Life behind the barbed wire: cipherpunks write code

Orig translationand"I'm Not a Drug Dealer: Then Why Do I Need Privacy?" is a kind of entry point into a parallel world, which is characterized by the creation and development of Internet technologies, the influence of the counterculture of the 60s, cyberpunk as an image of dystopia, the cypherpunk movement, and theAnonymous, the California techno-elite, the revelations of Assange and Snowden, as well as civil cryptography and the completely natural appearance of cryptocurrencies. Today, the power of corporationswithIn the case of the United States of America, the United States of America and the United States of America are notOfficialstatesmen, and the ideology of the Panopticon is becoming more and more real.And only the choice of each person, in particular, will determine the outcome of this difficult period.

The Panopticon, in its original conception, is a prison design developed by the rationalist, philosopher and lawyer Jeremy Bentham and described in detail in his writings from1978.According to some sources, the idea was suggested by Samuel Bentan, Jeremy's brother.)

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1787, FROM CRECHEFF IN WHITE RUSSIA. TO A FRIEND IN ENGLAND BY JEREMY BENTHAM

"...it is a new way of gaining the power of one mind over another mind."J.Bentham 1978

Panopticon, being a masterfully cunning examplearchitecture, includes two important aspects: for the prisoner - this is the impression that he is under inevitable and round-the-clock surveillance, and, at the same time, he really can not know at what moment they are being watched, but for the overseer - this is an opportunity to observe freely and quietly, which, in the end, deprives prisoners of any power.

Bentham understood that for a working conceptA panopticon will need to provide a fundamental imbalance of forces in every aspect of the conceived architecture. According to him, the Panopticon is applicable to prisons, hospitals, mental hospitals, and, most importantly, to schools, as they are powerful tools for social and psychological processing.

The idea of power through control stretches from the beginning of the history of mankind - beginning with the dawn of totalitarian regimes and ending with their final defeat in connection with revolutions or a mass exodus.

Brief immersion in a fictitious dystopia

Does visiting crypto conferencesMany people imagine our future as a beautiful utopia filled with tokens that are only growing in price and other crypto-decentralized products that make obtaining a loan as easy as placing “your millions of ETH” as collateral?

But, let's imagine a darker future -possibly dystopian. One can assume that one of the best ways to understand the present is to imagine the future. And what could be better for time travel through different versions of reality than reading science fiction?

Back in 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote "Oh Wondrousa new world ”, in which, for the sake of happiness, they took the benefits of science and technology, distributing the drug soma as a regular pharmaceutical drug, sold by the state as if under a pharmaceutical prescription. At the time when Huxley was writing his book - the bulk of the talk in intellectual circles was about how humanity would solve economic and social problems, everything heralded the so-called "Age of Utopia." At that historical time, Henry Ford had already managed to popularize industrial production (he became the prototype of the demigod from Huxley's book), and consumer credit was becoming more and more in demand due to rising prices for mass-produced goods. Huxley’s book has become a kind of protest in many respects against this idea of utopia and the dark future to which it will lead society.

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After almost sixteen years, in 1948, alreadyafter the horrors of World War II, the writer George Orwell (Eric Blair) published his famous novel "1984", which described the dystopian future, moreover, much less comforting than in Huxley's book, and, in many ways, even more terrifying. Witnessing the dawn of the Third Reich and the brutality of an industrial war machine fueled by new technologies, Orwell, apparently, drew inspiration from sources other than Huxley.

Aldous Huxley, a descendant of the British intellectual aristocracy, and Eric Blair(George Orwell), son of an employee of the Opium Department of the British Colonial Administration of India(in 1903, this was normal)were graduates of the elite Eton College.Within a year, Huxleyworked as a French teacher at Eton,teachingI'm lessonsEric Blair.

At that time, allied forces divided the world into “spheres”influences ”, and created political, military, and economic alliances around the world in the form of global colonialism, which existed due to the credit and debt system.

Since "1984" many similardystopian novels, and it is likely that you read them at some point in your life. It is only worth noting here that the idea of control in these two books is somewhat different. Yes, both options are based on mass psychological control and processing, but, nevertheless, there are differences.

Huxley's world was a world of apathy. The world of Orwell was a world of fear. Huxley’s world was presented with pleasure derived from sweet catfish and the pursuit of satisfying primitive, basic desires. Orwell’s world was a world of pain or the so-called “boot forever stepping on the face of humanity”. Huxley’s world was drowned in useless information, where no one cared about facts, especially unpleasant ones. In the Orwellian world, information was limited and controlled.

