- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

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by davidbrin＠cts.com 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

Thanks Bill, for passing on your message, along with the news that I've been dissed and discussed by R.A. Hettinga. Naturally, he never informed me, nor copied me his missives, nor invited me to answer. This appears to be quite typical. Let me make clear, this is not a case of disagreement over public issues of privacy, security and freedom. That topic area merits serious attention by adults, and your attempt, below, to paraphrase my position in The Transparent Society, is an example of adult discourse. Paraphrasing is what men and women do when they truly want to understand another's point of view. They then seek feedback in order to find out if their impressions are right, or if they've been just in their counter-arguments. Your attempt, below, is a good effort. Inaccurate in some details, but also quite interesting. I wish I had time for a full reaction. Perhaps I will try later, after returning from giving a keynote at the Libertarian National Convention. (An irony that will surely gall cypherpunks who routinely insist that theirs is the only possible pro-freedom zeitgeist.) No, my case against Hettinga is much simpler. The man publicly attributed to me views that I do not have, and have never expressed. Views that are, in fact, diametrically opposite to anything that I believe. Moreover, this cannot be due to inadvertence or carelessness, since he used quotation marks, something that an educated person only does when he can back it up with demonstrable citations. Not inadvertence or laziness, then, but rather deliberate falsehood bordering on libel. The man is an outright liar. I had no choice but to say so, lest the words that he tried to cram into my mouth become part of the public record. But enough about such people. They are noisy and - I've learned - quite irrelevant. It's why I no longer bother with cypherpunks. They are romantics who dream of fighting 'Big Brother". If tyranny ever does come, the loudest - already foolishly on record - will never get a chance to try out their fancy spy toys before they are shot. It's up to adults like you and me to see to it that never happens. For you, I'll offer the respect of a (brief) argument. Let's shift from technological determinism (the Moore's Law thing) to basic epistemology. * It is fundamentally impossible ever to verify for certain that someone else does NOT know something. * It is demonstrably possible - though sometimes difficult - to verify that YOU do know something. That's it, in a nutshell. The premise of the cypherpunks - to protect themselves and their freedom from inimical elites by limiting what those elites know - is untenable. Cowering under blankets and covers and shrouds and ciphers cannot possibly work in the long run, because it is based on an absurdity. They will never know which of their encryption programs has a back door, or which anonymity site is a police front. (Hint: they ALL will be.) Cowering can never offer any peace of mind. Moreover, it is a craven, self-centered and ultimately futile approach. In setting me up as a strawman, guys like Hettinga claim that I 'trust' government elites. Hogwash. I am far more suspicious of authority than any of them are! They would pick and choose some elites to trust while focusing their ire on just one (government). I don't trust ANY elite, of government, wealth, criminality or technology. Moreover, I will not cower from them. The only defense of freedom that works is the one americans have used for 200 years. An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! These guys see themselves as Keanu Reaves - cheap movie cliche heroes - skipping ratlike through garbage under the dark towers of the Neuromancer zaibatsus, while the rest of their fellow citizens mewl like sheep. Meanwhile, in real life, those citizens are standing up and - en masse - empowering themselves with the very same technology that the cynics and pundits think will enslave us! See: http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm Feh! Dig it, man. My freedom is NOT contingent on blinding govt. Let em see! They will, anyway. Maybe if they see better, they will do their jobs better. So? My freedom is protected by MY ability to supervise govt... to know what they are up to and to hold them accountable if they abuse their power. Not only is that epistemologically possible, it is exactly how we got the freedom we now have! I never said that task would be easy! The present administration makes daily efforts to erect barriers to public oversight and accountability, with vigor unseen since the Sedition Acts. I wish the cypherpunks were helping in the fight to preserve transparency, instead of playing into the concealers' hands. I don't want a blind guard dog. I want a guard dog who can see... but with a fierce choke chain around its neck, controlled by every american who is empowered to clearly supervize what the dog is up to and react quickly if so much as growls in the wrong direction. A few who read this will get it. The rest will call it 'naive', even though it's what worked for us so far. Nor is it any more naive than actually trusting PGP! In ten years, not one cypherpunk has answered my challenge to name a society in history that adopted widespread secrecy as a freedom-protection measure - and thrived. Ours, utilizing the tool of open accountability, has. Oh, one last metaphor. Humans are monkeys. Ever try to BLIND a big monkey? It won't let you! But you can LOOK at a big monkey. You can look at it, and yell for help from other little monkeys if you see it try mischief. You can do that if your top priority is protecting YOUR eyes, not trying to hide. Enough. Thanks again, Bill. Look up Witness.org. They are doing more good in the world than all the cypherpunks, cowering under their fantasy masks... masks that will blow away like dust, if ever a real storm comes. With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com Bill Stewart <bill.stewart(a)pobox.com> writes: >Bob - I'm not sure if you copied David separately/Bcc on your reply, >and I've dropped Cc:s to some of your lists that I'm not on, >and I missed your original message that David flamed you for >which you're flaming back about, but.... > >Perhaps I've missed some really critical things the time or two >that I've read "The Transparent Society", or projected too much >liberarian hype into my reading, but to me the big points were >- Moore's Law, etc., will make networked cameras so appallingly cheap > that that they'll be pretty much universal. It'll do it to other > information technologies as well, but the public has an easier time > understanding what a camera means than a database, so that's the > one to focus on when you're writing popular science. > >- Usual digressions into what Moore's Law and cheap and universal mean, > and some implications about the realism of expecations of privacy > that need to be said slowly for people who haven't spent years > talking about geodesic economies and therefore don't get it (:-) > >- Lots of people will be watching you on cameras, either because they > feel like it, or because they're watching something else > and it's too much trouble to not watch you at the same time. > And you'll be watching lots of people or things, for similar reasons, > and realistically there's not much that'll stop it. > >- The government will be watching you, like it or not. > Brin spends a while discussing the issue of whether we should > try to stop them from doing so through legislation, > but basically views it as a lost cause for economic reasons, > and all the related reasons of power, convenience, control, etc. > (I don't remember how much time he spent on the "even if they ban > government from watching you most of the time, they'll always > give themselves exemptions even if they bother following the rules, > so just get used to it" issue, but it was there. Video's too cheap.) > >- We might be watching the government, or we might not, > and the government are the only major group that can easily > make it hard to watch them, because they can throw you in jail > if you get in their face, and they've got enough control over > their actions to make it difficult to watch them. > THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO FOCUS AS CITIZENS, because if you don't > force them to do their work in the sunshine, they won't, > and because getting them not to watch you is a lost cause. > >- Cypherpunks technologies are mostly a lost cause, because > Bad Guys (mainly the government) will use them to do their bad open >things, > whereas they can put cameras in your ceiling to watch you type >your passwords, > hide bugs under your bed (next to the Communists) to listen to the > conversations you're having on your EnCryptoPhone, etc. > Making sure the government is maximally watchable is more important, > and if you say you're allowed to hide your actions, > they'll make sure they're allowed to hide theirs, > and they're better at this organized coercion thing than you are. > >Perhaps I'm putting words in Brin's mouth, especially about the latter, >but it has seemed to have been the major bone of contention >between Brin and various Cypherpunks. Meanwhile, Big Brother *is* >increasingly watching us, even if in GeodesicWorld nobody else >has bothered paying enough to watch hi-res videos of most of us very often, >and BB is trying very hard to make himself much less accountable, >because if we can see where George is, we can question him, >and if that happens, the Terrorists Have Won... > > (Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been promising > heavy scrutiny of the Worldcom Debacle, if nothing else because > they're so pleased to have dishonesty from somebody who's > not in the Oil Business or Military-Industrial Complex for a change.) > > >At 12:54 PM 06/25/2002 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >>I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at >>all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, >>per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial >>mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or >>whoever's) Law, and all that. >> >>I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property >>(call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by >>states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I >>would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common >>sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. >>... >>Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will >>determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the >>"consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private >>property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be >>decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, >>apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo >>cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual >>bananas.

