 information about people, the nation state, to have information about people is to be able to exercise control. And in this intersection of information, privacy and technology, these intersections are sometimes visible, mostly invisible. We have to work out how best to secure everyone's privacy, one second. Yeah, so there is a rapid deployment of technologies, privacy-destroying technologies that are used every day to collect information. And so things like routine collection of transactional data, automated surveillance, facial recognition software, internet tracking, click trails, cookies, traffic lights, cameras. Every day, your phones, your laptops, compromise privacy on a daily basis and further and expand the corpus of information that we have. And the forces that seek to collect this information are large, well-organized, very well-resourced. And this is and can often be a direct assault on the democratic project. There's a reinterpretation of what it means to be free if someone knows about you or has through a collection of information, whether overt or covert, subversive or otherwise, has a profile of you. And standing against these forces are people like Jake. I've been told not to describe certain parts of his profile and I'm sure all of you already know what he's done. Jake was a co-member of the TOA project. He was the first employee, if I'm not mistaken. And I believe he'll be talking about that later today. He also advised, as I found out a couple of days ago, the government of Ecuador on how to conduct their elections, specifically how to use electronic voting machines in a manner that best secures privacy and ensures public transparency in the democratic process. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Jake who will speak for about 20-25 minutes after which we'll have questions. I have a couple of requests, not requests, I have to say a couple of things. Please switch off your phones. If you're going to take photographs, try not to flash people's eyes. And lastly, are we online? Are we online? Great. We're online so the live stream is working. And also when you have questions after 20 minutes, wait for someone to give you a mic so that your comments are recorded. Can you hear me now? Without me having to have this microphone, you can just pass it into audience. So, I'm a little sniffly, sorry. I'm really quite honored to be here and so, I mean, first I feel like I should say thank you, you know, and I'll walk out here slowly. But I wanted to say thank you for having me here because it's quite an honor. I've been to India a number of times. Actually every time I come to India, I come to Bangalore. And it's really quite an honor. And some of the people here really inspire me, especially the free software community and the people from CIS, people like Maria, for example. And some of the other people who aren't here, unfortunately. But if you have some questions and you want to interrupt me, I would encourage you to do that. I'm a really big fan of anarchism, so you should participate. And by big fan, what I really mean is that I'm a philosophical anarchist. So while I like the idea of liberal democracy, it doesn't seem to be working out very well. So I'd like to talk about utopia. And I think if you're not a utopianist, you're kind of a schmuck. And so we should try to shoot for the moon and land in the clouds, I think, is the phrase. So, you know, I guess I sort of have a little bit of a dark view of what the current world looks like. And that in theory, when the Berlin Wall fell, you know, the world's history ended and we just had one superpower and everything was hunky-dory. And there were no problems, right? Sounds familiar. It's the sort of new conservative American view of the world. Well, so that's obviously bullshit. But, you know, you won't hear that from very many people. And in fact, we live in a world now where, for example, last week at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I found some targeted malware on an engolan activist computer. And this targeted malware appears to have at least been code signed by someone certified by Apple as a developer. And it appears that the person is unlinked in. Though I don't know for sure if this is really them, but they appear to work with an Indian cyber war research group in a university. And I'm happy to, like, share this information with anyone if they want to verify it or help me to understand it better. But it seems quite strange that the engolan government, which is known for some very serious human rights abuses, that they would, for example, have their dissidents targeted by an Indian consultant of sorts. That's kind of like the modern mercenary, right? So making South Africa look reputable again, I guess. By taking the mercenary out of that previous reputation and sort of moving it online. This kind of thing, though, it sounds very rare, but it seems to be the case that it happens all over the place. And so I could talk to you about TOR, or I could talk to you a little bit about anonymity on the internet, but I sort of think it's more important to talk about things that aren't technological, because technology is actually quite boring when we compare it with the richness of society. And if you object to this and you want to hear me talk about TOR, now's the time to speak up. So, I mean, do you mind if I sort of opine a little bit about philosophy and how this technology impacts our world instead of giving you a tutorial in TOR? Is that fine? Yeah. Okay, so, I mean, when I think about the Indian context, I'm particularly horrified by this idea of the central monitoring system and the mass identification of all people, right? If we look at history, what we see is that the mass identification of people as well as understanding details about them, their religion, their location, their sex, their sexual preference, their family structure, things like that, we see that in history, especially in the 20th century, that this information is used to exterminate people. This is a really concerning thing and every single time it has happened, everyone has said, oh, that will never happen or it could not happen. And for example, there was a company by the name of Deutsche Homage, which is a subsidiary of another company we're all familiar with, which is called IBM. Are you familiar with this story? Does anyone here not familiar with the story? Okay, well, I'm going to ruin your night. So the Germans are well known for being quite efficient, but part of the reason that the Germans are so well known for this myth of efficiency actually comes from things like Deutsche Homage's punch card machines. And actually, their punch card machines were created by IBM scientists, if you could call them that, and engineers, which I think is more accurate, who built this for census taking. Now, these machines were very simple. They're just machines that would add up columns and rows and they would output information and cross correlate them and tabulate them. And these machines were used primarily for census data. So they would take information about the German population and they would say, okay, on this block, there are this many children, there are this many Jews, there are this many communists, there are this many such and such, right? And Thomas Watson, who ran IBM at the time, did a pretty good job of denying direct connections with most of the subsidiaries around the world of what they did. But Deutsche Homage was pretty shameless about this and they were quite aware of what it was that they were building. And there's a wonderful book by Edwin Black. It's called IBM and the Holocaust. And I would really encourage you to read this book. It's probably the most important book of the 20th century with regards to how the surveillance in the 21st century may go. So if you go to IBMandtheholocaust.com, I think it is, you can see some excerpts from the book. And I think it's important for understanding, when we think that things cannot happen again, that we explain what has happened in the past. And to better understand the past, it will tell us about what possibilities exist for our future. And that isn't to say that such things will happen again, except it is to say that in the 20th century we did see that happen again and again. It just was a different scale, right? And sometimes this happened without surveillance. But when people suggest that surveillance has no harm, it is to deny history, in fact. For example, last week as well, I got a chance to ask Karl Bilt, who's the foreign minister of Sweden, why he supports the FRA law in Sweden, which is a dragnet surveillance law for spying on every bit of internet, telephone, SMS, and so on that flows through Sweden's borders. And he said that it was legitimate for foreign intelligence purposes, which is a really interesting thing if you're not Swedish, because it means that he has declared that spying on you is legitimate because you're not Swedish, for some reason. Now, I personally think that this is a kind of tyranny. But when we look at these systems and we look at them in a historical perspective, as well as where they are situated today, it's particularly scary because some of the people deploying these systems don't seem to understand this history. So I don't think that Karl Bilt is an evil guy because of that, for example, there are other reasons. But it seems to me that the things that he says make sense in that as long as he's in control of this surveillance system, it will only be used in service of democratic liberal state ideology. So in theory, this should be fine because surely no one has ever lost control of their computer systems. The last talk that we saw were the Angolan activists that I just mentioned. These are examples actually of how that does happen. And in fact, in Greece in 2002 or 2004, there's a thing known as the Athens incident, or the Athens affair. And this is where the prime minister of Athens, as well as a number of members of parliament, as well as other people, were actually wiretapped by unknown parties using the so-called Laughal Interception, the interception systems of their own telephone switches. So the United States built these telephone switch standards for spying on people and they get deployed everywhere. So there's a trickle down effect, which is that Greece gets them just the same way that Iran gets them, just the same way that the US has them. And the theory goes that the FBI in the United States is legitimate and so they go to a court, a competent court and of course they never abuse this officially. And so it should be fine. But then these technologies are deployed elsewhere. So as it happens in the Greek example, the person who ran the telephone switch, he was actually found hanged to death in his apartment after this was uncovered. Now of course it makes sense that he would be found dead if for example someone other than him put him up to this. Because it's a beneficial thing to deploy these wiretaps for political, economic, or social gain. And then instead of the military, which traditionally protects these types of systems, it's actually just some computer nerd. So one of you probably has access to this telephone switch in India, in the Indian context. And so an interesting thing is that by building in these back doors, the weakest link becomes that person in the room, whoever you might be, don't raise your hand. So when we start to combine these things together, we start to see some pretty uncomfortable things. First of all, if we look at the mandatory identification with things like, I think it's UIM is what is it? UID, UID, right? And we look at the central monitoring system. It is not the case that it will be perfect. It is just the case that there will be enough information collected to be good enough to cause people to behave differently. Because to watch is to control. And I won't cite verse and line of Foucault here, but it's worth mentioning that I'm not the first and I will not be the last person to mention that surveillance is a kind of control. But it's also in service of other kinds of control. And so the UID system and the central monitoring system, of course it's run by a government and there are people that will say that they're incompetent or they're disorganized and they won't do a great job. But they just have to do a good enough job to screw with innocent people who would otherwise be more free for the program to be successful. And these are things that deserve resistance. That is not protest, right? Protest as Elriga Meinhof would say is when you don't go along with the thing. And resistance is when you stop other people from going along too. I don't agree with how she went about it. I actually think it's a better idea to build alternatives to these systems. So instead of having a centralized system of biometrics where now if someone wants to steal your identity, they either lift your fingerprint or cut off your hand. Doesn't seem like the kind of security I would like. Maybe instead someone could build a blinded Chami and ID system for example where you can prove who you are but no one can actually cut off your hand and impersonate you. Where maybe the state does not have that personal information so that someone in the state's database cannot for example print out a copy of your fingerprint and then leave it somewhere. These things sound very far fetched but I think just a week ago at a place very near here people were doing workshops about transferable fingerprints. So we live in the future where those things are real. So when we centralized the collection of this kind of information, we actually centralized the place that an attacker would like to attack all of society in order to have control of the system of control. So these things I think are extremely, extremely terrifying especially when we consider for example the former head of the research and analysis wing and I were on a panel at the National Law School a couple of days ago on Saturday and he talked about how it's a necessity to be able to do interception and wiretapping. Well this is a really interesting thing because he also talked about not really understanding technology. And so I think the point is not that this person or raw that they are evil or that they have terrible intentions. In fact I think it's quite the opposite. He's a really sweet nice guy actually I was quite surprised by how nice he is. But it is the case that it doesn't matter what his intentions are because we cannot secure general purpose computing systems. We can try but there's a threshold of attack. Thanks. There's a threshold of attack where someone will probably win. And so having a centralized registry of all of this information, it leads us to think about the historical shifts that have happened in the past and how they might repeat. So if there is a valid concern about national defense or about espionage or about terrorism, does it make sense to build a centralized system full of your phone records, your internet browsing, your social history, your fingerprints? To put that in one place where someone who gets a job at this place now has that information. The person that does the backup of the database has this about every person. And what happens when someone has this information and they wish that they had your wife or your husband? Well what happens is that you lose. Right and you lose at a societal scale. So what we need to do is we need to build alternative systems that allow us to have some of these benefits without all of these downsides. And in the book, Cypherpunks, that Julian Assange, myself, Andy Mullomagoon and Jeremy Zimmerman wrote, it's available on the Pirate Bay. You can buy it in paper, but I suggest you download it on the Pirate Bay. You know, we talk about some of these things. So if you haven't downloaded it from the Pirate Bay, you have my blessing. I don't have any permission to give it away, but