Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
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At the date of publication, the WikiLeaks investigation continues.16 Several people have been legally compelled to give evidence. Court proceedings in the trial of Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing information to WikiLeaks, reveal an FBI file on the investigation of WikiLeaks that runs to over 42,100 pages, some 8,000 of which refer to Manning. Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for over 880 days. UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, Juan Mendez, formally found that Bradley Manning had been treated in a manner which was cruel and inhuman, and which possibly amounted to torture.17
CALLS FOR THE ASSASSINATION OF JULIAN ASSANGE AND PUBLICLY DECLARED WIKILEAKS TASK FORCES
The Grand Jury investigation is not the only avenue of attack on WikiLeaks. In December 2010, in the wake of Cablegate, various active US politicians called for the extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange, including by drone strike. US senators labeled WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization” and named Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and an “enemy combatant” engaged in “cyber warfare.”18
A 120-strong US Pentagon team called the WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF, was set up ahead of the release of the Iraq War Logs and Cablegate, dedicated to “taking action” against WikiLeaks. Similar publicly declared task forces in the FBI, the CIA and the US State Department are also still in operation.19
DIRECT CENSORSHIP
In an act of unprecedented censorship of a journalistic publication, the US government pressured internet service providers to cease services to WikiLeaks.org. On December 1, 2010 Amazon removed WikiLeaks from its storage servers, and on December 2 the DNS service pointing to the Wikileaks.org domain was disrupted. WikiLeaks was kept online during this period as the result of a “mass-mirroring” effort, whereby thousands of supporters of WikiLeaks copied the website, and hosted their own version, distributing the IP addresses through social networks.20
The Obama administration warned federal employees that materials released by WikiLeaks remained classified—even though they were being published by some of the world’s leading news organizations including the New York Times and the Guardian. Employees were told that accessing the material, whether on WikiLeaks.org or in the New York Times, would amount to a security violation.21 Government agencies such as the Library of Congress, the Commerce Department and the US military blocked access to WikiLeaks materials over their networks. The ban was not limited to the public sector. Employees from the US government warned academic institutions that students hoping to pursue a career in public service should stay clear of material released by WikiLeaks in their research and in their online activity.
FINANCIAL CENSORSHIP: THE BANKING BLOCKADE
WikiLeaks is funded by donations from supporters. In December 2010 major banking and financial institutions, including VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Bank of America, bowed to unofficial US pressure and began to deny financial services to WikiLeaks. They blocked bank transfers and all donations made with major credit cards. While these are American institutions, their ubiquity in world finance meant that willing donors in both America and around the world were denied the option of sending money to WikiLeaks to support its publishing activities.
The “banking blockade,” as it has become known, is being conducted outside of any judicial or administrative procedure and remains in place at the date of publication. WikiLeaks has been pursuing major court cases in different jurisdictions across the world in order to break the blockade, with some preliminary victories, and the legal processes are ongoing. In the meantime WikiLeaks has been denied income, has elevated costs, and has been operating on reserve funds for nearly two years.
The banking blockade is an assertion of the power to control financial transactions between third parties. It directly undermines the economic freedoms of individuals. Beyond even this, the existential threat it poses to WikiLeaks exemplifies a new and troubling form of global economic censorship. 22
Some people allegedly associated with WikiLeaks, along with supporters and WikiLeaks staff themselves, have had mysterious issues with their bank accounts—from account details to full bank account closure.
HARASSMENT OF JACOB APPELBAUM AND JÉRÉMIE ZIMMERMANN
On July 17, 2010 Julian Assange was slated to speak at the HOPE hacker conference in New York City. He canceled, and Jacob Appelbaum appeared in his stead. Since this appearance law enforcement agencies have been running a campaign of harassment against Appelbaum and people in his life. Appelbaum has been routinely detained, searched, denied access to legal counsel and interrogated at border crossings whenever he travels into and out of the United States. His equipment has been seized and his rights violated, during which he has been threatened with further violations of his rights. His detainment and harassment has involved dozens of US agencies, from the Department for Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the US Army. These detentions even include the refusal of access to toilets as a method of pressuring compliance. Through all this, Appelbaum has never been charged or told by the government why he is being harassed.23
In mid-June 2011, while preparing to board a plane at Washington’s Dulles Airport, Jérémie Zimmermann was stopped by two self-identified FBI agents. The agents questioned him about WikiLeaks and threatened him with arrest and imprisonment.
Appelbaum and Zimmermann are among a long list of friends, supporters, or alleged associates of Julian Assange who have been subject to harassment and surveillance by US agencies, a list that includes lawyers and journalists engaged in the course of their professional duties.
