INTERVIEW TO ASSANGE HIS
SCIENE HIS PHILOSOPHY & HIS SPIRIT [2011]
Appendix 4 . [EXTRACTS and
subtitles in capital letters added]
Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange [JA] and Google
CEO Eric Schmidt [ES]
On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took
place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian
Assange [JA], who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt [ES]. Also in
attendance was Jared Cohen [JC], a
former Secretary of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director
of Speech-writing for Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and
current Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa Shields [LS], Vice President of
the Council on Foreign Relations.
Schmidt [ES] and Cohen [JC] 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.
Transcript
JA
Who is Lisa
Shields. [the one who is going to be
[used this interview] 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.
ES Can we start... I want to talk a little about Thor. The sort of, the whole Navy network and..
JA Tor or Thor?
ES
Yeah,
actually I mean Tor. Uh...
JA
And Odin as
well.
ES 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.
HOW WIKILEAKS IS ORGANIZED &
WORKS
JA
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.
ES
Ok
JA And I wanted
there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of 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 discussions
about 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
non-linear way because when one person conveys 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 behavior of many people with a small amount of information.
So the question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce
behavior which is just? And dis-incentivize behavior which is unjust? So all
around the world there are people observing different parts of what is happening to them locally.
And 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. These are 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 the Fourth Estate. And so you have
some kind of... pipeline... and... So I have this description 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 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.
ES For all three
phases?
JA 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, and incentivizing
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 it still currently is for the
national security sector. And where internally we had a very small and
completely trusted team.
ES So publishing
means the question of the site itself? And making the material public?
JA Yeah. Making
the primary source material public. That is what I mean by publishing.
ES So the first
step was to make that correctly
JA It was clear to
me that all over the world publishing is a problem. And... Whether that is
through self censorship or overt censorship
ES Sorry, just
you're gonna have to [explain]... is that because of fear of retribution by the
governments, you know? Or all...
JA 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 the murders 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.
ES Sure
JA 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, there are 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.
ES Right. I see
JA 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 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 this censorship 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 was looking 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...
ES
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?
JA
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
ES So, again, in
constructing the argument you were concerned that governments or whatever would
attack the front ends of this thing through whatever... denial of service
attacks or blocking, basically filtering them out, which is essentially is commonly
done. So an important aspect of this was to always be available.
JA Always be available in one particular way or another.
Now that's not a.. it's a battle that 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.
ES Of course they
are.
JA 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.
ES That's a
structural problem with the naming of the internet, but the Chinese would
simply do content filtering on you.
JA Well, HTTPS
worked for about a year and a half.
ES Okey
JA Worked quite
well actually. And then changing up IPs, because they were... the Chinese
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...
ES
Ha ha ha ha ha. That's clever. Ha ha ha ha ha.
JA ...different
IPs. I was actually thinking we could return Public Security Bureau IPs!
[Jaret
Cohen, and Scott –the Google editor- show up]
JA A friend of
mine did an interview... .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.. ...
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...
ES 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 a brilliant
book we are working on.,, And Lisa assisted
me. And we seem to be ok with her assist. What we agreed was that we would talk
about the technology directions and maybe the implications of all of this, and
the deal was that it would be on the record for the book. We would have a
transcript prepared, which he would have an opportunity to modify and improve
its clarity, which all seemed incredible reasonable to me. So we just started
talking a little bit about... we talked a little bit about sort of the general
principles he's articulated and I was just starting to talk a little bit about
the structure, why WikiLeaks is architected the way it is. And the rough
summary there is that, the concern that he had in architecting this was that if
you look at the governments you know the sort of the stuff that they do, murder
journalists, imprison journalists and that kind of stuff, his view was that we
want to attack that problem by making a system that was very very hard to
block. So the non technical explanation of what he did is that if you built a
system where if they do the obvious things to block them it can essentially
show up in another way. Change its name and replicate...
JA We developed
an internal system to do some of these fast replicas. Not quite
unsophisticated, but worked quickly. But I think this is... I've been thinking
about this for a while now. I think there is... The 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... [JA
playing with Tomato on table]
JA
...because it takes too long. And because it takes too long to describe
this tomato precisely 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 plastiline imaginable. And
that is a big problem.
ES And you
would argue a different name-space structure, involving... properly...
JA
I think there is a fundamental confusion, an overloading of the current
URL.
ES Yep. Absolutely
JA
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 be referred 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 several that
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 a painting signed by 146 members Commons including Tony Blair. He's the
same guy who was the principal financier of Tony Rezko. Tony Rezko was the
financier and fundraiser of Rod Blagoyevich, from Chicago. Convicted of
corruption. Tony Rezko has been convicted of corruption. And Barack Obama. He
was the intermediary who helped Barack Obama buy one of his houses and then the
money not directly for the house but it bouyed up Tony Rezko's finances came
from that... [indistinct]. So during the - this is detail, but it will get to a
point. During the 2008 presidential primaries a lot of attention was turned to
Barack Obama by the US press, unsurprisingly. And so it started to look into
his fundraisers, and discovered Tony Rezko, and then they just started to turn
their eyes towards Nadhmi Auchi. Auchi then hired Carter Ruck, a rather
notorious firm of London libel solicitors, whose founder, Carter Ruck, has been
described as doing for freedom of speech what the Boston strangler did for door
to door salesmen [laughs]
JA
And he started writing letters to all of the London papers who had
records of his 2003 extradition to France and conviction for corruption in
France over the 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 from 2003. 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 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 they are going to
induce some change.
JC
So it's the evidence of the suppression that you look for in order to
determine value?
JA
Yeah, that is a very good - not precisely - but it is a very good..
JC Well, tell me precisely. Ha ha.
ES It's not perfect!
JA
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 information going around can come out. So...
JC
No no no, I wanted water, but
Eric took mine. Ha ha
JA
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.
ES
So, just, I want to know a bit more about the 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...
JA
OK. That's a very good question.
ES
Yeah, it is a pretty complicated
question.
JA
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, 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 expose these 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 who hounded 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 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.
ES
The problem is..
JA
And Google didn't send any lawyers to help them either!
JC Yeah, we guessed... [indistinct] entertainment
industry in California.
JA
That's an example of what happens if you have pretty bright guys; they
had a good Indian technical guy. They had bright 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 to the
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 soon find 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 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's
Association, 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
JC Huh huh. Wow
JA
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 in Singapore and the United States.