it's there, so take it. And by take it, I mean, make a copy of it and leave one behind. So we talk about this in the book and we talk about how that means that the internet, you know, in theory, when we allow everyone to connect, it allows us to be free and allows us to communicate freely, like just for the cost of connectivity and sometimes in some places for the nominal cost of some number of megabytes of data or number of seconds connected. And you know, you see around the world that there's some variation on this. But generally speaking, the idea is that you're free. But without encryption, without cryptography, and I don't mean something where you need to really understand how this works. The fact is the internet is not secure. And when you communicate, almost certainly by default, it is not secure. It is either insecure against legal attacks or it is insecure against technical and legal attacks. And that fact is concerning because when we have dragnet surveillance of the fiber interconnect points that come into India, for example, that means that someone can see those communications. So you take a little bit of a step to the side, I think, or we take a step to the side where people, in theory, have this great ability to communicate and we're free to do so and we're free to say what we want. But there's a person in the audience here who was charged under section 69A, 66A, right? So here's the question, are we really free or are we really free to have some serious consequences? You know, there's this theory about Mao where he talks about how we should let a thousand flowers bloom. Have you guys all heard that phrase? Well, the backstory to that is not about free software, like everybody should write a thousand different projects and we'll sort it out in the end. The sort of really simple summed up version of that story is that everybody talked about their concerns and put up posters and everything like that and then Mao wiped them all out, right? So we live in a time of great openness but it isn't the case that the asymmetry of power is in our favor, necessarily. And so, well, we see this great openness and we see some of the crackdowns. This has happened to me, it has happened to this person in the audience and many people think it will not happen to them and that's wonderful privilege. I wish I could be burdened with it, but I'm not. And I actually don't think anybody is, right? If we try to live in this post-privacy world, what we will actually find is we still don't live in a post-privileged world, right? So if you ever fear for your physical safety, right? If you ever have concerns about like the emergence of sexual assault in your country, you know you don't live in a post-privileged society. And so when we look at the surveillance machine and we look at the identification, who is to say that we really have privacy when all of this information is belong to a bureaucrat and the people that they hire? In my opinion, it suggests that in a sense we still have some privacy but we're losing it in a very large way. So for example, CCTV television, right? This is like a, in theory, not a big deal, you just have a couple of cameras but in the future as they start to become interconnected, as they start to do shape recognition and facial recognition, we start to lose our anonymity in the real world. On the internet, in theory, you can use things like Tor to try to protect yourself. You can use things like tech secure to encrypt your text messages or red phone to encrypt your calls but the majority of people probably in this room use things like Skype and Skype allows for some kinds of interception by law enforcement and it's done in secrecy. Microsoft even has patents that they filed about these kinds of interception techniques because they wanna make sure that people what, license them and they make money from other kinds of spying by their companies? I mean, that's a little concerning in itself but if we look at this and we think about it in a unified sense, that's when it becomes really terrifying because if what the Nazis were able to do with the census and some punch card machines were ever to be attempted by a society in the near future, think about how much worse it would be, how much more specific it would be and can you imagine such a thing? It would allow for precision targeted killing and in fact in Pakistan that's exactly what we see my country doing. We see drone attacks which are done by what are commonly known as signature strikes, right? So what is internet freedom? Internet freedom is the ability to post a video on YouTube and not be killed by a flying robot but we don't live in that world. There is no internet freedom like that because in fact, Anwar Al-Waqi who is as far as I can tell guilty of being a Muslim on YouTube and he wasn't even convicted of that in a court I might add. He has been talked about by the President of the United States, Obama, as if he has had a trial by jury and so this is where we start to see it all come together which is that the immense amount of information and the availability of this information, it allows us to make decisions about people in a way that is not fundamentally in line with how we have always done so before killing someone, for example. So Anwar Al-Waqi was killed by a drone and two weeks later, his 16-year-old son who was guilty of nothing, he was also killed by a drone. So these things actually are happening in a similar way but they're a little harder to object to because they are very targeted. And now the really scary part is that just last week Obama got up and he said that these drones, they actually save lives. I mean, you cannot really become more Orwellian when a guy talks about murdering people and saving lives in the exact same sentence. It's ridiculous. This is a travesty for due process. It is a travesty for anything that looks like justice. And when the president then talks about the guilt of the person and talks about all of these things he's alleged to have done, well, this tells us in a sense that fundamental core parts of due process have simply been thrown out the window. And what we see with the United States now is that it took many years for this to become public. And so one of the most concerning parts is the signature strike. And the signature strike is the idea that we all leave behind a data trail. So you're familiar with the concerns about data retention, I suspect, right? Anyone not familiar with data retention? Okay, one person, that's great. So data retention is this idea that people record information, corporations, governments, the things you do on the internet, data you leave behind. And they record it and they correlate it together and then they can go back and retroactively look at it. Now in Europe and in other countries this is like IP addressing information or maybe click data from your web browsing history, maybe your physical location as you walk around. There's a guy, I think his name is Malta Spitz and Der Spiegel did a story about his cell phone records and it showed everywhere he went. So to give you an idea, who here has a cell phone? Don't be shy, it's okay. I've got one too, I'll show it to you in just a moment. But this is a really interesting thing, this data retention idea, because it allows us to do something we could not do 100 years ago, which is that you can retroactively see where everyone has been, see who they've interacted with, who they've talked with and in some cases, depending on luck or targeting, you'll know what they've said. So this is what when we talk about data retention we refer to when we talk about signature strikes. So signature strike is this idea that you have the pattern of a guilty person. You have called people that we believe are guilty, that we think are doing terrible things. You've gone to markets that other bad people have gone to and so drones are dispatched and you are executed. That happens now in Pakistan, but it is not the Pakistanis that do it, although it seems to be that they condone it. It is the American government that does this and it was just last week that Obama went up and talked about how good this was and how righteous it was and how it saves lives. In the same breath as talking about assassinating people without a trial, which is a crime in my country or at least it used to be and it is a crime internationally as well, especially in sovereign territories. So when we talk about the internet and data retention and cell phones, what we have to remember is that it is directly tied to things that seem to have no connection. That is your ability to live without being killed by a flying robot, which is crazy, except that it's also true and it's also happening. So when we leave this data trail behind about ourselves, it tells a story about us, which is not actually the truth as we would tell it. It's what we would call a data doppelganger. The problem is that in the world in which we live now, people seem to believe that the data doppelganger is more real than what you think about yourself. So it tells these things and it says you definitely were at this place. You absolutely said these things to these people via text message. You really hold these beliefs, you really do associate with these folks. Well, freedom of association is a fundamental human right as well. But when we are under such heavy suspicion all the time, when we're being logged in these ways, the way that it is flipped, especially for an intelligence agency or agencies all around the world, it was said in fact by the man from the research and analysis wing. He said that often this is used to prove people's innocence. What is wrong with that sentence? I mean, there are many things, but the core thing that's wrong is the idea that they don't have to prove your guilt and that you're not innocent until you are proven guilty. This is also a tyranny. This idea that you are not innocent, right? And it is especially scary when we consider that what if they can't come up with the information that proves you to be innocent? Well, then what happens to you then? Well, then perhaps they dispatch you. If you happen to unfortunately be a Muslim in a particular part of Pakistan or in 70 countries where America has drones deployed, 70, 70 countries, what does that say? Well, it says that the concerns about things like punch card machines, they're actually extremely relevant and we can see that they're tied together. And while comparisons to the Holocaust are old and tired and completely ridiculous, what we must recognize is they're not old and tired in the sense that there is no connection. It's old and tired in the sense that it is a matter of scale and about industrialization and about brutality and about genocide. So this is not about genocide with these drones. This is about memoside, the idea that there are certain people who hold ideas, hold information that is so dangerous that they must be exterminated without due process, without perfect information, without a trial. This is a terrifying thing. So when we talk about universal identification and the central monitoring system, this is the world that every nation is trying to build right now. So that's the thing that is most concerning to me and why in fact I will never travel to Pakistan and why I do not carry a cell phone. Because it's obvious that these types of things do happen to real people and regular people, people who don't believe it will happen to them. So this is to me one of the most concerning aspects of our current society. And so the internet and theory while very liberating appears to be a little bit more like Mao's suggestion that we should let 1,000 flowers bloom and then people will then take that information and selectively pick those people off because they have revealed their true beliefs and then once that has happened we can suggest that they're guilty or talk about what a terrible person they were after they've been killed without a trial like my president has shamefully done last week on television. I mean, what a shame for the United States to have that guy get up there and talk about that. It's not only illegal, it's just ridiculous and it's preposterous. So this is the thing that is at stake around the entire world and we talk about this in the Cypherpunks book and it's a little uncomfortable because it seems preposterous and it seems like obviously these systems won't be misused obviously the people that run them, they're benevolent and they're generous and they won't harm us and they won't persecute us but I mean, is that true? And how will we know? What systems for auditing do we have? We have none. What kind of transparency is forced on these people? Almost nothing. When we ask them and when our representatives asked about this we generally are not given real facts. Usually it's hidden behind state secrecy and classifications and this of course is also in affront to democracy but it is said that this is how it must be but whenever someone does say such a thing we must challenge them. We must say how can there be a state secret from the people that give you legitimacy? But this is hard to say because it takes courage to say it and it has consequences when it is said. If we look at Julian Assange we see those consequences right now where he sits inside of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London unable to freely move even though he has been granted political asylum. So, I mean, I suppose that I could sort of talk about some other aspects of it. I could talk about de-packet inspection or I could talk about credit card logs and how when you tie all these things together it just gets better and better and better and machine learning sort of takes this data and then it automatically flags people including the pattern in which they walk and how they deviate and how there are anomalies. That's a sort of different talk that is to say that we could talk about that endlessly but those things are real and they do exist and they are quite concerning and so we sort of see the death of civil society in a sense on its way we can sort of see it in the distance I think because people will be less likely to speak up. For example, human rights watch and amnesty will not declare Bradley Manning a political prisoner because they fear pissing off the United States which lots of Americans fund them so how dare they spit in the face and suggest that America could do anything like that like Guantanamo Bay or drone killings because we have like no stain on our human rights record. So, I think we must look at these things but it takes intense study because these are deeply technical issues and they have historical roots that are highly uncomfortable. They're especially uncomfortable when we look at how these things have repeated but just not as efficiently and not as seriously throughout history, especially in the 20th century and especially across all of Europe both East and West, all of Europe and we see these things right now very close to here and who better than you guys and when better than now to talk about it. So, I wanted to show you one thing which is to say that when we talk about APT we should probably talk about what these things actually mean for effective activists. So, I joke that APT-0 is like, you know your local intelligence agency, right? Advanced process and threat. Well, it doesn't really take a lot but here's a great example of the types of things that people find when they start to speak out about these issues. This is a cell phone for, sensibly, I believe, for blind people. Have you guys ever seen one of these? At all? No? Okay, well, you see the big keypad and all that? This cell phone can be programmed to answer our calls automatically and it was found behind a television set bolted to the wall in a friend's apartment in London after he went to visit Julian and inside it has some notes about the phone number and the SIM card and when