Did we come here to laugh or cry?
Are we dying or being born?
– Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra
The New Age of Intelligence
Jonathan Logan
Paul Rosenberg
This entire work is copyright 2017 by Paul Rosenberg and the entity known as Jonathan Logan (as proven by possession of the PGP-key with fingerprint “BA1D 2A0F 6750 6728 A103 C8F6 B01F 8CC3 DA4D 16A9”).
Many of the references in this book are in the archive.today/xxxxx format. These are hosted by Wikileaks. If the archive.today domain becomes unavailable, a copy of these links should remain available at when.google.met.wikileaks.org
Table of Contents
Preface: Notes from the authors
1The View From The Castle
2Intel, The New Top Dog
3Coalitions of The Connected
4El Cid and The Westphalian Order
5The Runaway Train
6Hidden By Incredulity
7Descartes' Demon
8Having Eyes That See Not
Preface
By rights, Jonathan and I shouldn't be writing this book, this is properly a job for someone with forty years of direct experience. Such people, however, aren't talking.
We are privacy activists and tech entrepreneurs. We're only in the position to write this book because we were thrust into daily battles related to encryption, anonymity and network security, which has dragged us into spy-ish situations from Afghanistan to the Caribbean, and from data centers to clandestine meetings with some very interesting people. We've had the world of intelligence – and especially the new 21st century version – thrust upon us, day by day.
For more than a decade now, Jonathan and I have been operating the Cryptohippie online privacy service. (Cryptohippie is actually several companies, but we speak of it in the singular for convenience.) Our relationship began, appropriately enough, on an encrypted, pseudonymous chat system. We struck up a friendship, and, through some impressive linguistic analysis, Jonathan determined that I was the author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, which was being published anonymously at the time. Once I admitted authorship, he insisted that we spend some time together, which we did, meeting on a cold February morning at the old cathedral in Cologne, then driving around Germany for five days.
As we traveled, we talked about dozens of subjects. On the last night of the trip, Jonathan asked me to meet him at the hotel bar. There, our conversation quickly turned very serious, and went approximately like this:
Jonathan: Freedom must exist somewhere in the world... whether most people care about it or not.
Paul: Yes, I agree.
Jonathan: Right now, the internet is the essential realm. Someone has to provide strong privacy there. It's the only way people can communicate freely.
Paul: I agree with you. It's far too important to let go of.
Jonathan: I know how to do it.
Paul: I know you do.
Jonathan: I can't do it alone.
Paul: Okay...
Jonathan: I want you to do it with me.
What could I say, but “yes”?
So, I changed my career path, Jonathan altered his, and we began building an anonymity network that would provide strong privacy to those who cared.
Managing the network has been Jonathan's job, leaving me to generally oversee things and to make presentations everywhere I could, warning people of what was happening. Most of my audiences, I'm pleased to say, were sympathetic and responsive, even if not fully convinced.
And then came Edward Snowden, with hard proof from the inside. But aside from vindicating me, Snowden's revelations have changed very little. The surveillance state rolls on, having missed half a step at best.
As surprising as they were to most people, Snowden's revelations were not only outdated, but were technical implementations of 20th century espionage. What's happening now is something different, built around an entirely new model.
Jonathan and I (and Jonathan more than myself) have been able to sense the outlines of the new model, not because we're so much smarter than everyone else, but because we work in this field every day. No one has a clearer view than the man in the trenches, dealing with each new surprise as it pops up. For better or worse, and for the last decade or so, that has been us.
By January of 2014, we began thinking that what we needed to communicate what we saw taking shape. And so, a month later, we met in Nashville, Tennessee. I was, as was typical, speaking to a convention; in this case, a group of small internet providers, trying to convince them of the seriousness of mass surveillance, and showing them how to protect themselves and their customers. Jonathan met me there, and over another week's worth of travel we put together the notes that eventually became this book.
The picture we'll paint is of a new model of intelligence, and one with a very different and troubling trajectory. 21st century intelligence is different than 20th century intelligence, and the old model is no longer relevant. Not only that, but the position of intelligence in the world has changed... it has risen in importance and will rise further. It stands to affect or control a shocking amount of daily life.
What we're heading into is very different from where we've been, and thinking people need to understand this. And so, our book is intended to give you a clear view of the new world. What you do with that vision will be up to you.
Paul Rosenberg
December 2016
It is a strange feeling to contribute to a book on the subject of intelligence with the full knowledge that it cannot convey all there is to be said, mostly because the things to come are still taking shape and for a large part remain outside of what we can clearly perceive from the sidelines. So this book must remain a first attempt to communicate the subject.
