Knowledge Brings Fear » Welcome to the world of

tomorrow

by: Frank Rieger, frank@ccc.de. Please use the comment function below.

Losing a war is never a pretty situation. So it is no wonder that most people do

not like to acknowledge that we have lost. We had a reasonable chance to
tame the wild beast of universal surveillance technology, approximately until
september 10th, 2001. One day later, we had lost. All the hopes we had, to
keep the big corporations and “security forces” at bay and develop interesting
alternative concepts in the virtual world, evaporated with the smoke clouds of
the World Trade Center.

Just right before, everything looked not too bad. We had survived Y2K with
barely a scratch. The world’s outlook was mildly optimistic after all. The “New
Economy” bubble gave most of us fun things to do and the fleeting hope of
plenty of cash not so far down the road. We had won the Clipper-Chip battle,
and crypto-regulation as we knew it was a thing of the past. The waves of
technology development seemed to work in favor of freedom, most of the time.
The future looked like a yellow brick road to a nirvana of endless bandwith, the
rule of ideas over matter and dissolving nation states. The big corporations
were at our mercy because we knew what the future would look like and we
had the technology to built it. Those were the days. Remember them for your
grandchildren’s bedtime stories. They will never come back again.

We are now deep inside the other kind of future, the future that we speculated
about as a worst case scenario, back then. This is the ugly future, the one we
never wanted, the one that we fought to prevent. We failed. Probably it was
not even our fault. But we are forced to live in it now.

Democracy is already over

By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for
lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no interest
in real democracy. The “democracy show” must go on nonetheless.
Conveniently, the show consumes the energy of those that might otherwise
become dangerous to the status quo. The show provides the necessary
excuse when things go wrong and keeps up the illusion of participation. Also,
the system provides organized and regulated battleground rules to find out
which interest groups and conspiracies have the upper hand for a while. Most
of the time it prevents open and violent power struggles that could destabilize
everything. So it is in the best interest of most players to keep at least certain
elements of the current “democracy show” alive. Even for the more evil
conspiracies around, the system is useful as it is. Certainly, the features that
could provide unpleasant surprises like direct popular votes on key issues are
the least likely to survive in the long run.

Of course, those in power want to minimize the influence of random chaotic

outbursts of popular will as much as possible. The real decisions in
government are not made by ministers or the parliament. The real power of
government rests with the undersecretaries and other high-level, non-elected
civil servants who stay while the politicians come and go. Especially in the
bureaucracies of the intelligence agencies, the ministry of interior, the military,
and other key nodes of power the long-term planning and decision-making is
not left to the incompetent mediocre political actors that get elected more or
less at random. Long term stability is a highly valued thing in power relations.
So even if the politicians of states suddenly start to be hostile to each other,
their intelligence agencies will often continue to cooperate and trade
telecommunication interception results as if nothing has happened.

Let’s try for a minute to look at the world from the perspective of such an
60-year-old bureaucrat that has access to the key data, the privilege to be
paid to think ahead, and the task to prepare the policy for the next decades.
What he would see, could look like this:

First,
paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology, even more rapidly
than today. Robotics will evolve far enough to kill a sizeable chunk of the
remaining low-end manual jobs. Of course, there will be new jobs, servicing
the robots, biotech, designing stuff, working on the nanotech developments
etc. But these will be few, compared with today, and require higher education.
Globalization continues its merciless course and will also export a lot of jobs of
the brain-labor type to India and China, as soon as education levels there
permit it.
So the western societies will end up with a large percentage of population, at
least a third, but possibly half of those in working age, having no real paid
work. There are those whose talents are cheaper to be had elsewhere, those
who are more inclined to manual labor. Not only the undereducated but all
those who simply cannot find a decent job anymore. This part of the
population needs to be pacified, either by Disney or by Dictatorship, most
probably by both. The unemployment problem severely affects the ability of
states to pay for social benefits. At some point it becomes cheaper to put
money into repressive police forces and rule by fear than put the money into
pay-outs to the unemployed population and buy the social peace. Criminal
activities look more interesting when there is no decent job to be had. Violence
is the unavoidable consequence of degrading social standards. Universal
surveillance might dampen the consequences for those who remain with some
wealth to defend.

Second,
climate change increases the frequency and devastation of natural disasters,
creating large scale emergency situations. Depending on geography, large
parts of land may become uninhabitable due to draught, flood, fires or
plagues. This creates a multitude of unpleasant effects. A large number of
people need to move, crop and animal production shrinks, industrial centers
and cities may be damaged to the point where abandoning them is the only
sensible choice left. The loss of property like non-usable (or non-insurable)
real estate will be frightening. The resulting internal migratory pressures
towards “safe areas” become a significant problem. Properly trained personal,
equipment, and supplies to respond to environmental emergencies are
needed standby all the time, eating up scarce government resources. The
conscript parts of national armed forces may be formed into disaster relief
units as they hang around anyway with no real job to do except securing fossil
energy sources abroad and helping out the border police.

