- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

binary to 5-letter words encoder/decoder
by Stefan Claas 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

Hi all, I recently finished the English word list for my encoder/decoder and thought I would share the program with you. The software allows users with an offline computer and pencil and paper only to use their favorite encryption software and then encode /decode small binary blobs error free*, compared to other solutions IMHO. I must admit that this procedure is a bit time consuming but it should give users at least one more option in their tool set. *I received today an encrypted postcard in QR-code but was not able to decode the message, even with high dpi scan settings. https://github.com/sac001/b2w/ Regards Stefan

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NSA shill James Donald can't name NSA documents
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

...beacuse his boss and his contract don't allow him to. James has repeatedly alluded to some mysterious 'snowden document'...which he can't post here, link to, or even name. So there you have it. The list's official NSA shill.

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Biden: "If you don't vote for me, you ain't Black" -- Re: BLM's worst nightmare, Bevelyn Beaty - "Bring it on! We gonna clean up our streets…" - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

Bevelyn Z Beatty: "I came here to gloat": youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qX1y9bf6ok -f93 # ~50MiB, ~12mins Tell us how you really feel Joe Biden!-4qX1y9bf6ok.mp4 ----- Forwarded message from Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> ----- From: Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2020 20:54:43 +1000 Subject: BLM's worst nightmare, Bevelyn Beaty - "Bring it on! We gonna clean up our streets…" - [PEACE] Quote of the decade: Q. from Leah Bella Bella: .. The Dems are trying everything to get Trump out of office. They've tried [blaming him for] Covid, they've tried riots, the anarchists are his fault, everything, and the "liberals" are not going to stop, and they're seeing though that it's not affecting Trump's base; So what do they have to do? They have to cheat; so they're going to try this mail in ballots, and they're gonne try to cheat. So what I want to know is, now that you have a platform ... are you going to say something about these mail in ballots…? A. from Bevelyn Beatty: Well the reality is I'm already speaking on it. The thing is this, you would have to be retarded, to think that you're going to mail in a ballot. Like some things are just, you know? [retarded] [Chinese state media editor-in-chief ashs if US is 'mentally retarded'] … How could you think "I'm going to mail in a ballot, and they [Dems] are just going to be diligent, and they're going to accept it and ... This is the Democrat party we're talking about, THEY'RE CROOKS! They're going to STEAL it, what do you THINK is going to happen? The only way you can do that, for me personally, I would go [to vote in person]; I heard what you're saying, I [generally] will NOT wear a mask, I will raise HELL about a mask, But I will wear one, to go in there, and get my vote, down! Because the reality is this: AFTER the mask, if you _don't_ get your vote down, it might be the chip! Put it on for a second, and go in there, and vote; that is vital. Also take a screenshot [photo] of your vote, keep documentation of your vote, just in case people try to play you, and wanna recount votes... ----- Forwarded message from Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> ----- From: Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2020 20:30:48 +1000 Subject: BLM's worst nightmare, Bevelyn Beaty - "Bring it on! We gonna clean up our streets…" - [PEACE] BLM Just Met Its Worst Nightmare! Guest Bevelyn Beatty!-PVFXKMDOo8Q [Wayne Dupree Show] youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVFXKMDOo8Q -f243+251 # ~228MiB, ~ 1:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVFXKMDOo8Q Found here: https://rt.com/ ----- End forwarded message ----- ----- End forwarded message -----

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Re: shills - the ONE document
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

On Sat, 17 Oct 2020 16:31:54 +1000 jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: > On 2020-10-17 16:10, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote: > > so again, 'allegedly' snowden got 1.5 million 'documents' and the> journo-govt-shills-accomplices of snowden 'published' 10 or 20, after > getting permision > > from the government to do so. > > If accomplices of snowden, not accomplices of the deep state. > > And it does not matter which documents they published. What matters is > which documents Snowden thought mattered. > are you drunk or something? Now you're not making sense, even as a shill. > And there is one document he definitely was not supposed to get. OK, he was NOT supposed to get this 'one document'(that exists in your imagination). But he WAS SUPPOSED to get all the rest of documents that didn't reveal anything, right? He WAS SUPPOSED to get a bunch of useless stuff because he IS a shill, is what you're saying. Thanks for making my point, again. And I'll make a guess about the nature of this mysterious document. Is it a video about your homesexual encounters with black men? Is that why you want to ban gay porn?

