Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

by Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann

  JÉRÉMIE: There is licensing. Whether it’s government or company, they are changing the architecture of the internet from one universal network to a Balkanization of small sub-networks. But what we are discussing since the beginning are all global issues, whether we’re talking of the financial system going awry, whether we’re talking of corruption, whether we’re talking about geopolitics or energy or the environment. All of these are global problems that mankind is facing today and we still have one global tool between our hands that enables better communication, better sharing of knowledge, better participation in political and democratic processes. What I suspect is that a global universal internet is the only tool we have to address those global issues and that is why this fight for a free internet is the central fight that we all here have a responsibility to fight.

  ANDY: I totally agree that we need to ensure that the internet is understood as a universal network with free flow of information; that we need to not only define that very well, but also to name those companies and those service providers who provide something they call internet which is actually something totally different. But I think we have not answered the key question beyond this filtering thing. I want to give you an example of what I think we need to answer. Some years ago, about ten years ago, we protested against Siemens providing so-called smart filter software. Siemens is one of the biggest telcos in Germany and a provider of intelligence software. And they actually sold this filtering system to companies so that, for example, employees couldn’t look at the site of the trade unions to inform themselves of their labor rights and so on. But they also blocked the Chaos Computer Club site which made us upset. They designated it as “criminal content” or something, for which we brought legal action. But at an exhibition we decided to have a huge protest meeting and to surround Siemens’ booths and filter the people coming in and out. The funny thing was that we announced it on our site to attract as many people as possible through the internet, and the people in the Siemens booth had no fucking clue because they also used the filter software so they couldn’t read the warning that was obviously out there.

  JULIAN: The Pentagon set up a filtering system so that any email sent to the Pentagon with the word WikiLeaks in it would be filtered. And so in the case of Bradley Manning, the prosecution, in attempting to prosecute the case, of course, was mailing people outside the military about “WikiLeaks,” but they never saw the replies because they had the word “WikiLeaks” in them.118 The national security state may eat itself yet.

  ANDY: Which brings us back to the really basic question: is there something such as negative-effecting information? So, from a society point of view, do we want a censored internet because it’s better for society or not? And even if we talk about child pornography you could argue, “Wait a moment, this child pornography highlights a problem, that is the abuse of children, and in order to solve the problem we need to know the problem.”

  JACOB: So it provides evidence for the crime.

  JULIAN: Well, no it provides a lobby.

  ANDY: That would be the most radical approach but if we talk about Nazis or whatever, you still have to say what we’re talking about. People who have family will ask themselves: “Well, isn’t it better for society to filter the bad things out so that we stick to the good things, or is that not limiting our ability to view the problems and manage them and handle them and take care of them?”

  JÉRÉMIE: I think the solution is always another one than censorship. When we talk about child pornography we shouldn’t even use the word pornography—it is a representation of crime scenes of child abuse. One thing to do is to go to the servers, to disable the servers, to identify the people who uploaded the content in order to identify the people who produced the content, who abused the children in the first place. And whenever there is a network of people, a commercial network and so on, go and arrest the people. And when we pass laws—and we have one in France where you have an administrative authority from the Ministry of Interior that decides which websites will be blocked—we remove an incentive to the investigative services to go and find the people who do the bad stuff by saying, “Oh, we just remove the access to the bad stuff,” like we put a hand in front of the eyes of someone looking at the problem, therefore we solved the problem. So, just from that perspective, I think it is enough to describe it like this—where we all agree that we should remove those images from the internet.

  JACOB: I’m sorry, I’m squirming over here. It’s so frustrating to hear the argument that you’re making. I want to throw up, because what you just did, is you said, “I want to use my position of power to assert my authority over other people, I want to erase history.” Maybe I’m an extremist in this case—and in many other cases, I’m sure—but I’m going to go out on a limb here. This is actually an example of where erasing history does a disservice. It turns out that with the internet we learned that there’s an epidemic in society of child abuse. That’s what we learned with this child pornography issue—I think it’s better to call it child exploitation—we saw evidence of this. Covering it up, erasing it, is, I think, a travesty because, in fact, you can learn so much about society as a whole. For example, you can learn—and I’m obviously never going to have a career in politics after I finish this sentence, but just to be clear about this—you learn, for example, who is producing it, and you learn about the people that are victimized. It is impossible for people to ignore the problem. It means that you have to start searching out the cause that creates this, which is the exploiters of the children. Ironically some surveillance technology might be useful here in facial recognition of people and by looking at the metadata in the images. Erasing that, making sure that we live in a world where it’s possible to erase some stuff and not other stuff, creating these administrative bodies for censorship and for policing—that’s a slippery slope which, as we have seen, has turned directly to copyright, it has turned to many other systems.