Third,
immigration pressure from neighboring regions will raise in all western
countries. It looks like the climate disaster will strike worst at first in areas like
Africa and Latin America and the economy there is unlikely to cope any better
than the western countries with globalization and other problems ahead. So
the number of people who want to leave from there to somewhere inhabitable
at all costs will rise substantially. The western countries need a certain amount
of immigration to fill up their demographic holes but the number of people who
want to come will be far higher. Managing a controlled immigration process
according to the demographic needs is a nasty task where things can only go
wrong most of the time. The nearly unavoidable reaction will be a Fortress
Europe: serious border controls and fortifications, frequent and omnipresent
internal identity checks, fast and merciless deportation of illegal immigrants,
biometrics on every possible corner. Technology for border control can be
made quite efficient once ethical hurdles have fallen.

Fourth,
at some point in the next decades the energy crisis will strike with full force. Oil
will cost a fortune as production capacities can no longer be extended
economically to meet the rising demand. Natural gas and coal will last a bit
longer, a nuclear renaissance may dampen the worst of the pains. But the
core fact remains: a massive change in energy infrastructure is unavoidable.
Whether the transition will be harsh, painful and society-wrecking, or just
annoying and expensive depends on how soon before peak oil the
investments into new energy systems start on a massive scale as oil becomes
to expensive to burn. Procrastination is a sure recipe for disaster. The
geo-strategic and military race for the remaining large reserves of oil has
already begun and will cost vast resources.

Fifth,
we are on the verge of technology developments that may require draconic
restrictions and controls to prevent the total disruption of society. Genetic
engineering and other biotechnology as well as nanotechnology (and
potentially free energy technologies if they exist) will put immense powers into
the hands of skilled and knowledgeable individuals. Given the general raise in
paranoia, most people (and for sure those in power) will not continue to trust
that common sense will prevent the worst. There will be a tendency of controls
that keep this kind of technology in the hands of “trustworthy” corporations or
state entities. These controls, of course, need to be enforced, surveillance of
the usual suspects must be put in place to get advanced knowledge of
potential dangers. Science may no longer be a harmless, self-regulating thing
but something that needs to be tightly controlled and regulated, at least in the
critical areas. The measures needed to contain a potential global pandemic
from the Strange Virus of the Year are just a subset of those needed to contain
a nanotech or biotech disaster.
Now what follows from this view of the world? What changes to society are
required to cope with these trends from the viewpoint of our 60-year-old power
brokering bureaucrat?

Strategically it all points to massive investments into internal security.

Presenting the problem to the population as a mutually exclusive choice
between an uncertain dangerous freedom and an assured survival under the
securing umbrella of the trustworthy state becomes more easy the further the
various crises develop. The more wealthy parts of the population will certainly
require protection from illegal immigrants, criminals, terrorists and implicitly
also from the anger of less affluent citizens. And since the current system
values rich people more then poor ones, the rich must get their protection. The
security industry will certainly be of happy helpful assistance, especially where
the state can no longer provide enough protection for the taste of the lucky
ones.

Traditional democratic values have been eroded to the point where most
people don’t care anymore. So the loss of rights our ancestors fought for not
so long ago is at first happily accepted by a majority that can easily be scared
into submission. “Terrorism” is the theme of the day, others will follow. And
these “themes” can and will be used to mold the western societies into
something that has never been seen before: a democratically legitimated
police state, ruled by an unaccountable elite with total surveillance, made
efficient and largely unobtrusive by modern technology. With the enemy
(immigrants, terrorists, climate catastrophe refugees, criminals, the poor, mad
scientists, strange diseases) at the gates, the price that needs to be paid for
“security” will look acceptable.

Cooking up the “terrorist threat” by apparently stupid foreign policy and

senseless intelligence operations provides a convenient method to get through
with the establishment of a democratically legitimized police state. No one
cares that car accidents alone kill many more people than terrorists do. The
fear of terrorism accelerates the changes in society and provides the means to
get the suppression tools required for the coming waves of trouble.

What we call today “anti-terrorism measures” is the long-term planned and

conscious preparation of those in power for the kind of world described above.

The Technologies of Oppression

We can imagine most of the surveillance and oppression technology rather
well. Blanket CCTV coverage is reality in some cities already. Communication
pattern analysis (who talks to whom at what times) is frighteningly effective.
Movement pattern recording from cellphones, traffic monitoring systems, and
GPS tracking is the next wave that is just beginning. Shopping records (online,
credit and rebate cards) are another source of juicy data. The integration of all
these data sources into automated behavior pattern analysis currently
happens mostly on the dark side.

The key question for establishing an effective surveillance based police state
is to keep it low-profile enough that “the ordinary citizen” feels rather protected
than threatened, at least until all the pieces are in place to make it permanent.
First principle of 21st century police state: All those who “have nothing to hide”
should not be bothered unnecessarily. This goal becomes even more
complicated as with the increased availability of information on even minor
everyday infringements the “moral” pressure to prosecute will rise. Intelligence
agencies have always understood that effective work with interception results
requires a thorough selection between cases where it is necessary to do
something and those (the majority) where it is best to just be silent and enjoy.