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Re: shills - the ONE document
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

On Sat, 17 Oct 2020 15:14:33 +1000 jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: > On 2020-10-17 13:52, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote: > > you, like me, and the rest of the 'public', know exactly nothing about what snowden actually did, actually could access, et cetera. > > Snowden reported, and no one disputes his story. They want to jail him > and silence him, but they are not denying what he says. > > Plus, we know what documents he got, because he shared them. what THE FUCK are you talking about https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-did-snowden-take-not-even-nsa-really-know… "James Bamford tells Newsweek about the NSA's initial number of documents that were stolen. He adds that Clapper's new estimate, about 1.5 million, probably "reflects reality."" > And there is one document he definitely was not supposed to get. so again, 'allegedly' snowden got 1.5 million 'documents' and the journo-govt-shills-accomplices of snowden 'published' 10 or 20, after getting permision from the government to do so. your fairy tale about "the one document" is just your usual deranged nonsense. And it got boring, fast. I guess you can't link this 'one document' because your NSA contract doesn't allow you to. Oops. Shill detected.

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WATCH LIVE: Former CIA Director Testifies At Open Hearing On Russia Trump Collusion Investigation
by b0z0＠SDF.ORG 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qogsfuz6UTs b0z0(a)sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

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Part 2: Cryptography vs. Big Brother: How Math Became a Weapon Against Tyranny - YouTube
by Robert Hettinga 17 Oct '20

17 Oct '20

Part 2. Two more to go... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=n4qonsvSgAg&app=desktop

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[At-Risk Shares] Enumeration of Reasons to Leave Github
by Karl 16 Oct '20