ES
But again, I get the, the, that's [indistinct] there are sites that
participate in this?
JA
Yes, we have some fourteen hundred, but those are... we have mirrors
that are voluntary as well as
ES
So they basically opt-in mirror sites.
JA
They 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.
ES
You have been quoted in the press as saying that there is a much larger
store of information that is encrypted and distributed. Is it distributed in
those sorts of places?
JA
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.
ES
Got it,
JA
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.
ES
So, so and eventually you will reveal the key that is necessary to
decrypt it.
JA
No, ideally, we will never reveal the key.
ES
I see
JA
Because there is things, like, so redactions sometimes need to be done
on this material.
ES
Sure
JA
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.
ES And I understand that. One more sort
of tactical question for now. So, my simple explanation is that the tools will
get better for 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.
JA
No we have... we have lots of different paths. And that's quite
deliberate. And we don't say which one is used more than which other one,
because that means that investigative resources have to be spread across all
possible paths. But they are from in-person, in the mail. Postal mail is still
actually pretty good if you want to send anonymous stuff. Encrypt something to
a key, if you think it might be intercepted on the way, send it from somewhere,
it's still pretty good. Straight HTTPS uploads, although they are not actually
sort of straight. But to the user it looks like they are straight. Behind the
scenes all sorts of other stuff is going on. The biggest problem with computer
security is not communication. It's end points.
And so dealing with end point attacks both on someone trying
to send us information and more importantly if someone tries to send us
information is themselves compromised, that's one compromise of one person. If
our engine that receives information is compromised, that is a potential
compromise of every person that is trying to send us material.
ES
I guess I... I didn't ask my question quite right. If the... Is there
some new technology which in your view would kind of materially change this
simple model that I have about, of the vast increase... So what are those
technologies?
JA
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 then there'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.
ES Why don't you have to trust the underlying
networks?
THE HASHES IN ADVANCE
ELECTRONICS CASE: WIKILEAKS
JA
Well because you can sign... you can sign the hashes. And that's the hash. If a name is like a hash.
ES
You're basically saying you have a provable name...
JA
Yeah
ES
As opposed to an alterable name.
JA And those sorts of mechanisms are evolving
now. We have been using something like this internally, I've been writing a
paper on it to try and make this a standard for everyone. But you can see they
are actually evolving. If we look at magnet links... have you seen these? There
is an enhancement of BitTorrent, which is a magnet link, and a magnet link is
actually a hash.
So it is hash addressing. It doesn't point to any particular
server, rather there is a big hash tree.. a distributed hash, three over... I
don't know how technical I should get... There is a big distributed hash tree
over 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.
ES
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...
JA
As long as you get the hash...
ES
...you can't hide it
JA
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… And that is
something like WikiLeaks signs that, and says that that is...
ES An interesting piece of information
JA
...an interesting piece of information, and we have verified that it is
true. But that, once you need that information into the system then it becomes
very unclear how 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, if someone were to modify it, the hash
changes...
JC I was just gonna say, why wouldn't
they just rename it, rather than...
JA They can't because the name is
intrinsically coupled to the intellectual content.
ES
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. So how far are we from this type of system?
JA
On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are starting to come
up. There's also a very nice little paper that I've seen in relation to
Bitcoin, that... you know about Bitcoin?
THE ISSUE BITCOINS
JA 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… 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 balance and 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. 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 ground and 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.
-- [laughter] ------
JA
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 a sequence 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 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.
ES
Right, right. That's interesting.
JA
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...
ES
To enforce the scarcity...
JA
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 can send 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 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 stop me... I want
to buy this piece of pasta.
[JA using lunch table objects]
JA 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... and now 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 too fast 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 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.
ES Right. That's
very interesting.
JA 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 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!
ES Right
JA 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, you can 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.
ES Are you worried.. basically this entire system
depends on basically irrevocable key structures. Are you worried that the key
structures would fall apart?
JA 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 and remove 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.
ES The average
person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful lot of private
keys involving commerce were taken,
JA Yes,,, So.. 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 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 been told 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, you register 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.
THE ISSUE PHONES
ES And one more technical question,.. 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 behavior, 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 does that 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.
JA 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 high density...
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 one can in
theory hear the radio of the other.
ES You could form
a peer to peer network.
JA 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... ...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.
ES Right, right
JA 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
about what 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.
ES They have
their networks. So your argument that even with these existing phones they
odify them to have peer to peer encrypted tunnels for voice and data,
presumably
JA 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
ES Oh, so, oh, so
that's clever, so that way you can't be blocked, right? YEAH
Because UDP is a single packet, right? So...
JA Right, so you
send it to random internet hosts and a random internet host doesn't respond,
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
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 a mobile 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.
ES Yeah, yeah.
JA 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't
scale 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 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, human
beings 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...
ES It's not a
bandwidth problem
JA 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.
ES How would you
architect this how would you architect that... I think my summary 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?
JA 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.
THE INTERNET
JA
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 now
so 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 most similar to what happened
in this period of liberation movements in the 1960s, that they have seen.
JC Do
you see it scaling differently than it did in the 60s?
JA 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...
LS A-political?
Do you mean one word?
JA One word. People are going from... young people are
going from apolitical to political. It is a very very interesting transition to
see
JC 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?
JA 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 jury with Zimmermann and so on?
POLITICS AND ECONOMIC FACTOR ON WIKILEKS
JA I've read the Lord of the Flies... I've seen plenty of Lord of the Flies
situations... I think that the instincts
human beings have are actually much better than the societies that we have.
JC Then the
governments, basically…
JA I am not going to say governments. The whole
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? NO…
NO.. NO
JA
It's on
youtube. It's great. A wonderful thing. So it is explaining nuclear synthesis
through interpretive dance. And so there are like a hundred and thirty Stanford
students out there pretending to be DNA, a whole bunch pretending to be a
ribosomal subunit and da da da. And all wearing the hippy clothes of the day.
