The Dark Net Page 9
Dark Wallet
Happily ensconced in ‘Hackafou’, Amir describes the aims of his latest project to me. Ultimately, it’s about trying to make Bitcoins more anonymous and more trustworthy. The Dark Wallet will include a number of new features, which, if implemented correctly, will certainly cause more of a headache for ‘The System’. One of the key innovations is called ‘multi-signature’, where a Bitcoin payment can be released only if two of three parties sign it off. Another is called ‘trustless mixing’, a way of making Bitcoin payments harder to trace. It’s based on a project called CoinJoin, which jumbles up transactions that are happening at the same time, and then reroutes them to the final destination. Everyone ends up with the right amount but no one knows who was sending what to whom. The third key innovation is called the ‘stealth address’. Dark Wallet generates a fake Bitcoin address as the recipient’s, meaning that it is a little harder to link a real person to their wallet. While not making Bitcoin transactions perfectly anonymous, this is a significant step forward. Amir anticipates that a lot of people will want to take advantage of the extra layers of security it offers.
As a computer programmer, Amir is exceptionally precise and exacting. But whenever I try to press him on politics, he is a flurry of anger and unconnected ideas. Every time he speaks about Bitcoins, conversation switches swiftly to all the problems he sees in the world: the surveillance state, corrupt governments and greedy corporations, oppression, environmental damage. His politics are best described as system-opposition: us the citizens versus them, the governments and corporations. ‘I just see problems and work out solutions,’ he tells me. And just like Tim May, he sees salvation in maths, not man-made laws: ‘Bitcoin is a currency based on mathematics,’ he says, ‘the purest kind. And it creates the truest market, peer to peer with no corrupt or controlling third parties.’ In that sense, he sees Dark Wallet as a strike against the inefficient, useless governments in the world: ‘A bunch of gangsters running a sham democracy.’ There is a utopian faith in the certainty of maths and physics to resolve society’s problems, although with little thought given to precisely how. After all, I ask him, don’t governments serve some useful purposes? What about collective healthcare, education, help for those at the bottom?
Amir suddenly stops. ‘Do you want to play a computer game?’ he asks. He loads up something called Mirror’s Edge. The story is set in a near-future society in which a dictatorial state keeps the peace through a toxic mix of surveillance and sterile hyperconsumerism. The docile population prefers peace to freedom, except for a handful of rebels who rely on ‘runners’ to deliver messages to the underground resistance. As a runner, your job is to scamper across the tops of building, scurry down backalleys, and disappear into the shadows, evading the state police. ‘I love games,’ Amir says. ‘They’re how children learn about politics.’ He plays with his face impossibly close to the screen, head slightly cocked, half jumping out of his chair every time his online persona does. ‘Training,’ he says, chuckling. As he ducks and weaves he continues the thread we’d left off before he started the game: ‘It’s true – people are going to suffer. Yes, that’s sad. But that’s just the way it is.’
Cypherpunk Goes Mainstream
Bitcoin is the means to an end for cypherpunks like Amir, just as it had been for Tim May. That end amounts to free forms of communication and transactions between individuals that cannot be censored or monitored. ‘Currencies are just the beginning,’ Amir tells me. ‘The real genius of blockchain is that it is going to help us create a decentralised net that no one can censor. This is much bigger than just Bitcoin. We’re going to transform the entire internet.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Well, at the moment your Facebook data isn’t really controlled by you: it’s hosted on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers. Facebook administrators can do anything they like with it, because they own the servers, and so they own your data. It’s not really free, because it’s centralised. A social media platform built using blockchain would be different. Your posts would become part of the public blockchain record, and every user of the platform would have their own copy. Everything could be done anonymously, and censorship would be close to impossible. No one can shut it down, because no one owns it.’
