Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

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.

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.”

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.

A historical analogy could be how people learned that they should wash their hands. That required the germ theory of disease to be established and then popularized, and for paranoia to be instilled about the spread of disease via invisible stuff on your hands that you can’t see, just as you can’t see mass interception. Once there was enough understanding, soap manufacturers produced products that people consumed to relieve their fear. It’s necessary to install fear in to people so they understand the problem before they will create enough demand to solve the problem.

the natural efficiencies of surveillance technologies compared to the number of human beings will mean that slowly we will end up in a global totalitarian surveillance society—by totalitarian I mean a total surveillance—and that perhaps there will just be the last free living people, those who understand how to use this cryptography to defend against this complete, total surveillance, and some people who are completely off-grid, neo-Luddites that have gone into the cave, or traditional tribes-people who have none of the efficiencies of a modern economy and so their ability to act is very small.

Unfortunately you can’t be confident at all in the machine that you’re running them on, so that’s a problem. But that doesn’t lead to bulk interception; it leads to the targeting of particular people’s computers. Unless you’re a security expert it’s very hard to actually secure a computer. But cryptography can solve the bulk interception problem, and it’s the bulk interception problem which is a threat to global civilization. Individual targeting is not the threat.

We fought this big war in the 1990s to try and make cryptography available to everyone, which we largely won.63

If you build a system that logs everything about a person and you know that you live in a country with laws that will force the government to give that up, then maybe you shouldn’t build that kind of system. And this is the difference between a privacy-by-policy and a privacy-by-design approach to creating secure systems.

I wouldn’t even call it governments necessarily, because whoever has the ability to listen to all the phone calls has the ability to do things. This is about stock rates also—economically, you can benefit a lot if you know what’s going on.

It’s interesting that cryptography is regulated. There’s the Wassenaar Arrangement, which applies internationally, meaning you cannot export encryption technology, which helps to protect against surveillance technology, to those countries declared evil or, for whatever reason, problematic. But if you are dealing surveillance equipment you can sell that internationally.