But they were all actually very bright people. And I looked at that and
thought, could Stanford.. and it was a very good bit of education, so it is not
that it was cool and unusual, rather that it was extremely instructive, and
before computer animation was the best representation of how a ribosomal unit
behaves. Could you see tanford doing that now? Absolutely impossible. It is far
too conservative for it to do that now, even though that was an extremely
effective education... you can bet everyone who was in that dance remembers
exactly how nuclear synthesis occurs, because they all had to remember their
parts. And I remember it having seen it. No, rather that period of peak
earnings for the average wage in the United States was, what, like '77? That
certain things simply happened. That those people who were altruistic and not
too concerned about finances and fiscalization simply lost power relative to
those people who were more concerned about finances and fiscalization and
worked their way up in the system. So certain behaviours were disincentivized
and others were potentiated. And that is primarily I believe as a result of
technology that enables 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 it change 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.
JC So if you
were...
JA But
I think young people have fairly good values. Of course it's a spectrum and so
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 and other 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.
JC 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 at a sort of middling way.
And you would put China into I guess the middling category. .. 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?
JA I am not sure
about the impact on China. It is still a political society, so the impact 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
people think.
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 be
careful what people think. So they have to censor.
JC So the state
is rational, at least in its repression
JA 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… 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 olitburo might see. That's what they censor first.
They are not actually concerned about darknets
JC Sorry, about what?
JA They are not concerned about darknets. Because their
bosses can't see what is on the darknet, and so they can't be blamed for 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 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 how to 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!
ES Interesting.
JA 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 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.
ISSUE OF FREE INFORMATION AND CENSORSHIP
SM 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
JA Well, the way
it is right now we must understand that the way it is right now is very 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, that actually 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 better.
JC Which does
seem to be happening!
[Laughter]
JA Yes, and I
think things like, you know I have been pushing this idea of scientific
journalism that things must be precisely cited the original source or as much
of it as possibly available should be put in the public domain so that people
can look at it, just like in science so that you can test to see whether the
conclusion comes from the experimental data. Otherwise you probably just made
it up. You could have just made it up. And in fact that is what happens all the
time people just make it up. And they make it up to such a degree that we are
led to war. I mean most... Most wars in the 20th century have started as a
result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well
that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start
with lies.
And I say
no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations
basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it. And that means we
can be truthed into peace. And so that is the extremely optimistic thing. But
this, how do you distinguish publishers, truthful publishers, untruthful
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 publish on 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
of the 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 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 that will
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 arse covering, 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.
JC Let me just
add that uh..
JA 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. There is 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... effectively deploy coercive force,
by sending police to do debt requisition or kicking employees out of the
office.
JC Can I just
ask you about the same thing but sort of in reverse which is the ways in which
the sources of information as individuals can and can't be protected, in other
words how can their information be anonymous, so that they don't pay a price
for circulating it. and you know maybe with one example from North Korea or
Iran for example from the US, and the differences between those scenarios.
JA There is many
ways for people to transmit anonymously. One of the greatest difficulties for
sources is their proximity to the material. So if they have high proximity to
it and it's a limited number of people know it. It actually doesn't matter what
technical mechanism you then apply at the top. It would be quite difficult for
them to evade scrutiny. And it doesn't matter what country or regime you are
in. But systematic injustice by definition is going to have to involve many
people. And so while the inner sanctum of cabinet, maybe you cannot safely get
records out of this, but as those decisions start spreading down to lower
levels if they are to affect many people many people must have either the high
level planning that produces some unjust consequence or the shadow of it. So
maybe the whole plan isn't visible by the time it gets down to the grunts but
some component of it is visible. And this struck me when we got hold of the two
main manuals for Guantanamo Bay. The 2003 manual was the first one we got hold
of, written by Major... by General Jeffrey Miller, who subsequently went over
to Abu Ghraib, to GTMO-ize it, as Donald Rumsfeld called it, so that manual had
all sorts of abuses in it and one of the ones that I was surprised to see was
explicit instructions to falsify records for the Red Cross. And how many people
have read this manual? Well all the prison captains at Guantanamo Bay had read
this. Why would you risk telling the grunts this sort of information? It wasn't
even classified. They made it unclassified -- For Official Use Only -- why?
Because it's more expensive to get people who have classification clearance. If
you want to hire contractors without classification clearance it is cheaper.
You can't whisper to the coal face. You can't have the president whispering to
the coal face. Because the coal face, because the coal face is too big. You
can't have the president whispering to the intermediaries, because then you end
up with Chinese whispers - that means your instructions are not carried out. So
if you take information off the paper, if you take it outside of the electronic
or physical paper trail, the instructions decay. And that's why all
organizations of any scale have rigorous paper trails for the instructions from
the leadership. But by definition if you try... if you want people to do something,
you are going to have to have those form of instructions. Which means there is
always going to be a paper trail, except for small group decisions. Small group
decisions that don't end up going to the coal face. And instructing hundreds of
people... are they so important in the scheme of things?
INFORMATION CAN BE LIKED.. WHAT IS
THE COST
JA There is a tremendous cost to the organizational
efficiency, of doing that. So that means this abusive organization simply
becomes less powerful in its struggle for economic equilibrium and political
equilibrium with all other organizations.
ES This is the
inverse of your argument about empowering the dissidents in Egypt. They needed
SMS to communicate. In your argument, by stopping the inability to coordinate
at this level, the inverse of your argument. Literally the inverse of the
first... Well, your argument would be if
you take those tools away...
JA Yeah, well, I
say they take them away themselves in a way. Once things can become public. So
why is it that people engage... why is it that powerful organizations - there
is all sorts of reasons why non-powerful organizations engage in secrecy, which
to my view is legitimate, they need it, because they are powerless. But why do
powerful organizations engage in secrecy? Well, usually because the plans that
they have if made public would be opposed by the public. And plans that are
opposed before implementation often don't get implemented. So you want to wait
as long as possible. And then implementation eventually makes them public by
the very fact that they are being implemented but it is too late by then to
alter the course effectively. So an organization on the other hand that is
engaged in planning behaviour that if revealed is not opposed by the public
doesn't have that burden. It doesn't have that planning burden where it is
forced to take things off paper. So this will be an efficient organization,
this will not be an efficient organization, and in the mix as they do economic
and political battle, it will equilibriate out, these guys will shrink and
these guys will grow.
ES Is that your
fundamental justification, do you think... for this, for the work that you're
in?
JA Fundamental
justification is that, there is really two. First of all, the human civilization,
its good part, is based upon our full intellectual record, and our intellectual
record should be as large as possible if humanity is to be as advanced as
possible. The second is that in practice releasing information is positive to
those engaged in acts that the public support and negative to those engaged in
acts that the public does not support. …
Well, it can create a redress for an act of injustice that is revealed
and that's nice. But the larger effect is that it creates disincentives for
organizations that are to create unjust plans or engage in unjust acts.
