencies, I made this appeal: "There is a cry for justice in a child's heart," I suggested, "that is eroded over time by the way we sometimes have to live. Yet the day comes when we look at what we have done with our lives and its relationship to that cry for compassion."

He disagreed. "I long ago set aside the sentiments of my childhood religion," he said....

In order to do the things he had to do.

And the growing sophistication of technologies of torture, that enable governments to leave fewer marks, fewer clear memories in the minds of victims?

"A sign of growing sensitivity to world opinion," he said. "At least they're moving in the right direction."

How we do hear that cry for compassion, when the foggy weather in our own minds works to obscure it? Would it help, I asked Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to have audio clips on the web of what happens in those interrogation rooms?

"No," he said with conviction. "The descriptions I've read are sufficiently graphic."

What I cannot represent in words is the look in his eyes as his brain did a quick sort of the hundreds of detailed torture scenarios he had studied. Nor can I say how the face of that intelligence professional went suddenly wooden and his eyes looked away as he remembered what he had done as part of his job.

How wide do we draw the circle? A Department of Justice attorney arguing for weak encryption stopped at the border. Catching criminals inside America is his sole priority, so he wants a back door into every electronic conversation in the world. Ball draws a wider circle, including those in Guatemala, Ethiopia, or Turkey who might be alive if they had had a possibility of engaging in a private conversation. Ball favors strong encryption as a way to support human rights worldwide.

Our knowledge of "how things really work" pushes the conversation further. Seldom have intelligence agents told me they worry about abuse of the information they gather. They trust the system.

"We abide by the law," said a CIA professional. He added that even the NSA can not intercept conversations inside our borders.

They don't have to, said another. Our special friends in New Zealand or Canada listen to American traffic as we listen to theirs. Good friends, he added, help one another.

So ... granted that we live in a real world in which data gathered for one purpose finds its way into other nets, in which anything that has value will be bought and sold ... what are the limits we can place on the inordinate desires in the human heart to be in control, to know more than we have a right to know? How can technology serve the need for secure boundaries that guarantee citizens of a civil society the freedom they need? Knowing what human beings do to one another, how can we constrain our baser desires and make it less likely that they will determine policy and behavior?

Conferences like CFP generate more questions than answers. But as long as the questions are raised, we maintain the margin between necessity and possibility that defines human freedom.

That margin may be narrowing, but so long as it exists, our passion for freedom, justice, and compassion can still manifest itself in action as well as words.

February 21 1998