The Julian Assange Show: Episode 8

Transcript

THE WORLD TOMORROW – EPISODE 8

CYPHERPUNKS – PART 1

GENERIC TITLES – JA VOICE-OVER CUT WITH AUDIO FROM NEWS CLIPS

00:01

I am Julian Assange.

00:05

Editor of WikiLeaks.

00:06

We’ve exposed the world’s secrets;

00:10

Been attacked by the powerful.

00:18

For 500 days now I have been detained without charge, but that hasn’t stopped us.

00:26

Today we are on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow.

PROGRAMME SPECIFIC INTRO - JA VOICEOVER

NONE

PROGRAMME

00.33 – 00.38

ON SCREEN GRAPHIC: C Y P H E R P U N K S

00.39

A furious war over the future of our society is underway. For most this war is invisible. On the one side a network of governments and corporations that spy on everything we do. On the other, the Cypherpunks – virtuoso activists who make codes and take public policy. This is the movement that spawned WikiLeaks.

01.03

I am joined by three Cypherpunk friends; from Germany, Andy Müller-Maguhn, from France, Jeremie Zimmermann and from the United States, Jacob Appelbaum. I want to ask them, is the future of the world the future of the internet?

01.20

ON SCREEN GRAPHIC: PART 1

01.21

I want to look at the three basic freedoms; so, when I interviewed the head of Hezbollah Hasan Nasrallah there is a question as to whether Hezbollah...

JACOB A

What is that up there?

Well he has his own kind of house arrest as well because he can't leave his secret location.

JACOB A

I’m not sure I would make that comparison. Please don't make that comparison.

You can edit that out right?

01.44

So, I want to go back to these three fundamental freedoms: freedom of communication, freedom of movement and freedom of economic interaction. So, if we look at the transition of our global society onto the internet when we made that transition, the freedom of personal movement is unchanged essentially, the freedom of communication is enhanced tremendously in some ways in that we now can communicate to many more people. On the other hand, it is also tremendously degraded because there is no privacy any more and so our communications can be spied on and are spied on and stored, and as a result can be used against us…

02.27

AMM

Privacy is available, but it comes at a cost, yeah.

02.29

Yeah so in a sort of militarisation of these sort of interactions and our economic interactions have suffered precisely the same consequences.

02.39

AMM

Julian, it’s not wrong you are saying but I am not sure you can really distinguish between point two and three because the internet as we have it today is infrastructure for our social, our economic, our cultural, our political, all our things. So, however the communication architecture is, the money is just bits, I mean this is just a usage of the internet.

03.04

Andy, you've studied for years cryptographic telephones, secure phone calls, mass surveillances occurring in relation to telecommunications. I mean, what is the state of the art as far as the government intelligence, um, bulk surveillance industry is concerned.

03.24

AMM

Well yes, mass storage meaning um storing all telecommunication has become...

so that's all voice calls and...

AMM

Yes all voice calls, all internet connections. Actually, what you have to see is the…if you compare the military budget to the cost of surveillance and cost also of self cyber warriors, er, normal weapon systems cost a lot of money if you compare that to cyber warriors or to mass surveillance like that is very cheap, that is super cheap compared to just one aircraft, one military aircraft between....

…A hundred million.

04.06

Yeah but there are two questions here we also have this example of Eagle, the system sold by the French company Amesys that was sold to Gaddafi’s Libya and on the document that, you know, the commercial document, it was written nationwide interception mechanism. So that’s a big box that you put somewhere and you just listen to all your people communications. So, we can discuss about the technology and I’m interested very much by that...

04.35

And this, 10 years ago, this was seen as a fantasy. This was seen to be something that only paranoid people believed in. But the cost of doing it, has now decreased to the point where even countries like Libya with relatively few resources was doing it with French technology.

04.53

Exactly. So now, that's a fact. Technology enables total surveillance of every communication. Then there is the other side of that coin, is what we do with it. We could admit that for what you call the tactical one there are some indeed some legitimate use - investigators investigating on bad guys and networks of bad guys and so on may need under the supervision of the judicial authority, er, to be able to use such um such tools. But, the question is, yeah, where to draw this judicial supervision, where to draw the control that the citizens can have over the use of those technologies and this is a policy issue. And when we get to those policy issues and we were evoking that earlier, you have politicians that are asked to just sign something and don't understand the underlying technology.

05.45

JACOB A

Which is why we see so much hype about cyber war, is that some people that seem to be in the authority about war start talking about technology as if they understand it. And, all these people talking about cyber war and not one of them, not a single one is talking about cyber peace building or anything related to peace building, they are always talking about war because that's their business and so they are trying to rope technology into that and so when we have no control of our technology these people that wish to use it for, for their ends, for war specifically that is a recipe for some pretty scary stuff.

