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Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. It's a spec

Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. It's a special sort of odd neoliberal fantasy where capitalists or technologists can route around an authoritarian social movement that seizes the power of the state. Do you want to know what happens to people who think they can route around an authoritarian regime with clever computer code? There's a relevant XKCD about a $5 wrench [1], except instead of a $5 wrnech it's the entire apparatus of a developed nation-state. If you really think authoritarianism is coming to your country, stop fucking around with prime numbers and get serious about the work of political persuasion. [1] https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

zwkrt 5y ago
When authoritarianism comes around, it wont just be surveiling. An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because the goal is to turn the state into an all-encompasing master of peoples lives, and work is a large part of peoples lives (especially in an a11n regime!) Whether or not the state can surveil is a moot point if the owners of the tech are in on the game.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > a11n I'm not sure what this means, assuming weird auto-correct from authoritarian? > An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because... Only if that leadership is necessary to seize or hold power. An authoritarian regime in the US would not need buy-in from major tech companies.
  - Tyr42 5y ago
    They don't want to type the letters in the middle, so they dropped them and put a count of how many letters were dropped. I'm mostly familiar with a11y meaning accessibility.
    - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
      I believe this pattern was originally popularized by "i18n" for "internationalization", partly for convenience and partly to have an identifier that would fit in legacy systems.
      - adolph 5y ago
        Numeronym: According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym Agree that i18n cemented it in the letter count form (homonym form is older, like K9 for canine).
        mdp2021 5y ago
        ('K9' is homophone for 'canine'. To be homonyms, two terms should have different meaning - if two terms share the same name and meaning, they are the same...)
  - ByThyGrace 5y ago
    > a11n Perhaps it's like i18n, except it's the will of the dictator that which gets translated for the masses.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
[dead]
bentcorner 5y ago
Technology people make this mistake a lot. They see a problem like "the government might track all of our payments in the future" and create bitcoin. Or "the government might rootkit our phones" and creates an open source hardware phone. Or "the government might want to see who you are communicating with" and create an E2E encrypted chat application. None of these solutions do anything to solve the original problem, it just allows a portion of the population to ignore them.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  I am the author of the original tweet, so allow me to push back on this point of view. Technology people are not the solution to this problem, we are the problem. And we really need to stop being the problem. There have been authoritarian governments before, and still are all over the world: but they've never had access to technology anywhere near as powerful as what we have today, e.g., ubiquitous user location or unencrypted smartphone backup or vast unprotected email databases. These technologies themselves are brand new: smartphone cloud backup is only 10 years old, and ubiquitous GPS-enabled smartphones are younger than my middle-school aged child. But thanks to aggressive deployment by Silicon Valley we went ahead and created a surveillance utopia on a timescale so short that most citizens don't even realize what we've done. Future governments now have capabilities we could never have imagined a decade ago: centralized data repositories and collection systems that would make the Stasi blush. These systems now exist because people like us built them and decided to leave the problem of securing those repositories to the future. But we're running out of future. Is more privacy the solution? I don't know. It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused, and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale. I suspect this could happen but would be slow and inefficient and full of friction. None of that has to happen now -- there is no friction -- because Silicon Valley has already done the architecture work and deployed the technology at scale. They did it recklessly and with no thought to how it might be abused, and now they're finding it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It will not get easier. TL;DR: The data repositories already exist and all that's protecting them is a fig-leaf of legislation and honest government behavior that could disappear at any moment. Removing those repositories might not save us, but we need to try. We sure need to stop creating more of them.
marcosdumay 5y ago
To be fair, those primes are an exceptionally useful tool if you want to get serious about the work of political persuasion. They are not what will change things, but they are a tool you can use to disperse ideas and make change happen.
derbOac 5y ago
I strongly agree with you, but at the same time think giving more control to individuals in terms of communication, expression, and infrastructure is probably helpful? Non-technological and technological solutions aren't mutually exclusive. I guess I always think of the the quasiomnipotent totalitarian state as a kind of theoretical [anti?]ideal state, sort of like "what's the worst possible case scenario and how does this do in that scenario?" The goalposts are always being moved but that doesn't mean you shouldn't adjust accordingly.
demosito666 5y ago