There are several new projects under way that are trying to do this. One is a social media platform called Twister. Miguel Freitas is Twister’s chief developer. Miguel worked for several straight months – also unpaid, just as Zimmermann did when working on PGP – to convert the blockchain model into a social media platform after the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, admitted his government considered shutting down Twitter during the 2011 London riots. ‘I tried searching for peer-to-peer microblogging alternatives, but I couldn’t find any,’ he told me. ‘The internet alone won’t help information flow if all the power is in the hands of Facebook and friends.’
Twister is only one of many next-generation systems to guarantee free expression and privacy designed for the mass market rather than the specialist: each user-friendly, cheap and efficient. Jitsi is a free, secure, open-source voice, video-conferencing and instant-messaging application which started as a student project at the University of Strasbourg. Jabber, another instant-messaging service, is encrypted with industry-standard Secure Sockets Layer, run by volunteers and physically hosted in a secure data centre. Phil Zimmermann is currently working on a project called Darkmail, an automatically end-to-end encrypted email service.
Today there are hundreds of people like Amir and Miguel working on ingenious ways of keeping online secrets or preventing censorship, often in their own time, and frequently crowdfunded by users sympathetic to the cause. One is Smári McCarthy. Smári is unashamedly geeky: a computer whizz and founding member of the radical Icelandic Pirate Party. He used to work with Julian Assange in the early days of WikiLeaks. Smári isn’t really a cypherpunk – he resists any association with Ayn Rand’s philosophy – but he does believe that privacy online is a fundamental right, and worries about state surveillance of the net. He also believes that crypto is a key part of a political project. He wants you to encrypt all your emails with PGP, even (or especially) those you send to friends and family members. The reason, he explains, is to provide ‘cover traffic’ for those who do need to keep things secret. If everyone is using it, no one is: the dissidents will disappear in the crowd. Smári has scrutinised current National Security Agency (NSA) programmes and the overall security budget of the US government, and calculated it currently costs 13 cents a day to spy on every internet user in the world. He hopes that default encryption services like his will push that closer to $10,000. It’s not to stop people being spied on – he agrees that’s sometimes necessary – but rather to drastically limit it. At this inflated cost he estimates the US government would only be able to afford to keep tabs on around 30,000 people. ‘If we can’t trust the government to do only those things that are necessary and proportionate – and we can’t – then economics can force them to.’ But the reason everyone doesn’t use encryption is because it’s complicated and time-consuming to set up, he explains. Gmail, by contrast, is supremely sleek, simple and fast. So Smári and two colleagues decided to develop their own, easy-to-use, encrypted email system – and raised $160,000 in August 2013 from supporters on Indiegogo to do so. It’s called Mailpile. ‘It will be feature-complete, and easy to use,’ Smári explains, opening his laptop to give me a sneak preview. It certainly looks good.
In 2013, documents released by Edward Snowden alleged that the NSA, working with Britain’s GCHQ and others, was – among other things – tapping seabed ‘backbone’ internet cables, installing back-door access to private company servers and working to crack (and weaken) encryption standards, often without much legal basis, let alone a public debate. Fearful of government surveillance, ordinary people are taking measures to make themselves more secure online, and using software designed by people like Smári to help them.
The cypherpunk me
ssage isn’t going unheeded: more and more people are starting to adopt encryption technology – the demand for services like Mailpile, PGP or Jitsi is growing: the daily adoption rate of PGP keys tripled in the months following Snowden’s revelations. In the mid-1990s, the cypherpunks frequently warned of the impending ‘surveillance state’. It turned out they were right all along. And today cypherpunk is going mainstream – thanks to a tweet.
Ain’t No Party Like a Crypto-party!
In 2012, the Australian parliament passed a Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill, which gave the government more power to monitor online communications, in the face of opposition from civil liberties groups. In the immediate aftermath, one user posted a tweet on the timeline of the Australian privacy activist Asher Wolf: ‘ain’t no party like a crypto apps install party’. A few minutes later Wolf replied: ‘I want a HUGE Melbourne crypto-party! BYO devices, beer & music. Let’s set a time and place :) Who’s in?’ She later recalled that ‘by the time I’d had a cup of tea after tweeting the idea – I came back to the laptop and found Berlin, Canberra and Cascadia had already set dates. By the next morning, half a dozen more countries were calling for crypto-parties.’
