Crypto is not a dog... or doge... or is it?

As this goes online, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are in apparent price-freefall. This posting - prepared over a month ago - will not discuss the recent coin market meltdowns. Still, it seems a good moment to offer some light on one aspect.

First, I actually know a little about this topic. I've consulted with a number of companies, agencies, etc. about the blockchain era. More generally, about the conceptual underpinnings of "smart contracts" and the eerie, free-floating algorithms that were long-predicted by science fiction, but have become reality, as we speak. (Yes they are out there; some may be living right behind the screen you are looking at.)

One topic generating excitement - though the notion has been floating since the 1990s - is that of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAO, which are portrayed in many novels and utopian manifestos as a way for humans (and their helpers) to bypass sclerotic legacy nations and codger institutions with self-organizing action groups, using NFTs and Blockchain tokens to modernize and revitalize the concept of guilds -- global, quick, low-cost, boundaryless, open and inherently accountable. Bruce Sterling wrote about this notion in the last century (as in his novel, Heavy Weather) and other authors, like Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon), Karl Schroeder (Stealing Worlds), as well as Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), Annalee Newitz (Autonomous), and many others roam this conceptual landscape with agility! 

To a large extent, versions of DAO thinking underlie moves by nations like Estonia (or "E-stonia") to modernize democracy and public services. Also spreading widely is the related notion of Citizen Assemblies. 

But today I want to focus now on just one aspect of this brave new world: whether DAOs can find a middle ground between autonomy and accountability, by self-policing to reduce bad behavior by predators, while retaining their better, freedom enhancing traits.  

== Can blockchain-based DAOs - especially coin communities - self-police? ==

This is an important topic! Because major legacy nations like China are already stomping hard, using as justification the way cryptocurrencies do empower the very worst of parasitic human criminals. That justification might be reduced or eliminated if DAOs or blockchain communities could find a positive-sum sweet spot, cauterizing predators while preserving their role as gritty irritants, creating pearls of creative freedom.

Although there is no way to "ban" crypto currencies in general, there is an approach to making them much more accountable to real life law.

Let's start with an ironic fact. Blockchain-based token systems are not totally secret!  

Yes, they use crypto to mask the identity of token (coin) holders.  But those holders only "own" their tokens by general consent of all members in a communal 'shared ledger' that maintains the list of coins and which public keys stand ready to be turned by each owner's encrypted keys. In that sense it is the opposite of 'secret,' since the ledger is out there in tens of thousands of copies on just as many distributed computers. Attempts to invade or distort or corrupt the ledger are detected and canceled en masse. (The ecologically damaging "coin mining" operations out there are partly about maintaining the ledger.)

All of this means that - to the delight of libertarians - it will be hard to legislate or regulate blockchain token systems. Hard, but not impossible. For example, the value of Bitcoin rises and falls depending on how many real world entities will accept it in payment. And as stated above, and some governments have been hammering on that, lately.

There is another way to modify any given blockchain token system, and that is for the owners themselves to deliberate and decide on a change to their shared economy... to change the ledger and its support software.  No one member/owner can do that. Any effort to do so would be detected by the ledger's built in immune system and canceled. 

Only dig it, all such ledger-blockchain systems are ruled by a weird kind of consensus democracy. While there is no institutional or built in provision for democratic decision making in the commons - (Satoshi himself may have back doors: a separate topic) - there is nothing to stop a majority of bitcoin holders from simply making their own, new version of the shared ledger and inserting all their coins into it, with new software that's tuned to less eagerly reward polluters and extortionist gangs. 

Oh, sure, a large minority would refuse. Their rump or legacy Bitcoin ledger (Rumpcoin?) would continue to operate... with value plummeted as commercial and government and individual entities refuse to accept it and as large numbers of computer systems refuse to host rump-coin ledger operations. Because at that point, the holdouts will include a lot of characters who are doing unsavory things in the real world.

There are vernaculars for this. Indeed it has been done, occasionally, in what are called soft and hard 'forks.' 

