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Transcript of secret
meeting between Julian
Assange and Google CEO
Eric Schmidt
Friday April 19, 2013
On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took
place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whowas under house arrest in rural UK at the time and
Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Also in attendance wasJared Cohen, a former Secretary
of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson,
Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice
at the US State Department and current
Communications Director of the International Crisis
Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Councilon Foreign Relations.
Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to
discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their
forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.
We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of
the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter
half, is revealing.
You can download the recording here(ogg)
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[beginning of tape]
Well do you want us to start eating?ES
Well, we can do both.JA
Yeah, is that ok?ES
So this is... what's the date?JA
June 23rdLS
...June 23rd. This is a recording between
Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt and...?JA
Lisa ShieldsLS
...Lisa Shields. To be used in a book by
Eric Schmidt, due to be published by
Knopf in October 2012. I have been given
a guarantee that I will see the transcript
and will be able to adjust it for accuracy
and clarity.
JA
Can we start... I want to talk a little aboutThor. Right. The sort of, the whole Navy
network and...ES
Tor or Thor?JA
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Yeah, actually I mean Tor. Uh...ES
And Odin as well.JA
That's right, sorry. Tor, uh, and the Navy
network, and I don't actually understand
how all of that worked. And the reason I'm
mentioning this is I'm...I'm fundamentally
interested in what happens with that
technology as it evolves. Right. And so,
the problem I would assert, is that if
you're trying to receive data you need to
have a guarantee of anonymity to the
sender, you need to have a secure channel
to the recipient, the recipient needs to be
replicated, you know... What I'd like you to
do is if you could just talk a bit about that
architecture, what you did in WikiLeaks
technically, you know, with the sort of the
technical innovations that were needed
and maybe also what happens. You know,how does it evolve? Technology always
evolves.
ES
Let me first frame this. I looked at
something that I had seen going on with
the world. Which is that I thought there
were too many unjust acts.
JA
OKES
And I wanted there to be more just acts,
and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort ofJA
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say, well what are your philosophical
axioms for this? And I say I do not need to
consider them. This is simply my
temperament. And it is an axiom because
it is that way. And so that avoids, then,
getting into further unhelpful discussionsabout why you want to do something. It is
enough that I do. So in considering how
unjust acts are caused and what tends to
promote them and what promotes just
acts I saw that human beings are basically
invariant. That is that their inclinations
and biological temperament haven't
changed much over thousands of years
and so therefore the only playing field left
is: what do they have? And what do they
know? And "have" is something that is
fairly hard to influence, so that is what
resources do they have at their disposal?
And how much energy they can harness,
and what are the supplies and so on. But
what they know can be affected in a
nonlnear way because when one personconveys information to another they can
convey on to another and another and so
on in a way that nonlinear and so you can
affect a lot of people with a small amount
of information. And therefore you can
change the behaviour of many people with
a small amount of information. So the
question then arises as to what kinds of
information will produce behaviour which
is just? And disincentivise behaviour
which is unjust? So all around the world
there are people observing different parts
of what is happening to them locally. And
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there are other people that are receiving
information that they haven't observed
first hand. And in the middle there are
people who are involved in moving
information from the observers to the
people who will act on information. Theseare three separate problems that are all
coupled together. I felt that there was a
difficulty in taking observations and
putting them in an efficient way into a
distribution system which could then get
this information to people who could act
upon it. And so you can argue that
companies like Google are involved, for
example, in this "middle" business of
taking... of moving information from
people who have it to people who want it.
The problem I saw was that this first step
was crippled. And often the last step as
well when it came to information that
governments were inclined to censor. We
can look at this whole process as the
Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by theFourth Estate. And so you have some kind
of... pipeline... and... So I have this
description which is... which is partly
derived from my experiences in quantum
mechanics about looking at the flow of
particular types of information which will
effect some change in the end. The
bottleneck to me appeared to me to be
primarily in the acquisition of information
that would go on to produce changes that
were just. In a Fourth Estate context the
people who acquire information are
sources. People who work information and
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distribute it are journalists and publishers.
And people who act on it... is everyone. So
that's a high level construct, but of course
it then comes down to practically how do
you engineer a system that solves that
problem? And not just a technical system,but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and
is an attempt - although still very young -
at a total system.
For all three phases?ES
To deal with... not for all three phases but
for the political component, the
philosophical component and the
engineering component in pushing out
first component. Politically that means
anonymizing and protecting... Sorry.
Technically that means anonymizing and
protecting sources in a wide variety of
ways. Politically that also means
protecting them politically, andincentivizing them in a political manner.
Saying that their work is valuable, and
encouraging people to take it up. And then
there is also a legal aspect. What are the
best laws that can be created in the best
jurisdictions to operate this sort of stuff
from? And practical everyday legal
defense. On the technical front, our first
prototype was engineered for a very
adverse situation where publishing would
be extremely difficult and our only
effective defense in publishing would be
anonymity. Where sourcing is difficult. As
JA
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it still currently is for the national security
sector. And where internally we had a very
small and completely trusted team.
So publishing means the question of the
site itself? And making the materialpublic?
ES
Yeah. Making the primary source material
public. That is what I mean by publishing.JA
So the first step was to make that
correctly.ES
It was clear to me that all over the world
publishing is a problem. And... Whether
that is through self censorship or overt
censorship.
JA
Sorry, just you're gonna have to... is that
because of fear of retribution by the
governments, you know? Or all...
ES
It's mostly self censorship. In fact I would
say it's probably the most significant one,
historically, has been economic
censorship. Where it is simply not
profitable to publish something. There is
no market for it. That is I describe as a
censorship pyramid. It's quite interesting.
So, on the top of the pyramid there are themurders of journalists and publishers. And
the next level there is political attacks on
journalists and publishers. So you think,
what is a legal attack? A legal attack is
simply a delayed use of coercive force.
JA
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Sure.ES
Which doesn't necessarily result in
murder but may result in incarceration or
asset seizure. So the next level down, and
remember the volume... the area of the
pyramid.... volume of the pyramid! The
volume of the pyramid increases
significantly as you go down from the
peak. And in this example that means that
the number of acts of censorship also
increases as you go down. So there are
very few people who are murdered, thereare a few people who suffer legal... there
is a few number of public legal attacks on
individuals and corporations, and then at
the next level there is a tremendous
amount of self censorship, and this self
censorship occurs in part because people
don't want to move up into the upper
parts of the pyramid. They don't want to
come to legal attacks or uses of coercive
force. But they also don't want to be
killed.
JA
Right. I see.ES
So that discourages people from
behaving... and then there are other forms
of self censorship that are concerned
about missing out on business deals,
missing out on promotions and those are
even more significant because they are
lower down the pyramid. At the very
JA
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bottom - which is the largest volume - is
all those people who cannot read, do not
have access to print, do not have access to
fast communications or where there is no
profitable industry in providing that. Okay.