my friend found it and deactivated it he got a visit from two people the following day who did not believe that he was there and so they actually opened the door to his apartment and went inside and were quite surprised to find him sitting in bed under the covers looking saying, what are you doing in my apartment that I have rented? And of course, they said, oh, we're here about an inspection. The company knows about it. Of course, the company knew nothing about this inspection because these people were there to retrieve this phone which, well, as you can tell, they didn't do a very good job of that. These types of things are an example where if you were to ask the cell phone company whose SIM card this was, if you were to ask them, who has placed this phone here and where was it first activated? The asymmetry of this situation is such that you will not learn this information. So we must ask ourselves if we collect all of this information and it is the case that people use it to violate argument rights. If it is the case that they use it in these secret ways will we be able to use this giant database to protect ourselves and what is the difference between cops and thieves that behave in such a way? And it turns out that there is one big difference and one is above the law. That to me is pretty interesting. At the National Law School, it says, no matter how high you are, none are above the law, I believe is the quote. But that's not true. Just ask anybody here who's ever met an intelligence service person. Of course, they're above the law. And so when we build these systems we actually become beholden to a type of coup that the world has pretty much never seen should someone choose to undertake it. So in this sense, we have a real fight for democracy across the whole planet where we get rid of secrecy and we replace it with transparency almost always except in very small temporary windows which are known that these things will become public. And when we find things that we cannot reveal about the world it tells us something about those things. For example, when we talk about how but you wouldn't want to reveal atomic launch codes well doesn't that instead tell you that there is quite a risk about having atomic weapons? Because a bad guy will probably learn these launch codes. Like in the United States we learned about three years ago that they were all zeros. Isn't that a little bit terrifying now? I mean that's one of the most legitimate secrets. How is it that it came to be known in public here in India? Well, because there really are only secrets that are kept from the general public. Otherwise there really aren't secrets, right? There are people who conspire and these conspiracies often they are generally just regarded as business plans when they benefit the state and its surveillance capabilities. So when you, if you're a software developer when you work on these things you can ask yourself if regular people benefit from your work, right? If your work will be used to dominate and to enslave or if your work will be used to liberate. So if you work on targeted malware to break into people's computers what happens when that is used against you? How would you feel about this, right? And this is of course a question that no one wants to ask themselves because they want to think that they're righteous and they're correct. But of course this requires a debate and there is no debate with this kind of secrecy. And there really isn't even the ability to organize in an effective way if we have these kinds of surveillance systems and they're used to thwart and to break up these kinds of organizations, these kinds of debates. So we live in a really critical juncture in history the golden age of surveillance if you will where if we choose to do things in a way where we reject secrecy and we embrace actual democratic ideals where we embrace transparency then I think that we have a pretty good shot at building a world which is quite amazing and maybe if we're lucky we'll get off this rock and explore space for all time. That would be pretty fantastic but it's not the case that we're going to get another Carl Sagan. It's not the case that we're going to find ourselves actually being free in the future because when people control these systems they get to make that choice for us. They get to find out who's important in our social graph. They get to arrest those people, harass those people wiretap those people and leak their phone calls. So when people talk about cybersecurity and they say, ah, you know what we should do? We should spy on the whole internet so that we can make everybody secure. What we should say instead is no, let us make sure that our internet is actually secure and when you go to spy you are thwarted then we will know that we have a secure internet. So when people say we must wiretap in order to make our country secure we can say, no, no, we should not do that. If you can wiretap that means that so can that guy up there on stage. And in fact that is true. If you look at gsmmap.org for India you'll see that someone has in fact been in India and looked at the cell phone networks and all of the cell phone networks here are vulnerable to various different attacks if they even use encryption at all. So for about 30 US dollars you can get a Motorola C123 phone and load it with the Osmo-com baseband baseband and you can sniff gsm which means you can clone people's phones. So this is the trade-off we make societally so that some people can spy on a few people which has untold economic problems. So if we look at all of the systems this way we can make a very similar analysis which is basically the proposal that we should have a vanguard that watches us and takes care of us which is in the front to democracy as well because the idea is that we should all care about these issues and we should work together to fix them so that means that what we should do is actually secure them not hand over our security to a small cabal of unaccountable people that are not transparent and that do not respect our privacy or our civil liberties. So there's a bit about Tor I suppose that we could say there to try to protect yourself but ultimately if these things are socially successful no technology will liberate you because you will not liberate people who have become slaves. So if there are any questions I'd be happy to take them. Thanks for the talk. So one question that I think at least I find difficult is like you mentioned about information and who should have access to that information. So are there legitimate I mean there seem to be legitimate causes for this information to be mined by someone and so for instance in the world that we live in there is obviously a certain crime threat and this data can be used to prevent crime and it is I'm guessing in some cases used to do that. So what is very difficult to kind of draw a line at is that where this data where this information is used constructively and the problem is that if this information is there it will almost obviously be used destructively. So should this information be collected at all given that there are constructive uses of it. I mean in an ideal world every person would have absolute control with their own data and every time such a request would have to be made that person would have the ability to choose whether to share that data or not but let's say for medical research purposes or crime prevention purposes there are actual genuine reasons for this information to be mined. And I challenge you on that in that I think that there are legitimate points to be made about this but I suppose what I am suggesting here is that we have seen historically when this information is collected about terrorism we find out later that the terrorists weren't really terrorists they just happened to be of a class of people that were not welcome in society. So when we talk about the security aspects we can I think clearly weigh that and we have traditionally had courts that have weighed this in many places not in all places obviously. And so when we see this type of surveillance and we see the assertion that it is only going to be used for good at first without actually addressing the historical terrible things that happen with this kind of data I think we should just not accept that and as far as things like medical privacy or research with that I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to donate information or to share information with informed consent. So it's the difference between surveillance sous-surveillance that is people watching people from below that are above them and a term I guess you could say is like même moi valence or je valence or something I don't speak French so I'm just winging it here but the idea that you're allowed to watch yourself so they're like quantified self I do not suggest that you shouldn't know how many calories you've consumed I just suggest that when you note that down that there should not be the case that someone may just demand it of you because you use the internet. Like if you write it down in Evernote is it really the case that the US government should simply be able to take it without a court and really should they be able to go to Evernote and ask for this information in a way where they're gagged and you don't ever get to learn let alone to defend it and then they interpret it in such a way that you didn't write down the number of calories you ate that was actually some other thing which they've made up a story about so there are different kinds of data collection and they don't object to all of them I merely object to the idea that you should always be without consent and that these things should be done to your data and that you should really have no say in it and that people will always throw around the four horsemen of the infopocalypse child pornography, terrorism, money laundering and the war on some drugs right, you've heard this we've got to do it because of child porn we've got to do it because of the war on drugs we've got to do it because of terrorism right, well how many people were beat up by cops on the internet right, how many people have been beaten up by cops at protests how many of them are on the internet I would suggest probably more than there are child pornographers on the internet but we don't go about censoring the internet because some assholes exist there right and we shouldn't go about surveilling it because some people who are violent like corrupt police are in fact using the internet the internet presents a huge place telephones present a huge place for freedom of connection and this is very important and without instilling this with cryptography we will not have this and we will have people that will have access to this data and they will misuse this data there's a historical trend to it and we see it with people who are politically persecuted and prosecuted like Julian, like myself, like Manning probably like this nice woman in the front row where merely speaking our mind is the thing and it's not about terrorism I mean I myself have been called a terrorist by my government and I would say I don't actually use violence I use reason if reason is terrorism well we have a very different discussion so I really don't think that we should just accept this blindly this idea that it will always be used for good and in fact I think we should ask for proof and citations and we should ask for evidence that shows that it hasn't been misused and that people have not been harmed by this and I think we will see in fact that there's great historical proof of harm and so it is for that reason that we should not make that trade-off without informed consent and that requires a great democratic debate across the whole of the world because once we move to a surveillance state it will be very difficult to move away from it and that's not a trade-off that just a few people should make but if the whole world really overwhelmingly wants to spy on everyone I look forward to a day in which none of you wear clothes because that's what we're talking about we will all be unclothed to the people that have access to this database great, I'm glad to hear it sorry, I think Indian context is the Tata rule which was passed and similar rules which are passed in all the terrorism-affected states and you saw that I think we all saw the misuse of Tata and other related issues, things and just to ask, I think Jacob is basically it's very cynical to live in or rather you feel very cynical maybe it's the age or something like that I'm an optimist no, no, I'm talking about myself it's like we are the country with 10 different ID cards or I think each one for different set of things then we have we also are basically monitored pretty much pretty much everything by RTOs and NTOs and all kind of organizations in the name of all the four either the four ones or at least the one which is used very heavily in our country the democracies, as you've described one of the foremost democracies if you see from one side if democracies start adopting this as you mentioned it has been happening for quite some time the other guys that we normally used to associate with the wall gardens the guys you didn't speak about but they are also always, they have been doing these things for quite a number of times in an organized way or an unorganized way unfortunately we what are the alternatives for democracy without surrendering to the I mean I feel like I just spent an hour telling you I mean the alternative is that when people say let us secure the network by spying we say no let us secure the network by using strong mathematics when we get to a world in which let's say in the Indian context there is no more corruption maybe, maybe I could be wrong I mean I think you guys can get there I don't know, you tell me but you know then maybe having this database is fantastic right I mean maybe that's the thing is that maybe the problem is that we just need this database you know just to play devil's advocate here for a moment you know maybe what we need is we just need this database to ensure that we get rid of all the petty criminals right we get rid of all the corruption right and that's that's a good argument except that then you just end up with majorly empowered criminals but maybe this database will also be used to wipe those guys out too we'll just get rid of them there won't be the possibility of subverting these systems it'll be a perfect system and it will never be abused I tend to think so that the solution to these things is to not build them to not help these things to subvert them whenever possible to undermine them and sometimes just to straight up destroy them but the best way that we can do this I think without taking action against anyone else just taking action about ourselves and who we talk to is to recognize the transit of risk that surveillance poses just like people do with HIV wear a condom with HIV use encryption with the internet it's really simple you wouldn't put your partner at risk it would be rude unless they say yes don't do it and even if they were to say yes still probably don't do it because you know no but let's just say that you want to do the transit of risk is still there the transit of risk doesn't go away because people consent so you just have to acknowledge that right we will never be safe there are different kinds of safety right and so when we have these kinds of systems probably what we want to do is try to on an individual basis do these things but also know that we must do them on a societal wide scale if we do them on a societal wide scale then people who don't sit in this room who don't understand these things then we'll have a chance so the people that build applications in here when we build strong cryptography when we categorically refuse to put backdoors into software which we must do I believe you have a choice but I really think you should never put a