Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
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JULIAN: If you get your Facebook record, which has 800 MB of information about you.
ANDY: I know that after the fall of the Eastern bloc, the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to unify Germany and the Americans made a condition within the so-called 2+4 talks. They said they wanted to still keep the German telecommunications under their control, under their surveillance, and Kohl thought it was not important because he did not understand what telecommunications surveillance is. I met someone from his office team and they said they were really upset about this and they finally organized to have, like, 8,000 pages of transcripts of his phone calls that the Stasi had made rolled into his office on two small caddies. And he said, “Hey, what the fuck is that?” They said, “Oh, that’s your phone calls in the last ten years, including the ones with your girlfriends and your wife and your secretary and so on.” So they made him understand what telecommunication interception is. And indeed these records from this intelligence do help people to understand what the intelligence is doing. So we could argue for full disclosure and if we were to vote on that now, I wouldn’t be sure if I would really oppose it.
JULIAN: I don’t want to talk about that so much, as obviously there are cases where if you’re investigating the mafia, during the period of investigation you should keep the record secret. There are circumstances where this could be seen as legitimate. I’m not saying that as a policy it’s legitimate; I’m saying that it’s politically inevitable. There are such politically cogent demands for it—like, “these guys have murdered before, they’re plotting another murder”—that regardless of whether you think that interception should be available or not, it’s going to happen. You can’t win that political fight. But this kind of tactical surveillance has the benefit that it can be partly regulated and the harm can be confined to a minimum number of people. When tactical interception is used for law enforcement (as opposed to intelligence) often it is part of evidence collection. The evidence ends up in court cases, and therefore it ends up public. So you have some oversight, at least some of the time, of what’s going on. And you can interrogate people on the stand about how that information was collected and why we should assume it was valid. You can keep an eye on it. But regulation of strategic interception is completely absurd. It is, by definition, intercepting everyone, so what legislation are we going to apply if your starting premise is to intercept everyone?
JÉRÉMIE: This debate about full disclosure makes me think of the group known as LulzSec, who released 70 million records from Sony—all the users’ data from Sony—and you could see all the addresses, email addresses and passwords. I think there were even credit card details from 70 million users. As a fundamental rights activist I thought, “Wow, there is something wrong here if to prove your point or to have fun you disclose people’s personal data.” I was very uncomfortable with seeing people’s email addresses on the record. In a way, I thought those people were having fun with computer security, and what they were demonstrating is that a company as notorious and powerful as Sony wasn’t able to keep its users’ secrets secret, and having those 70 million users search in a search engine for their email address or for their name and find this record would make them instantly realize, “Oh wow, what did I do when I disclosed this data to Sony? What does it mean to give personal data to a company?”
JACOB: Then they shoot the messenger.
RATS IN THE OPERA HOUSE
JULIAN: We’ve gone through all these pessimistic scenarios, so now I want to look at a potential Utopian scenario. We have the radicalization of internet youth, and now internet youth is approaching the majority of youth. On the other hand, we have some desperate attempts at anonymization and freedom of publication, freedom from censorship—we have a vast array of state and private sector interactions which are fighting against that—but let’s assume that we take the most positive trajectory. What does it look like?
JACOB: I think we need the right to read and the right to speak freely without exception for every single person, not one single human being excepted, no exceptions whatsoever, to misquote Bill Hicks.121 He talked about this with regard to education, clothing and food, but that’s really what it comes down to: everyone has the right to read, everyone has the right to speak freely. In that comes a right to anonymous speech, the ability to be able to pay people in a way where there is no interference from third parties, the ability to travel freely, the ability to correct data about you that is in systems. To have transparency and accountability for any systems where we see any sort of agency.
ANDY: I would add the thought that with the increase of information processing systems and the network side of it, and with the availability of tools like Tor and encryption and so on, the amount of data that can be suppressed is pretty low, meaning that governments need to just do that and they know it. They know that acting in secret these days just means acting for a matter of time in secret, it will be subject to public record sooner or later, and this is a good thing. This changes the way they act. This means they know there is accountability. This also means they actually force whistleblowing inside processes, like in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requiring companies which are registered in the US stock markets to have a whistleblower infrastructure, so that people who need to report criminal or other misbehavior by their superiors have a way to report it without being affected directly by those they are reporting on.122 So this is a good thing and this will bring more sustainable processes in the long term.
JÉRÉMIE: Adding to what Jake just said, I think we must make it clear for everyone that a free, open and universal internet is probably the most important tool that we have to address the global issues that are at stake, that protecting it is probably one of the most essential tasks that our generation has between its hands, and that when somebody somewhere—whether it’s a government or a company—restricts some people’s ability to access the universal internet, it is the whole internet that is affected. It’s the whole of humanity that is being restricted. As we are witnessing that we can collectively increase the political cost of taking this decision, all of the citizens accessing the free internet can deter that behavior. We are beginning to see that as network citizens we have power in political decisions and we can make our elected representatives and our governments more accountable for what they do when they make bad decisions that affect our fundamental freedoms and that affect a free global universal internet.
