Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet Read online

  JÉRÉMIE: I would like to agree with Andy. I think that architecture matters and this is central to everything we stand for. But this is a message that we have a responsibility to convey to the public, because we understand it, as hackers, as technicians who build the internet every day and play with it. And maybe this is a way to win the hearts and minds of the younger generations. I think this is why the copyright wars are so essential, because with peer-to-peer technologies, since Napster in 1999, people just understood—got it—that by sharing files between individuals…

  JULIAN: You’re a criminal.

  JÉRÉMIE: No, you build better culture.

  JULIAN: No, you’re a criminal.

  JÉRÉMIE: That’s the storytelling, but if you build a better culture for yourself, everybody will use Napster.79

  ANDY: The history of the human race and the history of culture is the history of copying thoughts, modifying and processing them further on, and if you call it stealing, then you’re like all the cynics.

  JÉRÉMIE: Exactly, exactly! Culture is meant to be shared.

  JULIAN: Well, in the West since the 1950s we’ve had industrial culture. Our culture has become an industrial product.

  JÉRÉMIE: We are feeding the troll here because he’s playing the devil’s advocate and he’s doing it very well.

  JACOB: I’m not biting. It’s such obvious bullshit.

  JÉRÉMIE: It is bullshit. In the political storytelling it is called stealing, but I want to make my point that everybody who used Napster back in 1999 became a music fan and then went to concerts and became a descriptor telling everybody, “You should listen to those people, you should go to that concert” and so on. So people have had a practical example of how peer-to-peer technology decentralized the architecture. Actually, Napster was a bit centralized back at that time, but it seeded the idea of a decentralized architecture. Everybody had a concrete example where a decentralized architecture brought good to society, and when it is about sharing culture it is exactly the same as when it is about sharing knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is what we’re talking about when we’re discussing routing around censorship, or cutting through the political storytelling to build a better democratic system and to make society better.

  So, we have examples where decentralized services and sharing between individuals makes things better, and the counter-example is the devil’s advocate Julian is playing, where an industry comes and says, “Oh, this is stealing and this is killing everybody, killing actors, killing Hollywood, killing cinema, killing kittens and everything.” They have won battles in the past and now we may be about to win the ACTA battle. And I once again have to disagree with the devil’s advocate Julian was playing earlier. ACTA has been the greatest example of the circumvention of democracy so far, of sitting on the face of parliament and the international institutions, sitting on the face of public opinion and imposing unacceptable measures through the back door. If we manage to kick that out, then we will set a precedent, then we will have an opportunity to push for a positive agenda, to say, “ACTA is over, now let’s go and do something that really goes in the favor of the public.” And we’re working towards that and some members of the European Parliament now understand that when individuals share things, when they share files without a profit, they shouldn’t go to jail, they shouldn’t be punished. I think that if we manage that one we have a strong case for exposing to the rest of the world that the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of information, makes things better, that we have to promote it and not fight it, and that any attempt—whether it’s legislative or from a dictator or from a company—to hurt our ability to share information and share knowledge in a decentralized way must be opposed period. I think we can build momentum.

  JULIAN: What about the PIPA/SOPA debate in the US? This is new legislation proposed in the US Congress to create financial embargoes and internet blockades on behalf of US industries.

  JACOB: It was created specifically to attack WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks-related or WikiLeaks-like things that exist.

  JULIAN: In Congress the banking blockade against us was specifically mentioned as an effective tool.80

  JÉRÉMIE: And it was about giving this tool to Hollywood.

  JULIAN: So we had a big community campaign against it and eventually Google and Wikipedia and a bunch of others joined that campaign. But I didn’t go, “Ok, that’s great, we’ve won that battle.” That scared the hell out of me, because Google suddenly saw itself as a political player and not just a distributor, and it felt that tremendous, enormous power over Congress.

  JÉRÉMIE: Google was just one bit of the anti-SOPA and PIPA coalition.

  JACOB: Yes, but hang on, Tumblr, I think, made more of an impact than Google did.

  ANDY: Tumblr and Wikipedia and tons of individual actions, very small actions you may never have heard of, made an impact. There were thousands of them being parallelized—going in the same direction—and that’s, again, decentralized political action. It’s a decentralized political movement that we have witnessed. Google may have been the biggest actor that you’ve noticed among the others.

  JULIAN: Well, it’s what Congress said that it noticed.

  JACOB: I take a little bit of an issue with what Jérémie said earlier because you essentially promote the idea of a political vanguard. I don’t think you meant to do that but you did, and I just wanted to stop you right there, because the peer-to-peer movement is explicitly against a political vanguard. It’s the idea that we are all peers and we can share between each other; we may provide different services or we may provide different functionality. Once Ross Anderson said to me, “When I joined the peer-to-peer movement fifty years ago,” which I thought was a fantastic opener. He explained that he wanted to ensure that we never un-invented the printing press. Because as we start to centralize services, as we start to centralize control of information systems, we actually do start to un-invent the printing press in the sense that the Encyclopedia Britannica no longer prints books and they only print CDs—if you don’t have a general-purpose computer that can read those CDs, you don’t have access to that knowledge. Now, in the case of the Encyclopedia Britannica it doesn’t matter because we have Wikipedia and we have a lot of other material. But I don’t think as a society that we’re ready.

