Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet Read online

  JULIAN: I just wonder whether we couldn’t, in fact, standardize the actual practice in the United States, and formalize it so you do simply buy Senators and buy votes in the Senate.

  JÉRÉMIE: No, no, no, no.

  ANDY: Let’s assume we have the money.

  JULIAN: Yes, and that it is all open and there are buyers and each one goes to an auction.

  ANDY: But the weapons industry would still have more money.

  JULIAN: No, I think it wouldn’t. I actually think the military-industrial complex would be relatively marginalized because their ability to operate behind closed doors in a system that is not open to general market bidding is in fact higher than other industries.

  JACOB: There’s a fundamental inequality in the system.

  JÉRÉMIE: From an economic liberal, anti-monopolistic perspective, when you say let’s let the dominant actors decide what the policy will be, I can answer you with the experience of the internet in the last fifteen years, where innovation was so-called bottom up, where new practices emerged out of nothing, where a couple of guys in a garage invented a technology that spread.

  JULIAN: For nearly everything, for Apple, for Google, for YouTube, for everything.

  JÉRÉMIE: For everything. Everything that happened on the internet just boomed after being unknown a few months or a few years before, so you cannot predict what the next innovation will be and the pace of innovation is so fast that it is much faster than the policy-making process. So when you design a law that has an impact on what the market is today, on what the strength relationship between various companies and actors is, if you strengthen one that is strong already you may stop a new entrant from appearing that would have been more efficient.

  JULIAN: The market has got to be regulated to be free.

  JÉRÉMIE: Of course you have to fight monopolies and you need to have a power that is superior to the power of those companies in order to punish bad behavior—but my point here is that policy has to adapt to society, and not the other way around. We have the impression with the copyright wars that the legislator tries to make the whole of society change to adapt to a framework that is defined by Hollywood, say. “Ok, what you’re doing with your new cultural practice is just morally wrong, so if you don’t want to stop it then we’ll design legal tools to make you stop doing what you think is good.” This is not the way to make good policy. A good policy looks at the world and adapts to it in order to correct what is wrong and to enable what is good. I’m convinced that when you enable the most powerful industrial actors to decide what policy should be, you don’t go that way.

  ANDY: I’m just trying to positively get us into thinking what would be a good policy. What you just formulated is at this stage, for me, a little too complicated. I’m trying to simplify a little bit. There is this guy called Heinz von Foerster—the godfather of cybernetics—who once made a set of rules and one of the rules was, “Always act in a way that increases the options.”98 So with policies, technology, whatever, always do what gives you more, not less options.

  JULIAN: Chess strategy as well.

  ANDY: It was mentioned that the increase of privacy on money transactions might have a negative effect, so we need to think, “The money system right now has a specific logic and the question is how do we exclude the money system from taking over other areas?” Because the money system has the ability—unlike the communication sector—to affect and totally limit the options of people in other areas. If you can hire contract killers to do specific things, or if you can buy weapons and engage in a war with other countries, then you’re limiting other people’s option to live, to act. If I put more money in communications then more people have more options. If I put more weapons on the market…

  JACOB: No—the more you have the ability to surveil, the more you have control.

  ANDY: Which is another good argument for restricting the weapons market, including telecommunication surveillance technology.

  JACOB: Sure, you want to restrict my ability to sell that, how do you do that? How do you restrict my ability to transfer wealth?—Also through communications networks. One of the most offensive things about the bailouts in the United States—which were offensive for a whole bunch of reasons to many people—was that they showed that wealth is just a series of bits in a computer system. Some people by begging in a very effective way managed to get many of the bits to be set high, and then what is the question? Is there value in the system if you can just cheat the system and get your bits set high? And everybody else who is struggling to get along isn’t acknowledged as even having bits that are worth flipping in the first place.99

  ANDY: So what you’re saying is we need a totally different economic system? Because value today is not attached to economic value.

  JACOB: No, I’m saying there is an economic value.

  ANDY: You can do bad things and generate money with it, and you can generate good things and you will not get a cent.

  JACOB: Well no, what I’m saying is you can’t decouple the economy from communication. I’m not talking about whether or not we need a different economic system. I’m not an economist. I’m just going to say that there is some value in the communication systems and in the freedom of those communications, just as there is value in the freedom of actual bartering—I have the right to give you something in exchange for your labor, just as I have the right to explain an idea and you have the right to tell me what you think of my idea. We can’t say that the economic system exists in some kind of vacuum. The communication system is directly tied together with this, and this is part of society.