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At the same time, apathy and fear are instruments of oppression. And an understanding of how they are used is important for understanding where we will go next.

Prediction of Luke Magnota: The Future of Bitcoin

But, in each of the novels the theme is clearly tracedreadiness to make a person guilty of hiding something only on the basis of the fact that he does not want to be supervised or strictly follow dogmatic social norms.

Today, this is especially true, because the world began to be divided into those who value privacy and those who consider it necessary only for criminals.

privacy policy

If we talk about privacy in general - it is worth noting the following opinions of users from Twiter:

“Reminds me of the days when I was involved in international drug smuggling. There were good times. ”

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“Holy Jesus ... What do you do there in your free time? Lol »

Whenever a conversation about privacy comes up, the inevitable question arises: “Why do I need privacy at all?”

Therefore, it is worth talking about why privacy should be set as the default setting for all occasions.

Here is a simple example: three options for familiarizing the user with the privacy policy on the site or in the application that we use daily. Different approaches are used, and this is quite informative. At times, the options from points A, B, and C form a cluster.

A - You are presented with a simple clickable interface that describes the most important policy points in plain language, and for each of them, which requires consent, there is an optionselecting "I AGREE" and "I DISAGREE".(comment translator. In fact, there is no choice anyway).

B - you are provided with a link to the privacy policy, and one single button “I AGREE”.

C - they do not give you any obvious information about the privacy policy, but there is a vague feeling that it is somehow connected with that text, in small print, at the bottom of the site page.

For today, as a rule, option B is used,which is often discussed, promoted, legitimized and standardized, which is taken into account when developing sites and applications, which users get used to, and for this reason it is a self-reinforcing standard. This continues and continues, and let, from time to time, other approaches appear - option B remains the standard.

Let's say that over time, the world will dramaticallywill change, and the majority of people will recognize that option B, in fact, does not take into account their interests, and therefore will develop option D that will better meet their needs. But, it takes a lot of energy to demonstrate that option B is imperfect, and to prove that option D is better by setting it as a standard.

This "energy" may include marketing, PR,regulation, lawsuits, and other types of economic, political, or social activities, including acceptable and unacceptable methods, such as the date of bribes, conspiracy, or, say, revolution.

But, socio-economic systems are arrangedinevitably more difficult than is commonly believed. The fact is that the larger systems that evolve over time will be based on systems and knowledge gleaned from the past. Thus, in some respects, potential paths to the future are limited and determined by the paths open today and the logic of the initial decisions made today.

So, let, for today, t = 0, and you do not make sensethink about privacy, and it really does not have a significant impact on your life. In general, option B feels great. Perhaps you even justify its existence by posting similar things on Twitter, which is undoubtedly sad, because, probably, people themselves believe this:

“Why should a person have a right to privacy? I believe the world will get better if privacy is less. ”

But tomorrow you may find that circumstances have changed, and realize that option B is, in fact, far from optimal, and possibly even harmful.

Think about it:

Your privacy is evil!

So post to Twitter immediately:

1. Your bank details. Including passwords and pins

2. Your address, the location of any valuables in your home, as well as the date and time of your absence

3. Medical data

4. Recording your calls

5. Intimate photos of yourself and your family members

6. ... etc.

And if you try to hide it somehow, it meansyou have something to hide, and you are engaged in some kind of atrocities. You yourself became accomplices in the leak of your personal information - either of your own free will or because of indifference. And now you will live with these consequences if there are no other people who have sufficient strength, power and energy to change this.

If we don’t begin to value ourconfidentiality and we will not introduce, through technology, security mechanisms to maintain and enhance the security of personal data - we will create conditions for the future where our privacy will no longer have value and we will not be able to protect, maintain or strengthen it.

Cipher banks

You cannot talk about the importance of privacy andnot to mention cipher banks. Shifropank is any activist who advocates for the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a path to social and political change. When there was more commerce on the Internet and certain standards appeared, a group of activists became worried about the direction in which things were going. And the US government considered cryptographic software a "weapon" and did not allow it to be sold or even simply distributed.

In response, this group gathered on a mailing list, where, subsequently, one of the founders of the list [Eric Hughes] distributed the Shifropank Manifesto - a summary of the movement’s philosophy and community goals.

Note translator. No less famous is the Cryptoanarchist Manifesto from the equally famous cipherpunk - Timothy May.

If necessary, we must protect ourconfidentiality. We need to get together and create systems that enable anonymous transactions. For centuries, people have guarded their secrets through whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes and couriers. But, technologies of the past, unlike electronic ones, could not provide due confidentiality.