It is second nature to people like Amir, but most people don’t know how to browse the net anonymously using Tor, how to pay with Bitcoin, or how to send a message encrypted with PGP. A crypto-party is a small workshop to show them how. It’s typically twenty or so people being walked through the basics of online security by volunteer experts, free to attend and often held in someone’s home, at a university, or even a pub. Wolf’s tweet sparked a global, grass-roots movement.fn4 There is even a free crypto-party handbook, which was crowdsourced in less than twenty-four hours by activists all over the world, and continues to be publicly edited and updated.
Shortly after the Snowden revelations, a group of privacy activists held a very large crypto-party on the campus of Goldsmiths, University of London. I joined around two hundred people, all of whom wanted to learn how to stay anonymous online. In packed workshop sessions, each one hour long, we learned how to use Tor to browse anonymously; how to spend Bitcoins; how to use PGP. There was an interesting mix of participants. A group of older women were delighted at sending messages to each other using PGP (which is weirdly satisfying). Soon we were exchanging missives. With only a click, this:
Jklr90ifjkdfndsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkffdsshSklr9jkfmdsgk,nm3inj
219fnnokmf9n0ifjkdfndsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkfJflgmfklr90ifjkdfn
dsxmcnvjcxkjvoisdfuewlkf,nm3inj219fnnokmf972nfksjhf83kdbgfh
ydid89qhdkfksdfhs8g93kkkafndhfgusdug892kmgsndu19jgwdnng
skgds8t48senglsdpss9sy31bajsakf7qianfkalhs19jaslfauwq8qoafall
2kjhagfasjf993hamfalsfuqiejfkallnjksd732j1ls0dskj
suddenly becomes:
Hello!
I met a journalist worried about his sources in a dangerous part of the world overseas, and a few students who seemed happy to have found a cause to rage against. One German woman told me that she was old enough to remember the Stasi, and is convinced that we are sleepwalking into some kind of Orwellian dystopia. ‘Do you trust the police?’ She glares at me. Well, yes, most of the time, I reply. ‘Well, you shouldn’t!’ she snapped. I asked her if she’d ever heard of Tim May and the cypherpunks. She hadn’t. In fact, no one had. But so what? Surveys consistently show that we value privacy; nine out of ten Britons say they would like more control over what happens to their personal data online. The balance societies endeavour to find between individual freedoms and state power is always in flux. Most of us accept that, even in democracies, we need to be spied on sometimes – but that it should be limited, proportionate and not misused. We pass laws to try to ensure that’s the case: but modern technology has moved on so quickly, and with the advent of extremely powerful computing and the fact we share so much publicly about ourselves, a lot of people – not just cypherpunks – think that their right to privacy is being breached.
The Downside
People like Phil Zimmermann or Smári are developing crypto because they believe their work helps guard civil liberties from intrusive surveillance, especially in repressive regimes. And undoubtedly it does. But it’s not only freedom fighters and democratic revolutionaries that use their tools. Terrorists, extremists, serious organised criminals and child pornographers, denied mainstream channels, are often early adopters of new technology and also have an incentive to stay secret and hidden. The major producers and distributors – although not viewers – of child pornography are expert users of crypto. Without Bitcoin, the online drugs market Silk Road would probably never have existed.
David Omand, the former GCHQ Director who is now a visiting professor at King’s College London, remains close to the intelligence agencies in the UK. ‘It is absolutely vital that intelligence agencies retain the capability to monitor who they need, in order to keep the public safe,’ he tells me. ‘The internet gives a much wider range of options for avoiding surveillance. It is generally true that terrorists and serious criminals will and do use the latest technology available to them, and follow very closely the latest development in secure communications. It’s an arms race.’ It has been alleged – although never proven – that the 9/11 terrorists used PGP encryption in their communications: ‘I have no idea whatsoever about that,’ says Omand. But he is convinced that terrorists would have been ‘delighted’ by information about the Edward Snowden leaks. ‘You can be sure that they were following the story very closely indeed: as would have been the Russian and Chinese governments.’