ES In 10 years, what does this world look like?
In other words if you extrapolate this rgument...
JA Well, we are
at a bit of a crossroads, no? It could go either way. So remember Philip
Zimmermann's PGP case? That was just a
grand jury investigation. It was moderately serious. But he wasn't convicted.
No one at that time was being convicted, they were being nvestigated. It
changed the behaviour of tens of thousands of people who were involved in
choosing to put cryptography into programs or not. All sorts of tortured
copyright assignments and inter software company structuring arrangements, and
how code was deployed, were engaged in, just from that negative signal of a
grand jury investigation. So what that means is that signals about what
behaviour is acceptable, what behaviour you can get away with and what behaviour
is beneficial to individuals engaging in it and what behaviour is not, changes
how many people behave. So we are at a crossroads now where those organizations
that are fighting against those people who want to be able to publish freely
and disclose important information to the public... I can't remember the
beginning of this sentence now.
JC
You said we are at a crossroads now where those organizations that are
fighting against those people who want to be able to publish freely and
disclose important information to the public.
JA It was pretty long wasn't it? Okay,
hah. ...Could produce if successful a signal which discourages everyone or
almost everyone from engaging in those activities, or we and people who share
our values could be successful and that will then become the new norm of
accepted behaviour.
JC
Are you taking Bitcoin?
[laughter]
JA Yes. Yes. Um. So it is quite interesting to know whether,
if people read this and then act will they actually be enough to change the
result. That is why we are at a very interesting period and I think we are
literally at this crossroads and a little bit more push to one direction or
another could change the outcome a lot. So people should, if they want to see
the values that we promote succeed, promote those organizations and individuals
that represent those values and start taking on doing it themselves.
JC I was going to say, or become it
JA
Yeah, become it. Become representations of those values themselves. I am
always hesitant in saying that everyone should go out and be a martyr. Because
i don't believe that. I believe the most
effective activists are those that fight and run away. Not those who fight and
martyr themselves, but those who fight and run away to fight another day.
So that's about judgement, when to engage in the fight and when to withdraw so
as to preserve your resources for the next fight.
JC
Would you make the argument that fighting and running away is not that
not different, like physically fighting and running away is not that different
from fighting anonymously so long as you are sufficiently competent that your
anonymity...
JA
If you have perfect anonymity you can fight forever, yeah. You don't
have to run away.
JC
That's it in essence. Pre-run away.
JA
Well, you can lower the courage threshold, I mean that is one of the
nice things anonymity does. But maybe it is not the right way to put it. I mean,
people often say, you are tremendously courageous in doing what you are doing,
and I say, no no you misunderstand what courage is. Courage is not the absence
of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather courage is the intellectual mastery of
fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation. And in
keeping these things in balance. And not simply having prejudice about what the
risks are. But actually testing them. There are all sorts of myths that go
around about what can be done and what cannot be done. It is important to test.
You don't test by jumping off a bridge. You test by jumping off a footstool,
and then jumping off something a bit higher and a bit higher.
JC Actually, to follow up to that, it
goes back to what Scott was asking about the relationship between the person
providing information and the person receiving it. If we look at all the
different societies around the world, presumably not everyone is starting on
the same level playing field. There are some people who just have a greater
education of the risks associated with using these tools. There are some people
who are going to provide information in societies where the governments aren't
as vigilant, and some where they are very vigilant. It would seem that in a
place, now don't get me wrong, like North Korea, where the combination of very
vigilant regimes, with populations that are still relatively new to these tools
and the risks associated with them may not be able to have that understanding
of the true risks of the situation, and the opportunities that might be
available that you are mentioning.
JA
I think they are capable of learning. Like everyone else. These
societies are much more political than the West. People like to talk about
politics over dinner every night. So I am not sure it is right to take a
Western perspective and think that these people don't understand the lot that
they are in. Also, the extrinsic risks might be higher. The other risks
associated with conducting a political life may already be quite high. So one
has to keep these risks in proportion. Also the potential rewards are much
greater. One might be involved in a very grand historic moment, and become
swept up in it. And because we all only live once, we all suffer the continuous
risk of not having lived our life well. Every year. Every year that is not used
is 100% wasted, it's not a risk of that, it is a dead bet.
ES
One of the more, of the criticism that is constant, is that damage has
occurred because of WikiLeaks. I can't find it yet. Do you have a reasoned...
JA Up until Collateral Murder we were a
cause celebre in the United States, actually we are still a cause celebre, but
it is in a smaller libertarian or left wing or libertarian right wing community
now. But, and across, according to Reuters across 24 countries we have over
three quarters support of the general population. 24 countries. It's the worst
in the United States. So we have support of over 40% of the population, which
is pretty good actually, considering what has been happening. So, as a result
of embarrassing the US military and diplomatic class we have had a
counterattack. And that counterattack is significant. This is a very
significant power group. And it is a power group that is not just at the top of
the White House. It is not just a few generals. Rather it is all the people
connected to and profiting from that system. And that's about a third of the US
population. So all the way from Chelsea Clinton down to the someone in the
gutters of San Antonio whose brother is deployed in Iraq. There are 900,000
people in the US with Top Secret security clearances at this moment. There are
2 and a half million that have classified security clearances. If we go back
over the past 20 years and ask how many people had security clearances, maybe
it is 15 million. If you then go and look at all their spouses and business
partners and children we are looking at something like 30% of the population of
the United States. It is one degree removed from that way of living and that
ideological structure and that patronage system. So it is quite different in
the United States to say something that is against that system. And the New
York Times has found to its peril when it tries to speak out against it, so in
its relationships with us when it published material had to react very
defensively. In a way to someone outside the United... no, I think that even
traditional US journalists think this. It is sickening to see a newspaper of
any strength saying literally how pleased those words the White House was with
its behaviour. So if we look at the attacks on us, they always talk about the
words "placed people at risk." But risk relative to what? Right now
we are at risk of a meteorite passing through the roof of this house and
killing us all. That is a risk that is true. But is it a proportionate risk? Is
it a risk that is significant enough that it is even worth speaking about?
