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Libertaria in Cyberspace
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A lot has been written about Libertaria in Cyberspace both before and
after Timothy May wrote the paper by the same name. I wonder how such a
Libertaria will form.
For a truly free communications medium we must have strong cryptography.
This is a given. Anonymity cannot be insured without strong cryptography
and the freedom of remailers or similar mechanisms to operate
unobstructed. Speech is never truly free unless it can be anonymous if
the author so chooses. Who wants to espouse an opinion which will get
them flogged, either figuratively or literally, by their neighbors, their
government, or in some cases even their family?
In my opinion, Mr. May is correct when he says that physical space is too
small and too exposed to outside intervention. A floating oil tanker can
be torpedoed, and a small island simply invaded. Libertaria cannot easily
build a standing army without inviting intervention by world powers and
being dubbed as terrorists or an organized gang.
Yes, cyberspace does look much more promising. The amount of "space" in
cyberspace is unbelievably large. The amount of data I can store on one
gigabyte of hard drive is incredible by conventional standards. Data on
one computer can be made accessible through a network to any number of
other computers and it can further be distributed. And space is very cheap
in cyberspace. A three gigabyte hard drive runs around two hundred U.S.
dollars and that price is dropping all the time.
A truly free communications medium must allow its users to be anonymous.
Speech is never truly free unless it can be anonymous if the author so
chooses. Who wants to espouse an opinion which will get them flogged,
either figuratively or literally, by their neighbors, their government, or
their own family? Who wants to die "under mysterious circumstances" or in
an automobile "accident" on an empty road?
That an opinion is unpopular does not make that opinion wrong or invalid.
That an author does not want his "true name" attached to an opinion does
not diminish the value of that opinion. In some cases an author simply
does not want to attract attention regardless of whether such attention be
positive or negative.
Strong cryptography is necessary for anonymity and the secure exchange of
information. A remailer system such as we have built is simply not secure
without the aid of cryptography. No network connection is secure when the
connection is visible to anyone who has the capability and curiosity to
listen in.
A disturbing trend on the Internet today is the opinion that "good users
are known users" and that "good users have nothing to hide." This kind of
idea is offered by the government of the United States as well as many
users and system administrators. Such an opinion is detrimental to the
free flow of ideas and information.
The arguments that a "good users are known users" policy is necessary to
curb "computer crime" and network abuse are invalid in my opinion. A great
percentage of "computer crime" is simply due to lax security protocols in
the first place. When somebody can go into a university and run a sniffer
program to get hundreds of passwords the problem is not so much that the
user is running the program as it is that the data is available to the
user in the first place. When somebody can get a throw-away account and
post 30,000 ads to USENET the problem is not so much the abuser as it is
abusing the network as it is a fault in the system. When people post
mindless drivel to a network the problem isn't so much the poster as it is
that such drivel is read and ranked at the same level with more legitimate
postings.
The first case of somebody running a packet sniffer can be avoided very
easily by using encrypted protocols and secure machines. If root
permissions can not be easily obtained on a machine and they are necessary
to install trojans one major avenue for our cracker is blocked. If all
network traffic is encrypted the cracker's job becomes all but impossible.
Sadly most people seem to send passwords and vital information in the
clear and most machines do not have encrypted communications tools
installed. The majority of TCP/IP traffic is cleartext.
The second and third cases of network abuse and drivel propagation are
avoidable by various common sense means. First, news servers can be
altered to not propagate massively crossposted articles or articles which
are virtually identical and posted to many different groups over a short
time period. Second, readers of news can use reputation capital systems to
eliminate the remainder of off-topic postings and mindless drivel. If I
trust Bob's opinion and Bob says that a particular posting is rubbish
nobody has been censored unless Bob becomes very powerful and misuses
that power to censor opinions he doesn't like without anybody knowing.
However even that sort of abuse can be avoided by people being able to
retrieve what they aren't normally seeing to occasionally check.
And the argument that encryption must be outlawed or the government must
have access to decryption keys is rediculous. The law abiding citizens will
be monitored while the real terrorists, child pornographers, and tax evaders
will hide their data in sounds or pictures and use encryption anyway.
Put simply, for Libertaria to truly thrive in Cyberspace many things need
to occur:
First, encrypted network layers must become easily available. Nobody
sitting on a network backbone should be able to see what I am saying or
what anybody is saying to me. Authentication should be included here as
well.
Second, traffic analysis must be made considerably harder if not thwarted
totally. When I go to http://www.cypherpunks.to an outside observer should
not be able to see that I was the one who filed this request by watching
my TCP/IP traffic. A modification of CROWDS is perhaps appropriate here.
Third, some form of true distributed and redundant data system must be
created. Eternity servers as currently implemented accomplish this to a
certain extent, but don't seem to quite reach the mark. Some form of
truly redundant, distributed, and secure filesystem which spreads across
many jurisdictions would be most appropriate, I think. There are many
technical problems involved in this however. As with anything else, such a
filesystem should be anonymous and should be very hard to shut down.
Fourth, if indeed a programmer in the United States can use a crypto library
available outside the United States without infringing on ITAR then
programmers outside the United States should begin work on such a library.
Such a library should include many different algorithms for authentication,
encryption, and key exchange. This would allow programmers inside the United
States to legally write software which employs these technologies.
Fifth, existing news and mail readers on all major platforms need to be
altered to support anonymous remailers, encryption, decryption,
authentication, and key exchange. This should include, at minimum, Windows,
the Macintosh, and UNIX variants.
Perhaps a whole new set of network protocols is necessary even if a bit
grandiose.
Tim May is correct: Libertaria will thrive in cyberspace.
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