You, Online: Identity, Privacy, and the Future

YOU, ONLINEIdentity, Privacy, and the Future

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-* picture is from ‘occupy second life’ -* really versatile platform, eh?

INTRODUCTION

• PART I: What is Online Identity?

• PART II: The Persistence of Online Identity

• PART III: Theories of the Present and the Future

• PART IV: The Internet is not Immutable

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= PART I: What is Online Identity? = PART II: The Persistence of Online Identity = PART III: Theories of the Present and the Future = PART IV: The Internet is not Immutable -* these alternatives aren’t just technical alternatives, but they actual create a tangibly new form of identity, which i’ll explain

INTRODUCTION

• Initiating a conversation

• The internet is an experiment in ontology

• Putting reformists, revolutionaries, crypto-anarchists, techies, and ‘normies’ (excuse the language) in one room

• Building a shared history that can undo the digital divide

• Scare you

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-* i’m not going to do a cheesy hand-raising thing, but its safe to say that the amount of online identities is at least 1/person. Everyone has at least some presence online, and if you don’t it is probably a conscious decision not to. = Initiating a conversation -* Every time our current way of life is uprooted or altered in some meaningful way, we can’t be stubborn and say ‘no this isn’t changing who i am’, or to shy away from having a collective conversation. =The internet is an experiment in ontology -* I want people to imagine radically different modes of interaction, not necessarily technological ones either -* I also observe, especially here at sudo room, a distinct division. I think sudo room in particular is a space that seems committed to being a space for social activism as well as skill sharing. But in general the space for social activism is considered different from a ‘hacker’ space. = Putting reformists, revolutionaries, crypto-anarchists, techies, and ‘normies’ (excuse the language) in one room = Building a shared history that can undo the digital divide = Scare you

INTRODUCTION

• NOT a technical discussion or a how-to

• NOT a chronology (cause-effect fallacy)

• NOT a lecture (speak up, shout me down, talk amongst yourselves)

• NOT a pro- or anti-internet talk (but those elements will be there)

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INTRODUCTION

• UC Berkeley student during anti-cuts ‘09

• Freelance coder

• I’m building two platforms: one for ‘anonymous communities’, one for ‘local exploration’

• Some of the things I say might be bad for my career

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= UC Berkeley student during anti-cuts ‘09 = Freelance coder = Building a platform for anonymous community interactions -* that’s all i’m going to say. This isn’t a shameless plug for my own work = Some of the things I say might be bad for my career

PART IWhat is Online Identity?

(if the medium is the message, what is the internet saying?)

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- Part I: What is online identity? -* lonelygirl15, which i was actually surprised about how many people still remember their name. What seemed like an innocent, young girl opening up about herself to the world was actually a hoax. This whole episode serves to elucidate a lot of the questions regarding online identity. -* what kinds of new identities can we form online? -* Why is the division between real and online identity so discomforting? -* How are online identities being used and co-opted, profited off of?

SO WHAT ARE YOU, ONLINE?

• Several basic types of identity and interaction

• Messaging (static)

• Usenet/BBS/IRC/Forums (fluid)

• Social Networking (fixed)

• Content hubs (contextual)

• App-based interactions (proprietary)

• Putting all these together

• A highly modular communications medium

• Near infinite access and storage of information

• A common interface of metaphors

• Fundamentally imbued with the presence of capital and the state (more on that in a second)