backdoor in I will leave the United States forever before I would ever put a backdoor in and I know a lot of other people feel that way too because one backdoor is one too many and it even puts us at risk so if we if we build these systems and we build them to be actually secure it is from that security that we may ensure the security of our democracies and maybe in some cases you can still use your democracies now to put in strong privacy legislation to say that if a lawyer talks to people over the internet without encryption that there's some kind of negligence you know it's it's very straightforward and maybe there are economic incentives to make that happen I don't know that's for you to figure out but I do believe that mathematics can really help us in a way that the physical world used to help us with regard to organizing and economic costs of surveillance and so on so I don't know if that answers your question but uh... sorry we have another question there okay uh... sorry yeah so I guess it's pretty uh... the issues are fairly apparent to most of the people in this room but uh... I personally find it hard to talk to people who might otherwise not be interested off their own accord in these things and I was wondering if you have any sort of go-to anecdotes or some sort of way to get people more interested and more engaged in these topics again I encourage you to download on the pirate bay at the book cipher punks and give it as a gift to someone and have a discussion with them it's a good start I think for regular people that are not technologically inclined it's not perfect but I mean it's a it is a it's a long-term campaign where we haven't seen the devastating effects of it yet we in fact often just see people who benefit from it talking about how great it is and how they need more of it that's the expansion of authoritarianism that we see something people can relate to unrelated to technology but it's it's difficult because each person is different some people wish to say that they should have a master for example I know people who say I don't want to decide these things I want someone else to decide them for me and those people exist and there's nothing wrong with taking that point except that in some cases the choices that they make impact you and they take away your ability to make a choice about it it's hard to reach some of those people and I think in fact we can't reach all of them but what we can hopefully do is work with people who have the ability to change the laws and then to change those laws in such a way that the default becomes the safe thing where safe is defined as actually being secure and not secure except when a court orders it to be this way a court that doesn't even understand what TCPIP is doesn't know what a kernel is doesn't know what you know anything about technology is before they legislate about it that I think is the best bet that we have and in fact I think it's mostly about national security and economics not civil liberties that we will make this progress because for the most part people don't care to sacrifice their political careers by pushing for civil liberties they do often really care about making money for India for example and keeping India secure against aggressors and I think you know as awful as it is to sort of embrace these ideas which often turn out as blind nationalism which I think is quite dangerous it is without a doubt the case that those things are going to make more of an impact for most people in their mind than this idea that people who upset society have rights it's very hard but I could be wrong and I think each person has to look at their own context and it's a difficult problem to address in a generic solution and so the book is maybe useful but you know it's also like four white guys on a sofa take it for what it is this is a question about anonymity so we all know some proposed sort of applications where collecting some data about people and centralizing it can be useful you know if it's anonymized and then it's safe so like for we were talking about jotting down your calories on Evernote but you know there probably a lot of interesting research directives in public health that could be you know gleaned from that sort of data and a lot of people propose anonymizing that data to protect people's privacy but then we've also seen lots of interesting research that says that anonymous data can be actually very easily de-anonymized by cross-correlating it with your social graph or whatever other data is known about you so can you comment as to the practicality or even the possibility of you know any such initiatives that do centralize anonymous data can that be done securely or is it just anyone's guess yeah i mean i think that it's important to try to anonymize data sets but i actually think that it's really hard and so almost everybody that tries seems to fail and there's a there's a conference called the privacy enhancing technology summit happening in bloomington indiana this year i'm not sure where it will happen next year i would encourage all of you to go if you can although that might not be possible they have stipends for students and this is exactly the problem that is discussed at places like that's as it is is uh... locally i think that you know there are techniques for anonymizing some kinds of uh... data do seem to be helpful so for example in the tour network we have some statistics at metrics dot or project dot or and you can see the number of tour users from india for example and the way that we do that is that the very first relay in the tour action that you make it sees that you're coming from india and it puts this in a buffer and it says that i got a user from india in the last twenty four hours and then every twenty four hours it takes all those buffers and it adds them up and then submits them upstream but it doesn't submit for example the actual ip address it just says the country so of course people that run a relay they can screw with the statistics and so on so we make sure to try to even that out across all of the relays that we receive data from there's a paper about this this is a great example of anonymizing data which is that we're able to anonymize pretty much just one thing and draw one conclusion from it and then look at it in aggregate and we think that when there are many people coming from country you would have a really hard time knowing it was bob that came from india or something like this so it can be done and i think it would be very hard to take that data set and say oh it was bob that was in india this is hard though when you look at a country like north korea and there's like twenty tour users okay so maybe that's not so great but hey we have twenty tour users and i don't know who they are right and we see that maybe there's still twenty i don't know i haven't looked in a while but this kind of anonymity i think from data sets is possible and i think it's very powerful it tells us things it tells us for example whether or not we've had a censorship event in the country because when we did have thirty five thousand people coming from iran every day and then one day we have zero well we could guess that they guess by protocol or by p i p address or something that they block the tour network and sure enough they had and we did an analysis and then we deployed a patch to all the relays because it was a server side fix and uh... all of a sudden we have thirty five thousand people again so that was really useful to do that and it worked and it was through anonymous data collection and analysis i think that it's also important that we have an informed consent aspect that is when you run to our we say we collect the statistics we think that it doesn't harm you and we don't get any extra information that the first really for example would otherwise not have right the same the same thing and so if you look at medical research sometimes the way that this works is that like doctor just gives that data up and the person has no consent i think that may result in some pretty great breakthroughs i'm not really very comfortable with it i think that people have this right exercise and maybe they don't want to be part of a longitudinal study about you know pre-diabetic people or something like that i think they should be able to make that choice it doesn't seem like they're actually going to be able to make that choice very much anywhere around the world and so in trying to anonymize the data could be very useful but it's still without informed consent without opting in i think that it has very questionable setups you know i find it a little bit terrifying so if though you're working on a problem like this at the pets community writing a paper about it looking at the previous submissions and other academic literature your great way to sort of get up to speed on all the things that didn't work and a few things that and then to know whatever you're going to try uh... it might work uh... for example in washington state i worked on a paper called the privacy preserving medical marijuana registry or we actually just called it a privacy preserving medical registry but it was for marijuana and the idea was that uh... the federal government are a bunch of fascists and they arrest cancer patients who are dying because they smoke marijuana that's really fucked up right so we wanted to build a system where if you were a cancer patient you could prove you legitimately had been recommended the ability to smoke pot because it works for you because your doctor says so etc and it should provide you with positive arrest protection so police officer can't say i will use my like pot dying from cancer going to jail and the idea was you show them this card and the thing is the card is really simple it's just a card with a random number on it the random numbers in a database and that's it the simplest possible thing turns out that that's so simple that no one even bothered to build it and so in many places like in oregon state directly south of washington where i live uh... they had been collecting names of people and i believe that quantity of the illegal drugs that they were buying and putting this in a database and of course the federal government has gone for it and i believe they may have even acquired it legal means and in other states it has been the case that when these places are robbed dispensaries of marijuana they don't take the drugs of the money they take the lists about people so this is an example of a real-world way that you can defeat such a system you probably also use it for weapons registry of sorts and in fact canada has a similar thing or they did for a while where the license for a firearm was the thing you had on you if you ever lost it well you're in trouble because they didn't have another copy of it and the idea was you don't centralize things but you allow people to prove that they're authorized and so this is sort of the flip side of that not allows you then to look at the data and no matter what you do with the data almost certainly you'll be able to say that it is privacy-preserving because you don't have their name you don't have their address their social security number their birthday of nothing just know the number of people to you know directional registry so those kinds of systems can be built uh... ours was vetoed by the governor of washington because she said she favored legalization and then the next year we legalize marijuana so we didn't need my system which is great hi jade over here hey so uh... it's gonna be a fight i'm not sure uh... just a point that that bruce naira's in one of his posts that employing good security uh... measures uh... is less like wearing a condom or not sharing needles and a little bit more like keeping your hands clean or having good hygiene generally right and and i actually agree with that i think it just a number of people who died die of diarrhea and dysentery every year shows that it's it's a much tougher problem than than even aids uh... and and i think that uh... one other point i agree completely with you uh... with your idea about the data doppelganger being the very very threatening thing uh... the fact that actually is the primary proof of who you are rather than what you see if we are too you know stop pre-judging people like that and especially in events of crimes when someone is being uh... tried the the presumption is that you know a person who has committed a crime will lie and say i have not come to the crime in order to you and rightly the job is up to the state of the public prosecutors to show that they have now to show that they have unique evidence and i would say uh... in most cases you should have beyond something beyond circumstantial evidence and to do that you need to eventually be able to access their communications in in many circumstances right and uh... the technologies that that you and i uh... encourage people to use okay and the protections that we see uh... especially uh... in in terms of both if it's on my desk then i should not be forced to give up my my decryption key and if it is in the traffic then good security would mean that it is protected while in transit okay all of this makes it very difficult for public prosecutors forget about intelligence agencies etc just playing crimes and being able to show that you were the one who committed and and this brings me to the larger point which is that just as one uh... might argue that uh... that it is senseless to talk about sacrificing privacy uh... in order to gain security because after all the need security so that we can uh... enjoy prove uh... you know right such as freedom of speech and privacy it is also that uh... quite problematic if we start you know going down the path of sacrificing security to enhance privacy because without security we won't have the necessary condition to be able to enjoy that privacy right so that's the larger point so i agree with bruce schneyer although i just think that he is not i think when it's presented as an either or it's just like kind of ridiculous right it's not mutually exclusive of course it's a little bit like washing your hands but it is also like protecting yourself proactively while you engage in things it's a harm reduction you know it's a harm reduction strategy i think that washing your hands is harm reduction wearing a condom is harm reduction not sleeping with people that you think are unsafe is a harm reduction strategy there's like a whole bunch of things we can make as an analogy but the point is the transit of risk exists in all of these analogies as well and it's not going to go away it exists and we can't get rid of the risk in tire lane we won't change the behavior of all people at least not if they're free but we can change the behavior of all people but that is not the idea right of a society that is free the idea is that people should choose what it is they wish to to do right obviously in the case of extreme poverty and disease people often don't have the education to understand that they get to make this choice so there's an interesting discussion point to be had about how the analogy sort of falls short because all this technological privilege stuff is kind of a little bit highfalutin for everyday regular people sometimes but i think that the point is that i don't disagree with schnire but i would just say it's not limited to that we each have our own analogy there's preventative measures before you do a thing that is totally reasonable their preventative harm reduction measures for things that you are going to do anyway we are going to use cell phones we are going to use the internet we should use strong cryptography when we do i don't think there's anything wrong with that and i think that we should recognize we each have a responsibility because a centralized management system of all computers is probably not going to work out either so we you know we can