Oh look, Deutsche Telekom’s new anti-NSA phone was recent­ly panned by crit­ics as hack­able. Why? Well, one rea­son is that it uses non-open sourced encryp­tion that has­n’t been sub­ject to peer review. Might there be a BND back­door hid­ing in there? Maybe?

Deutsche Welle
Crit­ics slam Simko: Deutsche Telekom’s secure ‘Merkel­phone’

After the NSA spy­ing scan­dal, Deutsche Telekom says its “secure mobile plat­form” SiMKo pro­tects users from tap­ping. But crit­ics say it’s too expen­sive and still vul­ner­a­ble to hack­ing.

Date 03.12.2013
Author Michael Scatur­ro
Edi­tor Sonya Diehn

The Ger­man telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny says its Simko phones offer the same lev­el of secu­ri­ty to gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate clients as the Simko device that Telekom made for Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel. It hopes its plat­form will become a stan­dard that oth­er Euro­pean Union gov­ern­ments — and per­haps the EU itself — can use to thwart spy­ing.

Secure con­nec­tion

“The idea behind Simko is to project your own infra­struc­ture,” said Michael Bartsch, head of mobile secu­ri­ty at Deutsche Telekom. The com­pa­ny is mak­ing its net­work secure, Bartsch said. The phones then link up to the secure net­work through an encrypt­ed gate­way, he explained.

Bartsch said that Simko should allow, for exam­ple, a Ger­man busi­ness­man in Africa and his col­league in Paris to talk, email, and chat secure­ly.

The Simko phones do this via an encrypt­ed con­nec­tion to a com­pa­ny’s net­work. That net­work then con­nects the calls by means of a serv­er in Ger­many. This is intend­ed to assure that only trust­ed devices can inter­act with one anoth­er.

Pre­vi­ous ver­sions of the Simko plat­form used iter­a­tions of the Android or Win­dows Mobile oper­at­ing sys­tems. Telekom’s newest release, SiMKo 3, uses Sam­sung Galaxy S3 phones, and allows encrypt­ed voice calls through over Wi-Fi and 3G.

Bartsch said only mil­i­taries or gov­ern­ments sought encrypt­ed voice com­mu­ni­ca­tions, until about three or four years ago.

“It’s new for the con­sumer mar­ket,” Bartsch said. While the ser­vice works in cities, where mobile net­works are robust, the con­nec­tion is not as good in the coun­try­side, he con­ced­ed.

Mod­i­fied Galaxy

...

Telekom says Euro­pean gov­ern­ments and com­pa­nies approached it in search of non-US secure mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices. The com­pa­ny says one of Simko’s biggest sell­ing points is anonymi­ty — it says it does­n’t store any user data on its servers.

The com­pa­ny does­n’t even know who is using the devices, Bartsch added: “It could be the CEO or it could be the porter. We don’t know.”

Over­priced and hack­able?

But crit­ics of Telekom’s plat­form point out that it is extreme­ly expen­sive: each device costs about 1,700 euros ($2,310). A com­pa­ny would have to buy more than one, plus pay thou­sands in con­sult­ing and host­ing ser­vices from Telekom, to use Simko3.

A Ger­man tech indus­try CEO con­tact­ed by DW said he thought Simko had its mer­its, but felt that app-based secure chat and voice pro­grams — like Red­Phone or Silent­Cir­cle — were more cost-effec­tive alter­na­tives.

“Micro­phone log­ging could be an issue through a back­door in the Android or Apple iOS — in that case, Silent Cir­cle would­n’t help you. But most busi­ness peo­ple will nev­er have to wor­ry about this prob­lem,” the CEO said.

Pri­va­cy advo­cates in Ger­many and the U.S. also fault­ed Telekom for not using encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy that has been sub­ject­ed to peer analy­sis.

Christo­pher Soghoian of the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union said that in the wake of the NSA scan­dal, and alle­ga­tions of gov­ern­ment back­doors in some encryp­tion tech­niques, the only sys­tems that users should trust are those that are open source.

“Think of it this way: see­ing back­doors and see­ing mis­takes are two dif­fer­ent things,” Soghoian said. “No one can write 50,000 lines of per­fect code. The NSA and oth­er intel­li­gence agen­cies employ sophis­ti­cat­ed hack­ers to find these mis­takes.”

This is fas­ci­nat­ing: for­mer US cyber­czar Richard Clarke was giv­ing the keynote address at the Cloud Secu­ri­ty Alliance Sum­mit and he seems to be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­miss­ing the idea that the gov­ern­ments push­ing data-local­iza­tion pro­pos­als are actu­al­ly inter­est­ing in pro­tect­ing their cit­i­zen’s infor­ma­tion from NSA spy­ing and sug­gest­ed that it would do noth­ing mean­ing­ful in terms of secur­ing the data any­ways.

But Clarke also sug­gest­ed that the NSA needs to almost become the anti-NSA, like Jacob Appel­baum has sug­gest­ed, and inform the pub­lic of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties it finds instead of stash­ing them away for use lat­er. And they should back out of involve­ment with encryp­tion stan­dards alto­geth­er.

As the arti­cle also points out, “per­haps the best route to data secu­ri­ty is imple­ment­ing trust­ed encryp­tion stan­dards for data in trans­mis­sion, in use and at rest”, so if the NSA real­ly did remove itself from encryp­tion stan­dards altogth­er and allowed for the devel­op­ment of unbreak­able encryp­tion, and then cloud ser­vices stan­dard­ize the use of that encryp­tion for data-trans­mis­sion, data stor­age, and data usage, are the cloud ser­vices, them­selves, are going to the sole hold­ers of those encryp­tion keys? Is hand­ing off data exclu­sive­ly to the pri­vate sec­tor the com­pro­mise solu­tion we’re head­ing towards?

Search Secu­ri­ty
Richard Clarke: NSA rev­e­la­tions show poten­tial for police state
Bran­dan Blevins, News Writer Pub­lished: 24 Feb 2014

SAN FRANCISCO — Rev­e­la­tions about NSA mon­i­tor­ing activ­i­ties over the last year show the poten­tial for a police state mech­a­nism, accord­ing to the for­mer U.S. cyber­se­cu­ri­ty czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire con­se­quences.

At the 2014 Cloud Secu­ri­ty Alliance Sum­mit, unof­fi­cial RSA Con­fer­ence open­er Richard Clarke, chair­man of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based Good Har­bor Con­sult­ing LLC, spoke to a packed audi­ence. The for­mer cyber­se­cu­ri­ty advi­sor to Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma dis­cussed his involve­ment in the Decem­ber 2013 report review­ing the data col­lec­tion and mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.

Clarke said that the reac­tion to leaks by for­mer NSA con­trac­tor Edward Snow­den has per­haps been overblown, because he described the employ­ees at the three-let­ter agen­cies as “incred­i­bly intel­li­gent peo­ple” who are focused on com­bat­ing ter­ror­ism and pun­ish­ing vio­la­tions of human rights. As part of the review process, Clarke and his group were giv­en what he called carte blanche secu­ri­ty clear­ances to review all of the agen­cies’ intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing capa­bil­i­ties.

Those employ­ees are not cur­rent­ly lis­ten­ing to ran­dom phone calls and read­ing email, Clarke said, but that does­n’t mean U.S. cit­i­zens should ignore the agen­cies’ grow­ing capa­bil­i­ties.

“In terms of col­lect­ing intel­li­gence, they are very good. Far bet­ter than you could imag­ine,” Clarke said. “But they have cre­at­ed, with the growth of tech­nolo­gies, the poten­tial for a police state.”

Clarke said such con­cerns are hard­ly new, point­ing to the gov­ern­ment com­mit­tee head­ed by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s. Church warned at the time that the tech­nolo­gies at intel­li­gence agen­cies were devel­op­ing at such an alarm­ing rate that, if they were all turned on, the U.S. would nev­er be able to turn them off, effec­tive­ly cre­at­ing a per­ma­nent police state in which the entire pop­u­lar would be under con­stant sur­veil­lance.

Though such warn­ings seem dire, Clarke not­ed that the seem­ing­ly end­less scope of cur­rent gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance activ­i­ties stemmed large­ly from a lack of strict guid­ance from pol­i­cy mak­ers. He said a major aspect of the report to the White House was sim­ply prompt­ing the ques­tions that were pre­vi­ous­ly unasked: What are our intel­li­gence agen­cies col­lect­ing? What should they be col­lect­ing? If we should be col­lect­ing data, how do we safe­guard it? If we’re col­lect­ing data, how do we stay con­sis­tent with U.S. tra­di­tions of pri­va­cy and gov­ern­ment over­sight?

...

Clarke warned that such mea­sures are need­ed soon­er rather than lat­er. Harken­ing back to the ter­ror­ist attacks on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, which trig­gered a rash of secu­ri­ty-focused leg­is­la­tion such as the Patri­ot Act that laid the foun­da­tion for the intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing capa­bil­i­ties the U.S. gov­ern­ment has today, he said anoth­er large ter­ror­ism event could push the coun­try fur­ther toward a police state.

“The NSA, despite all the hoopla, has been a force of good. It could, with anoth­er pres­i­dent or after anoth­er 9/11, be a force not for good,” Clarke said. “Once you give up your rights, you can nev­er get them back. Once you turn on that police state, you can nev­er turn it off.”

...

U.S. cloud providers los­ing mar­ket share

Much of the dis­cus­sion around the NSA rev­e­la­tions right­ful­ly has been around civ­il lib­er­ties and per­son­al pri­va­cy, but accord­ing to Clarke, the “pol­i­cy mis­takes” that led to wide­spread data sur­veil­lance are also hav­ing a neg­a­tive impact on the busi­ness of U.S. cloud providers.

Though the scope is unclear, Clarke said that rival cloud providers in Europe and par­tic­u­lar­ly Asia are suc­cess­ful­ly play­ing up the fears of poten­tial NSA back doors in U.S.-based cloud ser­vices to their clients. Such sell­ing points are laugh­able, he not­ed, con­sid­er­ing gov­ern­ment agen­cies around the world are engaged in many of the same activ­i­ties as the NSA.

“The hilar­i­ous part is [U.S. cloud providers] don’t have those back doors, but some of the Asian prod­ucts do,” said Clarke.

He also warned that calls from the Euro­pean Union and else­where for data local­iza­tion — basi­cal­ly, mea­sures to ensure that data is only stored with­in servers that are phys­i­cal­ly locat­ed in cer­tain coun­tries or regions — are large­ly being dri­ven by “eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions.” Those coun­tries want local com­pa­nies to be more com­pet­i­tive against inter­na­tion­al cloud providers, Clarke said. Those coun­tries have no real con­cern for whether such mea­sures will mit­i­gate sur­veil­lance activ­i­ties.

“If you think that by pass­ing a law requir­ing data local­iza­tion stops the NSA from get­ting into those data­bas­es, think again,” Clarke said. “It’s being pushed by the bot­tom line.”

Instead of rely­ing on data local­iza­tion, Clarke instead sug­gest­ed that com­pa­nies focus on actu­al­ly secur­ing their respec­tive cloud envi­ron­ments, includ­ing tak­ing steps to imple­ment the stan­dards pro­vid­ed by the Cloud Secu­ri­ty Alliance.

Clarke did not absolve the U.S. gov­ern­ment of respon­si­bil­i­ty, how­ev­er. He said there are rec­om­men­da­tions in the report to the White House that have yet to be adopt­ed, but would improve the trust of U.S.-based cloud providers.

For exam­ple, gov­ern­ment spy agen­cies should noti­fy the world any­time they dis­cov­er a poten­tial zero-day vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, accord­ing to Clarke, instead of stash­ing them away in an arse­nal for future use. He said such mea­sures are need­ed to pro­tect U.S. com­pa­nies against a bar­rage of nation-state-spon­sored hack­ers and cyber­crim­i­nal car­tels, many of which rely on a grow­ing black mar­ket of zero days to com­pro­mise orga­ni­za­tions, ulti­mate­ly cost­ing the econ­o­my “hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars.”

Clarke also rec­om­mend­ed that the gov­ern­ment appoint a strong and inde­pen­dent advi­so­ry board to over­see issues of pri­va­cy and civ­il lib­er­ties. A group known as the P Club does already exist with­in the gov­ern­ment, he not­ed, but it cur­rent­ly lacks the need­ed author­i­ty to pro­vide true over­sight over intel­li­gence agen­cies. U.S. cit­i­zens need a vis­i­ble, account­able pres­ence to be reas­sured that such mat­ters are being tend­ed to, said Clarke.

Per­haps the most vital area where the gov­ern­ment needs to regain con­fi­dence is that of encryp­tion, Clarke sug­gest­ed, espe­cial­ly after reports sur­faced late last year show­ing that the NSA may have paid secu­ri­ty ven­dor RSA $10 mil­lion to imple­ment a pur­pose­ful­ly weak­ened ran­dom num­ber-gen­er­a­tion algo­rithm as the default option in its Bsafe line of prod­ucts.

This is espe­cial­ly true in cloud envi­ron­ments, where per­haps the best route to data secu­ri­ty is imple­ment­ing trust­ed encryp­tion stan­dards for data in trans­mis­sion, in use and at rest.

“Not much real­ly hap­pened, but enough hap­pened so that the trust in encryp­tion has been great­ly erod­ed,” Clarke said. “The U.S. gov­ern­ment has to get out of the busi­ness of f—ing with encryp­tion stan­dards.”

If we do go down this path, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see which com­pa­nies sud­den­ly decide to jump into the cloud ser­vices mar­kets.

Be sure to check out this fab­u­lous arti­cle that gives a great overview of many of the issues sur­round­ing mass sur­veil­lance, encryp­tion, poten­tial balka­niza­tion of the inter­net, and oth­er pos­si­ble approach­es to mak­ing data NSA-proof. It’s a long arti­cle but well worth the read:

Tid­BITS
06 Dec 2013
Are We Ready for the Post-Snow­den Inter­net?

by Geoff Dun­can

It has been near­ly six months since gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance rev­e­la­tions from Edward Snow­den began to be pub­lished in the Guardian, Wash­ing­ton Post, and oth­er out­lets. Snow­den turned over as many as 200,000 clas­si­fied doc­u­ments to jour­nal­ists, and they’ve revealed a myr­i­ad of intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing tools and oper­a­tions aimed square­ly at our elec­tron­ic lives, regard­less of loca­tion, cit­i­zen­ship, activ­i­ties, or legal sta­tus. And the hits keep com­ing: near­ly every week sees new details pub­lished from Snowden’s cache, momen­tum that has stirred up many inde­pen­dent rev­e­la­tions. Some have been minor, but oth­ers — like PRISM, tap­ping inter­nal net­work links at ser­vices like Google and Yahoo, and col­lect­ing loca­tion data on mobile phones world­wide — have been aston­ish­ing.

It’s easy to enjoy “Snow­den schaden­freude.” (Or per­haps “Snow­den­freude?”) Who doesn’t like see­ing the pow­ers-that-be tak­en down a notch or two? It’s also easy to believe the ongo­ing scan­dals don’t mat­ter to ordi­nary peo­ple. After all, who cares if the NSA knows about your online piz­za order last Sat­ur­day?

The dis­clo­sures are clear­ly impact­ing gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy and diplo­ma­cy, but may also change the fun­da­men­tal archi­tec­ture of the Inter­net. A broad range of coun­tries and com­pa­nies are open­ly talk­ing about form­ing iso­lat­ed and com­part­men­tal­ized net­works to pro­tect them­selves (and their cit­i­zens) from sur­veil­lance regimes.

And that might break up the Inter­net.

It Just Works — It seems obvi­ous, but the Internet’s great­est strength is inter­op­er­abil­i­ty. If you can get an IP “dial­tone” on any of the Internet’s 40,000+ net­works, you can access any site, app, or ser­vice any­where else in the world. Sure, there are prac­ti­cal con­cerns: you might not have much band­width, access might be expen­sive, your device or soft­ware may not be com­pat­i­ble, a site might be down or blocked, your con­nec­tion might be unre­li­able, et cetera. But that fun­da­men­tal inter­op­er­abil­i­ty is the heart and soul of why the Inter­net has become humanity’s dom­i­nant com­mu­ni­ca­tions medi­um, and has made things rang­ing from smart­phones to the Arab Spring pos­si­ble.

This year’s mass sur­veil­lance rev­e­la­tions — and the legal frame­works behind them — may rep­re­sent the biggest inter­op­er­abil­i­ty chal­lenge the Inter­net has faced. Now, being part of the Inter­net com­mu­ni­ty means being sub­ject to mon­i­tor­ing by the Five Eyes — the intel­li­gence agen­cies of the Unit­ed States, the Unit­ed King­dom, Cana­da, Aus­tralia, and New Zealand — in addi­tion to law­ful inter­cept and domes­tic sur­veil­lance con­duct­ed by nation­al and local gov­ern­ments. Coun­tries can pass laws to mon­i­tor com­mu­ni­ca­tions amongst their own peo­ple or with­in their own bor­ders — most coun­tries have — but those same coun­tries almost cer­tain­ly con­sid­er the activ­i­ty of the Five Eyes an infringe­ment on their sov­er­eign­ty. And they’re not hap­py about it.

Slouch­ing Towards Balka­niza­tion — The human reac­tion to exter­nal threats is pre­dictable: cir­cle the wag­ons, bar the gates, hide the chil­dren, and raise the draw­bridge. In the extreme, a coun­try could block Inter­net access at its bor­ders, cre­at­ing a walled gar­den. Inter­net ser­vices would work domes­ti­cal­ly, but be dis­con­nect­ed from (or even incom­pat­i­ble with) the glob­al Inter­net, keep­ing out the Internet’s broad­est dan­gers and the Five Eyes.

Few nations would risk the eco­nom­ic dam­age that would come from dis­con­nect­ing from the glob­al Inter­net. A more real­is­tic option is requir­ing Inter­net behe­moths like Google, Face­book, Yahoo, Ama­zon, and Apple to locate ser­vices and store data with­in a country’s bor­ders — where they would be sub­ject to the country’s laws. The Five Eyes’ sur­veil­lance regime is effec­tive because so much every­day Inter­net traf­fic is rout­ed through data cen­ters in North Amer­i­ca and Europe — where major Inter­net com­pa­nies are head­quar­tered — and sub­ject to those coun­tries’ laws. As of Jan­u­ary 2013, more than 100 coun­tries had no domes­tic Inter­net exchanges, mean­ing they were entire­ly depen­dent on for­eign ser­vices. Requir­ing major providers to locate data cen­ters with­in a country’s bor­ders means local traf­fic would stay local, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly beyond the reach of the NSA’s legal and clan­des­tine ten­ta­cles into Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.

It’s not a new idea. Chi­na man­dates that Inter­net busi­ness­es com­ply with the cen­sor­ship and data han­dover require­ments of the so-called “Great Fire­wall.” It’s not just a pro-for­ma require­ment: Chi­na has impris­oned a num­ber of dis­si­dent blog­gers, some on the basis of infor­ma­tion turned over by Yahoo’s Chi­nese sub­sidiary, and in 2010 Google moved its Chi­nese search engine from Bei­jing to Hong Kong to side­step Chi­nese cen­sor­ship require­ments. The same year, coun­tries like India, Sau­di Ara­bia, and Indone­sia moved to shut down the Black­Ber­ry ser­vice unless they were grant­ed a way to inter­cept mes­sages. Black­Ber­ry kept run­ning, most like­ly by park­ing servers in those juris­dic­tions where they can be mon­i­tored with­out involv­ing inter­na­tion­al law. Of course, Inter­net users may not be com­fort­able with what their gov­ern­ments do and don’t allow with­in their online bor­ders: accord­ing to the lat­est World Wide Web Foundation’s Web Index (found­ed by Web cre­ator Sir Tim Bern­ers-Lee), 30 per­cent of the world’s nations engage in mod­er­ate to exten­sive block­ing of online con­tent and ser­vices they deem objec­tion­able or sen­si­tive.

Some of these exam­ples pre­date recent sur­veil­lance dis­clo­sures. Who might be next? Con­sid­er Brazil. Brazil had pre­vi­ous­ly pon­dered its own nation­al secure email ser­vice (through its post office), but is now get­ting seri­ous, with Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff lay­ing out pro­pos­als to bol­ster Brazil’s domes­tic band­width (keep­ing Brazil­ian traf­fic in Brazil), require Inter­net com­pa­nies to locate data cen­ters with­in its bor­ders, and encour­age net­work oper­a­tors to use net­work­ing equip­ment designed and pro­duced in Brazil.

The notion of Brazil­ian-designed net­work­ing gear could be impor­tant. In the next two years Brazil is sched­uled to light up five new under­sea fiber links to Africa, Europe, and Asia, (and, yes, to the Unit­ed States), poten­tial­ly enabling Brazil (and its over­seas part­ners like Chi­na and South Africa) to bypass the Five Eyes. If those links — or Brazil’s expand­ed net­works — even­tu­al­ly work only with Brazil­ian gear, the coun­try could become the Internet’s largest walled gar­den. But Rouss­eff sees the moves as a way to pro­tect val­ues that his­tor­i­cal­ly have been cham­pi­oned by the Unit­ed States.

“In the absence of the right to pri­va­cy, there can be no true free­dom of expres­sion or opin­ion, and there­fore no effec­tive democ­ra­cy,” she told the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly. Then, dri­ving her point home, Rouss­eff announced (iron­i­cal­ly, via Twit­ter) that Brazil will be host­ing an ICANN sum­mit on Inter­net pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty in April 2014, and can­celled a state din­ner with the Oba­mas.

Brazil is not alone in con­sid­er­ing carv­ing away from the Five Eyes. In the Euro­pean Union, France and Ger­many have been high­ly crit­i­cal of recent sur­veil­lance rev­e­la­tions. The EU’s inter­nal mar­ket com­mis­sion­er Michel Barnier has called for a “Euro­pean data cloud”, and EU jus­tice com­mis­sion­er Viviane Red­ing char­ac­ter­ized the Euro­pean Parliament’s vote on data pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions as a dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence, requir­ing non-EU com­pa­nies to “deal respon­si­bly” with user data or be fined up to 5 per­cent of their annu­al world­wide rev­enue. If EU mem­ber states adopt the poli­cies, Inter­net users will see warn­ings when their per­son­al data is about to leave servers cov­ered by EU data pro­tec­tion laws.

Some “Email Made In Ger­many” ser­vices pig­gy­back­ing on pop­u­lar con­cern over NSA sur­veil­lance already do some­thing sim­i­lar. Rais­ing the ante, Deutsche Telekom is cur­rent­ly propos­ing an “all-Ger­man” domes­tic Inter­net with an eye towards encom­pass­ing the whole Schen­gen Area, twen­ty-six Euro­pean coun­tries that have mutu­al­ly set aside pass­port and immi­gra­tion con­trols. (The UK and Ire­land opt­ed out.)

Think Glob­al, Act Local — If Inter­net balka­niza­tion can pro­tect pri­va­cy, is it a bad thing? On some lev­els, keep­ing user infor­ma­tion, data pro­cess­ing, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­in a coun­try or region is just com­mon sense. Do we need to use a serv­er halfway around the world to send a quick mes­sage across town? It cer­tain­ly isn’t effi­cient, pure­ly on the basis of resource con­sump­tion, elec­tric­i­ty, net­work infra­struc­ture, and com­plex­i­ty.

The flip side is that balka­niza­tion — even when well-inten­tioned — can impact the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty and com­mu­nica­tive pow­er of the Inter­net. Requir­ing com­pa­nies to run sep­a­rate facil­i­ties in each coun­try in which they oper­ate is both expen­sive and cum­ber­some. Those costs could impede inno­va­tion if com­pa­nies have to choose between set­ting up a data cen­ter in (say) Aus­tria or invest­ing in R&D.

Some­times Inter­net ser­vices pick up their most loy­al fol­low­ings in unex­pect­ed places — that would be far less like­ly to hap­pen with a balka­nized Inter­net. Remem­ber Orkut, Google’s ear­ly exper­i­ment in social net­work­ing? Most peo­ple don’t, but it was huge in Brazil and India for years — and Google even­tu­al­ly moved it to Brazil entire­ly. Sim­i­lar­ly, Cana­di­an instant mes­sag­ing ser­vice Plurk nev­er man­aged to rival Twit­ter, but it became so pop­u­lar in Tai­wan it accept­ed mil­lions to relo­cate there in ear­ly 2013. How about San Francisco’s social/gaming ser­vice Hi5? It’s now part of Tagged, but its biggest audi­ence has always been in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Can social net­works and mod­ern apps sur­vive in a world with online bor­der check­points? Imag­ine installing a new col­lab­o­ra­tive music app or game from the App Store, only to find you can’t use it with your friends because it hasn’t been approved in their juris­dic­tion. Want to share a tagged pho­to? Maybe you can’t because your pre­ferred social net­work doesn’t sup­port a “right to be for­got­ten.” Maybe you’re trav­el­ling and want to check back in with fam­i­ly via Face­Time, but it’s blocked because Apple has not grant­ed the local gov­ern­ment a back door to tap into video chats. Or maybe all these ser­vices will work great once you reg­is­ter your devices, ver­i­fy your iden­ti­ty, and pay a fee to anoth­er coun­try. A glob­al patch­work of Inter­net regimes — each with its own quirks and require­ments — quick­ly under­mines the free exchange of data and infor­ma­tion on which the mod­ern Inter­net has thrived.

Per­haps most impor­tant­ly, coun­tries that decide to require Inter­net ser­vices host and process data local­ly will have the capa­bil­i­ty to mon­i­tor that data much more close­ly — and decide what can and can­not flow across their bor­ders, what they will and won’t col­lect. This might not be a major issue in demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries like Brazil and Ger­many — although they oper­ate their own sophis­ti­cat­ed intel­li­gence regimes. How­ev­er, author­i­tar­i­an states may decide to engage in (more) inter­nal cen­sor­ship and sur­veil­lance. Fur­ther, some firms will choose not to oper­ate in par­tic­u­lar coun­tries — like Google in Chi­na — due to legal require­ments, tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty, or the bur­den set­ting up sub­sidiaries. What if Face­book and Twit­ter had been required to run data cen­ters in Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen under the thumb of those coun­tries’ for­mer gov­ern­ments? Could the Arab Spring have tak­en place with­out the extra-ter­ri­to­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels made pos­si­ble by Face­book and Twit­ter?

...

Slouch­ing Towards Trans­paren­cy — Encryp­tion alone is no guar­an­tee data will be safe from the NSA’s pry­ing eyes, but, done well, broad­er use of strong encryp­tion can at least reduce weak points being lever­aged by the NSA or oth­ers.

So what about all those oth­er bugs and exploitable prob­lems that com­pro­mise encryp­tion and secu­ri­ty? There’s no easy answer oth­er than fix­ing those prob­lems and mak­ing bet­ter sys­tems. Most com­pa­nies han­dle this process behind closed doors (if they han­dle it at all), often con­sid­er­ing the details pro­pri­etary. But the Inter­net indus­try as a whole might be able to move for­ward via trans­paren­cy and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion author­i­ties — if only com­pa­nies would get on board.

In gen­er­al terms, trans­paren­cy would mean com­pa­nies being open not only about prob­lems and errors in their soft­ware and hard­ware prod­ucts, but also about how they cre­ate their prod­ucts so cus­tomers can under­stand their risks. For hard­ware mak­ers, that might include infor­ma­tion about design, parts, sup­ply chain, firmware, and phys­i­cal secu­ri­ty at man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties; for soft­ware mak­ers, it might include what libraries and tools they use or license and details of how their soft­ware com­mu­ni­cates. The idea is not just to let users (and cus­tomers) know whether prod­ucts are vul­ner­a­ble to a known prob­lem (rather like the wide­ly used CVE sys­tem that cat­a­logs secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties) but also to iden­ti­fy whether man­u­fac­tur­ing or devel­op­ment process­es are vul­ner­a­ble to the end-runs the NSA seems to pre­fer.

When prob­lems turn up — and they always do — solu­tions and case stud­ies can be made avail­able to the entire indus­try to be refined or per­haps adopt­ed as a best prac­tice. Such a process will inevitably look like the cat-and-mouse game soft­ware mak­ers have played with hack­ers and virus writ­ers for years, except it could be the glob­al Inter­net and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­tries going up against the NSA and its part­ners. And, like the fight against mal­ware, it would prob­a­bly be nev­er-end­ing.

A big ques­tion is who would man­age all this. No orga­ni­za­tion cur­rent­ly acts as a clear­ing­house for dig­i­tal secu­ri­ty threats — aside, per­haps, from the NSA — and it’s a gar­gan­tu­an task. Orga­ni­za­tions and frame­works like the ISO, the ISA Secu­ri­ty Com­pli­ance Insti­tute, Com­mon Cri­te­ria, and the Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy (NIST) could play a role here — although NIST is work­ing to regain trust in the com­put­er secu­ri­ty com­mu­ni­ty fol­low­ing recent reports the NSA got a back­door into a NIST encryp­tion stan­dard. (NIST imme­di­ate­ly launched a review.) The Inter­net Engi­neer­ing Task Force (IETF) appears ready to engage in a long-term effort to re-eval­u­ate the secu­ri­ty of many of the Internet’s core tech­nolo­gies. At least it’s a start.

Inter­net, mobile, and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­tries could take a cue from stan­dards bod­ies in oth­er indus­tries like aero­space, health­care, and safe­ty — con­sid­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies like the Nation­al Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Board and com­pa­nies like Under­writ­ers Lab­o­ra­to­ries. Stan­dards bod­ies and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion agen­cies iden­ti­fy risks, estab­lish best prac­tices, and devel­op tests and com­pli­ance pro­grams that con­firm prod­ucts meet secu­ri­ty stan­dards. NIST has issued a pre­lim­i­nary cyber­se­cu­ri­ty frame­work aimed at crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, but it includes an appen­dix on pri­va­cy and civ­il lib­er­ties.

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant Huawei is also try­ing to get the ball rolling on inter­na­tion­al cyber­se­cu­ri­ty stan­dards: it recent­ly pub­lished a white paper detail­ing its own inter­nal prac­tices — so far as I can tell, that’s a first for the indus­try. Huawei is the world’s largest telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions gear mak­er but is essen­tial­ly barred from the U.S. mar­ket over alle­ga­tions that its equip­ment might con­tain secret back­doors for the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. Thus, Huawei’s call for stan­dards may be self-serv­ing, but the company’s semi-pari­ah sta­tus might enable it to take a lead­ing role. After all, among com­pa­nies in its indus­try, Huawei has the fewest con­nec­tions to the U.S. gov­ern­ment and Inter­net com­pa­nies at the heart of this year’s mass sur­veil­lance rev­e­la­tions.

“We’re not say­ing that we have all the answers,” said Huawei USA Chief Secu­ri­ty Offi­cer Andy Pur­dy in a phone inter­view this Octo­ber, “but we’ve got to come up with some areas of agree­ment and we have to have prod­uct assess­ment. That feed­back loop is essen­tial for the glob­al indus­try gen­er­al­ly. We know it’s hard — we have thou­sands of sup­pli­ers — but we’ve got to raise the bar.”

Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty stan­dards and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion could become extreme­ly impor­tant if coun­tries like Brazil and Ger­many — and any­one who wants to part­ner with them — begin sep­a­rat­ing them­selves from the glob­al Inter­net and pre­fer­ring infra­struc­ture and gear designed and pro­duced in their own coun­tries.

...

It’s Com­pli­cat­ed — If there were an easy solu­tion to the con­flict between indi­vid­ual pri­va­cy, per­son­al and nation­al secu­ri­ty, and the mass sur­veil­lance being car­ried out by west­ern pow­ers, we would have fig­ured it out by now. The real­i­ty is that these issues have been with us for years; solu­tions are going to be incom­plete, long-term, and messy; and con­flict will only become more pro­nounced with our depen­den­cy on the Inter­net and mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

It’s a shame. From a hum­ble begin­ning more than four decades ago, the Inter­net has devel­oped into per­haps humanity’s most pow­er­ful tool for span­ning cul­tur­al divides, expand­ing access to infor­ma­tion and edu­ca­tion, enabling free­dom of expres­sion, pro­tect­ing human rights, and — despite the trolls — broad­en­ing the human expe­ri­ence. Let’s hope we don’t destroy it to spite our­selves.

As the arti­cle high­lights, there are a num­ber of approach­es the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty can take to thwart Five Eyes spy­ing that take very dif­fer­ent forms. Nations or regions (like the EU) could split up the inter­net by set­ting up their own sep­a­rate encryp­tion stan­dards and basi­cal­ly mim­ic­k­ing the ‘Great Fire­wall’ of Chi­na. As the author points out, if Brazil goes ahead and cre­ates an inter­net that only works with Brazil­ian gear, it could cre­ate the inter­net’s largest “walled gar­den”. Or we could see the inter­na­tion­al IT indus­try attempt to assem­ble new inter­na­tion­al bod­ies for estab­lish­ing secu­ri­ty stan­dards for IT hard­ware and soft­ware designed to keep the NSA out of every­one’s data. It would be like the ‘cat and mouse’ game already played between the IT indus­try and hack­ers and crim­i­nals, but now the Five Eyes would be added to the list of dig­i­tal mis­cre­ants.

And why not both solu­tions? Balka­nize the inter­net and then set up new inter­na­tion­al stan­dards and insti­tu­tions that are specif­i­cal­ly designed to keep the Five Eyes out. Will that com­bo pro­tect our pri­va­cy? Of course not since, as the arti­cle points out, such approach­es do NOTHING to stop domes­tic intel­li­gence agen­cies from legal­ly requir­ing access to our per­son­al data and the data local­iza­tion laws sim­ply enable domes­tic snoop­ing. So balka­niz­ing the inter­net and reestab­lish­ing secu­ri­ty stan­dards won’t real­ly do any­thing unless you trust your own gov­ern­ment or some­how pre­vent domes­tic sur­veil­lance too.

And, of course, there’s also the issue of non-NSA intel­li­gence agen­cies also snoop­ing on inter­na­tion­al traf­fic flows. The arti­cle also makes a key point on this mat­ter: “As of Jan­u­ary 2013, more than 100 coun­tries had no domes­tic Inter­net exchanges, mean­ing they were entire­ly depen­dent on for­eign ser­vices.” This is impor­tant because inter­net exchange points are where your data gets passed off from one ISP to anoth­er and they’re crit­i­cal for the cre­ation of a domes­tic-only inter­net. One rea­son Brazil can even talk about walling off its inter­net is because it’s build­ing exchange points at an incred­i­ble pace. Inter­net exchange points are need­ed to make the inter­net actu­al­ly work effi­cient­ly because they’re what gives the data mul­ti­ple options to get from point A to point B. This is why so many of the issues around balka­niz­ing the inter­net involve the loss of net­work effi­cien­cy because walling off your nation’s inter­net also involves restric­tions on how exchange points can route the traf­fic. So, as we enter this peri­od where pro­found changes to how the inter­net works might be com­ing, keep in mind that the poor­est nations of the world don’t have the infra­struc­ture nec­es­sary to ful­ly exploit those changes, for good or ill. But also keep in mind that this is also just a tem­po­rary state of affairs. Inter­net exchanges are even­tu­al­ly going to be built every­where and but not yet so we might not see the full impact of balka­niza­tion of the inter­net for the medi­um term.

This also means that the balka­niza­tion of the inter­net will prob­a­bly end up man­i­fest­ing itself in a qua­si-con­ti­nen­tal man­ner instead of nations all sud­den­ly decid­ing to route traf­fic nation­al­ly. Instead, those regions that cur­rent­ly pos­sess a large num­ber of exchange points become replace­ments for the role the US and UK have tra­di­tion­al­ly played in rout­ing glob­al traf­fic. Because if you want to avoid rout­ing your traf­fic through the US or UK but you also want to have the effi­cien­cies that come with hav­ing a glob­al inter­net, you’re going to have to send your traf­fic some­where with lots of exchange points when your cit­i­zens want to com­mu­ni­cate with the out­side world. When Brazil and the EU push for walled off inter­nets on the grounds that they are pro­tect­ing their domes­tic traf­fic from Five Eyes sur­veil­lance, they are implic­it­ly rec­om­mend­ing that the rest of the world start using Brazil and the EU as the new inter­na­tion­al data-traf­fic hubs.

