Sent: Sunday, December 2, 2012 9:41 PM
Subject: [HELP-Matrix Blog] Excerpt ~ Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms
http://cryptome.org/2012/12/assange-crypto-arms.htm
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1 December 2012
Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms
Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. OR Books, New York, 2012, 186 pages, Paper. Buy online. Cryptome review of the book.
Pages 1-7.
INTRODUCTION: A CALL TO CRYPTOGRAPHIC ARMS
This book is not a manifesto. There is not time for that. This book is a warning.
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.
No description of the world survives first contact with the enemy.
We have met the enemy.
Over the last six years WikiLeaks has had conflicts with nearly every powerful state. We know the new surveillance state from an insider's perspective, because we have plumbed its secrets. We know it from a combatant's perspective, because we have had to protect our people, our finances and our sources from it. We know it from a global perspective, because we have people, assets and information in nearly every country. We know it from the perspective of time, because we have been fighting this phenomenon for years and have seen it double and spread, again and again. It is an invasive parasite, growing fat off societies that merge with the internet. It is rolling over the planet, infecting all states and peoples before it.
What is to be done?
Once upon a time in a place that was neither here nor there, we, the constructors and citizens of the young internet discussed the future of our new world.
We saw that the relationships between all people would be mediated by our new world, and that the nature of states, which are defined by how people exchange information, economic value, and force, would also change.
We saw that the merger between existing state structures and the internet created an opening to change the nature of states.
First, recall that states are systems through which coercive force flows. Factions within a state may compete for support, leading to democratic surface phenomena, but the underpinnings of states are the systematic application, and avoidance, of violence. Land ownership, property, rents, dividends, taxation, court fines, censorship, copyrights and trademarks are all enforced by the threatened application of state violence.
Most of the time we are not even aware of how close to violence we are, because we all grant concessions to avoid it. Like sailors smelling the breeze, we rarely contemplate how our surface world is propped up from below by darkness.
In the new space of the internet what would be the mediator of coercive force?
Does it even make sense to ask this question? In this otherworldly space, this seemingly platonic realm of ideas and information flow, could there be a notion of coercive force? A force that could modify historical records, tap phones, separate people, transform complexity into rubble, and erect walls, like an occupying army?
The platonic nature of the internet, ideas and information flows, is debased by its physical origins. Its foundations are fiber optic cable lines stretching across the ocean floors, satellites spinning above our heads, computer servers housed in buildings in cities from New York to Nairobi. Like the soldier who slew Archimedes with a mere sword, so too could an armed militia take control of the peak development of Western civilization, our platonic realm.
The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute atoms, longed for independence. But states and their friends moved to control our new world -- by controlling its physical underpinnings. The state, like an army around an oil well, or a customs agent extracting bribes at the border, would soon learn to leverage its control of physical space to gain control over our platonic realm. It would prevent the independence we had dreamed of, and then, squatting on fiber optic lines and around satellite ground stations, it would go on to mass intercept the information flow of our new world -- its very essence even as every human, economic, and political relationship embraced it. The state would leech into the veins and arteries of our new societies, gobbling up every relationship expressed or communicated, every web page read, every message sent and every thought googled, and then store this knowledge, billions of interceptions a day, undreamed of power, in vast top secret warehouses, forever. It would go on to mine and mine again this treasure, the collective private intellectual output of humanity, with ever more sophisticated search and pattern finding algorithms, enriching the treasure and maximizing the power imbalance between interceptors and the world of interceptees. And then the state would reflect what it had learned back into the physical world, to start wars, to target drones, to manipulate UN committees and trade deals, and to do favors for its vast connected network of industries, insiders and cronies.
But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.
The universe believes in encryption.
It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.
We saw we could use this strange property to create the laws of a new world. To abstract away our new platonic realm from its base underpinnings of satellites, undersea cables and their controllers. To fortify our space behind a cryptographic veil. To create new lands barred to those who control physical reality, because to follow us into them would require infinite resources.
And in this manner to declare independence.
Scientists in the Manhattan Project discovered that the universe permitted the construction of a nuclear bomb. This was not an obvious conclusion. Perhaps nuclear weapons were not within the laws of physics. However, the universe believes in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. They are a phenomenon the universe blesses, like salt, sea or stars.
Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free from state control.
In this way, people can oppose their will to that of a fully mobilized superpower and win. Encryption is an embodiment of the laws of physics, and it does not listen to the bluster of states, even transnational surveillance dystopias.
It isn't obvious that the world had to work this way. But somehow the universe smiles on encryption.
Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action. While nuclear weapons states can exert unlimited violence over even millions of individuals, strong cryptography means that a state, even by exercising unlimited violence, cannot violate the intent of individuals to keep secrets from them.
Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem.
But could we take this strange fact about the world and build it up to be a basic emancipatory building block for the independence of mankind in the platonic realm of the internet? And as societies merged with the internet could that liberty then be reflected back into physical reality to redefine the state?