Police forces in general (with a few exceptions) on the other hand have the
duty to act upon every crime or minor infringement they get knowledge of. Of
course, they have a certain amount of discretion already. With access to all the
information outlined above, we will end up with a system of selective
enforcement. It is impossible to live in a complex society without violating a
rule here and there from time to time, often even without noticing it. If all these
violations are documented and available for prosecution, the whole fabric of
society changes dramatically. The old sign for totalitarian societies – arbitrary
prosecution of political enemies – becomes a reality within the framework of
democratic rule-of-law states. As long as the people affected can be made
looking like the enemy-”theme” of the day, the system can be used to silence
opposition effectively. And at some point the switch to open automated
prosecution and policing can be made as any resistance to the system is by
definition “terrorism”. Development of society comes to a standstill, the rules of
the law and order paradise can no longer be violated.

Now disentangling ourselves from the reality tunnel of said 60-year-old

bureaucrat, where is hope for freedom, creativity and fun? To be honest, we
need to assume that it will take a couple of decades before the pendulum will
swing back into the freedom direction, barring a total breakdown of civilization
as we know it. Only when the oppression becomes to burdensome and open,
there might be a chance to get back to overall progress of mankind earlier. If
the powers that be are able to manage the system smoothly and skillfully, we
cannot make any prediction as to when the new dark ages will be over.

So what now?

Move to the mountains, become a gardener or carpenter, search for

happiness in communities of like minded people, in isolation from the rest of
the world? The idea has lost its charm for most who ever honestly tried. It may
work if you can find eternal happiness in milking cows at five o’clock in the
morning. But for the rest of us, the only realistic option is to try to live in, with,
and from the world as bad it has become. We need to built our own
communities nonetheless, virtual or real ones.

The politics & lobby game

So where to put your energy then? Trying to play the political game, fighting
against software patents, surveillance laws, and privacy invasions in
parliament and the courts can be the job of a lifetime. It has the advantage
that you will win a battle from time to time and can probably slow things down.
You may even be able to prevent a gross atrocity here and there. But in the
end, the development of technology and the panic level of the general
population will chew a lot of your victories for breakfast.

This is not to discount the work and dedication of those of us who fight on this
front. But you need to have a lawyers mindset and a very strong frustration
tolerance to gain satisfaction from it, and that is not given to everyone. We
need the lawyers nonetheless.

Talent and Ethics

Some of us sold their soul, maybe to pay the rent when the bubble bursted
and the cool and morally easy jobs became scarce. They sold their head to
corporations or the government to built the kind of things we knew perfectly
well how to built, that we sometimes discussed as a intellectual game, never
intending to make them a reality. Like surveillance infrastructure. Like software
to analyze camera images in realtime for movement patterns, faces, license
plates. Like data mining to combine vast amounts of information into graphs of
relations and behavior. Like interception systems to record and analyze every
single phone call, e-mail, click in the web. Means to track every single move of
people and things.

Thinking about what can be done with the results of one’s work is one thing.
Refusing to do the job because it could be to the worse of mankind is
something completely different. Especially when there is no other good option
to earn a living in a mentally stimulating way around. Most projects by itself
were justifiable, of course. It was “not that bad” or “no real risk”. Often the
excuse was “it is not technical feasible today anyway, it’s too much data to
store or make sense from”. Ten years later it is feasible. For sure.

While it certainly would be better when the surveillance industry would die
from lack of talent, the more realistic approach is to keep talking to those of us
who sold their head. We need to generate a culture that might be compared
with the sale of indulgences in the last dark ages: you may be working on the
wrong side of the barricade but we would be willing to trade you private moral
absolution in exchange for knowledge. Tell us what is happening there, what
the capabilities are, what the plans are, which gross scandals have been
hidden. To be honest, there is very little what we know about the capabilities of
todays dark-side interception systems after the meanwhile slightly antiquated
Echelon system had been discovered. All the new stuff that monitors the
internet, the current and future use of database profiling, automated CCTV
analysis, behavior pattern discovery and so on is only known in very few
cases and vague outlines.

We also need to know how the intelligence agencies work today. It is of

highest priority to learn how the “we rather use backdoors than waste time
cracking your keys”-methods work in practice on a large scale and what
backdoors have been intentionally built into or left inside our systems. Building
clean systems will be rather difficult, given the multitude of options to produce
a backdoor – ranging from operating system and application software to
hardware and CPUs that are to complex to fully audit. Open Source does only
help in theory, who has the time to really audit all the source anyway…
Of course, the risk of publishing this kind of knowledge is high, especially for
those on the dark side. So we need to build structures that can lessen the risk.
We need anonymous submission systems for documents, methods to clean
out eventual document fingerprinting (both on paper and electronic). And, of
course, we need to develop means to identify the inevitable disinformation that
will also be fed through these channels to confuse us.

Building technology to preserve the options for change

We are facing a unprecedented onslaught of surveillance technology. The

debate whether this may or may not reduce crime or terrorism is not relevant
anymore. The de-facto impact on society can already be felt with the content
mafia (aka. RIAA) demanding access to all data to preserve their dead
business model. We will need to build technology to preserve the freedom of
speech, the freedom of thought, the freedom of communication, there is no
other long-term solution. Political barriers to total surveillance have a very
limited half-life period.