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-* first off, what do I mean by online identity at all? We can start by naming a few kinds of online identity, and how they relate = Many types of identity and interaction == Messaging (static) -* includes email, texts, chat, etc. These apps use identifiers that create a static identity, but other than that, you could be anything, or anyone. Just a name. The notion of ‘identity’ in these services is weak == Usenet/BBS/IRC (fluid) - You can change identity fluidly, and the notion of a name is just a convenience. These were some of the first services to really ‘play’ with anonymity. == Modern Social networks (fixed) -* Social networks rely on a highly fixed, world-relative identity. == Content hubs (contextual) == App-based interactions (proprietary) -* so what do I mean by online identity? Well I really mean the methods by which we communicate the ‘self’ within the context of the internet = Putting all these together == A highly modular communications medium -* these mediums are not only encapsulated in a whole range of diverse spaces, services, etc, but there’s a modularity in how we interact with them. We exist in all these identities at once, and sometimes simultaneously. We also have a whole range of choices when designing internet technology to incorporate different paradigms. == Near infinite access and storage of information -* we use these identities in a way that flows from our natural intuition. We talk as much as we need to, and such. Even though the actual data exists in a finite container


• Virtual reality vs. collective imagination

• Can we construct an online ‘self ’?

• The internet problematizes the concept of autonomy

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= Virtual reality vs. collective imagination -* there are two somewhat competing notions of what the internet ‘is’. Some might call it a virtual reality, a space where we ‘exist’ in a certain form. However, for the most part people have refused to create simple correlations between the internet and the world. We don’t have digital houses, cars, furniture, objects, etc. Instead, the internet is more akin to a communications channel that ‘stores’ information. In that sense it’s more of a collective imagination. That’s not to say that we can’t build a virtual reality on top of the internet, but it’s not the ‘point’ of the internet, in a sense. = Can we construct an online ‘self’? -* using my definition of online identity, it’s reasonable to ask whether there is a way to completely realize the online ‘self’. Interestingly, in order to do this we would have to have a complete picture of the ‘self’ at all, of what it means to be human. = The internet problematizes the concept of autonomy -* by being a symbolic interface, the internet actually constrains the methods of communication and types, forms, etc. However, it increases the scope of our communication. Both of these changes bring into question whether our online communication is actually in a sense autonomous. Not only can we not express the full range of our ideas, but we are also being aided. Example of strapping a bullhorn to yourself.


• Sensation vs. experience

• To record or not to record?

• Harder to censor, easier to watch

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= Sensation vs. experience -* increasingly we are becoming data analyzers, rather than collectors. -* the internet shows the division between sensation and experience, between presence and reference. -* we’re attaching our identities to those higher-level experiences. = To record or not to record? -* with the internet, because of its natural medium of data, we always encounter the issue of recording vs not recording. I want to eschew the legal and moral implications here and first ask the purely existential question -* we want to record ourselves (some of us, some of the time). But because of how modular these mediums are, recording is inherently problematic. -* we are in these spaces where we are basically being recorded by definition, but then we also use those mediums to communicate in natural ways. -* This is why those website EULAs are so long. they have to set the framework of how and what and when they actually record things -* and then purely hypothetically, do we even want to record everything? Is it possible to not be recorded, to not want to be recorded? Is it a newly inaugurated fact of human nature? = Harder to censor, easier to watch -* The reality of the internet is that it’s harder to censor and easier to observe ourselves and our communications.


Your online presence exists in forms of data spread across the world. But what kind of data,

where, and why?

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• Is the internet centralized or decentralized?

• What is the nature of a ‘free’ service/platform

• Who can see what I do online, and to what extent/form/etc. ?

• Should data be considered property, speech, or both?

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1. INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE INTERNET

2. MONEY AND THE INTERNET

-* So in order to actually answer these questions, or try to, I want to bring everyone to a similar playing field of understanding what is actually going on with the internet. In order to do that i’m going to focus on two main aspects of what the internet ‘is’ and how it works in the present day: Infrastructure, and Money. Obviously related, but different for the purposes of this talk. I understand that this isn’t a complete picture, but its nearly impossible to do that. -* Infrastructure is what actually physically exists to make the internet possible -* Money is going to explain what is actually being done to account for the capital costs of the internet, and how money is made from online activities.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE INTERNET

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Social LayerInteraction Layer