  If we are going to have this reductionist notion of freedom, of the three freedoms Julian mentioned, this is obviously tied to freedom of movement—you cannot even buy a plane ticket now without using a trackable currency, otherwise you’re flagged. If you walk into an airport and you try to buy a ticket on the same day with cash, you’re flagged. You get extra security searches, you cannot fly without identification and if you were to be so unlucky as to buy your plane ticket with a credit card they’ll log everything about you—from your IP address to your browser. I actually have the Freedom of Information Act data for my Immigration and Customs Enforcement records from a couple of years ago, because I thought someday maybe it would be interesting to look at the differences. And sure enough it has Roger Dingledine, who bought me a plane ticket for some work thing, his credit card, his address where he was when he bought it, the browser that he used and everything about that plane ticket was all put together.

  JULIAN: And that went to the US government, it wasn’t just kept in the commercial processor?

  JACOB: Right. The commercial data was collected, sent to the government and they were tied together. And the thing that I find to be really crazy is that it’s essentially the merging of these three things you’re talking about. It was my right to travel freely, it was my ability to buy that plane ticket or for someone else to purchase that plane ticket, and it was the ability for me effectively to be able to speak—I was going to travel to speak somewhere, and in order to do that I had to make compromises in the other two spheres. And in fact it impacts my ability to speak, especially when I find out later what they have collected and that they’ve put it together.

  CENSORSHIP

  JULIAN: Jake, can you speak a little bit about the detainment that you’ve had at US airports, and why that has occurred?

  JACOB: They’ve asserted that it occurs because “I know why.”

  JULIAN: But they don’t say?

  ANDY: Can I try to summarize it, because technical security and the security of governmental affairs are two things that are totally detached. You can have a totally secure technical system and the government will think it’s no good, because they think security is when they can look into it, when they can control it, when they can breach the technical security. This was not about Jake trying to approach planes, to kill anybody, to hijack the plane or whatever. This was about his ability to affect govern
mental affairs by travelling to other countries, speaking to people, and spreading ideas. That is the most dangerous thing that happens to governments these days—when people have better ideas than what their policy is.

  JACOB: I totally appreciate you complimenting me there in that statement, but I would just like to point out that this is way worse than that, because this is the data they collect on everyone. This was before I did anything interesting at all; it was merely the fact that I was travelling and the systems themselves, the architecture, promoted this information collection. This is before I was ever stopped for anything, it was before I was deported from Lebanon, it was before the US government took a special interest in me.

  ANDY: Maybe they forecast it, maybe they saw it earlier than you did.

  JACOB: Of course they did, partially because of collecting this data. But they always give me different answers. Usually they say one response, which is, uniformly across the board, “Because we can.” And I say, “Ok, I do not dispute your authority—well, I do dispute your authority, I do not dispute it now—I merely wish to know why this is happening to me.” Now people tell me all the time, “Well, isn’t it obvious? You work on Tor,” or, “You’re sitting next to Julian, what did you expect?” It’s fascinating to me because each of the different people that are holding me—usually from the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States—will tell me it is because they have the authority to do so more than anything else. I’ve also had them tell me bullshit like, “Oh, remember 9/11? That’s why,” or, “Because we want you to answer some questions and this is the place you have the least amount of rights, or so we assert.”

  And in this situation they’ll deny access to a lawyer, they’ll deny access to a bathroom but they’ll give you water, they will give you something to drink, like a diuretic, in order to convince you that you really want to co-operate in some way. They did this to pressure, for political reasons. They asked me questions about how I feel about the Iraq War, how I feel about the Afghan War. Basically, every step of the way they repeated the tactics of the FBI during COINTELPRO (the massive domestic covert operations program that ran between 1956 and 1971). For example, they specifically tried to assert their authority to change political realities in my own life, and to try to pressure me not only to change them, but to give them some special access to what’s going on in my head. And they’ve seized my property. I’m not really at liberty to discuss all of the things that have occurred to me because it’s a very murky grey area where I don’t really know whether or not I’m even allowed to talk about them. I’m sure this happened to other people but I’ve never heard of it happening to them.

  I was in the Toronto Pearson airport once while travelling home from an event where I was visiting my family. I was travelling back to Seattle, where I was living at the time, and they detained me, they put me in the secondary screening, and then the tertiary screening, and then finally into a holding cell. And they held me for so long that when I was finally released I missed my flight. But there’s a curious thing, which is that these pre-detention areas are actually technically US soil on Canadian soil, and so they have a rule that says that if you miss your flight or it’s so long before the next flight, you have to leave. So I technically got kicked out of America by being detained so long and I had to enter Canada, fly across the country, rent a car, and then drive across the border. And when I got to the border they said, “How long have you been in Canada?” and I said, “Well, five hours plus the detainment that happened in Toronto,” so I had been in Canada about eight hours, and they said, “Well, come on in, we’re going to detain you again.” And then they ripped my car apart and they took my computer apart and they looked through all this stuff, and then they held me. They gave me access to a bathroom within half an hour, they were very merciful you could say. And this is what they call the border search exception—this kind of behavior is because they have the ability, they assert, to do this, and no one challenges them about it.100