Nevertheless we both felt the need that we had to say what we could put into words and not wait until we got every little detail into a comprehensive and comprehensible form.
While writing this preface a TV newscast tries to explain to their audience how the recent terror attack on the Berlin Christmas market is the result of intelligence failure, that more data collection is the future of industry and that we need to be careful about “fake news” and “filter bubbles”. However, no connection between these topics is recognized. If this book helps readers to see the connections, it was worth writing.
It would not, however, have been written without the persistence of Paul to get it done even in the absence of perfection, based on our best knowledge and a strange urgency we both felt to say what we knew.
During our discussions we had to draw from a wide range of material produced by others; too many to mention individually. However, I have to mention the works of Stephan Blancke, Alfred Rolington and Hank Prunckun that enabled me to look at the process of intelligence from the eyes of the producers and consumers.
Last but not least some blame rests on my parents who failed to successfully curb my curiosity, which by now has led me into countless moments in which I thought: “How the hell did I get into this again?” Thank you for that, I won't ever be bored.
Jonathan Logan
December 2016
1
The View From The Castle
… to see what the rubes and the yokels are thinking about and what they think is going on and what they think the policy is.
– Daniel Ellsberg, on the use of the New York Times
If you've ever spent time in Europe, you've probably visited an old castle, and perhaps made it to the roof. And from that spot, you no doubt looked down upon the old city around it. Here's a view of that type, from a fairly small castle in a regional Italian town:
Many castle views are more dramatic than this one, but the point is the same: viewing the city from above is very different than seeing it from the inside. And this is the view that intelligence takes; it's the ruler's view rather than the peasant's view. And, truth be told, it can be an intoxicating view. “Drunk on power” is more than just a turn of phrase.
Very few of us ever examine the world from the vantage point of a ruler... the view from the castle. That, however, is the view the intelligence operator gets of the world.
And it's more than that; if you work in intelligence more than tangentially, there's no escaping that violence is a central component of the intel universe. The perspective of the ruler is one of using force. Call it “protecting the public” all you like, but it comes down to violence, and the view from the castle accepts that... nay, seizes it.
There has been an aristocracy of violence running through human cultures for a long, long time. In our own Western cultures it's on full display to those who look for it. We learn early that violence is associated with potency and nobility. This model is enshrined in the majority of movies and television shows, where both heroes and villains are defined by their use of violence.
The good violence of the hero makes men respect him and good women want him. The bad violence of the villain makes him worthy of punishment and contempt. And it makes foolish women want him. But in both of these cases, it is violence that makes these characters distinct entities and sets them apart from the gray and nameless masses.And so we learn that what defines us as distinct entities, whether bad or good, is violence.
As they arrive at mating age, boys learn to display their ability to use violence. This includes everything from sporting prowess to real fighting to adopting a tough-guy look. “Masculine” becomes closely associated with violence, in any of a dozen ways.
Likewise, girls learn to see an aptitude for violence as a sign of a male’s mating fitness. And a fit male desiring them makes them feel valuable.
So, there is an aristocracy of violence, and intelligence work pushes one directly into it. Over time, those in the castle accept a sort of camaraderie with other users of violence. For example, many of us have noted the odd affinity that develops between policemen and certain criminals. In fact, it's a brotherhood of the violent.
To see from the castle is also to see the world stripped naked: To see the masses respond in full-throated emotion to propaganda campaigns you created on a whim; to see them willing to suffer and die for stories you spun of whole cloth. The people down below wouldn't want to see such things; they wouldn't want to know how much unreality they sanctify. But you, up in the castle; you know how manipulable they are; how eager they are to sacrifice themselves for your whims, provided you present them in the right way.
We may recoil at this (reasonably, in our view), but it's the way things are. The peasant doesn't want to know and therefore serves in ignorance; the men and women in the castle accept it and rule. And if we, the villagers, ever want to live according to our own values, we'll have to accept the truth of this.
This view of reality can be jarring to healthy, empathetic people. Nevertheless, this is not an unfair description, and from it we hope you can gain a better understanding of how and why power corrupts.
This is the view from inside the world of intelligence. It may not be so pronounced at some of the lower levels, but it gains with each step up the turret.
Commotion on The Castle Walls
As we write this, the men and women on the castle walls are stirring and disagreeing amongst themselves. The old guard is clinging to the old way and the new kids are pushing them to either accept a new way or make their way out the door. And while it's hard to call anyone in the castle “right,” the old guard is definitely wrong – the old ways have passed.
The 20th century, for both better and worse, is over. We need to let it go. We're seventeen years into a new century and it's time to stop thinking the old way.