The universal acceptance of electronic communication systems has been a

tremendous help for political movements. It has become a bit more difficult
and costly to maintain secrets for those in power. Unfortunately, the same
problem applies to everybody else. So one thing that we can do to help
societies progress along is to provide tools, knowledge and training for secure
communications to every political and social movement that shares at least
some of our ideals. We should not be too narrow here in choosing our friends,
everyone who opposes centralistic power structures and is not geared towards
totalitarism should be welcome. Maintaining the political breathing spaces
becomes more important than what this space is used for.

Anonymity will become the most precious thing. Encrypting

communications is nice and necessary but helps little as long as the
communication partners are known. Traffic analysis is the most valuable
intelligence tool around. Only by automatically looking at communications and
movement patterns, the interesting individuals can be filtered out, those who
justify the cost of detailed surveillance. Widespread implementation of
anonymity technologies becomes seriously urgent, given the data retention
laws that have been passed in the EU. We need opportunistic anonymity the
same way we needed opportunistic encryption. Currently, every anonymization
technology that has been deployed is instantly overwhelmed with file sharing
content. We need solutions for that, preferably with systems that can stand the
load, as anonymity loves company and more traffic means less probability of
de-anonymization by all kinds of attack.

Closed user groups have already gained momentum in communities that

have a heightened awareness and demand for privacy. The darker parts of the
hacker community and a lot of the warez trading circles have gone “black”
already. Others will follow. The technology to build real-world working closed
user groups is not yet there. We have only improvised setups that work under
very specific circumstances. Generic, easy to use technology to create fully
encrypted closed user groups for all kinds of content with comfortable degrees
of anonymity is desperately needed.

Decentralized infrastructure is the needed. The peer-to-peer networks are

a good example to see what works and what not. As long as there are
centralized elements they can be taken down under one pretext or another.
Only true peer-to-peer systems that need as little centralized elements as
possible can survive. Interestingly, tactical military networks have the same
requirements. We need to borrow from them, the same way they borrow from
commercial and open source technology.

Design stuff with surveillance abuse in mind is the next logical step. A lot
of us are involved into designing and implementing systems that can be
abused for surveillance purposes. Be it webshop systems, databases, RFID
systems, communication systems, or ordinary Blog servers, we need to design
things as safe as possible against later abuse of collected data or interception.
Often there is considerable freedom to design within the limits of our day jobs.
We need to use this freedom to build systems in a way that they collect as little
data as possible, use encryption and provide anonymity as much as possible.
We need to create a culture around that. A system design needs to be viewed
by our peers only as “good” if it adheres to these criteria. Of course, it may be
hard to sacrifice the personal power that comes with access to juicy data. But
keep in mind, you will not have this job forever and whoever takes over the
system is most likely not as privacy-minded as you are. Limiting the amount of
data gathered on people doing everyday transactions and communication is
an absolute must if you are a serious hacker. There are many good things that
can be done with RFID. For instance making recycling of goods easier and
more effective by storing the material composition and hints about the
manufacturing process in tags attached to electronic gadgets. But to be able
to harness the good potential of technologies like this, the system needs to
limit or prevent the downside as much as possible, by design, not as an
afterthought.

Do not compromise your friends with stupidity or ignorance will be even

more essential. We are all used to the minor fuckups of encrypted mail being
forwarded unencrypted, being careless about other peoples data traces or
bragging with knowledge obtained in confidence. This is no longer possible.
We are facing an enemy that is euphemistically called “Global Observer” in
research papers. This is meant literally. You can no longer rely on information
or communication being “overlooked” or “hidden in the noise”. Everything is on
file. Forever. And it can and will be used against you. And your “innocent”
slip-up five years back might compromise someone you like.

Keep silent and enjoy or publish immediately may become the new mantra
for security researchers. Submitting security problems to the manufacturers
provides the intelligence agencies with a long period in which they can and will
use the problem to attack systems and implant backdoors. It is well known that
backdoors are the way around encryption and that all big manufacturers have
an agreement with the respective intelligence agencies of their countries to
hand over valuable “0 day” exploit data as soon as they get them. During the
months or even years it takes them to issue a fix, the agencies can use the 0
day and do not risk exposure. If an intrusion gets detected by accident, no one
will suspect foul play, as the problem will be fixed later by the manufacturer. So
if you discover problems, publish at least enough information to enable people
to detect an intrusion before submitting to the manufacturer.

Most important: have fun! The eavesdropping people must be laughed

about as their job is silly, boring, and ethically the worst thing to earn money
with, sort of blackmail and robbing grandmas on the street. We need to
develop a “lets have fun confusing their systems”-culture that plays with the
inherent imperfections, loopholes, systematic problems, and interpretation
errors that are inevitable with large scale surveillance. Artists are the right
company for this kind of approach. We need a subculture of “In your face,
peeping tom”. Exposing surveillance in the most humiliating and degrading
manner, giving people something to laugh about must be the goal. Also, this
prevents us from becoming frustrated and tired. If there is no fun in beating the
system, we will get tired of it and they will win. So let’s be flexible, creative and
funny, not angry, ideologic and stiff-necked.

———-
This text was first printed in Die Datenschleuder #89. It is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License . Die Datenschleuder is
the scientific journal for data travelers, published quarterly by the Chaos
Computer Club, Germany since 1984.

by: Frank Rieger, frank@ccc.de. Please use the comment function below.