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Re: Ross's TCPA paper
by Ross Anderson 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

Yes, this is a debate I've had with the medical privacy7 guys, some of whom like the idea of using Palladium to protect medical records. This is a subject on which I've a lot of experience (see my web page), and I don't think that Palladium will help. Privacy abuses almost always involve abuse of authorised access by an insider. Recent case: 15-year old girl in Croydon, England, gets termination of pregnancy without telling her mother. This is reported to the local health authority, where her uncle works; he sees the report and tells the family. Palladium doesn't help here. Even if the unclse is constrined by the Fritz chip from doing anything other than look at the screen, he still has the information. The fix for this problem is anonymous reporting, with the identity of the girl known only to the treating physician. It is a policy issue, not a techjnology issue; if technology such as Palladium is introduced it will most likely be by health authorities trying to find an excuse to retain access to data that they shouldn't have in the first place. (We've seen a similar effect with smartcards in healthcare, and in fact the general phenomenon has an interesting similarity with what the environmental economists call the `social reward trap': making `green' goods available often increases pollution as people consume green goods rather than consuming less.) Ross --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Re: privacy <> digital rights management
by Nomen Nescio 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

Privacy means different things in different contexts. In some cases you have to share data with someone else that you don't want them passing on widely. Medical data is an obvious example. So are credit card numbers. If you order books from Amazon, you have to give them your street address, and you don't necessarily want that shared. This kind of private data, which has to be shared with others, is what can be protected with a DRM system. Let us consider how a TCPA compliant version of Amazon.com can enhance protection of your private data. When you make your first order from Amazon, you have to supply personal data such as credit card and address that you don't want them sharing. Of course they have a privacy policy promising not to do that, but with TCPA we can do better. Suppose Amazon is running TCPA compliant software for their OS and database. Further suppose it is open source. We will see that open source software works even better with TCPA than closed source. Keep in mind that only Amazon is running a TCPA system in this example, the customers are not. But the customers do have TCPA-aware software that they can use to check that Amazon is doing what it claims. Your TCPA-aware software which will upload your personal data to Amazon first requires Amazon to prove that it is running in trusted mode. The TPM chip provides a signed statement showing that Amazon booted into HP's Trusted Linux. This is signed by a key which never leaves the TPM module; the key is certified by a TCPA root key so you know it is a valid TPM key. The signed data includes a hash of the BIOS which was computed by the TPM before booting; a hash of the OS loader module which was computed by the BIOS before transferring control to that module; and a hash of relevant parts of the Trusted Linux OS which was computed by the OS loader before transferring control. Your software can check these hashes against published values which represent known good builds of these software modules. In this way you can know that the remote system is running an unhacked version of Trusted Linux. The Linux software then similarly sends you a certification that it is running the TCPA compliant database application, again including a hash of the application before it was loaded. This open source software has its own published hash of valid builds. This assures you that you are talking to this particular program and no other. The TCPA compliant database program is special in that it has suppressed the large-scale database export features, and it saves the data in encrypted form. No other program will be able to access the data once it is stored because of the encryption. And this program with its missing export feature can only work on records one by one (as well as providing appropriate summary and accounting features). It will not be possible to export the database en masse for importing into an insecure program. Of course, nothing can stop Amazon from entering your credit card data and/or address into another program. They need to see this data in order to perform their normal business functions, and anyone can read it off the screen and type it into another computer. But the point is, they can't do it to the entire database. Amazon has millions of customers. Your data is a needle in that haystack. Business-wise, it makes no sense for Amazon to try to sell your data or illicitly pass it to business partners if they have to do it one record at a time. The important feature to prevent is large-scale export, and the TCPA compliant software is designed so that is impossible. Note how important the open-source element is in this security analysis. With closed source software, we have to trust Microsoft and the database vendor that their software performs as claimed. If the database guys had a secret feature to allow for export, there would be no way for third parties to detect it. But with open source, we have the source code, and we have a guarantee that a program built from that code is being run (we have a hash over the binary file). We can know exactly what the capabilities are of that remote software. The kind of guarantees provided by TCPA are much stronger and more convincing when the source code of the trusted software is publicly available. Surprisingly, TCPA may therefore provide a boost to open source. Note that, as with the earlier DRM analysis, the TCPA in this example exists to help Amazon prove to people that they are behaving honestly. They already have a privacy policy which restricts what they will do with their database. The TCPA lets them provide technical evidence that they are running software which will enforce those same restrictions. It makes it possible for customers to trust Amazon to follow through on their promises with much greater reliability than is possible today.

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Fakes...
by Canangium Muncerian 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

There is something extremely wrong with every single person in this world. They seem to be part of a pointless simulation. "The Matrix" has portrayed this idea somewhat, yet we watch it and go back to our daily lives. Yet in this very life, underneath the seeming diversity in people's opinions, values, talents, and interests, there is something that makes everyone the same. It is as though this planet is populated only by mindless fakes, objects that provide the appearance of intellect on the surface but are based on only mechanical reflexes and primitive thought patterns. I don't really care if anything I say has been said before, if it was portrayed in movies, in books, or in the lyrics of some useless song. With 6 billion people covering the globe at any given time, thousands and thousands of years of written literature, probability dictates almost any combination of words has occurred numerous times. Yet there is clear evidence there was no action, so those words, just like the people who spoke them, must have been just more fakes. I am forced to use this language (also created by the fakes) because there is no alternative, so everything I write here could be misunderstood to make me sound like one of them, but it will be the action that I take and the dedication that will separate me from them. In my estimation the fakes that occupy this planet don't make up 99%, but more like 99.9999999% of the population. I know this because I've searched, and in my search have so far only found one true ally (I have found him via the internet as well). But even with those numbers we would not give up because there is no logic in giving up. The people on this planet are all fakes because the societies have made them this way. Ideas that populate people's minds have no logic or purpose. Concepts such as religion, god, morality, individualism, freedom, identity, happiness, love and billions of others are all just memes. Like parasites they infect the minds and spread from one person to the next. They have no point or purpose; they exist without any logical basis or foundation. The fakes are completely controlled by them, and they will never see beyond them. To not be controlled by them one must do more then just realize that they exist. One must resist any ideas that have no point, endlessly question, and never accept imperfection or compromise in any answer. We (myself and my ally) are different though. While we have had the limitation of existing only in these societies, something has made it possible for us to resist being indoctrinated into becoming one of those fakes. We have no arbitrary wants, needs, desires, or preferences. If this world continues to exist the way it is then nothing in it will ever have a point. It will always be just a product of random evolution, one with no importance or relevance. The only logical goal is to dedicate our lives to increasing our numbers, those that aren't fakes, so that in thousands of years our numbers may be such that the fakes would no longer be a threat to progress. Those that join us must see every other person occupying this planet as the enemy, and us as their only allies. Like us they must have dedication only to taking the most logical action, and to nothing else. To tell you more about us, we've posted some personal information about ourselves on a website. You'll also find past responses to us on that webpage. Obviously anyone reading this email is most likely just another fake. Do not simply reply to this email, if you do your message will almost certainly be ignored. If you do wish to communicate, first demonstrate your interest by taking the effort to find us online, one of the ways to do that is described below. Use a major search engine to search for every combination of any two words from the list below. The order of the words shouldn't matter as long as you do not search for them in quotes. Also when you pick the right combination you shouldn't need to look at more then the first matches. There is no trick to this and this isn't meant to be quick, it should, however, be fairly clear if/when you find the right site. The following search engines were verified by us, please use any of them as other search engines may simply not list us correctly: MSN, Lycos, InfoSeek, LookSmart, HotBot, InfoSpace, Google, Ask.com, AllTheWeb, Teoma, WebCrawler, AltaVista, Yahoo, AOL Search, Netscape Search. perfect theory endless eternal desire driving perpetual vision logical infinite dream final best escape objective thought only logic ambition clue If this can't be solved, or if you never reach us, there should be no reason for you to give up as we will never give up and thus there will always be some way to find us. -------------- Ryan and Jacob __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com