  JULIAN: So, this has happened to you, but Chinese people I speak to, when they speak about the great firewall of China—in the West we talk about this in terms of censorship, that it’s blocking Chinese citizens from coming out and reading what is said about the Chinese government in the West and by Chinese dissidents and by the Falun Gong and by the BBC and, to be fair, in actual propaganda about China—but their concern is actually not about censorship. Their concern is that in order to have internet censorship there must also be internet surveillance. In order to check what someone is looking at, to see whether it is permitted or denied, you must be seeing it, and therefore if you are seeing it you can record it all. And this has had a tremendous chilling effect on the Chinese—not that they’re being censored but that everything that they read is being spied upon and recorded. In fact, that’s true for all us. This is something that modifies people, when they are aware of it. It modifies their behavior and they become less resolute in complaining about various kinds of authorities.

  JACOB: That’s the wrong answer to that type of influence, though. Their harassment of me at borders, for example, is not unique, in that every Arab-American, since September 11th and before, has had to deal with this. It’s just that I refuse to let the privilege of having white skin and a US passport go to waste in this, and I refuse to be silent about it because the things that they are doing are wrong, and the power that they are using, they are abusing. And we must stand up to those things, just in the same way that there are brave people in China that stand up to this, like Isaac Mao for example.101 He has been working very strongly against this type of censorship effectively, because the right answer is not to just give in to this type of pressure merely because the government asserts that it has the ability to do this.

  JÉRÉMIE: But once again we’re talking politics because what you say is, basically, that people should stand up for their rights—but people should understand why to do so, and then have the ability to communicate between each other to do so. I had the occasion to talk with some people from China—and I don’t know if they were in some position in the state, or if they were selected in order to be able to go outside to talk to me—but when talking to them about internet censorship I very often had this answer: “Well, it’s for the good of the People. There is censorship, yes, because if there wasn’t censorship then there would be extremist behavior, there would be things that we would all dislike, and so the government is taking those measures in order to make sure that everything goes well.”

  JACOB: That’s the same argument for organ harvesting. Don’t let those organs go to waste!

  JÉRÉMIE: If you look at the way Chinese censorship is being done, you see from the technical perspective that it’s one of the most advanced systems that exists in the world.

  JACOB: Absolutely.

  JÉRÉMIE: And I’ve heard that on Weibo—that is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter—the government has the ability to filter some hashtags to make sure they don’t leave a selected province.

  JACOB: It’s crucial to remember that when people talk about censorship in Asia they like to talk about it in terms of the “the other”—as if it only affects the people in “OverThereIstan.” It’s very important to know that when you search on Google in the United States, they say that they have omitted search results because of legal requirements. There is a difference between the two—both in how they are implemented and, of course, in the social reality of the how, the why, and the where even—but a big part of that actually is the architecture. For example, over the American internet, it’s very decentralized—it’s very hard to do the Chinese-style censorship in the same respect.

  JULIAN: Well, a big chunk of it is Google and you can censor Google. There are a load of pages that reference WikiLeaks that are censored by Google.

  JACOB: Yes, no doubt. And actually since the index itself is free, it’s possible to do a differential analysis.

  JULIAN: Yes, in theory.

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bsp; JACOB: In theory. And in practice there are some people that are working on that type of censorship detection by looking at the differences from different perspectives in the world. I think that it is important to remember that censorship and surveillance are not issues of “other places”—people in the West love to talk about how “Iranians and the Chinese and North Koreans need anonymity and freedom, but we don’t need it here.” And by “here,” they usually mean “in the United States.” But actually it is not just oppressive regimes, because if you happen to be in the top echelon of any regime it’s not oppressive to you. But we consider the UK to be a wonderful place; generally people think Sweden is a pretty great place, and yet you can see that when you fall out of favor with the people in power you don’t end up in a favorable position. But Julian’s still alive, right? So clearly that’s a symbol that it’s a free country—is that right?

  JULIAN: I worked hard to maintain my current position. But maybe we should speak about internet censorship in the West. This is very interesting. If we go back to 1953 and we look at the great Soviet encyclopedia, which was distributed everywhere, that encyclopedia sometimes had amendments as politics changed in the Soviet Union. In 1953 Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, died and fell out of political favor and so his section, which described him in glowing terms, was removed by the encyclopedia authority which posted out an amendment that was to be pasted into all of those encyclopedias. It was extremely obvious. I’m mentioning this example because it was so obvious and so detectable that the attempt became part of history. Whereas in the UK we have the Guardian and the other major newspapers ripping out stories from their internet archives in secret without any description. You go to those pages now and you try to find them, for example stories on the fraud case of the billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, and you see, “Page not found,” and they have also been removed from the indexes.