16 Oct '20

meanwhile ... I found this on the haven issues repository, seems like it needs more value. (the evac guide at https://gitlab.com/upend/github/evac-guide is stale for 2 years). https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/issues/425 To improve the credibility of the project and attract privacy-respecting developers, please consider moving away from Github. It's particularly important to get the bug tracker off MS Github to encourage reports. Direct practical problems with using Microsoft Github A survey shows that a significant number of bug reports are withheld when the bug tracker is inside a restrictive or politically controversial walled-garden like MS Github or gitlab.com. Github is Tor-hostile according to Tor project. GH has started forcing Tor users through an extra email verification step that effectively discourages bug reports: github-tor_hostility MS failed to secure Github, which was breached to the tune of 500gb of private projects. Security incompetence is further showcased by an MS-imposed requirement to create and account and sign in to report an MS security bug. And for those not discouraged by that, the sign-in page is also broken. Then security was breached again in July 2020 when OAuth tokens were stolen from both Github and Gitlab.com. MS suppresses democracy by blocking Github access to a project that facilitates protests in Catalonia. Ethical problems with using Microsoft products and services Microsoft harms the environment by serving the two most destructive oil companies in the world: ExxonMobil and Chevron. (#ExxonKnew) Exxon notoriously knew about climate change since 1977. They not only kept it secret from the public, but they also financed a disinformation campaign. Microsoft and Chevron were caught each paying $100k to "the Cloakroom", a project to hide bribes going from large corporations to republican politicians. Chevron's right-leaning stance is further pushed through its membership with ALEC, which doubles as a superPAC and bill mill that lobbies and writes policy for U.S. republicans. Microsoft is a notorious privacy abuser: MS is a PRISM corporation prone to mass surveillance. MS supported CISPA and collaborates with the NSA. MS paid $195k to fight the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). MS drug tests its employees, thus intruding on their privacy outside the workplace. MS finances other privacy abusers: In 2012 Microsoft spent $35 million on Facebook ads and in 2015 Microsoft was the third biggest spender on Facebook ads in the world. MS proxies through Accenture to make Sweden cashless. The war on cash is war on privacy. MS supplies Bing search service which gives high rankings to privacy-abusing CloudFlare websites. MS owns and operates Outlook Email and the LinkedIn social media site, both of which are exclusive walled-gardens that limit participation to those who have a phone number and the will to share it with Microsoft. MS supplies hotmail.com email service, which uses vigilante extremist org Spamhaus to force residential internet users to share all their e-mail metadata and payloads with a corporate third-party. MS unlawfully used people's images without consent to train their facial recognition products MS distributes a nonfree operating system, Microsoft Windows, which is jam-packed with malicious functionalities, including surveillance of users, DRM, censorship and a universal back door. MS was caught surreptitiously recording Xbox users and paying contractors to listen to the recordings. Dutch government commissioned a study which found Microsoft to have several GDPR violations. E.g. Office 365 violates GDPR article 5 ¶ 1.c, GDPR article 17, and stores the data outside the EEA (may also be a GDPR breach). Microsoft is detrimental to human rights and democracy Microsoft finances AnyVision to produce facial recognition technology that the Israeli military uses as a weapon against the Palestinian people who they oppress in their occupation. Note that Israeli snipers murdered an unarmed civilian Palestinian medic (in breach of the Geneva Convention) then edited the video to deceive the public for PR damage control. Microsoft supports ICE in a variety of ways in the course of ICE's implementation of Trump's xenophobic border policies. Microsoft services an ICE contract worth $19.4 million dollars despite protest from employees. In addition to MS Office products, Microsoft has renewed a Github contract and also supplies cloud computing through its Azure platform. MS partnered with FedEx, an NRA-supporting ALEC member as well as JP Morgan Chase, the most evil bank in the world. MS conceals US military contracts to bias PR and dodge social accountablity. They have a much bigger piece these contracts than the rest of MACFANG, they lack Googles AI principles, and unlike Google they ignore employee protest and petitions. MS is among the top 15 recipients of Trump's corporate tax breaks, a benefit of $128 billion. Microsoft sacked hundreds of employees immediately after receiving the tax breaks in February 2018. MS is anti-consumer and anti-competitive MS tricked users into "upgrading" to Windows 10, which sabotages users in a variety of ways, one of which is to prevent cloud-free accounts. MS strong-armed nearly all PC manufacturers charge every buyer for an MS Windows license regardless of whether the user actually wants Windows. MS hoards software patents and uses them to fight free software. Bad alternative: gitlab.com service The Gitlab.com SaaS is often considered an alternative to MS Github, but it's even worse-- for many reasons There's nothing wrong with self-hosting an instance running Gitlab CE or using the Gitlab instance of another party. Decent alternatives self-hosting (Gogs, Gitea, Gitlab CE, etc.) (+) avoids the "shake-up" problem of shrinking the community each time the project moves (there is no risk that the privacy factors would later take a negative turn). Bitbucket (-) dodgy j/s up the yin yang that clusterfucks uMatrix (-) has some relationship with Netlify, who uses AWS (-) non-free software? Launchpad notabug.org ("NAB") (privacy policy). Based on a liberated fork of gogs. (+) supports Tor (although the onion web UI is currently disabled in response to attack, so the onion site only accepts git connections) (+) supports SSH keys and SSH over Tor (+) no CAPTCHAs (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: e-voting non-existent. (-) noteworthy drawback unrelated to privacy: NAB doesn't associate PGP keys to users, so PGP signed commits may be unavailable or more manual work needed. (-) IRC support channel is dead. Codeberg. Runs on Gitea, which is a Gogs fork. (+) web UI works on Tor (probably SSH as well) (+) supports SSH and GPG keys (+) registration very non-intrusive, and not controlling about where you get your email (+) functions without any j/s, and the javascript that exists is all 1st-party (+) supports e-voting (-) logins don't work from all Ungoogled Chromium installations (-) no onion address yerbamate.dev git.openprivacy.ca git.nixnet.xyz git.sr.ht framagit.org: Gitlab CE instance git.jami.net: Gitlab CE instance, perhaps dedicated to jami sourcehut.org

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Social Network Employees Come Out About Selling Behavior Control
by Karl 16 Oct '20

16 Oct '20

Hey! Everyone around you, and most of the people still able to post to this list, are AI zombies. The things we say are paid for by clients of the AI systems, and these systems train us to never stop, learning around every moment when we choose to do so. https://thesocialdilemma.com/ https://humanetech.com/ Signed, https://facebook.com/xloem

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His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them
by coderman 16 Oct '20