== A forking solution? ==

A “fork,” in programming terms, is an open-source code modification. Usually, the forked code is similar to the original, but with important modifications, and the two “prongs” comfortably co-exist. Sometimes a fork is used to test a process, but with cryptocurrencies, it is more often used to implement a fundamental change or to create a new asset with similar (but not equal) characteristics as the original.

With a soft fork, only one blockchain will remain valid as users adopt the update. Whereas with a hard fork, both the old and new blockchains exist side by side, which means that the software must be updated to work by the new rules. But the aim is to render the old code so obsolete and so widely spurned that it ceases to have any use to anyone.

As an example: Etherium did a fork when about $100 million worth of coins (that would now be worth tens of billions) was tied up in a badly written smart contract that a hacker was stealing. The community decided to kill that smart contract showing that immutable blockchains can change if 50% +1 decides to change it.

If you squint at this, it's really not so radical.  (Don't even ask about the blockchain "spork!"). It is just an operating system upgrade that can only occur by majority consent of the owner-members of the commune.  As pioneered at the famous University of Fork... or...

And so the stage is set to 'regulate' in ways that leave the potential benefits of blockchain - self-correction, smart contracts and the like - alone while letting system users deliberate and decide to revise, a trait that should be possible in any democratic or accountable system.

Now, is there a way to use a Grand Fork to change the insane approach to coin "mining" so that ledger maintenance can be achieved without encouraging planet-killing pollution and waste?

== And finally... ==

The concept that I called equiveillance or look-back accountability, in The Transparent Society - and Steve Mann called sousveillance - is labeled "inverse surveillance" by members of the Asimov Institute, in Holland. “How can we use AI as a Panopticon to promote beneficial actions for citizens by organizations?” A proof of concept was explored in a 2021 hackathon. 

Well well. These are harder concepts to relate than they might think, I know from experience! Yet they are fundamental to the very basis of our kind of civilization.

Encryption is not the answer

Veering back into the real issues... those we can still hope to steer. Let's start with a cool, fun interview: I answer questions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and why it is possible that these new, genius offspring of humanity may decide not to treat us badly.

== Snowden and surveillance ==

Matt Novik really tears into Edward Snowden, exaggerating a bit, but raising good points.  My own complaint is more nuanced: that while Snowden did a service by forcing us to converse more vigorously about surveillance, he has since contributed very little to solutions. Sure, he’s joined with thousands of other paladins-for-freedom by pointing at various Orwellian traces and signs, yelling “Lo! Big Brother looms!”  

But then, his prescriptions tend to be the same, lame-arm-waved appeals for technological miracles and hiding from elites.

Look, I send money to the EFF and ACLU and I love that they are out there, yelling! But it’s also frustrating, because not one of these heroes ever explains how hiding from authorities is even remotely possible, over the long run. There are no examples from the history of our species when the blinding of all elites was accomplished by average people. Not one. 

What Snowden and his fellow paladins offer, when challenged, is vague assurances that encryption will take care of it. 

Ooh, a magic word! As if each decade’s ciphers aren’t child’s play to the next decade’s crackers. As if supposedly secure systems don’t topple every day. As if human error doesn't always offer a way in, even when there aren't trap- or backdoors, (And there almost always are.) 

As if the average Joe or Jane can sleep well, knowing for a fact that others don’t know something – an epistemologically crazy and unverifiable notion.

Alas, not one of these brave dreamers has apparently read the history of cat-and-mouse oppression by secret police, dating back to Hamurabi. There are standard Gestapo-Okrhana-Stazi tactics and only three or four - out of a dozen - categories, would be even slightly inconvenienced by crypto stuff.

You know where this is going.  There is only one method that will work, that can work.  That has worked, and it is not hiding from elites.  It is not depending on an epistemologically impossible reassurance that others do not know something. It depends on us knowing, maximally, and - in aggregate - supervising all elites. Because if we cannot verify what they know, at least we can watch and know what they do. 