For instance, check out this map of glob­al exchanges and note that ALL of Brazil’s neigh­bors have only one exchange point and the rest are all in Brazil. This means Bazil basi­cal­ly IS the South Amer­i­can inter­net for the time being. As we saw before, Brazil is already the inter­net exchange point hub for ALL of South Amer­i­ca and that intra-South Amer­i­can data traf­fic will have to con­tin­ue flow­ing in and out of pri­mar­i­ly Brazil until the rest of Brazil’s neigh­bors build their own large net­works of inter­net exchange points. Sim­i­lar­ly, take a look at the num­ber of inter­net exchange points in Europe. There are so many that Europe real­ly is a sort of mini-inter­net in and of itself. So as we talk about the balka­niza­tion of the inter­net, keep in mind that Brazil and the EU are cur­rent­ly the only inter­net exchange point glob­al hubs oth­er than the Five Eyes nations. It rais­es the ques­tion: if Brazil devel­ops its own hard­ware stan­dards and those stan­dards the heart of South Amer­i­can walled off inter­net, will the South Amer­i­can hard­ware and soft­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers set up insti­tu­tions specif­i­cal­ly designed to set up stan­dards that keep out Brazil’s intel­li­gence agen­cies? How about the EU? No? Might the Euro­pean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Stan­dards Insti­tute actu­al­ly work to ensure sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties exist in the EU’s archi­tec­ture? Quite pos­si­bly?

IEEE Spec­trum
NSA Sur­veil­lance Sparks Talk of Nation­al Inter­nets
Ger­many takes the lead in mak­ing the Inter­net local
By John Blau
Post­ed 23 Jan 2014 | 15:00 GMT

Just imag­ine the “net­work of all net­works,” the globe-span­ning Inter­net, becom­ing a loose web of tight­ly guard­ed, near­ly imper­me­able region­al or even nation­al net­works. It seems anti­thet­i­cal to the mythol­o­gy sur­round­ing the Internet’s pow­er and pur­pose. But ongo­ing rev­e­la­tions about the exten­sive sur­veil­lance activ­i­ties of the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency (NSA) are push­ing coun­tries like Ger­many and Brazil to take con­crete steps in that direc­tion.

With­in the 28-mem­ber Euro­pean Union, Ger­many is tak­ing the lead in push­ing for mea­sures to shield local Inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tions from for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vices. That should come as no sur­prise. For Ger­mans from the for­mer­ly Com­mu­nist-ruled part of the coun­try, NSA spy­ing sparks bit­ter mem­o­ries of eaves­drop­ping by the Stasi, the secret police agency of the for­mer East Ger­many. Because of that his­to­ry, Ger­many has one of the strictest data pri­va­cy regimes in the world. On more than one occa­sion, the coun­try has forced Google and oth­er Inter­net com­pa­nies to amend their data col­lec­tion and usage prac­tices.

...

Leslie Daigle of the Inter­net Soci­ety writes that the Inter­net “was not designed to rec­og­nize nation­al bound­aries” but rather for resilien­cy, which is “achieved through diver­si­ty of infra­struc­ture: Hav­ing mul­ti­ple con­nec­tions and dif­fer­ent routes between key points ensures that traf­fic can route around net­work prob­lems and nodes that are off the air because of tech­ni­cal, phys­i­cal, or polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence, for exam­ple.”

That said, Pohlmann argues that the Inter­net com­mu­ni­ty still needs “a com­mon glob­al infra­struc­ture that ensures a high lev­el of IT secu­ri­ty, even if no one can guar­an­tee 100 per­cent secu­ri­ty.” He calls on users to rely on end-to-end encryp­tion and vir­tu­al pri­vate net­works, which would make spy-agency snoop­ing dif­fi­cult.

But Jacob Appel­baum, a devel­op­er of the Tor Project, warns that even secure sys­tems like vir­tu­al pri­vate net­works can be ren­dered use­less through mis­use of so-called back­doors. Back­doors are essen­tial­ly soft­ware designs in net­works that allow author­i­ties to con­duct “deep pack­et” inspec­tion to mon­i­tor and inter­cept data. The Euro­pean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Stan­dards Insti­tute, for instance, works close­ly with oper­a­tors, gov­ern­ment, and law enforce­ment agen­cies to inte­grate sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties into com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works. But many oper­a­tors are con­cerned about how access to the back­door “keys” is reg­u­lat­ed, and, in the case of some equip­ment vendors—notably China’s Huawei Tech­nolo­gies Co.—about whether secret back­doors are built into net­work sys­tems with­out oper­a­tors’ knowl­edge.

Deutsche Telekom’s Ober­mann acknowl­edges the prob­lem. “We need strong and secure net­works in Europe,” he says. “Maybe that means we need to make the tech­nol­o­gy our­selves, or that the tech­nol­o­gy we buy doesn’t pro­vide back­doors.”

But don’t expect intel­li­gence forces to ever give up try­ing to pen­e­trate secu­ri­ty sys­tems, no mat­ter how advanced they may be, cau­tions Neel­ie Kroes, vice pres­i­dent of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, which is respon­si­ble for Europe’s dig­i­tal agen­da. “Spy­ing is the world’s sec­ond old­est pro­fes­sion,” she said in Bonn. “Let’s not be naive—it won’t ever stop. We just need to be able to pro­tect our­selves bet­ter.”

Yikes! The Euro­pean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Stan­dards Insti­tute works to inte­grate sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties into com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works? Should we per­haps take Jacob Appel­baum’s advice about turn­ing the NSA into the anti-NSA and apply­ing that the the EU? Maybe the new­ly pro­posed EU spy agency could play the role of ensur­ing that all of EU’s nation­al spy agen­cies can’t read any data flow­ing through the entire EU. At least, if the EU is to become a glob­al inter­net exchange point hub an anti-EU spy agency would be nec­es­sary if we’re going to adhere to our new glob­al expec­ta­tion of data pri­va­cy, right?

Edward Snow­den pro­vid­ed tes­ti­mo­ny to the EU par­lia­ment. It looks like Snow­den and the EU par­lia­ment are going to take the “the NSA was secret­ly bul­ly­ing the EU mem­bers into help­ing it spy on their citizens”-angle It’s not a sur­pris­ing angle since this is a tes­ti­mo­ny to the EU par­lia­ment about how all their nation­al gov­ern­ments were secret­ly set­ting up these agree­ments designed to allow sur­veil­lance of their cit­i­zens in plau­si­bly deni­able ways. So the EU MEPs might as well try to plau­si­bly deny that stuff like thing went on with their knowl­edge. It’s worth shot!

PC World
NSA cre­at­ed ‘Euro­pean bazaar’ to spy on EU cit­i­zens, Snow­den tells Euro­pean Par­lia­ment
Loek Essers @loekessers

Mar 7, 2014 5:43 AM

The U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency (NSA) has turned the Euro­pean Union into a tap­ping “bazaar” in order to spy on as many EU cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble, NSA leak­er Edward Snow­den said.

The NSA has been work­ing with nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies in EU mem­ber states to get access to as much data of EU cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble, Snow­den said in a tes­ti­mo­ny sent to Mem­bers of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment (MEPs) pub­lished Fri­day.

The Euro­pean Par­lia­ment had invit­ed Snow­den to pro­vide tes­ti­mo­ny for an inquiry into the elec­tron­ic mass sur­veil­lance of EU cit­i­zens. That sur­veil­lance, often insti­gat­ed by the NSA but car­ried out with help of EU mem­ber states, is quite exten­sive, he wrote.

The NSA has been pres­sur­ing EU mem­ber states to change their laws to enable mass sur­veil­lance, accord­ing to Snow­den. This is done through NSA’s For­eign Affairs Divi­sion (FAD), he said, adding that lawyers from the NSA and GCHQ work very hard “to search for loop­holes in laws and con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions that they can use to jus­ti­fy indis­crim­i­nate, drag­net sur­veil­lance oper­a­tions that were at best unwit­ting­ly autho­rized by law­mak­ers,” he said.

The efforts to “inter­pret new pow­ers out of vague laws” is an inten­tion­al strat­e­gy to avoid pub­lic oppo­si­tion and law­mak­ers’ insis­tence that legal lim­its be respect­ed, he said.

Recent­ly, the FAD has used such pres­sur­ing tech­niques on Swe­den and the Nether­lands as well as on New Zealand, accord­ing to Snow­den. Ger­many has also been pres­sured to mod­i­fy a law on the secre­cy of post and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion cor­re­spon­dence to appease the NSA, erod­ing the rights of Ger­man cit­i­zens under their con­sti­tu­tion in the process, Snow­den said.

“Each of these coun­tries received instruc­tion from the NSA, some­times under the guise of the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense and oth­er bod­ies, on how to degrade the legal pro­tec­tions of their coun­tries’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions,” he said. The ulti­mate result of this NSA guid­ance is that the right of ordi­nary cit­i­zens to be free from unwar­rant­ed inter­fer­ence is degrad­ed, and sys­tems of intru­sive mass sur­veil­lance are being con­struct­ed in secret with­in oth­er­wise lib­er­al states, he said, adding that this often hap­pens with­out the full aware­ness of the pub­lic.

Ulti­mate­ly, each nation­al spy agency is inde­pen­dent­ly hawk­ing domes­tic access to the NSA and oth­ers “with­out hav­ing any aware­ness of how their indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tion is enabling the greater patch­work of mass sur­veil­lance against ordi­nary cit­i­zens as a whole,” accord­ing to Snow­den.

Once the NSA has dealt with legal restric­tions on mass sur­veil­lance in part­ner states, it pres­sures them to per­form oper­a­tions to gain access to the bulk com­mu­ni­ca­tions of all major telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions providers in their juris­dic­tions, Snow­den said. “Some­times the NSA pro­vides con­sul­ta­tion, tech­nol­o­gy, or even the phys­i­cal hard­ware itself for part­ners to ‘ingest’ these mas­sive amounts of data in a man­ner that allows pro­cess­ing, he added.

“By the time this gen­er­al process has occurred, it is very dif­fi­cult for the cit­i­zens of a coun­try to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and it is very easy for the intel­li­gence ser­vices of that coun­try to make those com­mu­ni­ca­tions avail­able to the NSA—even with­out hav­ing explic­it­ly shared them,” Snow­den wrote.

The deals between the NSA and for­eign part­ners are set up in such a way as to pro­vide the NSA with a means of mon­i­tor­ing a partner’s cit­i­zens with­out inform­ing the part­ner, and to pro­vide the part­ner with a means of plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty, he said.

“The result is a Euro­pean bazaar, where an EU mem­ber state like Den­mark may give the NSA access to a tap­ping cen­ter on the (unen­force­able) con­di­tion that NSA doesn’t search it for Danes, and Ger­many may give the NSA access to anoth­er on the con­di­tion that it does­n’t search for Ger­mans. Yet the two tap­ping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA sim­ply cap­tures the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the Ger­man cit­i­zens as they tran­sit Den­mark, and the Dan­ish cit­i­zens as they tran­sit Ger­many, all the while con­sid­er­ing it entire­ly in accor­dance with their agree­ments,” Snow­den said.

Snow­den, who said that he’s still seek­ing asy­lum in the EU, also pro­vid­ed solu­tions to solve the mass sur­veil­lance prob­lem.

It is easy to make mass sur­veil­lance more expen­sive through changes in tech­ni­cal stan­dards, he said. “Per­va­sive, end-to-end encryp­tion can quick­ly make indis­crim­i­nate sur­veil­lance impos­si­ble on a cost effec­tive basis,” he said, adding that the result is that gov­ern­ments are like­ly to fall back to tra­di­tion­al, tar­get­ed sur­veil­lance found­ed upon an indi­vid­u­al­ized sus­pi­cion.

This tra­di­tion­al method is more effec­tive than mass sur­veil­lance, accord­ing to Snow­den. “I believe that spy­ing serves a vital pur­pose and must con­tin­ue,” he said.

...

Note that Snow­den reit­er­at­ed that the solu­tion is “per­va­sive, end-to-end encryp­tion” that will “quick­ly make indis­crim­i­nate sur­veil­lance impos­si­ble on a cost effec­tive basis” while adding both that spy­ing is impor­tant and also that gov­ern­ments will be forced to revert to tra­di­tion­al, tar­get­ed sur­veil­lance found­ed upon an indi­vid­u­al­ized sus­pi­cion once per­va­sive encryp­tion is employed. Part of what makes these sug­ges­tions inter­est­ing is that tar­get­ed sur­veil­lance has tra­di­tion­al­ly relied on tech­niques like wire­tap­ping. But the “per­va­sive, end-to-end encryp­tion” that Snow­den refers to obvi­ous­ly assumes encyp­tion that intel­li­gence agen­cies can’t break (oth­er­wise what’s the point?). At least, if it’s strong encryp­tion that’s being per­va­sive­ly imple­ment­ed, it should be basi­cal­ly unbreak­able even to agen­cies with immense resources for decades to come.

Sure, law enforce­ment and intel­li­gence agen­cies can always to plant spy­ware on your com­put­er to grab the data after it’s been decrypt­ed. That’s what Fin­Fish­er and the oth­er super-spy­ware toolk­its were all about. But as Jacob Appel­baum sug­gests in the open­ing com­ments his recent talk at the Chaos Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Con­gress:

The Tran­script

Act One

Jacob Appel­baum: So recent­ly we heard a lit­tle bit about some of the low-end cor­po­rate spy­ing that’s often billed as being sort of like the hottest, most impor­tant stuff, so the Fin­Fish­er, the Hack­ing Team, the VUPEN and sort of in that order it becomes more sophis­ti­cat­ed and more and more tied in with the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency. There are some Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act requests that have gone out that actu­al­ly show VUPEN being an NSA con­trac­tor, writ­ing exploits, that there are some ties there.

[see slide]

This sort of cov­ers the sort of, the whole gamut I believe, which is that, you know, you can buy these like lit­tle pieces of foren­sics hard­ware, and just as a sort of fun thing I bought some of those and then I looked at how they worked and I noticed that this “Mouse Jig­gler,” you plug it in and the idea is that it like keeps your screen awake. So have any of you seen that at all? This piece of foren­sics hard­ware so your screen­saver doesn’t acti­vate. So I showed it to one of the sys­temd devel­op­ers and now when you plug those into a Lin­ux box that runs sys­temd, it auto­mat­i­cal­ly locks the screen when it sees a USB ID.

[applause]

So when peo­ple talk about free soft­ware, free as in free­dom, that’s part of what they’re talk­ing about.

So there are some oth­er things which I’m not going to real­ly talk a lot about it because basi­cal­ly this is all bull­shit that doesn’t real­ly mat­ter and we can defeat all of that. This is the indi­vid­u­al­ized things we can defend against. But I want to talk a lit­tle bit about how it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the case that because they’re not the most fan­tas­tic, they’re not the most sophis­ti­cat­ed, that there­fore we shouldn’t wor­ry about it.
...

That’s the open­ing seg­ment of Appel­baum’s talk. Notice that he refers to some­thing like Fin­Fish­er as “bull­shit that doesn’t real­ly mat­ter and we can defeat all of that. This is the indi­vid­u­al­ized things we can defend against”. In oth­er words, if you real­ly know what you’re doing, the indi­vid­u­al­ized attacks are “bull­shit” that you can defend against. It’s the things like the NSA secret­ly fid­dling with encryp­tion stan­dards (the indi­rect secret Clip­per Chip ana­logue) that secu­ri­ty experts can’t eas­i­ly get around because use of stan­dards is hard to avoid.

Appel­baum goes on to talk about an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist that was­n’t at all a secu­ri­ty expert and who was seri­ous­ly vio­lat­ed by low­er-lever cyber­at­tacks to make the point that things like Fin­Fish­er are indeed a very real threat to non-experts. So the solu­tion that Edward Snow­den appears to be rec­om­mend­ing is main­stream strong encryp­tion under the assump­tion that tar­get­ed sur­veil­lance will still be an option for legit­i­mate spy­ing pur­pos­es. And, in most cas­es, that will be true because, in most cas­es, ran­dom tar­gets of sur­veil­lance are not going to have the knowl­edge required to pro­tect their data after it’s been decr­pyt­ed even if you set up the strong “end-to-end” encryp­tion for the inter­net. Future Fin­Fish­ers and oth­er forms of spy­ware will still be very for­mi­da­ble dan­gers for most ran­dom peo­ple. But if Appel­baum’s “this is all bull­shit” sen­ti­ment reflects a real­i­ty that secu­ri­ty experts real­ly can pro­tect against indi­vid­u­al­ized attacks once the NSA’s “bugs” get ham­mered out of the encryp­tion stan­dards, we could be enter­ing anoth­er form of social bifur­ca­tion: ran­dom non-secu­ri­ty experts will prob­a­bly still be sub­ject to mass-dig­i­tal sur­veil­lance via sophis­ti­cat­ed back doors in the soft­ware on your com­put­er. But secu­ri­ty experts and those wealthy enough to have experts man­age their data con­tent might end up being able to main­tain unbreak­able data-anonymi­ty. The Four Horse­men of the Infopoca­lypse only gets selec­tive­ly unleashed for use by those with the resources to do so but there’s still a con­tin­u­a­tion of end­less spy­ware for the rab­ble? As David Brin sug­gests:

But at a deep­er lev­el it is sim­ply stu­pid. Any loop­hole in trans­paren­cy ‘to pro­tect the meek’ can far bet­ter be exploit­ed by the mighty than by the meek. Their shills, lawyers and fac­to­tums will (1) ensure that ‘pri­va­cy pro­tec­tions’ have big options for the mighty and (2) that those options will be max­i­mal­ly exploit­ed. More­over (3) as I show in The Trans­par­ent Soci­ety, encryp­tion-based ‘pri­va­cy’ is the weak­est ver­sion of all. The meek can nev­er ver­i­fy that their bought algo­rithm and ser­vice is work­ing as promised, or isn’t a bought-out front for the NSA or a crim­i­nal gang.

Above all, pro­tect­ing the weak or meek with shad­ows and cutouts and pri­va­cy laws is like set­ting up Potemkin vil­lages, designed to cre­ate sur­face illu­sions. Any­one who believes they can blind society’s elites — of gov­ern­ment, com­merce, wealth, crim­i­nal­i­ty and tech-geek­ery — is a fool…

Soci­eties should prob­a­bly start talk­ing about how we can avoid the future Brin describes because we just might be head­ing towards it.

Hope­ful­ly there’s going to be some fol­lowup ques­tions on this top­ic...

Ger­many rejects Snow­den claim it bowed to NSA
By FRANK JORDANS, Asso­ci­at­ed Press
March 10, 2014 Updat­ed: March 10, 2014 12:01pm

BERLIN (AP) — Ger­many on Mon­day dis­missed a claim by NSA leak­er Edward Snow­den that it had bowed to U.S. demands to water down pri­va­cy rights for Ger­man cit­i­zens.

Snow­den told the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment in a state­ment pub­lished Fri­day that Ger­many was pres­sured to mod­i­fy its leg­is­la­tion on wire­tap­ping and oth­er forms of law­ful tele­coms sur­veil­lance. The for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency con­trac­tor did­n’t elab­o­rate on how the laws were changed or when, but sug­gest­ed it was stan­dard prac­tice for the NSA to instruct friend­ly nations on how to “degrade the legal pro­tec­tions of their coun­tries’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

“Laws are made by the Ger­man par­lia­ment and it does­n’t give in to out­side pres­sure, cer­tain­ly not from for­eign spy agen­cies, and that’s true in this case too,” gov­ern­ment spokesman Stef­fen Seib­ert said.

Snow­den’s claim is par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive for Ger­many. While Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s gov­ern­ment has been among the loud­est crit­ics of the NSA’s report­ed sur­veil­lance of for­eign cit­i­zens — includ­ing Merkel her­self — domes­tic crit­ics say Ger­man spy agen­cies col­lab­o­rat­ed close­ly with their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts in ways that may have breached Ger­many’s strict data pro­tec­tion laws.

Snow­den claims the NSA took advan­tage of dif­fer­ent legal sys­tems across Europe to eaves­drop on calls and emails across the con­ti­nent.

...

Here’s the lat­est cryp­to­graph­ic call to arms:

The New York Times
Snow­den Tries to Ral­ly Tech Con­fer­ence to But­tress Pri­va­cy Shields
March 10, 2014, 12:09 pm
By JENNA WORTHAM and NICOLE PERLROTH

AUSTIN, Tex. — Edward J. Snow­den wants the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try to get seri­ous about pro­tect­ing the pri­va­cy of its users and cus­tomers.

“When we think about what is hap­pen­ing at the N.S.A. for the last decade, the result has been an adver­sar­i­al Inter­net,” Mr. Snow­den told a crowd of devel­op­ers and entre­pre­neurs at the South by South­west con­fer­ence here on Mon­day, speak­ing by video­con­fer­ence.

“They are set­ting fire to the future of the Inter­net,” he added. “You guys are all the fire­fight­ers. We need you to help us fix this.”

Mr. Snow­den, the for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency con­trac­tor who leaked clas­si­fied doc­u­ments that revealed a vast net­work of gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, told the audi­ence that they “can enforce our rights for tech­ni­cal stan­dards.”

Mr. Snow­den said he chose the con­fer­ence, known as SXSW, to speak direct­ly to peo­ple with the skills to make mass sur­veil­lance sig­nif­i­cant­ly more expen­sive for gov­ern­ment agen­cies — if not impos­si­ble. For the past decade, Mr. Snow­den said, the N.S.A. had been giv­en free rein to make the Inter­net less secure by engag­ing in large-scale sweeps of data.

Mr. Snow­den fled the Unit­ed States last sum­mer and is liv­ing at an undis­closed loca­tion in Rus­sia, where he has been grant­ed tem­po­rary asy­lum. He faces charges in the Unit­ed States of vio­lat­ing the Espi­onage Act.

Mr. Snow­den appeared remote­ly at the con­fer­ence with Christo­pher Soghoian, the prin­ci­pal tech­nol­o­gist of the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, and Ben Wiz­n­er, direc­tor of the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Pri­va­cy and Tech­nol­o­gy Project and Mr. Snowden’s legal advis­er, both of whom were on site in Austin. The event was a rare live inter­view for Mr. Snow­den, con­duct­ed by Mr. Wiz­n­er.

Using tech­nol­o­gy to mask his where­abouts, Mr. Snow­den appeared through a Google Plus video­con­fer­ence — the irony of which was not lost on Mr. Snow­den or oth­ers, who joked about the fact that Google was involved in many of Mr. Snowden’s rev­e­la­tions.

Appear­ing before a green screen that had been pro­grammed to dis­play the Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tion, Mr. Snow­den addressed a rapt audi­ence that often broke into applause and cheers. Hun­dreds packed into an exhi­bi­tion hall to hear him speak and those who could not find seats stood along the wall or sat on the floor.

At var­i­ous points dur­ing the event, the Inter­net access in the con­ven­tion cen­ter buck­led under the bur­den of all the peo­ple try­ing to use their devices to tweet or go online. And at times, Mr. Snowden’s con­nec­tion dropped, in part because of the anonymi­ty soft­ware he used to mask his loca­tion.

Mr. Snow­den said he hoped to raise a call to arms to devel­op­ers, cryp­tog­ra­phers and pri­va­cy activists to build bet­ter tools to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of tech­nol­o­gy users. The goal, he said, was that encryp­tion would ulti­mate­ly be con­sid­ered as a nec­es­sary, basic pro­tec­tion, and not some­thing eas­i­ly dis­missed as an “arcane black art.”

Ulti­mate­ly, Mr. Snow­den said, that will “allow us to reclaim the open and trust­ed Inter­net.”

He was refer­ring to the many dig­i­tal encryp­tion pro­tec­tions that are cheap and wide­ly avail­able, but exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to use prop­er­ly.

Mr. Snow­den not­ed that encryp­tion ser­vices like Pret­ty Good Pri­va­cy, or PGP soft­ware, and anonymi­ty ser­vices, like Tor, are avail­able, but are not as easy to use as Google’s Gmail ser­vice or Chrome brows­er.

He also praised ser­vices like Open Whis­per­Sys­tems, a suite of appli­ca­tions that aims to make secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools usable, and com­mon­ly use.

Ulti­mate­ly, the tech indus­try can help fix the prob­lem of secu­ri­ty, Mr. Soghoian said. “Most reg­u­lar peo­ple are not going to down­load some obscure secu­ri­ty app,” he said. “They’re going to use the tools they already have,” like Google, Face­book and Skype.

Mr. Snow­den repeat­ed­ly empha­sized that he didn’t want to block gov­ern­ment agen­cies from doing their job to pro­tect cit­i­zens, but was instead con­cerned about unwar­rant­ed sur­veil­lance. He said that if the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and its tech­nol­o­gy indus­try are not held account­able for unwar­rant­ed over­sight, for­eign com­pa­nies and agen­cies might feel free to adopt sim­i­lar mass sur­veil­lance tac­tics and poli­cies.

When com­pa­nies col­lect data, he said, they should only “hold it for as long as nec­es­sary.”

Mr. Snowden’s com­ments Mon­day echoed his tes­ti­mo­ny to mem­bers of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, released Fri­day, in which he said tar­get­ed sur­veil­lance was accept­able.

At one point here in Austin, Mr. Snow­den answered a ques­tion sent via Twit­ter about whether any data was ever tru­ly safe, from a mali­cious hack­er or an agency like the N.S.A.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said with a bit of a laugh. “The Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment has assem­bled a mas­sive inves­ti­ga­tion team into me per­son­al­ly, into my work with jour­nal­ists and they still have no idea you know what doc­u­ments were pro­vid­ed to the jour­nal­ists, what they have, what they don’t have, because encryp­tion works.”

...

So Snow­den repeat­ed­ly empha­sized that he didn’t want to block gov­ern­ment agen­cies from doing their job to pro­tect cit­i­zens and also point­ed out that “the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment has assem­bled a mas­sive inves­ti­ga­tion team into me per­son­al­ly, into my work with jour­nal­ists and they still have no idea you know what doc­u­ments were pro­vid­ed to the jour­nal­ists, what they have, what they don’t have, because encryp­tion works.” Hmmmm....so it’s increas­ing­ly sound­ing like brute force decryp­tion could be the method of choice for future of intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment activ­i­ties sim­ply because it’ll be the only choice...at least when they’re inves­ti­gat­ing some­one that knows what they’re doing. Let’s hope those brute force tech­niques remain in the dig­i­tal realm.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how many peo­ple will be able to afford dig­i­tal space in a Swiss vault as the indus­try for ultra-pri­vate data cen­ters con­tin­ues to grow:

MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review
For Swiss Data Indus­try, NSA Leaks Are Good as Gold

Here’s how the Swiss promise to keep your data safe.

By Russ Juskalian on March 18, 2014

There is data secu­ri­ty, and then there is Swiss data secu­ri­ty.

The dif­fer­ence was explained to me by Stéphan Grouitch in a con­fer­ence room deep with­in a moun­tain in the Swiss Alps, lit by a sub­ter­ranean buzz of flu­o­res­cent lights. To get to here, under more than 3,000 feet of stone and earth, I showed my pass­port (some­thing I didn’t have to do to enter the coun­try from Ger­many), had my fin­ger scanned repeat­ed­ly, and passed under secu­ri­ty cam­eras and motion detec­tors. A blast door, thick­er than my fore­arm is long, is said to pro­tect this old Cold War bunker against a 20-mega­ton bomb.

“The coun­try has always stored valu­ables for peo­ple all around Europe—even before mon­ey,” says Grouitch, CEO of Deltal­is, the com­pa­ny that owns the bunker. When Deltal­is first looked into acquir­ing the facil­i­ty from the Swiss mil­i­tary, it con­sid­ered stor­ing gold bul­lion here. Instead, it now runs a farm of com­put­er servers where data is safe­guard­ed by strict pri­va­cy laws and a unique cul­ture of dis­cre­tion. To legal­ly access someone’s data here, you’ll need an order from a Swiss judge.

A Swiss play in data secu­ri­ty has been under way for around a decade, most­ly in con­nec­tion to bank­ing. But the con­tro­ver­sy around glob­al sur­veil­lance by the U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency is “a huge devel­op­ment,” says Franz Grüter, CEO of Green, an Inter­net ser­vice provider whose state-of-the-art data cen­ter in the vil­lage of Lup­fig is being filled out “years ahead of sched­ule.”

To get a sense of the oppor­tu­ni­ty, one need only look at the pro­ject­ed loss­es the U.S.-based cloud ser­vices indus­try (includ­ing Google, Microsoft, and IBM) is fac­ing because of anx­i­ety and indig­na­tion over U.S. wire­tap­ping. Esti­mates of lost mar­ket share through 2016 range from $35 bil­lion to $180 bil­lion (accord­ing to For­rester Research).

...

Euro­pean com­pa­nies, accord­ing to Grüter, now rou­tine­ly ques­tion where data is phys­i­cal­ly stored—and are declin­ing U.S. offers. One result is that a clus­ter of pri­va­cy com­pa­nies is form­ing in Switzer­land. ID Quan­tique makes the Cen­tau­ris CN8000, one of the world’s first com­mer­cial encryp­tion sys­tems using quan­tum mechan­ics. And Black­phone, a secure hand­set launched by U.S. pri­va­cy pio­neer Phil Zim­mer­man, will store sub­scribers’ tele­phone num­bers in Swiss servers.

Alto­geth­er, Switzer­land has around 1,440,000 square feet of data-cen­ter space. While that is far less than is avail­able in coun­tries like the U.S. and Ger­many, it’s a lot rel­a­tive to Switzerland’s pop­u­la­tion of eight mil­lion.

Richard Straub, head of mar­ket devel­op­ment at ID Quan­tique, says Swiss inno­va­tions are backed by strong research at uni­ver­si­ties like EPFL in Lau­sanne, ETH-Zürich, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gene­va. They also ben­e­fit from local demand. When ID Quan­tique took its prod­ucts to mar­ket, it found ear­ly, and eager, cus­tomers in the bank­ing indus­try and in gov­ern­ment. Offi­cials in Gene­va have used its tech­nol­o­gy to help trans­mit fed­er­al elec­tion results since 2007, and in online vot­ing for cit­i­zen ini­tia­tives since 2009.

So who can you trust with your data? Grouitch thinks Switzerland’s appeal should be obvi­ous. “This coun­try real­ly is a vault in the cen­ter of Europe,” he says.

“When ID Quan­tique took its prod­ucts to mar­ket, it found ear­ly, and eager, cus­tomers in the bank­ing indus­try and in gov­ern­ment”. Yeah, that’s prob­a­bly what we should expect every­where.

Well, that’s one way to put it:

ABC News
Bill Clin­ton Calls Edward Snow­den An ‘Imper­fect Mes­sen­ger’

By Erin Doo­ley
Apr 8, 2014 7:31pm

NSA leak­er Edward Snow­den has been char­ac­ter­ized as a trai­tor, a hack­er and a whistle­blow­er. Bill Clin­ton prefers to think of him as an “imper­fect mes­sen­ger.”

The for­mer pres­i­dent — who in pre­vi­ous inter­views has appeared hes­i­tant to crit­i­cize Snow­den — weighed in on the sur­veil­lance debate dur­ing remarks at the Naval Acad­e­my in Annapo­lis, Md., Tues­day after­noon.

“The Snow­den case has raised all these ques­tions about whether we can use tech­nol­o­gy to pro­tect nation­al secu­ri­ty with­out destroy­ing the lib­er­ty which includes the right to pri­va­cy of basi­cal­ly inno­cent bystanders,” he said.

Clin­ton even sug­gest­ed that the pri­va­cy-ver­sus-secu­ri­ty debate cre­ates a “false choice,” and argued that with a big enough invest­ment, the U.S. could design tech­nol­o­gy that would allow both aims to coex­ist.

“It seems to me clear, based on the peo­ple that I talk to, that we could be design­ing these sys­tems – if we’re pre­pared to spend the mon­ey to do it – in a way that dra­mat­i­cal­ly enhances both … pri­va­cy and our nation­al secu­ri­ty,” he added.

“We can­not change the char­ac­ter of our coun­try or com­pro­mise the future of our peo­ple by cre­at­ing a nation­al secu­ri­ty state which takes away the lib­er­ty and pri­va­cy we pro­pose to advance,” he con­tin­ued. “Don’t kill the goose that laid the gold­en egg.”

Dur­ing his speech to the mid­ship­men at the acad­e­my, Clin­ton didn’t dis­cuss his wife’s pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions. How­ev­er, he did reflect on his own path to the White House.

...

Pre­sum­ably Bil­l’s tech­nol­o­gy design plans that allows pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty to co-exist include some sort of cheap free ener­gy device that leads to glob­al pros­per­i­ty and an end to socioe­co­nom­ic strive. A uni­ver­sal trans­la­tor per­haps? Por­tals to par­al­lel uni­vers­es? Skynet? It’s Skynet, isn’t it. What­ev­er it is, let’s hope he shares it with the world soon:

The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald
Man who intro­duced seri­ous ‘Heart­bleed’ secu­ri­ty flaw denies he insert­ed it delib­er­ate­ly

Date
April 10, 2014 — 10:37PM

Ben Grubb

Exclu­sive

The Ger­man soft­ware devel­op­er who intro­duced a secu­ri­ty flaw into an encryp­tion pro­to­col used by mil­lions of web­site glob­al­ly says he did not insert it delib­er­ate­ly as some have sug­gest­ed.

In what appears to be his first com­ments to the media since the bug was uncov­ered, Robin Seggel­mann said how the bug made its way into live code could “be explained pret­ty eas­i­ly”.

The encryp­tion flaw, called Heart­bleed, has exposed large swathes of the inter­net to mali­cious exploita­tion, prompt­ing some secu­ri­ty experts to warn inter­net users against even using the web for the next few days.

The bug intro­duced a flaw into the pop­u­lar OpenSSL soft­ware, which is used by many pop­u­lar social net­work­ing web­sites, search engines, banks, and online shop­ping sites to keep per­son­al and finan­cial data safe. It allowed those who knew of its exis­tence to inter­cept user­names, pass­words, cred­it card details, and var­i­ous oth­er sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from a web­site’s serv­er in plain text.

It also allowed for a server’s pri­vate encryp­tion keys to be stolen. Once stolen, these keys can be used by crim­i­nals to decrypt data sent between a web­site’s serv­er and a user of that web­site.

“On a scale of one to 10, it is an 11,” renowned secu­ri­ty expert Bruce Schneier said of the bug.

‘Unfor­tu­nate­ly’ missed

Mr Seggel­mann, of Mün­ster in Ger­many, said the bug which intro­duced the flaw was “unfor­tu­nate­ly” missed by him and a review­er when it was intro­duced into the open source OpenSSL encryp­tion pro­to­col over two years ago.

“I was work­ing on improv­ing OpenSSL and sub­mit­ted numer­ous bug fix­es and added new fea­tures,” he said.

“In one of the new fea­tures, unfor­tu­nate­ly, I missed val­i­dat­ing a vari­able con­tain­ing a length.”

After he sub­mit­ted the code, a review­er “appar­ent­ly also didn’t notice the miss­ing val­i­da­tion”, Mr Seggel­mann said, “so the error made its way from the devel­op­ment branch into the released ver­sion.” Logs show that review­er was Dr Stephen Hen­son.

Mr Seggel­mann said the error he intro­duced was “quite triv­ial”, but acknowl­edged that its impact was “severe”.

Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries

A num­ber of con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have spec­u­lat­ed the bug was insert­ed mali­cious­ly.

Mr Seggel­mann said it was “tempt­ing” to assume this, espe­cial­ly after the dis­clo­sure by Edward Snow­den of the spy­ing activ­i­ties con­duct­ed by the US Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency and oth­ers.

“But in this case, it was a sim­ple pro­gram­ming error in a new fea­ture, which unfor­tu­nate­ly occurred in a secu­ri­ty rel­e­vant area,” he said.

“It was not intend­ed at all, espe­cial­ly since I have pre­vi­ous­ly fixed OpenSSL bugs myself, and was try­ing to con­tribute to the project.”

Despite deny­ing he put the bug into the code inten­tion­al­ly, he said it was entire­ly pos­si­ble intel­li­gence agen­cies had been mak­ing use of it over the past two years.

“It is a pos­si­bil­i­ty, and it’s always bet­ter to assume the worst than best case in secu­ri­ty mat­ters, but since I didn’t know the bug until it was released and [I am] not affil­i­at­ed with any agency,” Mr Seggel­mann said.

Ben­e­fits of dis­cov­ery

If any­thing had been demon­strat­ed by the dis­cov­ery of the bug, Mr Seggel­mann said it was aware­ness that more con­trib­u­tors were need­ed to keep an eye over code in open source soft­ware.

“It’s unfor­tu­nate that it’s used by mil­lions of peo­ple, but only very few actu­al­ly con­tribute to it,” he said.

“The ben­e­fit of open source soft­ware is that any­one can review the code in the first place.

“...the more peo­ple look at it, the bet­ter, espe­cial­ly with a soft­ware like OpenSSL.”

Well, nobody’s per­fect, right? So, assum­ing there’s real­ly noth­ing shady going on, the guy is right: one of the ben­e­fits of this secu­ri­ty night­mare is that at least the pub­lic is going to be much more aware of just how few peo­ple might be involved in main­tain­ing and review­ing open source soft­ware, includ­ing crit­i­cal soft­ware used by large swathes of the inter­net. Note that one per­son reviewed this guy’s code that was about to be used all over the world. One.