We, cipher banks, are engaged in the creation of anonymous systems. We protect our privacy with cryptography, anonymous remailers, digital signatures and decentralized electronic currencies.

The ideas expressed by cipherpunks are by no means new. Indeed, countless revolutions in history were often inspired by anonymous (almost) authors, artists, philosophers, etc. The cipher banks have formalized the relationship between technology and privacy, and have effectively used protection (see Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Privacy project), education, the media, literature, art, the legal code (many sued the US government and some won), subversive activities (hacks and leaks), political dissent, code and many other tools to achieve your goals.

Ethnicity began with the concept of "cipher banks writecode ”, but, has evolved into something more than just writing and developing software. Cipher banks act as individuals. They take personal responsibility for maintaining their own confidentiality, even regardless of their actual capabilities.

We, as supporters of cryptocurrency and other formsApplied cryptography in communications and computing strongly support cipherpunk. We really prove that even early prototypes have obvious advantages, and are directly involved in their evolution in order to further apply these technologies on a larger scale. These are important experiments for the future of privacy technologies that will be available to more than a handful of the elite.

Both in the past and in the future, confidentiality defines the line between the life and death of a person, his family and social group.

Girls just want privacy

Confidentiality, like everything else, isa topic that needs to be carefully studied. Does this seem insurmountable? Perhaps it is. Today, achieving complete confidentiality is Hercules’s real feat, which will require you to make all kinds of compromises between convenience and security. But, it is possible that tomorrow - it will become readily available to anyone who wants it.

There are three types of privacy that must be retained:

1. The secret of financial transfers. Nobody cares: to whom do we send money, how, when, in what quantity. We have every right not to disclose ourselves and the recipient.

2. The secret of movement. We must be able to absolutely anonymously navigate both the physical and virtual worlds, i.e. without providing identifying information.

3. Secret of messages. We must be sure that our conversations are strictly confidential and our personality is not attached to messages in both the real and virtual worlds.

For today, your degree of freedom is determineda number of factors: the place where you live, the platforms and applications that you use, an understanding of how to protect your privacy with various tools, such as a VPN, and the motivation of a third party who wants to monitor you. There are factors that are under your control, and there are factors that are beyond your control.

Already tomorrow, freedom and privacy shouldbecome the default setting. We must make a commitment to educate, protect, create and promote tools that promote privacy.

Cryptocurrencies and privacy

So how does all this relate to the world of cryptocurrencies? It is hoped that everyone understands - Bitcoin is not anomalous by default. This is an open, public registry, and anyone can view it. Since the advent of Bitcoin, people have created various tools to deanonymize its users, and to link specific addresses to people and companies.

There are, of course, different mixers, toggle switches and othersservices to confuse the track, but the desire of users to remain anonymous cannot fight serious companies creating effective methods and business models to sell the data to exchanges, regulators and law enforcement agencies.

But, the future belongs to those who build it. And we have a big fight ahead.

Cryptography is freedom!

And this is not about creating a new income stream for Wall Street or IPO investors. Yes, this is a good secondary effect, but not the main goal.

Cryptography is privacy!

And this is not about creating a dystopiancorporate digital currency on the blockchain, so those who support it can continue to drink Starbucks coffee, with a lot of debts, and like posts on Facebook and Instagram.

In conclusion, it is worth quoting from the famous anti-utopian scientific novel “We,” published by Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin in 1920:

“And what do you want last revolution? The last - no, revolutions - are endless. The latter is for children: infinity scares children, but it is necessary that children sleep peacefully at night ... "

The battle for privacy will not pass inin one place, at one time, or in some grandiose way. It will begin with the choice that we make every day and the degree of responsibility we place on ourselves and others.

So what do you choose? It is hoped that independence and confidentiality.

Conclusion from the translator

Freedom is not a gift from above. Freedom is a choice and the art of living. To live so that later there is nothing to regret. Only those who do not understand this are sorry. These are not just beautiful words. This is the reality that I personally chose for myself. And no one promises that Bitcoin, Thor or PGP will make you happy and rich. No one claims that these technologies were sent down from above to the “fathers of cipherpunk” by the cyber buddha itself. No, these are just tools. And it's up to you to decide how and for what purposes to use them. There is always a choice.

Useful links:

Russian Сypherpunks Community

Introduction to cryptography in 2 hours

Proprietary malware

Email Self Defense

Surveillance Self-Defense

Privacy tools

Protection against global surveillance systems

Recommended Reading:

"We". Evgeny Zamyatin

"Oh brave new world." Aldous Huxley

"1984". George Orwell