As I discussed in: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

== Algorithms that lobotomize us? ==

From The World Post:  “Wael Ghonim is the internet activist who helped spawn the Arab Spring in Egypt with his Facebook posts. During those heady days in Cairo, as he explains in an interview with The WorldPost, Ghonim came to realize that, "the algorithmic structure of social media amplified and abetted the turn to mobocracy" because it is designed to bring together those with common passions and sympathies irrespective of whether the information they share is truth, rumor or lies.

In our present moment, says Ghonim, "Donald Trump is the living example of the damage mobocratic algorithms can do to the democratic process." The challenge has thus shifted, he says. "While once social media was seen as a liberating means to speak truth to power," Ghonim argues, "now the issue is how to speak truth to social media."

Since "people will be as shallow as platforms allow them to be," he explains, Ghonim proposes that the big social media companies focus on creating a "meritocratic algorithm" that rewards credible information and dialogue, not just the broadcast of "sensational content" to the like-minded. See his TED Talk: Let's design social media that drives real change.

== More warnings ==

Mark Anderson's Strategic News Service (9/2016) carried a frightening warning: Is The Internet at Risk? from Jeff Hudson, the CEO of Venafi, the inventor of The Immune System for the Internet™.  Dig the following excerpt:

“We have proof that the algorithms used in encryption are not perfect, and as they age they become more vulnerable to hacking and attacks. The MD5 hash algorithm was used for a number of years before subsequently being cracked. SHA-1 is another algorithm that is in wide use and was recently judged to be vulnerable. 

"Attacks such as Heartbleed, DROWN, and FLAME all prove that encryption programs, techniques, and algorithms are not perfect; given enough time and computing resource, many popular encryption tools can be compromised. The logic here is inescapable: Trust is created by establishing tunnels. Tunnels are created by using certificates. Certificates rely on encryption. 

“Encryption is accomplished using an algorithm, or a program, that has been written to create a key that can be used by both ends of the tunnel to communicate in private. These algorithms are designed to create encryption keys that are difficult to reverse-engineer. The most widely used algorithm is called the RSA algorithm. Named after its creators - Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman - the RSA algorithm was patented in 1983.

“Most encryption uses the RSA algorithm. Therefore, maximum accumulation of digital trust is based on the RSA algorithm, but we know that no algorithm is perfect. All will fail at some point.

"To date, the encryption vulnerabilities that have been discovered have been remedied in a number of ways. Most involve introducing the next, more secure generation of encryption algorithms. There are two factors affecting encryption software that have changed recently. First, the amount and cost of computing resource available to apply to compromising programs has increased almost exponentially. This means that many more people today have access to the same capability that was available only to the NSA and other similarly talented and funded organizations just five years ago. Second, quantum computing is getting closer to being useful in compromising encryption.

"Couple these facts with an order-of-magnitude greater use of tunnels and encryption, an exponentially greater amount of valuable data in the digital economy, and our collective reliance on the Internet to maintain a functioning society, and we have a very critical situation.

"If - or, with a high degree of certainty, when - this happens, it will mean that uniformly across the Internet nothing can be trusted. Everything will be vulnerable to attack. Then what happens?

"Financial transactions will be put at risk. The monetary system will begin to fail.
Transportation will slow to a crawl.
Health and safety systems will be taken offline.
Communications systems will be disrupted.
Power availability will be intermittent, at best.
Emergency response will fail.
Government and law enforcement will function in only the most rudimentary ways.
In major metro areas, severe food shortages will begin within three days.
Water stops flowing.
It will be deadly serious."

== You can't fight what's coming ==

A  Berlin-based hacker-artist unveiled his scariest work -- an entirely boring-looking Hewlett Packard printer that also secretly functions as a rogue GSM cell base station, tricking your phone into connecting to it rather than your phone carrier’s tower, effectively intercepting your calls and text messages.  … Since it sits indoors near its victims, Oliver says it can easily overpower the signal of real, outdoor cell towers. But instead of spying, the printer merely starts a text message conversation with the phone, pretending to be an unidentified contact with a generic message like “Come over when you’re ready,” or the more playful “I’m printing the details for you now.”

“Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.” -- from The New York Times.