06.14

So, I see that the there’s now a militarisation of cyber space because we have interception across all national border points, er...

JACOB A

Target systems...

06.22

...and we have militarised computer hackers operating in bulk with programmes to attack sections of the internet and spy on sections of the internet.

06.35

AMM

May I oppose about the use of hackers in this context. You are talking about soldiers using computers as military means, this is not hacking and this is not hackers.

06.47

Alright let's not get into hacker definition. But, the point is that we have civilians lives. We don’t see tanks coming into or this may be a special lounge room actually but most people don't see tanks or bugs coming into their lounge room normally or even down their local road. Er but now we take our personal lives and we put all, we put it all on Facebook, we communicate using the internet, we communicate using mobile phones which are now meshed to the internet and the military has control or the intelligence agencies have control of that data and studying that data so this is some kind of militarisation of civilian life.

AMM

Absolutely.

07.29

There is a real question of whether or not we should um, um regulate the fact of just buying and owning those technologies or using it .... A nuclear weapon, you cannot sell that easily a nuclear weapon and some countries may want to build one, may have problems or something and that's the technology that is regulated and that they use that is being done with it. When we talk about weapon systems. So, I think the debate might be about er whether or not these technologies should be considered as war.

JACOB A

.... is weapons and there is no question that it is a weapon in places like Syria or in places like Libya. right they specifically use this surveillance equipment to target people politically in Libya, they targeted people in the United Kingdom using French equipment that would be illegal to run in France and they sold it knowingly.

AMM

They'd never do that right?

08.25

JACOB A

Well they were caught with their own internal documents in the spy files right?

Jeremy….

08.31

Statesmen and civilians is indeed a major issue which challenges the very structure of all democracies and the way it functions but is it the proper time now to evoke also that there is private surveillance and potentially private mass collection of data and actually just look at Google. Google knows, if you are a standard Google user Google knows who your communicating with, who you know, what you are researching, potentially your sexual orientation, your religion and philosophical [talked over by German] more than your mother and maybe more than yourself. Google knows when you're online and when you are not.

AMM

Do you know what you looked for two years, three days and four hours ago - you don't know, Google knows, no?

No. Actually I try not to use Google any more for these very reasons.

09.49

But what I’m saying it is not only the state sponsored surveillance it is the, the question of privacy, the way that data is being handled by third parties and the actual knowledge that people have of what is being made with the data.

Can you talk about Facebook as well, Jeremy.

10.07

Well, actually I don't use Facebook so I don’t know much about it. But no with Facebook you see the recent behaviour of users who are very happy to hand out any kind of personal data and of course when you see teenagers you know sending pictures of them being drunk or whatever, they may not have this vision that it means the whole rest of the world, potentially, for very, very long period of time that will have access to this data. And so Facebook makes its business by blurring this line between privacy, friends, publicity and is er even storing the data when you think that it is only meant for your friends and the people you love.

10.55WIN

This line between government and corporation I mean this is blurred, I mean if you look at the expansion in the military contractor sector in the West over the past ten years. The National Security Agency which is biggest spy agency in the world it had, it had ten primary contractors on its books that it worked with now it has, two years ago, has over one thousand so there is a spreading out, a smearing out of the border between what is government....

11.25

And it can be argued that US spying agencies have access to all of Google's stored data.

Well they do.

And all of Facebook data. So, in a way Facebook and Google maybe extensions.

11.35

Do you have a supeona?

JACOB A

I mean I know that the...

11.40

We just got two yesterday.

11.42

JACOB A

In our Twitter case so far…which unfortunately I can’t really talk about because I don’t actually live in a free country…

11.50

These orders also have gagging, a gag component? That’s been found to be unconstitutional hasn't it?