take this i mean the free software community works on distributing this work in a way that everyone benefits from so i really think that we can have free and open source software for free and open society and this is a little bit like washing our hands and then we can use strong cryptography to connect over hostile networks this is a little bit like protection in other ways you know i realize that reasonable people will have different analogies a lot of people really don't like talking about sex for example so they really don't like that and they prefer to talk about washing their hands but whatever right i mean i think that's very strange but i understand that that's that that's a point and you know so i guess i should say i don't really disagree with them in that i also think that that is a reasonable analogy and it's for the second part i feel like i couldn't help but imagine george orwell writing what you have said and i mean that with all due respect which is that there is a tension that exists which is that it would be so much easier to catch every criminal if there was a policeman in every house every phone call was recorded at all times if you had no rights against incriminating yourself you had no right to remain silent just think about how easy it would be to catch all of those criminals absolutely i don't want to live in that world i think that i think it was blackwell he suggested that you should ensure that some guilty people go free so that innocent people will actually be able to go free as well this is the the fundamental equation that we have in our liberal democracy which is that the presumption of innocence is a thing we should not get rid of suspicion no no but you are and you don't know it and that's what's terrifying you see because the thing is that freedom from suspicion is a fundamental grounding freedom that allows us to build other freedoms so when you know you pick up the phone and later it will be used against you you will choose your words differently can you be said in your mind can you say honestly that when you pick up the phone you speak totally freely and if the answer is no like for example would you call me in your hotel room or in my hotel room would you send me an email as freely would you choose your words more carefully knowing that the fb i probably reads my email i know a lot of people who have told me they don't call me anymore they don't talk to me not on facebook but if i was they would unfriend me and the point is that that kind of suspicion crosses the threshold in my mind because i generally agree with you except here's the thing criminals understand how the system works regular people don't when you don't understand how the system works the system can be used against you in unjust ways criminals can take their phone and put it in a train and have an alibi have it set to automatically answer so they can have been on the call for example they can have it set to play an audio track that's pre-recorded they can falsify the data trail because when we build the thing that you're talking about when we think about this balance where we say well we want them to have the ability to do a wiretap to retroactively police you you advocate for retroactive policing of data and when they do that who is it that will trick the system except the person that already wishes to break the law and so when we talk about retroactive policing what we have to recognize is that if we compromise our systems in order to have retroactive policing because it would be beneficial that this is a huge problem that is not at all what i'm suggesting all that i'm saying is that there is a huge problem in terms of legal standards such as uh... such as that which is very fundamental of presuming people to be innocent until proven guilty that these kinds of principles are right now being hammered upon absolutely one of the reasons that they are under threat is encryption in india i don't think that it's encryption i think it's actually power but we can talk about how power is being sorted and then we might say encryption but it's about power of course and power operating through legal regimes covering encryption so uh... in india for instance we have a law uh... which requires you uh... to decrypt something that is encrypted now in the u.s. different courts have taken different stands on whether this can be allowed or not whether this violates the right to get self encryption uh... self-incrimination or not uh... there is no uniform law around this in the world but the fact is the moment you go from something that you know okay which is where things like which is where generally we have had protections okay uh... when it comes to things that are stored on a file this is a new thing no it's not it's the exact same thing that we had before which is so you had a file they found a file and they're telling you the laws relating to letters for instance okay are different from the laws relating to things that are in your mind but the principle is the same as is the right to get self-incrimination you can apply it in law and you can have an unconstitutional law and i understand you have some laws that seem quite unconstitutional and i argued that the current law that we have on the statute books in india about requiring decryption is unconstitutional throughout the world if a police officer for instance why is it okay uh... in the u.s for a police officer to find an unlocked phone and use the information that is on the phone and throughout the world that is that kind of thing is generally fine if someone finds a letter then that is fine except that we didn't note everything down on letters earlier now more in because of technology more and more things are put outside of us which is where the laws against self-incrimination protect us but what you said something very specific which is what i am reacting to which is that you're talking about how we lose security when we have this much privacy i do believe that there can be situations where you can lose can you show some evidence of how we have lost security when people have their privacy retained because i would generally say that this is the balance between liberty and security and so i wonder what it is that leads you to say that because i think maybe there's an example in india that i'm not familiar with and i would like to to know it so i am talking in the abstract okay uh... but can you be concrete an example of my con my concrete example is people for instance if you have to retain the the legal presumption of innocence okay then what avenue is there without changing that legal presumption if everything in the world is encrypted what avenue is there for a public prosecutor to actually show uh... evidence well i suppose it would be the same as it was a hundred and fifty years ago before there were computers not quite precisely because the problem that i'm that i'm saying technology is changing things in a country of people where there are people that are illiterate that have committed crimes how is it different because everyone now has a protection of the literate person for example like are you saying that uh... a prosecutor would not be able to prove a crime if there's a crime there should be some evidence of course and lot of that more and more of that evidence now it is digital is my point and with digital evidence okay if you are to apply the same principles then encryption does toward that in a way that things weren't worked it earlier okay in a way that the public prosecutor couldn't have said earlier for someone using you know uh... brought thirteen on a regular letter it revealed to me what method of encryption you have used in a way that that wasn't toward it earlier i think about so that's where i would take issue with you i think you're wrong about that core assumption which is that i believe and i could be wrong that actually there are people who had letters and they were not encrypted and they simply did not disclose them because they had a right against incriminating themselves and because the court did not know that they existed they could not force in a compulsory manner the disclosure of these letters and people who are illiterate committed crimes they too presented a special challenge and you're right encryption does present a special challenge but i don't think it's a new challenge is a challenge we have balance throughout all of history where in it's a challenge through where we've balanced throughout history public prosecutor has to find evidence of these crimes so unless you're saying that all crimes are digital that they're prosecuting it seems to me like there'll be plenty of physical world evidence i mean i could be wrong but i think that we'll see that this is the balance that's coming out an encryption for example like off the record messaging there is no key that you can disclose because it is a derived session this is just like when we used to have conversations where we were not recorded at all time does that present a threat to the public prosecutor or is it hard for the public prosecutor then yes and we call that hearsay in courts and that is something which we finally been able to bring us back to so what we see is not the cryptography takes us to a place we haven't been it's actually that we see cryptography takes us to a place that we sometimes idealize which is not necessarily a good thing to do but it is this place where we used to have private ephemeral conversations and now we can have them again then this is important and this is actually positive it is not a problem in my opinion that soon we will be able and right now with off the record messaging and chatting you can show that two people had a conversation but you cannot show the content in a reliable absolutely perfect way this is not a new thing this is in fact returning to a very age-old thing where we finally been able to bring technology to the point of protecting us and bringing us to being able to have a free conversation that won't last for all time and that is not a bad thing that more and more things going that way in my mind is actually good because it reduces the total amount of power that a state that is unaccountable and not transparent has and it means that public prosecutions that are unjust will be more difficult and that's actually a positive thing in my opinion and when physical crimes are committed in the real world cryptography won't really significantly change it and if we build a surveillance state and we backdoor these things we will see that we don't have that in the real world anymore we don't have it online anymore and criminals will always be able to thwart it because they will understand how the system works I know that when I want to take a sort of like free day and I'm feeling particularly surveilled I do exactly what I suggested which is if I had a cell phone it takes it right on the train what data trail did I leave behind? does that mean I'm a criminal? I don't know but the point is that it helps me to feel better about the situation and it also seems to be the case that if I were interested in a more serious crime who wouldn't do that? I mean people would do that and they would say oh I left it on the train whoops I forgot about it so all of the sabotage all of the sort of undermining of our basic principles and liberty will still be beaten by someone who can just remember the difficult technological ability of leaving your phone somewhere I mean that to me is a fundamentally one where we should embrace encryption and we shouldn't say that it reduces our security societally and when someone suggests that we should ask for concrete specific citations where a terrorist has used encryption and we actually couldn't break their communications because the FBI's wiretap report says encryption thwarted them zero times in 2010 zero times that includes me, I'm in those statistics fuck but also it seems to be evidence to the contrary that encryption in fact is the primary thwarting thing when in fact it just helps everybody in a wide sense until they become targeted the nation looks very unconvinced let's move on we have a question and the second row followed by this gentleman over here uh... please speak into the mic make it a brief and then pass the mic back you said give me an example where we introduced privacy and it caused this problem I can think of one thing bitcoins when they were introduced okay so the transactions on that were uh... anonymous they're not anonymous, they're going okay, it may be hard to find it out but I think the silk road which they got a black market on which they sold the weapons and the drugs they were the ones who opted for the bitcoin transactions but bitcoin is not anonymous you can trace bitcoins, I mean the whole thing is a public log of all the transactions that have ever occurred so I mean I would never use bitcoins to buy drugs or weapons, I mean not that I would buy drugs or weapons just to be clear, right? but the very fact that you are anonymous in that thing attracts more people who would like to commit a crime than normal one okay, so would you say though that for example it is better that that used to be completely hidden and undercover and now you can see the scale of the problem and you can see how lame silk road is and you can see you're throwing all your civil liberties away because some guy with phbb and some bitcoin and a hidden service has like the ability to sell some shitty drugs I mean like who cares? if anything can you imagine how easy it is to infiltrate the network now where previously it was difficult I mean I'm not a big fan of law enforcement after what I have encountered in the last four years but let's say that there are some legitimate law enforcement people somewhere I'm sure that there are I don't really ever meet them but let's say that they, I've met a few to be fair and they were very nice to me which is probably why I think about them but those people right are in my opinion by posting these things online they actually open themselves up to infiltration they open themselves up to selling drugs they open themselves up you know to like moving money and committing crimes in a way where now all of the world's police forces can actually stop them in a sense I would say that that's actually a good balance if you were to get rid of anonymous communication if you were to get rid of electronic currency you might stop a few people from buying these things but you wouldn't actually stop the core problem you wouldn't even know about the core problem without infiltrating it and doing a similar thing so it actually presents less risk to law enforcement to have it so easily accessible and to make it something where anyone can participate and it presents more risk to people that are committing these crimes and I think that that's something which nobody talks about but I've talked with people from the DEA or from the FBI and since they weren't giving me a hard time about WikiLeaks related stuff I've said to them like hey so what about these things do you try to infiltrate them and they're like well of course and it gives me mixed feelings because I don't want to help them because I think the war on drugs is bullshit right? it's a class warfare and the reality is that what Portugal has done has been very good people decriminalizing drugs solid because it's about harm reduction but let's say that you really believe in the war on drugs it seems to me that anonymity helps you fight the war on drugs and Bitcoin is not anonymous anybody using it to buy drugs is just well I mean if they're also buying drugs they may literally be smoking crack right? so we should consider this fact right but it's not it's like it's presented as a boogeyman but let's be clear here right it's not what it is is it's a challenge that requires law enforcement to learn and I know that that's hard for a lot of police officers but it's not impossible and there