The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Q & A: Mitchell Kapor : Lotus Founder Working to Guard Privacy in the Electronic Age
Age: 43
Accomplishments: Founded Lotus Development Corp. Co-founded the to promote free and open communications in the digital world.
Education: Bachelor’s from Yale College, with interdisciplinary major in cybernetics. Master’s in psychology from Beacon College.
Interests: Eastern religion, reading, mountain biking on Martha’s Vineyard
Family: Kapor and his wife, Ellen Poss, a psychiatrist, have a young daughter and son. They live in Brookline, Mass.
Projects: Kapor is developing a program for a Boston public TV station that he refers to as the “Wall Street Week of Cyberspace.” He is also writing a book on democracy in cyberspace.
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When Mitchell Kapor founded a computer software company in 1982, he chose the name Lotus, a word representing the state of perfect enlightenment in the Hindu philosophy. Five years later, he left Lotus Development Corp. at least $100 million richer.
These days, the developer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program mainly tries to enlighten government and citizenry about the enormous potential of the nation’s electronic byways.
His nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990 with Grateful Dead lyricist and author John Perry Barlow, seeks to safeguard the right of free speech and other civil liberties of on-line Americans. Kapor is also a member of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, helping the Clinton Administration design its information superhighway policy.
We caught up with Kapor recently in San Jose at the 1994 Computer Bowl All-Star Game, a “technical IQ” fund-raiser for Boston’s Computer Museum, Kapor led an East Coast squad that out-nerded the West Coast team, featuring the likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
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Q: What is your worst fear about the information superhighway?
A: If the only things you could get were reruns of everything ever produced in Hollywood and the home shopping channels selling the full range of fake gems--that would be a disaster.
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Q: What is your greatest hope?
A: That we wind up with a network that reaches out to include virtually everyone in the society and that is highly participatory, in which people are not simply passive recipients of prepackaged information, but are engaged in a wide variety of activities, from education to entertainment to recreation to commerce. A system which can help revitalize the democratic process by encouraging more citizen participation, a network which stimulates information entrepreneurship and innovation, something which really restores the balance of power in a way that puts more power in the hands of individuals and less power in large, centralized institutions.
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Q: You are said to be an admirer of the principles of Thomas Jefferson. Why?
A: I find his political philosophy to be a major inspiration. He was not only the champion of liberty as the principal author of the Bill of Rights, he was a tremendous believer in decentralization of government, of putting control at the local level and letting individuals and communities shape their own destiny. I think there’s an opportunity with networks like the Internet, as they evolve and grow up, to put into practice a lot of the Jeffersonian principles.
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Q: Yet the Administration is perhaps not cooperating as fully as some might have hoped?
A: I think that the Administration really has a large vision for the National Information Infrastructure which is, on the whole, compatible with the kinds of things we’ve been talking about here. There are huge difficulties in crafting legislation which can get us out of the current morass and into this new regime. Where there are disagreements with the Administration, it’s on issues of privacy.
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Q: Is privacy the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s biggest concern?
A: It is certainly on EFF’s short list of issues, because there are major controversies, in that the federal government wants to impose certain systems that would benefit national security purposes and law enforcement.
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Q: The so-called Clipper Chip would allow the FBI and other agencies to tap into new digital communication networks.
A: It would have an unjustified effect on personal privacy and communications forever. I was thinking about this after President Nixon’s death. People who came of age during and lived through Watergate have an appreciation why there are separations of powers between different branches of government and why the framers of the Constitution limited the power of government: Because they knew people are fallible and periodically will get governments that dramatically and systematically commit major abuses of power. At the same time, I absolutely believe there are legitimate national security and law enforcement issues. I don’t want to see the hands of government unnecessarily tied, but I feel the rights of the individual to privacy are sufficiently important that we need a more public discussion on initiatives like Clipper Chip. We just can’t swallow it when they say this is the right solution and we have to do it.
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Q: The commercialization of the Internet seems inevitable. Is somebody going to want to manage this creature?
A: I’m sure there are going to be various kinds of demands for more controls. Heavy-handed attempts to take it over or to impose some sort of new code are going to fail, because people won’t go for it. My hope is that people can for the most part work things out on a voluntary, cooperative basis through agreements that don’t require a dysfunctional bureaucracy. That has certainly been the tradition and the spirit of the Internet. Whether it survives is really the challenge.