Recall that states are the systems which determine where and how coercive force is consistently applied.
The question of how much coercive force can seep into the platonic realm of the internet from the physical world is answered by cryptography and the cypherpunks' ideals.
As states merge with the internet and the future of our civilization becomes the future of the internet, we must redefine force relations.
If we do not, the universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.
We must raise an alarm. This book is a watchman's shout in the night.
On March 20, 2012, while under house arrest in the United Kingdom awaiting extradition, I met with three friends and fellow watchmen on the principle that perhaps in unison our voices can wake up the town. We must communicate what we have learned while there is still a chance for you, the reader, to understand and act on what is happening.
It is time to take up the arms of our new world, to fight for ourselves and for those we love.
Our task is to secure self-determination where we can, to hold back the coming dystopia where we cannot, and if all else fails, to accelerate its self-destruction.
-- Julian Assange, London, October 2012
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http://cryptome.org/2012/11/cypherpunks-ffi.htm
30 November 2012
Review: Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
Cypherpunks1: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. OR Books, New York, 2012, 186 pages, Paper. Buy online
This is a highly informative book, perhaps the best published on the substance of WikiLeaks, its technology, philosophy, origin and purpose, rooted in the Cypherpunks resistance to authority through encryption and anonymizing technology. The trenchant and salient, wide-ranging discussion among Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, is derived from a four-part RT series with additional editorial material and a summarizing prologue by Assange, "A Call to Cryptographic Arms."
It is an excellent introduction to the struggle for control of digital communications, economics and governance. A prime candidate for inclusion of reading lists of the enemies of authoritarian institutions, corporations and governments heavily invested in the Internet and aiming to control it by secret collusion for their purposes -- at the global public's expense, loss of privacy and reduced democracy. It claims to be a "watchman's warning" against the threat posed by the Internet and cellphone technology.
The panel asserts:
1. The internet is a threat to human civilization because of its panoptic surveillance and profiling of users.
2. "Strategic surveillance" gathers all online and cellphone data as distinguished from tactical surveillance with is specifically targeted.
3. Internet and cellphones allow surveillance more efficiently and pervasively than in the physical world.
4. Individuals can be surveilled more easily if they remain mesmerized by computers, cellphones and social media.
5. Encryption prevents access to private secrets by official and commercial online surveillance and by cellphones.
6. Protestors in Arab Spring went to the streets when cellphone and online systems were disabled and thereby escaped digital surveillance.
7. General purpose computers avoid the built-in controls of special purpose computers and devices.
8. Free software avoids the control of restrictive governmental and commercial software.
9. Free encryption and anonymizing technologies can protect against authoritarian aggression embedded in the equipment and operating systems of computers, cellphones, networks, internet service providers, financial institutions and governments.
10. Younger generations will need to invent and distribute ideas, critiques, code and technology against the legacy controls of older generations indoctrinated in submissive acceptance of authority.
11. Diverse, heterogenic concepts and technology will be required to oppose centralizing, homogenizing intents of the government- and commerce-dominated Internet and cellphones.
Evgeny Morozov and other net-negativists may scowl at the blind faith in encryption and anonymizing technology to save the Internet for its all too gullible users. Some cypherpunks are appalled at what WikiLeaks and Assange have become through excessive publicity and promotion by supporters and opponents.2 The book could be seen as a compendium of what not to do about communications security, privacy, secrecy and authoritarianism -- for that it is to be studied carefully.
For me, the greatest virtue of this book is its description of what comes after the lessons learned of Cypherpunks and WikiLeaks -- from the diverse initiatives nobody yet knows about due to deliberate avoidance of preening, crippling publicity.3
Read between the book's lines, there are undisclosed means and methods inside them to panic decrypting and surveilling authoritarians and their opponents into attacking each other.4
Admire the book's critique of those obsessed with being in the vanguard of protecting the public, covert authoritarians in power-seeking, monetizing cahoots.
Lesson one: Protect yourself by keeping quiet, offline and sans cell, avoiding vanguards.
These comments will change, provoked by this book.
Note 1: Wikipedia on Cypherpunks
Note 2: This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg.
Note 3: Archive of Cypherpunk mail list 1992-1998 (Zipped, 83MB).
Note 4: Julian Assange writes on the Cypherpunks mail list 1995-2002.
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Last week Amazon listed this book but today there is no listing (Amazon is a centralizing force criticized by the book, which may account for its USG-like censorship). Nor could a copy be found in three New York City bookstores. So we went to the publisher, OR Books, to buy a copy from its "R," Colin Robinson. from OR.
Comment: Interesting but so garbled too. Assane is definitely not a clear minded writer or one has to get use to his style of expressing. I expected something more profound from him. Maybe I should just study it more. Or just type up more of my own perspective on stuff. We must commmunicae to people in ways and with terms that are understandable and communicable to the masses. Think on a global mass level. ~ @Peta_de_Aztlan
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Posted By Blogger to HELP-Matrix Blog at 12/02/2012 09:41:00 PM
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