JACOB A

Maybe not right. You know for the Twitter case it’s public that we lost the stay where we said that disclosing this data to the government would do irreparable harm and they can never forget this data once they receive it. And you know, their government said yeah well your stay is denied. Twitter must disclose this data And you know, we are in the process of appeal specifically about the secrecy of docketing and I can't talk about that because we are in the process of appeal. But as it stands right now, the court found that they said on the internet that you have no expectation of privacy when you willingly reveal information to a third party, and by the way everyone on the internet is a third party. And, they said it was a one to one map with banking, privacy and with you know dialling a telephone. You willingly disclose the number to the phone company by using it and you knew that, right? But, using a telephone, you obviously are saying, I have no expectation of privacy by typing those numbers. I mean, there’s even less explicit connection to the machine. People don’t understand how the internet works. They don’t understand telephone networks either. But the courts have consistently ruled that this is the case. It’s absolute madness to imagine that we give up all of our personal data to these companies and then the companies have essentially become privatised secret police where, in the case of Facebook, we have democratised surveillance and instead of paying people off the way the Statsi did in your country, we reward them as a culture by, you know, they get laid now. You know, they report on their friends and are like, hey, yo, so and so got engaged…oh, so and so broke up…oh, I know who to call now, right? And, this is the difference between a privacy by policy and a privacy by design approach to actually creating secure systems. I mean when you’re trying to target people, and you know you live in a country that explicitly targets people then you... Facebook put its servers in Gaddafi's Libya or put it in Assad's Syria that would be absolutely negligent. So knowing that’s reality, these companies have some serious ethical liability that stems from the fact that they are building these systems and they have made the economic choice basically to sell their users out and this isn't, this isn't even a technical thing. This isn’t about technology at all it is about economics and they have decided that it is more important to collaborate with the state and to sell out their users and to violate their privacy and to be a part of the system of control to be paid back for being a part of the surveillance culture, to be part of that culture of control than to be resistant to it and so they build it, they become a part of it, they are complicit and liable.

14.22

I want to look at this, what I see as a, as a difference between a US um Cypherpunk perspective and um the European perspective, which I think is quite interesting. So, the US second amendment is the right to bear arms. Just recently watching some footage that a friend shot in the US on the right to bear arms and right above a fire arms store it’s “Democracy locked and loaded”. And that that’s the way that you ensure that you don’t have a totalitarian regimes, that people are armed and if they are pissed off enough, er then they simply take their arms and they retake control, er, by force. So, if we look back to this declaration that code-making, providing um secret cryptographic codes that the government couldn’t spy on was in fact ammunition in this big war that we fought in the 1990s to try and make cryptography available to everyone which we largely won actually.

15.24

JACOB A

In the West?

15.26

Yeah, in the West. Which we largely won and it is in every browser now perhaps being backdoored and subverted in different kinds of ways. Um, that this notion of you cannot trust a government to implement the policies that it says that it is implementing and so we must provide the underlying tools, cryptographic tools that we control as a sort of use of force in that a government no matter how hard it tries if the cyphers are good, er, cannot break into your communications directly. Maybe can put a bug in your house or whatever....

16.05

JACOB A

Force of authority is derived from violence. One must acknowledge with cryptography, no amount of violence will ever solve the math problem. And, this is the important key. It doesn't mean you can't be tortured, it doesn't mean that they can’t try to bug your house or subvert it some way but it means if they find an encrypted message it doesn't matter if they have the force of the authority behind everything that they do, they cannot solve that math problem. This is the thing though that is totally non-obvious to people that are non-technical and it has to be driven home. If we could solve all those math problems it would be a different story and of course the government will be able to solve those math problems if anyone could but that is the difference, right, it is actually a thing that changes it...

16.41

But it just a fact, it just happens to be a fact about reality such like that you can build atomic bombs, that there are mass problems that you can create that even the strongest state cannot directly, directly break and I think that was tremendously appealing, er, to California libertarians, um, and others who believed in this sort of democracy locked and loaded and here was a very intellectual way of doing it of a couple of individuals with cryptography standing up to the full power of the strongest superpower in the world and we are still doing it that little bit but I wonder, um, you know, I have a view that the likely outcome is that those are really tremendously big economic forces and tremendously big political forces like Jeremy was saying and that the natural efficiencies of these technologies compared to the number of human beings will mean that slowly we will end up into a global totalitarian surveillance society by totalitarian I mean a total surveillance and that perhaps there’ll just be the last free living people and these last free living people are those people who understand how to use this. Er, cryptography to defend against this complete total surveillance. Are we headed for that sort scenario?

18.07

First of all, if you look at it from a market perspective I am convinced that there is a marketing privacy that has been mostly left unexplored so maybe there will be an economic drive for companies to develop tools that will give users the individual ability to control that data and communication. Maybe this is one way that we can solve that problem, I’m not sure it can work alone but this may happen and we may not know it yet. Um, also it is interesting to see um what you are describing is the power of the hackers in a way, hackers to the primary sense of the term - not a criminal. A hacker is a technology enthusiast, is somebody who likes to understand how technology works, not to be trapped into technology and make it work better. I suppose you two when you were five or seven you had a screw driver and tried to open devices to understand what it was like inside, no? So this is what being a hacker is and hackers build the internet for many reasons, also because it was fun and um have developed it and have given the internet to everybody else so companies like Google and Facebook saw the opportunity to build business models based on capturing users personal data but still we see a form of power in the hands of hackers and what is of my primary interest these days is that we see these hackers gaining power even in the political arenas.