Losing a war is never a pretty situation. So it is no wonder that most people do

not like to acknowledge that we have lost. We had a reasonable chance to
tame the wild beast of universal surveillance technology, approximately until
september 10th, 2001. One day later, we had lost. All the hopes we had, to
keep the big corporations and “security forces” at bay and develop interesting
alternative concepts in the virtual world, evaporated with the smoke clouds of
the World Trade Center.

Just right before, everything looked not too bad. We had survived Y2K with
barely a scratch. The world’s outlook was mildly optimistic after all. The “New
Economy” bubble gave most of us fun things to do and the fleeting hope of
plenty of cash not so far down the road. We had won the Clipper-Chip battle,
and crypto-regulation as we knew it was a thing of the past. The waves of
technology development seemed to work in favor of freedom, most of the time.
The future looked like a yellow brick road to a nirvana of endless bandwith, the
rule of ideas over matter and dissolving nation states. The big corporations
were at our mercy because we knew what the future would look like and we
had the technology to built it. Those were the days. Remember them for your
grandchildren’s bedtime stories. They will never come back again.

We are now deep inside the other kind of future, the future that we speculated
about as a worst case scenario, back then. This is the ugly future, the one we
never wanted, the one that we fought to prevent. We failed. Probably it was
not even our fault. But we are forced to live in it now.
Democracy is already over
By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for
lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no interest
in real democracy. The “democracy show” must go on nonetheless.
Conveniently, the show consumes the energy of those that might otherwise
become dangerous to the status quo. The show provides the necessary
excuse when things go wrong and keeps up the illusion of participation. Also,
the system provides organized and regulated battleground rules to find out
which interest groups and conspiracies have the upper hand for a while. Most
of the time it prevents open and violent power struggles that could destabilize
everything. So it is in the best interest of most players to keep at least certain
elements of the current “democracy show” alive. Even for the more evil
conspiracies around, the system is useful as it is. Certainly, the features that
could provide unpleasant surprises like direct popular votes on key issues are
the least likely to survive in the long run.

Of course, those in power want to minimize the influence of random chaotic

outbursts of popular will as much as possible. The real decisions in
government are not made by ministers or the parliament. The real power of
government rests with the undersecretaries and other high-level, non-elected
civil servants who stay while the politicians come and go. Especially in the
bureaucracies of the intelligence agencies, the ministry of interior, the military,
and other key nodes of power the long-term planning and decision-making is
not left to the incompetent mediocre political actors that get elected more or
less at random. Long term stability is a highly valued thing in power relations.
So even if the politicians of states suddenly start to be hostile to each other,
their intelligence agencies will often continue to cooperate and trade
telecommunication interception results as if nothing has happened.

Let’s try for a minute to look at the world from the perspective of such an
60-year-old bureaucrat that has access to the key data, the privilege to be
paid to think ahead, and the task to prepare the policy for the next decades.
What he would see, could look like this:

First,
paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology, even more rapidly
than today. Robotics will evolve far enough to kill a sizeable chunk of the
remaining low-end manual jobs. Of course, there will be new jobs, servicing
the robots, biotech, designing stuff, working on the nanotech developments
etc. But these will be few, compared with today, and require higher education.
Globalization continues its merciless course and will also export a lot of jobs of
the brain-labor type to India and China, as soon as education levels there
permit it.

So the western societies will end up with a large percentage of population, at

least a third, but possibly half of those in working age, having no real paid
work. There are those whose talents are cheaper to be had elsewhere, those
who are more inclined to manual labor. Not only the undereducated but all
those who simply cannot find a decent job anymore. This part of the
population needs to be pacified, either by Disney or by Dictatorship, most
probably by both. The unemployment problem severely affects the ability of
states to pay for social benefits. At some point it becomes cheaper to put
money into repressive police forces and rule by fear than put the money into
pay-outs to the unemployed population and buy the social peace. Criminal
activities look more interesting when there is no decent job to be had. Violence
is the unavoidable consequence of degrading social standards. Universal
surveillance might dampen the consequences for those who remain with some
wealth to defend.

Second,
climate change increases the frequency and devastation of natural disasters,
creating large scale emergency situations. Depending on geography, large
parts of land may become uninhabitable due to draught, flood, fires or
plagues. This creates a multitude of unpleasant effects. A large number of
people need to move, crop and animal production shrinks, industrial centers
and cities may be damaged to the point where abandoning them is the only
sensible choice left. The loss of property like non-usable (or non-insurable)
real estate will be frightening. The resulting internal migratory pressures
towards “safe areas” become a significant problem. Properly trained personal,
equipment, and supplies to respond to environmental emergencies are
needed standby all the time, eating up scarce government resources. The
conscript parts of national armed forces may be formed into disaster relief
units as they hang around anyway with no real job to do except securing fossil
energy sources abroad and helping out the border police.
Third,
immigration pressure from neighboring regions will raise in all western
countries. It looks like the climate disaster will strike worst at first in areas like
Africa and Latin America and the economy there is unlikely to cope any better
than the western countries with globalization and other problems ahead. So
the number of people who want to leave from there to somewhere inhabitable
at all costs will rise substantially. The western countries need a certain amount
of immigration to fill up their demographic holes but the number of people who
want to come will be far higher. Managing a controlled immigration process
according to the demographic needs is a nasty task where things can only go
wrong most of the time. The nearly unavoidable reaction will be a Fortress
Europe: serious border controls and fortifications, frequent and omnipresent
internal identity checks, fast and merciless deportation of illegal immigrants,
biometrics on every possible corner. Technology for border control can be
made quite efficient once ethical hurdles have fallen.