While this is 100% correct that Surveillance-resistant systems or other technical means are not he answer to authoritarianism, this statement has at least two problems. 1. A technical solution may not in itself be the way to counter authoritarianism, but may assist in either resisting it or prevent it from gaining enough power. Since democracy is a state of permanent fight against the iron law of oligarchy (which ultimately leads to authoritarianism), any thing that reduces the power of the govt to a certain extent is good. In other words, we don't want the govt to be 100% efficient in whatever it does. Arguably modern tech in current state gives the govt near 100% efficiency in surveillance, so this has to be countered with any means, most of which are of course political and legislative, but surveillance-resistant technology can also play its part. 2. Authoritarianism is not the only threat. It's entirely possible to have a democracy in place and yet have a miserable existence under it. For example, if every perfectly democratic law we have now is enforced with 100% efficiency it will feel very close to a dystopia. Technology can help alleviate this to a certain extent.
adolph 5y ago
> get serious about the work of political persuasion The Conversations with Tyler Cowen podcast episode "Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy (Ep. 106)" has some interesting content in this regard. Tang works on the government side but the same principles are involved regardless of direction. https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyler-cowen-taiwan-tech-2ddd75e48bdf https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyle...
jjav 5y ago
> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. > > Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them. The only surveillance resistant (not surveillance-proof obviously) technologies are distributed, decentralized ones implemented in open source. You're right that political activism is ultimately the only good answer. But it's not either/or, it is still quite useful in parallel to also develop, maintain and popularize decentralized systems as much as possible.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them. There’s a range on this - ask Apple about the FBI – and there are still several levels of usefulness: designing systems which don’t store data unnecessarily, forcing things to follow the legal process rather than quietly turning data over, and notifying the user when this happens. Obviously not all of this is possible to varying degrees but not all authoritarian states are the same, either.
yanmaani 5y ago
Tor seems to do okay in Russia. Maybe not stellar, but in practice, it seems to work fine. Same for Signal and all this other stuff.
- BLanen 5y ago
  Just because a system(tor) exists doesn't means its existence has any real effect. The existence of Tor in the state of Russia and Russia being the Authoritarian state that it is supports the case.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Interesting thought, another reason to get to space. With the internet and modern IT tools, authoritarian control over the populace is approaching turnkey. Well, it is, we just haven't had a strongman yet in the US (that wasn't an idiot). The only defense is the speed of light. A question: at what amount of transit time from "the authority" to "the colony" does total information control fall apart? 1 light-minute? 1 light-hour? 1 light-day? Nevertheless, space will be a whole new set of rules. The "authority" will be on Earth, and won't be able to think in terms of "space".
BLanen 5y ago
Thank you for your comment. This is much needed on this website of cypherpunk idealism.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> There's a relevant XKCD So... what? Don't try? Don't bother? That's like saying don't bother cooking your food because even cooked food can get you sick some of the time. Or do you believe that a hypothetical future authoritarian government can hire an army of thugs to kneecap everybody who they believe shared an anti-regime meme? Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Laying the framework for anonymous communication today while it's easier just to be on the safe side is worthwhile.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Right, so my whole point here is... ...and how's that going?
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    Better than if they had nothing.
zajio1am 5y ago
> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. > Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. That seems to me like false dilemma of ideal freedom vs authoritarian regimes. Full-scale authoritarian regimes are scary but unlikely risk for western democracies. The real risk is small-scale creeping authoritarian policies accepted democratically with popular support. We have to consider that liberty is not without real trade-offs between it and other values. It is fantasy to offer political persuasion as a solution. Different people have different preferences for political values and if there is a policy that is unacceptable for liberty-loving minority but satisfies preferences of majority by offering better support for other values, then it is unlikely than just political work can stop it (that would mean to convince others to accept a position detrimental to their own values). And there is enough people who in good faith would like to repress terrorist, CSAM, corruption, tax evasion, public health risks for a 'small' liberty restriction.
panarky 5y ago
> get serious about the work of political persuasion The thing about populist authoritarian movements is that they're popular. They're supported by a large segment of the population, and that segment is full of passionate intensity while the rest of us lack all conviction [0]. I can't think of a large populist authoritarian movement in the last hundred years that was defeated by mere "political persuasion". [0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

zwkrt 5y ago

When authoritarianism comes around, it wont just be surveiling. An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because the goal is to turn the state into an all-encompasing master of peoples lives, and work is a large part of peoples lives (especially in an a11n regime!) Whether or not the state can surveil is a moot point if the owners of the tech are in on the game.