20.51

This political radicalisation of internet youth over the past two years especially, you have been all over the world talking to people who want anonymity, want privacy in relation to their own government and you must have seen in many different countries this phenomena. Is it something significant?

21.09

JACOB A

Sure I mean I think it is absolutely significant. I went to Tunisia after Ben Ali's regime fell.

And, you see that there’s a sort of awakening about that. I think you are wrong to say that is just happened in the last couple of years and I’m sorry to do this to you on your own show but, you know, you are part of the radicalisation of my generation, like I'm like a third generation Cypherpunk if I were in that and you know the work that you and Ralf did on the Rubberhose file system was part of what inspired me to work on cryptosystems and you know the crypto file system he wrote was in response to things like the, you know, regulatory investigative powers in the United Kingdom where they are basically the state has decided negative regulation is the solution to cryptography where they can you know, you know take, take your password. You know, in Julian's case when they created this it was because oppressive regimes would torture people for pass phrases you had to be give up different pass phrases in order to comply with their torture and I realised when I saw that this existed that you could use technology to empower every day people to change the world and the Cypherpunks going back, I mean this is, this is really it goes far, far back. You know the old mailing list, the Cypherpunk mailing list with Tim May and reading your old posts on the Cypherpunks mailing list, I mean that is what started a whole generation of people really becoming more radicalised because people realised that they weren't atomised any more and that they could literally take some time to write some software that if someone used it they could empower millions of people and there are just some unintended consequences on how that played out because the people that created Google, they didn't start out to create Google to create the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed but in effect that has what has been created and as soon as people start to realise it they will start sending in those national security letters, right?

22.56

I think there are three crucial points in what you just said, um...

JACOB A

Just three!

Yeah, among others....

one of them is authoritarian regime and the powers that authoritarian regime have in an era of digital technologies. In the case of the Ben Ali regime, it is obvious er in so many regime as of today it is obvious that you can decide what people can learn about or who they can communicate with and this is of tremendous power and this should be opposed. And the internet, free internet, is a tool for opposing that, um. Another that you, well that’s your area of expertise, er and it’s building tools and building tools to, to, building better technology, technology that can try to route around such problems as censorship but basically building tools that are part of that infrastructure that help us, um, topple dictators like that. And yet another issue, um, is the political storytelling, the pretext that are used every day by politicians, er, through the media, are we all going to die of terrorism therefore we need patriot act, er, child pornographers are everywhere their are paedo-nazis all over the internet therefore we need censorship [all laugh]...

24.24

JACOB A

Those damn paedo-nazis.

24.28

Paedo-nazi yeah - paedonazi.com is reserved already. Um and artists are going to die and there won’t be cinema any more therefore we need to give Hollywood the power to censor the internet and so on and so on. So um I think, here again the internet is a tool, er, is, er, internet may be the antidote to that political storytelling. Er, the political storytelling relies on emotionality and relies on the immediate term that is of extremely short span. One information appears and disappears 24 hours afterwards and is replaced by another and so on. With the internet, I got the feeling that we are building what I call internet time. As the great internet never forgets, we can build over years, day after day, dossier and we can elaborate and we can... this is what we have been doing for the last three years with ACTA. So we built our own political line with internet time, with precise analysis, with hard work, with connecting people together to participate in that.

23.40

We’ve won the narrative but behind the scenes, secret bilateral treaties have been set up which are achieving the same result any way, it is just subverted....

25.50

JACOB A

One thing that I think really has to be pointed out is that, you know, the people that are fighting against ACTA are in fact they are using technology and the technology enables them to resist but it is in fact the agency of everyday people that is important to understand here and techno-babble is not the thing that is important. What matters is people actually getting involved in that narrative and changing it while they still have the power to do so and the human aspect of that is in fact the most important part of that and the fact that WikiLeaks has released documents that enable that, that it is the information sharing that is important but it is also the people that take that important information and actually move it because there it at least the argument that we do live in a democracy, that we are free, that it is supposed to be that we are governed through consent and so if everybody understands what is going on and we find it is not something we consent to then it is very difficult to keep up that and just pass those as laws and do it without the consent of those that are governed.

26.50

It is about increasing the political costs of taking those bad decisions for the ones who take them and we can do that collectively with a free internet as long as we have between our hands.

Wait....

Before you go to negative please…

END CREDITS

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