Fourth,
at some point in the next decades the energy crisis will strike with full force. Oil
will cost a fortune as production capacities can no longer be extended
economically to meet the rising demand. Natural gas and coal will last a bit
longer, a nuclear renaissance may dampen the worst of the pains. But the
core fact remains: a massive change in energy infrastructure is unavoidable.
Whether the transition will be harsh, painful and society-wrecking, or just
annoying and expensive depends on how soon before peak oil the
investments into new energy systems start on a massive scale as oil becomes
to expensive to burn. Procrastination is a sure recipe for disaster. The
geo-strategic and military race for the remaining large reserves of oil has
already begun and will cost vast resources.

Fifth,
we are on the verge of technology developments that may require draconic
restrictions and controls to prevent the total disruption of society. Genetic
engineering and other biotechnology as well as nanotechnology (and
potentially free energy technologies if they exist) will put immense powers into
the hands of skilled and knowledgeable individuals. Given the general raise in
paranoia, most people (and for sure those in power) will not continue to trust
that common sense will prevent the worst. There will be a tendency of controls
that keep this kind of technology in the hands of “trustworthy” corporations or
state entities. These controls, of course, need to be enforced, surveillance of
the usual suspects must be put in place to get advanced knowledge of
potential dangers. Science may no longer be a harmless, self-regulating thing
but something that needs to be tightly controlled and regulated, at least in the
critical areas. The measures needed to contain a potential global pandemic
from the Strange Virus of the Year are just a subset of those needed to contain
a nanotech or biotech disaster.

Now what follows from this view of the world? What changes to society are
required to cope with these trends from the viewpoint of our 60-year-old power
brokering bureaucrat?

Strategically it all points to massive investments into internal security.

Presenting the problem to the population as a mutually exclusive choice
between an uncertain dangerous freedom and an assured survival under the
securing umbrella of the trustworthy state becomes more easy the further the
various crises develop. The more wealthy parts of the population will certainly
require protection from illegal immigrants, criminals, terrorists and implicitly
also from the anger of less affluent citizens. And since the current system
values rich people more then poor ones, the rich must get their protection. The
security industry will certainly be of happy helpful assistance, especially where
the state can no longer provide enough protection for the taste of the lucky
ones.

Traditional democratic values have been eroded to the point where most
people don’t care anymore. So the loss of rights our ancestors fought for not
so long ago is at first happily accepted by a majority that can easily be scared
into submission. “Terrorism” is the theme of the day, others will follow. And
these “themes” can and will be used to mold the western societies into
something that has never been seen before: a democratically legitimated
police state, ruled by an unaccountable elite with total surveillance, made
efficient and largely unobtrusive by modern technology. With the enemy
(immigrants, terrorists, climate catastrophe refugees, criminals, the poor, mad
scientists, strange diseases) at the gates, the price that needs to be paid for
“security” will look acceptable.

Cooking up the “terrorist threat” by apparently stupid foreign policy and

senseless intelligence operations provides a convenient method to get through
with the establishment of a democratically legitimized police state. No one
cares that car accidents alone kill many more people than terrorists do. The
fear of terrorism accelerates the changes in society and provides the means to
get the suppression tools required for the coming waves of trouble.

What we call today “anti-terrorism measures” is the long-term planned and

conscious preparation of those in power for the kind of world described above.

The Technologies of Oppression

We can imagine most of the surveillance and oppression technology rather
well. Blanket CCTV coverage is reality in some cities already. Communication
pattern analysis (who talks to whom at what times) is frighteningly effective.
Movement pattern recording from cellphones, traffic monitoring systems, and
GPS tracking is the next wave that is just beginning. Shopping records (online,
credit and rebate cards) are another source of juicy data. The integration of all
these data sources into automated behavior pattern analysis currently
happens mostly on the dark side.

The key question for establishing an effective surveillance based police state
is to keep it low-profile enough that “the ordinary citizen” feels rather protected
than threatened, at least until all the pieces are in place to make it permanent.
First principle of 21st century police state: All those who “have nothing to hide”
should not be bothered unnecessarily. This goal becomes even more
complicated as with the increased availability of information on even minor
everyday infringements the “moral” pressure to prosecute will rise. Intelligence
agencies have always understood that effective work with interception results
requires a thorough selection between cases where it is necessary to do
something and those (the majority) where it is best to just be silent and enjoy.