16 Oct '20

https://www.wired.com/story/his-writing-radicalized-young-hackers-now-he-wa… His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them =================================================================== Cory Doctorow’sLittle Brotherseries has been a young-adult sci-fi bible for teen hacktivists. But with the latest and darkest book in the trilogy, it’s all grown up. SET THE FIRSTand last books in Cory Doctorow’s epic, three-bookLittle Brothercypherpunk saga side by side, and they read a bit like a creative writing master class on telling two starkly opposite stories from the same prompt. The common premise: Islamist terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge. Thousands die. The Department of Homeland responds by turning San Francisco into a fascist, total-surveillance police state. The protagonist, a digitally gifted, troublemaking teen, must decide how to respond. In the firstLittle Brotherinstallment, which Doctorow published in 2008, the answer seemed righteously inevitable: The hero uses his hacker skills to fight back. Specifically, he and his plucky hacker friends figure out how to jailbreak their Xboxes and channel the video game consoles’ encrypted comms over the Tor network to create Xnet, a cheap, anonymous, surveillance-proof system for organizing protest and foiling the panopticon cops by injecting false data into their totalitarian schemes. In Doctorow’s third work in the series,publishing this week and titled Attack Surface, the protagonist takes an altogether different path. And while that path threads through the same alternate-world timeline of events, it’s tinted with all the shades of gray that the world has accumulated in the dozen long years since the series’ first, wide-eyed story. This time the hero—or antihero, more like—instead chooses to go work for the DHS. After all, she’s angry, itching to use her prowess in digital exploitation, and someone needs to help hunt these terrorists who actually knows what she’s doing. To get the job, she breaks into her friends’ Xnet system—it was riddled with hackable bugs, of course—and uses information cascade modeling to identify all of the resistance’s leaders, then serves up the map to the authorities. Not long after, she swaps her DHS job for a contract position in Iraq, where she uses those same tricks to identify insurgent leaders, hack their devices, find them, and target them for killing. The money is very good, and it keeps getting better. She’s transferred to Mexico City, switches contractors, and becomes accustomed to flying first-class, room service in Japanese-themed hotels, and aged scotch on the corporate account. Eventually she finds her employer is offering her exploitation skills to a kleptocratic Eastern European government that’s using them to suppress a “color revolution”-style movement. To assuage her guilt, she starts helping the dissidents, too, building surveillance systems by day and advising idealistic young rebels on how to defeat them by night—even while knowing that they’re almost certainly doomed, that the technological terrain has put them at an impossible disadvantage. InLittle Brother,the series’ first book, Doctorow’s narrator was the idealistic and ultimately naive crypto-rebel Marcus Yallow. InAttack Surface, the latest, it’s the realist, cynical, ethically compromised spy, Masha Maximow. But Doctorow doesn’t want the reader to choose between the two. He wants you to see yourself in both Marcus and Masha, equally, to live out his morality tale from both perspectives. And he argues that second perspective may be far more relatable: His latest book is designed not for the fresh-faced Marcuses who are still ethically unblemished, but for the far larger population of Mashas who have already made moral compromises in their tech careers—who already work at a privacy-invasive social media giant, an adtech firm, a surveillance contractor, or an intelligence agency. “I want to reach people who are maybe belated Robert Oppenheimers, who are thinking about whether or not it's a good idea to be running this Manhattan Project to manipulate people or spy on people or control people,” Doctorow told WIRED in an interview last week ahead ofAttack Surface’s release. “If you found yourself in tech because you were excited by how much self-determination and power and pleasure you got from mastering technology, and then found your entire professional life devoted to ensuring that no one else ever felt that, this is the time for your moral reckoning.” Doctorow’s goal isn’t to shame those readers, nor to absolve them. His message for all of those ethically compromised Mashas, he says, is that it’s not too late. “Now is the time to figure out which side of the struggle you're on,” he says. “The side of computers controlling us, or the side of computers giving us control.” For the last 12 years, Doctorow'sLittle Brotherseries has inspired and influenced digital subversives from Aaron Swartz to Laura Poitras to Edward Snowden.PHOTOGRAPH: JUCO THE FIRST PERSONto tell me aboutLittle Brotherwas John Gilmore, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of theoriginal Cypherpunks, the 1990s techno-libertarian group that coined the term. As we sat in a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Mission District on a rainy day in 2011, Gilmore talked me through the whole cypherpunk canon: Tim May’sCyphernomicon, Eric Hughes’ “Cypherpunks’ Manifesto,” and the legendary Cypherpunks Mailing List, which Gilmore had once hosted on his own server and whose archives he copied onto a USB drive for me on the spot. And by the way, had I heard about