throwawaygh 5y ago
> a11n I'm not sure what this means, assuming weird auto-correct from authoritarian? > An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because... Only if that leadership is necessary to seize or hold power. An authoritarian regime in the US would not need buy-in from major tech companies.
- Tyr42 5y ago
  They don't want to type the letters in the middle, so they dropped them and put a count of how many letters were dropped. I'm mostly familiar with a11y meaning accessibility.
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    I believe this pattern was originally popularized by "i18n" for "internationalization", partly for convenience and partly to have an identifier that would fit in legacy systems.
    - adolph 5y ago
      Numeronym: According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym Agree that i18n cemented it in the letter count form (homonym form is older, like K9 for canine).
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        ('K9' is homophone for 'canine'. To be homonyms, two terms should have different meaning - if two terms share the same name and meaning, they are the same...)
- ByThyGrace 5y ago
  > a11n Perhaps it's like i18n, except it's the will of the dictator that which gets translated for the masses.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

[dead]

bentcorner 5y ago

Technology people make this mistake a lot. They see a problem like "the government might track all of our payments in the future" and create bitcoin. Or "the government might rootkit our phones" and creates an open source hardware phone. Or "the government might want to see who you are communicating with" and create an E2E encrypted chat application. None of these solutions do anything to solve the original problem, it just allows a portion of the population to ignore them.

matthewdgreen 5y ago
I am the author of the original tweet, so allow me to push back on this point of view. Technology people are not the solution to this problem, we are the problem. And we really need to stop being the problem. There have been authoritarian governments before, and still are all over the world: but they've never had access to technology anywhere near as powerful as what we have today, e.g., ubiquitous user location or unencrypted smartphone backup or vast unprotected email databases. These technologies themselves are brand new: smartphone cloud backup is only 10 years old, and ubiquitous GPS-enabled smartphones are younger than my middle-school aged child. But thanks to aggressive deployment by Silicon Valley we went ahead and created a surveillance utopia on a timescale so short that most citizens don't even realize what we've done. Future governments now have capabilities we could never have imagined a decade ago: centralized data repositories and collection systems that would make the Stasi blush. These systems now exist because people like us built them and decided to leave the problem of securing those repositories to the future. But we're running out of future. Is more privacy the solution? I don't know. It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused, and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale. I suspect this could happen but would be slow and inefficient and full of friction. None of that has to happen now -- there is no friction -- because Silicon Valley has already done the architecture work and deployed the technology at scale. They did it recklessly and with no thought to how it might be abused, and now they're finding it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It will not get easier. TL;DR: The data repositories already exist and all that's protecting them is a fig-leaf of legislation and honest government behavior that could disappear at any moment. Removing those repositories might not save us, but we need to try. We sure need to stop creating more of them.

marcosdumay 5y ago

To be fair, those primes are an exceptionally useful tool if you want to get serious about the work of political persuasion. They are not what will change things, but they are a tool you can use to disperse ideas and make change happen.

derbOac 5y ago

I strongly agree with you, but at the same time think giving more control to individuals in terms of communication, expression, and infrastructure is probably helpful? Non-technological and technological solutions aren't mutually exclusive. I guess I always think of the the quasiomnipotent totalitarian state as a kind of theoretical [anti?]ideal state, sort of like "what's the worst possible case scenario and how does this do in that scenario?" The goalposts are always being moved but that doesn't mean you shouldn't adjust accordingly.