It’s a reminder that if we want to enjoy the ben­e­fits of an open source world, we need to cre­ate soci­eties where lots of peo­ple have both the edu­ca­tion­al back­ground required to engage in this kind of vol­un­teer work and the free time to actu­al­ly do it. Hope­ful­ly that’s some­thing the peo­ple Bill talks to are think­ing about.

This is kind of inter­est­ing: You can see the ori­gin of the “Heart­beat” fea­ture that led to “Heart­bleed” in Robin Seggel­man­n’s doc­tor­al the­sis. It’s sec­tion 7.2 the “Heart­beat Exten­sion”.

We’re also learn­ing that the NSA knew about the Heart­bleed bug for the past two years. This is, of course, lead­ing to an uproar in the secu­ri­ty com­mu­ni­ty. And since this was a bug in open source code that any­one could have detect­ed, it also rais­es the ques­tion of what oth­er intel­li­gence agen­cies knew about this “fea­ture” and why they did­n’t also alert the pub­lic about this prob­lem. Did they not find it? Did the 9‑Eyes get to learn the secret? The 14-Eyes? Or was the NSA the only spy agency to find a bug in crit­i­cal, wide­ly used open source code?

NSA Said to Exploit Heart­bleed Bug for Intel­li­gence for Years
By Michael Riley Apr 11, 2014 1:58 PM CT

The U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many web­sites send sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, now dubbed the Heart­bleed bug, and reg­u­lar­ly used it to gath­er crit­i­cal intel­li­gence, two peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

The NSA’s deci­sion to keep the bug secret in pur­suit of nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­ests threat­ens to renew the ran­corous debate over the role of the government’s top com­put­er experts.

Heart­bleed appears to be one of the biggest glitch­es in the Internet’s his­to­ry, a flaw in the basic secu­ri­ty of as many as two-thirds of the world’s web­sites. Its dis­cov­ery and the cre­ation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompt­ed con­sumers to change their pass­words, the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment to sus­pend elec­tron­ic tax fil­ing and com­put­er com­pa­nies includ­ing Cis­co Sys­tems Inc. to Juniper Net­works Inc. to pro­vide patch­es for their sys­tems.

Putting the Heart­bleed bug in its arse­nal, the NSA was able to obtain pass­words and oth­er basic data that are the build­ing blocks of the sophis­ti­cat­ed hack­ing oper­a­tions at the core of its mis­sion, but at a cost. Mil­lions of ordi­nary users were left vul­ner­a­ble to attack from oth­er nations’ intel­li­gence arms and crim­i­nal hack­ers.

Con­tro­ver­sial Prac­tice

“It flies in the face of the agency’s com­ments that defense comes first,” said Jason Healey, direc­tor of the cyber state­craft ini­tia­tive at the Atlantic Coun­cil and a for­mer Air Force cyber offi­cer. “They are going to be com­plete­ly shred­ded by the com­put­er secu­ri­ty com­mu­ni­ty for this.”

Vanee Vines, an NSA spokes­woman, declined to com­ment on the agency’s knowl­edge or use of the bug. Experts say the search for flaws is cen­tral to NSA’s mis­sion, though the prac­tice is con­tro­ver­sial. A pres­i­den­tial board review­ing the NSA’s activ­i­ties after Edward Snowden’s leaks rec­om­mend­ed the agency halt the stock­pil­ing of soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

The NSA and oth­er elite intel­li­gence agen­cies devote mil­lions of dol­lars to hunt for com­mon soft­ware flaws that are crit­i­cal to steal­ing data from secure com­put­ers. Open-source pro­to­cols like OpenSSL, where the flaw was found, are pri­ma­ry tar­gets.

The Heart­bleed flaw, intro­duced in ear­ly 2012 in a minor adjust­ment to the OpenSSL pro­to­col, high­lights one of the fail­ings of open source soft­ware devel­op­ment.

Free Code

While many Inter­net com­pa­nies rely on the free code, its integri­ty depends on a small num­ber of under­fund­ed researchers who devote their ener­gies to the projects.

In con­trast, the NSA has more than 1,000 experts devot­ed to fer­ret­ing out such flaws using sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis tech­niques, many of them clas­si­fied. The agency found the Heart­bleed glitch short­ly after its intro­duc­tion, accord­ing to one of the peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter, and it became a basic part of the agency’s toolk­it for steal­ing account pass­words and oth­er com­mon tasks.

The NSA has faced nine months of with­er­ing crit­i­cism for the breadth of its spy­ing, doc­u­ment­ed in a rolling series of leaks from Snow­den, who was a for­mer agency con­trac­tor.

The rev­e­la­tions have cre­at­ed a clear­er pic­ture of the two roles, some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry, played by the U.S.’s largest spy agency. The NSA pro­tects the com­put­ers of the gov­ern­ment and crit­i­cal indus­try from cyber­at­tacks, while gath­er­ing troves of intel­li­gence attack­ing the com­put­ers of oth­ers, includ­ing ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, nuclear smug­glers and oth­er gov­ern­ments.

Seri­ous Flaws

Ordi­nary Inter­net users are ill-served by the arrange­ment because seri­ous flaws are not fixed, expos­ing their data to domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al spy orga­ni­za­tions and crim­i­nals, said John Pesca­tore, direc­tor of emerg­ing secu­ri­ty trends at the SANS Insti­tute, a Bethes­da, Mary­land-based cyber-secu­ri­ty train­ing orga­ni­za­tion.

“If you com­bine the two into one gov­ern­ment agency, which mis­sion wins?” asked Pesca­tore, who for­mer­ly worked in secu­ri­ty for the NSA and the U.S. Secret Ser­vice. “Invari­ably when this has hap­pened over time, the offen­sive mis­sion wins.”

“If you com­bine the two into one gov­ern­ment agency, which mis­sion wins?...Invariably when this has hap­pened over time, the offen­sive mis­sion wins.” Yep! Hope­ful­ly at some point the glob­al secu­ri­ty indus­try is going to inter­nal­ize the fact that the best pos­si­ble path to true secu­ri­ty is glob­al peace and pros­per­i­ty and account­able gov­ern­ments every­where run by cit­i­zens that have absolute­ly no inter­est in mess­ing with the affairs of oth­er coun­tries. Only help­ing. No war or eco­nom­ic con­quest or any of that. Every­where. There won’t be much need to spy at that point! Plus, if today’s “Heart­bleed” is giv­ing you chest pains, just imag­ine what the Heart­bleed of the future is going to feel like:

New Sci­en­tist
DNA nanobots deliv­er drugs in liv­ing cock­roach­es

12:30 08 April 2014 by Sarah Spick­er­nell
For sim­i­lar sto­ries, vis­it the Nan­otech­nol­o­gy Top­ic Guide

It’s a com­put­er – inside a cock­roach. Nano-sized enti­ties made of DNA that are able to per­form the same kind of log­ic oper­a­tions as a sil­i­con-based com­put­er have been intro­duced into a liv­ing ani­mal.

The DNA com­put­ers – known as origa­mi robots because they work by fold­ing and unfold­ing strands of DNA – trav­el around the insec­t’s body and inter­act with each oth­er, as well as the insec­t’s cells. When they uncurl, they can dis­pense drugs car­ried in their folds.

“DNA nanoro­bots could poten­tial­ly car­ry out com­plex pro­grams that could one day be used to diag­nose or treat dis­eases with unprece­dent­ed sophis­ti­ca­tion,” says Daniel Lev­n­er, a bio­engi­neer at the Wyss Insti­tute at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

Lev­n­er and his col­leagues at Bar Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploit­ing the bind­ing prop­er­ties of DNA. When it meets a cer­tain kind of pro­tein, DNA unrav­els into two com­ple­men­tary strands. By cre­at­ing par­tic­u­lar sequences, the strands can be made to unrav­el on con­tact with spe­cif­ic mol­e­cules – say, those on a dis­eased cell. When the mol­e­cule unrav­els, out drops the pack­age wrapped inside.

A bug’s life

The team has now inject­ed var­i­ous kinds of nanobots into cock­roach­es. Because the nanobots are labelled with flu­o­res­cent mark­ers, the researchers can fol­low them and analyse how dif­fer­ent robot com­bi­na­tions affect where sub­stances are deliv­ered. The team says the accu­ra­cy of deliv­ery and con­trol of the nanobots is equiv­a­lent to a com­put­er sys­tem.

“This is the first time that bio­log­i­cal ther­a­py has been able to match how a com­put­er proces­sor works,” says co-author Ido Bachelet of the Insti­tute of Nan­otech­nol­o­gy and Advanced Mate­ri­als at Bar Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty.

“Unlike elec­tron­ic devices, which are suit­able for our watch­es, our cars or phones, we can use these robots in life domains, like a liv­ing cock­roach,” says Ángel Goñi Moreno of the Nation­al Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­o­gy in Madrid, Spain. “This opens the door for envi­ron­men­tal or health appli­ca­tions.”

DNA has already been used for stor­ing large amounts of infor­ma­tion and cir­cuits for ampli­fy­ing chem­i­cal sig­nals, but these appli­ca­tions are rudi­men­ta­ry com­pared with the poten­tial ben­e­fits of the origa­mi robots.

Com­modore cock­roach

...

The team says it should be pos­si­ble to scale up the com­put­ing pow­er in the cock­roach to that of an 8‑bit com­put­er, equiv­a­lent to a Com­modore 64 or Atari 800 from the 1980s. Goni-Moreno agrees that this is fea­si­ble. “The mech­a­nism seems easy to scale up so the com­plex­i­ty of the com­pu­ta­tions will soon become high­er,” he says.

An obvi­ous ben­e­fit of this tech­nol­o­gy would be can­cer treat­ments, because these must be cell-spe­cif­ic and cur­rent treat­ments are not well-tar­get­ed. But a treat­ment like this in mam­mals must over­come the immune response trig­gered when a for­eign object enters the body.

Bachelet is con­fi­dent that the team can enhance the robots’ sta­bil­i­ty so that they can sur­vive in mam­mals. “There is no rea­son why pre­lim­i­nary tri­als on humans can’t start with­in five years,” he says.

Snap­shots from the future:
Ack, why is my heart pound­ing so hard? Do I have a virus?

Here’s an arti­cle from 2008 that’s a reminder that the Four Horse­men of the Infopoca­lypse are going to be knock­ing at your door soon­er or lat­er. Physics demands it. Specif­i­cal­ly quan­tum physics:

SwissInfo.cm
Beam me up, Gene­va

Decem­ber 16, 2008 — 08:11

Star-Trek-style human tele­por­ta­tion may still be years away, but sci­en­tists in Gene­va have made a key break­through in the field of quan­tum tele­por­ta­tion.

Researchers at Gene­va Uni­ver­si­ty have devel­oped a “quan­tum mem­o­ry”, cap­tur­ing a sin­gle par­ti­cle of light (a pho­ton) in a crys­tal and then repro­duc­ing and retrans­mit­ting it.

The find­ings, pub­lished in last week’s edi­tion of the aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal Nature, could trans­late into impor­tant appli­ca­tions in the field of quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy, guar­an­tee­ing high­ly secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and quan­tum com­put­ers that will run bil­lions of times faster than today’s machines.

Quan­tum tele­por­ta­tion is the trans­mis­sion of key prop­er­ties from one par­ti­cle to anoth­er with­out a phys­i­cal link. It relies on an aspect of physics known as “entan­gle­ment”, where­by the prop­er­ties of two par­ti­cles can be tied togeth­er even when they are far apart. Albert Ein­stein called it “spooky action at a dis­tance”.

The Gene­va-based team man­aged to stop a light par­ti­cle in a tiny one-mil­lime­tre crys­tal cooled to a tem­per­a­ture of minus 270 degrees Cel­sius.

The pho­ton’s prop­er­ties were then passed on to some ten mil­lion atoms inside the crys­tal, explained Pro­fes­sor Nico­las Gisin, head of the Group of Applied Physics at Gene­va Uni­ver­si­ty. He said this pro­duced an echo, like in a cave, re-emit­ting the pho­ton with the same char­ac­ter­is­tics.

“We physi­cists have played with pho­tons for years. It has always been a fas­ci­nat­ing chal­lenge to try to stop a pho­ton and hold it for a while – to stop it with­out destroy­ing it and release it with the same quan­tum states,” he told swiss­in­fo.

Secure speedy com­mu­ni­ca­tion

But their research also has a prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion. While their work seems to have lit­tle to do with Scot­ty’s famous tele­por­ta­tion machine, it rep­re­sents a cru­cial stage in over­com­ing the dis­tance prob­lems which affect quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy today.

The find­ings will form the basis of a quan­tum repeater, which will make it pos­si­ble to devel­op secure, long-dis­tance quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works.

Today infor­ma­tion is sent via fibre-optic net­works as a series of light puls­es. A quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem also uses a fibre-optic cable, but a pho­ton’s spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion can be tele­port­ed instan­ta­neous­ly.

“The prob­lem with this tech­nol­o­gy is that the frag­ile entan­gle­ment between two pho­tons is lost over very long dis­tances,” explained Gisin.

After trav­el­ling through tens of kilo­me­tres of optic fibre, 99 per cent of pho­tons are lost.

Quan­tum repeaters would tack­le this prob­lem by enabling flag­ging pho­tons to be reac­ti­vat­ed, con­serv­ing their pre­cious infor­ma­tion as they are trans­mit­ted, say the sci­en­tists.

And the inter­cep­tion of data trans­mis­sions encrypt­ed using this tech­nique appears to be impos­si­ble – spy­ing on the pho­tons would effec­tive­ly destroy them.

Com­mer­cial appli­ca­tions for quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy already exist in the bank­ing sec­tor and for secure e‑voting. The Gene­va firm idQuan­tique suc­cess­ful­ly test­ed a quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy sys­tem for the fed­er­al elec­tions in Octo­ber 2007.

...

Quan­tum repeaters involv­ing pho­tons trapped in frozen dia­monds! Neat! And that was back in 2008. They’re only going to get bet­ter. For instance, one repeater approach announced in 2012 could lead to pos­si­ble quan­tum stor­age capac­i­ties. And just days ago anoth­er set of researchers announced a method involv­ing elec­trons trapped in frozen dia­monds that report­ed­ly allows for 100% accu­ra­cy in the data trans­mit­ted (you can be the secret dia­mond car­tel is secret­ly smil­ing some­where). It was a poten­tial­ly huge accom­plish­ment because if you want­ed to replace the glob­al fiber optic lines with quan­tum net­works you’re going to have to send that infor­ma­tion through a lot of repeaters:

The New York Times
Sci­en­tists Report Find­ing Reli­able Way to Tele­port Data

By JOHN MARKOFFMAY 29, 2014

Sci­en­tists in the Nether­lands have moved a step clos­er to over­rid­ing one of Albert Einstein’s most famous objec­tions to the impli­ca­tions of quan­tum mechan­ics, which he described as “spooky action at a dis­tance.”

In a paper pub­lished on Thurs­day in the jour­nal Sci­ence, physi­cists at the Kavli Insti­tute of Nanoscience at the Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy report­ed that they were able to reli­ably tele­port infor­ma­tion between two quan­tum bits sep­a­rat­ed by three meters, or about 10 feet.

...

They report that they have achieved per­fect­ly accu­rate tele­por­ta­tion of quan­tum infor­ma­tion over short dis­tances. They are now seek­ing to repeat their exper­i­ment over the dis­tance of more than a kilo­me­ter. If they are able to repeat­ed­ly show that entan­gle­ment works at this dis­tance, it will be a defin­i­tive demon­stra­tion of the entan­gle­ment phe­nom­e­non and quan­tum mechan­i­cal the­o­ry.

Suc­ceed­ing at greater dis­tances will offer an affir­ma­tive solu­tion to a thought exper­i­ment known as Bell’s the­o­rem, pro­posed in 1964 by the Irish physi­cist John Stew­art Bell as a method for deter­min­ing whether par­ti­cles con­nect­ed via quan­tum entan­gle­ment com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion faster than the speed of light.

“There is a big race going on between five or six groups to prove Ein­stein wrong,” said Ronald Han­son, a physi­cist who leads the group at Delft. “There is one very big fish.”

In the past, sci­en­tists have made halt­ing gains in tele­port­ing quan­tum infor­ma­tion, a feat that is achieved by forc­ing phys­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed quan­tum bits into an entan­gled state.

But reli­a­bil­i­ty of quan­tum tele­por­ta­tion has been elu­sive. For exam­ple, in 2009, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land physi­cists demon­strat­ed the trans­fer of quan­tum infor­ma­tion, but only one of every 100 mil­lion attempts suc­ceed­ed, mean­ing that trans­fer­ring a sin­gle bit of quan­tum infor­ma­tion required rough­ly 10 min­utes.

In con­trast, the sci­en­tists at Delft have achieved the abil­i­ty “deter­min­is­ti­cal­ly,” mean­ing they can now tele­port the quan­tum state of two entan­gled elec­trons accu­rate­ly 100 per­cent of the time.

They did so by pro­duc­ing qubits using elec­trons trapped in dia­monds at extreme­ly low tem­per­a­tures. Accord­ing to Dr. Han­son, the dia­monds effec­tive­ly cre­ate “minipris­ons” in which the elec­trons were held. The researchers were able to estab­lish a spin, or val­ue, for elec­trons, and then read the val­ue reli­ably.

In addi­tion to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an impreg­nable quan­tum Inter­net, the research holds out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of net­works of quan­tum com­put­ers.

To date, prac­ti­cal quan­tum com­put­ers, which could solve cer­tain class­es of prob­lems far more quick­ly than even the most pow­er­ful com­put­ers now in use, remain a dis­tant goal. A func­tion­al quan­tum com­put­er would need to entan­gle a large num­ber of qubits and main­tain that entan­gled state for rel­a­tive­ly long peri­ods, some­thing that has so far not been achieved.

A dis­trib­uted quan­tum net­work might also offer new forms of pri­va­cy, Dr. Han­son sug­gest­ed. Such a net­work would make it pos­si­ble for a remote user to per­form a quan­tum cal­cu­la­tion on a serv­er, while at the same time mak­ing it impos­si­ble for the oper­a­tor of the serv­er to deter­mine the nature of the cal­cu­la­tion.

Impreg­nable inter­net here we come! At least with­in a few decades it could be a real­i­ty. Maybe a lot soon­er depend­ing on how the research pro­gress­es.

And that means all the gov­ern­ments of the world, and not just the US gov­ern­ment, are going to have to make a deci­sion about how this kind of tech­nol­o­gy gets imple­ment­ed (they’ll prob­a­bly mess around with repeater nodes to enable wire­tap­ping). As we’ve seen with the Snow­den Affair, the main strat­e­gy for gov­ern­ments around the world for address­ing these kinds of touchy issues with the pub­lic is to ignore it and/or talk about NSA spy­ing capa­bil­i­ties. How are gov­ern­ments going to respond when tele­com oper­a­tors can start lay­ing down quan­tum-pro­tect­ed cables that their own law enforce­ment and secu­ri­ty agen­cies can’t pos­si­bly decrypt if that’s where the tech­nol­o­gy pro­gress­es? Which gov­ern­ments will embrace it and for which seg­ments of their pop­u­lace? This could be quite a conun­drum for the major­i­ty of gov­ern­ments around the world that either cur­rent­ly have or desire to have sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties. Which gov­ern­ments will embrace quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions (all of them per­haps?).

You also have to won­der how well a quan­tum inter­net would inter­face with the exist­ing non-quan­tum inter­net hard­ware. Inter­est­ing­ly, Los Alam­os Labs announced last year that it had been using a quan­tum net­work for over two years and is try­ing to devel­op the tech­nol­o­gy for use in home net­works. It still faces the hur­dle of how to han­dle quan­tum rout­ing, which requires quan­tum repeat­ing but oth­er tech­nolo­gies too, in a way that isn’t at all scal­able and has a cen­tral vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty where the mes­sages get read for rout­ing infor­ma­tion at a cen­tral hub so it’s not a full quan­tum net­work. But the solu­tion involved demon­strates how a quan­tum inter­net could poten­tial­ly turn intro­duce math­e­mat­i­cal­ly unbreak­able encryp­tion on to the tra­di­tion­al inter­net.

The Los Alam­os Labs approach uses a “hub and spoke” approach. Nodes in the net­work would still all be ran­dom­ly con­nect­ed to each oth­er tra­di­tion­al­ly, but they’ll also all have a direct quan­tum-capa­ble con­nec­tion to a cen­tral hub (this is for a local net­work, where fiber optic cables can be used for the quan­tum con­nec­tion). The quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy allows for the gen­er­a­tion of tru­ly ran­dom num­bers and that allows for the gen­er­a­tion of tru­ly ran­dom “one-time pad” encryp­tion keys that, if imple­ment­ed cor­rect­ly and tru­ly ran­dom­ly, allows for the­o­ret­i­cal­ly math­e­mat­i­cal­ly unbreak­able encryp­tion. Not quan­tum encryp­tion that depends on entan­gled pho­tons or elec­trons but just the stan­dard math­e­mat­i­cal­ly encryp­tion tech­niques cur­rent­ly used. The cen­tral hub receives and sends out the “one-time pad” to the nodes and the the nodes use that pad to encrypt the mes­sages and com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er over the tra­di­tion­al non-quan­tum net­work. So as long as the cen­tral hub is secure, the entire com­mu­ni­ca­tion loop could be effec­tive­ly unbreak­able because it’s both unbreak­able at a quan­tum lev­el over the quan­tum net­work and a math­e­mat­i­cal lev­el over the tra­di­tion­al net­work:

MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review
Gov­ern­ment Lab Reveals It Has Oper­at­ed Quan­tum Inter­net for Over Two Years
May 6, 2013

A quan­tum inter­net capa­ble of send­ing per­fect­ly secure mes­sages has been run­ning at Los Alam­os Nation­al Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers

One of the dreams for secu­ri­ty experts is the cre­ation of a quan­tum inter­net that allows per­fect­ly secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion based on the pow­er­ful laws of quan­tum mechan­ics.

The basic idea here is that the act of mea­sur­ing a quan­tum object, such as a pho­ton, always changes it. So any attempt to eaves­drop on a quan­tum mes­sage can­not fail to leave tell­tale signs of snoop­ing that the receiv­er can detect. That allows any­body to send a “one-time pad” over a quan­tum net­work which can then be used for secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion using con­ven­tion­al clas­si­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

That sets things up nice­ly for per­fect­ly secure mes­sag­ing known as quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy and this is actu­al­ly a fair­ly straight­for­ward tech­nique for any half decent quan­tum optics lab. Indeed, a com­pa­ny called ID Quan­tique sells an off-the-shelf sys­tem that has begun to attract banks and oth­er organ­i­sa­tions inter­est­ed in per­fect secu­ri­ty.

These sys­tems have an impor­tant lim­i­ta­tion, how­ev­er. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of quan­tum cryp­tog­ra­phy sys­tems are point-to-point con­nec­tions over a sin­gle length of fibre, So they can send secure mes­sages from A to B but can­not route this infor­ma­tion onwards to C, D, E or F. That’s because the act of rout­ing a mes­sage means read­ing the part of it that indi­cates where it has to be rout­ed. And this inevitably changes it, at least with con­ven­tion­al routers. This makes a quan­tum inter­net impos­si­ble with today’s tech­nol­o­gy

Var­i­ous teams are rac­ing to devel­op quan­tum routers that will fix this prob­lem by steer­ing quan­tum mes­sages with­out destroy­ing them. We looked at one of the first last year. But the truth is that these devices are still some way from com­mer­cial real­i­ty.

Today, Richard Hugh­es and pals at Los Alam­os Nation­al Labs in New Mex­i­co reveal an alter­na­tive quan­tum inter­net, which they say they’ve been run­ning for two and half years. Their approach is to cre­ate a quan­tum net­work based around a hub and spoke-type net­work. All mes­sages get rout­ed from any point in the net­work to anoth­er via this cen­tral hub.

This is not the first time this kind of approach has been tried. The idea is that mes­sages to the hub rely on the usu­al lev­el of quan­tum secu­ri­ty. How­ev­er, once at the hub, they are con­vert­ed to con­ven­tion­al clas­si­cal bits and then recon­vert­ed into quan­tum bits to be sent on the sec­ond leg of their jour­ney.

So as long as the hub is secure, then the net­work should also be secure.

The prob­lem with this approach is scal­a­bil­i­ty. As the num­ber of links to the hub increas­es, it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to han­dle all the pos­si­ble con­nec­tions that can be made between one point in the net­work and anoth­er.

Hugh­es and co say they’ve solved this with their unique approach which equips each node in the net­work with quan­tum transmitters–i.e., lasers–but not with pho­ton detec­tors which are expen­sive and bulky. Only the hub is capa­ble of receiv­ing a quan­tum mes­sage (although all nodes can send and receiv­ing con­ven­tion­al mes­sages in the nor­mal way).

That may sound lim­it­ing but it still allows each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly over a clas­si­cal link. The hub can then route this mes­sage to anoth­er node using anoth­er one time pad that it has set up with this sec­ond node. So the entire net­work is secure, pro­vid­ed that the cen­tral hub is also secure.

The big advan­tage of this sys­tem is that it makes the tech­nol­o­gy required at each node extreme­ly simple–essentially lit­tle more than a laser. In fact, Los Alam­os has already designed and built plug-and-play type mod­ules that are about the size of a box of match­es. “Our next-gen­er­a­tion [mod­ule] will be an order of mag­ni­tude small­er in each lin­ear dimen­sion,” they say.

Their ulti­mate goal is to have one of these mod­ules built in to almost any device con­nect­ed to a fibre optic net­work, such as set top TV box­es, home com­put­ers and so on, to allow per­fect­ly secure mes­sag­ing.

Hav­ing run this sys­tem now for over two years, Los Alam­os are now high­ly con­fi­dent in its effi­ca­cy.

Of course, the net­work can nev­er be more secure than the hub at the mid­dle of it and this is an impor­tant lim­i­ta­tion of this approach. By con­trast, a pure quan­tum inter­net should allow per­fect­ly secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion from any point in the net­work to any oth­er.

Anoth­er is that this approach will become obso­lete as soon as quan­tum routers become com­mer­cial­ly viable. So the ques­tion for any investors is whether they can get their mon­ey back in the time before then. The odds are that they won’t have to wait long to find out.

...

As we can see, while quan­tum com­put­ing could be a mas­sive­ly pow­er­ful tool for break­ing math­e­mat­i­cal encryp­tion, quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy also poten­tial­ly pro­vides tru­ly ran­dom num­bers that can be used to cre­ate the­o­ret­i­cal­ly unbreak­able keys and the means of trans­mit­ting the keys secure­ly. But only once quan­tum rout­ing arrives will this become scal­able for the whole inter­net. But it’s com­ing.

Will quan­tum routers make this “one-time pad” tech­nique obso­lete? Maybe, in the long run. But in the short run, the “one-time pad” method is an exam­ple of how quan­tum net­works could trans­form not only the rules of how we com­mu­ni­cate but also how we use the exist­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy and infra­struc­ture, at least region­al­ly at first where you can have a con­nect­ed quan­tum net­work that can act as a hub for pass­ing “one-time pad” keys. Once the trans­mis­sion of quan­tum data is enabled over longer dis­tances and quan­tum routers are invent­ed, we’re not going to see the tra­di­tion­al inter­net sud­den­ly get replaced. That’s going to take a while because all of that phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture needs to be replaced. But with the “one-time pad” method we could see the adop­tion of a basic quan­tum net­work skele­ton used to trans­mit one-time pad keys for unbreak­able encryp­tion over the tra­di­tion­al inter­net, which will han­dle the vol­ume of the actu­al­ly traf­fic.

So con­cerns over gov­ern­ment spy­ing and all oth­er spy­ing are poised to change quite a bit as the tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape changes in tru­ly fun­da­men­tal ways and it might hap­pen soon­er than you expect. Quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions could be won­der­ful for pro­tect­ing crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture. But it won’t just be crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture get­ting pro­tect­ed. Even­tu­al­ly, every­one else will be using the quan­tum inter­net too. And since it’s poten­tial­ly going to be ush­er­ing in a new era of tru­ly unbreak­able com­mu­ni­ca­tions, you can bet its usage will be watched very care­ful­ly by gov­ern­ments around the globe as is becomes a com­mer­cial real­i­ty. In addi­tion to mil­i­taries and oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies adopt­ing aggres­sive­ly adopt­ing quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy, as we would expect, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see who else ends up using it first. We’ll find out.

And will quan­tum code mak­ing beat quan­tum code break­ing? We’ll find that out too. But first, we need the quan­tum router. Once that’s avail­able, things could be get­ting increas­ing­ly “spooky” on the inter­net. Hack­ers will still exist, but they’ll have to get increas­ing­ly spooky too.

It’s prob­a­bly a good time to change your pass­words. Or maybe not. It’s unclear at this point but you should prob­a­bly change your pass­words any­ways:

PC World
Mas­sive Russ­ian hack has researchers scratch­ing their heads
Mar­tyn Williams @martyn_williams

Aug 6, 2014 5:10 PM

Don’t wor­ry, you’re not the only one with more ques­tions than answers about the 1.2 bil­lion user cre­den­tials amassed by Russ­ian hack­ers.

Some secu­ri­ty researchers on Wednes­day said it’s still unclear just how seri­ous the dis­cov­ery is, and they fault­ed the com­pa­ny that uncov­ered the data­base, Hold Secu­ri­ty, for not pro­vid­ing more details about what it dis­cov­ered.

“The only way we can know if this is a big deal is if we know what the infor­ma­tion is and where it came from,” said Chester Wis­niews­ki, a senior secu­ri­ty advi­sor at Sophos. “But I can’t answer that because the peo­ple who dis­closed this decid­ed they want to make mon­ey off of this. There’s no way for oth­ers to ver­i­fy.”

Wis­niews­ki was refer­ring to an offer by Hold Secu­ri­ty to noti­fy web­site oper­a­tors if they were affect­ed, but only if they sign up for its breach noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice, which starts at US$120 per year. Indi­vid­ual con­sumers can find out through its iden­ti­ty pro­tec­tion ser­vice, which Hold Secu­ri­ty says will be free for the first 30 days.

Hold Secu­ri­ty didn’t respond to email and tele­phone requests for com­ment Wednes­day, though it may have been inun­dat­ed with inquiries.

To recap, Hold Secu­ri­ty said Tues­day it had obtained a mas­sive data­base of stolen cre­den­tials amassed by a gang of Russ­ian hack­ers. The data­base con­tains 1.2 bil­lion unique “cre­den­tial pairs”—made up of a user ID (most­ly email address­es) and an asso­ci­at­ed pass­word. Look­ing at email address­es alone, there are “over half a bil­lion,” the com­pa­ny said, since some email address­es cor­re­spond to mul­ti­ple pass­words.

To assess how seri­ous the dis­cov­ery is, researchers want to know how old the cre­den­tials col­lect­ed by the Russ­ian gang are, where they came from, and how well-pro­tect­ed the pass­words are by “hash­ing,” which scram­bles the pass­words but can be vul­ner­a­ble to brute force attack.

The age is impor­tant because the old­er they are, the more like­ly they are to be dis­used and less valu­able, said Gary Davis, chief con­sumer secu­ri­ty evan­ge­list at McAfee.

Hold Secu­ri­ty acknowl­edged in its announce­ment that “not all” the cre­den­tials are “valid or cur­rent,” with some asso­ci­at­ed with fake email address­es, closed accounts or even pass­words a decade old.

It’s also unclear how many of the login and pass­word cre­den­tials were culled online recent­ly by the hack­er group, and how many were acquired on the black mar­ket from pre­vi­ous hacks.

Hold Secu­ri­ty said the hack­ers began by buy­ing cre­den­tials from pre­vi­ous­ly attacked accounts, and then did some hack­ing work of their own. But it’s unclear how many of the 1.2 bil­lion cre­den­tials came from pre­vi­ous hack­ing inci­dents, and which inci­dents those were.

“If you take Sony, LinkedIn, eBay and Adobe,” said Wis­niews­ki, nam­ing four of the biggest recent pass­word breach­es, “that’s already 500 mil­lion accounts.”

...

Regard­ing the ques­tion of how many of these cre­den­tials were pur­chased on the black mar­ket vs how many were direct­ly stolen by this hack­er group, note that Hold Secu­ri­ty is the same firm that report­ed a mas­sive theft of 360 mil­lion stolen cre­den­tials back in Feb­ru­ary. And in that case, those 360 mil­lion stolen cre­den­tials were for sale on a mas­sive and grow­ing black mar­ket

360 mil­lion new­ly stolen cre­den­tials on black mar­ket: cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firm

By Jim Fin­kle

BOSTON Tue Feb 25, 2014 6:36pm EST

(Reuters) — A cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firm said on Tues­day that it uncov­ered stolen cre­den­tials from some 360 mil­lion accounts that are avail­able for sale on cyber black mar­kets, though it is unsure where they came from or what they can be used to access.

The dis­cov­ery could rep­re­sent more of a risk to con­sumers and com­pa­nies than stolen cred­it card data because of the chance the sets of user names and pass­words could open the door to online bank accounts, cor­po­rate net­works, health records and vir­tu­al­ly any oth­er type of com­put­er sys­tem.

Alex Hold­en, chief infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty offi­cer of Hold Secu­ri­ty LLC, said in an inter­view that his firm obtained the data over the past three weeks, mean­ing an unprece­dent­ed amount of stolen cre­den­tials is avail­able for sale under­ground.

“The sheer vol­ume is over­whelm­ing,” said Hold­en, whose firm last year helped uncov­er a major data breach at Adobe Sys­tems Inc in which tens of mil­lions of records were stolen.

Hold­en said he believes the 360 mil­lion records were obtained in sep­a­rate attacks, includ­ing one that yield­ed some 105 mil­lion records, which would make it the largest sin­gle cre­den­tial breach­es known to date.

He said he believes the cre­den­tials were stolen in breach­es that have yet to be pub­licly report­ed. The com­pa­nies attacked may remain unaware until they are noti­fied by third par­ties who find evi­dence of the hack­ing, he said.

“We have staff work­ing around the clock to iden­ti­fy the vic­tims,” he said.

He has not pro­vid­ed any infor­ma­tion about the attacks to oth­er cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firms or author­i­ties but intends to alert the com­pa­nies involved if his staff can iden­ti­fy them.

The mas­sive trove of cre­den­tials includes user names, which are typ­i­cal­ly email address­es, and pass­words that in most cas­es are in unen­crypt­ed text. Hold­en said that in con­trast, the Adobe breach, which he uncov­ered in Octo­ber 2013, yield­ed tens of mil­lions of records that had encrypt­ed pass­words, which made it more dif­fi­cult for hack­ers to use them.

The email address­es are from major providers such as AOL Inc, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc and almost all For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions. Hold­en said he alert­ed one major email provider that is a client, but he declined to iden­ti­fy the com­pa­ny, cit­ing a nondis­clo­sure agree­ment.

Heather Bearfield, who runs the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty prac­tice for account­ing firm Mar­cum LLP, said she had no infor­ma­tion about the infor­ma­tion that Hold Secu­ri­ty uncov­ered but that it was plau­si­ble for hack­ers to obtain such a large amount of data because these breach­es are on the rise.

...

Part of what makes these kinds of mas­sive secu­ri­ty breach­es so frus­trat­ing is that so many of these breach­es are basi­cal­ly the result of suc­cess­ful spear phish­ing attacks and not only the stolen data is often per­fect for for even more spear phish­ing, but it’s very unclear what can pre­vent even more spear phish­ing because its an attack based on over­com­ing human minds, not IT sys­tems.

Have you ever thought about how much more awe­some the inter­net would be if the domain name “cuteoverload.com” went to the site every­one knows and loves in some coun­tries, but went to a a very dif­fer­ent site in oth­er coun­tries? Or how about hav­ing mul­ti­ple inter­nets avail­able to you to choose from where the dif­fer­ent inter­nets some­times share the same domain-name-to-web­site asso­ci­a­tion, but not always. And what if more and more of these alter­na­tive inter­nets could devel­op all the time, so there isn’t just one major inter­net but a glob­al net­work of inter­nets. Does that sound appeal­ing or more like a logis­ti­cal night­mare? If you said “sign me up” then you’re in luck. The anti-ICANN move­ment has already arrived:

The Hin­du
‘U.S. monop­oly over Inter­net must go’
Sep 2, 2014 01:18 AM , By Vidya Venkat

DEFINING IDEAS: Most of Pouzin’s career has been devot­ed to the design and imple­men­ta­tion of com­put­er sys­tems, most notably the CYCLADES com­put­er net­work.
Inter­view with Louis Pouzin, a pio­neer of the Inter­net and recip­i­ent of the Cheva­lier of Légion d’Honneur, the high­est civil­ian dec­o­ra­tion of the French gov­ern­ment

Louis Pouzi­no is recog­nised for his con­tri­bu­tions to the pro­to­cols that make up the fun­da­men­tal archi­tec­ture of the Inter­net. Most of his career has been devot­ed to the design and imple­men­ta­tion of com­put­er sys­tems, most notably the CYCLADES com­put­er net­work and its data­gram-based pack­et-switch­ing net­work, a mod­el lat­er adopt­ed by the Inter­net as Trans­mis­sion Con­trol Pro­to­col (TCP)/Internet Pro­to­col (IP). Apart from the Cheva­lier of Légion d’Honneur, Mr. Pouzin, 83, was the lone French­man among Amer­i­can awardees of the Queen Eliz­a­beth Prize for Engi­neer­ing, giv­en to the inven­tors of Inter­net tech­nol­o­gy in its inau­gur­al year, 2013.