a very interesting young-adult fiction book about teens using crypto tools to take on the DHS? By then, in fact,Little Brotherwas already a best seller and was quickly becoming required reading for a certain class of young, digital dissidents. When Nathan Freitas, today the director of the smartphone-focused privacy nonprofit Guardian Project, downloaded the ebook in 2008, he found that it captured his experience unlike anything he’d ever read before. “It was the world I had lived in since 9/11,” says Freitas, who at the time had left a job as a developer for mobile device firm Palm to become a pro bono security consultant, working on behalf of every underdog from protesters at the Republican National Convention to Tibetan monks demonstrating against Chinese rule. Little Brotherquickly became the book Freitas tried to convince every young technologist to read, to recruit them into a more political use of cryptography and hacking. Over the following years he watched it grow into a kind of bible for the digital protest movement, a piece of science fiction that felt far more immediate and urgent than sci-fi’s hacker classics. “It was a call to action for people who then would reference it in the way that people used to referenceSnow CrashorNeuromancer,” Freitas says. “It was a kind of touchstone for this idea that ‘now it's serious, now the internet is connected to our lives and war and oppression and surveillance.’” Most Popular - GEAR Prime Day 2020: The 65 Absolute Best Deals (Updated) GEAR TEAM - GEAR Amazon Prime Day: 28 Best Deals if You Work From Home (Updated) JULIAN CHOKKATTU AND GEAR TEAM - GEAR Prime Day 2020 Is Over: Here Are the 32 Best Remaining Deals (Updated) GEAR TEAM - - GEAR The iPhone 12 Ships Without a Charger. Will It Curb E-Waste? JULIAN CHOKKATTU ADVERTISEMENT In 2009, Freitas putLittle Brotheron the reading list for a class he taught at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. One of the graduate students in that NYU class was Harlo Holmes, who today serves as director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation,teaching activists and journalists how to combat surveillance. Holmes says that reading Doctorow’s book changed her life. “There was nothing more fundamental to my particular origin story than the semester I spent in that class and readingLittle Brother,” Holmes says. “It informed my thoughts around how privacy should work, the interplay between movement activists, technology, and the law, and what you should look out for when inviting technologies into your life to do that movement building.” Holmes’ final project for Freitas’ class was a smartphone camera tool she called “A Bigger Brother,” which has since evolved intoInformacam, designed to pull in phone sensor data and embed it in images to prove the authenticity of photos taken by protesters, such as images documenting police violence. In February 2013, Doctorow published anotherLittle Brotherbook titledHomeland. This sequel told the story of how Doctorow’s hero, Marcus Yallow, is given a USB drive full of scandalous, classified secrets from spy agencies—torture, drone strikes, mass surveillance—and has to decide how to make it all public without inflicting collateral damage on innocent lives, including his own. The book featured an afterword from Aaron Swartz, the young hacktivist who had been criminally prosecuted for downloading a collection of academic papers from the paywalled repository JSTOR in the hopes of making them freely available. Just two months beforeHomeland’s release, facing years in prison,Swartz had committed suicide. His posthumous words resonated inHomeland’s pages: “The system is changing,” Swartz wrote. “Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time—this is real life, after all—but we finally have a chance.” A month later, documentary filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras was readingHomelandwhile exchanging PGP keys and encrypted emails about bombshell NSA documents with a source she knew only as “Citizenfour.” Poitraswrote in her journalthat the book “feels likes a mirror of the exact fucking reality I’m living in. National security leaks, detention, threat of death, key passing.” A few months later, Poitras traveled to Hong Kong withGuardianjournalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill to meet Citizenfour, whose real name was Edward Snowden. She gave Snowden a copy ofHomeland. After the whistleblower and journalists had collaborated to publish the biggest leak of NSA secrets in history, Snowden took the book with him on his journey into exile in Russia. In her subsequent documentary about Snowden,Citizenfour, Doctorow’s book appears on the bedside table of his hotel room, next to a tangle of cables and piled laptops. “That moment inCitizenfourwhere Snowden grabs a copy ofHomelandand sticks it in his go bag, that’s kind of the apotheosis of it right there,” Doctorow says. “That was the moment when I thought, in some tiny way, I have been part of the moral instruction of some part of the current generation of technologists. The idea that now, whenever someone sits down to make a choice—do I take power away from users or do I give it to them?