Assange-WikiLeaks Crypto Arms Call Triple Cross

5 Dec 2012

      Assange-WikiLeaks Crypto Arms Call Triple Cross

Applying cryptography's bag of tricks to Julian Assange's
introduction to the new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the
Future of the Internet, entitled "A Call to Cryptographic Arms,"
it could be taken as a "A Cryptographic Call to Arms," that is,
an encrypted warning contained within the plain text.

Assange and WikiLeaks, like cypherpunks, is masterfully wily
at practicing the characteristic cryptography feature of duplicity,
never revealing what is going on beneath public assurances of
trustworthiness.

Assange and WikiLeaks, like cypherpunks, invoke open-closed
cryptographic duplicity as his personal behavior and as the policy
of the WikiLeaks initiative. Concealing, obscuring and diverting
his personal affairs while seeking publicity, and concealing,
obscuring and diverting the inner affairs of the operation  for
disclosing documents openly. This is cryptography in action.

In the same fashion Assange-WikiLeaks has periodically published
encrypted packages as "insurance" against takedown, it has also
released the unredacted State Department cables by way of a
complicated, presumably, orchestrated, leak. The leak of the
password to the cable collection by giving it to journalists to
publish is a classic instance of cryptographic dupery.

Cryptography formulates threats, ruses, disclosures, ploys,
diversions, deceptions, double-crosses, triple-crosses to hide
strengths and weaknesses, attacks and defenses, lies and
dissimulations, assurances of innocence and candor.

Crypto AG is a classic instance of NSA deception, among many,
to install a backdoor in a widely adopted encrypted system, then
leaked decades later as a warning to those who think they can
obtain fully secure communication systems.

A recent example if that of open source cryptography promoted
as means to verify encryption systems by public disclosure and
examination. Its shortcoming, and virtue to the wily, is that far
from all cryptographers subscribe to the sharing venture -- notably
those associated with governments, corporations and mendacious
individual efforts, instead take open source and not reveal what is
found of its weaknesses (to be exploited in secret) nor what is done
with the gift. US spies have admitted they take open source but do
not give back.

The same could be said of leak sites, anonymizers, IRC, news and
mail groups, social media, Skype, varieties of comsec offerings, and
the Internet itself among its many levels of access. Offer services,
free, paid, purloined or onioned, for which the take is much greater
than the offerings -- the standard asymmetric-warfare model, derived
from governance, education, non-profits and history's all-time leader,
religion, the latter exceeded only by wily hyenas patrolling the herd
to mount novel attacks to take down over-confident herdmasters.

Cryptographers do not trust one another. Cypherpunks triple cross
as ruse.

Consider that the Assange-WikiLeaks book Cypherpunks is a
cryptographic ruse which conveys an encrypted body of secrets,
additional insurance against the takedown of Assange and WikiLeaks
to be declared after the volume is widely distributed in print and
e-book form. A modern Lutherian proclamation of open and
encrypted dissent against the corruption of closed and secret
authority.

Further, imagine that Assange-WikiLeaks is planting encrypted
bits in all its releases which can be decrypted at a future time,
to re-assemble into a larger disclosure. In the world of cryptography
this would be expected.  Cypherpunks advocate this encrypted
concealment, dispersion, distribution and future coalescence.

Pre-positioning attacks and defenses well before they are needed
is conventional warfare -- as well as political, economic and
philosophical enterprise. Cypherpunks, before, during and after
WikiLeaks, has pre-positioned encrypted packs of arms demurely
clothed in dissent from and opposition to governance, finance and
faith.

This cryptographic call to arms is a triple-cross under a double-cross
planted in roots of trust, openness masquerading for multi-level
deception, in short, the essence of heavily-armored cryptography.

John Young

Ted Smith

Cincinnatus

Ted Smith

Cincinnatus

Greg Broiles

Ted Smith

jd.cypherpunks

coderman

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