-* Here’s the common, boring, completely un-helpful way that the internet is described to us in engineering school. -* What’s important to note, though, is that the vast majority of anything we ever interact with or even really understand is at the very top layer. That’s where HTTP, FTP, Bittorrent, Tor, bitcoin, online gaming, social networks etc reside. -* But in actuality, most of what we ‘do’ online isn’t even in this chart, because we’ve created such abstract ways of interacting. When you interact with a website, you’re not actually building HTTP calls or even in control of when the website fires off a packet of data. So what we actually do resides in a layer above the application layer, which i’m going to call the ‘interaction’ layer. This is where Websites talk to each other, or where me sending an e-mail is translated into the HTTP data. -* And if we want to get truly nitty-gritty, our lives aren’t in the interaction layer at all. How many of us can name one of these languages that websites talk in (APIs)? We are really actually on a social layer, where our individual motivations are coded into data at all. -* so why am I even showing you this? Well i’m trying to describe how, when we interact online, a whole array of information is being sent around all over the world. This is all underneath our footing, which is both cool and risky. -* this is also what i meant when i said that machines are actually using a whole stack of metaphors to communicate, so one of the ways that I like the describe the internet, is that its a medium that allows the conversion of metaphors into other metaphors.


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-* here’s a map of how the infrastructure looks to a pirate in International Waters. disregarding what’s going on inside of each country, this is how the countries talk to each other. Massive, incredibly expensive, undersea cables that are self-healing. These cables are also, for the most part, within 10 years old. Prior to that, we were piggybacking off of the telephone cabling,


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-* here’s a map of what the internet looks like to JUST AT&T in the US. Keep in mind that there are at least 3 other major services with completely separate internet lines criss-crossing the state. Also, if you can see, there are what look like highly redundant lines (SF to StLouis, SF to Chicago). These are partly for actual redundancy, but also for financial transaction data.


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• 4G / 3G

• Satellite (on the order of 2-3,000 operational)

• Private network infrastructure (GCCS, Milstar, DSCS)

-4g/3g -* a way to communicate via radio to the infrastructure i just showed you. It’s highly autonomous and self-healing, which is why you can access youtube on the bart. -Satellite -* There’s millions of dollars of plastic,metal, and silicon floating in space. Out of around 10 thousand satellites, only 2-3thousand are actually operational. So unlike what it seems, satellites are highly obsolescent technology -Private Networks -* These are the networks you never hear about, with their own encryption schemes, access points, topology, and protocols. !So what can you take away from this? -* the internet is mostly centralized in its implementation, and highly centralized in its funding. Even though we might say there are tons of internet service providers, there’s only a few dozen real gateways that hook it all up. -* the internet is a marriage of state and business interests,similar to train tracks and roads. -* private internets can and do exist. As i’ll show you later, there are more of them than you think.

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MONEY AND THE INTERNET

• Cables (continental, trans-atlantic & trans-pacific, specialty) • Routing • Switching • Hardware • Software • Hosting • Serving • Accessing • Spectrum ownership • These are all ‘first-world’ costs

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-* Trans-atlantic/trans-pacific cables, Billions of dollars + the financial institutions that carve paths through mountain ranges just to lay the shorted fiber cables -* Routing, switching, hardware, software -* Hosting, serving, accessing -* radio base stations and spectrums (AT&T paid 2 billion for a piece of the 700MHz spectrum). -* These are all first world costs. This says nothing to the industrial economies that actually provide the materials and labor that make these things.

MONEY AND THE INTERNET

• Military (efficiency)

• Pay-to-access (first party)

• Online transactions (second-party)

• Ads (third party) (more on this…)

• Nobody clicks on them, but they still power the internet

• Drum roll… data (all-party)

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- why did money initially get into the interne -* military, or the efficient functioning of the state body -* pay for access (first party) -* online transactions (first and second-party) -* ads (third party) -* currently, all these things exist, but the rising force of monied interest on the internet is: data. Data is threatening to overthrow all of these categories and reshape the way our lives are being run. Like I said, this talk is actually about online identity, so the main focus is going to be on the data.