Well, the answer is no. Similarly with the word possibility. There is a
possibility that a meterorite could descend on us all in this moment, but it is
not a probability. So these rhetorical tricks are often used by people who are
making their argument in relation to security. There is a risk of something
there is a possibility of something. What has to be done is people need to engage
in an intellectual defense against manipulation by rhetoric by understanding
that if someone mentions that there is a risk without saying the risk is higher
than crossing the road, or the risk is twice that of being stung by a bee, then
you must ignore it. Similarly with possibility versus probability.
JC
Are there examples where a positive outcome could be directly traced to
WikiLeaks in the political sphere that you would want to highlight? Something
that is a specific tangible positive outcome?
JA
The most significant one seems to be the Arab Spring
JC
You would argue that WikiLeaks was out there...
JA Well Amnesty International did in its latest
report and Tunisian professors did, because my direct involvement it would be
unseemly for me to argue that directly, and I am not certain about directly. I
am certain that we affected it. And we were deeply involved in it.
ES
Influenced it
JA
I am certain that we influenced it. And that's... that is really
something, a great moment. Something I am certain about is that we changed the
outcome of the Kenyan election in 2007. There has been many ministers whose
scalps were taken and people being forced to resign and so on. Those are
concrete and clear actions and one might argue that they are positive if you
didn't like the guy, and you would argue that they were negative if you did
like the guy, so I don't really want to mention those ones.
ES
Yes, if I go back to your earlier argument that the effect on a single
individual is not your actual goal. The actual effect is to change the system
in some fundamental way. Because you make the argument that these systems
become fiscalized, you know, they are static, independent of any pressure, so
an example of a truly large influence would be a revolution. Right?
JA
Yeah, well it is something that... you can make many of these sort of
large influences without these dichotomatic events. But the dichotomatic events
are easy to - binary events - are very easy to talk about and also are
provable.
ES
It's also a marketing prop. You want to have a marketing story
JA Yeah, so one party or another party
wins the election and it changed. That is a very clear outcome. There is a
revolution. One group is in power, and then another group is in power, it is a
very clear change. I suspect that the other changes we have had such as
liberalization of the publishing environment I suspect is the most significant
one that we have been involved in, and something we have pushed for many years.
There is no way that what we did last year we could have done four years ago.
It would not have been possible.
ES
How come? Technologically? or in terms of?
JA Technologically it was all perfectly
possible. The difference is a shift in the status quo. WikiLeaks became the
status quo. So that wasn't always so. During the first two years we were
battling for whether we were something that was acceptable to be on the
internet or not. After two years, and specially after the Bank Julius Baer
case, where we were involved in a big legal case in San Francisco... on the one
hand us, and on the other hand the largest private Swiss banking concern bank
Julius Baer, that was trying to shut us down. Which we conclusively won. And
cost them their US IPO as a result. That sort of sent out a signal that there
is a place in the world for a publisher like WikiLeaks. And then we started to
cement that place as time went by. And now we have really cemented it because
we had a case where the Pentagon stood up in public, back in October 2010 and
gave a 40 minute press conference with their spokesperson Geoff Morrell, saying
that WikiLeaks must - and me personally - must destroy everything we previously
published that had been derived from the Pentagon. That we must destroy
everything we were going to publish. And cease dealing with US military
whistleblowers. The precise terminology used was to return everything that we
had ever published, return everything that we were going to publish, and cease
soliciting information of US military personnel, or US government personnel.
Or, the Pentagon would "compel" us to do so. And when asked by a
journalist at the press conference what mechanisms do you have to compel them,
the response was, well, look this is the Pentagon, we are not concerned about
the law.
[sniggering]
JA That's perhaps a matter for the
Department of Justice, or the attorney general or something.
JA So what
was actually going on. This was a carefully... I mean, it seems ridiculous. Why
would the Pentagon act like a victim? Why would they look so ridiculous and powerless?
Why would they utter... give a demand that they were not capable of fulfilling,
it would make them look weak? It was a carefully constructed legal message,
designed to embroil us in the US Espionage Act. It was the notification, like
you see in the newspapers.
JA We demand that you do this. This is the type
of information that will cause grave harm to US national security. We make a
press conference so that we can argue that all those WikiLeaks people have seen
it. Then the next thing they publish they will demonstrate intent. So despite the fact that they have been
informed that this is amiss, they did it anyway, therefore they have intent,
because you can't accidentally commit espionage.
SM That's why they are concerned with the past and not just the
present. Because there has to be a pattern of practice and and as long as its
instances of fresh instance then there is no pattern.
JA Yeah, but in saying, no, we did
quickly, actually, before we had understood what the legal trap was. But in
saying no and then in relatively short
order producing the Iraqi War Diaries, which is one of the best things we've
ever done...
PLANS
JA
I think this idea I had about how to structure intellectual information
is important. So we will overlay that...
ES So that's... that's actually a part of your
plan, that you're talking about
JA
When you do have a presence... When you have such public recognition,
you have the luxury of being able to take fairly complex intellectual ideas and
push them up. That would normally take a long time to sort of organically get
traction, like Sun did with Java, for example, they take a long time to
organically get traction, but you can put your weight behind them and push them
up so we have some of those moves we can make. But also I've seen that it's
very difficult for us to be a command and control organization. You spoke about
the difficulties that you had to learn with Novell, but for us as an
organization, like a command and control organization with a leadership and
people who carry out tasks, we are in a position where we have the full force
of a superpower and its investigative organs, and the rest of NATO, operating
against us, bribing people, monitoring communications, etc, so that means that
for us any little psychological weakness in our people, any friction between
our people, can lead to those forces plucking them off.
ES You could be infiltrated you mean. In theory
JA
Yeah. Infiltrated. The plucking off I think is a bigger problem. But you are right about the infiltration...
ES
The forces opposed to you, they will think, okay, this is a foreign
actor, let's send our agent in, become a member, discover all their secrets.
JA
Right, and we are aware of that problem and we investigate people, and
so on. But what that means is that it has tremendously slowed down our growth.
Because you can't just put an ad out and say we want you to have these skills
and come into the office, it is absolutely impossible. So growth is constrained
in that way. But there is another way of leading, and that is leading through
values instead of command and control. And when you lead through values you
don't need to trust people, and values and the number of people who can adopt
the value, there is no limit on the speed of adoption. It all happens very
quickly. It's not, supply, in terms of employer supply limited, rather it's
demand limited, as soon as people demand a value they adopt it.