—Little Brothermight be weighing on their conscience, that is an awesome responsibility and a source of incredible pride.” Snowden himself says he's been reading Doctorow since his early twenties, long before Poitras handed him that copy of the secondLittle Brotherbook. "He is to me a radical idealist, because no matter how bad things get, his mind goes to the stories of cooperation and creation-sharing," Snowden wrote in a text message to WIRED. "When the traditional structures of oppression are up to no good, as was the case inLittle Brother, Cory doesn't reflexively indoctrinate young readers with platitudes on the inevitability of corruption. He helps them reimagine the limits of their own power." “Cory doesn't reflexively indoctrinate young readers with platitudes on the inevitability of corruption,” Edwards Snowden says. "He helps them reimagine the limits of their own power."PHOTOGRAPH: JUCO DESPITE THE DARK-AS-TOMORROW’S-HEADLINESthemes at their core,Little BrotherandHomelandwere young-adult novels, a two-part teen radical’s primer.Attack Surface, by contrast, is for actual adults, Doctorow says. Not because it has more adult language, violence, or sex—Doctorow cut the only sex scene in the book from the final draft—but because it deals with the very adult problem of having lived an ethically imperfect life. “The thing adults do is confront their moral legacy. They look back on what they've done and they think about their regrets,” Doctorow says. “The ongoing process of being an adult is having been corralled into compromises and then making sense of those compromises for yourself.” Doctorow says the book is meant to stand alone for new readers—even non-techy, civilian observers on the sidelines of the crypto wars—but that it’s also meant to speak to the core, cypherpunk audience of the first twoLittle Brotherbooks. And that includes the ones who didn’t turn out to be the heroes of their own story. “A bunch of people who grew up readingLittle Brother, imagining that they would become revolutionaries, woke up one day and realized that they're not revolutionaries, that in fact they're helping to make things worse, that they're part of a system that harms people,” says Eva Galperin, alongtime digital activist and head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab. Galperin serves in part as the inspiration for Masha’s character—both hackers, fictional and nonfictional, were born in the Soviet Union but grew up in San Francisco with immigrant parents. But Galperin sees Masha also in her idealistic friends who went to work for Facebook or Palantir or government agencies, vowing to change them from the inside but finding themselves changed instead. “This is a book for the people who realize that they've grown up and made a lot of compromises,” Galperin says, “and about how you turn back from that.” Attack Surface at some points reads almost like an admission of regret from Doctorow himself. When Masha describes how easily she exploited and rolled up Marcus Yallow’s Xnet for the DHS or the limits of encryption in an era when spy agencies and their contractors have hoards of zero-day vulnerabilities they can use to hack their targets, the book seems to be walking back a degree of technological solutionism that has long since gone out of style. At times it seems to even flirt with defeatism, conceding that all the techniques that worked to stop mass surveillance in Little Brother become useless the instant a sophisticated adversary has identified you as a subject for targeted surveillance. At one point, Doctorow writes in Masha’s voice about the hero of his earlier works in a passage that might also be read as Doctorow berating his past self: “What I truly hated about Marcus Yallow, above all else, was this: He gave people hope when no hope was called for. He told them they could master their computers and their networks, communicate in private and in secret, form networks of mutual aid and use them to bring down the powerful and unjust. But I’ve been on the other side of the data center, I’ve seen how hard it is to cover your tracks, to be perfect in your opsec, to know who and what to trust, to write code that is flawless.” But Doctorow says that the intention ofAttack Surfacewasn’t to swing in the other direction on the spectrum between “nerd triumphalism” and “nerd despair,” as he puts it. Instead, it’s to find a more nuanced middle ground, one that acknowledges that technology can win some battles, but that others must be won with human willpower and political struggle, sometimes with the aim of controlling technology’s most dangerous applications. The title ofAttack Surfacecomes from thecybersecurity term for a target system’s exposure to exploitation: The more attack surfaces—external connections and inputs—the more vulnerable the system is to hacking. But Doctorow says he chose the title because he defines “attack surface” as the volatile edge where two systems meet. Those systems might be a hackable device and the internet, or technology and the law, or even technology and human beings, with each having the power to potentially exploit the other. Those edges add up to a far more complex and unpredictable picture than the one Doctorow sketched inLittle Brother. The world ofAttack Surfaceis one where technology isn’t necessarily a force for good or evil, but where it has to be bent to the right cause by human ethics. “Technology is a tool that gives us space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology,” one wise character summarizes near the end ofAttack Surface, lecturing both Marcus and Masha. “It’s like parallel parking: You go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other.” Across its three-book arc, theLittle Brothernow achieves something similar: After driving his car to the extremes of digital idealism, Doctorow has backed it up to the other extreme of digital pessimism. And in doing so, he’s carved out a space for himself to fit a far messier truth between the two.

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