Worse yet, the dreaded NSA had developed a technique, code-named TEMPEST, to read those signals. Cryptome published everything Young could find about TEMPEST, and it became a leitmotif among the paranoid cypherpunks. At one point in 1996, both Assange and Bell joined in a heated discussion of whether even the water pipes and sprinkler system around a computer might propagate its electric field and spill its data even further.
Soon after “Assassination Politics” hit the list, Young would post that essay, which he still calls a “masterful piece of fiction,” to Cryptome. And amid the online shouting match that surrounded the article, it was Young who first took Bell seriously.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between ‘Assassination Politics’ and government-sponsored provocateurism, a well-documented practice to stigmatize anarchical and antiauthoritarian ventures,” he wrote. “However, it takes guts and thick skin to advocate overthrow of authority, knowing that reasonable people will think you’re a nut seeking celebrity martyrdom.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m SEEKING martyrdom,” Bell responded. “But the possibilities have certainly crossed my mind. Some people have suggested, and only partially in jest, that I may be one of the system’s first victims.”
In fact, Bell achieved martyrdom through a more common fate. In April 1997, his home was raided by federal agents who seized his computers, his car, three assault rifles, and a .44 Magnum handgun. It turned out Bell had pursued his agenda against the feds through more direct avenues than mere essays. In the criminal complaint filed against him, he was accused of evading taxes, falsifying his social security number, and intimidating federal agents, with “Assassination Politics” as Exhibit A. Agents dug up e-mails in which he had discussed buying the ingredients for the poison ricin, and other messages suggested he was planning to drop nickel-plated carbon fiber down the air shafts of a federal building. Bell believed that the material, which agents found in large quantities at a friend’s house, would become airborne, find its way into the building’s computers, and short out their wiring.
Finally, he was accused of dumping a chemical called mercaptan on the rug outside an IRS office in Vancouver, Washington. The stink bomb smelled like very potent rotten cabbage.
Despite his various stunts, Bell was charged only with tax evasion and sentenced to eleven months in prison. He was out again by the next summer, but rearrested for violating his probation. Prison darkened his outlook even further. “I once believed it’s too bad that there are a lot of people who work for government who are hardworking and honest people who will get hit [because of “Assassination Politics”] and it’s a shame,” he told Wired after being released in 2000. “Well, I don’t believe that anymore. They are all either crooks or they tolerate crooks or they are aware of crooks among their numbers.”
Eventually he would be tried again for stalking federal agents across state lines and sentenced to another decade in prison, where he spent his days demolishing computer monitors for forty-six cents an hour.
For some cypherpunks, Bell came to represent the first real victim of the Crypto Wars, and Cryptome became a resource for those following the case: It documented every step of Bell’s legal ordeals more closely than any newspaper. Young collected media clippings, court documents, even anonymized messages from friends who had received word from Bell during his time in prison. He became so closely involved in the case that in Bell’s first trial Young was subpoenaed as a witness, and argued on the stand that Bell had never intended to carry out any of his antigovernment plans so much as trumpet them around the Net.
In 1998, the committee for the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design contacted Young to ask him, based on his architecture work, to nominate candidates for their annual award. Naturally, he submitted Jim Bell for “Assassination Politics,” a groundbreaking work in “government accountability systems.”
Julian Assange continued to throw occasional jabs and quips into the mail list’s discussions of everything from the NSA’s TEMPEST project to “Assassination Politics” well into the late nineties. When Bell was sentenced to his first prison term and a copycat wrote up a new flavor of his murder-for-hire project aimed at celebrities, Assange posted it with the subject “Jim Bell . . . lives . . . on . . . in . . . Hollywood!”
Contributing to the melee of controversial ideas offered some light amusement for a wayward ex-con crypto-savant. But cypherpunks write code. And Julian Assange was a cypherpunk.
The story of Julf Helsingius and the Scientologists had sharply illustrated the human vulnerabilities in any encryption scheme. No matter how strong crypto may be or how cleverly the key is hidden, the cypherpunks had learned a user threatened with jail or bodily harm will cough up the goods. Cryptographers, with typical dark humor, call the method Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis: Rather than try to break an encryption scheme, simply imprison the user and beat the key out of him or her with a length of heavy tubing.
So a year after Helsingius broke under the pressure of a Finnish warrant, Assange posted a newly coded creation to another cypherpunk-friendly mail list, designed to outsmart rubber hose bullies. He called it Marutukku, after an Akkadian deity of protection, though he and his cocreators, a fellow researcher named Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and coauthor of Underground Suelette Dreyfus, would soon rename it, simply, “Rubberhose.”