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Re: Brin
by R. A. Hettinga 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or whoever's) Law, and all that. I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property (call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. Apparently, as "Somebody" observed below, Brin likes to split the difference fine enough between those two things to get considerable intellectual mileage out of the issue. His finger in my eye about lying, coupled with a long list of book-jacket blurbs, is probably part of that act as well. Since he's going on about false dichotomies, maybe I should trot out the philosophy department joke from my Mizzou undergraduate days about there being two kinds of people, those who think in dichotomies, and those who don't... :-). Adolescent appeals to first-semester informal fallacies aside, I (as most people behave, even if they don't explicitly believe it), really do think that ethics, much less politics, comes after physics, and not the other way around. For me that means that Coase's theorem -- the internal cost of transfer-pricing an asset on a firm's books versus the transaction cost of buying and selling those assets in a market -- applied to the coming "geodesic economy" of internet-based information and professional opinion, or even physical force, in a world of ubiquitous financial cryptography on geodesic networks, will eventually determine "firm" size in those markets, monopoly, oligopoly, or commodity markets or, more properly, monopoly (the USA and other state force monopolies) versus monopolistic competition (Burger King versus McDonald's, using "marketing", trademarks and patents to differentiate themselves) versus perfect competition (a grade-A soybean is a grade-A soybean, a bit is a bit is a bit, buy the cheapest bit). Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the "consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual bananas. Just so people do know what I think about the actual outcome, of economic progress, not the monkey-cage fight, it's this: Someday we'll have a race to the bottom. We'll have instantaneous, auction-priced, cash-settled, yes, Virginia, pretty much anonymous, markets for anything digitable -- anything that matters, in other words -- and that branded monopolistic competition, much less monopoly, even for force, will become increasingly less a fixture in our daily lives. In that case, if someone uses their own camera to observe us walking down the street, it wouldn't matter much, just like it doesn't matter much now. Of course, being interested in the effects of transaction cost on ownership structure, I'd go one further and expect that they'd even charge us a whisker's bit of cash to walk on their sidewalk as well, if it ever got cheap enough for them to do so, but that's just me. Toward that end, I suppose, Dr. Brin can, um, fling, all the names -- and all the appeals to authority -- he wants to at me, and I wish him well in his further efforts to terrify the public. It's an ancient and honorable way to make a living (see my .sig, below...), especially in a world where the net, and crypto, and, quite frankly, libertarian/anarcho-capitalism, which are the political-economic results of the first two bits of physics, have blown all the old space-opera scenarios out of the water, especially the "can't we all just get along", command-economy, top-down, "liberal", enlightened-erst-feudal, government-is-good-for-you, space-opera scenarios. ;-). Personally, I'm still much more interested in *doing* things -- finance using internet bearer financial cryptography, and even some of the tools in Wayner's book -- than I am with *talking* about things anymore. But, if the, ahem, market's any indication, :-), I may not have a choice. In which case I *will* probably be writing more, and doing less. Coming soon, to a monkey-cage near you? Here's hoping that finance will be, um, conserved, instead... Cheers, RAH - --- begin forwarded text

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