So we decided to deal with the top of thiscensorship pyramid. The top two sections:
the threats of violence, and the delayed
threats of violence that are represented by
the legal system. In some ways that is the
hardest case. In some ways it is the
easiest case. It is the easiest case because
it is clear cut when things are being
censored there, or not. It is also the
easiest because the volume of censorship
is relatively small, even if the per event
significance is very high. So in... Before
WikiLeaks had... although of course I had
some previous political connections of my
own from other activities, we didn't have
that many friends. We didn't have
significant political allies. And we didn't
have a worldwide audience that waslooking to see how we were doing. So we
took the position that we would need to
have a publishing system whose only
defense was anonymity. That is it had no
financial defense, it had no legal defense,
and it had no political defense. Its
defenses were purely technical. So that
meant a system that was distributed at its
front with many domain names and a fast
ability to change those domain names. A
caching system, and at the back tunnelling
through the Tor network to hidden
servers...
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So... if I could talk just a little bit about
this, so... You could switch DNS... your
website names very quickly, you use the
tunnelling to get back... to communicate
among these replicas? Or this is for
distribution?
ES
We had sacrificial front nodes, that were
very fast to set up, very quick to set up,
that we nonetheless did place in relatively
hospitable jurisdictions like Sweden. And
those fast front nodes were fast because
there was no... very few hops between
them and the people reading them.That's... an important lesson that I had
learned from things that I did before, that
being a Sherman tank is not always an
advantage, because you are not
manouevrable and you are slow. A lot of
the protection for publishers is publishing
quickly. You get the information out
quickly it is very well read, the incentive
for people to go after you in relation to
that specific piece of information is
actually zero. There may be incentives for
them to go after you to teach a lesson to
other people who might defy their
authority or teach a future lesson to your
organization about defiance of authority.
JA
So, again, in constructing the argumentyou were concerned that governments or
whatever would attack the front ends of
this thing through whatever... denial of
service attacks or blocking, basically
ES
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filtering them out, which is essentially is
commonly done. So an important aspect of
this was to always be available.
Always be available in one particular way
or another. Now that's not a.. it's a battlethat we have mostly won but we haven't
completely won it. Within a few weeks the
Chinese government had handed us to
their ban list. We had hundreds of domain
names, of various sorts, the domain names
that were registered with very very large
DNS providers, so if there was IP level
based filtering it would whack out another
five hundred thousand domains and that
would create a political back pressure that
would undo it. However DNS based
filtering still hits us in China because the
most common names - the ones that are
closest to "WikiLeaks" - the name that
people can communicate easily - they are
all filtered by the Chinese government.
JA
Of course they are.ES
And any domain with "WikiLeaks"
anywhere in it, no matter where it is, is
filtered. So that means there has to be a
variant that they haven't yet discovered.
But people... the variant has to be known
widely enough for people to go there. So
there is a catch 22.
JA
That's a structural problem with the
naming of the internet, but the ChineseES
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[background noise. JC entering]
would simply do content filtering on you.
Well, HTTPS worked for about a year and
a half.JA
Okay.ES
Worked quite well actually. And then
changing up IPs, because they were... theChinese internet filtering system is quite
baroque, and they have evolved it...
sometimes they do things manually and
sometimes they do it in an automated way,
in terms of adding IPs to the list based on
domain names, and then we did... we had
a quite interesting battle where we saw
that they were looking up our IPs, and we
see that these requests came from a
certain DNS block range in China.
Whenever we saw that we just then
returned...
JA
Ha ha ha ha ha. That's clever. Ha ha ha ha
ha.ES
...different IPs. I was actually thinking wecould return Public Security Bureau IPs!JA
This is Jared Cohen, by the way.ES
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[Chatter]
[chatter]
That's alright!JA
We're actually, we could use...ES
It's a useful day to drive!JA
We've actually been having a perfectly
wonderful time.ES
I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.SM
Why don't you just. Scott sit there, and
then you sit here, next to me...LS
Are you joining us?SM
Julian was kind enough... we... did not
bring a tape recorder!LS
Ha ha ha ha ha...
ESQuite embarrassing that you're you ask to
interview someone and you have to
borrow a tape recorder.
LS
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[laughter]
Um!JC
A friend of mine did an interview...JA
Hi!LS
...in Fiji, the staff of... during General
Rabuka's coup. Where he had General
Rabuka's second in command admit, on
tape, that the CIA had paid him off...
JA
Wow.JC
... and he got back. And he was like, yes!
This is the story of the decade! And the
tape had failed. I have a few of these. You
should always...
JA
Always always have your own...JC
For Scott and Jared, we spent a fair
amount of time just sort of chatting about
Google, and I went up to introduce Lisa... I
failed to properly articulate what abrilliant book we are working on.
ES
Ha ha ha!LS
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JA playing with Tomato on table],
naming of things is very important. The
naming of human intellectual work and
our entire intellectual record is possibly
the most important thing. So we all have
words for different objects, like "tomato."
But we use a simple word, "tomato,"instead of actually describing every little
aspect of this god damn tomato...
...because it takes too long. And because it
takes too long to describe this tomatoprecisely we use an abstraction so we can
think about it so we can talk about it. And
we do that also when we use URLs. Those
are frequently used as a short name for
some human intellectual content. And we
build all of our civilization, other than on
bricks, on human intellectual content. And
so we currently have system with URLs
where the structure we are building our
civilization out of is the worst kind of
melting plasticine imaginable. And that is
a big problem.
JA
And you would argue a different
name-space structure, involving...
properly...
ES
I think there is a fundamental confusion,
an overloading of the current URL.JA
Yep. Absolutely.ES
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So, on the one hand we have live dynamic
services and organizations... well there's
three things. Live dynamic services.
Organizations that run those services, so
that you are referring to a hierarchy. You
are referring to a system of control. An
organization, a government, that
represents an organized evolving group.
And on the other hand you have artefacts.
You have human intellectual artefacts that
have the ability to be completely
independent from any system of human
control. They are out there in the Platonic
realm somehow. And shouldn't in fact bereferred to by an organization. They
should be referred to in a way that is
intrinsic to the intellectual content, that
arises out of the intellectual content! I
think that is an inevitable and very
important way forward, and where this...
where I saw that this was a problem was
dealing with a man by the name of
Nahdmi Auchi. A few years ago was listed
by one of the big business magazines in
the UK as the fifth richest man in the UK.