Like Zimmermann’s PGP, Rubberhose was designed for activists in repressive regimes to smuggle out controversial data. But where a captured rebel activist with a laptop hard drive encrypted with PGP might be vulnerable to torturous key extraction, Rubberhose offered a clever solution. The keyholder would have multiple secret keys, each of which would appear to decrypt the entire hard drive. But the program could hide volumes of the drive like a false bottom of a box. (In fact, the effect works by spreading each encrypted portion of the data evenly over the entire hard drive to give the appearance that one volume fills the entire capacity, with no room for more secrets.)
When the torturer pulls out the rubber hose, the user simply pretends to give in, handing over a key that decrypts a volume full of decoy data. Thanks to Rubberhose’s unique properties, the torturer should believe he’s seen the full contents of the drive and grudgingly release the activist.
The program included an antiauthoritarian mission statement: “Entrenched moguls . . . label the activists as trouble-makers or whistle blowers to justify misusing them,” it read. “Where there is injustice, we like to upset the status quo too, and to support others who want to do the same. Our motto is ‘let’s make a little trouble.’”
But there was a darker side to Rubberhose, one that reveals something about Assange’s style of cold calculation. Say the torturers know that the user encrypted the hard drive with Rubberhose. Then there’s little she (Assange, in cryptographers’ fashion, calls her Alice) can do to prove that she’s given up all the keys. With the understanding that her torturers will beat her endlessly regardless of what she does, Alice has little incentive to give up information that incriminates her comrades to save herself. Like a cyanide capsule hidden in a spy’s tooth, Rubberhose actually motivates users to sacrifice themselves rather than give up their friends’ information. As Assange wrote:
With Rubberhose-style deniable cryptography, the benefits to a group member from choosing tactic 1 (defection) are subdued, because they will never be able to convince their interrogators that they have defected. Rational individuals that are “otherwise loyal” to the group, will realise the minimal gains to be made in choosing defection and choose tactic 2 (loyalty), instead.
Or as he put it more simply in the Rubberhose documentation: “Alice certainly isn’t in for a very nice time of it. (Although she’s far more likely to protect her data.)”
Despite Rubberhose’s cleverness, Assange wasn’t content to create mere tools. But it would take him another decade to evolve from the creation of his own equivalent of PGP to his own equivalent of Bl
ackNet. He spent two years traveling the world, shaking off the anger and frustration of his years in legal limbo. In 1999, he registered Leaks.org in a moment of foresight, but had no clear idea of what to do with it and left it fallow for years longer.
When Assange returned to the Cypherpunk Mailing List after his travels, he seemed to have taken on a new political radicalism. The list’s popularity was waning and it was choked with spam. In his second-to-last message he posted the following, which seems almost a rebuttal to Tim May’s libertarian dismissal of the “clueless 95%.” “The 95% of the population which comprise the flock have never been my target, and neither should they be yours,” he wrote. “It’s the 2.5 percent at either end of the normal that I find in my sights, one to be cherished and the other to be destroyed.”
That same liberal radicalism drove him to give up on formal education at military-tinged Melbourne University. And finally it pushed him to write the essay that would become his own “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto.” Fresh from the influence of university, he typed it up in the font and style of an academic math paper and posted it to his blog with the name “Conspiracy as Governance.”
The paper described authoritarian regimes as collections of nodes connected by lines of communication that depend on technology for their survival: Internet, phones, fax machines. And the key to toppling those structures was to cut those data-lines, Assange wrote.
When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.
Later we will see how new technology and insights into the psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance.
In fact, “later” never came. The essay gave no explanation of how technology could be used for cutting those communication lines. But it did say, in what seems to be a jab at Jim Bell, that killing conspiratorial leaders wasn’t the answer. “The act of assassination—the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species evolved,” Assange wrote.
Later that month in his blog, Assange would write the solution to the puzzle of “Conspiracy as Governance,” like an answer key at the back of a textbook. The solution was leaks.
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Leaks had a twofold purpose in Assange’s view: They empowered the regime’s enemies with damning facts. But more important, they induced the regime to stop communicating internally, a kind of calcification of its circulatory system more deadly than any outside enemy. “Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems,” Assange wrote.
Which leaves one final, unspoken question: how to make leaks happen? That’s a puzzle Assange had worked out years before, hiding the answer in his introduction to the pseudo-autobiographical Underground.
He quotes Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.”
While Assange theorized about leaks, Young was busy springing them.
After years of merely digging up public documents and reposting news, the anonymous tips began to flow. In May 1999, an anonymous e-mail referred Young to an article, already pulled from the Web at the time of the e-mail, in an issue of Executive Intelligence Review, which listed 116 names of MI6 officials sent to the newsweekly, along with locations and dates showing their movements across the globe. Young posted the file to Cryptome and it was downloaded tens of thousands of times within days.
The next year, Young received a UK MI5 report from an anonymous source, detailing the surveillance of a Libyan diplomat in London that British intelligence suspected of being a spy. The paper accused the diplomat of being involved in the murder of a UK-based Libyan dissident. It was marked “TOP SECRET DELICATE SOURCE UK EYES.” Young published it in its entirety.
A few months later, Young published a list of six hundred Japanese intelligence agents who were being sent abroad after the failure of Japan’s Public Security Investigation Agency to gather sufficient intelligence to shut down the Aum Shinrikyo cult that carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people. The list was titled “The Most Incompetent Intelligence Agency in the World.” Young received the list anonymously at first, but the source, a PSIA agent named Hironari Noda, revealed his identity within days.
The Japanese leak was followed by a list of 2,619 CIA informants from an anonymous sender. Young posted the names alphabetically with every source’s address. Within a week the leaker outed himself as the journalist Gregory Douglas, who had been given a trove of files by an ex-CIA agent to be published at his death.
Young’s next scoop came from old-fashioned investigative reporting. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA that it release all nonclassified data on TEMPEST, the electromagnetic spying trick that allowed intelligence agents to read screens through walls. The NSA first denied his request but gave in on appeal. He published hundreds of pages of detailed descriptions of the mechanisms behind the NSA’s epic hack. Much of it was painstakingly transcribed into HTML from the paper documents.
By 2006, Young had received two more leaks outing MI6 agents and was publishing controversial images of secure government facilities on a regular basis. He had gotten the attention of the three letter agencies: NSA programs crawled his website daily to monitor his material, and he’d received visits from the FBI and calls from DHS officials.
At some point, he also got the attention of Julian Assange. The PGP-encrypted e-mail hit Young’s in-box in early October 2006: “You knew me under another name from cypherpunk days. I am involved in a project that you may have feeling for. I will not mention its name yet in case you feel you are not able to be involved.
“The project is a mass document leaking project that requires someone with backbone to hold the .org domain registration. We would like that person to be someone who is not privy to the location of the master servers which are otherwise obscured by technical means.
“. . . Will you be that person?”
Young agreed, and two months later he found himself subscribed to an internal mailing list for developers on Assange’s secretive project. Every e-mail on the list began with the message: “This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‘WL.’”
The list argued over everything from the logo for the site—originally a mole breaking through a wall in front of a phalanx of dark bureaucratic figures—to potential funding sources and figureheads. The group approached Chinese-American dissident professor Xiao Qiang, Ben Laurie, a cryptographer who had developed an open-source version of the SSL protocol for encrypting Web traffic, and perhaps most significantly Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker upon whom all their greatest hopes were modeled.
“We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention available to us,” read the group’s e-mail inviting Ellsberg to join their advisory board. “New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political
firmament of man.”
Ellsberg never responded to that message. But the e-mail to the archetypal twentieth-century leaker crystallized everything Assange had learned from the cypherpunks: WikiLeaks would share all of David Chaum’s, Tim May’s and Phil Zimmermann’s beliefs in the power of cryptography to effect political change. It had all the ambitious complexity of “Assassination Politics,” with its illegality and violence carefully excised. And it had learned from Cryptome’s model of soliciting and anonymizing leaks as a self-propelled weapon against authority.
John Young’s tenure as a WikiLeaks adviser was short. Just two weeks after Young joined the mail list, Assange suggested attempting to raise five million dollars from sources like the Soros Foundation. Like my innocuous question about Young’s childhood when we met in an Upper East Side restaurant, the notion seemed to flip a switch in Young’s unpredictable mind.
The Cryptome founder responded with a series of increasingly angry and sarcastic e-mails, sent too fast to even allow responses from the other WikiLeakers. “The CIA would be the most likely $5M funder. Soros is suspected of being a conduit for black money to dissident groups racketeering for such payola,” he wrote bitterly, suggesting that WikiLeaks attempt to raise a hundred million dollars from the CIA instead.
“Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy,” Young added, vowing to leak the entire mail list on Cryptome—which he soon did. He signed off, “In solidarity with fuck em all.”
Assange responded shortly thereafter. “J., We are going to fuck them all.”
Then he unsubscribed John Young from the list.
In February 2011, I e-mailed a request to a Sheridan, Oregon, detention facility to speak with Jim Bell, who was serving the last years of the same sentence for a parole violation that had put him in prison earlier in the decade.
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 15