I asked him if he was worried about the rise in crypto-parties, or more widespread adoption of Tor, Mailpile and Dark Wallets. Might it make us less safe? ‘Yes, it does concern me. But you won’t stop the intelligence machine.’ He thinks intelligence officers will find a way around it – they have to – but it might end up being more intrusive than using the alleged methods exposed by Edward Snowden. He recounts that during the Cold War, Soviet cyphers were too strong for GCHQ to break, so British intelligence switched to recruiting more Soviet agents. If the state considers you to be a legitimate target for security investigation but can’t track your online activity using an anonymous browser, they’ll put a bug in your bedroom instead. He predicts more agents and intrusive operations in future, ‘which is typically more morally hazardous’.
For the cypherpunks, the fact that criminals use encryption is an unfortunate outcome, but a cost worth paying for the extra freedom it provides. Zimmermann has been asked repeatedly how he feels that the 9/11 hijackers might have used software he designed. It was, he says, far outweighed by the fact PGP is ‘a tool for human rights around the world . . . strong crypto does more good for a democratic society than harm.’ Zimmermann or Tim May don’t have responsibility for keeping the public safe, and don’t read top-secret security briefings. Omand did. Not that he blames Zimmermann – ‘it is not a moral consideration for him to weigh up. Of course he should have developed PGP. We would not have the benefits of the internet without such breakthroughs. But it’s for elected, democratic governments to decide whether new technologies also pose dangers for the public and what if anything needs to be done to keep down those risks to acceptable levels.’
The Gulch
In the early days, crypto was a libertarian dream – a way to spark a revolution. The cypherpunks were hard-nosed Ayn Rand libertarians, mainly concerned about individual liberty. Today, the issue of privacy and anonymity online has become a major preoccupation for people across the political spectrum. ‘Politically, the cypherpunks are all over the place now,’ says May, a little mournfully.
The majority of cypherpunks working on ways to evade state detection are not free-market warriors or convinced Randians like Tim May. Smári is a thoughtful anarchist, someone who supports the abolition of the state like May, but believes that humans, when left alone by powerful interests, will tend to cooperate and create flourishing societies, not isolated retreats. And unlike May, people like Smári worry about wel
fare, minority rights and other progressive causes. But they all share a distrust of governments and centres of power – especially the security establishment – and see crypto as a mathematically guaranteed way of rebalancing democracy towards ordinary folk. Enric Duran, an avowed anti-capitalist, sees Bitcoin much like Tim May does – ‘an important gambit in the path which heads towards our final objective of integrated cooperatives’, he tells me, via email. A world free of nation states. Crypto-currencies can ‘help stop our dependence on the Euro – and reduce the state’s ability to control us’.
Although representing radically different world views, they all believe that anonymity and privacy are vital to healthy, functioning, free society. For the cypherpunks, whether anarchist or libertarian, anonymity is about preserving the ability of people to hold multiple personalities and identities. By providing that, crypto extends the degrees of freedom individuals have, which in the long run will encourage people to live more productive and self-reliant lives, and leave more space for new ways of living. That’s how Amir sees it. ‘This is about trying to carve out a space of freedom,’ he explained, ‘so people can do things that are worthwhile. Far better to build trust networks that are based on establishing a relationship rather than judges, bureaucracy, the police.’ Amir is full of ideas. Next year he plans to build industrial machines that can be used to create sustainable agriculture, waste management systems: ‘We’re going to have our own industrial economy,’ he says. He thinks he’ll be able to build a house for 1,000 euros and sell it for five times that, which he’d reinvest in making another Calafou somewhere else: ‘If they want us to play their stupid economic game, we’ll beat them at it – and buy the world back.’