Notes for presentation.
“The platonic nature of the internet, ideas and information flows, is debased by its physical origins.”
It’s important to remember that governments can destroy and contort the internet because they own the land. These cables should become international property.
His thesis is that encryption can liberate us from this reality.
What is the Cypherpunk mailing list?
It’s almost as if they cite the extent to which government will go to investigate their shit as credentials.
There are two factors, increase of mass communication and increase of mass surveillance. Because we are communicating about more things online, such as our political views (search history), personal and business relationships, etc, more is there for surveillance to catch. It’s more dangerous. (22)
The problem is these people haven’t done anything wrong, but perhaps what the government is worrying about is that they will enable someone to do something wrong. I see the use of encryption as essentially the write to bear arms: it can be used in a terrible way, but it can be necessary to start a necessary revolution. (22)
Mass surveillance is taking away the guns. And it’s worse, because this level of knowledge was previously unknowable.
There are points where they sort of just bounce around strange conversations, like a disorganized email thread.
They then explore the militarization of cyberspace, which is interesting because again this maps to an amendment in the bill of rights. 4th amendment I think states that no solider can take residence in a home. They talk about how military is occupying the internet, the internet is now a battle zone.
Talk about the Navy having hacking conventions where they simulate hacking capture the flag. They’re training cyberwarriors, Microsoft is there recruiting.
“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 fol- lows orders for the good of the nation.”
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
Talk about Cisco, about Abbelbaum’s talk about how there are companies who are making these mass surveillance systems for third world countries, not caring about the consequences. I worked for this company during the Net Neutrality debates, and I asked execs about their stance on Net Neutrality. These people do anything for money, anything for their clients.
The future, implementing IFTTT security procedures.
Then they talk about the blurring line between government and private sector. Almost like the separation of church and state. These fundamental human rights seem to be uncovered again in the digital world.
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.”
NGO for Tara:
He is one of the co-founders of EDRI, European Digital Rights, an NGO for the enforcement of human rights in the digital age.