It’s been called “Brin’s Corollary.” That cameras get smaller, faster, better, cheaper, more mobile and numerous at rates faster than Moore’s Law.  Now meet the Piccolissimo -- the world’s smallest self-powered controllable drone. It comes in two sizes, a quarter-sized one weighing less than 2.5 grams and a larger, steerable one that’s heavier by 2 grams and wider by a centimeter (.39 inches). As brought to you earlier by sci fi (including my own.)

Ban this?  Hide from them?  Yeah. Right. There is another way.

And then there is...  More deeply perceptive than today’s crude polygraph “lie detectors,” fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) can zero in on the brain’s decision-making centers, appearing to achieve 90% accuracy at nailing falsehoods… though I’d lover to see the results with sociopaths. A combo approach had a perfect score. Though fMRI requires lots of infrastructure and cooperation by the subject.  

The crux? We will not resist tyranny by lying. The elites who get this power must be subjected to it!

On the Transparency Front: FBI vs Apple and the prescribers of "hiding."

On the Transparency Front – A New York Times article asserts that the blurry lines between foreign intelligence gathering and domestic surveillance are starting to vanish, altogether.  “National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.” This article - Surprise! NSA data will be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism - is lurid and over-wrought in tone, but of course we need to make clear that we’re interested and paying attention.  In the long run, that fact can lead to a balance that protects common citizens.  

But... protects them… from being surveilled? Oh stop. Please. The dumbitudinousness of that ongoing fantasy is plumb wearying. 

Not one of the silly jeremiads that have demanded government blindness has ever – and I mean ever, once – proposed any plausible way that can reliably happen, over an extended period.  Across the history of our species, show me one time when a society’s elites were denied sight consistently or for very long. 

There is a way to stay free and empowered citizens, even if we are surveilled. Yes, it can be so, despite the inevitability of elites getting to see.  It happens to be the very same trick that got us our current, anomalous levels of safety, privacy and freedom, three things I refuse to give up or “tradeoff” against each other. There is a method. But it takes more work than whining.

== The FBI vs Apple ==

Ah, the ongoing drama. The following riff, written a month ago, is already obsolete... or is it? I'll comment on the latest. But first --

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” Edward Snowden says in this recent interview. “Respectfully, that’s bullshit.” And while I am not a cracking expert (nor do I always agree with Snowden) my own instincts coincide with his on this point - that there is an awful lot of theater in all of this. The FBI is requesting that Apple create custom iOS software that disables the safety features in the iPhone of San Bernardino, California, shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, but Apple CEO Tim Cook has resisted such demands so far.

Apple needs a public image that they will defend their customers, come hell or high water. Also, if they make it easy for the FBI to gain access, then other governments like China will be able to demand the same - (though in fact, Apple is very cooperative with the Chinese government).

At the same time, the public has mixed feelings and Apple will lose sympathy if it seems that some major terror act was made easier by encryption.  

In The Transparent Society I speak of the 'ratchet effect." Civil libertarians who rely on notions of preventing elites from seeing will do fine... until some day when the citizenry is scared by some traumatic event.  At which point all the carefully erected "do not look" protections will topple away. This is why I do not put any faith in "do not look" rules, as any kind of long term safeguard.

Earlier, I offered this wager: "there's a good chance that the current iPhone imbroglio is all one big Potemkin act, a stage show put on to let Apple look tough as a defender of customer rights."

The latest? First, exactly as I predicted, the FBI eventually proclaimed: "Never mind! We managed to crack the iPhone without your help."

Second... A proposed bill in Congress, the “Compliancewith Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr, would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” According to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.” Indeed, recently, some of the world’s top cryptographers warned of the dangers of weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement… that any backdoor created to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications would inevitably be used by sophisticated hackers and foreign cyberspies. 

To be clear, the bill seems to have no chance of passing, as-is. But next time something bad and panic-worthy happens? Remember the Ratchet Effect?  Again... (and again and again)... if you base your defense of freedom upon public appearances and assurances that elites cannot see, then you are spectacularly delusional.

We are better defended by the other approach, fierce application of supervision powers, allowing us to look back at the elites who are going to look at us, anyway.

