Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet Read online

  JULIAN: To help build the campaign.

  JÉRÉMIE: Was it on Tumblr or some site like this where the home page lets you enter your phone number and you’ll be called back and put in touch with the Congress? And you would just start talking with somebody and say, “Yeah, this is bullshit.”

  JACOB: The internet was used in defense of itself.

  JÉRÉMIE: I think we hackers have a responsibility towards the tools we build and hand out to the rest of the world, and we may be witnessing the beginning of how efficiently this responsibility can be put into action when we use it collectively. Today in the EU there is the ACTA debate—ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a multinational treaty that is the blueprint for SOPA and PIPA.69 I just came back from the European Parliament where we as individuals, beardy smelly individuals, were dictating to one parliamentary committee. We were showing them articles in the rules of procedure in the European Parliament that apparently they were looking at for the first time and told them how to behave, and there was this vote that we won by 21 to 5 which marginalized the British Rapporteur in a small corner. This is a very small part of a small procedural point on the way towards defeating ACTA, this monstrous global agreement that has been designed behind our backs to circumvent democracy itself. But we may as citizens be able to kill that monster—easily, with the internet tools, the mailing lists, the wikis, the IRC chat rooms, et cetera—and I think that we may be witnessing the coming of age, the teenage years of the internet and the way that it can be used by society at large to try to make things change. I think it is of tremendous importance that we hackers are here with our technical knowledge to guide people and to tell them, “You should use this technology that enables control over your privacy rather than Facebook or Google,” and that the two articulate together quite well—or may articulate together quite well. This is a small bit of optimism.

  JULIAN: Jake, on this political radicalization of internet youth, over the past two years especially you’ve been all over the world talking about Tor, talking to people who want anonymity, who want privacy in relation to their own government, and you must have seen this phenomenon in many different countries. Is it something significant?

  JACOB: Sure. I think it is absolutely significant. The canonical example that I think of immediately is going to Tunisia. I went to Tunisia after Ben Ali’s regime fell and we talked about Tor in a computer science class, which includes some very technical people at the university, and someone raised their hand and said, “But what about the bad people?” And she rattled off the Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse—money laundering, drugs, terrorism and child pornography. “What about the bad people?” Those four things are always brought out and the specter of them is used to shoot down privacy-preserving technologies, because clearly we have to defeat those four groups. So I asked the class: “Who here has ever seen the Ammar 404 page?” which is the censorship page deployed by the Ben Ali regime before and during the revolution in order to stop access. Every single person in the room, except the person that asked that question, but including the professor in the class, raised their hand. And I looked at the girl who asked this question and I said, “Look at all the people around you. That’s all of your classmates. Do you really believe that it was worth oppressing every person in this room in order to fight against those things?” And she said, “Actually, I’m raising my hand too”.

  It was a little more drawn out than that but essentially people who have it contextualized for them realize what the real deal is. That changes things dramatically. And this happens all over the world, all the time—but it usually happens later, that is people see in hindsight that they could have used the technology, they see in hindsight that, “Oh yeah, it turns out it’s not just bad people because, in fact, I am the bad person if I speak my mind about something and a person in power doesn’t like what I have to say about it.” And you see that there’s an awakening.

  But it is wrong to say that it just happened in the last couple of years. I’m sorry to do this to you Julian, but you are part of the radicalization of my generation. I’m like a third-generation cypherpunk if I were to count it that way. The work that you and Ralf Weinmann did on the rubberhose file system was part of what inspired me to work on cryptosystems. The crypto file system I designed, called M.A.I.D., was in response to things like the regulatory investigative powers in the United Kingdom, where basically the state has decided negative regulation is the solution to cryptography, where they can take your password.70 Of course, in Julian’s case when they created this it was because oppressive regimes would torture people for a passphrase so you had to be able to give up different passphrases in order to comply with their torture. My crypto file system, M.A.I.D., was designed for a legal system where the accused has the right to remain silent but can prove, if compelled, that they are telling the truth without violating confidentiality. I had realized when I saw Julian’s work that you could use technology to empower everyday people to change the world. Going far, far back to the old Cypherpunk mailing list with Tim May, one of the founding members of it, and reading Julian’s old posts on the Cypherpunk list, that’s what started a whole generation of people to really become more radicalized, because people realized that they weren’t atomized anymore, that they could take some time to write some software which could empower millions of people.71

  There are just some unintended consequences with how that played out, because the people that created Google didn’t start out to create Google, to create the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed. But in effect that is what has been created, and as soon as people start to realize it they’ll start sending in those National Security Letters, right?

  JÉRÉMIE: I think there are three crucial points in what you just said.

  JACOB: Just three?

  JÉRÉMIE: Among others.