PART IIThe Persistence of Online Identity

(and why deleting your Facebook isn’t enough)21

- Part II: the persistence of online identity (or why deleting your Facebook isn’t enough) !- Eldo Kim, a harvard student that in December 2013 threatened to blow up his class before the final exam. Interestingly, he was doing quite a lot of protect his identity (tor, guerilla mail) - Also leads us to ask, if he didn’t have tor/guerillamail, would he have made the threats? - Also leads us to ask, is it wrong for Harvard to be able to reverse correlate his traffic?

THE PERSISTENCE OF ONLINE IDENTITY

(AND WHY DELETING YOUR FACEBOOK ISN’T ENOUGH)

• Raw communication

• Facts (wiki-fication of the internet)

• Opinion (the blogosphere)

• Self

• Tracking

• Analytics (new to the team)

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-* raw communication -* facts (wikipedia-ish) -* opinion (what we’re writing about the world) -* self (information that we provide explicitly or implicitly about ourselves) -* tracking (information about what we’re doing right now) (often described as metadata, but also includes things like GPS, surveillance camera feeds). -** Important to note that a lot of this tracking is basic to the internet. When you ask to get information from somewhere, you’re sending a self-addressed envelope. But i’ll talk a little bit more about that. -* analytics (not metadata, this is non-human generated data that takes the above data and creates new data).



• Explicitly volunteered information (polls, ratings, commentary)

• Reading the content we create or upload

• Tracking our use patterns (browsing, interacting, etc.) through IDs and meta-data

• Building a social graph

• Testing machine-learning algorithms on us

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DELETING YOUR FACEBOOK ISN’T ENOUGH

Big Data Analytics

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- what is big data analytics? -* big data analytics is the use of these massive troves of data to create more ‘relevant’ data that can then be resold or reused. Think of it as a great garbage compactor or recycling plant. Individually, we might not be that useful to any given company. If I don’t like Corona, then Corona is going to have a hard time selling me one, so they don’t particularly want to track me. But taken as a whole, my family, friends, community ARE useful to corona. We are a data metric that tells them how to design their branding, ads, etc. It makes it financially viable for them to design targeted advertising. - what are some of the mechanisms of big data analytics -* well, if Facebook etc want your information so bad and its worth so much, they’re going to find a way to get it. So that’s why Facebook invented the like button. It serves a highly insidious dual purpose. One one hand, it allows you to volunteer some personal information to Facebook, which they can form a picture of you with (that’s the obvious one). -* They also use the button to track you on the internet as a whole. Everywhere you go, wherever there’s a like button, Facebook knows you visited that page. Even if you didn’t click on the button itself, Facebook still knows. How? When you go to Facebook they put two cookies on your computer, one cookie helps them tell that you’re logged in so you don’t have to keep entering your password. The other cookie is a permanent cookie that never actually expires. It contains your unique Facebook ID, which Facebook can read. Google is doing this too. -* And then verizon, at&t, t-mobile are all collecting similar information when you use your data. They know which websites you were at, which apps you used, when, and how. -* And this model has seeped into pretty much every avenue of society. Those safeway cards?



• The paradox of consent

• Hannah Arendt’s natality, plurality, and visibility

• The internet as the new commons

• A kink in the system: the No-Network problem

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- not only is all this data being COLLECTED and STORED, but it is being collected and stored WITH and WITHOUT our EXPLICIT and IMPLICIT consent. -* how can data be collected exclusively WITH our explicit consent? This is the paradox of the modern day. We walk into a burger king, and the camera is pointed at us. We drive on the freeway and our license plate is being detected. We log into Facebook and our information is seeping into a massive deposit. Is it even possible to control these flows of information? In the past, we’ve been limited by capability. In a pre-technology society, the only way to gather data was the experience it. With the advent of urban society, we gained a heightened understanding of each other because we designed massively public spaces. Hannah Arendt’s notion was ‘the space of seeing’. In a post-technology world, we do not exist in-person to collect data. In fact, we don’t do much first-person data collection anymore. We only process data that was collected in a different time-space. We watch TV, read books, etc. We defer our first-person sensory experiences. So is it possible to categorize all that collection of data and put a stamp of approval on it? Or is there a specific code of conduct, the social contract as it were of private vs public, cameras vs no cameras. Can we have a public space within a private space or a private space within a public space?