  Just because it is a noble cause to go after that, maybe we should not take the easy way out, maybe in fact we should try to solve crimes, maybe in fact we should try to help those that are victimized, even though there is a cost to that kind of helping. Maybe instead of ignoring the problem, we should look at the fact that society as a whole has this big problem and it manifests on the internet in a particular way.

  It’s like, for example, how when Polaroid built the Swinger camera (this instant camera for taking pictures) people started to take abusive pictures with those as well. But the answer is not to destroy a medium, or to police that medium. It is when you find evidence to prosecute the crimes that the medium has documented. It is not to weaken that medium, it is not to cripple society as a whole over this thing. Because here we talk about child pornographers, let’s talk about the police. The police on a regular basis in many countries abuse people. There are probably more abusive cops on the internet than there are child pornographers on the internet.

  JULIAN: There are almost certainly more.

  JACOB: We know there’s “n” number of policemen in the world and we know there’s “x” number of those policemen that have committed ethical violations—usually violent violations. If we look at just the Occupy movement, for example, we see this. Shall we censor the internet because we know some cops are bad? Shall we cripple the police’s ability to do good policing work?

  JULIAN: Well, there is a question about re-victimization, which is where the child later on, or as an adult, or its social contacts, see the child abuse images again.

  JACOB: As long as those cops are online, I am being re-victimized.

  JULIAN: You could say seeing an image of you being beaten by a policeman is re-victimization. I would say that the protection of the integrity of the history of what actually happened in our world is more important; that re-victimization does occur, but nonetheless to set up a censorship regime which is capable of removing chunks of history means that we cannot address the problem because we can’t see what the problem is. In the 1990
s I acted in an advisory capacity on internet matters to pedophile-busting cops in Australia, the Victorian Child Exploitation Unit. Those cops were not happy about filtering systems, because when people can’t see that there’s child pornography on the internet it removes the lobby that ensures that the cops have the funds to stop the abuse of children.

  JÉRÉMIE: The point on which we agree—I think it’s the most important one—is that in the end it’s the individual responsibility of the people who do the content, the child abuse material and things like that, that really matters and on which cops should work.

  JACOB: We don’t agree. That’s not what I said.

  JULIAN: No, Jérémie is talking about doing, not publishing—there’s a difference.

  JACOB: The production of the content is not the issue, actually. Just a minor clarification—if, for example, you have abused a child and Andy took a picture of this as proof, I don’t think Andy should be prosecuted.

  JÉRÉMIE: No, it’s the people who abuse. Come on, it’s aiding and abetting.

  ANDY: But some people abuse the child to produce the pictures, right?

  JACOB: Of course they do.

  ANDY: There might also be an economic aspect involved here.

  JACOB: I agree with that entirely, I’m making a distinction here, which is to say that if the content itself is a historical record which is evidence of a crime, it is evidence of a very serious crime, and we should never lose sight of the fact that there is re-victimization, but there is the original victimization and that is actually the core issue, whether or not there are pictures of it.

  JÉRÉMIE: Of course. That’s what I mean.

  JACOB: Whether or not there are pictures is almost irrelevant. When there are pictures, it is very important to remember that you have to keep your eye on the prize, and that the goal is to actually stop the harm, stop the abuse. A big part of that is making sure that there is evidence and that there is the incentive for the people with the right tools to solve those crimes. That, I think, is incredibly important, and people really lose sight of that because the easy thing to do is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and then to stop it and say that has stopped the abuse. And it hasn’t.

  ANDY: And the trouble is that right now a lot of people will obviously favor the easy solution because it’s very inconvenient to look at what’s really going on in society. I think you do have a chance to handle a political problem because you’re not trying to make a policy that ignores the problem or makes it invisible. In a way this may be cyber politics, but this is also a question of how a society handles issues, and I do have strong doubts that there is something such as information that does harm directly. It has to do with the ability to filter, of course, and it’s also true that I don’t want to see all the pictures that are available on the internet. There are some that I really find disgusting and distracting but the same is true for the next video store, showing movies that are fictional and ugly. So, the question is do I have the ability to handle what I’m seeing and what I’m processing and what I’m reading? And that is the filtering approach. Actually, Wau Holland, the founder of Chaos Computer Club, said something funny: “You know, filtering should be handled in the end user, and in the end device of the end user.”119

  JULIAN: So filtering should be done by the people who receive information.

  ANDY: It should be done here. Here! [Pointing to his head]

  JULIAN: In the brain.

  ANDY: In the end device of the end user, that’s this thing you have between your ears. That’s where you should filter and it shouldn’t be done by the government on behalf of the people. If the people don’t want to see things, well, they don’t have to, and you do have the requirement these days to filter a lot of things anyhow.

