Tor, Encryption, Cybernetics and Forceful Technology
it's time for trustless tech and libertarian cybernetics
Tor, or The Onion Router, began as a US Government project. more specifically, it began in the labs of the United States Navy as a means to protect US intelligence operations.
those of you unfamiliar with the history of Tor but familiar with its current use case might be surprised by this fact. Tor, most recently, has become the doorway to the “darkweb”, a collection of websites that are hosted more anonymously than the “clearnet” and allow for more anonymous browsing and hosting. without going too far into technology I don’t adequately understand, Tor achieves more privacy and anonymity by wrapping communications in multiple layers of encryption and sending it along a convoluted route to its eventual destination that obscures where the communications originally came from. each node in the network knows enough to be able to unwrap the next layer of encryption, essentially enough to send your packet on to the next destination.
this technology that began in the windowless halls of US government intelligence agencies has become a thorn in the government’s side now. their technology has been used by hackers, drug dealers and all other manner of Very Cool and Less Cool People to circumvent censorship and intellectual property laws to traffic drugs, steal people’s identities, leak state secrets about war crimes committed in the Middle East and lots more. it’s also been used to access scientific research, host blogs, anonymously browse benign social media sites and send perfectly benign emails.
Tor’s security model isn’t perfect. bad actors, to include the US government, can run exit nodes in an attempt to de-anonymize traffic. with enough big data capabilities, Tor alone will not keep you safe.
but it’s a solid start, and its a solid example of what I like to call Forceful Tech.
rights don’t exist
rights don’t exist. they’re a mirage. they’re a pinky promise on some really old paper.
in the US, we have had a long history of pretending like they’re more than that. we are promised privacy. we are promised security. we are promised the US military won’t be deployed on US soil for no reason. we are promised that our funds, assets and property won’t be seized without due process. we act like good, responsible, tax paying citizens and we are “guaranteed” these things.
these promises have always been made with one party’s fingers behind their back. not just in the US, everywhere.
the fingers that the state holds behind their back is their monopoly on violence. when two parties enter into an agreement together, they have to do so on equal footing. obviously the average US citizen does not have the same capability to do violence as the US military and law enforcement organizations, so the government gave us the court system and laws and norms to prop up this idea that our rights are guaranteed.
these court systems and laws, though, are still just the government shaking our hands with one arm and holding their crossed fingers behind their back. the legal system is there to ostensibly give us reason to believe that our rights are guaranteed, but they’re also there to ensure that one side of the bargain is definitely upheld, and they can just as easily be used to upend the other side.
we’ve seen this many times throughout history, but we’re seeing it comically clearly now. the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, has upheld multiple military deployments in (blue) US cities. other courts have upheld gross invasions of privacy under the guise of upholding the rights of private companies to do commerce, law enforcement organizations to “enforce the law”, protecting children, etc.
the norm is to uphold the spirit of the law, to protect the individual, but this is a farce so long as one side of the bargain has tanks, drones and the NSA, and the blanket right to use all of the above against their citizens, and the other side of the bargain has… an armalite rifle, some sign posters and markers, and $200 cash.
put more simply: if the only thing protecting your rights is a pinky promise, you don’t have rights, you have privileges. the idea of “the social contract” is a farce they teach you in high school and political science class to uphold the imagined legitimacy of institutional governance.
forceful technology: the closest thing to a guarantee
short of eradicating the state entirely, there is no real way to fully guarantee your rights, and even in an imagined world without a state, your ability to have rights as stated is limited by your ability and willingness, or the ability and willingness of your community, to defend those rights.
the closest thing we will ever get to guaranteed rights is by enshrining them in pseudo-inalienable Laws of Nature. if we make it mathematically impossible, or at least phenomenally improbable, to invade someone’s privacy, that is as close as we will ever get to “guaranteeing” your right to privacy. mathematics, instead of institutions, protect your privacy in encrypted communications systems. mathematics and institutions both have laws, but the laws of mathematics cannot simply be broken on a whim. the laws of physics cannot be broken depending on who makes it into the oval office.
“sure”, you say, “encryption is an easy win for this argument, but what about So Many Other Rights?”
a perfectly valid point, but let me point out that an enshrined right to privacy, especially when combined with adequate security culture, can be used to ensure your rights to many other things. if every citizen in America had the ability to anonymously contact a journalist and provide cryptographically verifiable proof that the documents they are leaking are legitimate, and the journalist and the leaker both paid due attention to security culture, we would take a massive stride in ensuring the right to a free press. yes, the journalistic institution is still vulnerable, as we’re seeing in the fact that Amazon is buying up a large swathe of the US media ecosystem, but protecting sources with Forceful Tech like encrypted communications goes a long way.
encryption can go a long way in guaranteeing your right to free speech (Truly Anonymized social media paired with Truly Anonymized VPN’s, for example), and there is significant potential in cryptographic systems being used to allow for Truly Anonymized and Cryptographically Verifiable voting systems to enshrine your right to vote.
let’s take this further, though.
cybernetic systems
cybernetics is a massively influential and incredibly heady and academic field of study that I’m only just dipping my toes into, but I know enough to have noted its potential in the realm of forceful tech. cybernetic systems are systems wherein a large swathe of data that would be valuable to run a society is made readily available, wherein a large part of the system is automated based upon readily available and verifiable information.
there are some concerns here that I’d like to address off the bat. one, there is a way to do cybernetics in a much more dangerous way. China has a system that is incredibly cybernetic, in that they collect and act upon a massive amount of data in their cities, much of which is gathered by a large surveillance and censorship apparatus. this cybernetic system has been used to destroy dissent and arrest opposition to the state. if you ask me “how can we prevent a cybernetic system from being used in an anti-progressive manner” my answer would be some combination of “we have to guide it in the right direction”, “Truly Anonymized data collection is possible” and “I do not know.”
there are other concerns, such as the problem of controlling for runaway systems. after much of the US stock market was automated into high frequency and automated trading systems, flash crashes wherein these automated systems made cascading decisions that brought the market to its knees in seconds occurred more frequently. financial systems that lean toward larger data collection also, as stated above, can lead to further financial censorship and surveillance. as I stated before, my answer to these concerns are that we need to ensure we develop safeguards to guide these systems in a progressive manner, that we can collect Truly Anonymized data and “I do not know.”
cybernetic systems have the potential to revolutionize both our ability to make data-backed decisions, and our ability to manage communities and societies without central powers. if we had systems that increasingly made decisions on our behalf with access to verifiable and up-to-date data and applied that approach to agricultural systems, we would be able to optimize for crop yield and soil health. applying this approach to logistics infrastructure would allow for faster shipping times, less waste and less overhead. all this can be done without ceding more power to a central authority that can wield its monopoly on violence against its people.
cybernetic systems wielded by a Truly Libertarian Society can be the mysterious third thing between the powers of right libertarianism (corpofascism) and centralized authoritarian governments (state communism, theocratic fascism, etc.) cybernetic systems are the application of Forceful Technology to the cause of organizing, running and supporting progressive society.