• Because they don’t really delete it (surprise)

• Because i’ll just start a new Facebook account

• More importantly: it’s the system, stupid!

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-* this isn’t just a bash on Facebook, but i’m using this phrase as a metaphor for ‘can’t i just refuse to participate’? -* well first of all, having created a Facebook at all ever has already identified you, and they connect you to any other apps in their ecosystem -* once you make a Facebook, they keep using that information in other ways. For example, if you befriend two people, Facebook creates a social graph that connects those two people to each other. And when you delete your Facebook, that information remains. Even if you ‘perms-delete’ your Facebook, so you can’t even log in again, those connections remain -* Because these tech giants are imbuing this process of data collection into the very fundamental nature of technology. Whether or not you choose to have a Facebook account (I choose not to), all our routes of entry into the internet are being monitored. If not by fb/google, but by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and of course NSA, GCHQ, China !-* The state -* why do they want big data? They’re not selling me corona. They already have a census bureau. Do they want to know my voter opinion? -* NO. They absolutely don’t. While there are movements to ‘open’ politics to transparency, by and large, the state is NOT using big data analytics to ‘gauge’ my opinion, except in very high-intensity election runs. -* They’re using it for: foreign/domestic intelligence. This is where both the big bucks are and where the power lies. -* but how can the government use my browsing history for foreign intelligence? -* the answer is: they can’t really, but in the meantime they can suppress radical movements.


• Metadata is built-in to the internet (by definition)

• Tracking is built-in to the majority of the internet (web 2.0)

• Identity is (now being) built-in to the vast majority of the internet (web 3.0)

• We’ll get to ‘web 4.0’ in part III

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• There is and will always be actual tangible value to collecting some kinds of data

• This isn’t just about the internet. If you don’t use the internet at all, that’s itself a data point.

• Surveillance isn’t about technology, but technology is a really good wedge.

• What’s all the commotion about ‘fitness trackers’?

• The double sided coin

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• Closing the loop

• Data + Computation = Intelligence

• Cybernetics and the feedback cycle

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-* closing the loop -* a term used in both the state and the market -* once these companies have information about every step of your life, they can create a cybernetic feedback loop to control us. Our buying habits, our political urges, etc. can be molded by powerful processes. -* Is this happening right now? YES. It is very much so. -* how the advertising bidding process works

TAKE A BREATH

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PART IIITheory

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THE FRIENDSHIP PARADOX

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Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do

Scott L. Feld (1991) American Journal of Sociology 96 (6): 1464–1477

-* a person with many friends is more likely to be your friend. They have a higher ability to make friends in the first place -* this phenomenon is true in every social network, has been mathematically derived, and empirically observed. Take twitter. -* this idea has been used for epidemiology, interestingly enough: take a random person, and then observe their friends. The group of friends has higher ‘centrality’ or connectedness on average than a pool of random people. -* The friendship paradox raises the question: If all these social networks have this very basic property, are we actually benefiting ourselves from using them? Is it valuable to amplify this property until we’re all suffering from this collective neurosis? Or is the friendship paradox itself an unfortunate fact of life? Or more interesting yet, are we on the verge of building a new system that intelligently observes and aids these ‘lonely’ people until that inequality stops holding true (after all, its not mathematically certain. Improbable graphs exist where on average we have more friends than our friends)

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2/3

• Observed on almost every social network, mathematically derived, and empirically proven

• Also applies to: publishing papers, sexual partners

• Used in epidemiology for better subject choice

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3/3

• Amplifying our insecurity?