Ahead of the ninth annu­al meet­ing of the Inter­net Gov­er­nance Forum (IGF) from Sep­tem­ber 2–5 in Istan­bul, Mr. Pouzin shared his con­cerns regard­ing the monop­oly enjoyed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment and Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions over the Inter­net and the need for democ­ra­tis­ing what is essen­tial­ly a glob­al com­mons. Excerpts from an inter­view, over Skype, with Vidya Venkat.

What are the key con­cerns you would be dis­cussing at the IGF?

As of today, the Inter­net is con­trolled pre­dom­i­nant­ly by the U.S. Their tech­no­log­i­cal and mil­i­tary con­cerns heav­i­ly influ­ence Inter­net gov­er­nance pol­i­cy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Brazil Net­mundi­al con­vened in April, 2014, with the Inter­net Cor­po­ra­tion for Assigned Names and Num­bers (ICANN), fol­low­ing objec­tions raised by [Brazil­ian] Pres­i­dent Dil­ma Rouss­eff to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency (NSA) spy­ing on her gov­ern­ment, only hand­ed us a non-bind­ing agree­ment on sur­veil­lance and pri­va­cy-relat­ed con­cerns. So the demand for an Inter­net bill of rights is grow­ing loud. This will have to lay out what Inter­net can and can­not do. Key gov­ern­ment actors must sign the agree­ment mak­ing it bind­ing on them. The main issue per­tain­ing to tech­no­log­i­cal dom­i­nance and there­by con­trol of the net­work itself has to be chal­lenged and a bill of rights must aim to address these con­cerns.

What is the way for­ward if the U.S. dom­i­nance has to be chal­lenged?

Today, Chi­na and Rus­sia are capa­ble of chal­leng­ing U.S. dom­i­nance. Despite being a strong com­mer­cial pow­er, Chi­na has not deployed Inter­net tech­nol­o­gy across the world. The Chi­nese have good infra­struc­ture but they use U.S. Domain Nam­ing Sys­tem, which is a basic com­po­nent of the func­tion­ing of the Inter­net. One good thing is because they use the Chi­nese lan­guage for domain reg­is­tra­tion, it lim­its access to out­siders in some way.

India too is a big coun­try. It helps that it is not an author­i­tar­i­an coun­try and has many lan­guages. It should make the most of its region­al lan­guages, but with regard to tech­nol­o­gy itself, India has to tread more care­ful­ly in devel­op­ing inde­pen­dent capa­bil­i­ties in this area.

As far as Euro­pean coun­tries are con­cerned, they are most­ly allies of the U.S. and may not have a strong incli­na­tion to devel­op inde­pen­dent capa­bil­i­ties in this area. Africa again has poten­tial; it can estab­lish its own inde­pen­dent Inter­net net­work which will be patro­n­ised by its bur­geon­ing mid­dle class­es.

So you are say­ing that coun­tries should have their own inde­pen­dent Inter­net net­works rather than be part of one mega glob­al net­work?

Devel­op­ing inde­pen­dent net­works will take time, but to address the issue of dom­i­nance in the imme­di­ate future we must first address the monop­oly enjoyed by ICANN, which func­tions more or less as a proxy of the U.S. gov­ern­ment. The ICANN Domain Nam­ing Sys­tem (DNS) is oper­at­ed by VeriSign, a U.S. gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor. Thus, traf­fic is mon­i­tored by the NSA, and the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion (FBI) can seize user sites or domains any­where in the world if they are host­ed by U.S. com­pa­nies or sub­sidiaries.

ICANN needs to have an inde­pen­dent over­sight body. The process for cre­at­ing a new body could be primed by a coali­tion of states and oth­er organ­i­sa­tions plac­ing one or sev­er­al calls for pro­pos­als. Eval­u­a­tion, short­list, and hope­ful­ly selec­tion, would fol­low. If a selec­tion for the inde­pen­dent body could be worked out by Sep­tem­ber 2015, it would be well in time for the con­tract ter­mi­na­tion of the Inter­net Assigned Num­bers Author­i­ty (IANA) with the U.S. gov­ern­ment.

The most cru­cial ques­tion is should gov­ern­ments allow cit­i­zens to end up as guinea pigs for glob­al inter­net cor­po­ra­tions?

Break­ing that monop­oly does not require any agree­ment with the U.S. gov­ern­ment, because it is cer­tain­ly con­trary to the World Trade Organization’s prin­ci­ples. In oth­er words, mul­ti­ple roots [DNS Top Lev­el Domains (TLD)] are not only tech­ni­cal­ly fea­si­ble; they have been intro­duced in the Inter­net back in 1995, even before ICANN was cre­at­ed. This avenue is open to entre­pre­neurs and insti­tu­tions for inno­v­a­tive ser­vices tai­lored to user needs, spe­cial­ly those users unable to afford the extrav­a­gant fees raked in by ICANN. The deploy­ment of inde­pen­dent roots cre­ates com­pe­ti­tion and con­tributes to rein­ing in devi­ous prac­tices in the domain name mar­ket.

The U.S. gov­ern­ment is adamant on con­trol­ling the ICANN DNS. Thus, copies (mir­rors) should be made avail­able in oth­er coun­tries out of reach from the FBI. A Ger­man organ­i­sa­tion Open Root Serv­er Net­work is, at present, oper­at­ing such a ser­vice. To make use of it, users have to mod­i­fy the DNS address­es in their Inter­net access device. That is all, usage is free.

But would this process not result in the frag­men­ta­tion of the Inter­net?

Frag­men­ta­tion of the Inter­net is not such a bad thing as it is often made out to be. The bone of con­tention here is the DNS monop­oly.

On August 28, near­ly 12 mil­lions Inter­net users sub­scrib­ing to Time Warner’s cable broad­band lost con­nec­tiv­i­ty due to a sud­den out­age in one day. In a world of frag­ment­ed Inter­net net­works, such mass out­ages become poten­tial­ly impos­si­ble. The need of the hour is to work out of the cur­rent trap to use a more inter­op­er­a­ble sys­tem.

In this con­text, a usu­al scare­crow bran­dished by the U.S. gov­ern­ment is frag­men­ta­tion, or Balka­ni­sa­tion, of the Inter­net. All monop­o­lies resort to sim­i­lar argu­ments when­ev­er their turf is threat­ened by a loom­ing com­pe­ti­tion. Fur­ther­more, the pro­pri­etary nam­ing and unsta­ble ser­vice def­i­n­i­tions spe­cif­ic to the likes of Ama­zon, Apple, Face­book, Google, Twit­ter, and more, have already divid­ed the Inter­net in as many closed and incom­pat­i­ble inter­nets of cap­tive users.

Recent­ly, the Indi­an Exter­nal Affairs Min­is­ter had object­ed to U.S. spy­ing on the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty. Can gov­ern­ments like India use a forum like IGF to raise con­cerns relat­ing to sur­veil­lance?

Even if gov­ern­ments do attend IGF, they do not come with a man­date. A major prob­lem with the Inter­net gov­er­nance space today is that they are under the dom­i­nance of cor­po­rate lob­bies. So it is a bit hard to say what could be achieved by gov­ern­ment par­tic­i­pa­tion in the IGF. This is a prob­lem of the IGF: it has no bud­get or sec­re­tary gen­er­al, it is designed to have no influ­ence and to main­tain the sta­tus quo. That is why you have a par­al­lel Inter­net Ungover­nance Forum which is not ally­ing with the exist­ing struc­ture and putting forth all the issues they want to change. Indi­an cit­i­zens could par­tic­i­pate in this forum to raise pri­va­cy and sur­veil­lance-relat­ed con­cerns.

Do you feel Inter­net gov­er­nance is still a very alien sub­ject for most gov­ern­ments and peo­ple to engage with?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the phrase “Inter­net gov­er­nance” is too abstract for most peo­ple and gov­ern­ments to be inter­est­ed in. The most cru­cial ques­tion is what kind of soci­ety do you want to live in? Should gov­ern­ments allow cit­i­zens to end up as guinea pigs for glob­al Inter­net cor­po­ra­tions? The rev­e­la­tions by NSA con­trac­tor Edward Snow­den have proved beyond doubt that user data held by Inter­net com­pa­nies today are sub­ject to per­va­sive sur­veil­lance. Con­duct­ing these intru­sive activ­i­ties by con­trol­ling the core infra­struc­ture of the Inter­net with­out obtain­ing the con­sent of cit­i­zen users is a big con­cern and should be debat­ed in pub­lic. There­fore, debates about Inter­net gov­er­nance are no longer alien; they involve all of us who are part of the net­work.

Could com­pet­ing DNS top lev­el domains be part of the future of the inter­net? It’s look­ing like a pos­si­bil­i­ty. So to get a bet­ter idea of what that might mean, here’s a 2012 inter­view of Pouzin on the Open Root alter­na­tive that gives us a bet­ter idea of just how open the Open Root inter­net could be:

Tech­Week europe
Open Root: The Grand­fa­ther Of The Inter­net Takes On ICANN

FRANCE: Louis Pouzin invent­ed a pre­cur­sor to the Internet’s TCP/IP’s pro­toool, and now he wants to break ICANN’s monop­oly on top lev­el domains

On Octo­ber 29, 2012 by Tech­WeekEu­rope Staff 0

Lit­tle known to the gen­er­al pub­lic, Louis Pouzin is a real IT leg­end. Back in 1971, the French gov­ern­ment tasked him with design­ing Cyclade, the French answer to the Amer­i­can ArpaNet.

Lat­er, Pouzin and his team cre­at­ed the data­gram pro­to­col which Vin­ton Cerf and Robert Kahn used as the basis for the Internet’s TCP/IP pro­to­col, in 1974. In just a few years, the new com­mu­ni­ca­tion stan­dard would be adapt­ed by the major­i­ty of com­put­er net­works in the world.

The grand­fa­ther of the Inter­net

The 81 year old engi­neer, who is a long­time mem­ber of Inter­net Soci­ety (ISOC), is offi­cial­ly retired, but he still wants to influ­ence the future of the Inter­net – and in par­tic­u­lar wants to see it freed from dom­i­na­tion by US organ­i­sa­tions. To this end, he has been involved in the move­ment for Alter­na­tive DNS roots, which offer an alter­na­tive to the Domain Name Sys­tem (DNS) roots pro­vid­ed under the con­trol of ICANN, the Internet’s rul­ing body.

Although the Inter­net is pub­lic, decen­tralised and inde­pen­dent of any state in its day-to-day oper­a­tions, the net­work remains under the con­trol of ICANN (Inter­net Cor­po­ra­tion for Assigned Names and Num­bers), an Amer­i­can organ­i­sa­tion that has been respon­si­ble for link­ing domains (assigned names) and IP address­es (num­bers) since 1996.

Specif­i­cal­ly, it is ICANN and its many affil­i­ates (AFNIC in France, Nominet in the UK) that con­trol the root servers of the Inter­net and allow over two bil­lion Inter­net users to find their way among mil­lions of servers host­ing data.

Although this year it has some­what soft­ened its grip, ICANN has long imposed a US char­ac­ter set (ASCII) on bil­lions of peo­ple native­ly using oth­er alpha­bets (Russ­ian, Chi­nese, Ara­bic, Indi­an). In addi­tion, it oper­ates a busi­ness mod­el which some find ques­tion­able: rental of domain names.

“ICANN, with its self-pro­claimed monop­oly, says that there is only one root – Verisign – which oper­ates under con­tract with the US Depart­ment of Com­merce (DOC). Chang­ing this root must be approved, first by ICANN, and then DOC. While in actu­al­i­ty, there are many roots cre­at­ed by oth­er organ­i­sa­tions, to allow access to sites which, for var­i­ous rea­sons, have TLD (Top Lev­el Domains) that do not exist in the ICANN root servers,” Pouzin told Silicon.fr.

The octo­ge­nar­i­an doesn’t want to sim­ply denounce the monop­oly and Amer­i­cano-cen­tric vision of ICANN, but offer an alter­na­tive design. along­side oth­er Alter­na­tive DNS activists, he set up a French site, called Open Root, to pro­vide an alter­na­tive to ICANN’s root servers.

Open the Root

While ICANN is a monop­oly con­trolled by the US gov­ern­ment, Pouzin wants Open Root aims to be an asso­ci­a­tion (EUROLINC) under the con­trol of users. While ICANN requires the use of the Amer­i­can­ised Latin alpha­bet, Open Root pro­vides sup­port for all alpha­bets and ideograms cur­rent­ly exist­ing on the plan­et. While ICANN pro­pos­es leas­ing domain names, Open Root offers the out­right sale of a domain name at a min­i­mal price.

“Open Root should be inde­pen­dent of the ICANN root, a sanc­tu­ary for users reject­ed by ICANN, or refus­ing the con­di­tions imposed by the organ­i­sa­tion. (…) Anoth­er group of inter­est is the cit­i­zens of coun­tries whose lan­guages are not sup­port­ed by ICANN,” said Pouzin.

How­ev­er, the ini­tia­tive is not to the lik­ing of AFNIC, the organ­i­sa­tion respon­si­ble for domain names in France. “We wel­come any ini­tia­tive to pro­mote inno­va­tion and com­pe­ti­tion. Nev­er­the­less, it seems essen­tial to guar­an­tee the unique­ness of the domain names already in use. Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion roots, although they may offer new fea­tures in each case, are a path that we do not want to take,” said Julien Nail­let, a spokes­woman for AFNIC.

The Inter­net Archi­tec­ture Board (IAB) has issued a stern warn­ing against alter­na­tive roots in an Inter­net stan­dard doc­u­ment, called RFC 2826 (the Inter­net stan­dards are laid down by “Request for Com­ment” or RFC doc­u­ments).

The objec­tion boils down to ambi­gu­i­ty: because exten­sions like .com or .biz might be dupli­cat­ed in dif­fer­ent roots, users would have to know which rout serv­er to use to look for a giv­en site, or else they could go to the wrong place. “Deploy­ing mul­ti­ple pub­lic DNS roots would raise a very strong pos­si­bil­i­ty that users of dif­fer­ent ISPs who click on the same link on a web page could end up at dif­fer­ent des­ti­na­tions, against the will of the web page design­ers,” says the infor­ma­tion­al RFC.

Brand­ing issues

The monop­oly of the ICANN root servers effec­tive­ly guar­an­tees the unique­ness of domain names. After all, there is only one data­base asso­ci­at­ing a domain name (like TechWeekEurope.co.uk) to the IP address of the serv­er host­ing the web­site. But is this uni­ty an illu­sion, and is it real­ly a ben­e­fit?

Pro­po­nents of Alter­na­tive DNS sys­tems think ICANN’s resis­tance to the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of exten­sions might have some­thing to do with the amount of mon­ey it charges for cre­at­ing new domain names for big brands.

In what Pouzin sees as ram­pant com­mer­cial­ism, ICANN has final­ly allowed new “gener­ic” top lev­el domains (gTLDs) out­side the nor­mal list of coun­try names and exten­sions such as .com – and is charg­ing heav­i­ly for them. When the $185,000 cost of apply­ing is added to the annu­al cost of $25,000 and the back-end reg­istry and con­sult­ing, ICANN believes the total cost to some­one rent­ing a new domain could be over $500,000

Even if Open Root doesn’t attract more than a hand­ful of users, Pouzin thinks it will be invalu­able in start­ing a debate about Inter­net gov­er­nance. After all, this net­work now con­nects bil­lions of human beings, and soon will do the same for tens of bil­lions of objects.

Pouzin acknowl­edges the dif­fi­cul­ty that Alter­na­tive DNS roots would allow mul­ti­ple sites with the same address (URL). He points out that already there are mul­ti­ple sites for a word like “tube”, although in prac­tice tube.com, tube.net and tube.org may all be rent­ed by the same organ­i­sa­tion, as a defen­sive mea­sure.

“In the open roots frame­work, in case there exists sev­er­al .tube, they will be dis­tin­guished by the root select­ed by the user,” the Open­Root site explains, so surf­ing the web becomes an activ­i­ty where users have to take even more con­trol over what they are doing.

...

Well this cer­tain­ly is a fas­ci­nat­ing plan: It sounds like the “Open Root” mod­el Pouzin advo­cates would basi­cal­ly allow for the cre­ation of a num­ber of com­pet­ing mini-inter­nets that all still rely on the same under­ly­ing hard­ware infra­struc­ture (the glob­al telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture shut­tling all the traf­fic) but oper­ate with­in their own domain-name bub­bles. The bub­bles could, and pre­sum­ably would, be heav­i­ly over­lap­ping in most cas­es but not nec­es­sar­i­ly. Why do we want this? Well, it’s unclear from a gen­er­al user-friend­li­ness stand­point except that it makes it hard­er for an exist­ing domain name to be blocked by ICANN. And the poten­tial­ly to expand the lan­guage char­ac­ter sets is actu­al­ly quite nice for many peo­ple.

Of course, such a sys­tem also poten­tial­ly makes it much eas­i­er for gov­ern­ments or pri­vate enti­ties oper­at­ing their own root servers to block spe­cif­ic domain names on their own mini-inter­nets and any users that aren’t tech savvy enough to jump around from root serv­er to root serv­er might just be out of luck. And there’s no guar­an­tee that the most “free” root servers (free in terms of non-blocked site) will actu­al­ly be free because there’s no rea­son a for-prof­it alter­na­tive DNS roots could be set up too (Com­puServ shall rise again!).

So it’s sort of of wash in terms of the addi­tion­al free­doms gained (more options, more headaches) which rais­es the ques­tion of why we would want to destroy the exist­ing ICANN monop­oly in order to make way for the Alter­na­tive DNS root sys­tem Pouzin pro­pos­es since the ICANN monop­oly already co-exists with the Open­Root sys­tem Pouzin cham­pi­oning. You can buy your own Alter­na­tive Top Lev­el Domain serv­er and buy all the domain names you’d like from Mr. Pouz­in’s Open-root ser­vice. Here’s the rates.

And then there’s the bit­coin-esque gold rush aspect to it all. Remem­ber: Pouz­in’s sys­tem does­n’t involve rent­ing domain names. You buy it per­ma­nent­ly for a par­tic­u­lar root (again, here’s the rates). Remem­ber the domain-name gold-rush­es of yes­ter­year? What would the new gold rush be like if we sud­den­ly splin­tered the inter­net and then start­ed offer­ing per­ma­nent domain names for sale. Because even if all alter­na­tive DNS providers like Open-Root strived to main­tained afford­able rates for the sale of per­ma­nent own­er­ship of a domain name for a giv­en root, unless there’s a rule against sec­ondary sales it’s hard to see why the exor­bi­tant prices cur­rent­ly charged for some domain names would­n’t con­tin­ue to be charged in the sec­ondary mar­kets under Pouz­in’s frag­ment­ed inter­net mod­el where per­ma­nent own­er­ship of a domain is what’s for sale. And it might even get more expen­sive in the long run because you would poten­tial­ly have to buy “mysite.com/org/biz” for mul­ti­ple domain name roots.

Still, the Open Root mod­el sounds like it has quite a few niche uses and it would­n’t be all that sur­pris­ing if nation­al or pri­vate domain name roots pro­lif­er­ate in the future. Child-friend­ly roots, for instance, could be a great tool for par­ents.

But, again, since all of these ser­vices can already exists, with or with­out ICANN, destroy­ing ICANN and ditch­ing the only “default” root for the globe just to make access­ing The Pirate Bay after it gets block even eas­i­er than it already is seems like quite a big risk to the con­nec­tiv­i­ty that makes the inter­net great for some rel­a­tive­ly minor gains, espe­cial­ly since the US is already set to give up con­trol of ICANN so rea­sons to fret over the out­sized US influ­ence over which sites get blocked by ICANN are set to fade any­ways. Unless, of course, you hap­pen to be in the busi­ness of cre­at­ing and sell­ing cus­tom roots and domains in which case this is clear­ly one of the great­est ideas ever. And there’s a lot of dif­fer­ent groups that could make a lot of mon­ey if we broke up ICANN and sud­den­ly frag­ment­ed domain names around the globe (Name­coin hoard­ers should rejoice) so there’s prob­a­bly going to be a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple that see this as the great idea ever and that means we should­n’t be sur­prised if this idea catch­es on going for­ward. of course, that also means we should­n’t be sur­prised if cuteoverload.com sud­den­ly becomes a lit­tle more NSWF going for­ward. The age of root-aware­ness is almost upon us.

David Golum­bia recent­ly wrote a fab­u­lous piece about the tech­no­crat­ic nature of the ideals behind the Tor Project and the vari­ety of fun­da­men­tal­ly unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic, polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions that are used to jus­ti­fy its devel­op­ment, includ­ing the invo­ca­tion of nat­ur­al law argu­ments by Tor’s lead devel­op­er, Roger Din­gle­dine. Giv­en Edward Snow­den’s pro­mo­tion of Libertarian/Cypherpunk ideals as a glob­al pro-human right­s/pro-democ­ra­cy ral­ly­ing cry, and the inevitable growth of tech­no­crat­ic temp­ta­tions as tech­no­log­i­cal advances con­tin­ue, it’s crit­i­cal read­ing:

Uncomputing.org
Tor, Tech­noc­ra­cy, Democ­ra­cy

By David Golum­bia | Pub­lished: April 23, 2015

As impor­tant as the tech­ni­cal issues regard­ing Tor are, at least as important—probably more important—is the polit­i­cal world­view that Tor pro­motes (as do oth­er projects like it). While it is use­ful and rel­e­vant to talk about for­ma­tions that cap­ture large parts of the Tor com­mu­ni­ty, like “geek cul­ture” and “cypher­punks” and lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and anar­chism, one of the most salient polit­i­cal frames in which to see Tor is also one that is almost uni­ver­sal­ly applic­a­ble across these com­mu­ni­ties: Tor is tech­no­crat­ic. Tech­noc­ra­cy is a term used by polit­i­cal sci­en­tists and tech­nol­o­gy schol­ars to describe the view that polit­i­cal prob­lems have tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions, and that those tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions con­sti­tute a kind of pol­i­tics that tran­scends what are wrong­ly char­ac­ter­ized as “tra­di­tion­al” left-right pol­i­tics.

In a ter­rif­ic recent arti­cle describ­ing tech­noc­ra­cy and its preva­lence in con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal cul­ture, the philoso­phers of tech­nol­o­gy Evan Selinger and Jathan Sad­ows­ki write:

Unlike force wield­ing, iron-fist­ed dic­ta­tors, tech­nocrats derive their author­i­ty from a seem­ing­ly soft­er form of pow­er: sci­en­tif­ic and engi­neer­ing pres­tige. No mat­ter where tech­nocrats are found, they attempt to legit­imize their hold over oth­ers by offer­ing inno­v­a­tive pro­pos­als untaint­ed by trou­bling sub­jec­tive bias­es and inter­ests. Through rhetor­i­cal appeals to opti­miza­tion and objec­tiv­i­ty, tech­nocrats depict their favored approach­es to social con­trol as prag­mat­ic alter­na­tives to gross­ly inef­fi­cient polit­i­cal mech­a­nisms. Indeed, tech­nocrats reg­u­lar­ly con­ceive of their inter­ven­tions in duty-bound terms, as a respon­si­bil­i­ty to help cit­i­zens and soci­ety over­come vast polit­i­cal fric­tions.

Such tech­no­crat­ic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cial­ly in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathan. Hack­ers (“civic,” “eth­i­cal,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans, Anony­mous “mem­bers,” even Edward Snow­den him­self him­self walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands.

While these sug­ges­tions typ­i­cal­ly frame them­selves in terms of the words we use to describe core polit­i­cal values—most often, val­ues asso­ci­at­ed with democracy—they actu­al­ly offer very lit­tle dis­cus­sion ade­quate to the rich tra­di­tions of polit­i­cal thought that artic­u­lat­ed those val­ues to begin with. That is, tech­no­crat­ic pow­er under­stands tech­nol­o­gy as an area of pre­cise exper­tise, in which one must demon­strate a sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of knowl­edge and skill as a pre­req­ui­site even to con­tribut­ing to the project at all. Yet tech­nocrats typ­i­cal­ly tol­er­ate no such char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of law or pol­i­tics: these are triv­ial mat­ters not even up for debate, and in so far as they are up for debate, they are mat­ters for which the same tech­ni­cal skills qual­i­fy par­tic­i­pants. This is why it is no sur­prise that amount the 30 or 40 indi­vid­u­als list­ed by the project as “Core Tor Peo­ple,” the vast major­i­ty are devel­op­ers or tech­nol­o­gy researchers, and those few for whom pol­i­tics is even part of their ambit, approach it almost exclu­sive­ly as tech­nol­o­gists. The actu­al legal spe­cial­ists, no more than a hand­ful, tend to be ded­i­cat­ed advo­cates for the par­tic­u­lar view of soci­ety Tor prop­a­gates. In oth­er words, there is very lit­tle room in Tor for dis­cus­sion of its pol­i­tics, for whether the project actu­al­ly does embody wide­ly-shared polit­i­cal val­ues: this is tak­en as giv­en.

This would be fine if Tor real­ly were “pure­ly” technological—although just what a “pure­ly” tech­no­log­i­cal project might be is by no means clear in our world—but Tor is, by anyone’s account, deeply polit­i­cal, so much so that the devel­op­ers them­selves must turn to polit­i­cal prin­ci­ples to explain why the project exists at all. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the Tor Project blog post writ­ten by lead devel­op­er Roger Din­gle­dine that describes the “pos­si­ble upcom­ing attempts to dis­able the Tor net­work” dis­cussed by Yasha Levine and Paul Carr on Pan­do. Din­gle­dine writes:

The Tor net­work pro­vides a safe haven from sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ship, and com­put­er net­work exploita­tion for mil­lions of peo­ple who live in repres­sive regimes, includ­ing human rights activists in coun­tries such as Iran, Syr­ia, and Rus­sia.

And fur­ther:

Attempts to dis­able the Tor net­work would inter­fere with all of these users, not just ones dis­liked by the attack­er.

Why would that be bad? Because “every per­son has the right to pri­va­cy. This right is a foun­da­tion of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety.”

This appears to be an extreme­ly clear state­ment. It is not a tech­no­log­i­cal argu­ment: it is a polit­i­cal argu­ment. It was gen­er­at­ed by Din­gle­dine of his own voli­tion; it is meant to be a—possibly the—basic argu­ment that that jus­ti­fies Tor. Tor is con­nect­ed to a fun­da­men­tal human right, the “right to pri­va­cy” which is a “foun­da­tion” of a “demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety.” Din­gle­dine is cer­tain­ly right that we should not do things that threat­en such demo­c­ra­t­ic foun­da­tions. At the same time, Din­gle­dine seems not to rec­og­nize that terms like “repres­sive regime” are inher­ent­ly and deeply polit­i­cal, and that “sur­veil­lance” and “cen­sor­ship” and “exploita­tion” name polit­i­cal activ­i­ties whose def­i­n­i­tions vary accord­ing to legal regime and even polit­i­cal point of view. Clear­ly, many users of Tor con­sid­er any obser­va­tion by any gov­ern­ment, for any rea­son, to be “exploita­tion” by a “repres­sive regime,” which is con­sis­tent for the many mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty who pro­fess a vari­ety of anar­chism or anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ism, but not for those with oth­er polit­i­cal views, such as those who think that there are cir­cum­stances under which laws need to be enforced.

Espe­cial­ly con­cern­ing about this argu­ment is that it mis­char­ac­ter­izes the nature of the legal guar­an­tees of human rights. In a democ­ra­cy, it is not actu­al­ly up to indi­vid­u­als on their own to decide how and where human rights should be enforced or pro­tect­ed, and then to cre­ate autonomous zones where­in those rights are pro­tect­ed in the terms they see fit. Instead, in a democ­ra­cy, cit­i­zens work togeth­er to have laws and reg­u­la­tions enact­ed that real­ize their inter­pre­ta­tion of rights. Agi­tat­ing for a “right to pri­va­cy” amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion would be appro­pri­ate polit­i­cal action for pri­va­cy in a democ­ra­cy. Even cer­tain forms of (lim­it­ed) civ­il dis­obe­di­ence are an impor­tant part of democ­ra­cy. But cre­at­ing a tool that you claim pro­tects pri­va­cy accord­ing to your own def­i­n­i­tion of the term, overt­ly resist­ing any attempt to dis­cuss what it means to say that it “pro­tects pri­va­cy,” and then insist­ing every­one use it and nobody, espe­cial­ly those lack­ing the cod­ing skills to be insid­ers, com­plain about it because of its con­nec­tion to fun­da­men­tal rights, is pro­found­ly anti­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic. Like all tech­no­crat­ic claims, it chal­lenges what actu­al­ly is a fun­da­men­tal pre­cept of democ­ra­cy that few across the polit­i­cal spec­trum would chal­lenge: that open dis­cus­sion of every issue affect­ing us is required in order for polit­i­cal pow­er to be prop­er­ly admin­is­tered.

It doesn’t take much to show that Dingledine’s state­ment about the polit­i­cal foun­da­tions of Tor can’t bear the weight he places on it. I com­ment­ed on the Tor Project blog, point­ing out that he is using “right to pri­va­cy” in a dif­fer­ent way from what that term means out­side of the con­text of Tor: “the ‘right to pri­va­cy’ does not mean what you assert it means here, at all, even in those juris­dic­tions that (unlike the US) have that right enshrined in law or con­sti­tu­tion.” Din­gle­dine respond­ed:

Live in the world you want to live in. (Think of it as a corol­lary to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’.)

We’re not talk­ing about any par­tic­u­lar legal regime here. We’re talk­ing about basic human rights that humans world­wide have, regard­less of par­tic­u­lar laws or inter­pre­ta­tions of laws.

I guess oth­er peo­ple can say that it isn’t true — that pri­va­cy isn’t a uni­ver­sal human right — but we’re going to keep say­ing that it is.

This is tech­no­crat­ic two-step­ping of a very typ­i­cal sort and deeply wor­ry­ing sort. First, Din­gle­dine claimed that Tor must be sup­port­ed because it fol­lows direct­ly from a fun­da­men­tal “right to pri­va­cy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to pri­va­cy” is not what any human rights body or “par­tic­u­lar legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talk­ing about how human rights are pro­tect­ed, he asserts that human rights are nat­ur­al rights and that these nat­ur­al rights cre­ate nat­ur­al law that is prop­er­ly enforced by enti­ties above and out­side of demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­ties. Where the UN’s Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion on Human Rights of 1948 is very clear that states and bod­ies like the UN to which states belong are the exclu­sive guar­an­tors of human rights, what­ev­er the ori­gin of those rights, Din­gle­dine asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role.

We don’t have to look very hard to see the prob­lems with that. Many in the US would assert that the right to bear arms means that indi­vid­u­als can own guns (or even more pow­er­ful weapons). More than a few con­strue this as a human or even a nat­ur­al right. Many would say “the citizen’s right to bear arms is a foun­da­tion of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety.” Yet many would not. Anoth­er democ­ra­cy, the UK, does not allow cit­i­zens to bear arms. Tor, notably, is the home of many hid­den ser­vices that sell weapons. Is it for the Tor devel­op­ers to decide what is and what is not a fun­da­men­tal human right, and how states should rec­og­nize them, and to dis­trib­ute weapons in the UK despite its explic­it, demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly-enact­ed, legal pro­hi­bi­tion of them? (At this point, it is only the exis­tence of legal ser­vices beyond Tor’s con­trol that make this dif­fi­cult, but that has lit­tle to do with Tor’s oper­a­tion: if it were up to Tor, the UK legal pro­hi­bi­tion on weapons would be over­writ­ten by tech­no­crat­ic fiat.)

We should note as well that once we ven­ture into the ter­rain of nat­ur­al rights and nat­ur­al law, we are deep in the thick of pol­i­tics. It sim­ply is not the case that all polit­i­cal thinkers, let alone all cit­i­zens, are going to agree about the ori­gin of rights, and even few­er would agree that nat­ur­al rights lead to a nat­ur­al law that tran­scends the pow­er of pop­u­lar sov­er­eign­ty to pro­tect. Dingledine’s appeal to nat­ur­al law is not polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral: it takes a side in a cen­tral, ages-old debate about the ori­gin of rights, the nature of the bod­ies that guar­an­tee them.

That’s fine, except when we remem­ber that we are asked to endorse Tor pre­cise­ly because it instances a pol­i­tics so fun­da­men­tal that every­one, or vir­tu­al­ly every­one, would agree with it. Oth­er­wise, Tor is a polit­i­cal ani­mal, and the pub­lic should accede to its devel­op­ment no more than it does to any oth­er pro­posed inno­va­tion or law: it must be sub­ject to exact­ly the same tests every­thing else is. Yet this is exact­ly what Tor claims it is above, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Fur­ther, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to nat­ur­al rights is today most often asso­ci­at­ed with the polit­i­cal right, for a vari­ety of rea­sons (ur-neo­con Leo Strauss was one of the most promi­nent 20th cen­tu­ry pro­po­nents of these views). We aren’t sup­posed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s sup­posed to be above the left/right dis­tinc­tion. But it isn’t.

Tor, like all oth­er tech­no­crat­ic solu­tions (or solu­tion­ist tech­nolo­gies) is pro­found­ly polit­i­cal. Rather than claim­ing it is above them, it should invite vig­or­ous polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion of its func­tions and pur­pose (as at least the Tor Project’s out­go­ing Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Andrew Lew­man, has recent­ly stat­ed, though there have yet to be many signs that the Tor com­mu­ni­ty, let alone the core group of “Tor Peo­ple,” agrees with this). Rather than a staff com­posed entire­ly of tech­nol­o­gists, any project with the poten­tial to inter­cede so direct­ly in so many vital areas of human con­duct should be staffed by at least as many with polit­i­cal and legal exper­tise as it is by tech­nol­o­gists. It should be able to artic­u­late its ben­e­fits and draw­backs ful­ly in the oper­a­tional polit­i­cal lan­guage of the coun­tries in which it oper­ates. It should be able to acknowl­edge that an actu­al foun­da­tion of demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­ties is the need to make accom­mo­da­tions and com­pro­mis­es between peo­ple whose polit­i­cal con­vic­tions will dif­fer. It needs to make clear that it is a polit­i­cal project, and that like all polit­i­cal projects, it exists sub­ject to the will of the cit­i­zen­ry, to whom it reports, and which can decide whether or not the project should con­tin­ue. Oth­er­wise, it dis­par­ages the very demo­c­ra­t­ic ground on which many of its pro­mot­ers claim to oper­ate.

...

There’s a lot to digest there, but part of what makes the devel­op­ment of Tor and the tech­no­crat­ic approach to defend­ing ‘nat­ur­al law’-endowed uni­ver­sal human rights such an intrigu­ing devel­op­ment is the inevitabil­i­ty of it. Right now, the poten­tial applic­a­bilty of Tor’s tech­no­crat­ic approach to oth­er aspects of the social con­tract is some­what lim­it­ed out­side of the dig­i­tal pri­va­cy domain. How many oth­er rights can be the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pro­tect­ed through tech­nol­o­gy (This is ignor­ing all the evi­dence that spy agen­cies can crack Tor)?. Assume Tor — plus some super-encryp­tion — can pro­vide a real guar­an­tee of inter­net traf­fic anonymi­ty to pret­ty much any­one. Are there any oth­er domains of rights, oth­er than dig­i­tal pri­va­cy rights, where some­thing anal­o­gous to Tor is pos­si­ble? Med­ical tech­nolo­gies that are poten­tial­ly read­i­ly acces­si­ble to any­one, like med­i­c­i­nal herbs you can grow, are one exam­ple of where peo­ple secure their rights to life or hap­pi­ness on their own although action. Although, in many cas­es, the Drug War says oth­er­wise. The ubiq­ui­ty of cell­phone cam­eras has cer­tain­ly made a dif­fer­ence in record­ing civ­il rights abus­es. And if you’re the type of per­son that views fiat cur­ren­cy and cen­tral bank­ing as a vio­la­tion of your nat­ur­al rights, Bit­coin could be con­sid­ered an exam­ple of anoth­er tech­no­crat­ic solu­tion. The blockchain will free us all! But it’s hard to think of many oth­er exam­ples out­side of the dig­i­tal domain where some­thing that could be con­sid­ered a “nat­ur­al right” could be pro­tect­ed by a bunch of peo­ple get­ting togeth­er and cre­at­ing a tech­no­log­i­cal plat­form. Still, that’s going to change.