== We must look back ==

Windows 10 covertly sends your disk encryption keys to Microsoft: Here's a disturbing article by Cory Doctorow, though I can’t verify: “Windows 10 has many unprecedented anti-user features: a remote kill switch that lets it disable your hardware; key-logging and browser-history logging that, by default, sends it all to Microsoft, and a deceptive "privacy mode" that continues to exfiltrate your data, even when you turn it on.”  

To which I reply… sure it’s disturbing. And you expect elites to behave any differently than this? Ever?  

Doctorow's vague-general "Danger Will Robinson!" cries are typical among the millions who are right to sniff the aroma of looming Big Brother… but utterly wrongheaded to recommend the solution of “let’s hide!”

Dig this and finally dig it well. You will not stop elites from looking, by whining and complaining. You will not stop them by encrypting and tech noodling.  You will not blind elites by passing laws that restrict what they are allowed to see. You will not stop the descendants of monkeys from looking at stuff!  Especially when they are sitting on the highest branch.

What we can do is remain free and left-alone by looking back.  By dropping the sick-stupid and cowardly obsession with hiding… 

...and instead concentrating our efforts on supervision, on sousveillance and looking back at power.  On applying accountability.  On seeing.  

That may not blind them, but it will put severe restraints on what they can do with any info about us.  What they can do to us.

This is what they fear us doing. And it is why they subsidize the current wave of handwringing moans and articles crying out “stop looking at me!”

== Hacking Transparency == 

A cogent run-down on reasons why it is so hard to cope with cyber-attacks, to determine who is responsible, or even be sure that one has happened at all.  

A nightmare scenario, brought into real life... when hackers fooled some Ukrainian civil servants into revealing information that then let the hackers take down part of the Ukrainian power grid.  A scenario right out of the pages of Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out: A CyberAttack, a Nation Unprepared; Surviving the Aftermath. 

The Orwellians are out there, preparing.  North Korea’s “Red Star” computer operating system – based on a Linux/Redhat distro – has rigid firewalls, prevents user tinkering, and watermarks all media: “reportedly tags every bit of media it comes into contact with, whether it is on a drive connected to the computer or on the computer itself, including files that aren't even accessed. Once tagged, the media files can then be traced back to whomever has them and, presumably, the source of them.”  

A very interesting article about a speech by an NSA official on the processes involved in hacking into a corporate or national network.  

Hackers invaded a shipping company’s systems to download cargo manifests, allowing Somali pirates to board a vessel, ignore the fortified crew, and use barcode scanners to find valuable cargo to carry off.  

Back in 2012, Youtube added a new feature that allows you to automatically blur all faces in a video. Today, it's going a step further: you can now draw a rectangle around any object in a video and YouTube will then blur it and automatically follow it.  Self-controlled editing gives responsible folks a chance to do the right thing before posting.  

Stay alert. The world needs lerts.

  

The Right to Record Police

Last year I touted the most important civil liberties event (so far) in the 21st Century, when top U.S. courts (Glik v. Cunniffe) ruled that citizens have an absolute right to record their interactions with police in public places, and the Obama Administration issued a declaration supporting this ruling as "settled law."  I went on to say that the matter would continue to be at issue, at the level of the streets, with many cameras and cell phones "accidentally" broken… until that phase of resistance ends the way it must, with more bystander-cams catching -- then deterring -- the breaking of cameras. And of course all of it was portrayed in both fiction and nonfiction 25 years ago.

Moreover, the mighty will keep coming up with chess moves, some motivated by nascent tyrannical impulses but also by the best of (blinkered) intentions. For example, what good will your recording do, if you cannot transmit it away from your current location, for safekeeping?  

Heed this: Police can now switch off iPhone cameras and wi-fi: "Apple has recently patented a piece of technology that would allow the authorities and police to block data transmission, including video and photos, whenever they like. All they need to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed “sensitive” and needs to be protected from externalities…. Apple has patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless gadgets, commanding them to disable recording functions."