  ANDY: I’m not sure Wikipedia is all that good compared as a resource. I don’t trust a single page there that I didn’t re-write myself.

  JACOB: But the Encyclopedia Britannica is no different. It’s just one source of many, and what matters is the verification of the data. All I mean to say is that we should not promote this idea of a vanguard because it is very dangerous.

  JULIAN: Hang on, why? I’m a bit of a vanguard. What’s the problem with them?

  JÉRÉMIE: I’m not talking about vanguards, I’m just saying that we have new tools between our hands. We were mentioning the printing press. Another visionary, a friend of mine Benjamin Bayart, maybe less well-known in the non-French speaking world, said, “The printing press taught the people how to read; the internet taught the people how to write.”81 This is something very new, this is a new ability for everyone to be able to write and express themselves.

  ANDY: Yes, but filtering is becoming even more important these days.

  JÉRÉMIE: Sure because everybody talks, and many people say bullshit. As the academic and activist Larry Lessig and, I guess, so many other teachers will tell you, we teach people how to write but when students give in their papers, ninety-nine point something per cent of them are crap, but nevertheless we teach them how to write.82 And so, of course, people say bullshit on the internet—that’s obvious. But to be able to use this ability to express yourself in public makes you more and more constructed in your way of speaking over time, more and more able to participate in complex discussions. And all the phenomena we’re describing are built around engineered complexity that we need to break down into small parts in order to be able to understand and debate calmly. It’s not about a politica
l vanguard, it’s about channeling through the political system this new ability to express ourselves that we all have between our hands, to share our thoughts, to participate in the sharing of knowledge without being a member of a political party, of a media company, or of whatever centralized structure you needed in the past in order to be able to express yourself.

  THE INTERNET AND ECONOMICS

  JULIAN: I want to look at three basic freedoms. When I interviewed the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah…

  JACOB: Where’s that fucking drone strike? What’s that up there?

  JULIAN: Well, he has his own kind of house arrest as well because he can’t leave his secret location.

  JACOB: I’m not sure that I would make that comparison. Please don’t make that comparison.

  JULIAN: There’s a question whether Hezbollah has the ingredients of a state—has it actually become a state? This is something that is mentioned in the US embassy cables, that Hezbollah has developed its own fiber optic network in south Lebanon.83 So, it has the three primary ingredients of a state—it has control over armed force within a particular region, it has a communications infrastructure that it has control over, and it has a financial infrastructure that it has control over. And we can also think about this as three basic liberties. The liberty of freedom of movement, physical freedom of movement—your ability to travel from one place to another, to not have armed force deployed against you. We can think about the liberty of freedom of thought, and freedom of communication, which is inherently wrapped up in freedom of thought—if there’s a threat against you for speaking publicly, the only way to safeguard your right to communicate is to communicate privately. And finally, the freedom of economic interaction, which is also coupled, like the freedom of communication, to the privacy of economic interaction. So let’s speak about these ideas that have been brewing in the cypherpunks since the 1990s of trying to provide this very important third freedom, which is the freedom of economic interaction.

  JÉRÉMIE: But why would you need only three freedoms? In my European Charter for Fundamental Rights there are more.

  JULIAN: Privacy becomes important either from a communitarian perspective, which is you need privacy in order to communicate freely and to think freely, or you need it for your economic interaction in some way. So I think there are more derivative freedoms but these—the first three that I said—are the fundamental freedoms from which other freedoms derive.

  JÉRÉMIE: Well, there is a legal definition to fundamental freedom.

  JULIAN: But I’ve read the EU Charter and I can tell you that it’s an absolute dog’s breakfast of consensus.

  JÉRÉMIE: Yes, OK, and the lobbies managed to put intellectual property in the EU Charter.

  JULIAN: All sorts of crazy, crazy things.

  ANDY: I do think there is a point that we can agree on, which is that the money system, the economic infrastructure to interchange money, totally sucks at the moment. And even anybody who just has an eBay account will wildly agree with that, because what Paypal is doing, what Visa and MasterCard are doing, is actually putting people in a de facto monopoly situation. There was this very interesting thing from the WikiLeaks cables also, that said that the Russian government tried to negotiate a way that Visa and MasterCard payments from Russian citizens within Russia would have to be processed in Russia, and Visa and MasterCard actually refused it.84

  JULIAN: Yes the power of the US embassy and Visa combined was enough to prevent even Russia from coming up with its own domestic payment card system within Russia.

  ANDY: Meaning that even payments from Russian citizens within Russian-to-Russian shops will be processed through American data centers. So the US government will have jurisdictional control, or at least insight.

  JULIAN: Yes, so when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

  ANDY: And that, of course, is a very unsatisfying situation, independent of whether I like the US or not. This is just a very dangerous thing to have a central place where all payments are stored, because it invites all kinds of usage of that data.