Inter­est­ing­ly, it’s the rights that involve how we treat each oth­er or rights (rights that pre­vent unfair and harm­ful dis­crim­i­na­tion) or rights involv­ing pub­lic ser­vices and guar­an­tees that don’t often lend them­selves to tech­no­crat­ic ‘solu­tions’ like Tor (although cell­phone cam­eras that record abus­es are one notable excep­tion). And these also tend to be the kinds of rights the right-wing would rather become option­al and are high­ly vul­ner­a­ble to things like the Lib­er­tar­i­an/qausi-anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist ide­olo­gies that we find in the Cypherpunk/Libertarian move­ments from pol­i­cy stand­point.

So, since it’s look­ing like we’re enter­ing a peri­od where Cyber­lib­er­tar­i­ans is going to have an ele­vat­ed pro­file on the glob­al stage for the fore­see­able future, we’re prob­a­bly going to see a lot more appeals to tech­no­crat­ic solu­tions in gen­er­al, even when one does­n’t exist or make sense. And some­thing that could make the grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of tech­no­crat­ic solu­tions espe­cial­ly impact­ful, and harm­ful, is the num­ber of con­cep­tu­al par­al­lels between the ideas embraced by Tor’s lead devel­op­er Roger Din­gle­dine and the Libertarian/“let’s let the mar­ket run every­thing” neolib­er­al approach to run­ning the world that’s embraced by not only the GOP but at a con­sti­tu­tion­al lev­el in the Euro­pean Union and euro­zone. The “free mar­ket” is just one big tool for every­thing!

Sure, one would hope that an ele­va­tion of dis­cus­sions of “nat­ur­al rights” would­n’t, by default, descend into some­thing like what Peter Thiel noto­ri­ous­ly penned in 2009 Cato Unbound piece about how democ­ra­cy and free­dom are incom­pat­i­ble. But as Golum­bia points out, it’s hard not to notice that the appeals to “nat­ur­al rights” that tran­scend man-made gov­ern­ment is gen­er­al­ly some­thing you hear on the right these days when they want to tran­scend some sort of pro­gres­sive laws and reg­u­la­tions:

...
We should note as well that once we ven­ture into the ter­rain of nat­ur­al rights and nat­ur­al law, we are deep in the thick of pol­i­tics. It sim­ply is not the case that all polit­i­cal thinkers, let alone all cit­i­zens, are going to agree about the ori­gin of rights, and even few­er would agree that nat­ur­al rights lead to a nat­ur­al law that tran­scends the pow­er of pop­u­lar sov­er­eign­ty to pro­tect. Dingledine’s appeal to nat­ur­al law is not polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral: it takes a side in a cen­tral, ages-old debate about the ori­gin of rights, the nature of the bod­ies that guar­an­tee them.

That’s fine, except when we remem­ber that we are asked to endorse Tor pre­cise­ly because it instances a pol­i­tics so fun­da­men­tal that every­one, or vir­tu­al­ly every­one, would agree with it. Oth­er­wise, Tor is a polit­i­cal ani­mal, and the pub­lic should accede to its devel­op­ment no more than it does to any oth­er pro­posed inno­va­tion or law: it must be sub­ject to exact­ly the same tests every­thing else is. Yet this is exact­ly what Tor claims it is above, in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Fur­ther, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to nat­ur­al rights is today most often asso­ci­at­ed with the polit­i­cal right, for a vari­ety of rea­sons (ur-neo­con Leo Strauss was one of the most promi­nent 20th cen­tu­ry pro­po­nents of these views). We aren’t sup­posed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s sup­posed to be above the left/right dis­tinc­tion. But it isn’t.
...

That’s all part of why the com­pli­ca­tions the Tor-style tech­no­crat­ic approach to civ­il rights pro­tec­tion is prob­a­bly going to extend beyond the prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with using tech­nol­o­gy, itself, as a safe­guard for civ­il rights as a work around to the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. The pro­mo­tion of tech­noc­ra­cy as a means of guar­an­tee­ing our ‘nature rights’ is the kind of Pan­do­ra’s box that could get very dicey very fast in part because many visions of the ‘nat­ur­al order’ that define those ‘nature rights’ are kind of Old World Order-ish in a bad way:

Salon
Con­ser­v­a­tives’ his­to­ry prob­lem: Why they’re doomed by their own “Gold­en Age”
Com­pare the hey­days of pro­gres­sives and con­ser­v­a­tives — and it’s clear which one fared bet­ter for Amer­i­cans

Michael Lind
Mon­day, Mar 30, 2015 04:59 AM CST

“He who con­trols the past, con­trols the future,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. One of the great­est weapons in the arse­nal of a polit­i­cal move­ment is what the lit­er­ary crit­ic Van Wyck Brooks called “a usable past” and what the his­to­ri­an William McNeill calls “mythis­to­ry.” The most potent polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive in any coun­try on earth goes some­thing like this: “The past was a glo­ri­ous Gold­en Age, and the present is dis­mal. Fol­low us, and we will cre­ate a future as glo­ri­ous as the Gold­en Age in the past!”

Until recent­ly, nei­ther the cen­ter-left nor the cen­ter-right in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics had agreed-upon his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives. But recent­ly each move­ment has moved toward a greater con­sen­sus in its view of America’s past, present and future.

The cen­ter-left con­sen­sus today holds that the New Deal era of the 1930s through the 1970s, and per­haps its Pro­gres­sive Era pre­lude, con­sti­tut­ed the Gold­en Age. The present dis­mal Bronze or Iron Age began with Ronald Rea­gan in 1980–or, more accu­rate­ly, in 1976 with Jim­my Carter elect­ed as the first of three weak, cen­ter-right Demo­c­ra­t­ic presidents—Carter, Clin­ton and Obama–who have fol­lowed the last lib­er­al pres­i­dent, Lyn­don John­son. The Glo­ri­ous Future, accord­ing to the emer­gent pro­gres­sive con­sen­sus, will take the form of a “new New Deal” which, by some com­bi­na­tion of poli­cies, will check or reverse grow­ing inequal­i­ty and plu­toc­ra­cy, in the spir­it of the New Deal and its echo, the Great Soci­ety.

This new cen­ter-left his­tor­i­cal con­sen­sus marks the defeat of the alter­nate his­tor­i­cal visions of both New Left rad­i­cals and New Demo­c­rat neolib­er­als.

...

A sim­i­lar move toward a new con­sen­sus about Amer­i­can his­to­ry seems to be tak­ing place on the Amer­i­can right. The new right-wing his­tor­i­cal con­sen­sus illus­trates the grow­ing intel­lec­tu­al homo­gene­ity of the move­ment.

As recent­ly as the 1990s, the Amer­i­can right was divid­ed among neo­con­ser­v­a­tives, theo­con­ser­v­a­tives, pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tives, Straus­sians and lib­er­tar­i­ans. Each sub­cul­ture with­in the right had its own dis­tinct the­o­ry of his­to­ry, includ­ing a the­o­ry of the date at which Amer­i­can his­to­ry took a wrong turn.

Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives (I was one, until the ear­ly 1990s) began as New Deal/Great Soci­ety lib­er­als who were alien­at­ed by the New Left’s rejec­tion of the Cold War lib­er­al con­tain­ment strat­e­gy and its utopi­an rad­i­cal­ism. The first-wave neo­cons accept­ed and endorsed the New Deal and the Civ­il Rights rev­o­lu­tions; for them, Amer­i­can his­to­ry took a wrong turn with the cam­pus rad­i­cal­ism of the late Six­ties.

Short­er neo­con his­to­ry: Yay 1932! Yay 1964! Boo 1968!

This kind of neo­con­ser­vatism died in the mid-1990s. The sec­ond-wave neo­cons like Robert and Don­ald Kagan and Irv­ing Kristol’s son Bill, edi­tor of the Rupert Mur­doch mag­a­zine The Week­ly Stan­dard, aban­doned or down­played domes­tic lib­er­al­ism and spe­cial­ized in pro­mot­ing a post-Cold War Amer­i­can empire. The muta­tion of what had been Cold War lib­er­al­ism into per­pet­u­al war­mon­ger­ing helped to dri­ve me (and oth­er for­mer neo­con­ser­v­a­tives includ­ing Fran­cis Fukuya­ma and Mark Lil­la) out of the right alto­geth­er. Neo­con mil­i­tarists still have some influ­ence in the GOP, but after the bloody fail­ures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the right is like­ly to be more hawk­ish in rhetoric than in prac­tice.

At the oth­er extreme from the neo­con­ser­v­a­tives were those whom Jacob Heil­brunn called the theo­con­ser­v­a­tives or “theo­cons” of the reli­gious right. Most theo­cons argued that the Founders intend­ed to estab­lish a “Chris­t­ian” or “Judeo-Chris­t­ian nation.” But an even more extreme minor­i­ty of neo-Calvin­ist “recon­struc­tion­ists” argued that Amer­i­ca went down­hill after Cot­ton Math­er. The Enlight­en­ment was real­ly the “Endark­en­ment” and Thomas Jef­fer­son was an infi­del whose ide­al of sep­a­ra­tion of church and state was an abom­i­na­tion. The Rev­erend Pat Robert­son, whose con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries I exposed in the New York Review of Books in 1995, claimed that Freema­sons and Illu­mi­nati and inter­na­tion­al bankers were manip­u­lat­ing Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy on behalf of Satan. (After two decades of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy fias­cos, I won­der whether I was too quick to dis­miss this the­o­ry).

Many main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and intel­lec­tu­als dis­graced them­selves by oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly kow-tow­ing to crack­pot preach­ers with mass fol­low­ings like Pat Robert­son and the late Jer­ry Fal­well for a cou­ple of decades. But their ideas nev­er had an audi­ence out­side of evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tantism. The reli­gious right went has gone into steep decline in this cen­tu­ry, as younger gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­cans become more social­ly lib­er­al and sec­u­lar.

The pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tives in the 1980s and 1990s tend­ed to be apol­o­gists for the Old South like the late his­to­ri­an M. E. “Mel” Brad­ford, whom the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive Bill Ben­nett dis­placed as Reagan’s choice to head the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties. For many pale­o­cons, the date at which Amer­i­can his­to­ry took a wrong turn was 1865. It was the blood­thirsty tyrant Abra­ham Lin­coln, not Woodrow Wil­son or Franklin Roo­sevelt, who destroyed the Con­sti­tu­tion, crushed the Old Repub­lic and fas­tened big gov­ern­ment on the Amer­i­can body politic.

Short­er pale­o­con his­to­ry: Yay 1776! Boo 1865!

Like theo­con­ser­vatism, pale­o­con­ser­vatism is all but extinct as an intel­lec­tu­al force, though some of its elder­ly votaries still have sway in some Repub­li­can pri­maries. The decline of neo­con­ser­vatism, theo­con­ser­vatism and pale­o­con­ser­vatism has left Straus­sian­ism and lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as the most influ­en­tial intel­lec­tu­al cur­rents on the Amer­i­can right.

Straus­sians are dis­ci­ples of the Ger­man émi­gré philoso­pher Leo Strauss, who taught that mod­ern “nat­ur­al rights” the­o­ry rep­re­sent­ed a break with ancient and medieval “nat­ur­al law” phi­los­o­phy. Because the Amer­i­can repub­lic was found­ed on nat­ur­al rights, atti­tudes toward the Amer­i­can found­ing among Straus­sians depend on whether they think the replace­ment of nat­ur­al law by nat­ur­al right was progress or not. “East Coast Straus­sians” tend to be equiv­o­cal about moder­ni­ty, the Enlight­en­ment and the Amer­i­can Found­ing, while “West Coast Straus­sians” embrace all three. There is some over­lap among Straus­sians and neo­cons, but equat­ing them is a mis­take.

The intel­lec­tu­al leader of the West Coast Straus­sians was Har­ry Jaf­fa, author of “Cri­sis of the House Divid­ed” (1959), who died in Jan­u­ary of this year. Jaf­fa argued against pro-Con­fed­er­ate pale­o­cons that the Amer­i­can right should embrace the fig­ure of Lin­coln. In Jaffa’s account Lin­coln vin­di­cat­ed the time­less and true nat­ur­al rights ideals of the Amer­i­can Found­ing against South­ern­ers who repu­di­at­ed nat­ur­al rights in order to defend slav­ery.

Jaf­fa seems to have won the debate on the right. Rich Lowry, the edi­tor of Nation­al Review, has recent­ly pub­lished a book in which he attempts to draft Lin­coln for con­ser­vatism. And in 2001 David Boaz, vice-pres­i­dent of the lib­er­tar­i­an Cato Insti­tute, in an essay enti­tled “Don’t Put Slav­ery in the Flag,” argued that the South’s insti­tu­tion of chat­tel slav­ery was a greater offense to free­dom than the North’s high tar­iffs. This the­sis was and is con­tro­ver­sial among lib­er­tar­i­ans.

The Straus­sians also have shaped the con­tem­po­rary right’s views of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. While Lin­coln is in, Theodore Roo­sevelt, can­di­date of the Pro­gres­sive Par­ty for pres­i­dent in 1912, is out. Strauss­ian schol­ars, many of them asso­ci­at­ed with the con­ser­v­a­tive Clare­mont Insti­tute, have argued that both TR and Woodrow Wil­son betrayed the ideals of the Amer­i­can Found­ing in favor of his­tori­cist and rel­a­tivist philoso­phies import­ed from Bismarck’s Ger­many. Glenn Beck helped to trans­mit this the­o­ry from the class­rooms to the chat rooms.

Accord­ing to the new con­ser­v­a­tive con­sen­sus, the Founders and Lin­coln are heroes of “con­sti­tu­tion­al con­ser­vatism.” The ideals of the Amer­i­can Found­ing and Lincoln’s sec­ond Found­ing, hav­ing ear­li­er been betrayed by proslav­ery South­ern­ers, were betrayed again by Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pro­gres­sives alike. Amer­i­can his­to­ry took a wrong turn with the elec­tion of 1912, in which a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans vot­ed for one of two pro­gres­sive can­di­dates, Roo­sevelt and Wil­son.

Short­er Strauss­ian his­to­ry: Yay 1776! Yay 1865! Boo 1912!

As “usable pasts” go, the new con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ry is com­mend­ably sim­ple, coher­ent and straight­for­ward. But as an ex-con­ser­v­a­tive known for kind­ly, con­struc­tive crit­i­cism of the right, I feel oblig­ed to point out a major weak­ness.

If your the­o­ry as a con­ser­v­a­tive is that every­thing after the Pro­gres­sive Era and the New Deal has been a dis­as­ter, and you don’t want to ide­al­ize the Old South, then you are stuck with mak­ing the peri­od from 1865 to 1912 your glo­ri­ous past. In oth­er words, the Gold­en Age was the Gild­ed Age.

...

As we can see, the Venn dia­gram of ide­o­log­i­cal ‘Gold­en Ages’ includes a lot of over­lap, but quite a bit of dis­agree­ment amongst the var­i­ous dom­i­nant strains of US polit­i­cal thought and that dis­agree­ment does­n’t just reflect dis­agree­ments in how best to estab­lish and pro­tect our human rights but also deep dis­agree­ments over who gets what rights. Few things exem­pli­fy the inher­ent dan­gers asso­ci­at­ed with try­ing to bal­ance uni­ver­sal human rights through unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic means than this:

...
And in 2001 David Boaz, vice-pres­i­dent of the lib­er­tar­i­an Cato Insti­tute, in an essay enti­tled “Don’t Put Slav­ery in the Flag,” argued that the South’s insti­tu­tion of chat­tel slav­ery was a greater offense to free­dom than the North’s high tar­iffs. This the­sis was and is con­tro­ver­sial among lib­er­tar­i­ans.
...

As we’ve seen with some promi­nent Lib­er­tar­i­an fig­ures like Hans Her­mann-Hoppe, when you take Lib­er­tar­i­an strains of thought to their log­i­cal extremes, monar­chy would real­ly lead to much greater lev­els of ‘free­dom’ vs democ­ra­cy since democ­ra­cy has an inher­ent­ly de-civ­i­liz­ing nature. That’s the kind of ter­ri­to­ry we enter when every­one gets to make up their own def­i­n­i­tions of what con­sti­tutes “nat­ur­al law”. Neo­re­ac­tionary ter­ri­to­ry. And that’s why democ­ra­cy is so impor­tant to the uphold­ing of every­one’s rights: Even when you make uphold­ing uni­ver­sal rights one of your goals, it’s still pos­si­ble to jus­ti­fy pret­ty some sort of fas­cist plu­toc­ra­cy or maybe even a new monar­chy. Or, quite pos­si­bly, a tech­noc­ra­cy.

One of the take away lessons from all this is that the when we’re deal­ing with issues like pro­tect­ing human rights, we are deal­ing with a top­ic filled with so many ten­sions and inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions that the idea of falling back on a tech­noc­ra­cy for the pro­tec­tion of our rights quick­ly becomes approach that can sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly resolve those ten­sions is sim­ply unten­able. And that’s exact­ly why the demo­c­ra­t­ic process is so vital for the pro­tec­tion human rights: clean, ele­gant solu­tions like “let’s just have a bunch of peo­ple inde­pen­dent­ly cre­ate super-encryp­tion tools to pro­tect our uni­ver­sal right to pri­va­cy in the dig­i­tal realm” aren’t actu­al­ly clean or ele­gant because, even if we all agreed on what those uni­ver­sal rights are, they aren’t always com­pat­i­ble with each oth­er under all sit­u­a­tions. While Tor, itself, can be use for make very pos­i­tive pur­pos­es, it’s also avail­able for use by the Four Hores­men of the Infopoca­lypse and they aren’t known for respect­ing many rights beyond the right to dig­i­tal pri­va­cy. That’s why democ­ra­cy is the best solu­tion: when rights come into con­flict and com­pro­mis­es, judge­ment calls, and pri­or­i­ties are required, tech­noc­ra­cy is a solu­tion with­out long-term legit­i­ma­cy.

Still, despite the com­pli­cat­ed conun­drums tech­nolo­gies like Tor present to the pub­lic, David Golum­bia was spot on when he said:

...
Tor, like all oth­er tech­no­crat­ic solu­tions (or solu­tion­ist tech­nolo­gies) is pro­found­ly polit­i­cal. Rather than claim­ing it is above them, it should invite vig­or­ous polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion of its func­tions and pur­pose
...

At the end of the day, Tor and the issues that is rais­es are real­ly quite fas­ci­nat­ing! We’re inevitably going to face more and more com­pli­cat­ed “lib­er­at­ing” tech­nolo­gies like Tor in the future so the need for more con­ver­sa­tions about how to use this or that dou­ble-edged tech­no-sword could be used to pro­tect against this or that gov­ern­ment abuse is only going to grow. Just wait for per­son­al micro­drone swarms. You could pro­tect a lot of your per­son­al rights with a per­son­al micro­drone swarm.

Some­thing else to keep in mind: If you think about it, if we go down the path of embrac­ing Lib­er­tar­i­an tech­no­crat­ic solu­tions like Tor to dif­fi­cult prob­lems, where the top tech­ni­cal mas­ters become the archi­tects of the tech­nolo­gies that we rely on to pro­tect rights, in the not too dis­tant future those peo­ple devel­op­ing with a deep knowl­edge of how it works and pos­si­ble vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties aren’t going to be peo­ple. There’s no nat­ur­al law that says the top tech­no­crat can’t be tech­nol­o­gy.

Here’s a reminder that adver­tis­ing in the dig­i­tal age via smart devices is prob­a­bly going to be less about get­ting infor­ma­tion out to con­sumers and more about tak­ing infor­ma­tion about those cus­tomers back to the adver­tis­ers. Also, you pets prob­a­bly aren’t going to appre­ci­ate some of the lat­est trends:

Ars Tech­ni­ca
Beware of ads that use inaudi­ble sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC
Pri­va­cy advo­cates warn feds about sur­rep­ti­tious cross-device track­ing.

by Dan Good­in — Nov 13, 2015 12:00pm CST

Pri­va­cy advo­cates are warn­ing fed­er­al author­i­ties of a new threat that uses inaudi­ble, high-fre­quen­cy sounds to sur­rep­ti­tious­ly track a per­son­’s online behav­ior across a range of devices, includ­ing phones, TVs, tablets, and com­put­ers.

The ultra­son­ic pitch­es are embed­ded into TV com­mer­cials or are played when a user encoun­ters an ad dis­played in a com­put­er brows­er. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, near­by tablets and smart­phones can detect it. When they do, brows­er cook­ies can now pair a sin­gle user to mul­ti­ple devices and keep track of what TV com­mer­cials the per­son sees, how long the per­son watch­es the ads, and whether the per­son acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buy­ing a prod­uct.

Cross-device track­ing rais­es impor­tant pri­va­cy con­cerns, the Cen­ter for Democ­ra­cy and Tech­nol­o­gy wrote in recent­ly filed com­ments to the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion. The FTC has sched­uled a work­shop on Mon­day to dis­cuss the tech­nol­o­gy. Often, peo­ple use as many as five con­nect­ed devices through­out a giv­en day—a phone, com­put­er, tablet, wear­able health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there has­n’t been an easy way to track activ­i­ty on one and tie it to anoth­er.

“As a per­son goes about her busi­ness, her activ­i­ty on each device gen­er­ates dif­fer­ent data streams about her pref­er­ences and behav­ior that are siloed in these devices and ser­vices that medi­ate them,” CDT offi­cials wrote. “Cross-device track­ing allows mar­keters to com­bine these streams by link­ing them to the same indi­vid­ual, enhanc­ing the gran­u­lar­i­ty of what they know about that per­son.”

The offi­cials said that com­pa­nies with names includ­ing Sil­ver­Push, Draw­bridge, and Flur­ry are work­ing on ways to pair a giv­en user to spe­cif­ic devices. Adobe is devel­op­ing sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies. With­out a doubt, the most con­cern­ing of the com­pa­nies the CDT men­tioned is San Fran­cis­co-based Sil­ver­Push.

CDT offi­cials wrote:

Cross-device track­ing can also be per­formed through the use of ultra­son­ic inaudi­ble sound bea­cons. Com­pared to prob­a­bilis­tic track­ing through brows­er fin­ger­print­ing, the use of audio bea­cons is a more accu­rate way to track users across devices. The indus­try leader of cross-device track­ing using audio bea­cons is Sil­ver­Push. When a user encoun­ters a Sil­ver­Push adver­tis­er on the web, the adver­tis­er drops a cook­ie on the com­put­er while also play­ing an ultra­son­ic audio through the use of the speak­ers on the com­put­er or device. The inaudi­ble code is rec­og­nized and received on the oth­er smart device by the soft­ware devel­op­ment kit installed on it. Sil­ver­Push also embeds audio bea­con sig­nals into TV com­mer­cials which are “picked up silent­ly by an app installed on a [device] (unknown to the user).” The audio bea­con enables com­pa­nies like Sil­ver­Push to know which ads the user saw, how long the user watched the ad before chang­ing the chan­nel, which kind of smart devices the indi­vid­ual uses, along with oth­er infor­ma­tion that adds to the pro­file of each user that is linked across devices.

The user is unaware of the audio bea­con, but if a smart device has an app on it that uses the Sil­ver­Push soft­ware devel­op­ment kit, the soft­ware on the app will be lis­ten­ing for the audio bea­con and once the bea­con is detect­ed, devices are imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized as being used by the same indi­vid­ual. Sil­ver­Push states that the com­pa­ny is not lis­ten­ing in the back­ground to all of the nois­es occur­ring in prox­im­i­ty to the device. The only fac­tor that hin­ders the receipt of an audio bea­con by a device is dis­tance and there is no way for the user to opt-out of this form of cross-device track­ing. SilverPush’s com­pa­ny pol­i­cy is to not “divulge the names of the apps the tech­nol­o­gy is embed­ded,” mean­ing that users have no knowl­edge of which apps are using this tech­nol­o­gy and no way to opt-out of this prac­tice. As of April of 2015, SilverPush’s soft­ware is used by 67 apps and the com­pa­ny mon­i­tors 18 mil­lion smart­phones.

Sil­ver­Push’s ultra­son­ic cross-device track­ing was pub­licly report­ed as long ago as July 2014. More recent­ly, the com­pa­ny received a new round of pub­lic­i­ty when it obtained $1.25 mil­lion in ven­ture cap­i­tal. The CDT let­ter appears to be the first time the pri­va­cy-invad­ing poten­tial of the com­pa­ny’s prod­uct has been dis­cussed in detail. Sil­ver­Push offi­cials did­n’t respond to e‑mail seek­ing com­ment for this arti­cle.

Cross-device track­ing already in use

The CDT let­ter went on to cite arti­cles report­ing that cross-device track­ing has been put to use by more than a dozen mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies. The tech­nol­o­gy, which is typ­i­cal­ly not dis­closed and can’t be opt­ed out of, makes it pos­si­ble for mar­keters to assem­ble a shock­ing­ly detailed snap­shot of the per­son being tracked.

“For exam­ple, a com­pa­ny could see that a user searched for sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­ease (STD) symp­toms on her per­son­al com­put­er, looked up direc­tions to a Planned Par­ent­hood on her phone, vis­its a phar­ma­cy, then returned to her apart­ment,” the let­ter stat­ed. “While pre­vi­ous­ly the var­i­ous com­po­nents of this jour­ney would be scat­tered among sev­er­al ser­vices, cross-device track­ing allows com­pa­nies to infer that the user received treat­ment for an STD. The com­bi­na­tion of infor­ma­tion across devices not only cre­ates seri­ous pri­va­cy con­cerns, but also allows for com­pa­nies to make incor­rect and pos­si­bly harm­ful assump­tions about indi­vid­u­als.”

...

Now that Sil­ver­Push and oth­ers are using the tech­nol­o­gy, it’s prob­a­bly inevitable that it will remain in use in some form. But right now, there are no easy ways for aver­age peo­ple to know if they’re being tracked by it and to opt out if they object. Fed­er­al offi­cials should strong­ly con­sid­er chang­ing that.

“As of April of 2015, SilverPush’s soft­ware is used by 67 apps and the com­pa­ny mon­i­tors 18 mil­lion smart­phones.”
It turns out head­phones have been more pri­va­cy enhanc­ing than we may have real­ized in recent years:

...
The audio bea­con enables com­pa­nies like Sil­ver­Push to know which ads the user saw, how long the user watched the ad before chang­ing the chan­nel, which kind of smart devices the indi­vid­ual uses, along with oth­er infor­ma­tion that adds to the pro­file of each user that is linked across devices.
...

Well, at least it does­n’t sound like adver­tis­ers have been turn­ing our devices into Bat­man-style sonar devices that use ultra­sound to cre­ate 3D maps of our local envi­ron­ments. Although if there was ultra­sound bounc­ing get­ting emit­ted from our devices for 3D map­ping pur­pos­es we might hot hear much about it:

Slate
This Tech­nol­o­gy From The Dark Knight Could Become Real­i­ty

By Jason Bit­tel
June 19 2013 10:41 AM

Remem­ber in The Dark Knight when ol’ Bats turns every cell­phone in Gotham City into a “high fre­quen­cy gen­er­a­tor” and you rolled your eyes as if that were some­how less real­is­tic than the mag­i­cal rolling wheels of the Bat Bike? Well, new research is show­ing that the acoustic map­ping capa­bil­i­ties of such devices aren’t quite as futur­is­tic as you might think.

Using just an advanced algo­rithm and a hand­ful of micro­phones, researchers at the Swiss Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in Lau­sanne have suc­cess­ful­ly mapped the dimen­sions of a closed area by mea­sur­ing “room impulse respons­es.” At the most basic lev­el, they blast a noise out of a speak­er and then use the micro­phones to record what hap­pens when the sound waves bounce off of the room’s walls, ceil­ing, floor, and any oth­er objects. In this way, it’s real­ly sim­i­lar to how a bat, dol­phin, or super­hu­man uses echolo­ca­tion.

...

Giv­en the many recent rev­e­la­tions about the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s will­ing­ness and capa­bil­i­ty to snoop, the Bat­man appli­ca­tion of all this seems a lit­tle more threat­en­ing than it might have a month ago. For instance, if the gov­ern­ment can mon­i­tor domes­tic phone calls—with­out a war­rant, by the way—then what’s to stop them from run­ning a sim­i­lar map­ping algo­rithm to peer inside your home? With micro­phones of their own, home com­put­ers, tablets, and smart TVs could hypo­thet­i­cal­ly pro­vide oth­er data sets for the algo­rithm to munch on. (Again, such notions would all be firm­ly with­in the realm of coo-coo con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry if we didn’t keep learn­ing things like this.)

So I asked Ivan Dok­man­ic, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer and one of the paper’s authors, point-blank: Are smart­phone micro­phones sen­si­tive enough to detect acoustic echoes?

“Com­par­i­son with The Dark Knight is not absurd at all, but we need to start small,” Dok­man­ic told me. “The lev­el of detail obtained in Bat­man is a bit unre­al­is­tic for many good the­o­ret­i­cal rea­sons, but I believe there is poten­tial to get some idea about the space.” Dok­man­ic also said that while cell­phone micro­phones could do the job, most mod­els out there today are active­ly work­ing against the type of back­ground noise nec­es­sary for acousti­cal map­ping. (Apple has even used this in their adver­tis­ing.)

Bat­man aside, Dokmanic’s research will like­ly have more imme­di­ate appli­ca­tions in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, archi­tec­tur­al acoustics, audio foren­sics, tele­con­fer­enc­ing, and indoor local­iza­tion. This last one could be real­ly cool, since the algo­rithm can be reversed if the building’s dimen­sions are already known. So don’t be sur­prised if some­day soon there’s an ori­en­ta­tion app that uses acoustic vibra­tions to guide you around a muse­um, office build­ing, or air­port.

The NSA saga has got us all antsy about sur­veil­lance and pri­va­cy, but let’s not for­get that in today’s world of GPS, Google Street View, and Face­book check-ins, more often than not we want to be found.

“With micro­phones of their own, home com­put­ers, tablets, and smart TVs could hypo­thet­i­cal­ly pro­vide oth­er data sets for the algo­rithm to munch on”
Yep, the iPhone sonar ruler app might be get­ting an upgrade some­day. Let’s hope the app devel­op­ers that could some­day be using this tech­nol­o­gy all have Bruce Wayne’s gen­er­al out­look on uphold­ing the com­mon good. And since devices are already send­ing out bursts of ultra­son­ic sounds that are intend­ed to be picked up by oth­er ran­dom devices, just think about the kind of fas­ci­nat­ing details and 3D spa­tial infor­ma­tion that could take place in a future envi­ron­ment of an ever-grow­ing “inter­net of things”, includ­ing the near future envi­ron­ment.

Still, as scary as a sonar spy­ware-app sounds, it could be worse. So much worse...

Now that a venge­ful lunatic is set to become pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States and Steve Ban­non, a venge­ful white nation­al­ist advi­sor known for pur­su­ing the destruc­tion of his ene­mies, is whis­per­ing in the pres­i­dent-elec­t’s ear, we prob­a­bly should­n’t be sur­prised that Edward Snow­den is push­ing tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions like encryp­tion as a key tool for sur­viv­ing the Trump era. After all, one of the main sales pitch­es of the Cypher­punk rev­o­lu­tion was sup­pos­ed­ly that peo­ple could use encryp­tion as a tool for orga­niz­ing polit­i­cal resis­tance under repres­sive regimes, so a Trump vic­to­ry would cer­tain­ly be the kind of event that we should expect to trig­ger a surge in Cypher­punk calls for more encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Espe­cial­ly after an FBI far-right fac­tion basi­cal­ly worked in coor­di­na­tion with Steve Ban­non’s Bri­et­bart news to swing the elec­tion.

But as the arti­cle below points out, that’s not actu­al­ly the mes­sage Snow­den is push­ing in the wake of a Trump vic­to­ry. Yes, he is still push­ing encryp­tion as a key civic tool for the Trumpian age. But not for the pur­pose of advanc­ing an polit­i­cal agen­da that can counter and undo the dam­age full-spec­trum Trump/GOP con­trol will do to the nation and world. No, Snow­den actu­al­ly rec­om­mends that we avoid pol­i­tics. As Snow­den sees it, “If you want to build a bet­ter future, you’re going to have to do it your­self. Pol­i­tics will take us only so far. And if his­to­ry is any guide, they are the least effec­tive means of see­ing change we want to see”:

Giz­mo­do

Edward Snow­den Is a Fuck­ing Idiot

Matt Novak
11/17/2016 10:16am

Today, Edward Snow­den is wrong about almost every­thing. Yes, he’s a patri­ot, and yes, I believe that what he did in 2013 to reveal dan­ger­ous ele­ments of our sur­veil­lance state was impor­tant and com­mend­able. But Snow­den is com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to the chal­lenges that we face as we move into the year 2017—a per­ilous fuck­ing time for our coun­try, to say the least.

On Tues­day, I had the plea­sure of attend­ing the Real Future Fair in Oak­land, which fea­tured some amaz­ing speak­ers like Mae Jami­son, the first Amer­i­can woman of col­or in space. It was a fas­ci­nat­ing con­fer­ence, but there was one speak­er that made me incred­i­bly frus­trat­ed: Edward Snow­den, who joined us in Oak­land via tele­con­fer­ence robot from Rus­sia. And I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that he’s pro­mot­ing an idi­ot­ic world­view that’s com­plete­ly devoid of answers for how to effec­tive­ly com­bat the threat that Don­ald Trump and his neo-fas­cist goons pose to our democ­ra­cy.

What got me so riled up about Snowden’s talk? He firm­ly believes that tech­nol­o­gy is more impor­tant than pol­i­cy as a way to pro­tect our lib­er­ties. Snow­den con­tends that he held this belief when Oba­ma was in office and he still believes this today, as Don­ald Trump is just two months away from enter­ing the White House. But it doesn’t make him right, no mat­ter who’s in office.

“If you want to build a bet­ter future, you’re going to have to do it your­self. Pol­i­tics will take us only so far. And if his­to­ry is any guide, they are the least effec­tive means of see­ing change we want to see,” Snow­den said on stage in Oak­land from Rus­sia, com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to how his­to­ry might actu­al­ly be used as a guide.

Snow­den spoke about how impor­tant it is for indi­vid­u­als to act in the name of lib­er­ty. He con­tin­u­al­ly down­played the role of pol­i­cy in enact­ing change and trot­ted out some lib­er­tar­i­an garbage about laws being far less impor­tant than the encryp­tion of elec­tron­ic devices for the pro­tec­tion of free­doms around the world.

“Law is sim­ply let­ters on a page,” Snow­den said. It’s a phrase that’s still ring­ing in my ears, as a shock­ing­ly obtuse rejec­tion of civ­i­lized soci­ety and how real change hap­pens in the world.

How do we advance the cause of lib­er­ty around the world? Encrypt your devices, accord­ing to Snow­den. Okay, now what? Well, Snowden’s tapped out of ideas if you get beyond “use Sig­nal.” The clos­est he got to advo­cat­ing for any­thing involv­ing pol­i­cy change was when he told peo­ple they could donate to the Free­dom of the Press Foun­da­tion which, it should prob­a­bly be not­ed, he cur­rent­ly works for.

Imag­ine if advo­cates of human rights held this same world­view fifty years ago. What would the Amer­i­can civ­il rights move­ment have looked like in the 1950s and 60s if you didn’t believe changes in pol­i­cy mat­tered? If you tru­ly think that laws are irrel­e­vant and that secur­ing your com­mu­ni­ca­tions from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance is the only force for lib­er­ty, then your biggest prob­lem with the FBI’s per­se­cu­tion of Mar­tin Luther King Jr. was that they tapped his phone lines. King’s use of his phone was a means to an end, just as the FBI’s sur­veil­lance of King was a means to an end. The end, as far as civ­il right lead­ers were con­cerned, was enact­ing pol­i­cy. Shield­ing your com­mu­ni­ca­tions from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance is mere­ly a tac­tic to allow you to oper­ate and orga­nize with­out gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence. Encryp­tion doesn’t fight against injus­tice all by its lone­some.

What about the 1964 Civ­il Rights Act, a crown­ing achieve­ment of the civ­il rights move­ment that brought about real change to a sys­tem built on sys­temic racism? The Civ­il Rights Act didn’t end racism, and it, along with its legal cousin the Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965, are cur­rent­ly being butchered beyond recog­ni­tion after a dev­as­tat­ing Supreme Court deci­sion. But the answer to pro­gres­sive loss­es in the courts isn’t “encrypt your phone.” The answer is to bring about pol­i­cy changes through local and nation­al laws to ensure that human rights are pro­tect­ed. Encrypt your data all you like—it’s an impor­tant, if admit­ted­ly flawed, way to help orga­nize and protest. (Pri­va­cy tools like Tor are leak­ing like a sieve and there are a hun­dred dif­fer­ent ways for the state to access your com­mu­ni­ca­tions even if you have the most advanced opsec in the world.) But don’t tell me that pol­i­cy doesn’t mat­ter.