ES
Another criticism, I think, with respect to WikiLeaks, you were careful,
according to the reports, to work to redact sensitive information, as I
understand that there was an editing process, someone had to build a
specialized search engine because the documents were so complicated, there was
a fairly lengthy review period with the mainstream media, you know, etc, etc,
that's all fairly well documented... now imagine another person, not you, who
does not have the same values but has the same technology, because the
technology is obviously copiable, what happens when there is more of them than
there are of you? Or one of them and one of you?
JA
Well, sources... so who holds WikiLeaks accountable? We have our values.
How do people see whether we are sticking to our values, or whether we betray
our values? How do people.. maybe they don't like our values... Maybe they do.
How can the human economic ecosystem discipline us or encourage us in
particular directions? Sources speak with their feet. If sources believe that
we are going to protect them, and that we are going to have higher impact for
the material, they will simply give us material instead of giving it to someone
else. So that is one way in which we are disciplined by the market of sources.
ES So it
is a selection bias, basically.
JA Yeah, so the question is well, could sources
pick another group that were going to publish without any harm minimization
procedure at all? Well the answer is yes, but one has to understand the primary
reason we engaged in harm minimization procedures. It's not primarily because
the material we release will have a reasonable risk of producing harm as a
result of disclosure. That's very rare. Rather, there is a probable risk that
if we don't engage in that sort of behaviour, our opponents will
opportunistically attempt to distract from the revelations that we have
published, very important matters, by instead speaking about is there a
potential for harm, and therefore, is this release hypocritical, given that we
want to promote justice and is the organisation hypocritical... and so a lot of
the procedures that we engage in are not merely to try to minimize risk to
people who might be named in the material, rather it is to minimize risk that
opportunists will reduce the impact of the material when it is released. So
part of the impact maximization that we are doing is to prevent this type of
attack on what we publish. So from that point of view, intelligence sources
will understand that we do that in order to maximise impact. Now that said, we
do not permanently redact anything. We only do delayed redactions. So we delay
until the security situation has changed and we can release this, and I think
that is an important difference to what...
ES So is it fair to say that,
eventually the things that you redacted will be all.. made available
JA
All be made available
LS
That's a different question
actually from what you were asking, which was, what if the same process and
technology fell into...
JA Yes, so I'm getting to that, so it disturbs me
greatly - it is a - and we have all sorts of other projects about syndicating
our submission system to third parties and so on. It disturbs me that we are
redacting at all. It is a very very dangerous slippery slope. And I've already
said that we go through this not merely to minimize harm but for political
considerations, to stop people distracting from the important part of the
material by instead hyping up concerns about risks.
JC It's a pragmatic decision, or a
strategic decision
JA
It's a pragmatic, tactical decision to keep the maximum impact there,
instead of having to be distracted... But that is us already engaging in a
rather dangerous compromise. Now it is not nearly to the same degree as the
newspapers, because we have done this collaboration with them, and we can see
that some of them are just appalling. I mean we released these results. An
analysis of their redactions versus what actually needed to be redacted, and it
is extremely interesting.
ES
So there was a difference of view
on what needed to be redacted?
JA
Oh they had... The Guardian redacted two thirds of a cable about Bulgarian
crime, removed all the names of the people who had infiltrated - the mafioso -
who had infiltrated the Bulgarian government. Removed a description of the
Kazakstan elite, which said that the Kazakstan elite in general were corrupt,
not even a particular name, just in general! Removed a description that a an
energy company out of Italy operating in Kazakhstan was corrupt, so they have
redacted for naming of individual names of people who might be unfairly put at
risk, just like we do--that is what we require of them. They have redacted the
names of mafioso, individual mafioso because they are worried that they might
get sued for libel in London by this mafioso. They have redacted the names...
they have redacted the description of a class of Kazakhstan elite, a class has
been corrupt, and they have redacted descriptions of individual companies being
corrupt because they don't want to expose themselves to any risk at all. And
that's true of the Irish Independent, even though very good journalists, totally
onside legally, they do this.
Incredible self-censorship across the board and they don't
admit doing it or reveal the fact that they are doing it. So we don't want to
go down that path. I'm sure all these groups started out as just no we will
just do these little redactions and then economics comes into play and then why
take the risk and so on. And so you end up with a system of self-censorship and
it is embarrassing to do it and so why tell the public that you are doing it,
but you are not telling the public you are doing it so it gets easier and
easier to do every time. If we look at email. Who censors email? No one censors
email! Look at a telephone call to your grandmother, is there a censor sitting
there on the line determining whether you are about to say something bad to
your grandmother and cutting it out? Of course not. The postal system. Are
other people opening envelopes to see whether you are sending something bad?
No. Youtube, apriori, is anyone sitting there reviewing every video before it is
posted?
ES Let me give you the technical
answer, just so you know it. We can't review every submission, so basically the
crowd marks it if it is a problem.
JA Let me give you the technical
answer, just so you know it. We can't review every submission, so basically the
crowd marks it if it is a problem.
ES Post publication.
JA So once it is out, people can take
copies and it could be spreading everywhere
ES And what happens is the takedown
of... we get into trouble because various players want us to do pre-publication
review. But with 48 hours of youtube video coming in every minute, we can't
mechanically do it. So there is a.. so if someone posts something wrong or evil
or violating a law, whatever, there is a gap, hopefully short, between the time
that it is published, and marked for further review against our policies. And
the policies are well specified in a document
JA
Yeah
LS
It's a pretty high bar though, to take stuff down. It's not just wrong
as in factually wrong.
ES But under the way that these things work, commercial websites
have a, you know, we can decide what we want to allow that we don't, we have a
set of criteria, you can see them, you can read them. We've got some kinds of
videos and not other kinds of videos. And you can't violate copyright and all
that kind of stuff.
JA
Well, I rather like what happened with
Collateral Murder. Collateral Murder instantly got flagged up by our opponents
as rated over 18, so nobody could see it on Youtube without logging in. But
with an embed they could see it just fine. And so my interpretation of this is
that when there is an embed someone else's brand is on the damn thing. And when
it is not an embed, your brand is on it!
ES
Without knowing the specifics all I can
tell you is the system is responsive to the post publication feedback. We've
had a couple of cases in youtube where there have been ratings scams where they
publish a document and people will decide they want to demote him and so they
will give him a lot of negatives because he is being attacked and if he becomes
unfairly lower rank than he should be, so these systems are manipulable by
pressure groups, and I would think that would be a constant in this case.