  JACOB: One of the fundamental things the cypherpunks recognized is that the architecture actually defines the political situation, so if you have a centralized architecture, even if the best people in the world are in control of it, it attracts assholes and those assholes do things with their power that the original designers would not do. And it’s important to know that that goes for money.

  JULIAN: Like oil wells in Saudi Arabia as well, the curse of oil.

  JACOB: No matter where we look we can see, especially with financial systems, that effectively even if the people have the best of intentions, it doesn’t matter. The architecture is the truth. It’s the truth of the internet with regard to communications. The so-called lawful intercept systems, which is just a nice way of saying spying on people…

  JULIAN: It’s a euphemism, lawful interception.

  JACOB: Absolutely, like lawful murder.

  ANDY: Or lawful torture.

  JACOB: You’ve heard about the lawful drone strikes on American citizens by the US president, Obama? When he killed Anwar al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son in Yemen that was lawful murder, or targeted killing as they put it.85 So-called lawful intercept is the same thing—you just put lawful in front of everything and then all of a sudden because the state does it, it is legitimate. But in fact it’s the architecture of the state that allows them to do that at all, it’s the architecture of the laws and the architecture of the technology, just as it’s the architecture of financial systems.

  What the cypherpunks wanted to do was to create systems that allow us to compensate each other in a truly free way where it is not possible to interfere. Like Chaumian currencies, which are electronic currencies designed according to the specifications of David Chaum, the originator of eCash (a fully anonymous electronic currency), although you could argue that they are more centralized than is necessary. The idea is to be able to create anonymous currencies, as opposed to Visa/MasterCard, which is a tracking currency. While built around a central authority, Chaumian currencies use cryptographic protocols invented by David Chaum in order to ensure anonymous transactions.86

  JULIAN: So, basically electronic cash but without, say, serial numbers on the cash.

  JACOB: Or serial numbers that allow you to establish that it is valid currency but don’t allow you to know that Julian paid Andy, or what the amount was necessarily.

  JÉRÉMIE: It’s recreating cash in the digital world, actually.

  JULIAN: Creating an electronic currency is a big deal precisely because control over the medium of exchange is one of the three ingredients of a state, as I was saying with regard to Hezbollah. If you take away the state’s monopoly over the means of economic interaction, then you take away one of the three principal ingredients of the state. In the model of the state as a mafia, where the state is a protection racket, the state shakes people down for money in every possible way. Controlling currency flows is important for revenue-raising by the state, but it is also important for simply controlling what people do—incentivizing one thing, disincentivizing another thing, completely banning a certain activity, or an organization, or interactions between organizations. So, for example, with the extraordinary financial blockade against WikiLeaks, it’s not the free market that has decided to blockade WikiLeaks, because it’s not a free market—government regulation has made particular financial players kings and doesn’t allow other market entrants. Economic freedom has been impinged by an elite group that is able to influence both regulation and the principles involved in these banks.87

  ANDY: Sad to say, this is the unsolved problem of the electronic world right now. Two credit companies, both with a US based electronic infrastructure for clearance—meaning access to the data in the US jurisdiction—control most of the credit card payments of the planet. Companies like Paypal, which is also governed under US jurisdiction, apply US policies, be it blocking the sale of Cuban
cigars from German online retailers or the blockade of payments to WikiLeaks in non-US jurisdictions. This means the US government has access to data and the option to impose payment controls on worldwide payments. While American citizens might argue that this is the best democracy money can buy, for European citizens this is just priceless.

  JULIAN: In our traditional world we have had to a degree freedom of movement, not so great in some cases.

  JACOB: Are you sure, Julian? I feel like your freedom of movement is a classic example of how free we really are.

  JULIAN: Well no, the UK has announced it’s going to put 100,000 people per year in my condition.88 So I think that is collateral to a degree.

  JACOB: This is the reason why the founders of my country shot people from Britain. There’s a reason we shot the British. And it still exists today! The tyranny exists.

  JÉRÉMIE: Let’s not get personal.

  ANDY: What your country, the US, is currently doing is privatizing prisons and negotiating contracts that guarantee a 90 per cent filling rate to the private companies running these former US government prisons.89 Well, what is that? That is capitalism as absurd as it can get.

  JULIAN: There are more people in US prisons than there were in the Soviet Union.

  JACOB: This is this fallacy where, because I object to something that is wrong you can suggest that I am part of something that is equally wrong. I’m not suggesting that the United States is perfect. I think the United States is actually pretty great in a lot of ways, but specifically with regard to the Founding Fathers’ rhetoric.

  JULIAN: The Founding Fathers’ rhetoric is in clear dissolution in the past ten years.

  JACOB: We must not forget that a lot of perception about the Founding Father’s rhetoric is mythology and we should be cautious about idolizing them. So, yes, of course. All I mean to say by my comment about British tyranny and the situation that Julian finds himself in is that this is actually a cultural thing. This is where society comes in and where society is very important, and it’s very difficult for the technology to supplant that. And financial issues are the most dangerous thing to be working on. There is a reason why the person that created another electronic currency, Bitcoin, did so anonymously. You do not want to be the person that invents the first really successful electronic currency.90