If you earnest­ly put for­ward this idea that fight­ing for pol­i­cy is some­how irrel­e­vant and that laws are “sim­ply let­ters on a page” you have very lit­tle to offer mod­ern soci­ety. You’re sur­ren­der­ing to liv­ing in a fun­da­men­tal­ly bro­ken world and are ignor­ing the meth­ods by which his­to­ry actu­al­ly evolves to meet the needs of a civ­i­lized soci­ety. Every time some­one like Snow­den says “encrypt your phone” our response must be, “okay, now what do we do?” And Snow­den doesn’t have an answer.

“Tech­nol­o­gy works dif­fer­ent­ly than law. Tech­nol­o­gy knows no juris­dic­tion,” Snow­den said via video con­fer­ence in Rus­sia, seem­ing­ly obliv­i­ous to the fact that a change in pol­i­cy would be nec­es­sary for his return to the Unit­ed States, not stronger encryp­tion of his com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

...

In Oak­land, Snow­den also addressed his tweet from Octo­ber 21st in which he said that, “There may nev­er be a safer elec­tion in which to vote for a third option.” Snow­den told us that he more or less stands by his tweet and that any­thing else “freezes us into a dynam­ic of ‘you must always choose between two bad options’” which is a “fun­da­men­tal­ly un-Amer­i­can idea.”

This might be the “glass half full or glass half emp­ty” for our times. Peo­ple like Snow­den sub­scribe to the belief that the less­er of two evils is still evil. I sub­scribe to the belief that the less­er of two evils is still less evil. When you’re talk­ing about some­one as dan­ger­ous to democ­ra­cy as Don­ald Trump and the fuck­ing knobs he’s sur­round­ing him­self with who are more loy­al than they are intel­li­gent, these com­pet­ing world­views mat­ter.

...

If you’re look­ing for NSA docs about the sur­veil­lance state, Snow­den is your man. If you’re look­ing for guid­ance on how to make the world a more just place, we have to look else­where and lis­ten to peo­ple who believe in the only thing that can pos­si­bly influ­ence the world for the bet­ter: Rad­i­cal changes in poli­cies that touch the lives of every­one around the globe.

“In Oak­land, Snow­den also addressed his tweet from Octo­ber 21st in which he said that, “There may nev­er be a safer elec­tion in which to vote for a third option.” Snow­den told us that he more or less stands by his tweet and that any­thing else “freezes us into a dynam­ic of ‘you must always choose between two bad options’” which is a “fun­da­men­tal­ly un-Amer­i­can idea.””

Yes, in Snow­den’s world, vot­ing for ‘the less­er of two-evils’ is a “fun­da­men­tal­ly un-Amer­i­can idea.” No, the patri­ot­ic thing to do is aban­don pol­i­cy and law as sim­ply “let­ters on a page” and aban­don pol­i­tics in gen­er­al as “the least effec­tive means of see­ing change we want to see”. Self-empow­er­ment by remov­ing your­self from pol­i­tics, that’s the tick­et! Now hand over that US-intel­li­gence-estab­lish­ment-fund­ed pri­va­cy tech­nol­o­gy so we can effec­tive­ly orga­nize against the com­ing Trump repres­sion so we can hope­ful­ly avoid any Trump repres­sion by com­plete­ly obscur­ing our pol­i­tics, tak­ing no stand at all that would alert the Trump admin­is­tra­tion about our oppo­si­tion to its fas­cist agen­da, and just sort of wait­ing this out. Or some­thing. Freeee­dom!

Here’s an arti­cle that points towards a social phe­nom­e­na that’s worth keep­ing in mind as the dig­i­tal econ­o­my con­tin­ues to grow and make hack­ing poten­tial­ly more and more lucra­tive: tra­di­tion­al orga­nized crime syn­di­cates are final­ly get­ting into the hack­ing busi­ness in a big way, and as a con­se­quence the type of young indi­vid­u­als that’s get­ting recruit­ed into these orga­ni­za­tion fits a dif­fer­ent pro­file from the mob­sters of the past:

Finan­cial Times

Organ­ised crime final­ly embraces cyber theft
Euro­pean police strug­gle to keep up as the God­fa­thers go dig­i­tal, writes Misha Glen­ny

March 7, 2017 3:56 pm by Misha Glen­ny

One over­rid­ing mes­sage will emerge from Europol’s Seri­ous and Organ­ised Crime Threat Assess­ment 2017 to be pub­lished this week: the God­fa­thers have final­ly gone dig­i­tal. Drones, track­ing devices, social engi­neer­ing, hack­ing, encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion have in a short space of time been added to the villain’s bag of tricks along­side the crow­bar, the knuck­le-duster and the gold chains.

This is a devel­op­ment that law enforce­ment agen­cies deal­ing with transna­tion­al organ­ised crime around the world have been dread­ing. For much of the past 15 years, tra­di­tion­al organ­ised crime and cyber crime have been two dis­crete branch­es of elite malfea­sance.

...

Accord­ing to the SOCTA, Europol is now com­bat­ing 5,000 inter­na­tion­al crime groups with­in the EU, 1,400 more than in 2013. But there are many oth­ers oper­at­ing out­side the ter­ri­to­ry while sell­ing their illic­it goods and ser­vices into the EU.

Less than a decade ago, a Swedish cyber crim­i­nal described how he had tried to inter­est his father’s organ­ised crime oper­a­tion in Malmö in online cred­it and deb­it card fraud.

“The returns were much high­er and the risks much low­er,” he explained to me, “but they just couldn’t get their heads round the tech­nol­o­gy. They pre­ferred to stick with what they knew best — base­ball bats, Sem­tex and stock­ings over their heads.”

His response hint­ed at the gulf that has kept apart old-style crime and the new world of crim­i­nal hack­ers: the use of vio­lence. In the world of mafia organ­i­sa­tions, if you can­not deploy or cred­i­bly threat­en intim­i­da­tion, you don’t make the start­ing grid. Vio­lence is the sine qua non of tra­di­tion­al organ­ised crime. But in cyber crime, the phys­i­cal is not an issue: you can hatch a crime in Astana with your vic­tim in LA while organ­is­ing the cash-out in Dubai.

As a con­se­quence, cyber crime has attract­ed per­pe­tra­tors with a whol­ly dif­fer­ent social pro­file from the hit­men of Sici­ly, the sicar­ios of Pablo Esco­bar or the fin­ger­less enforcers of the yakuza. They often start very young. More expe­ri­enced cyber crim­i­nals mon­i­tor the activ­i­ty of young­sters with apti­tude on the dark net and recruit them by gen­tly entic­ing them into crim­i­nal activ­i­ty — a process that begins before the young hack­er has a devel­oped moral com­pass.

The hack­ers and mal­ware writ­ers are often geeks with lim­it­ed social skills and rarely any record of thug­gery. Mean­while, the front line of cyber crime is waged by peo­ple known as social engi­neers — mod­ern con­fi­dence trick­sters who per­suade you to do things on your com­put­er which you will lat­er regret.

But now tra­di­tion­al organ­ised crime has under­stood that embrac­ing tech­nol­o­gy can lead to spec­tac­u­lar prof­its. In one court case in Brus­sels, a Dutch-Turk­ish group import­ing hero­in from South Amer­i­ca per­suad­ed two techies to hack into the port of Antwerp and manip­u­late the unique nine-dig­it PIN num­bers that every seago­ing con­tain­er is allot­ted. Using this they were able to dig­i­tal­ly mark the con­tain­ers with cocaine as hav­ing been cus­toms cleared.

Europol antic­i­pat­ed this shift four years ago by estab­lish­ing its cyber unit, EC3. But with encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which are vir­tu­al­ly unbreak­able, now becom­ing the stan­dard for crime groups, the rev­o­lu­tion in tech­nol­o­gy is often seen as much as a curse as a ben­e­fit by law enforce­ment around the world.

“As a con­se­quence, cyber crime has attract­ed per­pe­tra­tors with a whol­ly dif­fer­ent social pro­file from the hit­men of Sici­ly, the sicar­ios of Pablo Esco­bar or the fin­ger­less enforcers of the yakuza. They often start very young. More expe­ri­enced cyber crim­i­nals mon­i­tor the activ­i­ty of young­sters with apti­tude on the dark net and recruit them by gen­tly entic­ing them into crim­i­nal activ­i­ty — a process that begins before the young hack­er has a devel­oped moral com­pass.”

Mob­ster hack­er groom­ing. Yikes.

And note the sud­den jump in orga­nized crimes since 2013, the year Edward Snow­den made hack­ing a glob­al top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion:

...
Accord­ing to the SOCTA, Europol is now com­bat­ing 5,000 inter­na­tion­al crime groups with­in the EU, 1,400 more than in 2013. But there are many oth­ers oper­at­ing out­side the ter­ri­to­ry while sell­ing their illic­it goods and ser­vices into the EU.
..

Who knows if that jump is relat­ed to all the atten­tion the Snow­den affair gave to dig­i­tal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, but it’s a reminder that a lot peo­ple prob­a­bly think “hey, I should be doing that too!” when­ev­er there’s a big new expose on gov­ern­ment hack­ing capa­bil­i­ties. And if it’s tra­di­tion­al orga­nized crim­i­nal groups with­out exist­ing in-house hack­ing capa­bil­i­ties get­ting excit­ed about get­ting into the cyber­crime busi­ness they’re going to have recruit some­one which means it’s prob­a­bly been a REALLY good time to be an up and com­ing young hack­er over the past few years. There does­n’t appear to be a short­age of demand.

So now you know: if you’re hang­ing out on the Dark Web brag­ging about your hack­ing skills and some­one gen­tly starts giv­ing you fun crim­i­nal hack­ing ideas, it just might be a mob­ster who wants to recruit you, so be sure not to demon­strate a moral com­pass because that prob­a­bly won’t help.

If, on the oth­er hand, you are enticed into solv­ing one of the most dif­fi­cult puz­zles ever cre­at­ed as part of a hack­er recruit­ment scheme for a mys­te­ri­ous group ded­i­cat­ed to the Cypher­punk ide­ol­o­gy and wants to build tools that would lead to the auto­mat­ic release of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion if a whis­tle-blow­er or researcher is indis­posed of for a peri­od of time (like an auto­mat­ed ver­sion of Edward Snow­den’s “Dead man’s switch”), that’s prob­a­bly not a mob­ster try­ing to recruit you. Or maybe it is. No one real­ly knows:

Rolling Stone

Cica­da: Solv­ing the Web’s Deep­est Mys­tery

How one teenage whiz kid found him­self in a world of inter­na­tion­al intrigue

By David Kush­n­er
Jan­u­ary 15, 2015

Mar­cus Wan­ner need­ed a lit­tle adven­ture in his life. A skin­ny 15-year-old braini­ac with wire-frame glass­es and wavy brown hair, he was the eldest of five, home-schooled by their moth­er, a devout Catholic, near Roanoke, Vir­ginia. Shut­tling Mar­cus between home, church and the Boy Scouts seemed like the best way to keep him away from trou­ble (and girls). “I missed out on a lot,” he recalls with a sigh. “I did­n’t get out much.”

Though Mar­cus was gift­ed with com­put­ers, his mom and dad, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer, also locked him down online. He could­n’t send an e‑mail or reg­is­ter on a web­site with­out their per­mis­sion. To make sure he was abid­ing, he was restrict­ed to the liv­ing-room com­put­er, which they could see. “It was the Big-Broth­er-eye-over-the-shoul­der thing,” he says. But his par­ents only had so much pow­er. “There was no way we could check what he was up to if he cov­ered his tracks,” his moth­er admits. “He’s light-years ahead of us.” Mar­cus was a good kid, depend­able, hard­work­ing, the leader of his Boy Scout troop, just a project away from Eagle Scout. But he could only take so much. “Until a point, I tried to go with the flow,” he says. “And then I was like, ‘Aw, fu ck it.’?”

Fu ck It Day came Jan­u­ary 7th, 2012. His par­ents had recent­ly caved in and let him get a lap­top. Dressed in a T‑shirt and his green Boy Scout car­go shorts (the only kind he wore), he was sit­ting on his bed, sur­rep­ti­tious­ly surf­ing the sci­ence and math board on 4chan, the noto­ri­ous under­ground forum, when he came across a strange image that had appeared on the site three days ear­li­er. It con­tained a mes­sage writ­ten in a thin white font against a black back­ground. “Hel­lo,” it read. “We are look­ing for high­ly intel­li­gent indi­vid­u­als. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a mes­sage hid­den in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to find­ing us. We look for­ward to meet­ing the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.” It was signed “3301.”

For all Mar­cus knew, it could have been anoth­er dumb 4chan prank. He’d nev­er been one for games like this. With the excep­tion of the Rubik’s Cube, which he could solve in under a minute, puz­zles were dull. But it was late and he was bored. Some­one on 4chan had cre­at­ed an Inter­net Relay Chat chan­nel where peo­ple were log­ging in to dis­cuss the bizarre mes­sage. Mar­cus tried to imag­ine him­self ask­ing his par­ents for per­mis­sion to chat with strangers on a site that had made a pic­ture of a guy stretch­ing open his ass hole the Net’s gross­est meme. Then again, he thought, maybe it was time he did­n’t ask per­mis­sion. With one click on the IRC link, Mar­cus said fu ck it and went inside – not know­ing what or whom he’d find.

Tekk does­n’t want to give his real name. Or his full han­dle. Or where he grew up. Or the name of the uni­ver­si­ty where he recent­ly start­ed as a fresh­man, or where we meet for piz­za one night this past fall. He’s been feel­ing para­noid ever since he stum­bled upon 3301, which is how he met Mar­cus. This is clear when some­one acci­den­tal­ly drops a plate near­by us and Tekk, a pasty, scruffy 18-year-old with thick black hair and glass­es, whips around in a pan­ic. “Sor­ry,” he tells me. “I’m still a bit twitchy.”

The twitch­i­ness began Jan­u­ary 5th, 2012. At the time, he was just anoth­er shel­tered 15-year-old nerd in sub­ur­bia, web­mas­ter for his high school paper, and an earnest­ly goofy coder (one of his sites allows vis­i­tors to send vir­tu­al fruit to one anoth­er). But his life took an unex­pect­ed turn that day when a friend in robot­ics lab showed him a mys­te­ri­ous image he’d seen on 4chan. “Dude, you can’t be on 4chan on school com­put­ers – that’s not wise!” Tekk recalls say­ing. “That’s like the cham­ber pot of the Inter­net.”

But the chal­lenge to find what was hid­den in this pic­ture intrigued him. He stared intent­ly at the image. Some­one on the IRC had heard rumors that ter­ror­ist groups encrypt secret notes in image files, ones that could be retrieved by open­ing the file in a dif­fer­ent for­mat. Run­ning a text–editing pro­gram called Notepad, he opened the image and, sure enough, saw a strange string of words and garbage char­ac­ters at the end: “TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says ‘lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk.’?”

Tekk har­rumphed with sat­is­fac­tion. Cae­sar, he knew, was one of the most ancient forms of encryp­tion, dat­ing back to Julius Cae­sar, who used the cipher to safe­guard mil­i­tary secrets. It works by tak­ing the alpha­bet and then count­ing down each let­ter based on a des­ig­nat­ed num­ber (say, replac­ing let­ters with ones three let­ters down the alpha­bet). When Tekk Googled Tiberius Claudius Cae­sar, he learned this was the fourth Roman emper­or. Mov­ing each char­ac­ter down four spots, the string of let­ters and num­bers became a web­site address. When he clicked the link, it took him to a page with an image of a wood­en duck and anoth­er cryp­tic mes­sage: “WOOPS just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the mes­sage out.”

When I ask Tekk how he felt upon see­ing this rid­dle, he laughs and says, “It kind of rhymes with ‘what the duck?’?” He joined the con­ver­sa­tion among the puz­zle solvers on the IRC. To Tekk, many seemed like the usu­al 4chan mis­cre­ants. But one guy total­ly knew his shit: Mar­cus.

Mar­cus and Tekk had a lot in com­mon. They were both 15, savvy online and self-reliant. “He was a leader and, like myself, a bit of a con­trol freak,” Mar­cus says. And they were both already hooked on crack­ing the mys­tery. “We just kind of fig­ured, ‘OK, we’re in this togeth­er,’?” Tekk says. “And oth­er peo­ple just weren’t doing as well as we were.”

Split­ting off from the 4chan scrum, they formed their own pri­vate IRC chan­nel, and cher­ry-picked oth­er bright solvers to join them. They called their team #deci­pher. It con­sist­ed of about 10 like-mind­ed 4channers around the world. There was Wakeen, a 16-year-old Chilean-born math prodi­gy, who, as he puts it, “obsess­es about cryp­tog­ra­phy.” There was John Hen­rik Gut­torm, a 26-year-old hack­er in the Arc­tic cir­cle of Nor­way, who did sound and lights for local con­certs dur­ing the long sun­less days. “If you ask some­one here what he does, he says, ‘Fish­ing and fuck­ing,’?” Gut­torm tells me. “?‘And in the win­ter, less fish­ing.’?”

As Team #deci­pher knew, cryp­to­graph­ic mind-ben­ders have been around for cen­turies. The most leg­endary is the Voyn­ich man­u­script (a hand­writ­ten codex car­bon-dat­ed to the 15th cen­tu­ry and thought to have orig­i­nat­ed in Cen­tral Europe), which cryp­tog­ra­phers have still yet to solve. In the past decade, so-called alter­nate-real­i­ty games – which took play­ers on elab­o­rate scav­enger hunts online and off – had been used to mar­ket The Dark Knight, Halo 2 and the Nine Inch Nails record Year Zero.

More roman­ti­cal­ly, spy mas­ters have used rid­dles and puz­zles as a recruit­ment tech­nique going back at least to World War II, when British cryp­tog­ra­ph­er Alan Tur­ing used an extreme­ly chal­leng­ing cross­word to help find agents who could crack Nazi codes. Recent­ly, cor­po­ra­tions have also found ciphers use­ful for scout­ing. In 2004, a bill­board appeared in Sil­i­con Val­ley with just the cryp­tic phrase “{first 10-dig­it prime found in con­sec­u­tive dig­its of e}.com.” The answer, 7,427,466,391 – with the .com added – led to a Web page with anoth­er mind-numb­ing math prob­lem, which ulti­mate­ly land­ed on the home­page of Google Labs, the test­ing wing of the online behe­moth. “One thing we learned while build­ing Google is that it’s eas­i­er to find what you’re look­ing for if it comes look­ing for you,” the mes­sage on the site read. “What we’re look­ing for are the best engi­neers in the world. And here you are.”

In 2011 and 2013, one of Britain’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, the Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters, car­ried on Tur­ing’s tra­di­tion and post­ed com­pli­cat­ed cryp­to­graph­ic puz­zles online to attract young tal­ent. “The aim was to appeal to a wider and dif­fer­ent audi­ence than the more tra­di­tion­al cam­paigns, in order to reach indi­vid­u­als with tech­ni­cal, ana­lyt­i­cal and math­e­mat­i­cal skills,” a GCHQ spokesper­son told me in a state­ment. “Both cam­paigns were suc­cess­ful.”

Per­haps 3301 was Google, the solvers spec­u­lat­ed, or some oth­er cor­po­ra­tion, or gov­ern­ment, or hack­er group – they had no idea. The meta-mys­tery of 3301’s iden­ti­ty made this rid­dle all the more com­pelling. “Usu­al­ly with puz­zles in a book or on a web­site, you know the dri­ving force behind it,” says Ken­ny Pater­son, a cryp­tog­ra­ph­er and pro­fes­sor of Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. “But here no one knows what the goal is, what you get, how you know when you won.”

But what­ev­er it was, the #deci­pher crew want­ed to mas­ter it. As they dis­cussed the duck-decoy clue in IRC, they real­ized that the mes­sage – “looks like you can’t guess how to get the mes­sage out” – con­tained the words “out” and “guess,” which, when com­bined, formed the word out­guess, the name of a steganog­ra­phy pro­gram. Steganog­ra­phy dates back to around 440 B.C. Greece, and entails hid­ing a mes­sage or image with­in anoth­er one. When they ran the duck-decoy image through Out­Guess, they rejoiced in unearthing anoth­er clue. “Here is a book code,” it read, and list­ed 75 com­bi­na­tions of num­bers: 1:20, 2:3, 3:5, etc.

...

Using the book code from the decoy image to ana­lyze “The Lady of the Foun­tain,” they found anoth­er hid­den mes­sage. Mar­cus had become the sec­re­tary of #deci­pher and described it in his notes. “The first code is ‘1:20,’?” he typed. “Tak­ing the 20th char­ac­ter of the first line of decod­ed text, we get ‘C.’ Con­tin­u­ing with the sec­ond line (2:3), an ‘A’ is found.” By the end, he had stitched togeth­er anoth­er mes­sage: “Call us at tele­phone num­ber two one four three nine oh nine six oh eight.” One thought flashed through Mar­cus’ mind as he sat on his bed in his Boy Scout shorts, and it rhymed with “what the duck?”

Tekk was already feel­ing out of sorts. The puz­zle, which the #deci­pher team was now call­ing Cica­da, had become all-con­sum­ing. “Solv­ing things is kind of addic­tive,” he says. “It kind of felt like Nation­al Trea­sure.” He was stay­ing up until four in the morn­ing, drag­ging him­self to school, all the while hid­ing his secret dig­i­tal life from his par­ents. “If I had delved into what he was solv­ing and known it was from an unknown source, it would have caused me much more stress at the time,” his moth­er tells me. “It would have freaked them out,” Tekk says. “Meet­ing with strangers on the Inter­net to solve puz­zles sounds a lit­tle sketch.”

It got sketch­i­er when the solvers called the mys­te­ri­ous tele­phone num­ber with a Dal­las area code. “Very good. You have done well,” said the com­put­er­ized voice on the record­ing. Then it doled out anoth­er clue. “There are three prime num­bers asso­ci­at­ed with the orig­i­nal final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them,” the mes­sage went on. “You will have to find the oth­er two. Mul­ti­ply all three of these num­bers togeth­er and add a .com to find the next step. Good luck. Good­bye.”

The final.jpg image referred to the first one in the puz­zle – the white-font mes­sage against the black back­ground. The group strug­gled to fig­ure out what oth­er two num­bers could be gleaned, until even­tu­al­ly some­one tried look­ing at the height and width: 509 by 503 pix­els, both prime. When mul­ti­plied with 3301, they got 845,145,127, and added a .com, which led them to anoth­er web­site, with a pic­ture of a cica­da, wings unfurled. Beneath the pic­ture was a count­down clock. Run­ning the image through Out­Guess revealed a mes­sage: “You have done well to come this far,” it read. “Patience is a virtue. Check back at 17:00 on Mon­day, 9 Jan­u­ary 2012 UTC.”

Inside his bed­room, Mar­cus checked his chunky black watch: one day to go, noon Roanoke time. He had a Boy Scout meet­ing on the night of Jan­u­ary 9th, but spent that morn­ing in his room anx­ious­ly await­ing zero hour. As 12 p.m. struck, he hit refresh on his Web brows­er and then saw 13 pairs of num­bers fill his screen:

52.216802, 21.018334
48.85057059876962,
2.406892329454422

And so on.

Mar­cus scrib­bled the num­bers and their prime fac­tors on a stray piece of card­board, and felt cold­ness creep across his chest. Until now, this mys­tery had been con­fined to the Inter­net, an invis­i­ble jour­ney with a face­less troop across the ether. But Cica­da had just bro­ken the fourth wall and flown into the real world. “Find our sym­bol at the loca­tion near­est you,” the mes­sage con­clud­ed. The num­bers were coor­di­nates.

When the Cica­da coor­di­nates hit the Web, it set off a furi­ous scav­enger hunt as solvers punched the loca­tions into Google maps. There was no way of know­ing exact­ly how many peo­ple were on the case, but scores now filled the active Cica­da dis­cus­sion forums. To the aston­ish­ment of the solvers, 3301 had some­how plant­ed clues around the world. There were more than a dozen, spread over four con­ti­nents. The Street View images seemed ran­dom: a nar­row street near the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­saw, a park­ing lot on a busy inter­sec­tion of Seoul, a coun­try road on the North Shore of Oahu. One loca­tion came up in front of a promi­nent doc­tor’s house in a wealthy sec­tion of Seat­tle. (When RS called the doc­tor, he said that he had nev­er heard of Cica­da 3301.)

Solvers mobbed the IRC, crowd-sourc­ing any­one close to the loca­tions who could head to the spots. Tekk, increas­ing­ly spooked, found the whole thing “creepy,” he says, and his imag­i­na­tion ran wild. “They could have been, like, sit­ting there with knives at night,” he says. “Just wait­ing to stab some­one who went out. We had no idea what we were doing.” Mar­cus, how­ev­er, was less con­cerned, and game. After a child­hood feel­ing iso­lat­ed, he iden­ti­fied with the intel­lec­tu­al breadth and depth of 3301. “I saw a kin­dred spir­it in whomev­er made the puz­zles,” he says. “I did­n’t have any fear of it.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he did­n’t have any way to trav­el. “I did­n’t have car priv­i­leges,” he says. “And it was­n’t like I could say, ‘Mom, the Inter­net told me to dri­ve to Seat­tle.’?”

...

While Mar­cus looked for deep­er mean­ing in the coor­di­nates, Tekk had news of his own. One of the guys in #deci­pher had a broth­er, Bon­go, who lived in Syd­ney and was head­ing out to the Aus­tralia coor­di­nates. Bon­go arrived on a leafy, res­i­den­tial street, where he found a poster with a cryp­tic black draw­ing taped to a tele­phone pole: a cica­da. Below it was the square black matrix of a QR code (often used in adver­tis­ing to quick­ly link to web­sites and prod­uct info). Before long, sim­i­lar posters were found around the world: War­saw, Poland; Fayet­teville, Arkansas; Paris; Seoul; Seat­tle; Mia­mi.

When scanned with a QR read­er, the codes led to one of two dif­fer­ent rid­dles, each with a book cipher. The first was the Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca 11th Edi­tion. The oth­er cor­re­lat­ed to “Agrip­pa,” a 1992 poem by sci-fi nov­el­ist William Gib­son, which was dis­trib­uted on a flop­py disk and cod­ed to encrypt itself after one read so that it could nev­er be accessed again. Both clues includ­ed a some­what chill­ing note from 3301 that sug­gest­ed they were both aware of and not keen on the solvers’ col­lab­o­ra­tion. “You’ve shared too much to this point,” the note read. “We want the best, not the fol­low­ers. Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.”

As the solvers bus­ied them­selves with the new puz­zles, para­noia spread. “Cica­da attracts a fair bunch of loonies and para­noid peo­ple,” says Mar­tin Wehrmey­er, a solver who helps run the Uncov­er­ing Cica­da forum. This was­n’t feel­ing like just a game any­more. How much infor­ma­tion had they giv­en away? How close­ly were they being tracked? And who was doing the track­ing? Some thought it was the CIA, the NSA or even William Gib­son him­self (although when I ask Gib­son if he’s the one, he laughs, shakes his head no and says, “I would hope that if I were doing some­thing like that, it would be fun­nier”).

Oth­ers won­dered if it was a crim­i­nal hack­er group, look­ing for pawns in some nefar­i­ous plan. Wakeen, the Chilean prodi­gy, got fright­ened after receiv­ing a call at 2 a.m. that just had an emer­gency test tone on the oth­er line. On the Cica­da forums, he and the oth­ers began notic­ing that active mem­bers seemed to be drop­ping out of the action. “That got me para­noid,” he says, “so I had a con­tin­gency plan with a friend where, if I dis­ap­peared, I would try to leave behind evi­dence.”.

Even the more math-mind­ed skep­tics who nev­er con­sid­ered them­selves part of the tin­foil-hat crowd could­n’t help feel­ing freaked. The com­pet­i­tive aspect of solv­ing the puz­zle first also increased, height­en­ing every­one’s ten­sion. To throw oth­ers off the 3301 trail, the #deci­pher team began plant­i­ng false clues online.

No one seemed more rat­tled than Tekk. He and oth­ers began ques­tion­ing peo­ple in the #deci­pher IRC to see if they were moles. They adopt­ed the mot­to “Every­one except you is Cica­da.” Mar­cus was among those who got fed up with Tekk’s dra­ma. “Tekk was real­ly secre­tive,” he recalls. “At one point, it felt like too much.” One after­noon, Tekk logged on to find that some­one had unearthed his true iden­ti­ty and post­ed pic­tures of his fam­i­ly along with his home address. Tekk was shat­tered. “It just made me more wary of the Inter­net in gen­er­al,” he says.

As more com­pli­cat­ed puz­zles came their way and more rumors mount­ed, the num­ber of solvers in the forums dwin­dled – from frus­tra­tion, bore­dom and fear. But there was one of them who was still ful­ly com­mit­ted: Mar­cus. “It was my only life,” he says. And since he was home-schooled, he had the lux­u­ry and curse of being able to spend as much time on Cica­da as he want­ed. “That was all I did,” he says.

On Feb­ru­ary 6th, one long month after see­ing the first clue, he received an e‑mail from 3301. “Con­grat­u­la­tions,” it read. “Your month of test­ing has come to an end. Out of the thou­sands who attempt­ed it, you are one of only a few who have suc­ceed­ed. There is one last step, although there will not be any hid­den codes or secret mes­sages or phys­i­cal trea­sure hunts. This last step is only hon­esty. We have always been hon­est with you, and we expect you to be hon­est with us in return.

“You have all won­dered who we are, and so we shall now tell you we are an
inter­na­tion­al group. We have no name. We have no sym­bol. We have no mem­ber­ship ros­ters. We do not have a pub­lic web­site, and we do not adver­tise our­selves. We are a group of indi­vid­u­als who have proven our­selves much like you have by com­plet­ing this recruit­ment con­test, and we are drawn togeth­er by com­mon beliefs. A care­ful read­ing of the texts used in the con­test would have revealed some of these beliefs, that tyran­ny and oppres­sion of any kind must end, that cen­sor­ship is wrong and that pri­va­cy is an inalien­able right.

“We are not a hack­er group, nor are we a warez group [who trade music and movies online]. We do not engage in ille­gal activ­i­ty, nor do our mem­bers. If you are engaged in ille­gal activ­i­ty, we ask that you cease any and all ille­gal activ­i­ties or decline mem­ber­ship at this time. We will not ask ques­tions if you decline. How­ev­er, if you lie to us, we will find out.

“You are undoubt­ed­ly won­der­ing what it is that we do. We are much like a think tank, in that our pri­ma­ry focus is on research­ing and devel­op­ing tech­niques to aid the ideas we advo­cate: lib­er­ty, pri­va­cy, secu­ri­ty.” It end­ed with a short ques­tion­naire: “Do you believe that every human being has a right to pri­va­cy and anonymi­ty?”

Mar­cus typed, “Yes.”

“Do you believe that infor­ma­tion should be free?”

“Seri­ous­ly?” Mar­cus replied. “You guys are badass. I’m with you all the way!”

“Do you believe that cen­sor­ship harms human­i­ty?”

“With­out a doubt,” he wrote. “Count me in, but with one reser­va­tion. You have pre­sent­ed two con­flict­ing ideas: resis­tance of cen­sor­ship and a require­ment to refrain from ille­gal behav­ior. What of the peo­ple who would cen­sor cer­tain aspects of cul­ture? What of the ‘pirates’? I believe that there should be no restric­tion on the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion. Do you ask me and the oth­er ‘cho­sen ones’ to...cease shar­ing of copy­right­ed mate­r­i­al?” He con­clud­ed respect­ful­ly, “Thank you for a life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.” Then he hit send, and wait­ed to see if 3301 would take him in.

On Feb­ru­ary 28th, Mar­cus received an e‑mail signed with 3301’s PGP key. “Hel­lo,” it read. “The next step is final­ly here.” The mes­sage includ­ed spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for vis­it­ing a secret site on the dark­net, the hid­den part of the Web, along with a user­name and pass­word. The mes­sage con­clud­ed with one pow­er­ful word, ush­er­ing Mar­cus into 3301. “Wel­come,” it read.

Mar­cus was­n’t the only solver to receive the mes­sage. So did, by Mar­cus’ and Tekk’s esti­mates, at least 20 oth­ers. Tekk was still very wary. “I was­n’t sure what I was get­ting into,” he recalls. The dark­net address led them to a page where they found them­selves in a chat forum with the oth­er recruits – as well as a hand­ful of peo­ple who claimed to be part of 3301. It felt thrilling to have final­ly arrived.

The solvers want­ed answers. Who were 3301? What were their goals? How did they start? They received some cir­cum­spect answers from the elders, though of course they had no idea what was real­ly true or if they were being played. 3301, the sto­ry went, had been start­ed by a few friends who shared like-mind­ed imper­a­tives – anonymi­ty, pri­va­cy, encryp­tion – and want­ed a way to pool their tal­ents to cre­ate use­ful soft­ware that ensured these ideals. As friends recruit­ed friends, 3301 grew inter­na­tion­al­ly. The group, as they under­stood it, had no offi­cial affil­i­a­tion with any one gov­ern­ment or mil­i­tary. “They insin­u­at­ed they were a part of a bunch of dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions,” Tekk recalls. “It was some kind of secret soci­ety.” They shared a com­mon goal: to increase pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty in the Dig­i­tal Age, and ensure the free­dom of infor­ma­tion.

...

3301 (cho­sen because it’s a com­pelling prime num­ber, a twin prime for­ward and back­ward), they were told, was orga­nized into decen­tral­ized cells – also called broods – each with its own area of research. They were told that the group is com­part­men­tal­ized so that indi­vid­ual cells had no knowl­edge of each oth­er. Mar­cus, Tekk and the oth­er recruits were told they were Brood b.0h. Puz­zles were not always used for recruit­ment but had been, in this case, because the group was seek­ing new mem­bers with cod­ing and cryp­tog­ra­phy skills.

Now that the new brood had been tak­en in, the 3301 mem­bers told them, they would be tasked with cre­at­ing soft­ware that fit the ide­ol­o­gy of the group. In dis­cus­sions on the dark­net site that ran for weeks, the recruits decid­ed to cre­ate soft­ware to pro­tect whis­tle-blow­ers like Chelsea Man­ning, who was fac­ing tri­al at the time. Togeth­er, they came up with an idea they called the Cica­da Anony­mous Key Escrow Sys­tem, or CAKES. In short, it would trig­ger the auto­mat­ic pub­li­ca­tion of sen­si­tive data online if and when the whis­tle-blow­er or researcher was indis­posed for a des­ig­nat­ed peri­od of time (due to, say, death or incar­cer­a­tion).

For months, Mar­cus and the oth­ers col­lab­o­rat­ed on CAKES, work­ing on their own and shar­ing notes on 3301’s hid­den site. The men­tors from 3301 would drop in and share their com­ments and thoughts on the progress. This kind of secret col­lab­o­ra­tive process was unusu­al but not with­out prece­dent. Bit­coin, the cryp­tocur­ren­cy, had been devel­oped in secre­cy as well. But, for Brood b.0h, the buzz of accep­tance soon gave way to the drudgery of what felt like home­work. Mar­cus would log on to see that few­er and few­er of the oth­ers were com­plet­ing their tasks. Even Tekk, who had to deal with the real-world task of a sum­mer job, had stopped vis­it­ing the forum ear­ly on. “I had oth­er work to focus on,” he says. “I just fad­ed away.”

By the end of 2012, Mar­cus was the last one still cod­ing. But after months at his lap­top, he was stuck. Part of his enthu­si­asm for solv­ing Cica­da and join­ing 3301 was to col­lab­o­rate with oth­ers, to get out of his box in Roanoke and be part of some­thing larg­er, some­thing pow­er­ful, some­thing world-chang­ing. But now here he was sort of full cir­cle, the last scout on the trail. With CAKES only par­tial­ly done, he appealed to the elders in 3301 to recruit new mem­bers with the skills to help him com­plete the pro­gram­ming. His men­tors com­mu­ni­cat­ed that they would be look­ing for new recruits. Despite all his time in 3301, he still did­n’t know much more about the group oth­er than what he had been ini­tial­ly told. And, for fear of being excom­mu­ni­cat­ed, he did­n’t dis­cuss it with fam­i­ly or friends.

On Jan­u­ary 4th, 2013, the anniver­sary of the first Cica­da puz­zle, solvers crowd­ed their IRC chan­nel, antic­i­pat­ing when and how the new puz­zle from 3301 would drop. Amid the fer­vor, an anony­mous per­son post­ed a mys­te­ri­ous con­fes­sion­al. “I was part of what you call 3301/Cicada for more than a decade,” the anony­mous author wrote, “and I’m here to warn you: Stay away.”

