 So I'm here to talk about an interesting area We are My company were very concerned about how we can apply decentralized technologies To reducing surveillance and censorship So I did I've been traveling quite a bit recently I Just went around the world for the last two weeks spend a bunch of time in China And this photo is actually taken on the left in short itch in London In the UK we have I think it's more close-circuit TV cameras per person than any other country in the world And this is in a place that's supposed to be a bastion of freedom There's a quote here on the right-hand side from a book Called on the tyranny and I absolutely recommend you it's a short read but it really Sets out some basic principles of how to resist Totalitarianism There's another kind of censorship that We're not always aware of which is some people call this fake news, but it's the idea of censoring things in a way that seems okay, but actually is completely false I way way as a famous artist in China and he The sculpture here is made out of bicycles. It's very tall. This is in the Royal Academy in London and the actual meaning about the sculpture is very much about a Revolutionary piece about how bicycles are used heavily in China and really the idea of moving forwards in a society But instead of this very vanilla piece that's approved by the People's Republic of China Which is that he likes to ride bicycles So there's lots of forms of kind of subtle censorship and more overt censorship. I read a lot of sci-fi I'm actually writing a sci-fi novel most about time. I Very influential book to me recently was the three-body problem. This is actually written in China. It's a Chinese author And it's managed to stay in China and be quite successful there and if you read this book it talks about an alien race that Has no ability to sense of their thoughts literally they transmit their thoughts through electromagnetic waves and then over time they have completely much more advanced technology than anyone else in in in the world And so the people in the world think they're screwed, but it turns out that the one thing that humans can do is not They can filter their thoughts. They can decide, you know, what they're gonna broadcast to people The circle of 984 is obviously very very well understood But the circle is also a great book talking about how a corporation becomes the totalitarian control versus the Versus the state. So I think it's an interesting point to think about that. I'm gonna give a really quick tour through encryption and a little bit about surveillance People have been trying to censor or encrypt what they say for a long time back in 50 BC the history of the Caesar cipher Essentially a very simple rotational cipher That's unless you know the particular seed to get Decipher to work you can't figure out what the person is transmitting. It's really easy to crack with a computer But a little bit more difficult with paper In the 1940s really a pivotal point in the in the Second World War was The development technologies to crack the enigma machine which is being used by the Germans to encrypt its transmissions Our ensuring obviously very influential person here, not just in this but also in the history of computers The interesting part of this actually was not so much the the way it was cracked, but the fact that the The ability to read these messages became an issue such that It was not clear how much action should be taken When it was clear that the Germans are about to attack a certain area So there's kind of like an information theory aspect that had to be figured out there Back in 89. I got my first email address as it's undergraduate student of Cambridge and This is how you access the email pretty much But the interesting thing about this is it was fundamentally decentralized you could run an email server You still can in your house, and it would be you know Steve at my server comm Since then we've really centralized it and another thing we missed out on is encryption So back in 91 Phil Zimmerman wrote an interesting piece of code called PGP So stood for pretty good privacy PGP was actually classified as a weapon as munitions by the US government and He was he was charged who's actually almost put in jail at one point We're not quite there still although this if you got to get into Bitcoin and so on those people Almost gonna go to jail for this over some of these things will have We get all the way to 2013 and this is shocking to many people but Just really opened a lot people's eyes You know whether you agree with his methods or not? I think that the information that Snowden exposed has has really changed a lot of the conversation It was certainly one of the motivating factors in my team's desire to Create something which was able to resist surveillance There is surveillance everywhere. I just spend a few weeks in China I was unable to access Google Facebook LinkedIn any major sites that the West is used to using I believe China is getting ready to just cut the hard lines So those be by do we chat 10 cent they'll have hard lines the internet everybody else will just have nothing and China is just fine architecture Tends to be an interesting aspect the way to create societies if an optic on is a prison that was designed in the late 19 late 1800s That was essentially every single person was able to be watched by the By the guards without the awareness of being watched It's like a little weird sort of picture here It's a piece of modern art showing how Everyone's under surveillance It's kind of weird, right? so Moving from decentralized essentialized Arpanet, which is the beginnings of the internet was initially fundamentally a fully decentralized architect It was actually designed to withstand a nuclear attack Right now if you just take out Google data centers, you'll be good. Not that I'm suggesting you do that We now have very much more centralized architectures Google Facebook LinkedIn as my example showed in China was not just that the firewall was filtering me But was I was very dependent. I still am on a couple of different services Back in 99, which I first got into peer-to-peer. I was very influenced by what was happening with Napster Napster was actually easy to shut down because it was a centralized directory server Which if you targeted that you could shut it down on the the music guys did and then it came back later BitTorrent was much more difficult to shut down and Bramco and the men of BitTorrent is actually now developing a technology for Bitcoin And then we get Bitcoin in 2008 really the beginning of peer-to-peer money And I think it's touching 10,000 or 9,000 or 11,000 today and then Ethereum Which is even more interesting in terms of being a decentralized computer I'm gonna leave you with a couple of things here. This is speech from The great dictator Charlie Chaplin If you come tonight and watch me DJ, I actually have a really cool mix with him speaking on top of it and this is you know from the Second World War and It's fascinating to me that a lot of lessons maybe it's kind of a generational thing a lot of lessons We're still having to learn I have to revisit these ideas of what it means to create totalitarian states and I believe that Technology can give us a solution here as it can to many things But it can also give us the opposite it could give us essentially either of the ability to control society or the ability to free Society and it's pretty much a choice there a lot of it depends on how you architect these things Little pitch for our project back in May. I started this project called orchid and We are essentially rebuilding some Some older technologies Essentially reimagining the way that Anonymous communication can be had over the internet The way our architecture works is we have a series of nodes That when you want to access information you go through a series of these nodes each of those nodes is getting paid in a cryptocurrency that we've developed The exit node goes and picks up the piece of content whether it's BBC Facebook Twitter Wraps it and then sends it back along the same chain such that you're able to view that in wherever you are So our goal is essentially is to open up the entire internet to everyone So China's obviously a big example of that, but I'm very concerned about the Middle East And just surveillance and censorship everywhere. I think it's very important for us to think about I Have a habit of finishing my my talks early, so I guess I've got two minutes left These are my coordinates if you want to get in touch I'm giving a few other talks today and and as I said, I'll be out at the Lulu place tonight, but thank you very much