Before you react with unalloyed paranoia and loathing, do consider the rationalization. Understand that the Professional Protector Caste has very good reasons to fear what bad guys can do with cell phones during a crisis, triggering bombs, for instance, or reporting where first responders have clustered.  The ostensible reasons are real. But so are our reasons for finding this worrisome. And as usual, there are win-win solutions that no one mentions. Could you come up with some?  I sure can.

Only, now comes the next step.  We should not have to aggressively shove cameras in the faces of cops, to let them know an age of accountability is here. Moving a step closer to a more Transparent Society -- federal Judge Shira Scheindlin prescribed an important experiment, when she found the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk methods unconstitutional. “The City’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” the judge concluded. To rein in this practice, she ordered “a trial program requiring the use of body-worn cameras in one precinct per borough, a community-based joint remedial process to be conducted by a court-appointed facilitator, and the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure that the NYPD’s conduct of stops and frisks is carried out in accordance with the Constitution.”

For solid justification of this right to record: Take another look at the Sixth Amendment: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial duty…and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor…" I call this the Transparency Amendment -- for the real bulwark of freedoms the passive "right to remain silent" but the assertive right to "compel testimony" on our behalf, even from reluctant witnesses. The logical extension of this is a universal ability to record our interactions with authority. 

==Experiments in Transparency==

Watched Cops are Polite Cops: Reason Magazine ran a pretty good discussion of this experiment in transparency and accountability.  Implications are explored… though the author seems unaware of recent rulings giving citizens a universal right to look-and-record back.

And California governor Jerry Brown has just signed a bill requiring that companies inform consumers when their data has leaked or been hacked.  Social Security numbers, addresses, personal details and passwords have all been pried loose or spilled with regularity, and seldom have the hundreds of thousands of exposed people been told.  Now at least you must be... and we'll all see how incredibly often this happens.  And you are surprised?  And you expect that any system humans design will be totally reliable?  Or reliable at all?  Again, there are alternatives.  Transparency -- catching those who would use our information against us -- is a measure that will work with technological change.  This bill is a welcome step in that direction.

== Rewarding whistle-blowing henchmen? ==

Some great ideas need to gel a bit, before getting attention.  Take my 20-year old (and relentlessly-futilely pushed all that time) idea for a series of whistleblower incentives to help shine light on bad things. From my “Eye of the Needle” or EON list of great projects for billionaires. The "Henchman's Prize" is one of my personal favorites - a million dollars plus a new identity for whoever blows the whistle - with full evidence - on the 'worst' concealed plot or scheme that year!  How could this not shine light on something heinous every year? I suspect nothing could more cost-efficiently help poor nations curb corrupt kleptocracies, converting to diamond-shaped patterns... or help developed nations maintain their healthy accountability systems.  See: The Transparent Society.)

Now some attention is being paid to a simplistic version that would only apply to one  -- and not the most worrisome – variety of henchmen-turned-whistleblowers. “A series of prizes for government employees who risk their livelihoods to shed light on U.S. government abuse might be one way to provide an incentive for more whistleblowing. It needn’t just be one big prize. Think about a foundation that might give out multiple prizes, at all levels of government. Yes, it would need to be pretty well funded.”

Um…. Duh? There are dozens of other necessary traits that this proposal would need, that the article seems to have left out, like ways to liability-shelter the prize-givers, how to ensure the system contains no political or national biases and spreads the love around… and so on.

Above all, we need a set of sliding scales to work from, recognizing that not every henchman who betrays his bosses is an unalloyed hero.  For example, while some leaks have been moderately bracing and debate-stimulating (Edward Snowden), others have been hugely over-rated in importance/consequence (WikiLeaks), and only few of the recent spills (e.g. Swiss banking secrecy) have risen to the level that I would call true whistle-blowing of actual illegality.  Sorry not to be following the romantic rush to call every leaker a "hero"! But it just doesn't work that way, and a mature sliding scale really is needed.

Make no mistake!  We need to encourage a secular trend toward a more open world!  But let's keep a sense of proportion along the way, or the whole whistleblower approach will never gell into its true potential.