are actually some that are quite smart that realize this trade-off and well I don't particularly like it I think that anonymity is for everyone and that includes people who misbehave and sometimes the misbehaving is a bad guy we you know or like whatever boogeyman in society and that boogeyman really reaches people right like in the West it's about child pornography and terrorism and drugs and money laundering and in like let's say in the Middle East it's about offense about religion not always but sometimes or it's about speaking out against your leaders not always but sometimes and in China it's often about politics and we saw that in the case of Xi Tao right a single IP address put him in prison for 10 years thanks to Yahoo and you know anonymity can be very powerful in helping people that are otherwise not very powerful but it's when there is a targeted attack against you know entities like drug dealers for example anonymity won't protect you forever there are going to be attacks that are social in nature even with strong crypto right so the thing that that crypto and anonymity can help with is dragnet surveillance but ultimately like when someone installs malware like Finfisher on your telephone no amount of encryption is going to stop Finfisher from working really I mean once you've typed in your passphrase and the keys are in memory it's going to extract it in and you know snitch you out right so it's not a panacea but it does help scale communications in a way that are secure and I think that this is an important thing I don't sell it as a panacea I'm not selling it at all I'm just suggesting that if we use this stuff it can really help us and it can really protect us at a societal scale we're just fighting these things at a much different level and I think in really to successfully fight these things we have to learn and so the war on drugs we should end it that's the solution to problems about drugs is regulating it and keeping people safe and reducing harm and the problem of money laundering is probably similar so we should make sure that people have the ability to freely communicate and to share their own wealth I mean we talk about this in the cypherpunks book and bitcoin does present a threat but it is not anonymous and so keep that in mind if you think you get anonymity properties from it you probably don't get the ones you think you do and certainly you should be careful about whether or not that's something you really really need and so it doesn't really to me that's not a concrete point in favor of these things changing the landscape too much except that it brings us back to a place where due process and the rest of the things we actually like in our society are actually required because it used to be you could just grab it and now you have to again ask for permission, you have to talk to a person you have to question them and ask them these questions I actually think that that's a much better idea because it scales much like you would expect it to so it doesn't scale very well at all and that's really important because if you have a government that can at the same time it scales really well and it has the ability to for example revoke your visa automatically or stop you at a border automatically and do these things that can be very seriously misused and if it happens at a smaller scale you can still have those kinds of controls it's just really hard to do it automatically and at like a billion people scale can we have the next question one thing I wanted to ask was since you know you have been caught by the government sorry not caught but probed allegedly and then you said that FBA reads your emails and at a scale that you use encryption so where do you see the masses using encryption and the utopia you talked about is it that we shun the communication that we use or probably because encryption these days I don't think so it's coming must to use because still people are getting caught over the encrypted network so where do you see this going the encryption and the utopia you talked about I mean I'll be brief because this is an easy one which is to say that I chose a bunch of services like Twitter, Gmail, my ISP or whatever and I paid for them in traceable ways and I did that because I knew the U.S. government was coming for me okay first of all second of all I did that so that all of you would have an example about how they will come for you okay and third of all I take issue with your word caught surely there will be something in that to hang me there's no question right and this is the battle right what happens to Bradley Manning and what happens to Julian is probably what will happen to me and to many other people right because this is a witch hunt so what is the solution to a witch hunt it is a free and open and just society that's not even a utopia I just want to process I just want to be able to confront my accusers this is not really much of a utopia and so I think that strong encryption actually does help me from being targeted in things that I didn't choose to be surveilled as an example and I think that that works really well and I think things like off the record messaging plus tour plus SSL and TLS these things are actually often used by lots of people and anytime you've ever gone online and bought something and you saw a little padlock and you successfully did that every time you use encryption you know this war on privacy you're winning it a little bit he said did you hear there's a war on drugs and every time you're high you're winning it right it's not my joke but I think the same thing is true for encryption and so we can't say that encryption doesn't work it's just that encryption buys you time that's all it does, it just buys you time sometimes the amount of time it buys you is the amount of time you need sometimes it doesn't buy you enough time and obviously sometimes encryption isn't the problem because the metadata about you is the problem and who you talk to is the thing that someone is after so these things can help you I think and I think it's worth considering using them I also think the real thing we need to do is actually use the internet with this in mind but then change our society with these things in mind and we'll find some balance between my utopia and crypto anarchy and you know totalitarian fascism but where we find that and what's kind of balance and how we find that is up to you guys I like to come and visit but it's up to you to decide that and so even though we might lose some of these things some of the time you can protect yourself some of the time and against many people if you use strong crypto in this room probably nobody can break it it doesn't mean that we're losing just because sometimes some intelligence agencies can break it we should do it, we should do it anyway and we should make it as hard as possible for people that wish to spy on us because they are spies I once met a guy every day men were men and spies were spies and they didn't ask for permission to spy and whine when they couldn't sounds great I want that day back too the point which you kept up regarding the centralized database or the UID which we are implementing by that we are preparing an attack surface where bad guys or say someone can actually find all the data about people and just to if they can have access to that data they have all the data in the similar perspective or say in the similar way I wanted like if you are creating a strong encryption say the creators of that particular encryption and the law and enforcement agencies or the FBA say any governments ask and they would be now knowing that these are the creators of the of this particular encryption which is being used so they can force them what can be the thing they can just now go to them itself and ask for the decryption algorithm something kind of that so again aren't we creating a surface for these guys? I totally understand the question I'll restate it more succinctly which is if we build centralization into systems of spying we add attack surface and in the central system we have a place where someone can go to get this information previously they had to go to a billion people and take their fingerprints now they go to a database and pull it out this is attack surface for the fingerprint database let's say that's true you do create that attack surface and in fact you still have the old attack surface and now you have the new attack surface the thing is with crypto when we build these things as free software first of all you can inspect the source code if you have a developer or a programmer nearby or if you are one that is of encryption that really matter not the particular implementation this is very important right so if you understand how Tor works you can build a client that is your own if you wish to some people have in fact done this there are multiple implementations of Tor because they don't want to trust us but the final point you make which is that they can force us this is the difference between at least me and some other people I think and maybe it's because I don't have children it would be very fearful but go on anyway who knows right you always have a choice and so when you choose to be a rat-fink motherfucker and sell people out and to harm them never say that you were forced always remember that you had a choice and that is in fact the most important thing and why we must have diversity so that these are not centralized points if there was only one encryption product obviously it would be a huge target but when there are a million encryption products and some of them are okay we see that this attack service still exists but it's spread out everywhere at some point we'll have to change the tactic and in fact we've seen that Fin Fisher tries to break into your computer instead of going after Skype instead of going and getting things from Skype they take a different you know they're hacking right so they take a different angle and it works and so it does present some kind of centralization but there are different ways to attack it but similarly even if the Zeta Cartel from Mexico were to come and say hey do this thing we must build systems that when you comply because you will comply you cannot harm people so I have some like for example I can push source code to various different Tor related projects although not core Tor because I have some other people that review it they review it because they started the project and they really do that we look at the source code that they review we peer review these things if someone were to come to me and try to force me to do it we've even compartmentalized the structure such that even if you could force me to write the code or assert that I had written it someone else has to sign off on it even if you could force them to merge the code well the whole world would see that that code was merged and I think it would be very hard to get people to do that willingly in a legal situation the Zeta Cartel obviously does present a real threat when we have those kinds of things when they're willing to like kill you or your family or something and in that case I would at least understand the choice you made I would never deny that there was a choice and so we must always categorically refuse to build so-called lawful interception and we must categorically refuse to put in backdoors and we should always do our development in the open and we should make it free software so people can review it and we should have open specifications so that people understand that if someone did come to us and some change happened they would understand why the change happened this is huge and very important to do that and that allows us to retain our choice as long as possible and when someone tries to force us it will give us the maximum amount of agency to stop and to resist it and hopefully if we have enough people working on this there'll be just too many people to try to compromise to make that feasible strategy and instead I think other strategies will be attempted and it could be wrong but I think that that's the right way to do it and the true Crip people seem to do a very good job of this in that they don't even let their identities be known they are a cryptographic key right and so they try to head that off so it would be very hard I don't know if they use Tor or not but I would suspect that they do and I would suspect that what that means is that you can't even go to them to try to force them and so you can build projects like that because yes it does increase the attack surface but it doesn't mean that it's therefore we should give up it just means we have to look at those edges and we have to see that that's a much better attack surface than everything being unencrypted for example or not understanding about cryptography at all okay thanks as you just said to build a individual crypto or say ask many people to build a crypto algorithm or build the encryption for a public service like any public service into which is being used by many people say Skype take an example of Skype some previous couple of years before Skype was did not allow Indian government to access the decryption algorithm but other governments like US was allowed for it so in that case is it again a concentration of say allowing to decrypt the encryption or say in how would it be if it's a public service the encryption is again with that particular public service well there's something to be said about Skype right Skype is closed source malware in my opinion right and it's and if we look we see that when you pass a URL through Skype that Microsoft actually takes the URL from your private chat messages and scans it by like hitting the web server so between two people when you're talking Microsoft somehow is in the picture and they go to the URL you've privately passed so if you passed a company sensitive URL through that Microsoft now knows about it and maybe they index it who knows but they've literally visit that URL even if you have never visited it no one has ever visited it don't use systems like that that is a really important point build alternative systems build the Skype of today that doesn't sell out its users like for example RIM right when the Indian government pressured RIM what did they do they bent over because for them expanding the market share in capitalism was more important than considering that you are a human being that has privacy rights and that you deserve to understand your data and who gets to see it well that's because RIM considers the carriers and the countries to be the customers and not the end user that carries the telephone this is wrong and so we should replace RIM because they have betrayed us same with Skype the gentleman in the first row hey so we had a debate earlier over here about the balance between liberty and security so can data or a data doppelganger be really admitted as concrete evidence can't it be classified or they should be a debate on this matter don't you think so how much effort has been taken to engage with legal structures across the democratic world to decide where do we stand on this issue do we really consider a data footprint to be concrete given the fact that attribution is so difficult so difficult in internet networks yes has there been effort engaged across the world to discuss this yes absolutely yes there has and in the case of the twitter case against me for example that's USAV apple bomb we lost we lost the ability to even fight in fact and in the future we don't really even get to fight about whether or not they get the data they say that metadata which data metadata and aggregate right tells a story which is sometimes richer than the content of your communications but in this case what we found was that um frankly they think that it's perfect there's no question about whether or not the IP address I logged into twitter is solid they just assume that because they got it from