WARRANTLESS SEIZURE OF ELECTRONIC RECORDS AND THE “TWITTER SUBPOENA CASE”
On December 14, 2010 Twitter received an “administrative subpoena” from the US Department of Justice ordering it to give up information that might be relevant to an investigation into WikiLeaks. The subpoena was a so-called “2703(d) order,” referring to a section of the Stored Communications Act. Under this law the US government claims the authority to compel the disclosure of private electronic communication records without the need for a judge to issue a search warrant—effectively getting around Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search and seizure.
The subpoena sought user names, correspondence records, addresses, telephone numbers, bank account details, and credit card numbers from accounts and people allegedly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, Dutch businessman and internet pioneer Rop Gonggrijp, and WikiLeaks itself. Under the terms of the subpoena Twitter was gagged from even telling them of the existence of the order. However, Twitter successfully appealed against the gag clause and won the right to inform the targets that their records were being requested.
Having been told about the subpoena by Twitter, on January 26, 2011 Appelbaum, Jonsdottir and Gonggrijp, represented by Kecker and Van Nest, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had their attorneys jointly file a motion to vacate the order. This has become known as the “Twitter subpoena case.”24 A further motion was filed by Appelbaum’s attorney requesting to unseal the still-secret court records of the government’s attempts to collect his private data from Twitter and any other companies. Both motions were denied by a US Magistrate Judge on March 11, 2011. The plaintiffs appealed.
On October 9, 2011 the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Californian email provider Sonic.net had also received a subpoena demanding the data of Jacob Appelbaum. Sonic had fought the government order and lost, but had obtained permission to disclose that it had been forced to turn over Appelbaum’s information. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Google had been served a similar subpoena, but did not say whether Google had challenged it in court.25
On November 10, 2011 a federal judge decided against Appelbaum, Jonsdottir and Gonggrijp, ruling that Twitter must give their information to the Justice Department.26 On January 20, 2012 the plaintiffs again appealed, seeking to challenge the refusal to unseal orders that might have been sent
to companies other than Twitter.”27 At the time of publication, the case is ongoing.
INCREASED COMMUNICATION VERSUS INCREASED SURVEILLANCE
JULIAN: If we go back to this time in the early 1990s when you had the rise of the cypherpunk movement in response to state bans on cryptography, a lot of people were looking at the power of the internet to provide free uncensored communications compared to mainstream media. But the cypherpunks always saw that, in fact, combined with this was also the power to surveil all the communications that were occurring. We now have increased communication versus increased surveillance. Increased communication means you have extra freedom relative to the people who are trying to control ideas and manufacture consent, and increased surveillance means just the opposite.
The surveillance is far more evident now than it was when bulk surveillance was just being done by the Americans, the British, the Russians and some other governments like the Swiss and the French. Now it is being done by everyone, and by nearly every state, because of the commercialization of mass surveillance. And it’s totalizing now, because people put all their political ideas, their family communications, and their friendships on to the internet. So it’s not just that there is increased surveillance of the communication that was already there; it’s that there is so much more communication. And it’s not just an increase in the volume of communication; it’s an increase in the types of communication. All these new types of communication that would previously have been private are now being mass intercepted.
There is a battle between the power of this information collected by insiders, these shadow states of information that are starting to develop, swapping with each other, developing connections with each other and with the private sector, versus the increased size of the commons with the internet as a common tool for humanity to speak to itself.
I want to think about how we present our ideas. The big problem I’ve had, as someone who is steeped in state surveillance and understanding how the transnational security industry has developed over the past twenty years, is that I’m too familiar with it and so I don’t understand how to see this from a common perspective. But now our world is everyone’s world, because everyone has thrown the inner core of their lives onto the internet. We have to somehow communicate what we know while we still can.
ANDY: I suggest not looking at it from a citizen’s point of view but from the point of view of people in power. The other day I was at this strange conference in Washington and I met these guys with a German embassy badge. I approached them and I said, “Oh, you’re from the German embassy,” and they said, “Ah, not exactly from the embassy, we are from near Munich.” It turned out they were from the foreign intelligence and I asked them at the evening buffet, “So, what is the focus of secrecy?” They told me, “Well, it’s about slowing down processes in order to better control them.” That’s the core of this kind of intelligence work, to slow down a process by taking away the ability of people to understand it. To declare things secret means you limit the amount of people who have the knowledge and therefore the ability to affect the process.
If you look at the internet from the perspective of people in power then the last twenty years have been frightening. They see the internet like an illness that affects their ability to define reality, to define what is going on, which is then used to define what the people know of what is going on and their ability to interact with it. If you look at, say, Saudi Arabia, where by some historical accident religious leaders and the people owning the majority of the country are the same, their interest in change is in the zeros. Zero to minus five, maybe. They look at the internet like an illness and ask their consultants, “Do you have some medicine against this thing out there? We need to be immune if this affects our country, if this internet thingy comes.” And the answer is mass surveillance. It is, “We need to control it totally, we need to filter, we need to know everything that they do.” And that is what has happened in the last twenty years. There was massive investment in surveillance because people in power feared that the internet would affect their way of governance.