So I think we should practice that. We should continue to share knowledge about how to do it. We should continue to improve our ways of action, the way we exchange tactics about going to the parliament, about exposing what the politicians are doing, about exposing the influence of industry lobbies on the policy-making process. We should continue to build tools to make citizens more able to build their own decentralized encrypted infrastructures, to own their communication infrastructure. We should promote these ideas to the whole of society as a way to build a better world and we are beginning to do it—we should just continue.
JULIAN: Jake, if you look at people like Evgeny Morozov’s description of the problems in the internet, these issues were foreshadowed long ago by the cypherpunks.123 It wasn’t a view that one should simply complain about the burgeoning surveillance state and so on, but that we can, in fact, must build the tools of a new democracy. We can actually build them with our minds, distribute them to other people and engage in collective defense. Technology and science is not neutral. There are particular forms of technology that can give us these fundamental rights and freedoms that many people have aspired to for so long.
JACOB: Absolutely. The key thing I think that people should walk away with—especially if there’s some sixteen-year-old or eighteen-year-old person that wishes they could make the world a better place—is that nobody sitting here and nobody anywhere in the world was born with the accomplishments that they later have on their gravestone. We all build alternatives. Everybody here has built alternatives and everyone, especially with the internet, is empowere
d to do that for the context in which they exist. And it is not that they have a duty to do it, but it is that if they wish to do this, they can. And if they do that, they will impact many people, especially with regard to the internet. Building those alternatives has an amplification, a magnification.
JULIAN: So, just for you, if you build something you can give it to a billion people to use.
JACOB: Or if you participate in building an anonymity network—like the Tor network for example—you help to build the alternative of anonymous communication where previously it did not exist.
JÉRÉMIE: It’s about sharing that knowledge freely and enabling communication channels for knowledge to flow freely, this is what you are doing. Tor is free software, it is as widely spread as it is today because we embed that notion of freedom in the way we build alternatives and build technology and build models.
JACOB: We need free software for a free world, and we need free and open hardware.
JULIAN: But by free you mean unconstrained, people can muck about with the internals, they can see how it operates?
JACOB: Absolutely. We need software that is as free as laws in a democracy, where everyone is able to study it, to change it, to be able to really understand it and to ensure that it does what they wish that it would do. Free Software, Free and Open Hardware.124
JULIAN: They had this notion from the cypherpunks that “code is law.”
JÉRÉMIE: That’s from Larry Lessig.
JULIAN: On the internet what you can do is defined by what programs exist, what programs run, and therefore code is law.
JACOB: Absolutely, and what that means is that you can build alternatives, especially in terms of programming but even in terms of 3D printing or social things like hacker spaces that exist.125 You can help to build alternatives and the key thing is to drive them home into a normalization process, one where people become socially very used to being able to build their own three-dimensional objects, to being able to modify their own software, and where they are aware that if someone blocks them from doing that then whoever is doing the blocking isn’t providing internet access, they are providing a filternet or a censornet, and, in fact, they are violating their duty of care.
That’s what every single one of us has done with our lives and people should know that they have the ability to do it for future generations, and for this generation now. That’s why I’m here—because if I don’t support Julian now, in the things that he is going through, what kind of world am I building? What kind of message do I send when I let a bunch of pigs push me around? No way, never. We have to build and we have to change that. As Gandhi said, “You have to be the change you want to see in the world,” but you have to be the trouble you want to see in the world, too.126 That’s a line from A Softer World, it’s not the same as the Gandhi quotation, but I think people need to know that they cannot just sit idly by, they need to actually take action, and hopefully they will.127
ANDY: I think we’re seeing a good chance that people can proceed further on from where we are, and alternatives come from people who are unsatisfied with the situation they find or the options they have.
JULIAN: Can you talk a bit about the Chaos Computer Club in this context?
ANDY: Always CCC… fnord.128
JULIAN: It is unique in the world, actually.
ANDY: The CCC is a galactic hacker organization that promotes freedom of information, transparency of technology, and cares about the relationship between human and technological development, so society and development interacting with each other.
JULIAN: This has actually become political.
ANDY: The CCC has become like a forum of the hacker scene with a few thousand members based a little bit in Germany—but we don’t understand ourselves as living in Germany, we understand ourselves as living in the internet, which is perhaps a big part of our self-understanding which also attracts. We are very well-networked with other hacker groups in France, in America and other places.
JULIAN: And why do you think that this started in Germany? The heart is in Germany—it’s expanded out to the rest of the world.
ANDY: Germans always try to structure everything.