twitter that it's great there's no review of twitter's logging system so I think it's probably possible that you could for example insert false logging data and it would be introduced into court as evidence and in fact it may be the case that they can get this data from the company without even knowing it so you would not even know to review the company's logging procedure and yes they will use that as evidence and in fact they wish to use that as evidence against me to hang me literally under the espionage act in my country which carries the death penalty so that's the debate in democratic west countries right and we lost right and we lost just a couple months ago in the USA the apple bomb case and you know it sucks to be a loser but hey it's a good example don't be me I suppose as the example but also recognize who they are who are the players and what they're doing um and it's uh yeah it's terrifying stuff and the reality is that people believe machines can be perfect and so whatever a machine has said it's like electronic voting what's the vote? oh 39 against 1 let's do a recount 39 against 1 how about now? still 39 against 1 damn that's really terrible and that's pretty much what we've seen happening here I think there will be some really good lawyers that will argue against it in some cases and I'll say well yeah that's not true and then there will be some debate about it prove your innocence again because they'll say well we have this data prove another alibi like oh yes someone stole my phone prove it did you file a police report prove it it seems to fit the pattern you were normally walking this way are you sure that you didn't do that again right and so it flips it and that's the really scary part is that debate basically happened without anybody looking so in Qatar I once encountered their censorship and surveillance system and I found out that if you visit certain websites it's like oops this page is not available and it has some like smiling guys from Qatar and they've got like poofy hair and they're like ha ha ha sorry about that right and I noticed that when I went to this website which was for an industrial film company I used to work at let's say that it's blocked me and then it redirected me to a site that logged this data and it logged my IP address and it logged the site I had gone to and I was like wow that's amazing so I put in some IP addresses of systems that I thought were interesting in Qatar like police and other places and I just like filled their log file such that they had all gone to the same site that was blocked too why not who's going to argue about being innocent better than them right so I thought that would be useful and also on that trip a weird thing happened like someone broke into my hotel room and the hotel was like oh we didn't enter your room and I said yes but someone did and they said sir no one enters your hotel room from the cleaning staff without permission I said well I didn't give you permission they said no one from the cleaning staff alright great maybe yeah I mean it's you know who knows that was kind of interesting but I guess the point is that that kind of that kind of stuff is clear and it will become more clear how unjust it is over time what we must try to do is avoid that injustice from the onset and know these things before we learn them the hard way that sometimes data lies we should also know these things don't tell the picture that the prosecutor wants just because they have individual facts it used to be a little bit more like that I think in some cases but even then it's still quite dangerous and we're talking about very serious severe penalties in some cases like I have some foyers which show that my co-worker Roger had purchased an airplane ticket for me for a couple of reasons it logged the IP address he bought it from the credit card number it logged his name it logged my name it logged the flight information and it tied it all together and when I fired it I got his credit card so I had his credit card and they logged it all and the crazy part is that he only dealt with the flight company and I got this data from the Customs and Border Protection so the corporation that sold this and then I asked him to buy me another plane ticket and he did because he was very gracious because it was for work but that was a great example it looks like Roger concretely bought me a plane ticket but how do we know that Roger did that it also could have been the case that it wasn't Roger that bought the plane ticket it could have been someone else using Roger's credit card we have lawmakers who aren't you know in America we have this problem too it's mail generally senators and congressmen they talk about women's bodies and how they work and you see this all the time they're like oh yeah absolutely this is what we should do about legislating women's choices so you see the same thing right these guys don't understand women's bodies at all and they legislate about that all the time why would it be different with technology now everybody gets to do it it's unfortunate and that's a reality so you should kick them out and take their place hi is it okay if I ask two questions press classes thanks anyway so the first one is about Silk Road I think it's really problematic to speak about it as the dark web because I don't know about the weapons and I don't know how many people will be buying weapons because like you said Bitcoin is pseudo anonymous but with drugs I think any statement like you said about getting high it's actually a political statement where the usage of drug itself is not the problem it's the involvement of the mafia or the cartels which is the problem and Silk Road sort of does away with that so in that with respect to Silk Road I think it was compromised sometime back and since Todd hosts it I want to just ask you like how we should be clear I'll explain something about Tor which I didn't which is Tor has this idea it's a Tor hidden services Tor hidden services are a way for you to have an address where someone can reach and to connect to your computer and when you want to publish that it's a long cryptographic hash which is really hard to remember which is 80 bits in length and it ends in .onion so it's a pseudo TLD so to speak and it's not like an easy to remember name because it's in Zuko's Triangle you can only have a couple of properties there are three possible properties and we have chosen one where it's globally unique and secure and that means you don't get the easy and memorable name and so Silk Road set up a Tor hidden service we have nothing to do with them we do not host them they are just another anonymous user of the Tor network and it's very important to draw this distinction because if I ran a service like that will I have particular feelings about the war on drugs there's no way I'd fucking touch that that's really dangerous so I don't know anything about them being compromised I don't know anything about who runs it or anything like that and I don't want to know in fact that's why I want an anonymity system so that people can do those things and I don't have to be near them and I can have anonymity and we can be completely separate and I can be left alone hopefully right it's really important that's the case so Tor does not host Silk Road and that's really important and whether or not they're compromised I have no idea but I would imagine that if all of the governments in the world were working on compromising it would be quite an amusing law enforcement operation in that you'll probably see like Dutch police which I know do this kind of thing like breaking into computer systems and infiltrating them they're probably going to be social engineering like American FBI agents right anonymously like hey do you want to buy some drugs yeah I want to buy some drugs right and you know you're going to see that kind of thing so at some point though this is sort of like the Stasi you know where you have this like we finally got this guy you know he's like a really interesting guy he seems to be able to get away with anything and it turns out they're resting another cop right I mean I wouldn't be surprised if things like that happen and I wouldn't be surprised if it was entirely filled with cops but who knows it's really hard to know and I think there are some interesting studies to be done there and I try to stay as far away from that as I can because it's super duper dangerous and who buys their drugs with Bitcoin seriously I'm surprised a lot of people do but I mean I'm in India there's a drugstore down the street right you guys make fantastic drugs it's all and it's all legal I tell you with rupees it's better than Bitcoin actually but only in some ways I think that's like another conversation but okay so that I'll just come to my second it's more like a comment so I have a problem with your user of the term informed consent I'm not a techie I'm a lawyer and so the thing is informed consent I think was most popularized with medical negligence cases and then we saw this happening that like what you spoke about with Obama's comments on the drone attacks like so neoliberalism or whatever you want to use technocracy and your conservatism so that sort of works in a subtle way where it sort of presents the opposite of what it's doing like what Obama said with the drone attacks like something like what Marxist like the Marxist concept of the freedom of choice like not actually being freedom at all so yeah so another problem with informed consent is that you may know the information that is required to make that consent and I may know it but the layman doesn't actually know it and there is no way to get it to them so is it even possible to make an informed consent and how informed it should consent be for it to be informed consent like you use it and so I mean I think there's an oversimplification of the term like with the way you use it and I think it's really problematic with the kind of stuff that you're saying to do that so I agree it's really difficult to have informed consent but I think we should shoot for for example when people legislate about technology and want to put in back doors but they don't understand the unintended consequences I think that it's really ridiculous to say therefore when they spy with these things that it's legitimate because their power is legitimate and their power is legitimate because we consent to their power and we consent to them making these decisions that they don't know a damn thing about and so yes obviously it is the case that you know informed consent about subtle things is very difficult but we should be aiming for that kind of thing for example you should be told the side effects of a medical treatment before you undergo it you should understand the probabilities this suggests though that education is a fundamental human right and I would say that that is important because if you don't understand probabilities and statistics if you don't understand what it means to be one in a million and what death is when there are side effects to those medical procedures for example it's hard to argue that you do have informed consent obviously but I would say that there isn't really an alternative like there isn't a better model where we can say that you know you shouldn't be given that choice you shouldn't have that data you shouldn't learn about those things you should just be told what to do for example this is the flip side of informed consent is that you don't get to consent to things at all or you get to consent without being informed and I feel like I don't want to be over there and I know it's really hard to get over to informed consent so for some things like for example wiretapping we can try to solve this problem in a way where we don't need people to understand the nuances of what it means to be secure in a world where everything is actually insecure except when the law says otherwise that I would just rather move towards the thing where we can say as best as we know through strong mathematics it is secure do you want to make this phone call? that's a much easier thing as opposed to unless someone sits outside with an MC catcher unless someone is recording it you're secure unless someone wants you to not be secure like I feel like this requires much more of an education and so when we want to move towards an informed consent model we should also work towards actually doing the things we say that we're doing and making sure that people understand it and I know that that's an uphill battle and obviously like I think a great example of informed consent is about consenting with regard to sexuality you never know that the person you're going to sleep with is actually an asshole right? but you should hope that they are tested and that they're safe and that's the best you can do is that you can try to have an open and honest dialogue and you can try to protect yourself but you may find out later that they were duplicitous or that they're kind of a jerk or that they're secretly racist or that they're not secretly racist whatever right? and I still think it's better to try to move in a direction of informed consent where people are open and honest about these things than the alternatives and more so than what we have now and I agree that it's problematic and it is very hard but I don't see an alternative we could present other than informed consent where people may make choices that I wouldn't make but at least we can say that they have thought about them when they had an opportunity to think about it and at least it wasn't being forced upon them and you see this with genetic testing you see it with things relating to drugs and sex and rock and roll right? I mean it's all over the place and I still think it's a much better thing even though it is problematic but ultimately I think liberty is problematic right? I mean it is very very problematic to give and to ensure that people have choices especially when there are unintended unknown consequences for example so we should try to like get rid of those unintended consequences whenever possible and I realize that many of these things are not achievable probably even in my lifetime but it's still I think worth working towards so I don't know if that satisfies you but I really hope that it does are you saying that people were not informed about the concept of informed consent? shit you got me yeah okay well I mean there you go I mean I'm sorry to do it later there are five people that left and they missed out but everybody else clear on that it's very controversial yeah I don't know are there any other questions is if they're they're in back the woman in back yeah okay so how many more questions everybody that wants to raise your question raise your hand I was told we have the space till 10 but I don't think I can stand here for that long I'm not going to sit down either oh maybe I might hey you guys yeah I'll try to be quick so try to ask questions illicit a one word answer we'll get more questions I just have a couple of questions one you've been talking about the encryption as a measure of securing your own communication as well as your data how foolproof do you think that your encryption is number one and number two how do you even know that law enforcement agencies or someone who wants to spy on you are not decrypting your data already and you're not knowing it that's actually great that's easy okay so there's a peer reviewed open scientific community about cryptography that talks about cryptography and it works on it and I'm a part of this community in a very minor way and I read the literature and I feel pretty strong about the systems we've built I don't think they're perfect there's a thing we call the 100 year crypto problem I'm like migrating to sitting down partially here a little tired awkwardly anyway so that I feel pretty good about the fact that it works today I don't think that it works for 