JULIAN: And yet despite this mass surveillance, mass communication has led to millions of people being able to come to a fast consensus. If you can go from a normal position to a new mass consensus position very quickly, then while the state might be able to see it developing, there’s not enough time to formulate an effective response.
Now that said, there was a Facebook-organized protest in 2008 in Cairo. It did surprise the Mubarak government, and as a result these people were tracked down using Facebook.28 In 2011, in a manual which was one of the most important documents used in the Egyptian revolution, the first page says “Do not use Twitter or Facebook” to distribute the manual, and the last page says “Do not use Twitter or Facebook” to distribute the manual.29 Nonetheless, plenty of Egyptians did use Twitter and Facebook. But the reason they survived is because the revolution was successful. If it had not been successful, then those people would have been in a very, very grim position. And let’s not forget that pretty early on President Mubarak cut off the internet in Egypt. It is actually questionable whether the internet blackout facilitated the revolution or harmed it. Some people think it facilitated it, because people had to go out on the street to get news about what was happening, and once you’re out on the street you’re out on the street. And people were directly affected because their cell phone and internet didn’t work anymore.
So if it is going to be successful, there needs to be a critical mass, it needs to happen fast, and it needs to win, because if it doesn’t win then that same infrastructure that allows a fast consensus to develop will be used to track down and marginalize all the people who were involved in seeding the consensus.
So that was Egypt, which, yes, was a US ally, but which is not a part of the English-speaking intelligence alliance of the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Now instead let’s try to imagine the Egyptian revolution kicking off in the United States—what would happen to Facebook and Twitter? They would be taken over by the state. And if the revolution was not successful they would be plumbed, as they are now, by the CIA and FBI for details on who were the critical participants.
JÉRÉMIE: It’s difficult to disassociate surveillance from control. We need to address both. That’s more my interest—the control of the internet, whether it is by governments or corporations.
JACOB: I think it’s pretty clear that censorship is a by-product of surveillance generally speaking, whether it’s self-censorship or actually technical censorship, and I think that an important way to convey this to regular people is to do it non-technically. For example, if we built roads the way that we build the internet, every road would have to have surveillance cameras and microphones that no one except the police could access, or someone who has successfully pretended to be the police.
JULIAN: They’re getting there, Jake, in the UK.
JACOB: When you build a road it is not a requirement that every inch can be monitored with perfect surveillance that is only available to a secret group of people. Explaining to everyday people that that is the way we are building roads on the internet and then requiring people to use those roads—that is something that regular people can connect with when they realize that the original builders of the road will not always be the ones in control.
ANDY: But some people don’t even build roads. They put a garden out there and invite everybody to be naked. So now we’re talking Facebook! It’s a business case to make people comfortable with disclosing their data.
JACOB: Right. People were compensated for being in the Stasi—the old East German state security—and they are compensated for participating in Facebook. It’s just in Facebook they are compensated with social credits—to get laid by their neighbor—instead of being paid off directly. And it’s important to just relate it to the human aspect, because it’s not about technology, it’s about control through surveillance. It’s the perfect Panopticon in some ways.30
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JULIAN: I’m quite interested in the philosophy of technique. Technique means not just a piece of technology but it means, say, majority consensus on a board, or the structure of a parliament—it’s systematized interaction. For example, it seems to me that feudal systems came from the technique of mills. Once you had centralized mills, which required huge investments and which were easily subject to physical control, then it was quite natural that you would end up with feudal relations as a result. As time has gone by we seem to have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques. Some of these techniques can be democratized; they can be spread to everyone. But the majority of them—because of their complexity—are techniques that form as a result of strongly interconnected organizations like Intel Corporation. Perhaps the underlying tendency of technique is to go through these periods of discovering technique, centralizing technique, democratizing technique—when the knowledge about how to do it floods out in the next generation that is educated. But I think that the general tendency for technique is to centralize control in those people who control the physical resources of techniques.
Something like a semi-conductor manufacturer is, I think, the ultimate example of that, where you need such order that the air itself must be pure, where you need a construction plant that has thousands of people in it who have to wear hairnets to keep every little skin flake, every bit of hair away from the semi-conductor manufacturing process, which is a multi-step process that is extremely complicated. And there are literally millions of hours of research knowledge possessed by the semi-conductor manufacturing organization. If those things are popular, which they are, and they underpin the internet, then coded within internet liberation is semi-conductor manufacturing. And coded within semi-conductor manufacturing is the ability for whoever has physical control of the semi-conductor manufacturer to extract enormous concessions.