demosito666 5y ago

While this is 100% correct that Surveillance-resistant systems or other technical means are not he answer to authoritarianism, this statement has at least two problems. 1. A technical solution may not in itself be the way to counter authoritarianism, but may assist in either resisting it or prevent it from gaining enough power. Since democracy is a state of permanent fight against the iron law of oligarchy (which ultimately leads to authoritarianism), any thing that reduces the power of the govt to a certain extent is good. In other words, we don't want the govt to be 100% efficient in whatever it does. Arguably modern tech in current state gives the govt near 100% efficiency in surveillance, so this has to be countered with any means, most of which are of course political and legislative, but surveillance-resistant technology can also play its part. 2. Authoritarianism is not the only threat. It's entirely possible to have a democracy in place and yet have a miserable existence under it. For example, if every perfectly democratic law we have now is enforced with 100% efficiency it will feel very close to a dystopia. Technology can help alleviate this to a certain extent.

adolph 5y ago

> get serious about the work of political persuasion The Conversations with Tyler Cowen podcast episode "Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy (Ep. 106)" has some interesting content in this regard. Tang works on the government side but the same principles are involved regardless of direction. https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyler-cowen-taiwan-tech-2ddd75e48bdf https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyle...

jjav 5y ago

> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. > > Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them. The only surveillance resistant (not surveillance-proof obviously) technologies are distributed, decentralized ones implemented in open source. You're right that political activism is ultimately the only good answer. But it's not either/or, it is still quite useful in parallel to also develop, maintain and popularize decentralized systems as much as possible.

acdha 5y ago
> Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them. There’s a range on this - ask Apple about the FBI – and there are still several levels of usefulness: designing systems which don’t store data unnecessarily, forcing things to follow the legal process rather than quietly turning data over, and notifying the user when this happens. Obviously not all of this is possible to varying degrees but not all authoritarian states are the same, either.

yanmaani 5y ago

Tor seems to do okay in Russia. Maybe not stellar, but in practice, it seems to work fine. Same for Signal and all this other stuff.

BLanen 5y ago
Just because a system(tor) exists doesn't means its existence has any real effect. The existence of Tor in the state of Russia and Russia being the Authoritarian state that it is supports the case.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Interesting thought, another reason to get to space. With the internet and modern IT tools, authoritarian control over the populace is approaching turnkey. Well, it is, we just haven't had a strongman yet in the US (that wasn't an idiot). The only defense is the speed of light. A question: at what amount of transit time from "the authority" to "the colony" does total information control fall apart? 1 light-minute? 1 light-hour? 1 light-day? Nevertheless, space will be a whole new set of rules. The "authority" will be on Earth, and won't be able to think in terms of "space".

BLanen 5y ago

Thank you for your comment. This is much needed on this website of cypherpunk idealism.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> There's a relevant XKCD So... what? Don't try? Don't bother? That's like saying don't bother cooking your food because even cooked food can get you sick some of the time. Or do you believe that a hypothetical future authoritarian government can hire an army of thugs to kneecap everybody who they believe shared an anti-regime meme? Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Laying the framework for anonymous communication today while it's easier just to be on the safe side is worthwhile.

throwawaygh 5y ago
> Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Right, so my whole point here is... ...and how's that going?
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Better than if they had nothing.

zajio1am 5y ago

> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. > Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes. That seems to me like false dilemma of ideal freedom vs authoritarian regimes. Full-scale authoritarian regimes are scary but unlikely risk for western democracies. The real risk is small-scale creeping authoritarian policies accepted democratically with popular support. We have to consider that liberty is not without real trade-offs between it and other values. It is fantasy to offer political persuasion as a solution. Different people have different preferences for political values and if there is a policy that is unacceptable for liberty-loving minority but satisfies preferences of majority by offering better support for other values, then it is unlikely than just political work can stop it (that would mean to convince others to accept a position detrimental to their own values). And there is enough people who in good faith would like to repress terrorist, CSAM, corruption, tax evasion, public health risks for a 'small' liberty restriction.

panarky 5y ago

> get serious about the work of political persuasion The thing about populist authoritarian movements is that they're popular. They're supported by a large segment of the population, and that segment is full of passionate intensity while the rest of us lack all conviction [0]. I can't think of a large populist authoritarian movement in the last hundred years that was defeated by mere "political persuasion". [0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...