In 1980 left Iraq. He'd grown rich under
Saddam Hussein's oil industry. And is
alleged by the Italian press to be involved
in a load of arms trading there, he has
over two hundred companies run out of
his Luxembourg holding unit. And severalthat we discovered in Panama. He had
infiltrated the British Labour political
establishment to the degree that the 20th
business birthday in London he was given
JA
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Elf-Acquitaine scandal. Where he had
been involved in taking kickbacks on
selling the invaded Kuwaiti governments'
oil refineries in order to fund their
operations while Iraq had occupied it. So
the Guardian pulled three articles from2003. So they were five years old. They
had been in the Guardian's archive for 5
years. Without saying anything. If you go
to those URLs you will not see "removed
due to legal threats." You will see "page
not found." And one from the Telegraph.
And a bunch from some American
publications. And bloggers, and so on.
Important bits of history, recent history,
that were relevant to an ongoing
presidential campaign in the United States
were pulled out of the intellectal record.
They were also pulled out of the
Guardian's index of articles. So why? The
Guardian's published in print, and you can
go to the library and look up those
articles. They are still there in the library.How would you know that they were there
in the library? To look up, because they
are not there in the Guardian's index. Not
only have they ceased to exist, they have
ceased to have ever existed. Which is the
modern implementation of Orwell's dictum
that he controls the present controls the
past and he who controls the past controls
the future. Because the past is stored
physically in the present. All records of
the past. This issue of preserving
politically salient intellectual content
while it is under attack is central to what
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WikiLeaks does -- because that is what we
are after! We are after those bits that
people are trying to suppress, because we
suspect, usually rightly, that they're
expending economic work on suppressing
those bits because they perceive that theyare going to induce some change.
So it's the evidence of the suppression
that you look for in order to determine
value?
JC
Yeah, that is a very good - not precisely -
but it is a very good...JA
Well, tell me precisely. Ha ha.JC
Well, it's not precise... it's not always
right. It's a very suggestive...JA
It's not perfect!ES
It's not perfect. It is a very suggestive
signal that the people who know the
information best - ie. the people who
wrote it - are spending economic work in
preventing it going into the historical
record, preventing it going into the public.
Why spend so much work doing that? It's
more efficient to just let everyone have it.
You don't have to spend time guarding it,
but also you are more efficient in terms of
your organization because all the positive
unintended consequences of the
JA
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information going around can come out.
So...
No no no, I wanted water, but Eric took
mine. Ha ha.JC
So we selectively go after the information,
and that information is selectively
suppressed inside organizations and very
frequently if it is a powerful group as soon
as someone tries to publish it it is also
suppressed.
JA
So, just, I want to know a bit more aboutthe technology. So in this structure, you
basically have a, you basically can put up
a new front very quickly and you have
stored replicas that are distributed. One of
the questions I have is how do you decide
which ISPs...
ES
OK. That's a very good question.
JAYeah, it is a pretty complicated question.
ES
Yeah, so I will give you an example of how
not to choose them. So we dealt with a
case in the Cacos islands where there was
a great little group called the TCI journal.
The Turks and Cacos Islands Journal,
which is sort of a best use case of the
internet. So who are they? Well they are a
bunch of legal reformers, logically minded
people in the Turks and Cacos islands,
JA
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who lived there, who saw that overseas
property developers were coming in and
somehow getting crowned land, very
cheaply and building big high rises on it
and so on. They were campaigning for
good governance and trying to exposethese people. It's a classic best use case
for the internet. Cheap publication means
that we can have many more types of
publishers. Which means that you can
have self subsidizing publishers. So you
can have people that are able to publish
purely for ideological reasons or for
altruistic reasons, because the costs of
altruism in relation to publishing are not
so high that you cannot do it. They were
hounded out of the Turks and Caicos
islands pretty quickly. And they moved
their servers to India. The Turkish
property developer they had been busy
exposing then hired correspondent
lawyers in London who hired
correspondent lawyers in India whohounded them out of their ISP there, they
then moved to Malaysia, they got hounded
out same deal there. The ISP, they became
non profitable to the ISP as soon as the
legal letters started coming in. They went
to the US, and once they were in the US
their US ISP didn't fold - they picked one
of the better ones - and it didn't collapse
as fast. However it was noticed that they
were using a Gmail address. The editors
were anonymous because of the threats.
Who was the responsible party? It was
anonymous, although their columnists
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often were not. And so a suit was filed in
California, and as part of filing suit they
started issuing subpoenas. They issued a
subpoena for Gmail. And the result was
that Gmail... Google told them that they
had to come to California to defend,otherwise it would be handed over. These
are little guys in the Turks and Caicos
Islands trying to stop corruption in their
country against property developer with
hundreds of millions. How can they go to
California to fight off a libel suit, to fight
off a subpoena which is part of a bogus
libel suit? Well, of course they can't go. We
managed to arrange some lawyers for
them and there just happened to be a nice
little bit of the California statute code that
addressed this precise situation which is
when someone publishes something and
then a subpoena is issued to try and get
their identity--you can't do it and you've
got to pay costs. That was a nice little
legal hook that someone had introduced.
The problem is..ES
And Google didn't send any lawyers to
help them either!JA
Yeah, we guessed... [indistinct]
entertainment industry in California.JC
That's an example of what happens if you
have pretty bright guys; they had a good
Indian technical guy. They had bright
JA
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political guys. You have a decent technical
guy, you have decent political guys, you
come together to try and fix corruption in
your country using the internet as a
publishing mechanism, what happens? You
are hounded, from one end of the earth tothe other! These guys were lucky enough
that they had enough resources that they
could survive this hounding, and they
ended up finding some friends and settling
into a position where they are alright. For
us this was a matter of looking at what
ISPs had survived pressure, also because I
was connected to this role of politics and
technology and anticensorship for a long
time and I knew some of the players. So
we had friends at ISPs, within the ISPs,
that if you like we had already
ideologically infiltrated so we knew that
they would fight in our corner if there was
a request come in and we knew if there
was a decent chance that subpoenas were
served, even with a gag order, we'd soonfind out about it. So how can someone do
it who is not in that world. Well the
answer is, not easily. You can look at ISPs
that WikiLeaks has used or is currently
using, or that the Pirate Bay has used, or
other groups that are tremendously under
attack. In the case of this little ISP, and it
is often a little ISP that is fighting, take
the little ISP PRQ in Sweden that was
founded by Gottfried, whose nickname is
Anakata, he is one of the technical brains
behind the Pirate Bay, so they had
developed a niche industry, also Bahnhof
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an ISP in Sweden of dealing with refugee
publishers, and that is the correct word
for it, the correct phrase for it, that they
are publishing refugees. They had at that
time other than us Malaysia Today, which
had to flee, the American Homeowner'sAssociation, which had to flee -- from
property developers in the United States,
the Cavatz Centre, a Caucasian, a Caucus
news center which is constantly under
attack by the Russians. In fact PRQ was
raided several times by the Swedish
government under pressure from the
Russian government. The Rick Ross
institute on destructive cults, an American
based outfit had been sued out of America
by Scientology and so on.