• Or maybe, an unfortunate fact of life?

• Can/should we build a system that avoids/solves this?

THE RULES STILL APPLY HERE

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(The case of Diablo 3)

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• Faucets and Sinks

• Real Money Auction House (RMAH)

• May 2012: $300/million

• Feb 2013: $0.20/million, March 2013: $0.05/million (hyper-inflation is often defined as losing 50% of value in a month)

• May 2013: $.004/million (1/100,000th in 1 year)


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THE FUTURE

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THE FUTURE 1

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Complete autonomy of capital : a mechanistic utopia where human beings become simple accessories of an automated system, though still retaining an executive role; Mutation of the human being, or rather a change of the species : production of a perfectly programmable being which has lost all the characteristics of the species Homo sapiens. This would not require an automatized system, since this perfect human being would be made to do whatever is required; Generalized lunacy : in the place of human beings, and on the basis of their present limitations, capital realizes everything they desire (normal or abnormal), but human beings cannot find themselves and enjoyment continually lies in the future. The human being is carried off in the run-away of capital, and keeps it going.

–Jacques Camatte, The Wandering of Humanity (1973)

-* Not mutually exclusive: “These possibilities are abstract limits; in reality they tend to unfold simultaneously and in a contradictory manner.”

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THE FUTURE 1

Collapse and Post-Collapse• Catastrophe

• My opinion is that some kind of internet will eventually be re-created in a post-catastrophe

• Revolution

• The current model of the internet still centralizes power, so a revolutionary ‘decentralized’ or ‘worker-owned’ internet must be tangibly different (more on that)

• Voluntary

• Primitivism

• But not necessarily

Catastrophe In my mind, despite the collapse of society as we know it, the internet will still come back. There’s too much of actual value in an electronic internet for us to not recreate it. The paradox of the internet is: it’s too dangerous to own, too valuable to kill. It is the archetypal ‘ring’ from lord of the rings. Revolution The current model of the internet still centralizes power, so a revolutionary ‘decentralized’ or ‘worker-owned’ internet must be tangibly different (more on that) Voluntary Primitism But not necessarily

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THE FUTURE 1

Post-Internet

• Planes of Immanence (Deleuze & Guattari)

• Merger of the self with the other

• Comfort vs. Actualization

• Again, the question of recording

-* Humans will move on from the internet. We will be intelligent, free beings with too many routes of entry to information for us to be captured. We will invent new things, reach out to those of us who are oppressed or incapable. The previous utopian image of the internet, the complete identification of the self with the other, will be the goal. This is possible, and it is in some senses happening. But this desire coexists with the completely self-oriented desire to exist comfortably, to find beautiful men/women, to achieve tranquil bougeois-hood. This is in many ways the modern dream of technology. A new, more accessible lifestyle around the corner, where ‘smart’ bathtubs will bathe us, where ‘smart’ fridges will always be stocked. Where a ‘smart’ network helps us find other ‘smart’ enlightened people to share in our appreciation of existence. But this only begs the questions that Hannah Arendt was asking. What would that ‘smart’ network look like, and is it possible for a network to be too smart. I think we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a technologized society is. Technology, which comes from techne, meaning craft, or the ethic of doing versus understanding. But doing what? What is the object of the technologized subject?

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THE FUTURE 1

Neo-Internet

• Internet of Things

• Metaphor of the ‘smart’ wine-rack

• Carmatte’s ‘managed’ utopia

• Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality

• Vacuous pleasure vs. Jouissance

• Carmatte’s ‘generalized lunacy’