JC
Sometimes by regimes. I mean there are some autocratic regimes that will
flag content posted by activists as inappropriate
JA
We've had stuff, we have posted, or by antiscientologists, I think there
were 5000 scientology videos were removed from youtube when some lawyer claimed
that they were all, swore that they were all his copyright... because we do
purely political really political - I don't mean party political, I mean
political sphere and how power is delegated - because we deal with almost
purely political material there is such scrutiny on us that if we, if we, at
least at this moment if we were to go to publish first pull later they would
go, oh, well it's too late! You've put it out there, now there is a thousand
copies!
ES You have a different model, right. You require
human editors
JA Well, it is a problem, though, it is
a severe problem, because it means that in terms of scalability things are very
hard for us. That's why we have this new syndication system where we are
syndicating the editing to various non-profits and so on...
ES
But you are finally outsourcing the human judgment, because it's not
possible today to write computer algorithms to do this for you
JA
I think that this human judgment actually is more... yes there is some
cost to publishing without vetting, but actually the problems of vetting before
publication are so severe that they are a much, much greater problem. And if
you have to choose between these two, you would choose publication without
vetting
ES
That's also interesting to us. That says you would fundamentally
prefer... you are so concerned about this human judgment and the possibility of
bias... [inaudible] then you expose yourself to...
JA We'd ask the source
to do it. We'd put the weight if you like on the people sending us the
material: you exercise your judgement about what you send us, but everything
you send us we will publish... otherwise, we will be compromised and other
people will also try and... once they understand that we have a lever to
determine what is published and not published, people will try and get that
lever by levering us
ES
I want to make sure we've got Jared, other questions, Lisa?
JC
Well, actually I have a follow up question on that, I mean, again, we're
looking futuristically, in each aspect of the book, and what I wonder is I mean
you have a certain volume of content that you are getting right now but at a
certain point, at one point Twitter only had so much content, and as well at a
certain point it does become so overwhelming that, to your point, there is no -
if you publish everything that gets sent at what point is there such a mixture,
is there so much content that it's just manipulated that it essentially drowns
out the legitimate..
JA
The manipulated content will never be the issue. Although there is
something to be said for having a perfect record, which we do at the moment.
But manipulated content will always be an insignificant quantity of material.
And the reason is it that it takes economic work to manipulate content, to do
it well you need someone who is even more intelligent than the person who created
the original document, even more informed. And if the whole document is going
public this is not like a news story where you give the journalist manipulated
content. You have to fool - all the opponents and everyone else in the world
with the material, so it is a lot harder. And at the same time every
organization generates a mountain of paperwork, and internal records just by
virtue of its activities, so all of those records are produced for free. The
legitimate content will always outweigh the manipulated content.
ES
That assumes people [inaudible]...
JA
A small amount of manipulated content can devalue a large amount of
unmanipulated content.
ES
Can I disagree with you on one
point. I fundamentally believe that disinformation becomes so easy to generate
because of, because complexity overwhelms knowledge, that it is in the people's
interest, if you will over the next decade, to build disinformation generating
systems, this is true for corporations, for marketing, for governments and so
on. And it makes the job for a legitimate journalist that much harder, right.
Because it just... and your answer earlier was that this is fundamentally a
trust problem. Which I think is roughly correct. I would argue that it is
fundamentally a ranking problem.
Ranking is based on trust and other algorithms. It's the same
conclusion. But I think it's not in my view correct to say that there will
always be more sort of tactically correct information than a small amount of
manipulative information. It is perfectly reasonable that the actors will see
that computer AI systems can generate a lot of stuff. You're well aware of the
document projects to write papers by computers...
JA
Yeah, I've seen those. I've seen
those. Everyone always thought that we would get flooded with those and it
never happened.
ES
But do you think [inaudible]...
JA We have had, literally, if you include, if you
exclude the nutters, going on about how over a garden party, one night, twelve
years ago, speaking to his ex wife with a pot plant in between them, she told
him that he was the antichrist, and he understood it was true.
If you exclude those cases, hah, which we get a bit of, then
the genuine attempted frauds, there have been about 20. It's just, it's
extraordinary, it's almost nothing.
ES
No, well, let's argue, you could make the argument that that's a
statement about altruism and good, and that the steps required to actually
manipulate are hard enough that you have to be pretty badly intended... the
threshold for doing that is pretty high, in other words...
JA So what is the closest? It's the pump and dump scams in
stocks, for instance. That's the one that we see fairly frequently, and where
they push things, they've done it as GIFs and they even have things to avail of
OCR recognition on emails...
ES
In Google's case we see lots and lots of linkfarms which are attempting
to manipulate our rankings. And we detect them.
JA
What we are seeing now, we're seeing, HBGary this um, intelligence
contractor, hi-tech intelligence contractor was hired by, was asked by Bank of
America to submit a tender and we got hold of their copy of the tender, we
don't know who ended up taking the tender, to take us down. And the quote was
two million a month. And they would spread disinformation, and they would hack
this and they would target our journalists, and they had network maps of people
who supported us and they would leverage their careers and self interests
versus their ideology etcetera. So that's there, but disinformation has always
been there. I'm not sure why it should increase relative to the information
increase we are seeing everywhere else.
ES
This by the way is an actual... a fundamental argument against something
you and I were talking about earlier. But we do need to resolve this. Does the
rate of disinformation..
JC
Arm wrestling maybe?
LS
Don't mind that [inaudible] right?
JC
I think there's more... This is actually one of the most interesting...
the whole conversation is fascinating, but this last piece is really
fascinating because it plays into how Eric and I and Scott are thinking about,
this is how we are thinking about these chapters, it's like, imagine 10 years
from now, or imagine 15 years so, for the purposes of argument, let's imagine,
10 years from now it's very easy not just for a large group of people sort of
create fake documents, produce them in mass, and distribute them in mass let's
assume a single individual has that capacity through the technology platforms
JA
You won't have Julian Assange saying it is true.
LS
They are verifying documents, they are not verifying facts.
JC No they are
verifying sources.
JA
No no, we don't verify sources, we verify... that documents are official
documents.
JC
They are going to be faced with
more noise [inaudible] the question as to whether human beings prefer truth
over fiction but whether or not they can find the truth.
LS
But it's also not verifying facts
ES
But that's the core question.
JA
It's not about verifying facts.