Any por­ten­tous­ly dire and anony­mous mes­sage on the Inter­net could be bullsh it or trolling. But as the skep­ti­cal solvers read the screed, the author seemed knowl­edge­able enough about 3301 to give them pause. The author said he had been a mil­i­tary offi­cer in an unnamed, non-Eng­lish speak­ing coun­try when, after a year of being unknow­ing­ly vet­ted in per­son, he was recruit­ed by a mem­ber of 3301. He described them as “a group of like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als, all incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed and con­nect­ed, [work­ing] togeth­er for the com­mon good: the good of mankind.” But over sev­er­al para­graphs, he cau­tioned about their cultish beliefs, a con­vic­tion, for exam­ple, in “the Glob­al Brain as anoth­er kind of ‘God’?” – 3301 was noth­ing more, he wrote, than a “reli­gion dis­guised as a pro­gres­sive sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion.” He con­clud­ed by say­ing he had since found Jesus.

“The Warn­ing,” as the post became known among Cica­da obses­sives, only added to the mythol­o­gy and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries – par­tic­u­lar­ly since the author of the post could not be reached, and dis­ap­peared. Some wrote it off as the rant of some crazy troll or 4chan punk mess­ing with their heads. For insid­ers like Mar­cus, though, the details in the Warn­ing rang true – the mil­i­tary ori­gins, the ide­ol­o­gy behind the work. He believed it could have come from some­one in the group. But it was also, per­haps, pur­pose­ful mis­in­for­ma­tion to deter any­one naive enough to believe it. “I think it was meant to keep peo­ple away,” he says.

In fact, the Warn­ing proved sus­pi­cious­ly well-timed. Hours after it appeared, an image was post­ed to 4chan, writ­ten in the famil­iar thin white font. “Hel­lo again,” it read. “Our search for intel­li­gent indi­vid­u­als now con­tin­ues. The first clue is hid­den with­in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to find­ing us. We look for­ward to meet­ing the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301.”

As solvers swarmed to the puz­zle, Mar­cus had grown weary of labor­ing away on CAKES alone and await­ed what he hoped would be the influx of fresh recruits to help him.

...

Yet with­in weeks, solvers hit a dead end. Some, claim­ing to have com­plet­ed the puz­zle, returned to the forums com­plain­ing they’d nev­er received the final invites from 3301 to join the group. Oth­ers spec­u­lat­ed that per­haps those who had been recruit­ed this year sim­ply refused to reveal them­selves. All Mar­cus knew was that, if there was a new brood select­ed, they were nowhere to be found on the dark­net site. He had no idea what was hap­pen­ing behind the scenes. Per­haps the brood had­n’t lived up to 3301’s expec­ta­tions. Per­haps there’d been an infil­tra­tion by the author­i­ties. Per­haps 3301 were the author­i­ties and this all was some weird hon­ey pot. In March, Mar­cus received a mes­sage from anoth­er solver, nick­named Sage, who’d made it into the 2012 brood. “We’ve been laid off,” Sage told him, but had no fur­ther infor­ma­tion. When Mar­cus tried to log back on to the dark­net site, it was gone.

On April 28th, 2014, a strange puz­zle appeared on Twit­ter. It was an encrypt­ed mes­sage sup­pos­ed­ly sent by a mil­i­tary cryp­tog­ra­ph­er who claimed to have hid­den on a sub­ma­rine, which was being com­man­deered by a “mys­te­ri­ous ene­my” who’d stolen plans for high-grade mil­i­tary weapons. The cryp­tog­ra­ph­er was send­ing mes­sages that, when cracked, would reveal her loca­tion so oth­ers could swoop in.

But this was­n’t anoth­er clue from 3301. It was from the Unit­ed States Navy, which, after study­ing Cica­da 3301, thought it’d be cool to launch a pro­mo­tion­al puz­zle of its own. “We knew about Cica­da and were inspired by it,” says Sean Forbes, spokesman for Navy Recruit­ment Com­mand. The puz­zle, called Project Archi­teuthis, required solvers to deci­pher the cod­ed mes­sages from the fic­tion­al cryp­tog­ra­ph­er – with the prize of prov­ing their prowess to mil­i­tary recruiters. The 10 solvers received cer­tifi­cates of com­ple­tion from the Navy. It was a pure PR move to make the Navy appeal to young cryp­tog­ra­phers. “We know that’s where our audi­ence lives,” Forbes says. “They live online.”

The Navy isn’t the only gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion pulling a Cica­da. In May, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency, using its @NSACareers han­dle, post­ed a strange jum­ble of let­ters on its Twit­ter feed. When decrypt­ed, the let­ters spelled a mes­sage: “Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Mon­day in May as we explore career essen­tials to pro­tect our nation.” NSA spokes­woman Mar­ci Green Miller tells me the puz­zle was an effort to lure “the best and the bright­est” young minds into the NSA.

Ron Patrick, the head of recruit­ment for the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, tells me the agency is dis­cussing devel­op­ment of a Cica­da-style puz­zle of its own. Patrick first learned of Cica­da from his col­lege-age kids, who want­ed to know if the CIA had cre­at­ed it, as con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists on the Inter­net sus­pect­ed. “They thought for sure we were the ones behind it,” he tells me, “but it’s def­i­nite­ly not us.” Patrick, like the eru­dite solvers, doubts 3301 is affil­i­at­ed with a gov­ern­ment or cor­po­ra­tion. But from what he can gath­er, he says, it’s dif­fi­cult to real­ly know. “I would hope it’s not a hack­ing group look­ing to get tal­ent,” he says, “and turn that tal­ent against us.”

Across the world, cryp­tog­ra­phers, schol­ars, Feds and geeks are spec­u­lat­ing as to what the real sto­ry is behind 3301. Alan Wood­ward, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sur­rey who spe­cial­izes in com­put­er secu­ri­ty, first sus­pect­ed that the NSA or the GCHQ was pulling the strings, but he now thinks that the breadth of the puz­zle could “point to a large cor­po­ra­tion” recruit­ing skilled cryp­tog­ra­phers. Game devel­op­er and cryp­tog­ra­phy expert Elon­ka Dunin thinks it “just may be one group of peo­ple in a chat room gig­gling,” but adds, “I put word out to my cryp­to friends about Cica­da and came back with a big blank.”

Giv­en the com­plex­i­ty of the puz­zles, most believe that 3301 can’t be an indi­vid­ual and has to be at least a small group. Whether or not it has mil­i­tary ori­gins, no one real­ly knows. It could just be one big nerdy head game, engi­neered by some way­ward puz­zle mas­ters who sim­ply get off on the plea­sures of their own myth­mak­ing. Or it could be, as the Warn­ing sug­gest­ed, some­thing more high-mind­ed, some mis­sive from a vast con­spir­a­cy in the ether. Or maybe it real­ly is the prod­uct of some like-mind­ed geeks out to bet­ter the world. At the moment, no one real­ly knows for sure – which, of course, is exact­ly what keeps it intrigu­ing in the first place.

As for Cica­da, the mys­tery did­n’t end in 2013 after all. On Jan­u­ary 6th, 2014, a Twit­ter account under the han­dle @1231507051321 post­ed anoth­er cryp­tic mes­sage in a white font against a black back­ground: “Hel­lo,” it read. “Epiphany is upon you. Your pil­grim­age has begun. Enlight­en­ment awaits.” Solvers, how­ev­er, have spent the bet­ter part of a year stuck in the Cica­da hole, try­ing to deci­pher 58 pages of runes. So far, there’s no word of any solvers com­plet­ing it. As of this writ­ing in ear­ly Jan­u­ary – on what would be the fourth anniver­sary of Cicada’s begin­ning – die-hards are wait­ing anx­ious­ly to see if or when the 2015 puz­zle begins.

But there is one for­mer 3301 mem­ber who has decid­ed to sur­face regard­less, Mar­cus Wan­ner. For two years, he remained silent and anony­mous. He won­ders why 3301 had stopped reach­ing out to him – and won­dered if per­haps his brood had done some­thing to annoy them, or some­how not proved its worth. But enough time has passed with­out word that he fig­ures that now – in the spir­it of free infor­ma­tion, in which 3301 so staunch­ly believe – he should share his sto­ry and work. “It’s time to go pub­lic,” he tells me, in his dorm at Vir­ginia Tech, where he’s study­ing com­put­er sci­ence.

In addi­tion to shar­ing his sto­ry, Mar­cus has decid­ed to hide the code for CAKES on the dark­net, where oth­ers might find it and fin­ish what his brood start­ed. Tor Eke­land, an attor­ney with the Whistle­blow­ers Defense League who has rep­re­sent­ed sev­er­al high-pro­file hack­tivists, says such soft­ware would be “extreme­ly valu­able, because it gives lever­age and pro­tec­tion to the whis­tle-blow­er. There’s noth­ing like this out there.” Ever the faith­ful scout, Mar­cus says the com­ple­tion of the project would ful­fill the pledge he made to 3301. But, giv­en all the secre­cy and mis­di­rec­tion, he isn’t sure how the mys­te­ri­ous puz­zle mas­ters will take it. “Hope­ful­ly,” he says, “Cica­da won’t be on my case.”

“You have all won­dered who we are, and so we shall now tell you we are an
inter­na­tion­al group. We have no name. We have no sym­bol. We have no mem­ber­ship ros­ters. We do not have a pub­lic web­site, and we do not adver­tise our­selves. We are a group of indi­vid­u­als who have proven our­selves much like you have by com­plet­ing this recruit­ment con­test, and we are drawn togeth­er by com­mon beliefs. A care­ful read­ing of the texts used in the con­test would have revealed some of these beliefs, that tyran­ny and oppres­sion of any kind must end, that cen­sor­ship is wrong and that pri­va­cy is an inalien­able right.”

Yep, that group is appar­ent­ly recruit­ing incred­i­bly skill prob­lem solvers. Or at least was recruit­ing (they had anoth­er recruit­ment round in 2016). How is it? Who knows because the recruit­ed mem­bers don’t even know. They only get to know that their job is to work in decen­tral­ized cells of coders to build soft­ware that fits the group’s ide­ol­o­gy:

...
3301 (cho­sen because it’s a com­pelling prime num­ber, a twin prime for­ward and back­ward), they were told, was orga­nized into decen­tral­ized cells – also called broods – each with its own area of research. They were told that the group is com­part­men­tal­ized so that indi­vid­ual cells had no knowl­edge of each oth­er. Mar­cus, Tekk and the oth­er recruits were told they were Brood b.0h. Puz­zles were not always used for recruit­ment but had been, in this case, because the group was seek­ing new mem­bers with cod­ing and cryp­tog­ra­phy skills.

Now that the new brood had been tak­en in, the 3301 mem­bers told them, they would be tasked with cre­at­ing soft­ware that fit the ide­ol­o­gy of the group. In dis­cus­sions on the dark­net site that ran for weeks, the recruits decid­ed to cre­ate soft­ware to pro­tect whis­tle-blow­ers like Chelsea Man­ning, who was fac­ing tri­al at the time. Togeth­er, they came up with an idea they called the Cica­da Anony­mous Key Escrow Sys­tem, or CAKES. In short, it would trig­ger the auto­mat­ic pub­li­ca­tion of sen­si­tive data online if and when the whis­tle-blow­er or researcher was indis­posed for a des­ig­nat­ed peri­od of time (due to, say, death or incar­cer­a­tion).
...

And what is that ide­ol­o­gy? Appar­ent­ly pppos­ing tyran­ny and oppres­sion of any kind (with a par­tic­u­lar fix­a­tion on cen­sor­ship and pri­va­cy) sounds nice, it also sounds a lot like the hyper-Lib­er­tar­i­an ide­ol­o­gy of the Cypher­punks. And as the mys­te­ri­ous alleged ex-mem­ber warned, it’s also rather cultish:

...
Any por­ten­tous­ly dire and anony­mous mes­sage on the Inter­net could be bullsh it or trolling. But as the skep­ti­cal solvers read the screed, the author seemed knowl­edge­able enough about 3301 to give them pause. The author said he had been a mil­i­tary offi­cer in an unnamed, non-Eng­lish speak­ing coun­try when, after a year of being unknow­ing­ly vet­ted in per­son, he was recruit­ed by a mem­ber of 3301. He described them as “a group of like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als, all incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed and con­nect­ed, [work­ing] togeth­er for the com­mon good: the good of mankind.” But over sev­er­al para­graphs, he cau­tioned about their cultish beliefs, a con­vic­tion, for exam­ple, in “the Glob­al Brain as anoth­er kind of ‘God’?” – 3301 was noth­ing more, he wrote, than a “reli­gion dis­guised as a pro­gres­sive sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion.” He con­clud­ed by say­ing he had since found Jesus.
...

A “Glob­al Brain as ‘God’ ” Cypher­punk cult. Sounds inter­est­ing, and def­i­nite­ly not pro­gres­sive as the mys­tery ex-3301 mem­ber char­ac­ter­ized it.

But regard­less of the real goals or ide­ol­o­gy of the 3301 group, it’s an exam­ple of the kinds of lengths orga­ni­za­tions might go to in order to recruit the best hack­er tal­ent. As the arti­cle points out, using puz­zles to recruit is noth­ing new and the NSA, CIA, and major cor­po­ra­tions have all start­ed mim­ic­k­ing the 3301 recruit­ment mod­el.

Might orga­nized crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion use sim­i­lar tech­niques? Well, it seems unlike­ly a group that does­n’t already have a very tal­ent­ed set of hack­ers or cryp­tol­o­gists would have the capac­i­ty to devel­op such elab­o­rate puz­zles, although the idea of decen­tral­ized cells of coders work­ing inde­pen­dent­ly towards build­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed and total­ly new soft­ware tools and have no idea who they’re actu­al­ly work­ing for does seem like the kind of thing an well-resourced orga­nized crime out­fit would like to do.

So if you’re a young hack­er with incred­i­ble prob­lem solv­ing skills who wants to avoid a reg­u­lar job in IT secu­ri­ty and the mob­ster life does­n’t seem like the life for you, there appears to be an inter­na­tion­al Cypher­punk cult out there spread across con­ti­nents that would love to recruit you to work for free and build tools for them.

Here’s a rather amus­ing piece on Bit­coin that points towards one of the poten­tial­ly use­ful appli­ca­tions of the tech­nol­o­gy: once some­one devel­ops a quan­tum com­put­er pow­er­ful enough to eas­i­ly solve the com­pu­ta­tion­al puz­zles at the heart of Bit­coin’s “min­ing” sys­tem an obvi­ous appli­ca­tion of that new quan­tum com­put­er will be using it to mine bit­coins and utter­ly crush the rest of the min­ing com­pe­ti­tion and make a bunch of mon­ey (assum­ing Bit­coin has­n’t implod­ed by them). If you con­trolled that quan­tum com­put­er you could imme­di­ate­ly be the top min­er in the world and col­lect all the mined bit­coins and asso­ci­at­ed trans­ac­tion fees. And since some­one devel­op­ing a such a pow­er­ful quan­tum com­put­er might not open­ly share it with the world, hav­ing Bit­coin around serves one use­ful pur­pose. It might indi­rect­ly tell the world that some devel­oped a quan­tum com­put­er after some min­er sud­den­ly appears that destroys the com­pe­ti­tion:

For­tune

Break­ing Bit­coin With a Quan­tum Com­put­er

By Jeff John Roberts
Jan­u­ary 6, 2018

Alex Beath, a Toron­to-based physi­cist and pen­sion fund ana­lyst, is skep­ti­cal about Bit­coin but sees one use­ful pur­pose for the cryp­to-cur­ren­cy: It may detect when some­one cre­ates a work­ing quan­tum com­put­er.

“The sec­ond some­one cre­ates a viable quan­tum com­put­er, the NP-com­plete math prob­lems at the heart of Bit­coin min­ing tech become instant­ly solv­able,” Beath notes. “In oth­er words, one answer to the ques­tion ‘what’s the first thing you’d do with a quan­tum com­put­er?’ is ‘mine all of the remain­ing Bit­coin instant­ly.’ Until that hap­pens, nobody has a quan­tum com­put­er.”

Beath’s off-the-cuff obser­va­tion, which he made in response to a For­tune query about the secu­ri­ty of bit­coin, is amus­ing. But it also under­scores a seri­ous prob­lem: Name­ly, a new era of com­put­ing is fast-approach­ing and when it arrives, the sys­tem that gave rise to many cryp­to-cur­ren­cy for­tunes will col­lapse.

This threat to Bit­coin and oth­er soft­ware sys­tems that use the same under­ly­ing encryp­tion technique—a tech­nique like­ly to crum­ble in the face of a quan­tum-based attack—is not new. Indeed, it was pre­dict­ed decades ago, and Ethereum founder (and for­mer jour­nal­ist) Vita­lik Buterin wrote about how to defend it in 2013.

The dif­fer­ence today, though, is that com­pa­nies like Microsoft, Google and IBM are mak­ing rapid break­throughs that could make quan­tum com­put­ing viable in less than 10 years.

Right now, engi­neers are stymied over how to deploy enough “qubits” (a quan­tum ver­sion of the bina­ry bit sys­tem used in tra­di­tion­al com­put­ers that lets a unit be a 0 and 1 simul­ta­ne­ous­ly) in a sta­ble fash­ion.

Accord­ing to CEO Louis Parks of Secur­eRF, which is devel­op­ing quan­tum-resis­tant secu­ri­ty sys­tems, the num­ber of qubits in a machine has recent­ly soared from 16 to 50. This is far from the 4,000 to 10,000 that would like­ly be need­ed to crack Bitcoin’s cryp­tog­ra­phy but, at this point, Parks says quan­tum com­put­ing is now at stage akin to when the Wright broth­ers began show­ing air­planes were viable.

In oth­er words, it’s not too soon for cryp­to-cur­ren­cy “hodlers” to wor­ry about the secu­ri­ty of their for­tune. The good news is that both Beath and Buterin think it will be pos­si­ble to mod­i­fy dig­i­tal wal­lets to defend against quan­tum attacks, though doing the same for min­ing will be a big­ger task.

The big­ger issue in all this, how­ev­er, is Bitcoin’s future vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is just a micro­cosm of what the entire world will face when quan­tum com­put­ing arrives. That’s because the same vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties are present in our online bank­ing and shop­ping sys­tems, and in many of the com­put­ers all around us. As chip maven and For­tune alum Stacey Hig­gin­both­am put it when I asked about the threat to dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy:

“As for the end of Bit­coin, I’d wor­ry more about the end of cryp­tog­ra­phy and AES [Advanced Encryp­tion Stan­dard] encryp­tion itself.”

...

———-

“Break­ing Bit­coin With a Quan­tum Com­put­er” by Jeff John Roberts; For­tune; 01/06/2018

““The sec­ond some­one cre­ates a viable quan­tum com­put­er, the NP-com­plete math prob­lems at the heart of Bit­coin min­ing tech become instant­ly solv­able,” Beath notes. “In oth­er words, one answer to the ques­tion ‘what’s the first thing you’d do with a quan­tum com­put­er?’ is ‘mine all of the remain­ing Bit­coin instant­ly.’ Until that hap­pens, nobody has a quan­tum com­put­er.””

It’s a rather amus­ing sce­nario: some­one secret­ly devel­ops a quan­tum com­put­er pow­er­ful enough to almost instan­ta­neous­ly solve the Bit­coin min­ing prob­lem — a prob­lem that is designed to be so dif­fi­cult that it’s only solved once every 10 min­utes — and then pro­ceeds to mine bit­coins instead of using that com­put­er for all sorts of oth­er appli­ca­tions, acci­den­tal­ly reveal­ing to the world that they final­ly devel­oped such a super quan­tum com­put­er. Is such a sce­nario plau­si­ble? Well, that prob­a­bly depends a lot on who devel­ops this com­put­er and what the val­ue of Bit­coin is when this hap­pens.

And if the pro­jec­tions of quan­tum com­put­ing devel­op­ment are accu­rate, that fate­ful day might be a mere decade away:

...
This threat to Bit­coin and oth­er soft­ware sys­tems that use the same under­ly­ing encryp­tion technique—a tech­nique like­ly to crum­ble in the face of a quan­tum-based attack—is not new. Indeed, it was pre­dict­ed decades ago, and Ethereum founder (and for­mer jour­nal­ist) Vita­lik Buterin wrote about how to defend it in 2013.

The dif­fer­ence today, though, is that com­pa­nies like Microsoft, Google and IBM are mak­ing rapid break­throughs that could make quan­tum com­put­ing viable in less than 10 years.
...

Is the count­down to Bit­coin’s cryp­to-quan­tum-poca­lypse a mere 10 years off? Let’s hope so, because that would be pret­ty neat to have pow­er­ful com­put­er com­put­ers. Except for the part about how it might break a lot more than just Bit­coin:

...
The big­ger issue in all this, how­ev­er, is Bitcoin’s future vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is just a micro­cosm of what the entire world will face when quan­tum com­put­ing arrives. That’s because the same vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties are present in our online bank­ing and shop­ping sys­tems, and in many of the com­put­ers all around us. As chip maven and For­tune alum Stacey Hig­gin­both­am put it when I asked about the threat to dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy:

“As for the end of Bit­coin, I’d wor­ry more about the end of cryp­tog­ra­phy and AES [Advanced Encryp­tion Stan­dard] encryp­tion itself.”
...

“As for the end of Bit­coin, I’d wor­ry more about the end of cryp­tog­ra­phy and AES [Advanced Encryp­tion Stan­dard] encryp­tion itself.”

Yeah, break­ing AES encryp­tion, a stan­dard used across the inter­net, seems like a pret­ty rea­son­able wor­ry. Far more rea­son­able than wor­ry­ing about Bit­coin. Unless, of course, you own a lot of bit­coins, in which case, yeah, the cryp­to-quan­tum-poca­lypse should be extra con­cern­ing to you.

But there is one mis­take in the above spec­u­la­tion that Bit­coin enthu­si­ast don’t need to wor­ry about: even if you devel­op a quan­tum com­put­er that can instan­ta­neous­ly solve the Bit­coin min­ing prob­lems, that won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly allow you to actu­al­ly “mine all of the remain­ing Bit­coin instant­ly.” And that’s because you’d have to solve a large num­ber of sequen­tial “blocks” (each of which would pay out some bit­coin) and then send that large string of blocks out the entire bit­coin net­work in the hopes that the entire min­ing com­mu­ni­ty accepts it. And if a giant, seem­ing­ly-impos­si­ble string of blocks that end­ed up pay­ing ALL of the remain­ing bit­coins sud­den­ly hit the Bit­coin net­work, that would prob­a­bly cre­ate the kind of cri­sis that prompts a big emer­gency response where vir­tu­al­ly all of the rest of the Bit­coin node oper­a­tors (who are like­ly, them­selves, min­ers too) to basi­cal­ly cry foul and reject your super-long sequence of blocks.

Or maybe not. Maybe the Bit­coin com­mu­ni­ty real­ly would just shrug its shoul­ders and move on the final stage of Bit­coin where all 21 mil­lion bit­coins are mined and min­ing income relies sole­ly on fees.

But whether or not your quan­tum-gen­er­at­ed super long sequence of new blocks gets accept­ed, this would clear­ly cre­ate a mas­sive cri­sis for Bit­coin. What if com­pet­ing quan­tum com­put­ers were avail­able and a sin­gle enti­ty could just “mine” at will? Would­n’t that force all the oth­er min­ers to leave?

And that points towards one of the oth­er more nefar­i­ous actions some­one could do with a cut­ting edge quan­tum com­put­er that vast­ly exceeds all the com­pe­ti­tion: they could kill Bit­coin too.

How so? Well, we got a taste of how that could hap­pened back in Novem­ber, when Bit­coin Cash sud­den­ly came on the scene as a con­se­quence of a “fork­ing” event. Basi­cal­ly, Bit­coin Cash was cre­at­ed as a new clone of Bit­coin with dif­fer­ent rules due to a dis­agree­ment with­in the Bit­coin com­mu­ni­ty over dif­fer­ent visions for the how it should work. The Bit­coin Cash sup­port­ers want­ed a ver­sion of Bit­coin that allowed for larg­er “blocks” so more trans­ac­tions could be record­ing dur­ing each block cre­ation event, increas­ing the over­all scal­a­bil­i­ty of the net­work. But this change would dis­ad­van­tage a lot of the exist­ing dom­i­nant min­ing oper­a­tions so a large num­ber of the tra­di­tion­al Bit­coin min­ers refused to accept these changes. Thus the “fork”.

And when that fork­ing event hap­pened, all the Bit­coin min­ers had a choice: do they mine tra­di­tion Bit­coins, or the new Bit­coin Cash? And a large num­ber of min­ers chose Bit­coin Cash result­ing, in a tem­po­rary col­lapse in the com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er used to mine bit­coins. And this almost killed Bit­coin.

That’s because of a quirk in how Bit­coin’s min­ing rules work: Bit­coin arti­fi­cial­ly sets the dif­fi­cul­ty of its min­ing puz­zles such that a new block is “mined” every 10 min­utes on aver­age. And in order to main­tain­ing this lev­el of dif­fi­cul­ty, the Bit­coin net­work auto­mat­i­cal­ly resets the dif­fi­cul­ty every two weeks based on the num­ber of blocks mined in the pri­or two weeks. So imag­ine a sce­nario where the dif­fi­cul­ty gets reset at some arbi­trary lev­el, and then sud­den­ly a large per­cent­age of the over­all com­pu­ta­tion pow­er of the min­ing net­work leave for what­ev­er rea­son. Well, if that hap­pens its very pos­si­ble that, for the next two weeks, the Bit­coin net­work won’t be able to cre­ate new “blocks” (groups of trans­ac­tions) every 10 min­utes. Maybe it will take an hour. Or a day. Or who knows how long, up to two weeks.

Yes, at the end of that two weeks, the dif­fi­cul­ty will be arti­fi­cial­ly reduced so the remain­ing min­ers can hit that 10 minute aver­age for new block cre­ation. But until that two week reset point is hit it’s pos­si­ble Bit­coin could end up being bare­ly usable. And if more and more min­ers leave as this process plays out, you could see a grow­ing exo­dus of inter­est in the net­work. A lot can hap­pen in two weeks.

That sce­nario is know as the “death-spi­ral”, and it almost hap­pened dur­ing the roll out of Bit­coin Cash. So, get­ting back the ques­tion of quan­tum com­put­ing, imag­ine a dom­i­nant quan­tum min­er sud­den­ly comes on the scene. And instead of sud­den­ly try­ing to mine all the remain­ing bit­coins at once, they do it more slow­ly. Like one new block a minute. That would still be 10 times faster than nor­mal, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly so fast that it cre­ates an imme­di­ate Bit­coin com­mu­ni­ty cri­sis. So what hap­pens at the end of two weeks? The dif­fi­cul­ty of min­ing gets increased 10 fold. Now imag­ine this process is repeat­ed for anoth­er two weeks and we see anoth­er 10 fold increase in the dif­fi­cult. So it’s 100 times more dif­fi­cult than it was a month ago to mine a new block. If this increase in dif­fi­cul­ty keeps hap­pen­ing, and the same min­ers keep­ing ‘win­ning’, at some point, almost all the min­ers are just going to give up.

Now imag­ine that hap­pens and bit­coin min­ing reach­es a lev­el of dif­fi­cul­ty where, even if ALL of the pri­or min­ers pooled their resources, they could­n’t cre­ate a sin­gle new block over the next two weeks. The quan­tum min­er is the ONLY one capa­ble of min­ing any­thing. And now imag­ine that this quan­tum min­er just decides to stop min­ing. The entire Bit­coin net­work would freeze for the next two weeks. That quan­tum min­er would be the only per­son capa­ble of enabling a new bit­coin trans­ac­tion. They could choose to allow no trans­ac­tions, or maybe they would allow spo­radic trans­ac­tions with extreme­ly high fees. It would be up to them.

And if the Bit­coin net­work did­n’t implode dur­ing that peri­od, at the end of two weeks it would reset the min­ing dif­fi­cul­ty to an extreme­ly low lev­el (because no blocks were mined dur­ing the pri­or two weeks), and then for the next two weeks almost any­one could eas­i­ly mine a block, cre­at­ing a whole new set of prob­lems. Prob­lems like blow­ing through all the remain­ing unmined bit­coins due to mas­sive block gen­er­a­tion. Imag­ine what that chaos would do to the val­ue of Bit­coin.

Is such a sce­nario fea­si­ble? Well, as we saw with the roll out of Bit­coin Cash,
the “death spi­ral” sce­nario is very fea­si­ble in gen­er­al because it almost hap­pened:

Quartz

One met­ric is far more impor­tant to bit­coin users than its price

Writ­ten by Joon Ian Wong
Novem­ber 13, 2017

Bitcoin’s price fell over the weekend—while the price of an off­shoot, bit­coin cash, soared. The ral­ly in bit­coin cash was so bull­ish that it even briefly sur­passed anoth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cy, ethereum, in total mar­ket val­ue, at $29.9 bil­lion.

While the bit­coin and bit­coin cash price action is excit­ing, investors in either would do well to pay atten­tion to anoth­er crit­i­cal met­ric: the amount of com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er com­mit­ted to min­ing each dig­i­tal coin, also known as the hash rate. A steep and pro­longed drop in bitcoin’s hash rate could set off a much-feared “chain death spi­ral” that could ren­der the bit­coin net­work use­less. Bit­coin showed signs of its poten­tial for trig­ger­ing this dynam­ic over the week­end, when its hash rate fell by 50%.

How does a death spi­ral work? The bit­coin net­work cur­rent­ly adds a new bun­dle of trans­ac­tions, known as a “block,” rough­ly every 10 min­utes. The exact time is deter­mined by how long it takes for a bit­coin min­er to process a block of trans­ac­tions. This, in turn, is set by some­thing called the “dif­fi­cul­ty” on the bit­coin net­work. Dif­fi­cul­ty auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts itself to match the hash rate so that trans­ac­tions won’t take too long.

But bitcoin’s dif­fi­cul­ty only adjusts every 2,016 blocks, or rough­ly every two weeks. So if the hash rate sud­den­ly plum­mets, the dif­fi­cul­ty could be ren­dered too high for the amount of pro­cess­ing pow­er on the net­work. This in turn could mean severe delays in com­plet­ing bit­coin trans­ac­tions. As trans­ac­tions start get­ting delayed, the network’s util­i­ty is reduced and investors could start dump­ing bit­coins, caus­ing the price to drop. Min­ers, in turn, could start min­ing oth­er coins because a low­er bit­coin price means min­ing is less prof­itable.

And so the cycle would con­tin­ue, with investors and min­ers aban­don­ing bit­coin, caus­ing greater delays in trans­ac­tion times, and pre­vent­ing a dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ment from hap­pen­ing quick­ly enough to break the cycle. “Trans­ac­tions get back­logged to a point where the coin becomes basi­cal­ly use­less,” says Peter Kim, who co-found­ed a devel­op­er tool called Nitrous and is now work­ing on an app for the cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­kets.

Think the death-spi­ral sce­nario sounds far-fetched? It came close to hap­pen­ing over the week­end. Bitcoin’s hash rate fell by 50% over two days as min­ers switched their machines from bit­coin to bit­coin cash, because it was more prof­itable to do so. The drop in the hash rate meant that the aver­age time tak­en to com­plete a bit­coin trans­ac­tion dou­bled from 10 min­utes to 20 min­utes or more, accord­ing to bit­coin ana­lyst Jim­my Song. This coin­cid­ed with a more than 20% crash in bitcoin’s price. “Bit­coin cash was up to 100% more prof­itable to mine because of the price run-up,” Song says.

Iron­i­cal­ly, bit­coin was saved by bit­coin cash’s own dif­fi­cul­ty increas­es. The algo­rithm gov­ern­ing dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ments on bit­coin cash caused a surge in the dif­fi­cul­ty, mak­ing the coin less prof­itable to mine. The bit­coin cash peo­ple didn’t want volatile hash rates in their cryp­tocur­ren­cy, so they changed the protocol’s dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ment rules on Nov. 13. By this time, many min­ers had already switched their hash pow­er back to bit­coin.

Accord­ing to the hash rate mon­i­tor at Fork.lol, bitcoin’s hash rate has recov­ered to about 20 per­cent­age points from where it was before it crashed. Bitcoin’s hash rate is once again well above that of bit­coin cash. A death spi­ral was avert­ed.

Bit­coin watch­ers don’t expect to see the last of this sort of volatil­i­ty in hash rate. “When it’s more prof­itable to mine [bit­coin cash], min­ers will go there. When it’s more prof­itable to mine [bit­coin], like right now, min­ers will go there,” Song said.

...

———-

“One met­ric is far more impor­tant to bit­coin users than its price” by Joon Ian Wong; Quartz; 11/13/2017

“While the bit­coin and bit­coin cash price action is excit­ing, investors in either would do well to pay atten­tion to anoth­er crit­i­cal met­ric: the amount of com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er com­mit­ted to min­ing each dig­i­tal coin, also known as the hash rate. A steep and pro­longed drop in bitcoin’s hash rate could set off a much-feared “chain death spi­ral” that could ren­der the bit­coin net­work use­less. Bit­coin showed signs of its poten­tial for trig­ger­ing this dynam­ic over the week­end, when its hash rate fell by 50%.”

Yep, if min­ers walk away from Bit­coin, it does­n’t just metaphor­i­cal­ly die. It lit­er­al­ly stops work­ing as well as before, which just might cre­ate a self-rein­forc­ing death spi­ral:

...
How does a death spi­ral work? The bit­coin net­work cur­rent­ly adds a new bun­dle of trans­ac­tions, known as a “block,” rough­ly every 10 min­utes. The exact time is deter­mined by how long it takes for a bit­coin min­er to process a block of trans­ac­tions. This, in turn, is set by some­thing called the “dif­fi­cul­ty” on the bit­coin net­work. Dif­fi­cul­ty auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts itself to match the hash rate so that trans­ac­tions won’t take too long.

But bitcoin’s dif­fi­cul­ty only adjusts every 2,016 blocks, or rough­ly every two weeks. So if the hash rate sud­den­ly plum­mets, the dif­fi­cul­ty could be ren­dered too high for the amount of pro­cess­ing pow­er on the net­work. This in turn could mean severe delays in com­plet­ing bit­coin trans­ac­tions. As trans­ac­tions start get­ting delayed, the network’s util­i­ty is reduced and investors could start dump­ing bit­coins, caus­ing the price to drop. Min­ers, in turn, could start min­ing oth­er coins because a low­er bit­coin price means min­ing is less prof­itable.

And so the cycle would con­tin­ue, with investors and min­ers aban­don­ing bit­coin, caus­ing greater delays in trans­ac­tion times, and pre­vent­ing a dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ment from hap­pen­ing quick­ly enough to break the cycle. “Trans­ac­tions get back­logged to a point where the coin becomes basi­cal­ly use­less,” says Peter Kim, who co-found­ed a devel­op­er tool called Nitrous and is now work­ing on an app for the cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­kets.
...

And this almost hap­pened, with the wait time for a tra­di­tion­al Bit­coin trans­ac­tion sud­den­ly jump­ing from 10 min­utes to 20 min­utes or longer after the com­pu­ta­tion pow­er (hash rate) of the tra­di­tion­al Bit­coin min­ing net­work dropped in half:

...
Think the death-spi­ral sce­nario sounds far-fetched? It came close to hap­pen­ing over the week­end. Bitcoin’s hash rate fell by 50% over two days as min­ers switched their machines from bit­coin to bit­coin cash, because it was more prof­itable to do so. The drop in the hash rate meant that the aver­age time tak­en to com­plete a bit­coin trans­ac­tion dou­bled from 10 min­utes to 20 min­utes or more, accord­ing to bit­coin ana­lyst Jim­my Song. This coin­cid­ed with a more than 20% crash in bitcoin’s price. “Bit­coin cash was up to 100% more prof­itable to mine because of the price run-up,” Song says.

Iron­i­cal­ly, bit­coin was saved by bit­coin cash’s own dif­fi­cul­ty increas­es. The algo­rithm gov­ern­ing dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ments on bit­coin cash caused a surge in the dif­fi­cul­ty, mak­ing the coin less prof­itable to mine. The bit­coin cash peo­ple didn’t want volatile hash rates in their cryp­tocur­ren­cy, so they changed the protocol’s dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ment rules on Nov. 13. By this time, many min­ers had already switched their hash pow­er back to bit­coin.
...

“Iron­i­cal­ly, bit­coin was saved by bit­coin cash’s own dif­fi­cul­ty increas­es. The algo­rithm gov­ern­ing dif­fi­cul­ty adjust­ments on bit­coin cash caused a surge in the dif­fi­cul­ty, mak­ing the coin less prof­itable to mine.”

Yep, if Bit­coin Cash did­n’t sud­den­ly and dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase its own min­ing dif­fi­cul­ty as a con­se­quence of all these new min­ers flood­ing into, tra­di­tion­al­ly Bit­coin might have actu­al­ly seen a death spi­ral. Although it prob­a­bly would­n’t have seen a full blown death spi­ral that tru­ly kills the net­work. After all, who care if trans­ac­tions take a long time since hard­ly any­one actu­al­ly uses Bit­coin for com­mer­cial trans­ac­tions. It’s all just a spec­u­la­tive pump and dump at this point.