Internet of Things discussion - imagine a wine-rack. Well for the last 2000 years its just been a wine rack, the world around it has been shifting. The way a human may fill their wine rack was of concern. The internet of things imagines an entirely new wine rack. One that detects when you’ve taken a bottle, and automatically orders a new one. One that tells which wines you like by how quickly you picked and drank them. One that can give you suggestions for upping your wine quality for a small fee, or gives you ‘deals’ on new wines. Lets you buy your friends wine for their racks. Etc etc. The thing to note here is that the wine rack is autonomously communicating with the internet. But also to note is that our self is becoming increasingly ‘managed’. We are essentially discarding our autonomy to ‘choose’ the wines we love, and giving it to a system that can manage our capital and provide us a benefit. !Now this isn’t to say that this is wholly novel. Our current system of wine is already basically autonomous. It’s simply a willful giving-up of control. !Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality -* Another route for the internet to go is for it to become ever more high-bandwidth, to where we can transmit more about ourselves in real time to others. We would be able to develop tools that augment our reality with extra information or create wholly new worlds which seem real to our eyes. This would be yet another revolution, that has all the capabilities of a new art form, as well as a communications medium. How does that interact with our identities, though? It creates a dichotomy where, on one level, we have the most amazing capability of connecting with each other and breaking down the barriers of distance, but at the same time, will we use such a technology to understand the lives of people around the world, or will we be even more inner facing, even more closed in our societies? If we look to history, the answer

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THE FUTURE 1

Distant Future

• Solar system colonization

• Ironically, the internet will hold us back

• Post-humanism vs Trans-humanism

• Carmatte’s ‘species mutation’

-* colonize mars. We use our internet and concentrated wealth to further colonize other places in the solar system. Supposing we find a near-limitless source of energy such as fusion, a wandering humanity could be possible. But with only light-speed communication, our ability to exist in real-time with these communities would be broken. Thus, we would become a modular humanity. The great exodus would be an exciting though depressing event. Such a situation was romanticized in the anime movie ‘Voices of a Distant Star’. !- i’ll end that science fiction there, but the lingering question is: what does a networked future really look like? How do we experience the other without exploiting the other? Why is society’s innovation rapidly focusing on a smaller and smaller class? Will internet access help oppressed people at all?

PART IVThe Internet is not Immutable

(i.e. alternative ‘net’s)

45 With help from: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/intro-to-tor-i2p-darknets

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/intro-to-tor-i2p-darknets

END-TO-END ENCRYPTION (E2EE)

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Symmetric Cryptography


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Asymmetric Cryptography

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• Companies will say: it hinders the user experience

• The NSA keeps your PGP traffic in case they ever obtain your private key

• The math behind cryptography is pretty complicated and it CAN and HAS been subverted

• Certain countries force you to decrypt your stuff!

• But supposing all this weren’t true and we had a perfect cryptography system…


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Metadata

MESH-NET 1/3

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MESH-NET 2/3

• Locality vs centrality

• Surveillance and censorship protection

• Community owns the tools of production

-* supposed I didn’t want my use habits tracked -* A sharing economy for internet access. -* In a mesh-net, locality is more important than connection to a larger ‘network’. I haven’t focused on Internet Service Providers too much, but they’re basically the gateways to the current internet. Without gateways, we can organize our mesh however we want. -* In a mesh net, censorship is much harder. They could be invaluable for countries facing censorship. -* if you’re trying to connect within the mesh, it’s a lot harder for the NSA etc. to track you. -* However, With current mesh-net technology, a malicious node can encourage other nodes to route their traffic through it, and then track them that way. -* Also still possible for a node to track you. You are sending requests to them and those requests include your data. Fundamentally, the topology is different, but the nodes are still the same. For example, even if Facebook were to directly join the Oakland mesh net, its still Facebook and it could still track you. -* The mesh network is a cool idea, and greatly reduces the barrier of entry to ‘unconnected’ regions, but it is also an idea that is somewhat consistent with the ambitions of giant tech companies. That’s why these companies are creating mesh networks themselves. -* companies like fb/google are creating mesh networks for full, free access to their services. This free service is purely in exchange for your tracking data and you looking at ads.

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MESH-NET 3/3

• Malicious nodes

• A mobile-phone mesh-net is not viable (yet)

• We still use a few key services (Facebook, Google Maps) that could be (and have been) tracked

• Big-money tech companies like mesh-networking!