Huh huh, huh huh huhJC
Hhm hm hmES
Huh huh. WowJC
Malaysia Today, run by a wonderful guy by
the name of Raja Petra who, he has two
arrest warrants out for him in Malaysia,
he is based in London, but his servers
can't survive in London, they are inSingapore and the United States.
JA
But again, I get the, the, that's [indistinct]
there are sites that participate in this?ES
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Yes, we have some fourteen hundred, but
those are... we have mirrors that are
voluntary as well as
JA
So they basically opt-in mirror sites.
ESThey determine their own risks, we don't
know anything about them, we can't
guarantee that they are all trustworthy,
etc, but they do increase the numbers.
JA
You have been quoted in the press as
saying that there is a much larger store ofinformation that is encrypted and
distributed. Is it distributed in those sorts
of places?
ES
No, that's an open... we openly distribute
backups of... encrypted backups of
materials that we view are highly sensitive
that we are to publish in the coming year.
JA
Got it.ES
Not as some people have said so that we
have a "thermonuclear device" to use on
our opponents. But rather so that there is
very little possibility that that material,
even if we are completely wiped out, will
be taken from the historical record.
JA
So, so and eventually you will reveal the
key that is necessary to decrypt it.ES
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No, ideally, we will never reveal the key.JA
I see.ES
Because there is things, like, so redactions
sometimes need to be done on this
material.
JA
Sure.ES
So it's... our view is that the material is so
significant that even if we released it as is,with no redactions, that the benefits
would outweight the harms. But through
redacting things we can get the harm
down even more.
JA
And I understand that. One more sort of
tactical question for now. So, my simple
explanation is that the tools will get betterfor an anonymous sender send to a
distrustful recipient, and then this
anonymous [noise] your describing. We
will get to the point where the... a very
large amount of people using such
services for all sorts of reasons: truthful,
lying, manipulation, what have you. The
current technology used... basically, like
FTP [indistinct] runners sent to you.
Basically people will FTP something and
then just sort of ship it to you.
ES
No we have... we have lots of differentJA
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that I have about, of the vast increase of...
Yes! So I've...JA
So what are those technologies?ES
The most important one is naming things
properly. If we are able to name some... a
video file or a piece of text in a way that is
intrinsically coupled to the information
there, so that there is no ambiguity-- a
hash is an example of this--but thenthere's variations, maybe you want one
that human beings can actually remember.
Then it permits this information to be
spread in such a way where you don't
have to trust the underlying networks.
And you can flood it.
JA
Why don't you have to trust the underlying
networks?ES
Well because you can sign... you can sign
the hashes.JA
You can sign the name as well as the
content.ES
You can sign the hash.JA
You can sign the hash.ES
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many millions of computers involved in
thee hashtree, and many many entry
points into this hashtree so it is very hard
to censor. And the addressing for content
is on the hash of the content.
Right so you are basically doing the hash
as the address, and you do the addressing
within the namespace to provide... so as
long as you have a signed...
ES
As long as you get the hash...JA
...you can't hide it.ES
Well, there's a question as to you've got a
name of something, you've got a hash, but
what does that tell you. Nothing really,
because it is not really human readable.
So you need another mechanism to get the
fact that that's important to you.
JA
Sure.ES
And that is something like WikiLeaks signs
that, and says that that is...JA
An interesting piece of informationES
...an interesting piece of information, and
we have verified that it is true. But that,
once you feed that information into the
system then it becomes very unclear how
JA
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it got into the system. Well how do you get
rid of it from the system? And if you do get
rid of it, if someone does manage to get
rid of it, you know for sure that it's been
gotten rid of, because the hash doesn't
resolve to anything anymore. Similarly, ifsomeone were to modify it, the hash
changes...
I was just gonna say, why wouldn't they
just rename it, rather than...JC
They can't because the name is
intrinsically coupled to the intellectual
content.
JA
I think the way to explain this... To
summarise the technical idea is... take all
the content in a document, come up with a
number, so if the content is gone, the
number doesn't match, show anything.
And if the content has changed, the
number doesn't compute right anymore.
So it is an interesting property.
ES
Mm hm. So...JC
So...JA
So how far are we from this type of
system?ES
On the publishing end, the magnet links
and so on are starting to come up. There'sJA
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also a very nice little paper that I've seen
in relation to Bitcoin, that... you know
about Bitcoin?
No.ES
Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved
out of the cypherpunks a couple of years
ago, and it is an alternative... it is a
stateless currency.
JA
Yeah, I was reading about this just
yesterday.JC
And very important, actually. It has a few
problems. But its innovations exceed its
problems. Now there has been innovations
along these lines in many different paths
of digital currencies, anonymous,
untraceable etc. People have been
experimenting with over the past 20
years. The Bitcoin actually has the balanceand incentives right, and that is why it is
starting to take off. The different
combination of these things. No central
nodes. It is all point to point. One does not
need to trust any central mint. If we look
at traditional currencies such as gold, we
can see that they have sort of interesting
properties that make them valuable as a
medium of exchange. Gold is divisible, it is
easy to chop up, actually out of all metals
it is the easiest to chop up into fine
segments. You can test relatively easily
whether it is true or whether it is fake.
JA
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[laughter]
You can take chopped up segments and
you can put them back together by
melting the gold. So that is what makes it
a good medium of exchange and it is also
a good medium of value store, because
you can take it and put it in the groundand it is not going to decay like apples or
steaks. The problems with traditional
digital currencies on the internet is that
you have to trust the mint not to print too
much of it.
And the incentives for the mint to keep
printing are pretty high actually, because
you can print free money. That means you
need some kind of regulation. And if
you're gonna have regulation then who is
going to enforce the regulation, now all of
a sudden you have sucked in the whole
problem of the state into this issue, and
political pushes here and there, and who
can get control of the mint, push it one
way or another, for particular purposes.
Bitcoin instead has an algorithm where
the anyone can create, anyone can be
their own mint. They're basically just
searching for collisions with hashes.. A
simple way is... they are searching for asequence of zero bits on the beginning of
the thing. And you have to randomly
search for, in order to do this. So there is
a lot of computational work in order to do
JA
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this. And each Bitcoin software that is
distributed.. That work algorithmically
increases as time goes by. So the difficulty
in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and
harder and harder as time goes by and it
is built into the system.
Right, right. That's interesting.ES
Just like the difficulty in mining gold
becomes harder and harder and harder
and that is what makes people predict that
there is not going to be a sudden amount
of gold in the market, rather...
JA
To enforce the scarcity...ES
Yeah, to enforce scarcity, and scarcity will
go up as time goes by, and what does that
mean for incentives in going into the
Bitcoin system. That means that you
should get into the Bitcoin system now.
Early. You should be an early adopter.
Because your Bitcoins are going to be
worth a lot of money one day. So once you
have a... and the Bitcoins are just... a
Bitcoin address is just a big hash. It's a
hash of a public key that you generate. So
once you have this hash you can just
advertise it to everyone, and people cansend you Bitcoins, and there is people who
have set up exchanges to convert from
Bitcoin to US dollars and so on. And it
solves a very interesting technical
JA
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[JA using lunch table objects]
problem, which is how do you stop double
spending?
All digital material can be cloned, almost
zero costs, so if you have currency as a
digital string of numbers, how do you stopme... I want to buy this piece of pasta.
Here is my digital currency and, now I
take a copy of it. And now I want to buy
your bit of egg. And then you go... andnow I want to buy your radish! And you
go, what? I've already got that! What's
going on here? There's been some fraud!
So there's a synchronization problem.
Who now has the coin? So there is a point
to point.. a spread network with all these
problems, some points of the network
being faster, some points of the network
being slower, multiple paths of
communication, how do you solve this
synchronization issue about who has the
currency? And so this is to mind actually
the real technical innovation for Bitcoin, it
has done this using some hashtrees and
then a delay time, and then CPU work has
to be done in order to move one thing to
another so information can't spread toofast etc. OK, so, once you have a system of
currency that is easy to use like that, then
you can start to use it for things that you
want to be scarce. What is the example of
JA
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some things that we want to be scarce?
Well, domain names. Names. We want
names to be scarce. We want short names
to be scarce, otherwise if they are not
scarce, if it doesn't take work to get them,
as soon as you have a nice naming system,some arsehole is going to come along and
register every short name themselves.
Right. That's very interesting.ES
So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is
precisely what I wanted and what I was
theorizing about, which is not a DNS
system, but rather short names... short bit
of text to long bit of text tuple registering
service. Cause that is the abstraction of
domain names and all these problems
solved. Yes, you have some something that
you want to register that is short, and you
want to couple that to something that is
unmemorable and longer. So for example,the first amendment, that phrase, the "US
first amendment", is a very short phrase,
but it expands to a longer bit of text. So
you take the hash of this text, and now you
have got something that is intrinsically
coupled to that which is unmemorable.
But then you can register "US First
Amendment" coupled to the hash. And
that then means you have a structure
where you can tell whether something has
been published or unpublished, you can...
one piece of human intellectual
information can cite another one in a way
JA
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that... can't be manipulated, and if it is
censored the censorship can be found out.
And if one place is censored, well you can
scour the entire world for this hash, and
no matter where you find you know it is
what you wanted precisely!
RightES
So that, in theory, then permits human
beings to build up an intellectual scaffold
where every citation, every reference to
some other part of human intellectual
content, is precise, and can be discovered
if it exists out there anywhere at all, and is
not dependent on any particular
organization. So as a way of publishing
this seems to be the most censorship
resistant manner of publishing possible,
because it is not dependent on any
particular mechanism of publishing. You
can be publishing through the post, youcan be publishing on conventional
websites, you can be publishing using
Bittorrent, whatever, but the naming is
consistent. And same is for... publishing is
also a matter of transferring, you can... all
you then have to do is, if you want to
transfer something anonymously to
someone else, one particular person, you
encrypt the information with their key,
and you publish it.
JA
Are you worried.. basically this entire
system depends on basically irrevocableES
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key structures. Are you worried that the
key structures would fall apart?
Well the hashing, in terms of the naming
part, going to patterns--it doesn't depend
on the key structure at all. In terms of
Bitcoin has its own key structure and
that's an independent thing, there is all
sorts of problems with it. Hackers can
come in and steal keys etc. And the same
problems that you have with cash.
Armored vans are needed to protect the
cash etc. And there are some
enhancements you can use to try andremove the incentives one way or another.
You can introduce a subcurrency with
fixed periods of expense. So you retract
for one week or one day and a merchant
will accept or not accept.
JA
The average person does not understand
that RSA was broken into an awful lot of
private keys involving commerce were
taken,
ES
YesJA
so...ES
The public key structure is a tremendous
problem, so in the same way that domain
name structures are a tremendous
problem. The browser based public key
system that we have for authenticating
JA
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what websites you are going to, it is awful.
It is truly awful. The number of people
that have been licensed to mint keys is so
tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted
and got bought up cheaply by Russian
companies, you can assume, I have beentold actually that VeriSign, by people who
are in the know, although I am not yet
willing to go on the public record, cause I
only have one source, just between you
and me, one source that says that VeriSign
has actually given keys to the US
government. Not all, but a particular key.
That's a big problem with the way things
are authenticated presently. There are
some traditional alternative approaches,
like PGP has a web of trust. I don't think
those things really work. What I think
does work is something close to what SSH
does, and that's probably the way forward.
Which is it is opportunistic key
registration. So there is part of your
interaction, the first time you interact, youregister your key, and then if you have a
few points of keying or some kind of flood
network, then you can see that well lots of
people have seen that key many times in
the past.
And one more technical question, and I
think we should probably, Scott you were
sort of...
ES
I'm ready! Ha ha ha.SM
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When we were sort of chatting initially we
talked about my idea that powering,
mobile phones being powered, is sort of
changing society. A rough summary of
your answer for everybody else is that
people are very much the same and
something big has to change their
behaviour, and this might be one of them,
and you said, you were very interested in
someone building phone to phone
encryption. Can you talk a little bit about,
roughly, the architecture where you would
have a broad open network and you have
person to person encryption. What doesthat mean technically, how would it work,
why is it important. That kind of stuff. I
mean, I think people don't understand any
of this area in my view.
ES
When we were dealing with Egypt we saw
the Mubarak government cut off the
internet and we saw only one - there was
one ISP that quite few of us were involved
in trying to keep its connections open, it
had maybe 6% of the market. Eventually
they cut.. eventually the Mubarak
government also cut off the mobile phone
system. And why is it that that can be
done? People with mobile phones have a
device that can communicate in a radio
spectrum. In a city there is a highdensity... there is always, if you like, a
path between one person and another
person. That is there is always a
continuous path of mobile phones, each
JA
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one can in theory hear the radio of the
other.
You could form a peer to peer network.ES
So in theory you could form a peer to peer
network. Now the way most GSM phones
are being constructed and others is that
they receive on a different frequency to
that which they transmit...
JA
Yes.ES
...and that means that they cannot form
peer to peer networks. They have to go
through base stations. But we're seeing
now that mobile phones are becoming
more flexible in terms of base station
programming. And they need to do this
because they operate in different markets
that have different frequencies. They have
different forms of wireless output, and so
... and also, even if there is not sufficiently
flexible mobile phones, we are seeing that
in the mobile phone aspect, maybe WiMax
is coming along which will give them
greater radius for two way
communications. But also it is getting very
cheap to make your own base station.
There is software now which will run a
base station.
JA
Right, right.ES
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For you. So you can throw these things up
and make your own networks with
conventional mobile phones pretty quickly.
In fact this is what is done to spy, to keep
spying on mobile phones. You set up a
fake base station. And there's vans now,
you can buy these in bulk on the
commercial spy market, to set up a van
and intercept mobile phone calls. During
these revolutionary periods the people
involved in the revolution need to be able
to communicate. They need to be able to
communicate in order to plan quickly and
also to communicate information aboutwhat is happening in their environment
quickly so that they can dynamically adapt
to it and produce the next strategy. Where
you only have the security services being
able to do this, and you turn the mobile
phone system off, the security services
have such an tremendous advantage
compared to people that are trying to
oppose them. If you have a system where
individuals are able to communicate
securely and robustly despite what
security services are doing, then security
services have to give more ground. It's not
that the government is necessarily going
to be overthrown, but rather they have to
make more concessions.
JA
They have their networks. So your
argument that even with these existing
phones they modify them to have peer to
peer encrypted tunnels for voice and data,
ES
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presumably.
Voice is a bit harder. What we did
internally in this prototype I designed was
a -- which only works for medium sized
groups - so a peer to peer flood
UDP-encrypted network -- UDP permits
you to put lots and lots of cover traffic in
cause you can send stuff to random
internet hosts.
JA
Oh, so, oh, so that's clever, so that way
you can't be blocked, right?
ES
Yeah.JA
Because UDP is a single packet, right?
So...ES
Right, so you send it to random internet
hosts and a random internet host doesn'trespond, which is exactly the same thing
as a host that is receiving stuff. And even
structured... and using this you can do
hole punching through firewalls and it
means that normal at home people can
use this. They don't need to have a server.
And it is very light bandwidth, so you can
put it on mobile phones as well. The killer
application is not lots of voice. Rather it is
chat rooms. Small chatrooms of thirty to a
hundred people -- that is what revolution
movements need. They need it to be
secure and they need it to be robust. The
JA
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system I did was protocol independent. So
yes, you've got your encapsulating thing,
UDP or whatever, and in theory you could
be pushing it over SMS you could be
putting it over TCP, you could be pushing
it over whatever. You could be using amobile phone, you could be using a
desktop or whatever. You can put that into
one big mesh, so that all you need, even
when the whole country is shut off you
just need one satellite connection out and
your internal network connects to the rest
of the world.
Yeah, yeah.ES
And if you've got a good routing system. If
it is a small network you can use flood,
and thereby -- flood network takes every
possible path therefore it must take the
fastest possible path. Right? So a flood
network always finds a way but doesn'tscale to large quantities. But if you've got
a good routing system you just need this
one link out. And in Cairo, we had people
who hacked Toyota in Cairo, and took over
their satellite uplink, and used that to
connect to this ISP that fed 6% of the
market, and so that sort of thing was
going on all this time. There was a hacker
war in Egypt to try and keep this -- I don't
like to call it radical, but this more
independent ISP -- that provided 6% of the
market, up and going. But it shouldn't
have been so hard. It should have been
JA
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the case that all you need to do is have
one connection and then the most
important information could get out. And
if you look at, if this is equivalent to SMSs,
I mean look how important Twitter is and
how important SMS is. Actually, humanbeings are pretty good at encoding the
most important thing that is happening
into a short amount of data. There's not
that many human beings. There just aren't
that many. So with one pipe you can...
It's not a bandwidth problem.ES
It's not a bandwidth problem. So all you
need is one pipe. And you can connect a
country that is in a revolutionary state to
the rest of the world. And points within
that country just as important. Cities
within that country. And it's not that hard
a thing to do quite frankly.
JA
Scott, do you wanna?ES
It's hard to stop! It's so interesting!SM
I actually, I have like five hours more...ES
I know! Because it's like one thing and
then there's like more and...SM
How would you architect this how would
you architect that... I think my summaryES
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would be that this notion of a hash idea of
the name is a very interesting one,
because I had not linked it to Bitcoin, or
that kind of approach, with scarcity. That's
a new idea for me. Have you published
that idea?
I've published... not the link to Bitcoin,
that paper that came out about coupling
something to Bitcoin was just trying to
address the DNS issue. But fortunately the
guy who did it understood that... why just
have quadtets? You know, why limit it to IP
addresses? It's sort of natural in a way to
make the thing so that it could go to any
sort of expansion. But the idea for... that
there should be this naming system and
the importance of this naming system, the
importance of preserving history and
doing these scaffolds, and mapping out
everything. Yeah, so that's on the site,
under... I think it is part of one of the Hans
Ulrich interview.
JA
I think we should study this quite a bit
more so we generally understand it... so
we might have a few more questions about
it... The other comment I would make is
that on the assumption that what you are
describing is going to happen someday is
probable given that the incentive
structure is...
ES
Well I've had these ideas several years but
now I see other people are also getting
into...
JA
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[chatter about food]
Well there is enough people who are
interested in solving the problem you are
trying to solve. On the internet you see a
lot of experiences. What I am thinking of
is how would I attack it. How would I
attack your idea. And I still think I would
go after the signing and the key
infrastructure. So if I can break the keys...
ES
There are different parts of the idea. So, if
you publish some information or if you
spread some information... this publishing
thing is quite interesting as to whether
when something has gone from not beingpublished to being published its quite...
interesting. So if you spread some
information and you've got it well labeled,
using a hash.
JA
That hash is important. It is something
that has to spread in another way. So that
is say by WikiLeaks signing the hash. But
there is many ways for it to spread. I mean
people could be swapping that hash in
email. They could be telling each other on
the telephone etcetera.
JA
You are saying that all of these systems
are do not have a single point of attack, I
can break down your HTTPS but you can
still use the US postal service to send it,
for example.
ES
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Exactly, and you would know that you
were getting the right thing, because of its
naming it is completely accurate.
JA
I am just wondering, on the human side of
this, you have such experience of the
world you described earlier. I mean I had
three hours sleep, so forgive me if I don't
remember exactly what you said, but some
combination of technical and altruistic
people and what amounts to a kind of
subculture that you've been in for some 15
years now.. So you know about how the
subculture works. And that subcultureneeds to either I guess stay the same or
expand in order to do the work that you
are describing, and so since our book is
about ten years away...
JC
It's dramatically expanded...JA
What are the patterns there in terms of
the people part, rather than the...?JC
That's the most optimistic thing that is
happening. The radicalization of internet
educated youth. People who are receiving
their values from the internet... and then
as they find them to be compatible
echoing them back. The echo back is nowso strong that it drowns the original
statements. Completely. The people I've
dealt with from the 1960s radicals who
helped liberate Greece and.. Salazar. They
are saying that this moment in time is the
JA
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most similar to what happened in this
period of liberation movements in the
1960s, that they have seen.
Do you see it scaling differently than it did
in the 60s?JC
And as far as what has entered into the
West, because there are certain regions of
the world I am not aware of, but as far as I
am aware that -- and of course I wasn't
alive in the 1960s -- but as far as I can tell,
that statement is true. This is the political
education of apolitical technical people. It
is extraordinary, in the same way that the
young...
JA
A-political? Do you mean one word?LS
One word. People are going from... young
people are going from apolitical to
political. It is a very very interestingtransition to see.
JA
How do you think... I mean this is your
world why do you think that took place? I
mean, why do you think it took place?
JC
Fast communication. Critical mass of
young people. Newer generation. And
then some catalyzing events. The attack
on us was a catalyzing event. And our
defense... our success in defending was a
catalyzing event. I don't know, do you
remember the PGP case, and that grand
JA
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[LS spills water all over her note taking laptop]
[JA quickly grabs her laptop and turns it upside
down]
[laughter]
jury with Zimmermann and so on?
He had a lot of fun that with that.ES
I wrote half a book on that. It was never
published, because my cowriter went and
had children.
JA
Ha ha ha haLS
Ha ha ha!ES
Ha ha ha! Why do I feel that has happened
before?JC
So much for the historical record!SM
As I said--multiple copies!JA
Why don't you save whatever you wereSM
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[chatter]
[laughter]
[laughter]
[Laughter]
doing... get it into the name tree before...
Someone: everything goes wrong...
Did you see how fast he was? It was like
an impulse.LS
Yeah, I feel you were almost there before
the computer...JC
Computers are important...
SM
That was sweet, thank you. Go ahead.LS
So you were saying. But young people
aren't inherently good. And I say that as a
father and with regret.SM
Oh no I think that actually... well, I've read
the Lord of the Flies...JA
and I went to thirty different schools, soJA
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[laughter]
I've seen plenty of Lord of the Flies
situations...
...But no, I think that the instincts human
beings have are actually much better than
the societies that we have.
JA
Then the governments, basically.JC
I am not going to say governments. Thewhole structure of the society. The
economic structure. And that people learn
that simple altruistic acts don't pay off and
they see that some people who act in non
altruistic ways end up getting Porsches
and fast cars, and it tends to pull people in
that direction. I thought about this a while
ago when I saw there was this fantastic
video that came out of Stanford in about
'69 on nuclear synthesis of DNA. Have you
seen it?
JA
No.SM
No.JC
No.ES
It's on youtube. It's great. A wonderfulJA
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fiscalization. So fast bank transfers. The
IRS being able to account for lots of
people, it sucks people into a very rigid
fiscalized structure. So you can have a lot
of political change in the United States.
But will it really change that much? Will itchange the amount of money in someone's
bank account? Will it change contracts?
Will it void contracts that already exist?
And contracts on contracts, and contracts
on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I
say that free speech in many places - in
many Western places - is free not as a
result of liberal circumstances in the West
but rather as a result of such intense
fiscalization that it doesn't matter what
you say. ie. the dominant elite doesn't
have to be scared of what people think,
because a change in political view is not
going to change whether they own their
company or not. It is not going to change
whether they own a piece of land or not.
But China is still a political society.Although it is radically heading towards a
fiscalized society. And other societies, like
Egypt was, are still heavily politicized.
And so their rulers really do need to be
concerned about what people think, and
so they spend a portion of efforts on
controlling freedom of speech.
So if you were...JC
But I think young people have fairly good
values. Of course it's a spectrum and soJA
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on. But they have fairly good values most
of the time. And they want to demonstrate
them to other people and you can see this
when people first go to university and so
on. And they become hardened as a result
of certain things having a pay off andother things not having a payoff. Studying
for an exam, constantly, even though in
some cases the work is completely
mindless, and pointless, has a payoff at
the end of the year, but going and talking
to someone and doing a favour doesn't
have a payoff at the end of the year. And
so this disincentivizes some behaviours
and incentivizes other ones.
But let me tease out some of this, I mean
it sounds like you have got a view of the
globe with certain societies where the
impact of technology is relatively slight,
certain societies where politically the
impact of technology can be quite great,
and certain societies where it would be ata sort of middling way. And you would put
China into I guess the middling category.
JC
Well, it's starting to...JA
Since our book is all about technology and
social transformation ten years down the
line... what's the globe that you see given
the structure that you are describing?
JC
I am not sure about the impact on China.
It is still a political society, so the impactJA
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could be very great. I mean I often say
that censorship is always cause for
celebration. It is always an opportunity,
because it reveals fear of reform. It means
that the power position is so weak that
you have got to care about what peoplethink.
Right. It's like you find the sensitive
documents by watching them hunt.JC
Exactly.JA
This is a very interesting argument.ES
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.JC
So when the Chinese express all this
energy on censoring in all these novel
ways, do we say that it is a complete
waste of time and energy, or do they have
a whole bunch of experience managing
the country and understand that it matters
what people think? I say it is much more
reasonable to interpret it as the different
groups different actors within China who
are able to control that censorship system
understand correctly that their power
position is weak and they need to becareful what people think. So they have to
censor.
JA
So the state is rational, at least in its
repression.JC
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I am always worried in talking about the
state, because it's all individuals acting in
their own perceived interest. Some, this
group or that group.
JA
Fair enough.JC
Even the censors in China of the Public
Security Bureau, people who work there.
Why do they censor stuff and what do they
censor first? I'll tell you what they censor
first? They censor first the thing that
someone in the Politburo might see. That'swhat they censor first. They are not
actually concerned about darknets.
JA
Sorry, about?JC
They are not concerned about darknets.
Because their bosses can't see what is on
the darknet, and so they can't be blamedfor not censoring it. We had this fantastic
case here in the UK, we had a whole
bunch of classified documents from the
UK military, and published a bunch. And
then later on we did a sort of preemptive
FOI which we do occasionally on various
governments when we can. So we did it on
the UK ministry of defense, just to see
whether they were doing some
investigation, sort of a source protection
to understand what is going on. So we got
back... first they pretended they were
missing documents and we appealed and
JA
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we got back a bunch of documents. And so
it showed that someone in there had
spotted that there was a bunch of UK
military documents on our website. About
their surveillance programme. Another
two thousand page document about howto stop things leaking, and that the
number one threat to the UK ministry was
investigative journalists. So that had gone
into some counterintelligence da da da da,
and they had like, oh my good, it has
hundreds of thousands of pages, and it is
about all sorts of companies and it just
keeps going, and it's endless, it's endless!
Exclamation marks, you know, five
exclamation marks. And that was like,
okay, that is the discovery phase, now the
what is to be done phase. What is to be
done? BT has the contracts for the MoD.
They told BT to censor us from them. So
everyone in the UK MoD could no longer
read what was on WikiLeaks. Problem
solved!
Interesting.ES
It's like all the generals and their bosses
and all these people could no longer see
that we had MoD stuff on there. And so
now there is no more complaints and their
problem is solved. So understandings like
this might be quite advantageous to use in
some of these systems. So it means that
darknets for example, if you understand
the bureaucratic structures that employ
JA
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people and give them tasks always have
that sort of thing going on then that
means that darknets are gonna have a
pretty easy time of it, until they are so big
that they are not darknets anymore.
Hm. That's really... that's really really
interesting. You mentioned investigative
journalism, do you... you've had a lot of
experience with journalism by now, in
many different respects, i mean, how do
you see the kind of freedom of information
that you are describing, that you were
describing earlier, as fitting into
journalistic processes, if at all, or is it
replacing it?
JC
No it is, I mean it's more how these
journalistic processes fit into something
that is much bigger, and the much bigger
thing is that we as human beings
shepherd and create our intellectual
history as a civilization. And it is that
intellectual history on the shelf that we
can pull off to do stuff, and not do the
dumb thing again. Someone already said
said it was done and wrote about their
experience and we don't do it again. And
so there are several different processes
that are creating that record and other
processes where people are trying to
destroy pieces of that record and others
that are trying to prevent people putting
things into the record. We all live off that
intellectual record, so what we want to do
is get as much into the record, prevent as
JA
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much as possible being deleted from the
record, and then, and then have the
record as searchable as possible.
But one consequence of this view is that
actors will find the generation of verylarge amounts of misinformation strategic
for them.
ES
Yeah. So this is another type of censorship
that I have thought about but don't speak
so much about. Which is censorship
through complexity.
JA
Hide it. Too complicated.ES
And that is basically the offshore financial
sector. Censorship through complexity.
Censorship of what? Censorship of
political outrage. With enough political
outrage there is law reform and enough
law reform you can't do it anymore. Sowhy is it that all these careful tax
structuring arrangements are so complex?
I mean, they may be perfectly legal, but
why are they so god damn complex? Well,
because the ones that weren't complex
were understood and the ones that were
understood were regulated, so you're only
left with the things that are incredibly
complex.
JA
More noise less signal, kind of...ES
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Yeah, exactly, exactly...JA
But how in the future will people deal with
the fact that the incentive to publish
information that is misleading, wrong,
manipulative, is very high. Furthermore
you can't figure out who the bad publisher
was as well as the good...because there's
anonymity in the system.
SM
Yeah, so I suggested. Well, the way it is
right now is there is very... first we must
understand that the way it is right now isvery bad. Friend of mine Greg Mitchell
wrote a book about the mainstream
media, So Wrong For So Long. And that's
basically it. That yes we have these heroic
moments with Watergate and Bernstein
and so on, but, come on, actually, it's
never been very good it's always been
very bad. And these fine journalists are an
exception to the rule. And especially when
you are involved in something yourself
and you know every facet of it and you
look to see what is reported by it in the
mainstream press, and you can see naked
lies after naked lies. You know that the
journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple
mistake, and then simple mistakes, and
then people repeating lies, and so on, thatactually the condition of the mainstream
press nowadays is so appalling I don't
think it can be reformed. I don't think that
is possible. I think it has to be eliminated,
and replaced with something that is
JA
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publishers, this is a reputation business.
And so what I would like is that part of
that repetitional business, like in science,
where is your data? You're not providing
your data, why the hell should I take this
seriously? Is that now that we can publishon the internet, now that there is
physically room for the data, newspapers
don't have physical room for the primary
source, now that there is physical room
for the primary source, it should be there
and we should create a standard that it
should be there. And sure people can
deviate from this standard, but well you
deviate from the standard, if you can't be
bothered providing us with the primary
source data why should we pay any
attention to what you are writing? You're
not treating the reader with respect. It's
not falsifiable therefore, therefore we can
pay no attention to it. But the issue of
reputation, this is an important issue. How
do things have reputation? Well, part ofthe way that they have reputation is by
this coupling of something happens,
someone else says something about it,
someone else says something about that,
etc. And this is a series of citations as
information flows from one person to
another and they augment it and so on.
For that to be strong you need this naming
system. Where what you are relying on is
not some startup website that just appears
tomorrow, or some company that didn't
like it and has modified it or is being sued
out of existence. So that, I think, would
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help with reputation. Complexity is
harder. I think that is a big problem. So
when things become open things tend to
become more complex, because people
start hiding what they are doing, their bad
behaviour, through complexity. And so thatwill be bureaucratic double speak is an
example. When things get bureaucratized
and so on, and everything becomes mealy
mouthed, and so that's a cost of openness.
Is that kind of bureaucratization, and in
the offshore sector you see incredible
complexity in the layers of things
happening to one another so they become
impenetrable. And of course cryptography
is an intellectual system that has
specialized in making things as complex
as possible. Those things are hard to
attack. On the other hand complex
systems are also hard to use. So
bureaucracies and internal
communications systems which have this,
which are full of weasel words and arsecovering, are inefficient internal
communications systems. And similarly,
those tremendously complex offshore
structuring arrangements are actually
inefficient. But maybe you're ahead when
the tax regime is high, but if the tax
regime is zero you're not going to be
ahead at all. Sorry, if the tax regime is 3%,
you're not going to be ahead at all, you're
going to be choked by the complexity.
Well, if they weren't inefficient then
everybody would have their moneyJC
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offshore Julian.
Yeah, that's right.JA
I mean that as a joke, but it's probably
true, heh.JC
No, that's true.JA
Let me just add that uh...JC
There is a battle between all of these
things going on. With different people,
economic different... see I don't see a
different between government and big
corporations and small corporations,
actually this is all one continuum, these
are all systems that are trying to get as
much power as possible. So that's what
they are. A general is trying to get as
much power for his section of the army,
and so on. They advertise, they produce
something that they claim is a product,
people buy it, people don't buy it, they
complexify in order to hide the flaws in
their product and they spin, so I don't see
a big difference between government and
non government actors in that way. Thereis one difference about the deployment of
coercive force but even there we see that
well connected corporations are able to
tap into the governmental system and the
court system and are able to deploy...
JA
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effectively deploy coercive force, by
sending police to do debt requisiti