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Cypherpunks, freedom and the future of the internet.
Book written by:
• Lots of internet figures, many technical
• Assange
• Abbelbaum
Assange really drives the conversations.
Really are conversations between authors. Bouncing around.
Interesting: cite their degree of governmental surveillance as accolades almost
book about Governmental relationships with the internet.
Starts out with reminder: “The platonic nature of the internet, ideas and information flows, is debased by its physical origins.”
• Highlights the danger of internet becoming controlled
• World wireless ideal direction (signal jammers)
• I think should lead to cables being international property
Thesis: internet liberated by cryptography. Governmental DOS’ still possible, but by that point shit is bound to hit the fan.
Two motivations to this discussion:
• Increase in mass communication online (more ways, e.g. business talk, political affiliation via search history, etc). More to lose!
• Increase in mass surveillance from governments. More being taken.
Sort of thinking paranoid style: government previously owned all ways of self-teaching: libraries, now they want internet
I see it: problem with Assange and company:
• Haven’t done anything wrong (arguably)
• Govs are scared they’ll enable someone to do something wrong.
Leads me to my first major observation:
• Lots of parallels between fundamental human rights.
• Especially those in Bill of Rights
First example: I see encryption, and general tech, as similar to right to bear arms: can be used in a terrible way (plotting terror attacks) or great way (necessary revolution). Mass surveillance is taking away the right to convene privately, away the right to guns.
Move on to militarization of cyberspace.
Talk about how military is occupying internet.
Internet is being used as a battleground between nation states.
But our private life is on their too. Relates to 3rd amendment, no “soldier can be in home of owner without consent during peacetime”.
The navy has hacking conventions, simulating capture the flag essentially.
[Can mention the Facebook ad I got on my phone]
Companies recruit, etc. Abblebaum had this to say:
• “They weren’t promoting creative thinking or some kind of framework for independent analysis; they were pushing a cog-in-the-machine-mentality of someone who follows orders for the good of the nation.”
From one of the optional Youtube videos Dr. Jones posted, Abblebaum talks about Tor. In it, he mentions the evil players in this market. Cisco, for instance, designing mass surveillance for other countries.
• Talk about personal experience at Cisco.
⁃ During my time, asked execs about net neutrality.
⁃ They’ll do anything for their clients, money.
The future: IFTTT security procedures.
Finally, they talk about bluring line between gov and private sec. Almost like “separation of church and state” but now separation between state and private sector.
Extra things:
Twitter, Google received a 2703(d) notice, which is a secret subpoena for metadata which doesn’t require a warrant. Twitter fought to notify the users, Google didn’t.
“but as it stands right now, the court said that on the internet you have no expectation of privacy when you willingly reveal information to a third party, and, by the way, everyone on the internet is a third party.”
“Actually, we made some calculations in the Chaos Computer Club: you get decent voice-quality storage of all German telephone calls in a year for about 30 million euros including administrative overheads”