TOR-NET 1/3

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TOR-NET 2/3

• Security through “onion routing”

• Internet service providers (Comcast, etc) can’t see what you’re doing

• Websites can’t see where you’re from

• Certain services can be “inside” the onion, which means they’re un-blockable

-* “onion routing” -* prevents organizations from tracking your traffic -* enforces anonymity so that takedown notices can’t target you. -* certain services can be ‘inside’ the network, which means they can’t be individually blocked and their server addresses are hidden (not block able). -* Main downside is that the network itself is not configured for such activity, so this subset of ‘tor-nodes’ are often highly susceptible to attacks. -* Other downside is that the previous forms of tracking can still apply. Usage patterns, header data, etc. Modern internet is not designed for anonymity.

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TOR-NET 3/3

• A few (on the order of 1000s) of nodes = bottleneck

• There is still a trust dependency for tor nodes i.e. correlation attacks

• Can’t use certain services, such as peer-to-peer file-sharing

• Again… metadata. Still building on top of the regular internet

INVISIBLE INTERNET PROJECT (12P)

1/3

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2/3

• Security through “garlic routing” (great metaphor, eh?)

• Somewhat of a hybrid of Mesh and Tor

• No central infrastructure! How awesome

• Can create secure, encrypted channels (friend-to-friend)

• Actually better than Tor for hidden services because it was designed for them, but also because it is self-organizing

• Can do peer-to-peer file sharing! Also, anonymous e-mail, anonymous chat, etc.

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3/3

• It’s slow

• NOT designed for the greater internet (and less secure for that stuff)

• Hasn’t been around as long as other services (so fewer eyes on the code and fewer papers published).

• In other words, your-mileage-may-vary

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What if I wanted to do away with the entire paradigm of the internet?

–Anonymous

“In effect, a perfect anarchy”

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FREENET

FREENET 1/3

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SF

Europe

AfricaOakland

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FREENET 2/3

• There’s no such thing as ‘location’ on the freenet, just a way to find more and more closely matching names.

• This is NOT an internet. It’s technically a ‘distributed data-store’

• No ‘users’ or ‘servers’ in the traditional sense. The system itself ‘stores’ the data.

• It’s all encrypted: in storage, in transit, everywhere. Not even the person holding the data knows what it is.

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FREENET 3/3

• You CAN’T access the internet through the Freenet (it’s self-contained)

• It’s slow (but the more connections there are, the faster it gets)

• It’s “forgetful” (!)

• Wait a minute…the freenet is like a giant BRAIN!

• Unfortunately, the freenet doesn’t mix well with the law

AN INTERNET THAT’S DIFFERENT™

• Monied interests are inevitable

• But WE, an intelligent, careful society, create a better future

• For certain things, centralization is good. For certain things, decentralization is good (that’s the honest truth of technology)

• Transparency is key. Trust is key.

• Is this possible? Or is this the dream that powers the engine?

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- I don’t personally think we can design a technology that is ‘impervious’ to the state or money. As I mentioned at the beginning, the internet is founded fundamentally upon the machinations of the state and capital. Nor do I think that we can create a society impervious to tracking. Any powerful state apparatus can embed cameras into public/private space. Nor do I think that receding deeper and deeper into the trenches of the self is viable (a phone that is completely locked down and can only communicate ephemerally with certain trusted individuals and self-destructs if it comes in contact with law-enforcement or ex-lovers). That battle will turn us into paranoid maniacal misanthropes. !- But just the same, we can’t live in a society that fundamentally controls us or turns us into vehicles of commerce. This will only enforce social distinctions, xenophobia, boundaries, and the eye of the surveillance state. We have to live in a society that can support free, and yes, illegal, dissent.

THANKS FOR LISTENING!

(now start talking)

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You, Online: Identity, Privacy, and the Future

Internet

Transcript of You, Online: Identity, Privacy, and the Future