JC
That's another argument
JA
We have published all the fake documents that we have received that were
interesting - we published saying that they were fake. JC? Like WikiForgeries?
But there's not that many to bother with. Because actually,
they are not fake: on a meta level they are true forgeries.
ES
They are very interesting in and of themselves, right?
JA
Very interesting in and of
themselves. One was an attempt to influence the Kenyan election by saying that
the opposition has signed a secret agreement with the Islamic minority to
introduce Sharia law across Kenya. It sounds ridiculous, but actually it was
carefully constructed.
JC
So how do you know if they are forgeries?
JA
Well that one was hard, that was a carefully constructed document. We
checked signatures and we found the real one, and etc. That was hard work.
Usually it is not hard work
JC But it requires human capital to do, right?
JA
Yeah, usually someone makes an elementary mistake and there is also
incentives for giving us... It is pretty disincentivizing to send us a forgery,
because we are perceived as being quite good at detecting them, and we make the
whole document public. So why wouldn't you just give it to a newspaper because
they don't make the document public. And you are dealing with people who don't
have expertise in that domain, so it's a lot easier to overcome them. This
bigger issue you are talking about... let's say you don't have authenticators
like us. Authentication is hard. We can't authenticate the amount of material
we are getting in. So we have thought about ways to deal with this, of having a
great big mesh of people and information flowing through and different people
adding their authenticators to it as it flows through to distribute and
delegate that. And that might pan out. But what if everyone was simply just publishing.
Everyone was just publishing anonymously. And you had no authenticators. What
would happen? Well, to begin with you would just have a flat structure. Right,
a completely flat structure, information there, let's say is addressed by a
hash or something. So structure at all, there's this document and there is a
document and so on. And so then you will have people who will want to influence
making robots that put a whole load of garbage everywhere. But it is not tied
into any structure. So how does anyone get to anything? Do they hear it from
their friends and then go and look at it? Do they link it into their webpages?
ES
It creates an influence graph of some kind..
JA
Yeah, so there is some kind of influence graph that you use to get the
information. So you can flood the internet with information, that doesn't mean
you're going to flood the influence graph with information. That is something
that's different.
ES
But that's the modern story of ranking, right? You know, the web was
full of spam, but spam gets ranked low because of influence and the link
structure and so on. I think we should see if we can finish up. The sun is
coming on out.
JA OK
LS
How do you know if you've won?
JA
If I've won? Well it's not
possible to win this kind of thing. This is a continuous striving that people have
done for a long time. Of course, there is many individual battles that we win,
but it is the nature of human beings that human beings lie and cheat and
deceive and organized groups of people who do not lie and cheat and deceive
find each other and get together... and because they have that temperament, are
more efficient. Because they are not lying and cheating and deceiving each
other. And that is an old, a very old struggle between opportunists and collaborators.
And so I don't see that going away. I think we can make some significant
advances and it is perhaps, it is the making of these advances and being involved
in that struggle that is good for people. So the process is in part the end
game. It's not just to get somewhere in the end, rather this process of people
feeling that it is worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in
fact worthwhile for people.
JC
As we are walking I'd like to ask
one last question that I was wondering along the way... Scott talked about the
subculture that's developed around all this which is a real interesting idea
for us to explore in the book because it raises this question of, does the subculture
create the demand that leads to the creation of the technology or does the technology
in fact create the subculture. It's sort of a interesting cause and effect.
JA
Well you know you can argue this
on both sides. But I think the technology permits the subculture. Once you have
a whole bunch of young people who can communicate their ideas and values freely
then culture arises naturally. And that culture comes out of, yes, it comes out
of experiences and harmonizing with other cultures, and yes, it is already in the
record, but it also comes out of the temperament of young people. The desire to
find allies and friends and share in a process, and to remove power from old
people.
JC
It's remarkable how uncreative old people are.
ES
Speaking as an older person, I
agree. I think part of your intellectual argument is that you start off
relatively... the model you are using, the temperament model, you start off
with sort of human values, and then they get coopted if you will, my words not
yours, with the status model that you are sort of forced into the structure,
and that the incentive system and the constraints put you into this box as you
get older, and that's sort of...
JA
Right, exactly. And with different systems that potentiate different
ways of transmitting wealth or communicating values or making some types of
group cognition more efficient than others...
ES
Right, right. And your argument that if you get enough of these sort of
new, this group that you identify, together, it in fact is a summary change in
these complex systems...
JA
Right. It will be interesting to
see whether we have a bit of a... some sort of state change as well. A
revolution is a big state change, like everything was in one state and then it collapses
into another state. And those transitions happen very quickly. It will be interesting
to see whether we will have a broader, general, globalized cultural change that
has this fast transition. It's possible.
ES
Yeah. One thing I have learned is that things happen fast because of
globalization. Cause everything is interconnected. It didn't used to be true
JA
So information, money, and wealth. Right. The big issue with
globalization is that you can be an arsehole and move your money elsewhere.
Fast EFTs, fast wealth movements, fast signing of contracts, which are a type
of wealth movement--these encourage opportunism. Because if political
sanction... money can move faster than political sanction, then you just keep
moving the money through the system. And growing it as it moves through the
system. And have it become more and more powerful, and by the time the moral
outrage comes to stop it, it is too late, it's gone. So what's happening now on
the internet is that political sanction - by political I mean - I use political
the way Australians use it, by the way, which is that it's not about party
politics, it's about..
ES
Well I hope we have been... At least a distraction!
JA
We wouldn't mind a leak from Google, which would be, I think probably
all the PATRIOT Act requests
ES
I've actually spent quite a bit of time on this question. Because I am
in great trouble because I have given a series of criticisms about PATRIOT 1
and PATRIOT 2. Because I think they're... because they're non transparent. You
know, because the judge's orders are hidden and so on. And the answer... the
answer is that the laws are quite clear about Google and the US. We couldn't do
it. It would be illegal.
JA
So we're fighting this case now, with Twitter, we've done three court
hearings now, trying to get the names of the other companies that fulfilled the
subpoenas for the grand jury in the US. Twitter resisted and so that's how some
of us became aware. They argued that we should be told that there was a
subpoena. I wasn't told, but...
SM
And this concerning you,
concerning WikiLeaks
JA
Yeah, me personally, but three other people too. Well we know there is
at least four other people.
ES
I can certainly pass on your request to our general counsel.
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