Data War is not like the Cold War, nor is it like World War Two. “Cyber attacks” are not like the siege of Leningrad or the invasion of Normandy. All such metaphors have been overridden by time and are wrong; they need to be abandoned. They stand opposed to an accurate understanding of the current situation.
Furthermore, government does not operate by “checks and balances” and does not provide “equal justice under law,” at least not in cases that pertain to the powerful[1]. This much is visible to any intelligent person who isn't clinging to the peasant role.
Yet the old guard continues to treat the new era as if it involves nation versus nation, block versus block, and so on. They can't see that reality has changed.
For example, despite all the noise about cyber-attacks, most known cyber attacks over the internet, with the exception of Stuxnet and a handful of lesser known attacks, have been run by private organizations.
Yes, news-readers say “this attack originated in China,” but even when that has been true, most Chinese hackers did not receive a paycheck from their government for working twelve hour shifts to breach American defenses. That's 20th century thinking, and as we say, it has been made false by the march of time. Private groups run cyber attacks, not state employees. Certainly some cyber attacks have been funded by states, though probably a minority of them.
Furthermore, private groups of that type do not simply disband when their state funding dries up. They continue to work, both for themselves and at the behest of other paying customers. Nation-states are only some of the players.
The news-writers and -readers (and the government agents who leak stories to them) are stuck in the vocabulary of the 20th century.
Likewise national distinctions have blurred badly. Even a famously “American” company like General Motors has stockholders situated all over the world, with allegiances to probably 150 separate states. GM has offices and sub-corporations all over the world. Their employees are located all over the world. Even their Board of Directors includes individuals from all over the world.
GM plays American when it needs government loans, and certainly works with (that is, funds) US politicians, but it's not really an American company anymore. The same is true for most other major corporations.
But for all the commotion on top of the castle walls, the ruling class is coming to grips with the passing of the 20th century and the arrival of something new. The peasant class is not only slower to see this, but they are prevented from seeing it. (More on that in Chapter Four.)
The View From The Castle
The castle-dwellers have concerns that the village dwellers don't. In particular, they face-off against other castle-dwellers whose power rests on violence, just as theirs does. And the castle dweller knows that such others are competitors. Fellow users of violence are always a threat. They compulsively compete among themselves to be the big man.
So the peoples of the castle and the village see the world very differently. Here are some of those ways:
The essential factor.
There are things that matter to the village and things that matter to the castle, and the things that matter to the castle take precedence. Chief among them is the necessity of maintaining power. Whatever laws exist are bent or broken when they affect the position of rulership. In the US, we've seen George W. Bush calling the constitution “a goddamn piece of paper” (or at least treating it so), Lincoln suspending habeus corpus, Woodrow Wilson jailing 10,000 people who dared speak against his war, and Franklin Roosevelt forcibly relocating 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. And these are just the more famous cases; it's hard to say which modern presidential administration didn't push the IRS to attack their political opponents.
The central crime that cannot be tolerated by the castle-dweller is generally called lèse-majesté, which is to injure the honor of the ruler. In modern, western governments this stands against the concept of free speech, but when push comes to shove – and please note the examples above – constitutional freedoms are quietly abandoned. Al
so please notice that the people of the village, always given a double-dose of fear at such times, are quite willing to be accomplices in these events by pretending that they were no big deal. In their hearts, they know that rulership takes precedence over laws, and when 'push comes to shove,' they accept it and pull out excuses for it.
And bear in mind that this affects all people of unusual power, as was beautifully illustrated in the film, The Godfather, when the powerful studio executive, Jack Woltz, declares that, “a man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous!” Power is fundamental, laws are subsidiary.
So, there there are laws, and then there are necessities.
An early 21st century example of this has been the Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road) trial: Ulbricht committed no violence, nor did he personally sell any drugs, beyond, perhaps, and few mushrooms at an early stage of his Silk Road project.
What made Ulbricht an enemy of the castle was twofold: First, that he made the War On Drugs look ridiculous by building a system that delivered peer-reviewed drugs, honestly and safely, to the masses. Secondly, that he made commerce-without-state a practical reality.
Ulbricht, then, undercut both mandatory compliance and a large sector of the enforcement complex. Because this was intolerable, murder charges were manufactured and a rigged trial was held. Ulbricht was given two life sentences plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole.
This unjust “justice” had nothing to do with keeping people safe. Indeed, it made them less safe. It had everything to do with Ulbricht making the rulers look ridiculous.
Some members of the governing class may understand this and others may simply be acting upon base instincts (then pulling out legislation and rulings for justification), but in either case, what lies beneath is the offense of lèse-majesté.
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