Police forces in general (with a few exceptions) on the other hand have the
duty to act upon every crime or minor infringement they get knowledge of. Of
course, they have a certain amount of discretion already. With access to all the
information outlined above, we will end up with a system of selective
enforcement. It is impossible to live in a complex society without violating a
rule here and there from time to time, often even without noticing it. If all these
violations are documented and available for prosecution, the whole fabric of
society changes dramatically. The old sign for totalitarian societies – arbitrary
prosecution of political enemies – becomes a reality within the framework of
democratic rule-of-law states. As long as the people affected can be made
looking like the enemy-”theme” of the day, the system can be used to silence
opposition effectively. And at some point the switch to open automated
prosecution and policing can be made as any resistance to the system is by
definition “terrorism”. Development of society comes to a standstill, the rules of
the law and order paradise can no longer be violated.

Now disentangling ourselves from the reality tunnel of said 60-year-old

bureaucrat, where is hope for freedom, creativity and fun? To be honest, we
need to assume that it will take a couple of decades before the pendulum will
swing back into the freedom direction, barring a total breakdown of civilization
as we know it. Only when the oppression becomes to burdensome and open,
there might be a chance to get back to overall progress of mankind earlier. If
the powers that be are able to manage the system smoothly and skillfully, we
cannot make any prediction as to when the new dark ages will be over.

So what now?

Move to the mountains, become a gardener or carpenter, search for

happiness in communities of like minded people, in isolation from the rest of
the world? The idea has lost its charm for most who ever honestly tried. It may
work if you can find eternal happiness in milking cows at five o’clock in the
morning. But for the rest of us, the only realistic option is to try to live in, with,
and from the world as bad it has become. We need to built our own
communities nonetheless, virtual or real ones.

The politics & lobby game

So where to put your energy then? Trying to play the political game, fighting
against software patents, surveillance laws, and privacy invasions in
parliament and the courts can be the job of a lifetime. It has the advantage
that you will win a battle from time to time and can probably slow things down.
You may even be able to prevent a gross atrocity here and there. But in the
end, the development of technology and the panic level of the general
population will chew a lot of your victories for breakfast.

This is not to discount the work and dedication of those of us who fight on this
front. But you need to have a lawyers mindset and a very strong frustration
tolerance to gain satisfaction from it, and that is not given to everyone. We
need the lawyers nonetheless.

Talent and Ethics

Some of us sold their soul, maybe to pay the rent when the bubble bursted
and the cool and morally easy jobs became scarce. They sold their head to
corporations or the government to built the kind of things we knew perfectly
well how to built, that we sometimes discussed as a intellectual game, never
intending to make them a reality. Like surveillance infrastructure. Like software
to analyze camera images in realtime for movement patterns, faces, license
plates. Like data mining to combine vast amounts of information into graphs of
relations and behavior. Like interception systems to record and analyze every
single phone call, e-mail, click in the web. Means to track every single move of
people and things.

Thinking about what can be done with the results of one’s work is one thing.
Refusing to do the job because it could be to the worse of mankind is
something completely different. Especially when there is no other good option
to earn a living in a mentally stimulating way around. Most projects by itself
were justifiable, of course. It was “not that bad” or “no real risk”. Often the
excuse was “it is not technical feasible today anyway, it’s too much data to
store or make sense from”. Ten years later it is feasible. For sure.

While it certainly would be better when the surveillance industry would die
from lack of talent, the more realistic approach is to keep talking to those of us
who sold their head. We need to generate a culture that might be compared
with the sale of indulgences in the last dark ages: you may be working on the
wrong side of the barricade but we would be willing to trade you private moral
absolution in exchange for knowledge. Tell us what is happening there, what
the capabilities are, what the plans are, which gross scandals have been
hidden. To be honest, there is very little what we know about the capabilities of
todays dark-side interception systems after the meanwhile slightly antiquated
Echelon system had been discovered. All the new stuff that monitors the
internet, the current and future use of database profiling, automated CCTV
analysis, behavior pattern discovery and so on is only known in very few
cases and vague outlines.
We also need to know how the intelligence agencies work today. It is of
highest priority to learn how the “we rather use backdoors than waste time
cracking your keys”-methods work in practice on a large scale and what
backdoors have been intentionally built into or left inside our systems. Building
clean systems will be rather difficult, given the multitude of options to produce
a backdoor – ranging from operating system and application software to
hardware and CPUs that are to complex to fully audit. Open Source does only
help in theory, who has the time to really audit all the source anyway…

Of course, the risk of publishing this kind of knowledge is high, especially for
those on the dark side. So we need to build structures that can lessen the risk.
We need anonymous submission systems for documents, methods to clean
out eventual document fingerprinting (both on paper and electronic). And, of
course, we need to develop means to identify the inevitable disinformation that
will also be fed through these channels to confuse us.

Building technology to preserve the options for change

We are facing a unprecedented onslaught of surveillance technology. The

debate whether this may or may not reduce crime or terrorism is not relevant
anymore. The de-facto impact on society can already be felt with the content
mafia (aka. RIAA) demanding access to all data to preserve their dead
business model. We will need to build technology to preserve the freedom of
speech, the freedom of thought, the freedom of communication, there is no
other long-term solution. Political barriers to total surveillance have a very
limited half-life period.

The universal acceptance of electronic communication systems has been a

tremendous help for political movements. It has become a bit more difficult
and costly to maintain secrets for those in power. Unfortunately, the same
problem applies to everybody else. So one thing that we can do to help
societies progress along is to provide tools, knowledge and training for secure
communications to every political and social movement that shares at least
some of our ideals. We should not be too narrow here in choosing our friends,
everyone who opposes centralistic power structures and is not geared towards
totalitarism should be welcome. Maintaining the political breathing spaces
becomes more important than what this space is used for.

