Assange: How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

http://www.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/cryptography-weapon-fight-empire-states-julian-assange

by 23david • 13 years ago

179 67 13 years ago

nextstep• 13 years ago

The most important problem of our time is the risk of losing all privacy. We must work to make strong crypto widely accessible to the masses.

nullc• 13 years ago

Strong crypto is only one step... but it's the no brainer softball step, it's _just code_ and it doesn't have to have any gnarly UI impact.

We won the important battle getting the regulations largely out of the way. If we can't achieve pervasive always on encryption— and at least kill passive dragnet content collection dead— then can we achieve anything at all?

wladimir• 13 years ago

What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your calls, mails, visited sites, google searches, for any time in the future to look at at their leisure.

It always reminds me of a shocking fact in Dutch history: In the Netherlands, the Germans managed to exterminate a relatively large proportion of the Jews. The main reason was that before the war, the Dutch authorities had required citizens to register their religion so that church taxes could be distributed among the various religious organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance)

And this looks so quaint now. We can only imagine what potentially damning information a totalitarian government can now find about every citizen retroactively.

Digital networks are increasingly an intermediate in every little communication and transaction between people. And with the internet of things, in everything we do, in the future maybe even inside our bodies (what's after Google Glass?).

We really need a way to prevent rampant data collection, otherwise the internet is a large threat to civilization. I didn't go into technology to facilitate some 1984-ish world government :(

mkup• 13 years ago

So, maybe new encrypted chat app should expand encrypted text by 1000x or 10000x (add random garbage)?

If the government has a very big disk, then let's fill that very big disk with tons of crap.

grinich• 13 years ago

OTR encryption is pretty good in this regard.

"If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised."

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

vixen99• 13 years ago

And of course the prime example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust Putting aside questions about IBM's complicity, it's certain that Jews were indeed identified and recorded in their millions using the Hollerith punched card technology.

femto• 13 years ago

Will that solve things? As we are seeing, much of the value is in the metadata, who is speaking to whom. Cryptography won't necessarily hide that, as ultimately the network itself needs to know where messages are going to.

The design of the network has a role to play. Is it possible to design a network that doesn't expose where information is flowing, or better yet, doesn't even need to know where information is flowing (it can't leak what it doesn't know)? Such a network would presumably not require an address space.

Freenet does something like this, exchanging messages by a process akin to a dead drop and restricting each node's view of the network to its immediate neighbours. I'm thinking something like Freenet, but operating as a physical network rather than an overlay network. Does such a thing already exist?

jlgaddis3• 13 years ago

I think Bitmessage[0] has the right general idea.

I don't think that, in its current form, it is scalable by any means. I do think that it's a good start, however.

[0] https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page

betterunix• 13 years ago

"Is it possible to design a network that doesn't expose where information is flowing, or better yet, doesn't even need to know where information is flowing (it can't leak what it doesn't know)?"

Post encrypted messages to Usenet; since anyone can receive them, there is no need for a destination address. Post the messages through anonymous remailers (mix-nets) if you want to avoid revealing that you sent them.

This problem was solved a long time ago.

jakeogh• 13 years ago

The biggest threat we face is our tendency to enslave ourselves in the name of a perfect society.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." -General Douglas MacArthur July 30th 1957

Eisenhower warned us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

D9u• 13 years ago

Ike omitted the Congressional portion of the equation. It's taken the collusion of both mainstream political parties, in concert with the military-industrial establishment, to bring us to the current juncture.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

It would be so incredibly helpful for America's democracy if it had a multi-party system, where a new party could "easily" rise up to become the major one after 2 or so elections.

Having a 2 party system (for decades or centuries at a time) only guarantees that there will be a lot of things both parties will agree on, and there's nothing the citizens can do about it (other than massive protests, which don't seem to be happening in America anymore, or if they do happen they get mocked by the media, and then by the brainwashed masses who watch said media).

I think approval voting would change things dramatically, but even using the voting systems of other countries (such as having 2 voting tours) would help a lot:

http://www.electology.org/approval-voting

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

According to wikiquote, the sentence before your quote is "Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public."

It's not in the name of a perfect society... there is simply huge money in fear.

kimlelly• 13 years ago

Relevant poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6017918

WhoIsSatoshi• 13 years ago

read his book.

chrisvineup• 13 years ago

Which is precisely why the government in the UK added encryption sections into the RIPA acts http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_P... people who fail to hand over keys to encryption can face a prison sentence. The rather obvious flaw in this is that people routinely forget their passwords and the prosecution have to prove intent.

cmdkeen2• 13 years ago

Yet the UK has successfully obtained convictions for failing to hand over passwords - and the UK legal system hasn't yet been compromised to the level of ignoring reasonable doubt.

The majority of people who receive such notices hand over their decryption keys. Because the UK requires such notices only be made after consulting with specialists - it isn't like some random cop makes the requirement on their own. Those specialists can determine things like the likelihood of the "I forgot" defence working.

It should be fairly easy to come up with scenarios where claiming a forgotten password is unlikely. Especially if it is a case of the key being used regularly, for instance whole drive encryption, or one key for all email encryption. Then they're not claiming they forgot the key at some point - they're claiming they forgot it at the very moment the police came knocking. Because otherwise they'd have to claim they've been sitting on a bricked computer, or unusable email account. Which becomes even harder if you can show emails having been sent from that account up until a certain point in time.

Remember criminals tend not to be the smartest cookies running state of the art encryption with deniable characteristics etc.

userulluipeste2• 13 years ago

Can't I just say that the police knocking gave me intense emotions which caused me a cerebral shock or something?

contingencies7• 13 years ago

The cypherpunks have yet to do their greatest work. Join us.

Nice ending, a call to action and all that. Quick quiz then - what do fellow HN'ers see as some of the greatest work still to come from a cypherpunk-like movement?

greyman3• 13 years ago

For example, being able to communicate in an encrypted way with anyone.

This is not yet a solved problem, because now I can do that only with someone who is able and is willing to install PGP or other tools - a very limited number of people. That would be quite an achievement.

contingencies7• 13 years ago

That would be nice, but such a goal faces at least five major challenges: not everyone has or wants computers, those with computers these days often don't control them anymore (OTA updates to or vendor-locked devices), most people aren't educated enough to use any solutions that do exist, global discoverability requires central or at least hierarchical registration prior to key exchange, and secure key management is still so painful that average individuals are not going to opt in to it without some kind of serious requirement on their part... or deal well with a potential scenario of key loss.

Zigurd6• 13 years ago

Encryption using ephemeral keys is UI transparent, and requires no key management.

IvarTJ2• 13 years ago

As a moderately advanced computer user, I would like to see:

Convenient and standard way to cryptographically identify myself across different mediums.

Convenient variants of communication mediums such as chat rooms and forums that do not rely on or can be controlled by any one third-party server.

gwu782• 13 years ago

This is only my opinion but...

If you are a moderately advanced user, then you can start using such methods right now. While no method is "perfect", they do exist.

Because you're advanced, you do not need to wait for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. to introduce them to you in their products and services.

Until these methods become popular beyond only advanced users, there will be a tradeoff in "convenience".

"Engineering" by nature involves tradeoffs. I think (and again, this is only my opinion) you have to decide what is more important to you and better in the lng run for everyone using computers: a. "convenience" or b. what is by advanced users perceived as "the smarter way" (for lack of a better phrase).

The large monopolies mentioned have set their focus not on the advanced user but on the user who purportedly values "convenience" (a subjective definition) above all else. They make guesses about what things might become popular and they make assumptions about what their end users want. The future of computers is always uncertain. These companies will react to what users are doing.

If you want the companies that provide "convenience" to redirect their focus toward what you believe is "the smarter way" then I think you must lead by example. Start using the methods you prefer, even when it is less convenient than not using them.

pantaril• 13 years ago

- distributed DNS and PKI (certificates proving identity of someone) using namecoin or similar

- usable distributed social network and search engine which would not store and sell my personal info to marketing companies

- strong encryption integrated in webbrowsers and e-mail clients and enabled and used by default.

- maybe more widespread link-level enryption (something like IPSec)

gwern• 13 years ago

Assassination markets...

netcan• 13 years ago

I think there is a commonality between the war against pirating , wikileaks and government surveillance programs that all relate in some way to "information wants to be free." I'm not quite sure how to articulate it.

Basically, there is a trend. Technology liberates "information" by improving access to it. But the same forces also work on aggregating information. Information is not just what the government is doing. It's also what you are doing.

When we talk about governments trying harder to maintain their secrets or record companies trying to maintain their copyrights, it seems like they are fighting a lost cause. You can't fight the trend. copyright is meaningless in a world of digital copies. Information gets out. It gets aggregated. Is that any different from these

Same force only this time we don't like the result.

route66• 13 years ago

If you would not try to align record companies and the NSA in the axis of evil you would come to a less convoluted analogy: If we accept that copyright is meaningless in a world of digital copies (a.k.a. "cannot put the toothpaste back") the same holds for the river of digital traces everyone leaves behind.

So it's not governments who try harder to maintain their secrets, it's you (or us or whoever).

Just for the fun of it: take a recent pandora related artist-bashing thread, look for the "too late, digital wants to be free" comments and apply them to a scenario where we not talking about sound waves but phone metadata.

beloch• 13 years ago

Sixty years ago, if something weird happened most people would say, "Gee, I wish I owned a camera!"

Ten years ago, if something weird happened most of us would say, "Gee, I wish I'd brought a camera!".

Today, if something weird happens most of us would say, "Gee, I wish I'd had my phone out of my pocket when that happened!".

A couple of years from now, we'll just take for granted that we're recording everything around us all the time.

Humans love sharing stories, but we're obsessed with our own credibility. We could entertain others with a well spun tale far better than with a cellphone snap-shot, but we still strive to record that snap-shot so we won't need to tell the story and risk being doubted. In the process, we are eliminating the mutability of truth and perspective in human experience in favor of cold, hard bits that tell only the objective truth, and will do so perfectly for as long as they are stored.

While we worry about keeping the secrets we have, we're generating new secrets at an exponentially increasing rate. Secrets are necessarily losing their impact as a result. A nude photo was once a scandal. A hardcore pornographic movie, deliberately leaked, is now cheap promotion. Here in Canada, the mayor of a major city was allegedly caught doing crack on tape. People weren't sure whether to care or not, and it mostly came down to whether or not they already liked him. Society is changing to accommodate the reduction of personal privacy by becoming less responsive to scandal.

This is why the use of encryption has such difficulty overcoming sloth and why there is so little rage among the U.S. public about their loss of privacy. Compared to the indignities their pop-idols are subjected to, the snooping of the NSA seems benign. The government would have to start placing cameras in their bathrooms and bedrooms before they'd be properly outraged, and in a decade or two even that may be tolerable! However, even as some types of information lose their ability to wound, the type of information the government seeks will still serve as an instrument of control.

It's a bit of a conundrum. How do we make people care more about privacy when society is busy transforming itself to care less? I don't think the cypherpunk movement has a hope of combating this trend. Whatever it does for the good of society will have to be done in spite of society rather than with it's willing participation.

popee• 13 years ago

What you do in your house is your thing, but in my country it is not legal to record stuff in public without permission.

Also, yeah, humans like to share stuff, but not with enemies or whom they think is not worth sharing (like corrupted government, etc).

Andrew_Quentin• 13 years ago

What country is that?

ippisl2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure people are willing to totally skip privacy.

One interesting data point is a snapchat. It enables private picture sharing and it's pretty popular.

Another private messaging app talks about protecting the privacy and safety of your children, I can see the app becoming popular.

Maybe by building this kinds of networks we can offer more private channels. But not sure this can lead to anti government encryption because :

A. People are interested in protection from terrorism.

B. There are plenty of ways for government to subvert this kind of apps, especially since they are owned by commercial entities.

And maybe that's a good thing, in a world where terrorists will probably have increasing technological capabilities to cause damage.

contingencies7• 13 years ago

It's a bit of a conundrum. How do we make people care more about privacy when society is busy transforming itself to care less?

I'm not sure that society is transforming itself. I feel like there are certain corporate actors that are extremely influential in this area and should either review their business ethics or prepare to be regulated out of their present mode of existence.

I don't think the cypherpunk movement has a hope of combating this trend.

Perhaps you are right, but defeatism and apathy is easy. Why shouldn't people who dislike the negative aspects of society's present direction challenge themselves? As the old Margaret Mead saying goes, "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Whatever it does for the good of society will have to be done in spite of society rather than with it's willing participation.

Will is a funny one. If you take the oft-quoted computational sphere view on truths, cultimating in self-evidence, then it may be fair to say that such truths entering the stage of self-evidence are indeed accepted by society with it's willing participation.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

That is wrong on many levels.

Its like saying in the 1950-s - if we ship enough weapons to the MLK supporters they will get their civil rights. Maybe, maybe not. What we will have for sure is more volatile and bloody situation.

Cryptography cannot be stable response to a surveillance/government overreach state. It just creates an arm race in which the government still has the power to beat you up to a pulp on whim. With a robot(wait 5 years).

It's the second amendment fallacy - enough technology in the hands of the people can stop the government.

By encrypting everything you just open the door for arbitrary enforcement on various laws.

speeder• 13 years ago

More or less...

There is some math proof that you can always encrypt more than someone can decrypt, thus if everyone used crypto no government would be able to decrypt everything.

Zigurd6• 13 years ago

You are assuming the surveillance state has some value for your own security.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

You are assuming that because he's proposing that crypto alone cannot be the answer to a surveillance state, that he wants a surveillance state. But I don't think that's what he wants.

siddboots• 13 years ago

What makes me disagree with this point is the same sentiment behind the phrase "the universe believes in encryption." As far as anyone on earth knows, prime factorization takes exponential time on a deterministic machine. Without one or two major advances in human knowledge, there can't be any "arms race".

More to the point, encryption isn't a "weapon" in this situation, it's the goal. If people are able to use encryption that can be trusted, the people have means to the basic right of privacy when they wish for it.

mrgoldenbrown• 13 years ago

The arms race doesn't need to happen in the pure math realm of crypto. It can happen in a myriad of other areas. One example - if I have a keylogger installed on your computer, it doesn't matter how perfect your encryption algorithm is.

gnosis• 13 years ago

Encryption is just one (important) piece of the privacy puzzle. Another important piece is steganography.[1]

Effective steganography could hide the fact that you're using encryption at all, and could make traffic analysis[2] more difficult. Widespread use of effective steganography could make wholesale digital spying a lot more difficult.

The use of anonymous remailers[3] also needs to become much more popular; in particular, the mixminion[4] remailer, which was designed to address many weaknesses in earlier remailers.

Traditionally much more difficult, but as or even more important than the technological solutions mentioned above, is educating the general public about the need for and value of privacy enhancing technologies. Fortunately, the massive publicity around the recent spying scandals is doing a lot of the hard work for us in this area.

Finally, there's a great need for educating the general public on how to use these privacy enhancing technologies properly, and making them easier to use. There's still a lot to be done on this front, but the challenges are not insurmountable, and they are getting easier as the general public becomes more computer literate and more privacy- and security-conscious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion

mikegioia• 13 years ago

I read something a while back (unfortunately, I can't find it) in the NYTimes postulating that the 9/11 hijackers used steganographic techniques to communicate via the open 'net. If that's true, I wondered, then what could possibly be the point of storing/analyzing internet communications twelve years later? If they were using steganography in 2001, I can't imagine the techniques they're using to hide in plain view today.

It makes you wonder what the actual point to all of this surveillance is. Regardless, I whole-heartedly agree with you that steganography should be prioritized much higher than crypto.

VexXtreme• 13 years ago

You are naive if you think that national security is the reason for all this surveillance. It's a pretext, a convenient excuse for the masses. The real reason is establishing a global surveillance network, monitoring digital communications both in the US and abroad and establishing/continuing international supremacy.

Since you can't explain it in those exact terms to the masses without causing an outrage, you have to tell them it's for their own safety and to protect them from brown skinned tunic-wearing AK47-waving freedom-hating lunatics.

Zigurd6• 13 years ago

When you argue against the routine use of strong encryption for data storage and communications, remember that before the NSA became the hot news, it was foreign hacking and spying that was the problem. You need strong encryption, and you will need it for threats that arise in the future.

uonyechi• 13 years ago

Quick question then (which may be a bit naive). What happens when this crypto tech falls into the hands of terrorists - the ones that target human lives?

userulluipeste2• 13 years ago

Quick answer - someone says that the future is imperfect: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter3.html

Zigurd6• 13 years ago

It already has. What now? Discourage the general population from using it, thus exposing them to hackers and foreign spies?

Assange: How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

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