But in 10 years, when quan­tum com­put­ing is expect­ed his that tip­ping point where it can break the min­ing puz­zle, the val­ue of Bit­coin is pre­sum­ably going to be a lot more depen­dent on its util­i­ty in com­merce. It would be rather sad for Bit­coin if that was­n’t the case by then. So we should expect the impact of sud­den­ly drops in the hash rate and delays in trans­ac­tions times to have a grow­ing impact on the val­ue of Bit­coin the more it actu­al­ly gets used for com­merce.

But that’s not the only dan­ger quan­tum com­put­ers pose for Bit­coin. Because at the fol­low­ing arti­cle reminds us, if you con­trol the major­i­ty of the Bit­coin net­work’s com­put­ing pow­er you can exe­cute the 51 per­cent attack and do things like dou­ble-spend­ing coins. This is one of the pri­ma­ry rea­sons there’s such an empha­sis on mak­ing it a com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly inten­sive effort to mine new blocks. It real­ly is impor­tant for the entire net­work that some­one does­n’t just take it over through supe­ri­or com­put­ing pow­er, which is exact­ly what supe­ri­or quan­tum com­put­ing by a sin­gle enti­ty would enable.

But the arti­cle points towards a poten­tial­ly far more sig­nif­i­cant vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty the sud­den emer­gence of supe­ri­or quan­tum com­put­er could enable, and it relates to the above warn­ing about how peo­ple should prob­a­bly be more con­cerned about what quan­tum com­put­ing does to encryp­tion in gen­er­al: if you can break the public/private key encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy Bit­coin (and much of the inter­net) relies on, you can poten­tial­ly take over oth­er peo­ple’s Bit­coins. And that would be a very dif­fer­ent kind of death spi­ral:

MIT Techol­o­gy Review

Quan­tum Com­put­ers Pose Immi­nent Threat to Bit­coin Secu­ri­ty
The mas­sive cal­cu­lat­ing pow­er of quan­tum com­put­ers will be able to break Bit­coin secu­ri­ty with­in 10 years, say secu­ri­ty experts.

by Emerg­ing Tech­nol­o­gy from the arX­iv
Novem­ber 8, 2017

Bit­coin is tak­ing the world by storm. The decen­tral­ized dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy is a secure pay­ment plat­form that any­body can use. It is free from gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence and oper­at­ed by an open, peer-to-peer net­work.

This inde­pen­dence is one rea­son Bit­coin has become so pop­u­lar, caus­ing its val­ue to rise steeply. At the begin­ning of 2017, a sin­gle bit­coin was worth around $1,000. By Novem­ber 2017, this had risen to around $7,000. Indeed, the total val­ue of the cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­ket is some $150 bil­lion.

A cru­cial fea­ture of Bit­coin is its secu­ri­ty. Bit­coins have two impor­tant secu­ri­ty fea­tures that pre­vent them from being stolen or copied. Both are based on cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols that are hard to crack. In oth­er words, they exploit math­e­mat­i­cal func­tions, like fac­tor­iza­tion, that are easy in one direc­tion but hard in the other—at least for an ordi­nary clas­si­cal com­put­er.

But there is a prob­lem on the hori­zon. Quan­tum com­put­ers can solve these prob­lems eas­i­ly. And the first quan­tum com­put­ers are cur­rent­ly under devel­op­ment..

That rais­es an urgent ques­tion: how secure is Bit­coin to the kinds of quan­tum attack that will be pos­si­ble in the next few years?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Divesh Aggar­w­al at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and a few pals. These guys have stud­ied the threat to Bit­coin posed by quan­tum com­put­ers and say that the dan­ger is real and immi­nent..

First some back­ground. Bit­coin trans­ac­tions are stored in a dis­trib­uted ledger that col­lates all the deals car­ried out in a spe­cif­ic time peri­od, usu­al­ly about 10 min­utes. This col­lec­tion, called a block, also con­tains a cryp­to­graph­ic hash of the pre­vi­ous block, which con­tains a cryp­to­graph­ic hash of the one before that, and so on in a chain. Hence the term blockchain.

(A hash is a math­e­mat­i­cal func­tion that turns a set of data of any length into a set of spe­cif­ic length.)

The new block must also con­tain a num­ber called a nonce that has a spe­cial prop­er­ty. When this nonce is hashed, or com­bined math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, with the con­tent of the block, the result must be less than some spe­cif­ic tar­get val­ue.

Giv­en the nonce and the block con­tent, this is easy to show, which allows any­body to ver­i­fy the block. But gen­er­at­ing the nonce is time con­sum­ing, since the only way to do it is by brute force—to try num­bers one after the oth­er until a nonce is found.

This process of find­ing a nonce, called min­ing, is reward­ed with Bit­coins. Min­ing is so com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly inten­sive that the task is usu­al­ly divid­ed among many com­put­ers that share the reward.

The block is then placed on the dis­trib­uted ledger and, once val­i­dat­ed, incor­po­rat­ed into the blockchain. The min­ers then start work on the next block.

Occa­sion­al­ly, two min­ing groups find dif­fer­ent nonces and declare two dif­fer­ent blocks. The Bit­coin pro­to­col states that in this case, the block that has been worked on more will be incor­po­rat­ed into the chain and the oth­er dis­card­ed.

This process has an Achilles’ heel. If a group of min­ers con­trols more than 50 per­cent of the com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er on the net­work, it can always mine blocks faster than who­ev­er has the oth­er 49 per­cent. In that case, it effec­tive­ly con­trols the ledger.

If it is mali­cious, it can spend bit­coins twice, by delet­ing trans­ac­tions so they are nev­er incor­po­rat­ed into the blockchain. The oth­er 49 per­cent of min­ers are none the wis­er because they have no over­sight of the min­ing process.

That cre­ates an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a mali­cious own­er of a quan­tum com­put­er put to work as a Bit­coin min­er. If this com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er breaks the 50 per­cent thresh­old, it can do what it likes.

So Aggar­w­al and co specif­i­cal­ly exam­ine the like­li­hood of a quan­tum com­put­er becom­ing that pow­er­ful on the net­work. They look at the pro­ject­ed clock speeds of quan­tum com­put­ers in the next 10 years and com­pare that to the like­ly pow­er of con­ven­tion­al hard­ware.

Their con­clu­sion will be a relief to Bit­coin min­ers the world over. Aggar­w­al and co say that most min­ing is done by appli­ca­tion-spe­cif­ic inte­grat­ed cir­cuits (ASICs) made by com­pa­nies such as Nvidia. This hard­ware is like­ly to main­tain a speed advan­tage over quan­tum com­put­ers over the next 10 years or so.

“We find that the proof-of-work used by Bit­coin is rel­a­tive­ly resis­tant to sub­stan­tial speedup by quan­tum com­put­ers in the next 10 years, main­ly because spe­cial­ized ASIC min­ers are extreme­ly fast com­pared to the esti­mat­ed clock speed of near-term quan­tum com­put­ers,” they say.

But there is a dif­fer­ent threat that is much more wor­ry­ing. Bit­coin has anoth­er cryp­to­graph­ic secu­ri­ty fea­ture to ensure that only the own­er of a Bit­coin can spend it. This is based on the same math­e­mat­ics used for pub­lic-key encryp­tion schemes.

The idea is that the own­er gen­er­ates two numbers—a pri­vate key that is secret and a pub­lic key that is pub­lished. The pub­lic key can be eas­i­ly gen­er­at­ed from the pri­vate key, but not vice ver­sa. A sig­na­ture can be used to ver­i­fy that the own­er holds the pri­vate key, with­out reveal­ing the pri­vate key, using a tech­nique known as an ellip­tic curve sig­na­ture scheme.

In this way, the receiv­er can ver­i­fy that the own­er pos­sess­es the pri­vate key and there­fore has the right to spend the Bit­coin.

The only way to cheat this sys­tem is to cal­cu­late the pri­vate key using the pub­lic key, which is extreme­ly hard with con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers. But with a quan­tum com­put­er, it is easy.

And that’s how quan­tum com­put­ers pose a sig­nif­i­cant risk to Bit­coin. “The ellip­tic curve sig­na­ture scheme used by Bit­coin is much more at risk, and could be com­plete­ly bro­ken by a quan­tum com­put­er as ear­ly as 2027,” say Aggar­w­al and co.

Indeed, quan­tum com­put­ers pose a sim­i­lar risk to all encryp­tion schemes that use a sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, which includes many com­mon forms of encryp­tion.

There are pub­lic-key schemes that are resis­tant to attack by quan­tum com­put­ers. So it is con­ceiv­able that the Bit­coin pro­to­cols could be revised to make the sys­tem safer. But there are no plans to do that now.

...

———-

“Quan­tum Com­put­ers Pose Immi­nent Threat to Bit­coin Secu­ri­ty” by Emerg­ing Tech­nol­o­gy from the arX­iv; MIT Techol­o­gy Review; 11/08/2017

“Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Divesh Aggar­w­al at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and a few pals. These guys have stud­ied the threat to Bit­coin posed by quan­tum com­put­ers and say that the dan­ger is real and immi­nent.”

The quan­tum dan­ger is real and immi­nent accord­ing to one group of researchers. Well, maybe not immi­nent, but if the pro­jec­tions are that this tech­nol­o­gy could emerge in a decade, we can’t rule out a much ear­li­er tech­no­log­i­cal break­through. And we can’t rule out a qui­et break­through either, which means the poten­tial for things like a sur­prise quan­tum-enabled “51 per­cent attack” is indeed immi­nent-ish:

...
Occa­sion­al­ly, two min­ing groups find dif­fer­ent nonces and declare two dif­fer­ent blocks. The Bit­coin pro­to­col states that in this case, the block that has been worked on more will be incor­po­rat­ed into the chain and the oth­er dis­card­ed.

This process has an Achilles’ heel. If a group of min­ers con­trols more than 50 per­cent of the com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er on the net­work, it can always mine blocks faster than who­ev­er has the oth­er 49 per­cent. In that case, it effec­tive­ly con­trols the ledger.

If it is mali­cious, it can spend bit­coins twice, by delet­ing trans­ac­tions so they are nev­er incor­po­rat­ed into the blockchain. The oth­er 49 per­cent of min­ers are none the wis­er because they have no over­sight of the min­ing process.

That cre­ates an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a mali­cious own­er of a quan­tum com­put­er put to work as a Bit­coin min­er. If this com­pu­ta­tion­al pow­er breaks the 50 per­cent thresh­old, it can do what it likes.

So Aggar­w­al and co specif­i­cal­ly exam­ine the like­li­hood of a quan­tum com­put­er becom­ing that pow­er­ful on the net­work. They look at the pro­ject­ed clock speeds of quan­tum com­put­ers in the next 10 years and com­pare that to the like­ly pow­er of con­ven­tion­al hard­ware.
...

And just as immi­nent-ish is the far more wor­ry­ing attack: the quan­tum attack on the encryp­tion stan­dards used to secure indi­vid­ual Bit­coin accounts:

...
But there is a dif­fer­ent threat that is much more wor­ry­ing. Bit­coin has anoth­er cryp­to­graph­ic secu­ri­ty fea­ture to ensure that only the own­er of a Bit­coin can spend it. This is based on the same math­e­mat­ics used for pub­lic-key encryp­tion schemes.

The idea is that the own­er gen­er­ates two numbers—a pri­vate key that is secret and a pub­lic key that is pub­lished. The pub­lic key can be eas­i­ly gen­er­at­ed from the pri­vate key, but not vice ver­sa. A sig­na­ture can be used to ver­i­fy that the own­er holds the pri­vate key, with­out reveal­ing the pri­vate key, using a tech­nique known as an ellip­tic curve sig­na­ture scheme.

In this way, the receiv­er can ver­i­fy that the own­er pos­sess­es the pri­vate key and there­fore has the right to spend the Bit­coin.

The only way to cheat this sys­tem is to cal­cu­late the pri­vate key using the pub­lic key, which is extreme­ly hard with con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers. But with a quan­tum com­put­er, it is easy.

And that’s how quan­tum com­put­ers pose a sig­nif­i­cant risk to Bit­coin. “The ellip­tic curve sig­na­ture scheme used by Bit­coin is much more at risk, and could be com­plete­ly bro­ken by a quan­tum com­put­er as ear­ly as 2027,” say Aggar­w­al and co.
...

“The only way to cheat this sys­tem is to cal­cu­late the pri­vate key using the pub­lic key, which is extreme­ly hard with con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers. But with a quan­tum com­put­er, it is easy.”

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing sce­nario: if some­one secret­ly devel­oped quan­tum encryp­tion-crack­ing tech­nol­o­gy, they could poten­tial­ly spend every­one’s bit­coins for them. But if they did this too aggres­sive­ly, the val­ue of bit­coin would plum­met because it would be seen as a giant failed exper­i­ment. So they might want to be sub­tle about it and try to sneak tiny trans­ac­tions from accounts that make a ton of trans­ac­tions. Or per­haps they could mere­ly demon­strate the pow­er to spend oth­er bit­coins and issue pub­lic demands. Like a Bit­coin hostage sit­u­a­tion.

Once you can spend oth­er peo­ple’s bit­coins there’s all sorts of Bit­coin night­mare sce­nar­ios pos­si­ble. And the more Bit­coin incor­po­rates itself into the larg­er econ­o­my the more those Bit­coin night­mare sce­nar­ios becomes every­one’s night­mare sce­nar­ios.

Now, keep in mind that there are post-quan­tum encryp­tion tech­nolo­gies in devel­op­ment so it’s pos­si­ble Bit­coin and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies could pre­vent this par­tic­u­lar night­mare sce­nario by switch­ing to a post-quan­tum cryp­to­graph­ic stan­dard. But that still would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly fix the issue with the “min­ing” unless there’s a post-quan­tum proof-of-work mech­a­nism avail­able.

But, of course, let’s not for­get that quan­tum encryp­tion-crack­ing tech­nol­o­gy is far more than a threat to Bit­coin. That real­ly is a threat to every­one rely­ing on quan­tum-vul­ner­a­ble public/private key encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy, which includes most inter­net trans­ac­tions. And while quan­tum-proof public/private key encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy is in devel­op­ment, there’s no guar­an­tee they’ll be imple­ment­ed before it’s need­ed, for Bit­coin or any­thing else:

...
Indeed, quan­tum com­put­ers pose a sim­i­lar risk to all encryp­tion schemes that use a sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, which includes many com­mon forms of encryp­tion.

There are pub­lic-key schemes that are resis­tant to attack by quan­tum com­put­ers. So it is con­ceiv­able that the Bit­coin pro­to­cols could be revised to make the sys­tem safer. But there are no plans to do that now.
...

So, return­ing the ini­tial whim­si­cal obser­va­tion that Bit­coin served a pur­pose by act­ing as a pub­lic ear­ly warn­ing sys­tem for the secret devel­op­ment of pow­er­ful quan­tum com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy, don’t for­get that such an event would be an impor­tant warn­ing for every­one using public/private key tech­nol­o­gy. And that includes every­one using the inter­net for any­thing pri­vate. In oth­er words, if you read some future arti­cles about how some­one sud­den­ly dom­i­nat­ed the Bit­coin min­ing mar­ket, you might want to review your sen­si­tive encrypt­ed data. And delete it if pos­si­ble.

And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, it’s not just future inter­net trans­ac­tions you poten­tial­ly need to wor­ry about once quan­tum encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy is devel­oped. It’s all your past inter­net trans­ac­tions too. Or at least any trans­ac­tions that hap­pened to be scooped up by the NSA/GCHQ, or any oth­er pub­lic or pri­vate enti­ty and is still stored some­where. Yep, decades of inter­net traf­fic that was­n’t pre­vi­ous­ly read­able because the encryp­tion could­n’t be cracked will sud­den­ly be much more crack­able once this tech­nol­o­gy is devel­oped. And if it’s sud­den­ly read­able, it’s prob­a­bly going to be read. So that’s some­thing else to keep in mind should you read a sto­ry about some­one sud­den­ly dom­i­nat­ing Bit­coin min­ing: decades of your encrypt­ed inter­net traf­fic that was har­vest­ed by any­one will become much more crack­able:

Tech Repub­lic

How quan­tum com­put­ing could unpick encryp­tion to reveal decades of online secrets

The encryp­tion we take for grant­ed as being uncrack­able would have a lim­it­ed shelf-life in the quan­tum age, says a secu­ri­ty expert.

By Nick Heath | Sep­tem­ber 19, 2016, 4:20 AM PST

Whether it’s our cred­it card details or our pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, almost every bit of sen­si­tive dig­i­tal data in the mod­ern world is pro­tect­ed by encryp­tion.

These cryp­to­graph­ic sys­tems that scram­ble our data so it’s use­less to a would-be attack­er rely on under­ly­ing math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems that are typ­i­cal­ly too com­plex to be cracked by com­put­ers.

...

Quan­tum com­put­ing is still a large­ly the­o­ret­i­cal field, which stud­ies how to exploit the bizarre and counter-intu­itive way that mat­ter behaves at an atom­ic lev­el to devel­op huge­ly pow­er­ful machines. For cer­tain tasks, quan­tum com­put­ers have the poten­tial to be expo­nen­tial­ly faster than exist­ing sys­tems, as well as being vast­ly more ener­gy effi­cient.

While uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­ers don’t exist today, and there are pre­dic­tions they won’t until the 2030s, some progress is being made. Cana­di­an firm D‑Wave makes a sys­tem that, while not a uni­ver­sal com­put­er, utilis­es var­i­ous atom­ic behav­iors, such as entan­gle­ment and state super­po­si­tion, to help solve a range of dif­fi­cult com­pu­ta­tion­al prob­lems. There are also reports that Google could be on track to cre­ate a basic 50 qubit quan­tum com­put­er by the end of 2017 — enough by some esti­mates to solve cer­tain prob­lems that con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers would find almost impos­si­ble.

Why these devel­op­ments mat­ter to the world of cryp­tog­ra­phy is that a uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­er could be capa­ble of unpick­ing many of the encryp­tion sys­tems used today, accord­ing to Brown.

Vul­ner­a­ble sys­tems, he said, include the Trans­port Lay­er Secu­ri­ty (TLS) cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols, which are used by web­sites and web ser­vices to secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions and trans­ac­tions with users. A quan­tum com­put­er run­ning Shor’s algo­rithm could poten­tial­ly break the cur­rent pub­lic-key algo­rithms used by TLS, he said.

Har­vest­ing secrets today to crack them tomor­row

Even if it proves to be decades before quan­tum com­put­ers are cre­at­ed, Brown said the threat could still apply to infor­ma­tion being trans­mit­ted online today.

He point­ed out that the world’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices are engaged in har­vest­ing inter­net traf­fic as it pass­es through fiber optic cables, under pro­grams such as the GCHQ/NSA oper­a­tion Tem­po­ra, and that there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of traf­fic being stored until such a time that quan­tum com­put­ers are avail­able to decrypt it.

“If I’m a com­pa­ny and I have trade secrets under­ly­ing how my busi­ness will be suc­cess­ful, my core intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, that has to live for a long peri­od of time,” said Brown.

“If that infor­ma­tion is out there encrypt­ed on the inter­net, then you need to wor­ry,” he said, adding the same threat might apply to oth­er long-lived, sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, such as med­ical data.

Decryp­tion of these stored com­mu­ni­ca­tions could again be achieved by run­ning Shor’s algo­rithm on a quan­tum com­put­er and using the machine to attack the stored key estab­lish­ment algo­rithm and obtain the sym­met­ric encryp­tion keys, he said.

Firms also need to think about how the prod­ucts they rely upon use encryp­tion and whether the secu­ri­ty they offer would hold in a post-quan­tum world.

“If you think about some­thing like OpenSSL, OpenSSL is used wide­ly across the inter­net in count­less num­bers of prod­ucts,” said Brown.

“That means if you use a prod­uct that uses OpenSSL, you could be then eval­u­at­ing your prod­uct to say ‘How am I using cryp­tog­ra­phy? Am I using it in a safe way? Do I need to use it in a dif­fer­ent way?’. There are an ever larg­er num­ber of items this affects,” he said.

Beyond decrypt­ing sen­si­tive data, quan­tum com­put­ers could also be used to inter­fere with the dig­i­tal sign­ing process that guar­an­tees soft­ware updates or dig­i­tal doc­u­ments as authen­tic, he said.

With these threats in mind, com­pa­nies need­ed to start think­ing about what data they own that could be at risk, he said, and those that have con­trol over encryp­tion sys­tems need to start prepar­ing to replace cryp­to­graph­ic algo­rithms with alter­na­tives that would be secure in a “post-quan­tum world”.

“As a com­pa­ny, if you think about how you update the cryp­tog­ra­phy that you use, this is not some­thing you do over a week­end. This isn’t a new ver­sion of [Microsoft] Exchange that you’re rolling out.

“You real­ly have a two, three or four year type of tran­si­tion for most orga­ni­za­tions,” he said.

One exam­ple of a “quan­tum resis­tant” cryp­to­graph­ic algo­rithm is Google’s New Hope, a “post-quan­tum key-exchange algo­rithm” that Google uses on a small frac­tion of con­nec­tions between desk­top Chrome and its servers.

Giv­en uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­ers don’t yet exist, Google says that New Hope is an exper­i­ment, and that the algo­rithm may or may not prove secure against such an an attack in future.

It is pos­si­ble to over­state the threat posed by the advent of quan­tum com­put­ing, how­ev­er, accord­ing to Ross Ander­son, pro­fes­sor of secu­ri­ty and engi­neer­ing at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty.

“I don’t real­ly share the doom and gloom about cryp­tog­ra­phy,” he said, point­ing out that a range of cryp­tog­ra­phy in use today, for exam­ple that used to pro­tect bank account infor­ma­tion stored on EMV pay­ment cards, is not at immi­nent risk of being bro­ken.

“First, most of the cryp­tog­ra­phy we actu­al­ly use is shared key stuff. The 256-bit AES keys in EMV will con­tin­ue to work for the fore­see­able future.”

Even where quan­tum com­put­ers might pose a risk to encryp­tion, such as to the cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols that secure inter­net comms, online infra­struc­ture is set up in a way that makes it fea­si­ble to drop in replace­ment, “quan­tum-resis­tant” pro­to­cols, he said.

Ross argues that the TLS pro­to­col used to encrypt comms online is now typ­i­cal­ly applied at cen­tralised front-ends, such as those run by Cloud­Flare and Aka­mai. “Most of that we could pull out and replace with Ker­beros if we had to,” he said.

...

———-

“How quan­tum com­put­ing could unpick encryp­tion to reveal decades of online secrets” by Nick Heath; Tech Repub­lic; 09/19/2016.

“While uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­ers don’t exist today, and there are pre­dic­tions they won’t until the 2030s, some progress is being made. Cana­di­an firm D‑Wave makes a sys­tem that, while not a uni­ver­sal com­put­er, utilis­es var­i­ous atom­ic behav­iors, such as entan­gle­ment and state super­po­si­tion, to help solve a range of dif­fi­cult com­pu­ta­tion­al prob­lems. There are also reports that Google could be on track to cre­ate a basic 50 qubit quan­tum com­put­er by the end of 2017 — enough by some esti­mates to solve cer­tain prob­lems that con­ven­tion­al com­put­ers would find almost impos­si­ble.”

Notice how the pre­dic­tion that uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­ers might not exist until the 2030’s is a pre­dic­tion that gives a pes­simistic time frame of 20 or so years instead of 10 years for the emer­gence of this kind of quan­tum encryp­tion-crack­ing tech­nol­o­gy. That’s still a pret­ty short time frame for think­ing about how to pre­pare for some­thing like this.

And that includes the time it takes for the world to come to terms with the inevitable crack­ing of encrypt­ed data that was har­vest­ed by some­one and held. Yes, the biggest actors in that are­na are the NSA and its 5‑Eyes part­ners. But they can pre­sum­ably already crack a large amount of that data through either brute force tech­niques or known back doors. And Google and Face­book and the var­i­ous oth­er data giants will all have access to vast pools of valu­able data that was sent over the inter­net so they effec­tive­ly have a back door into chunks of inter­net traf­fic.

In terms of being able to read stored data that was pre­vi­ous­ly encrypt­ed we should expect the 9‑Eyes, and 14-Eyes, and 41-Eyes gov­ern­ments to ben­e­fit the most, along with the rest of the gov­ern­ments on the plan­et that have been col­lect­ing and stor­ing inter­net data and oth­er encrypt­ed data vul­ner­a­ble to quan­tum crack­ing. And all the pri­vate enti­ties that have been trans­mit­ting, col­lect­ing, and per­haps steal­ing that encrypt­ed data. And then there’s all the hacked data that’s been pro­tect­ed by encryp­tion so far. All of that old data will become new­ly crack­able for all those enti­ties:

...
Why these devel­op­ments mat­ter to the world of cryp­tog­ra­phy is that a uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­er could be capa­ble of unpick­ing many of the encryp­tion sys­tems used today, accord­ing to Brown.

Vul­ner­a­ble sys­tems, he said, include the Trans­port Lay­er Secu­ri­ty (TLS) cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols, which are used by web­sites and web ser­vices to secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions and trans­ac­tions with users. A quan­tum com­put­er run­ning Shor’s algo­rithm could poten­tial­ly break the cur­rent pub­lic-key algo­rithms used by TLS, he said.

Har­vest­ing secrets today to crack them tomor­row

Even if it proves to be decades before quan­tum com­put­ers are cre­at­ed, Brown said the threat could still apply to infor­ma­tion being trans­mit­ted online today.

He point­ed out that the world’s secu­ri­ty ser­vices are engaged in har­vest­ing inter­net traf­fic as it pass­es through fiber optic cables, under pro­grams such as the GCHQ/NSA oper­a­tion Tem­po­ra, and that there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of traf­fic being stored until such a time that quan­tum com­put­ers are avail­able to decrypt it.
...

Beyond that, quan­tum crack­ing could facil­i­tate the dig­i­tal sign­ing process used to authen­ti­cate soft­ware updates and dig­i­tal doc­u­ments. It’s a great way to intro­duce spy­ware:

...
Beyond decrypt­ing sen­si­tive data, quan­tum com­put­ers could also be used to inter­fere with the dig­i­tal sign­ing process that guar­an­tees soft­ware updates or dig­i­tal doc­u­ments as authen­tic, he said.

With these threats in mind, com­pa­nies need­ed to start think­ing about what data they own that could be at risk, he said, and those that have con­trol over encryp­tion sys­tems need to start prepar­ing to replace cryp­to­graph­ic algo­rithms with alter­na­tives that would be secure in a “post-quan­tum world”.
...

And note how the quan­tum ‘resis­tant’ tech­nolo­gies under devel­op­ment are still exper­i­men­tal and might not actu­al­ly work. It’s a reminder that prepa­ra­tions for the immi­nent-ish post-quan­tum might not actu­al­ly be avail­able. Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty could become an extreme­ly asym­met­ric exer­cise, and not in favor of cyberde­fense:

...
One exam­ple of a “quan­tum resis­tant” cryp­to­graph­ic algo­rithm is Google’s New Hope, a “post-quan­tum key-exchange algo­rithm” that Google uses on a small frac­tion of con­nec­tions between desk­top Chrome and its servers.

Giv­en uni­ver­sal quan­tum com­put­ers don’t yet exist, Google says that New Hope is an exper­i­ment, and that the algo­rithm may or may not prove secure against such an an attack in future.
...

But as Ross Ander­son points out at the end, it’s very pos­si­ble to over­state the dan­ger. And he also points out how things like inter­net tech­nol­o­gy are ver­sa­tile and mod­u­lar enough to swap out quan­tum-vul­ner­a­ble encryp­tion for quan­tum-proof
encryp­tion (once that’s avail­able) and that should be a pret­ty straight­for­ward thing to do. But that’s not going to pro­tect old quan­tum-vul­ner­a­ble data that’s stored some­where. So while it is indeed pos­si­ble to over­state the dan­ger, it’s also very easy to under­state it:

...
It is pos­si­ble to over­state the threat posed by the advent of quan­tum com­put­ing, how­ev­er, accord­ing to Ross Ander­son, pro­fes­sor of secu­ri­ty and engi­neer­ing at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty.

“I don’t real­ly share the doom and gloom about cryp­tog­ra­phy,” he said, point­ing out that a range of cryp­tog­ra­phy in use today, for exam­ple that used to pro­tect bank account infor­ma­tion stored on EMV pay­ment cards, is not at immi­nent risk of being bro­ken.

“First, most of the cryp­tog­ra­phy we actu­al­ly use is shared key stuff. The 256-bit AES keys in EMV will con­tin­ue to work for the fore­see­able future.”

Even where quan­tum com­put­ers might pose a risk to encryp­tion, such as to the cryp­to­graph­ic pro­to­cols that secure inter­net comms, online infra­struc­ture is set up in a way that makes it fea­si­ble to drop in replace­ment, “quan­tum-resis­tant” pro­to­cols, he said.

Ross argues that the TLS pro­to­col used to encrypt comms online is now typ­i­cal­ly applied at cen­tralised front-ends, such as those run by Cloud­Flare and Aka­mai. “Most of that we could pull out and replace with Ker­beros if we had to,” he said.
...

“Ross argues that the TLS pro­to­col used to encrypt comms online is now typ­i­cal­ly applied at cen­tralised front-ends, such as those run by Cloud­Flare and Aka­mai. “Most of that we could pull out and replace with Ker­beros if we had to,” he said.”

Yes, thanks to the rel­a­tive­ly cen­tral­ized nature of how TLS pro­to­cols (the replace­ment for the SSL pro­to­col for encrypt­ed inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion which gets banned from gen­er­al used in mid 2018) it will at least be rel­a­tive­ly easy to upgrade inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tions for every­one to quan­tum-proof encryp­tion. Assum­ing such tech­nol­o­gy is avail­able.

But the old data is still going to be vul­ner­a­ble. Assum­ing it was­n’t already cracked a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty was exposed. That the thing about old data that gets har­vest­ed from some­thing like encrypt­ed inter­net traf­fic: if a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is exposed for that har­vest­ed data’s encryp­tion, the hold­ers of that har­vest­ed data can pre­sum­ably go about doing that. And pre­sum­ably do go about doing that some­times.

It’s one of the grand ironies of the Cypher­punk move­ment: if you real­ly want­ed to encour­age pri­va­cy, you’de have a pub­lic edu­ca­tion cam­paign mak­ing it clear that encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy has an expi­ra­tion date, so if you want to keep some­thing real­ly pri­vate over the long run don’t use any dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy where some­one else will pos­si­bly be able to copy even the encrypt­ed data. Wait for the tru­ly quan­tum tech­nol­o­gy. That’s because quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions might actu­al­ly be effec­tive­ly uncrack­able thanks to the laws of physics. But that’s only if the quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion involves send­ing the actu­al data via entanglement(which would be effec­tive­ly unhack­able), as opposed to send­ing a cryp­to­graph­ic key
over a quan­tum net­work and then send the actu­al data over tra­di­tion­al fiber optic net­works where the encrypt­ed data can still be har­vest­ed for poten­tial future crack­ing. Because even if quan­tum com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy allows for new forms of encryp­tion that are vast­ly supe­ri­or to present day encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy, that quan­tum-encrypt­ed data still might end up being crack­able 20 or 30 years from now from some super-quan­tum encryp­tion crack­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

Har­vest­ed data like inter­net or any telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion data is always going to have this vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. Quan­tum com­put­ers can solve the “NP Com­plete” prob­lem set — a super class of math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems that can’t be solved sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly. Yet. But if some­one solves the NP Com­plete math prob­lem, it’s going to be the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble for any­one to crack encryp­tion just using a reg­u­lar com­put­er. Math is fun like that. Now imag­ine apply­ing the math solu­tions to the NP Com­plete prob­lem to a super quan­tum com­put­er. That’s going to be one incred­i­ble prob­lem solv­ing machine. Per­haps the kind that could effec­tive­ly decrypt data encrypt­ed using a cryp­to­graph­ic key sent over a quan­tum net­work (where you don’t have a pub­lic key to start as a ref­er­ence point).

And who knows what kind of more fun­da­men­tal math rev­e­la­tion could be wait­ing around the cor­ner after that. Although, in the case of crack­ing quan­tum encryp­tion the data is com­mu­ni­cat­ed instan­ta­neous­ly using “spooky” quan­tum phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of quan­tum entan­gle­ment of two par­ti­cles. And that’s going to be a hel­lu­va lot hard­er to crack once a real quan­tum inter­net is cre­at­ed. Chi­na already used a quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lite to gen­er­ate shared encryp­tion keys that were trans­mit­ted between Bei­jing and Aus­tria via quan­tum entan­gle­ment and used as the shared keys for a video con­fer­ence call that would be vir­tu­al­ly unhack­able even with a quan­tum com­put­er because there was no expo­sure of a pub­lic key. Both sides of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion were effec­tive­ly shar­ing pri­vate keys exclu­sive­ly with each oth­er mak­ing it effec­tive­ly impos­si­ble to crack because there was no NP Com­plete prob­lem to solve. You need the pub­lic key for that.

And even­tu­al­ly it won’t be cryp­to­graph­ic keys deliv­ered over quan­tum net­works. It will be all of the data. THAT’s the point when you can start trust­ing your cryp­to-com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy. Maybe. Because even if quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy changes the game going for­ward in terms of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions being insta­neous­ly trans­ferred using quan­tum entan­gle­ment, it’s still very pos­si­ble that data will be har­vest­ed else where. Like by your ISP.

But even if the inter­net back­bone becomes a vast, uncrack­able quan­tum net­work, that does­n’t mean the cord going into your home will be. And even if you do get end-to-end quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tion so even your ISPs and the inter­net back­bone can’t crack the com­mu­ni­ca­tion accord­ing to the known laws of physics, that does­n’t mean new laws of physics tricks won’t be learned that allow for the secrete har­vest­ing and even­tu­al crack­ing of the data. Like the trick that was learned in 2011 that allowed for the secret extrac­tion of the quan­tum key with­out either par­ty detect­ing it. It was trick spe­cif­ic to that par­tic­u­lar quan­tum net­work tech­nol­o­gy, and one that could be pro­tect­ed against in the future. But it’s a reminder that there might be flaws in the quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy of the future that allow for mass data har­vest­ing by all sorts of par­ties.

Also keep in mind that, while direct quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions that are effec­tive­ly unbreak­able will be quite neat (except for unleash­ing the Four Horse­men of the Infopoco­pal­yse), before that hap­pens the quan­tum com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy will be much more like­ly to be some­thing like that Chi­nese satel­lite that dis­trib­utes cryp­to­graph­ic keys via quan­tum entan­gle­ment but the data is still sent over things like fiber optic cables and avail­able for data har­vest­ing. It will just pre­sum­ably be gen­uine­ly math­e­mat­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble to break the encryp­tion because there won’t be a pub­lic key to work with so there would­n’t be a math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lem avail­able to brute­ful.

But that har­vest­ed data with the quan­tum-net­work shared encryp­tion keys could still be vul­ner­a­ble to get­ting cracked some day. How so? Because it’s still infor­ma­tion that can some­how be played with and test­ed and per­haps, through ran­dom chance, con­vert­ed into read­able infor­ma­tion. And a real­ly, real­ly, real­ly pow­er­ful quan­tum com­put­er might be able to do some­thing like that. How pow­er­ful? Well, who knows what kinds of crazy laws of physics might get dis­cov­ered some­day that allow for amaz­ing quan­tum-hack­ing tech­nol­o­gy. Black hole quan­tum com­put­ers? Yeah, that’s a thing. In the­o­ry. Seri­ous­ly, we might be able to shoot X‑Rays into black holes designed to yield answers to prob­lems leaked out in the black hole’s Hawk­ing radi­a­tion. And who knows what kind of crazy crap we could do with micro-black hole quan­tum com­put­ing. iPhones might have micro-black hole quan­tum proces­sors some day. The future could be nuts.

So, to sum­ma­rize, if you see an arti­cle about a decade from now about the sud­den over­tak­ing of the Bit­coin min­ing sec­tor, get ready for a data pri­va­cy night­mare unlike any­thing human­i­ty has expe­ri­enced before. If you’re a Bit­coin enthu­si­ast, get ready for a big­ger night­mare. And spend/sell your Bit­coins while you still can. And in the mean time, you should prob­a­bly avoid send­ing any­thing over the inter­net that you don’t want har­vest­ed and even­tu­al­ly cracked by a quan­tum com­put­er.

Will Bit­coin sur­vive the cryp­to-quan­tum-poca­lypse? How about the rest of the dig­i­tal pri­va­cy land­scape? We’ll see. We’ll see...