  ANDY: Ok, let me add number four maybe, yeah?

  JACOB: You don’t even know what they are yet.

  JÉRÉMIE: I see three points that are intertwined. I’m not saying they should be taken separately, but one of them is authoritarian regimes and the powers that authoritarian regimes have in an era of digital technologies. In the case of the Ben Ali regime—it is obvious in so many regimes today—you can decide what people can learn about, or who they can communicate with. This is of tremendous power and this should be opposed, and the internet—a free internet—is a tool for opposing that. Another point is building tools and better technology, technology that can try to route around such problems as censorship, but basically building tools that are part of that infrastructure that helps us topple dictators. And yet another issue is the political storytelling you evoked with the Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse, the pretexts that are used every day by politicians through the media—“Are we all going to die of terrorism? Therefore we need a Patriot Act;” “Child pornographers are everywhere;” “There are pedo-Nazis all over the internet, therefore we need censorship.”

  JACOB: Pedo-Nazis?

  JÉRÉMIE: Pedo-Nazis, yeah—pedo-nazi.com is reserved already. “Artists are going to die and there won’t be cinema anymore, therefore we have to give Hollywood the power to censor the internet,” and so on. I think here again the internet is a tool, an antidote to the political storytelling. The political storytelling relies on emotionality and a media time-frame that is of extremely short span—information appears and disappears twenty-four hours afterwards and is replaced by new information. With the internet, I get the feeling that we’re building what I call internet time. As the great internet never forgets, we can build dossiers over years, day after day, and we can elaborate, we can analyze. This is what we’ve been doing for the last three years with ACTA. Once again, WikiLeaks has been an inspiration to us because the first version of ACTA that got leaked was leaked to WikiLeaks in 2008.72

  JULIAN: Yes, we picked it up.

  JÉRÉMIE: And we leaked two versions ourselves. There are five versions of the text over three years that w
e could take and paragraph by paragraph, line by line, say this is doing that, this is the industry asking for this, and involve legal experts and technology experts and build a version of political storytelling that was different from the official, “Oh, we need ACTA to save culture and save children from fake medications,” and such. And so we built our own political line with internet time, with precise analysis, with hard work, with connecting people together to participate in that.

  JULIAN: That’s true, and I think that view of ACTA has won the public.

  JÉRÉMIE: So far, so good.

  JULIAN: That I think will be the historical view, but behind the scenes this so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was originated by the US copyright industry, has actually been used in a whole lot of bilateral treaties to try and create a new international regime about what is legal and what is not legal as far as publishing is concerned, and what mechanisms there are to stop people from publishing various things. It standardizes a harsher version of the US DMCA system (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), under which if you send someone a letter demanding they take something down from the internet, they have to take it down, and there is some sort of two week process where they can make counter-arguments and so on but because it is expensive for any ISP publisher to deal with the counter-argument they just take it down immediately, and they allow the author or the uploader to try and fight it out themselves. The effect of it has been quite severe in the US, in removing a whole bunch of content. Scientology abused it to remove literally thousands of videos from YouTube.73

  So let’s assume that ACTA has been knocked out in the European Parliament, actually successfully, at least this iteration. But the main developments of ACTA seem to be occurring anyway—we’ve had the democratic debate, ACTA has been demonized in the public sphere, we’ve won the narrative, but behind the scenes secret bilateral treaties have been set up which are achieving the same result, it has just subverted the democratic process. For example WikiLeaks got hold of and released the new EU-India free trade agreement, and incorporated in that are large chunks of ACTA.74 That has been happening to a number of other agreements and legislation. The ACTA head might well get cut off but the body will split into a few bits and they will all worm their way into things, into the international order in the form of all these bilateral treaties. So you can have your democratic victories that take place in public, on the surface, but underneath things are still done anyway. Which is to show that I don’t think that policy or legislative reform is the way; although you can’t give the opponent a free kick either, because then they just accelerate. So it is important to check them in various ways, as ACTA is being checked. It slows them down. But even a win in parliament in relation to legislation doesn’t stop this below the surface activity.

  JACOB: One thing that I think really has to be pointed out is that Roger Dingledine, one of the creators of Tor, who I would say is sort of my mentor and has really given me a lot to think about with regard to censorship circumvention and anonymity online, talks about how, for example, firewalls are not just technically successful—and it is important to understand the technology behind them if you wish to build technology to resist them—but they are socially successful. People who are fighting against ACTA are using technology and the technology enables them to resist, but it is in fact the agency of everyday people that it’s important to understand here, and technobabble is not the thing that is important. What matters is people actually getting involved in that narrative and changing it while they still have the power to do so, and the human aspect of that is, in fact, the most important part. WikiLeaks has released documents that enable that, and the information-sharing is important, but it is also the people who take that important information and actually move it who matter. Because there is at least the argument that many of us might live in a democracy, that we are free, that it is supposed to be that we are governed through consent. And so if everyone understands what is going on and we find it is not something we consent to, then it is very difficult to keep going and just pass those as laws and do it without the consent of those that are governed.