Anonymity will become the most precious thing. Encrypting

communications is nice and necessary but helps little as long as the
communication partners are known. Traffic analysis is the most valuable
intelligence tool around. Only by automatically looking at communications and
movement patterns, the interesting individuals can be filtered out, those who
justify the cost of detailed surveillance. Widespread implementation of
anonymity technologies becomes seriously urgent, given the data retention
laws that have been passed in the EU. We need opportunistic anonymity the
same way we needed opportunistic encryption. Currently, every anonymization
technology that has been deployed is instantly overwhelmed with file sharing
content. We need solutions for that, preferably with systems that can stand the
load, as anonymity loves company and more traffic means less probability of
de-anonymization by all kinds of attack.

Closed user groups have already gained momentum in communities that

have a heightened awareness and demand for privacy. The darker parts of the
hacker community and a lot of the warez trading circles have gone “black”
already. Others will follow. The technology to build real-world working closed
user groups is not yet there. We have only improvised setups that work under
very specific circumstances. Generic, easy to use technology to create fully
encrypted closed user groups for all kinds of content with comfortable degrees
of anonymity is desperately needed.

Decentralized infrastructure is the needed. The peer-to-peer networks are

a good example to see what works and what not. As long as there are
centralized elements they can be taken down under one pretext or another.
Only true peer-to-peer systems that need as little centralized elements as
possible can survive. Interestingly, tactical military networks have the same
requirements. We need to borrow from them, the same way they borrow from
commercial and open source technology.

Design stuff with surveillance abuse in mind is the next logical step. A lot
of us are involved into designing and implementing systems that can be
abused for surveillance purposes. Be it webshop systems, databases, RFID
systems, communication systems, or ordinary Blog servers, we need to design
things as safe as possible against later abuse of collected data or interception.
Often there is considerable freedom to design within the limits of our day jobs.
We need to use this freedom to build systems in a way that they collect as little
data as possible, use encryption and provide anonymity as much as possible.
We need to create a culture around that. A system design needs to be viewed
by our peers only as “good” if it adheres to these criteria. Of course, it may be
hard to sacrifice the personal power that comes with access to juicy data. But
keep in mind, you will not have this job forever and whoever takes over the
system is most likely not as privacy-minded as you are. Limiting the amount of
data gathered on people doing everyday transactions and communication is
an absolute must if you are a serious hacker. There are many good things that
can be done with RFID. For instance making recycling of goods easier and
more effective by storing the material composition and hints about the
manufacturing process in tags attached to electronic gadgets. But to be able
to harness the good potential of technologies like this, the system needs to
limit or prevent the downside as much as possible, by design, not as an
afterthought.

Do not compromise your friends with stupidity or ignorance will be even

more essential. We are all used to the minor fuckups of encrypted mail being
forwarded unencrypted, being careless about other peoples data traces or
bragging with knowledge obtained in confidence. This is no longer possible.
We are facing an enemy that is euphemistically called “Global Observer” in
research papers. This is meant literally. You can no longer rely on information
or communication being “overlooked” or “hidden in the noise”. Everything is on
file. Forever. And it can and will be used against you. And your “innocent”
slip-up five years back might compromise someone you like.

Keep silent and enjoy or publish immediately may become the new mantra
for security researchers. Submitting security problems to the manufacturers
provides the intelligence agencies with a long period in which they can and will
use the problem to attack systems and implant backdoors. It is well known that
backdoors are the way around encryption and that all big manufacturers have
an agreement with the respective intelligence agencies of their countries to
hand over valuable “0 day” exploit data as soon as they get them. During the
months or even years it takes them to issue a fix, the agencies can use the 0
day and do not risk exposure. If an intrusion gets detected by accident, no one
will suspect foul play, as the problem will be fixed later by the manufacturer. So
if you discover problems, publish at least enough information to enable people
to detect an intrusion before submitting to the manufacturer.

Most important: have fun! The eavesdropping people must be laughed

about as their job is silly, boring, and ethically the worst thing to earn money
with, sort of blackmail and robbing grandmas on the street. We need to
develop a “lets have fun confusing their systems”-culture that plays with the
inherent imperfections, loopholes, systematic problems, and interpretation
errors that are inevitable with large scale surveillance. Artists are the right
company for this kind of approach. We need a subculture of “In your face,
peeping tom”. Exposing surveillance in the most humiliating and degrading
manner, giving people something to laugh about must be the goal. Also, this
prevents us from becoming frustrated and tired. If there is no fun in beating the
system, we will get tired of it and they will win. So let’s be flexible, creative and
funny, not angry, ideologic and stiff-necked.

———-
This text was first printed in Die Datenschleuder #89. It is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License . Die Datenschleuder is
the scientific journal for data travelers, published quarterly by the Chaos
Computer Club, Germany since 1984.

Excerpted from Knowledge Brings Fear » Welcome to the world of tomorrow

http://frank.geekheim.de/?page_id=128

READABILITY — An Arc90 Laboratory Experiment http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability