What you won't hear at Davos

Steve Kinney admin at pilobilus.net
Tue Jan 26 19:20:51 PST 2016


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 01/26/2016 06:39 PM, Ryan Carboni wrote:

> The elites at Davos like to talk about change and improving
> lives, but some fly by helicopter from a private jet. They
> could have collectively chartered a plane to Zurich, and then
> take a train to Davos. It does become reminiscent in which
> Russia supports American democracy groups, and the US supports
> Russian democracy groups... democracy has become a buzzword for
> elites to reduce the autonomy of other elites.

Quite so. "Democracy" was an early casualty of the Industrial
Revolution, which concentrated unprecedented wealth and power in
the hands of industrialists.  In the United States, the issue of
collective rule by land owners vs. collective rule by factory
owners was decided by the Civil War.  Today "democracy" normally
means "deniable subversion and control by a ruling oligarchy."

> In 1793, it took less then a year for Napoleon to raise an army
> of a million men.
> 
> In WWII, it took America several years to build up it's
> fighting strength to a level capable of fighting the Nazis.
> 
> Perhaps today, if we were to start a military from scratch, it
> will take fifteen years to do it (probably longer if you desire
> aircraft).
> 
> The point I'm making is indirect, there is a lot of inertia
> today brought on by the complexity of technology. The decisions
> made today once fully implemented cannot be changed for a
> while.

Not to mention future shock.  Big decisions made today, if they
can not be implemented by next Tuesday, are likely to be
implemented in a world where their relevance is limited at best -
if they can be implemented at all.  The future itself is
recognized as an adversary by those whose interests are best
served by maintaining established power structures.

> The elites have made wrong decisions, they have erred in the 
> direction of mass surveillance instead of mass liberty, but it
> did not stop the success of terrorists. Now we are all less
> secure.

Wait, what?  I would question the possibility that 'elites' can
make any decisions in the direction of mass liberty.  If an elite
class exists, its collective interest lies in increasing the
liberties available to the elite class, at the expense of everyone
else's liberties.

Ideally the lower classes should have the 'liberty' to choose
options from a menu presented to them by their betters.  This
softens the blow of a policy regime where "everything that is not
mandatory is prohibited."  Should one faction of an elite class
appear to advocate for 'popular liberty,' they are doing so in an
effort to shift market dynamics to favor their own enterprises, at
the expense of other elite factions that will oppose any such
nonsense.

> Apparently Juniper routers were backdoored... some of which
> were used by US agencies. One seems to hear more about the OPM
> hack then the Obamacare website being totally insecure.
> Government IT policies and organizations have been totally
> inadequate for a long time. The GCHQ wants MIKEY-SAKKE, as
> opposed to MIKEY-DH, they don't just want to intercept and
> decrypt future communications, they want to decrypt past
> communications ( as if that has been a major obstacle to 
> investigations prior to the computer).
> 
> But I ramble, to be very clear, to make the internet itself
> secure, it will probably take ten years. While frequent
> derisions that people don't use encrypted databases are
> nonsensical, the solutions more likely to yield a result will
> take longer to implement.
> 
> Basically ten years ago, all the elites made the wrong choice,
> and they don't even have the excuse of saying they properly
> weighed the issues.

Of course they weighed the issues.  Doing so enables an elite
class to use its power today, to remain an elite class tomorrow.
At the outset of the Internet's exponential growth, America's
captains of corporate industry contracted their strategic advisers
- - think tanks, intelligence services, market researchers,
propaganda shops - to determine what policies and practices would
best serve their interests in the emerging Information Age.

Informed by the openly published analyses and strategic plans of
social and political activists on the early Internet (i.e. the
WELL community's 'electronic democracy' advocates), these advisers
reported that the Internet would destabilize social and political
power structures in unprecedented ways, shifting power away from
the few toward the many - much as the printing press had in an
earlier age, but on a larger scale with more immediate, agile and
adaptive impact.

Proposed solutions included mitigating the worst impacts of the
Internet on established power by making it a surveillance
platform, with unprecedented scope and depth of penetration into
the everyday lives of whole populations.  This would facilitate
faster, more effective tactical, policy and propaganda responses
to the emergence of populist power centers on the network,
partially mitigating the Internet's undesirable impacts.  So,
along with a major shift toward authoritarian governance,
consolidated broadcast propaganda platforms and accelerated
redistribution of wealth (= power) upward in the social hierarchy,
a comprehensive State and corporate surveillance regimen was
facilitated by the "open" and inherently insecure nature of its
protocols and implementations.

Early 'netizens' understood the potential of the Internet as a
force multiplier for populist political actors, and they knew that
established power blocks with a common vested interest in the
status quo would fight back.  They redoubled their efforts to
develop, refine and propagate strategies and tactics for Internet
enabled populist political action.  Technologists sympathetic to
these efforts started developing practical countermeasures to
Internet surveillance and censorship, and the rest is Cypherpunk
history.

The meaning of "security" depends very much on context:  Whose
security, against what hostile actors?  Technologists with an
Anarchist, Libertarian or other populist political orientation
view "insecure" network protocols, software and hardware as
problems to be solved.  Political warfare assets employed by
military, law enforcement and corporate actors would call these
same features strategic and tactical assets, enabling them to
enhance the security of their employers against hostile and/or
destabilizing influences.

Occasionally, anti-security in the network infrastructure will
turn around and bite its authors in the ass - comprehensive
Chinese penetration of U.S. military contractors and the OMB
personnel records fiasco will probably stand as classic examples
for quite a while.  But occasional victories by one's adversaries
is a cost of doing business in any war, including information
warfare against one's own restive and unruly populace.  Lessons
are learned, tactics are adjusted, and the information warriors
move on to the next battle front.

We shall have a "more secure Internet" going forward.  But as long
as we do have a ruling class, we shall not have a "secure
Internet" except at the scale of darknet operations that, as their
name implies, are as secure against wide public participation as
they are against State and corporate surveillance.

I do hope the IETF and IT industries proves me at least partially
wrong, by implementing the objectives outlined in RFC 6973.  But I
believe nothing of this sort can be implemented until or unless
sufficient technical countermeasures to enable State and corporate
actors to proceed with mass surveillance and censorship as usual
are available.

Another security issue overshadows all of the above:  The role of
disinformation operations that attack the network's end users via
weaponized social psychology.  But that's a whole 'nother topic.

:o/



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1
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=jwx0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----



More information about the cypherpunks mailing list