  JÉRÉMIE: It’s about increasing the political costs of taking those bad decisions for the ones who take them, and we can do that collectively with a free internet as long as we have it between our hands.

  JACOB: But you could do it without an internet also, because we have—historically—had free societies pre-internet, it was just economically more expensive, it was more difficult in some ways, and this is actually why the peer-to-peer movement is so important.75

  ANDY: Point number four is, I think, the architectural dimension of decentralized systems is a core thing that also needs to be put in the hands of the people, because now we have this centralized cloud computing.76

  JULIAN: We have Facebook completely centralized. Twitter completely centralized. Google completely centralized. All in the United States; all controllable by whoever controls coercive force. Just like the censorship that started after WikiLeaks released Cablegate, when Amazon dropped our site from its servers.77

  ANDY: And we have cloud computing providing an economic incentive for companies to have a cheaper way of processing their data in so-called international data centers run by US corporations, which means bringing the data into US jurisdictions, just like the payment companies and so on.

  JULIAN: There is a tendency within the shift to cloud computing that is quite worrying. There are enormous clusters of servers all in one location, because it is more efficient to standardize control of the environment, to standardize the payment system. It is a competitive technique because piling up servers in the one location is cheaper than spreading them out. Most of the communication that occurs on the internet, except for streaming movies, is between server and server, so if you put the servers closer together it is cheaper. We end up with these big hives of communicating servers. It makes sense for Google, for example, to put its servers near the big content providers, or the other way around, because the pages are indexed by Google to be searchable. So there are huge buildings in the US that are just completely filled with servers from many different companies. That’s where the NSA places some of its mass interception collection points. The internet could exist without this centralization, it’s not that the technology is impossible, it’s just that it is simply more efficient to have it centralized. In economic competition, the centralized version wins out.

  ANDY: While the architectural point of view is very important to understand—centralized infrastructures make central control and abuse of power very easy—this is also like killing the small supermarket next door with a centralized retail concept.

  JULIAN: And going to a big, big multinational like Safeway.

  ANDY: Yes, the same way that it happened with shopping. It’s very important to keep up a decentralized infrastructure approach. When I was part of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which makes and regulates the domain names on the internet, I learned something from Vince Cerf, who invented at least part of the TCP/IP protocol, the fundamental communication protocol of the internet. He always used to say, “You know, one good thing about governments is they’re never singular, they’re always in plural.” So even among governments, there are those that want to have their own decentralized range of power, and even within governments there are different factions fighting with each other. That is finally what is going to save us from Big Brother, because there are going to be too many who want to be Big Brother and they will have fights amongst each other.

  JULIAN: I don’t think so, Andy. I think once upon a time we had national elites that were competitive with each other, and now they’re linking together and they’re lifting off their respective populations.

  ANDY: They are linking together, you are right in that respect—and I’m not so sure it’s really going to save our ass—but there is the chance of actually keeping our own identity. We have to stick to our own infrastructure, that’s
the important thing to learn here—that if we want to oppose the surveillance state, the one Big Brother, we have to study what that is, whether it is indeed a linking of central states that say, “Hey, if we combine we can gain even more.” And we need to know what our role is here—our role is to keep decentralized, have our own infrastructure, not rely on cloud computing and other bullshit, but have our own thing.

  JULIAN: But we may have this domination of technique. If it’s a fact that it’s easier to use Twitter than start your own Twitter; if it’s a fact that it’s easier to use Facebook than DIASPORA, or some alternative; if it’s a fact that cloud computing is cheaper, then these techniques and services will dominate.78 It’s not a matter of saying that we should start our own local services, because these local services simply will not be competitive, and they will only ever be used by a small minority of people. We need something better than saying that we should have a poor-man’s version of Facebook and expect people to use it.

  ANDY: Well, coming back to the Catholic Church, we’re going back to times where there is one major issuer of books, as Amazon is trying to control the complete supply chain of e-books, so we must keep our own printing/publishing capabilities. This might sound a bit over-reaching, but we have seen what these companies can do if they or the governmental agencies they depend on in their jurisdiction don’t want stuff to be happening. And I think the next step will obviously have to be that we need our own money, so that even if they don’t like the fact that we support projects like WikiLeaks or whatever, we have our own way to do that without relying on a central infrastructure which all goes through one jurisdiction.