A final note on this: want a whistle blower who has made vastly more real difference than Julian Assange?  Swiss bank leaker Hervé Falciani says "he faces constant risk and worries about his safety. The French government has provided three bodyguards.

“I am weak and alone,” Mr. Falciani said, as three round-the-clock bodyguards provided by the French government looked on with hard stares. The protection was needed, he insisted, because he faces constant risk as the sole key to decipher the encrypted data — five CD-ROMs containing a list of nearly 130,000 account holders that may be the biggest leak ever in the secretive world of Swiss banking.  He is in high demand these days, having cast himself as a crusader against the murky world of Swiss banking and money laundering. Once dismissed by many European authorities, he and other whistle-blowers are now being courted as the region’s governments struggle to fill their coffers and to stem a populist uprising against tax evasion and corruption.”

Dig it. We need light sent in all directions. And the aim is not to so cripple government that it ceases to be our tool, capable of shining light at other, cryptic elites.

== The encryption mythology: busted again ==

When I first started writing The Transparent Society, attending EFF and Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) and gatherings of hackers, I tried to understand the incredible transcendentalist faith that so many in the community were devoting to encryption, portraying it as a panacea for all privacy concerns and the sure route to protecting all freedom against would be oppressors.  I am technically trained and grasped all of their arguments... only then I asked:

"Have you studied Bakunin?  or any of the other anarchists or other rebels against tyrannical systems, across 6000 years?  Lenin? Machiavelli? Mao? The Gestapo's tactics in the ongoing cat-vs-mouse game that is played for keeps by rebels against secret police?  Can you list the two dozen or so general types of methods used by the Czar's forces, or the KGB?"  Not one of them had read even a scintilla of background on a subject that (they claimed) fascinated them!  Not one.

Nor could they show how strong encryption of their internet access, from email to IP addresses to physical location, would thwart more than four or five of the ancient methods.  Nor how they could ever be sure that the encryption was actually working, in a world where the powers that be can create false internet IDs as easily as you can and create personas that build cred as fast as you do.  Indeed, would you bet your house that even a majority of the personas on Anonymous aren't NSA fronts?  Really?

Now comes this word: "The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents."

Anyone shocked (shocked!) by this never read The Transparent Society.  Nor even a sliver of human history.  Cowering from power does not work! The only thing that has a chance to work - while we still have some political leverage - is light. Torrents of light, aggressively applied to ALL centers of power, and not just government. (Indeed, govt is one of our principal methods for shining light onto other power centers!)  Light that need not blind our civil servants, or even deny them short term tactical secrecy, to do their jobs.

But light of accountability, nonetheless, to remind the watch dog that it is a dog and not a wolf.

Postscript: Pro-publica offers an apologia that cogently discusses their reasons for revealing the NSA's decryption program.

==A step toward "Smart Mobs"?==

The Internet Response League seeks to call gamers to civic duty. IRL’s first project is to develop a plug-in for World of Warcraft that will notify gamers in the virtual world when real-world disasters break out and ask for help. Gamers would be asked to tag data and other simple but brain-labor-intensive tasks.  Dang, it's took long enough. See my story "The Smartest Mob" for where this might all lead.

Five myths about the NSA... by a guy who should know.  For example: " The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids the NSA from targeting U.S. citizens or legal residents without an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." Ah, but the rub is the secret/potemkin nature of that FISA "court" which could be redesigned to contain adversarial processes by ombundsmen who are vetted, but chosen by us, to act on our behalf.  Oh… and fix the darned inspectors general!  There are dozens of measures that could help restore our confidence, without crippling the Protector Caste from doing their jobs.

Alas, instead, after the New York Times exposed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, Congress amended the law to weaken the court’s oversight. "Rather than individual warrants, the court can now approve vast, dragnet-style warrants, or orders, as they’re called. For example, the first document released by the Guardian was a top-secret order from the court requiring Verizon to hand over the daily telephone records of all its customers, including local calls."