100 years in the sense that in 100 years there can be a lot of changes and 100 years ago the crypto was pretty bad right yes so this well like for example if you're using sure so if you're using blackberry instant messenger for example are rim products like it's not good enough for five seconds right and and don't use it it's not safe in my opinion and I think probably it's pretty bad but for the actual encryption algorithms that are used in Tor for example these are like cutting edge public reviewed crypto systems and we put them into Tor in a way that we think is secure and the thing is that we don't know we don't know for sure and so the idea is that we publish them openly and in a peer reviewed sense in hopes that people that are much smarter than us and that's a lot of people especially when they're all together working on it that they'll be able to tell us if it's okay and so that's why I'm also not saying it's perfect I'm just saying that it makes it a lot harder right and and and I think that's worth doing in the second part how do I know I'm certain that everything I do is compromised right because I've been told by people in the US government that they're gonna like do awful things to me right and one of the awful techniques that they have is human infiltration of your life no cryptography presents let's say a problem to a tyrannical organization that will put a person like for example in the United Kingdom there's a man named Mark Mark is best known for infiltrating an environmental group and for six years pretending to be an environmental activist including falling in love with a woman in that group and then one day it turns out he's a cop right so no encryption like no encryption or decryption process is necessary for that kind of infiltration and so do I think that I'm being spied upon well if the largest US law enforcement investigation in history is a measure they did it for much lesser of people I suppose they might do it for me as well and so I'm pretty sure that it's happening but I'm still going to make it as hard as possible and that way when evidence comes I'll be able to see how they broke the systems and where they broke them and hopefully people will learn from it and I hope that I can do a little more than just serve as an example a little bit but I don't think that they would attack me through cryptosystems I think they would attack me through human systems and through human weaknesses and they would probably win and that's why society has to ensure that things like that don't actually happen to for example investigative journalists or people that are effective activists or people that wish to have free association I don't know if that answers your question but I think it's very hard to know if they've broken the crypto I'm sorry can we move on and ask you can talk to me later about it I'm not saying that there is a honey trap or there isn't a honey trap just as a really bad joke my partner for example woke up with two dudes with night vision goggles watching her sleep in the middle of the night in her bedroom that's an example of a really serious chilling effect on my free speech and there's a guy with night vision goggles watching her sleep in her bedroom that's the FBI but it's not a joke that's serious stuff that really happens and that has a chilling effect so the point is though that they also break into computer systems and so on and the thing is that your country is building the same set of capacity right now electronically and they already have some of this physically and we should probably make sure that things like that are considered in a front to justice and that the rule of law does not allow it because if the rule of law allows that what is the point of the rule of law it just seems like the rule of arbitrary and capricious men to me my question is changing from survival system to a anonymity system is a big change all over the globe if you consider it right so if you turn the system in this way will it be sustainable, will it survive in that way is there any way we can conclude that it is actually workable and it's practical to have a system like that and still it will survive and it will not create more problems than we have right now well I have no idea let's try so is there any place in the world where we have a system like this where it's anonymous and it's still there properly system working well the tour network exists today and you can use it and people are using it and society hasn't yet broken down into complete chaos I mean I don't know if you mean is there a full society I mean the Venetian society had anonymity as a part of its democracy and that was a very strong thing until they became crony capitalists and so it was crony capitalism that destroyed Venetian society and not anonymity anonymity in fact is one of the strong fundamental aspects that allowed Venetian society to grow quite to a strong point I think that was the 15th century in Venice so I mean there are examples throughout history of places where strong anonymity is available I mean you can look through it it's really hard to know what that means though right if you live your life without oppression for example is that success if you only live half your life without oppression is that success I don't know but I think the thing is that we should try to get rid of surveillance because we live for almost all of human history without total society-wide surveillance that's a huge shift and that's a huge expansion we should reject that expansion especially when it happens non-democratically and then additionally we should make sure that strong cryptography at least makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for that to happen again and that I don't think is going to make us break down into like you know a chaotic nightmare situation one more thing so first I wanted to thank you with respect to your comments about the Canadian gun registry I'm Canadian and have argued vehemently for the Canadian gun registry in the past and I've never prior to tonight envisioned a bunch of militant vegetarians assassinating duck hunters across Canada because they tapped into that database so why do they have to be vegetarians? they don't have to be vegetarian but as I'm progressing towards vegetarian the thought enters my mind India the best place it's the best place to be a vegetarian in the world it's the only place where you don't have to say you're sorry for being a vegetarian and meat eaters have to suck it up it's pretty much the only place in the world where the vegetarian food doesn't actually taste like crap so it is delicious so my question is you spoke at the very beginning about your utopian vision and this will be short I really promise so I am I am probably a Taoist and so maybe my utopian vision would be to return to a society where the tying of ropes is how unspoken communication happens I'm curious what your elevator pitch is for a utopian society in your mind sans maybe cryptography and due process which seems like incremental steps toward that thing I mean my utopian society is an anarchist society where we decide if these things in a democratic way right anarchism is in Balcunin and Emma Goldman not anarchism is in George Bush and everything will be anarchy right I mean really like philosophical anarchism where we recognize fundamental human rights so this is sort of a preference based utilitarianism where we can make decisions about our life and we choose to do these things in a way that we choose say like and it might impact other people and when it impacts those other people we ask them and if it would harm them maybe we don't do that and maybe we make sure that we come up with structures that we regularly regenerate in order to make sure that they don't sort of accumulate power and accumulate hereditary power at that that I think could provide a basis for us to build something else so I don't have a prescriptive suggestion other than some very base rules like letting people live their life without forcing them to do things and coercing them and there's a city it's called Christiania it's in the heart of Copenhagen and it's the only anarchist free zone in the whole world and it's far from perfect it has about I think seven or eight hundred families and they occupied a military base in the seventies and it still exists today and they're an anarchy it has four or five rules like no hard drugs, no bulletproof vests, no weapons like really like completely simple things and they all come together once a week or once a month and they decide issues in their community by discussing it with their neighbors and they agree by consensus on the solution so that people don't get bowled over have their property taken without really like a lot of debate and it is really awesome it's like the exact opposite of North Korea right and that in my sense Christiania is is a really good idea and I think that I would I don't know that I want to live there since I'm not Danish and I don't speak Danish but it seems like that is a lot closer and that's what I'd like to see and I think there are some problems with it but from that you can get to other places in a way where you don't sort of like step on other people in order to get there and you don't force other people in order to get there and you know there's a great book it's a Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and it sort of talks about anarchism as a political movement and about these ideas you know of libertarian ideology I guess you could say and I think that there's there's really quite a lot to be studied there and to be debated at the same time I also see that the rule of law when it is actually democratic has a lot of power and it is important and can protect for example minorities that would be say put down you know in a bad way in a consensus based discussion so I think there's some debate about it so at the core you could just say that I think there should be debate where we can achieve consensus about what we wish to do next and then every couple of generations we should probably change it and in fact Thomas Jefferson sort of suggested this too he said that every person should have a seat at the table when practically possible and that's sort of like my idea of a utopia right and from there you might want a wiretapping spy society that infiltrates you know relationships for example that that one is not sustainable right in anthropology we in fact see and in sociology that like groups that are friendly and open and giving they tend to last longer and I think that's a big rambling fucking mess of a reply but I hope you enjoyed it I don't know I mean you guys are probably like sweating you must really be sweating your legs are falling asleep or something perhaps we should wrap up here and you could take these questions if anybody is really dying to ask me a question I know that this is an important thing which can help people but if people really want to go stand up and get out and I think you should do that sorry for everyone if you really want to go you should just start leaving it'll naturally this is a very specific question regarding India you have the UID system UID system was because in other systems there are a lot of duplicates so they wanted one system where they wouldn't have duplicates of people where a single person would exist as a single person now suppose you don't want to have this bundle of data in one place which would probably you mentioned the problems of that then probably you could remove some data from it like you could have only a biometrics proving that you're a citizen of the country and just a card and the only thing that it has is your biometrics proving that you're and they have data of your biometrics not linking it to anything else but then you will need at other places to prove something else like for example now you're applying to a college which has say 33% reservation for women for example and you need to prove that you're a woman okay and it's an online application I'm saying and the only way you can do it is for that card number but then that doesn't have any data so sometimes you'll need some particular data so what's your question? no the question is do you have any alternative in mind where see for example you work for the for Ecuador in their electoral system so did you implement something over there that probably kept them safer so is your question how is it that India survived all the way to this time and had universities without the UID system can I rephrase your question that way because I think that the alternative system is one which does not require a total surveillance where you centralize all that information and then force you to share it with third parties where you don't have auditing systems and also on top of it you're forced to comply with it and if you don't want to be in a free society you don't get to be in that database and therefore if you're not in the database you don't get to be a member of a free society is that about sum it up? maybe to try to stay free my solution is to try to build systems where you you know actually don't need to build all of that in order to prove that you're a woman there's another solution for that there are many solutions for proving proving that in fact and I don't know it just seems a little bit weird like I just don't believe that the balance is there and I can imagine that you can build like it was one of my favorite people to ever live in terms of the things he has invented and so I can imagine you can build a system and in fact I know these things have been built where you have an electronic ID card and you can prove just a certain property about yourself and only that property and you can reveal that thing to a selective party and it's not centralized let's say I can't remember the name of the system I saw but the Canadians have a thing it's called proportional ID and the idea is you have an ID card and you reveal certain parts from the University of Toronto's proportional ID thing it's great it's some cutouts of like paper and you put it over your ID and you flip to the page where you need to show your age and so you show the cutout where it shows your birthday or you need to show your gender so it just is a cutout of that and then maybe you also have to show a picture so you show the picture as well and then when you show this to a bouncer at a nightclub or you show it to like a person writing you a ticket you know you reveal the thing that by law you need to reveal but nothing else to do that his way he's of course hacking a normal Canadian ID card where they have all that information in a central database so imagine you have the same thing but no central database and imagine you use cryptography instead of cutouts of paper you could probably build something like that that's not the UID system as far as I can tell and it sounds like what you're saying is that would be really useful so what I would suggest is that you should build that and now you'll have a solution and so then when you say why do we have this piece of shit UID system you can say God because I didn't get off my ass and do it I should have built a real private solution that might not actually be practical but at least you can know that there are alternative solutions to it and so you should try to build that if you want and if you want some paper references to show systems like this I'd be happy to do that you can send me an email about it and yeah this is a ridiculously long thing too we're gonna end here thank you all for coming this event was organized by Hasgeek, Null and the tactical technology collective Kiran, Maya and Akash and Maya Jake is speaking tomorrow at a panel in the National Law School which is in Nagarbhavi okay sorry so Jake is speaking at a panel tomorrow at the National Law School if you're interested please make your way there I don't know the time it's after lunch sometime thank you