  PRIVACY FOR THE WEAK, TRANSPARENCY FOR THE POWERFUL

  JULIAN: Andy, I spoke recently with the president of Tunisia and I asked him about what was going to happen to the intelligence records from the rule of the dictator Ben Ali—the equivalent of the Stasi archives of Tunisia—and he said that while these were very interesting, the intelligence agencies are a problem, they are dangerous, and he would have to knock them off one by one. But in relation to these archives, he thought it best for the cohesion of Tunisian society that they all be kept secret so there wasn’t a blame game. You were a young man during the fall of the Stasi in East Germany, can you speak a little bit about the Stasi archives, and what do you think about this opening up of security archives?

  ANDY: Germany probably has the most well-documented intelligence agency on the planet, or one of them. All the documents from the East German Staatssicherheit—all the handbooks, procedural papers, training documents, internal studies—are roughly public. Roughly means that not all of them are easy to access but a lot of them are, and the government has created an agency to take care of the records so German citizens also have the right to view their own Stasi files.

  JULIAN: The German government created the BStU (the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen), this big Stasi archives file distributor.

  ANDY: Yes, and journalists can apply so-called research inquiries, which is maybe comparable to freedom of information requests, to allow them to study matters. And there are lots of books, and also handbooks of strategic behavioral learning of how the Stasi applied this and that. Actually, I think this is a very good thing to learn from. I can understand it is a bit too much to expect the Tunisians to publish all the personal records that the former intelligence agency made because the president—the current president—will have to judge about his own records here, and also those of his allies and so on. These intelligence agencies don’t respect privacy so you will have personal records of your sexual matters, your telecommunications, your money transfers, of everything you have done, which you might not want to have disclosed.

  JULIAN: Did you follow the situation with the Amn El Dawla in Egypt, the domestic state security? Thousands of people went in, they looted the archives as the Amn El Dawla tried to burn them and destroy them and dump them in the garbage, and lots of material came out and was spread around the place. You could buy a record for $2 in a local market and upload it. It hasn’t destroyed Egyptian society.

  ANDY: No, I’m just saying that I do have a bit of an understanding that people don’t want their personal records to be released. I can understand that, if I was living in a country where forty years of intelligence was kept about me and every time I go to the loo it is being recorded.

  JULIAN: But there’s cost-benefit analysis, right? From my perspective, once a rat, always a rat.

  ANDY: Right, but the hacker ethics argument, roughly, is to use public information and protect private information or data, and I do think that if we’re advocating for privacy—and we have very good reasons to do so—we shouldn’t just say there’s a balance of things here. We can distinguish. It’s not that we have to put it all on the public.

  JACOB: But there’s a benefit to that secrecy that is asymmetric. Let’s take a step back. You argue essentially from a completely flawed point, which is this notion that data is private when it is limited, and that’s just not true. For example, in my country if a million people have a security clearance and are allowed to access that private data…

  JULIAN: 4.3 million…

  JACOB: How can you call that data private? The problem is that it is not truly 100 per cent secret from every person on the planet.

  JULIAN: It’s secret from the powerless and to the powerful.

  ANDY: Yes, you’re right. But if we want to open the archive entirely…

  JULIAN: It has happened in some European countries.

  ANDY: No. I don’t know a single country where all the records have been disclosed.

  JULIAN: To a greater extent than Germany, records were released, in Poland for example.

  ANDY: That might be. What has happened actually, the bad side of this deal Germany has done, is that they used former officers of the East German State Security in order for t
he Stasi to administer not only the Stasi records but also part of the so-called “New Germany,” the unified former Eastern part. There’s this interesting story about a company winning the public tender to clean the building where the records were kept. That company won the tender just because they were the cheapest bidder for the same service that other companies bid for. After six years the organization keeping the records found out that they had hired a company built up by the former Eastern intelligence to clean their own records.

  JÉRÉMIE: There was a report on that on WikiLeaks. I read it. It was great.120

  ANDY: WikiLeaks published the report about exactly that, so you are right that once these records are created and they are in the hands of evil people it is hard to declare privacy.

  JULIAN: We can go to a broader issue, though. The internet has led to an explosion of the amount of information that is available to the public—it’s just extraordinary. The educative function is extraordinary. On the other hand, people talk about WikiLeaks and they say, “Look, all that private government information is now public, the government can’t keep anything secret.” I say this is rubbish. I say that WikiLeaks is the shadow of a shadow. In fact, that we have produced over a million words of information and given it to the public is a function of the enormous explosion in the amount of secret material out there. And, in fact, powerful groups have such a vast amount of secret material now that it dwarfs the amount of publicly available material, and the operations of WikiLeaks are just a percentage fraction of this privately held material. When you look at this balance between powerful insiders knowing every credit card transaction in the world on the one hand, and on the other hand people being able to Google and search for the blogs of the world and people’s comments, how do you see this balance?

  ANDY: I could argue that it is good if all these records get disclosed because people will learn that if they use their credit card they leave a trace. Some people, if we explain it to them, will find this very hard to understand and very abstract. The moment they read their own records they will understand.