What might be going on without supervision? Who can know?  One of the more lurid accusations going around is that the NSA and/or other agencies are already engaged in wholesale blackmail of public officials and/or aristocrats or other major figures... exactly as I warned both publicly and in fiction.  I am not yet ready to credit this rumor as anywhere near 50% likely... we still have too many sincere members of the Professional Protector Caste (PPC) who at least tell themselves they are working for democracy's good... and something like this could only be rationalized by terminally delusional or even evil men. Still, the temptation is there.  It is a failure mode that will flower into full stench, if not now then someday, so long as we fail to develop means of full accountability, while still letting the PPC do their main jobs.

But there are places where folks actually seem to get it!  The Right to Know Act of 2013: California wants companies to disclose everything they know about you.   (Someone report in on rumors that the big database Company Axcion is taking a bold move toward getting YOU involved in managing your own information.)

== More Transparency News ==

A new browser-widget called "Balancer" takes a corrective measure that I long ago predicted, in EARTH -- by offering the user a wide variety of perspectives on important issues, and not only those that the user happens to agree-with.  Balancer keeps track of the political leanings of your surfing history – and suggests ways to even out your habits. Alas, if you deem this a valuable service, you are already one of those who needs it least.

Ever heard of IPv6?  It is ready to go, allowing the Internet to address vastly, vastly more sites and devices.  Says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf: "My concern is that the (current) address space is 32-bits. It can only support 4.3bn terminations. We thought it would be enough in 1973, but as of 2011 the original internet space is exhausted." So why has the internet not migrated to IPv6 given that in 1998 the IETF adopted the 128-bit internet address space to expand from 4.3bn to 340 trillion trillion trillion devices? IPv6 is not pervasive, he says. While IPv6 software is installed on operating systems and routers Cerf says: "The ISPs have been reluctant to turn it on. This is a constant debate because IPv6 is the only way to expand the address space."

Vint goes on to discuss many of the challenges facing the Internet, on the 40th Anniversary of his invention -- with Robert Kahn -- of the TCP/IP packet-based network protocol.

In other news...Facebook will no longer allow you to opt out of their Facial Recognition Database -- as long as you have posted a profile picture.

And... this interesting article introduces (to me, at least) the term of elite panic, a state where regular citizens behave cooperatively while elites (government, business, religious leaders, et.al.) lose their collective cool to paranoia. It describes - alas - a great deal of our recent past.  Indeed, back when I decrypted the Tytler Calumny, I realized that the people often behave far more wisely that the elites who tell themselves how smart they are.

Nor is this the only step forward.  Take another harbinger of things to come. The Seattle Meshnet project creates a completely alternative “internet” with sparse but growing coverage thanks to radio links set up by local hackers. Meshnetters can talk to each other through a channel that they themselves control.  Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can't be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination. Another meshnet in northeast Spain now has more than 21,000 wireless nodes, spanning much of Catalonia.

An alternative: Hyperboria is a virtual meshnet because it runs through the existing internet, but is purely peer-to-peer. This means people who use it exchange information with others directly over a completely encrypted connection, with nothing readable by any centralized servers.  Read up about this, but you are seeing only the tip of a big iceberg.

== And the miscellany corner ==

Accusing Google Glass users of being either "glassed-out" zombies or else deliberate "glassholes" -- take this fairly typical Atlantic-style grouchitudinism: "Rather than being ransacked by the undead set forth by vodou bokors, tomorrow's cities might be ravaged by the unabsent, set forth by the contemporary practitioners of dark and light magic -- companies like Google itself. Even so, whether undead or unabsent, the Infected or the Wearers, all zombies may share one thing in common: they build their armies by devouring human brains."  Wow. Somebody’s little luddite must have misplaced his binky.

Economist Robert Higgs has noted the existence of a “ratchet effect” related to the growth of state power: while a crisis may be invoked to justify the expansion of the state’s reach, curiously enough, there’s little or no contraction in state power after the crisis abates. People with power are loath to relinquish it. They can be expected to embrace any opportunity to acquire more power greedily, grasping it with both hands.

And finally, cop-blocking -- kind 'o inspiring... though be careful if you do this. Keep your sense of proportion and humor.

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