JÉRÉMIE: German engineering is better.
JULIAN: But I think it’s not just that. It’s that this is Berlin and it’s the fall of the East.
ANDY: It has to do with different things. Germany has done the worst thing a country can to do to others, so it is perhaps a bit more immune to doing those things again, like starting a war with other countries. We’ve done it all, we’ve been through it, we’ve been punished hard and we had to learn from it, and actually this decentralized thinking and anti-fascistic behavior, like avoiding a totalitarian state, is still taught in German schools because we experienced that at the worst level. So I think that is part of understanding the CCC, which is a bit of a German phenomenon. Wau Holland, the creator who founded the CCC, also had a very heavily political approach to this. I saw his father at his grave, when his son actually died before him, and his father was not saying pleasant words. He said: “…and that there will never be any totalitarian, non-peaceful activities from German ground again.” That was his father’s comment when he buried his son, and for me that explained a lot about why Wau was so heavily into influencing and taking care of people, acting peacefully with others, spreading ideas and not limiting them, and not behaving aggressively but co-operatively.
And the thought of co-operatively creating things—like open source movements and so on—has indeed been infecting and coming together with the thoughts of American cypherpunks and Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and so on. This is a global thing going on now, which does have very different, very decentralized cultural attitudes of Swiss, German, Italian hackers—and that is good. Italian hackers behave totally differently than German hackers—wherever they are, they need to make good food; with German hackers, they need to have everything well-structured. I’m not saying the one is better than the other, I’m just saying that each of these decentralized cultures has its very beautiful parts. At the Italian hacker conference you can go to the kitchen and you will see a wonderful place; at the German hacker camp you will see a wonderful internet, but you better not look at the kitchen. Still, the heart of it is we are creating. And I think we find ourselves in some kind of a common consciousness which is totally away from our national identity—from being Germans or from being Italians or from being Americans or whatever—we just see that we want to solve problems, we want to work together. We see this internet censorship, this fight by governments against new technology, as some kind of evolutionary situation which we have to overcome.
We are on the way to identifying solutions and not only problems, and that is a good thing. We probably still have to fight a lot of bullshit for the next I don’t know how many years, but now finally there’s a generation of politicians coming up who don’t see the internet as the enemy but understand that it is part of the solution, and not part of the problem. We still have a world built on weapons, on the power of secret-keeping, on an entire economic framework and so on, but that is changing and I do think we are very important in the policy-making right now. We can discuss the issues in a controversial way—and that is something that the CCC has managed for a long time, actually. We are not a homogeneous group, we have very different opinions. I appreciate that we sit here together and we don’t come up with the best answers right away, we just come up with questions, and we crash our different ideas on the table and see what the bottom line is. That’s the process that needs to go on, and that’s what we need a free internet for.
JULIAN: I posed the question of what the most positive trajectory for the future would look like. Self-knowledge, diversity, and networks of self-determination. A highly educated global population—I do not mean formal education, but highly educated in their understanding of how human civilization works at the political, industrial, scientific and psychological levels—as a result of the free exchange of communicati
on, also stimulating vibrant new cultures and the maximal diversification of individual thought, increased regional self-determination, and the self-determination of interest groups that are able to network quickly and exchange value rapidly over geographic boundaries. And perhaps that has been expressed in the Arab Spring and the pan-Arab activism which was potentiated by the internet. In our work with Nawaat.org, who created Tunileaks, pushing the State Department cables past the regime’s censorship into pre-revolutionary Tunisia, we saw first-hand the terrific power of the network for moving information to where it is needed, and it was tremendously rewarding to have been in a position, because of our efforts, to contribute to what was starting to happen there.129 I do not perceive that struggle for self-determination as distinct from our own.
This positive trajectory would entail the self-knowing of human civilization because the past cannot be destroyed. It would mean the inability of neo-totalitarian states to arise in practice because of the free movement of information, the ability for people to speak to each other privately and conspire against such tendencies, and the ability for micro-capital to move without control away from such places which are inhospitable to human beings.
From those underpinnings you can build a wide variety of political systems. Utopia to me would be a dystopia if there was just one. I think Utopian ideals must mean the diversity of systems and models of interaction. If you look at the churning development of new cultural products and even language drift, and sub-cultures forming their own mechanisms of interaction potentiated by the internet, then yes I can see that that does open this possible positive path.
But I think in all probability tendencies to homogenization, universality, the whole of human civilization being turned into one market, mean you will have normal market factors such as one market leader, one second, a third niche player, and then stragglers that don’t make any difference at all, for every service and product. I think it will perhaps mean massive language homogenization, massive cultural homogenization, massive standardization in order to make these rapid interchanges efficient. So I think the pessimistic scenario is also quite probable, and the transnational surveillance state and endless drone wars are almost upon us.