I'm not comparing anything, merely reacting against any attempts to trivialize the very real need for a platform for anonymous dissent.
From the lives of the people involved to the stability of the democratic institutions themselves, those are very real and very high stakes. It would be extremely disingenuous and insulting to pretend that the intent of the article was to anonymously tweet "trump is a poop".
The "stability of democratic institutions" are under attack when anonymous entities fan hysteria by disseminating information in the guise of "Rogue Gov" agencies, institutions, etc. That is not dissent.
Actual, factual, courageous, whistle blowing and dirty laundry airing:
Even if I were to accept the official Watergate story (which I do not considering that the star reporter was Naval Intelligence just 2 years prior to his 'big break') "Deep Throat" was not running an alternative information outlet in public.
Accepting this makes it trivial for non-governmental elements, or foreign governments, to put up e.g. @AltStateDepartment for every single governmental org. That is not going to promote "stability" of our system. In fact, this is precisely what I would do if I wanted to entirely demoralize Jane/Joe public and undermine /the public and democractic state/.
It would be very irresponsible to recommend buying a burner phone to people trying to stay anonymous. At the very least, it would give away your location even if you somehow manage to remain unrecorded by street CCTVs in the vicinity of the shop at the time of purchase. Assuming it is even possible to buy one without providing full personal details, as is required by law in most of the EU.
Twitter now not only gives platform to powerful demagogues, it is also actively stifling dissent by effectively disallowing anonymity.
FWIW, in the UK you can buy a burner phone and SIM in cash without giving away any personal details at most supermarkets (at least Tesco and Sainsbury's). With the new EU regulations removing roaming charges, you can fly to London on holiday, and buy a UK burner phone anonymously with two years of data on it that's enough for heavy Twitter use in all of the EU for £240 + phone cost.
If you're under enough surveillance that your adversary will follow you on holiday and track all your supermarket purchases, you have bigger problems.
> If you're under enough surveillance that your adversary will follow you on holiday and track all your supermarket purchases, you have bigger problems.
Problem with modern surveillance is not that somebody is actively tracking you, it's the ability to retroactively track you back with perfect accuracy soon as you become become an inconvenience.
Sure, for digital surveillance I get this concern. But when we're talking about identifying that "on holiday, subject X spent some of that cash he withdrew on a burner phone at a random supermarket he visited, not just on ice cream and beer", then you really need significant HUMINT resources.
In the context of maintaining digital anonymity against a state-level adversary, I think that considering retroactive unmasking as part of the threat landscape is quite reasonable.
The situation one is trying to avoid is:
- Tyrant in power
- You try to be anonymous
- You fail, because you didn't take enough steps to protect your tracks (when buying the phone, leasing the VPS, accessing the VPS, etc) from retroactive investigation
- You are now fired / jailed
Surveillance is ubiquitous enough that I suspect anonymity is nearly binary in nature.
>Security cameras will probably record your face at the store. Most stores delete old footage on a regular basis, overwriting it with new footage. If possible, wait a week or two before you start tweeting so that the footage is already deleted by the time anyone tries to figure out your real identity.
This addresses shop cameras, not street-level government surveillance that would be accessible for 10+ years and is trivially addressable by the time and location of the transaction.
Probably, but doing it correctly would require a whole different type of opsec expertise that should not realistically be expected from someone who is getting their security tips from The Intercept.
Just a hunch, but I would guess that a poor disguise would be more suspicious than no disguise. If I was a shopkeeper and government agents came to me asking if I remembered anyone suspicious in the past month, I'd probably recall the guy with the obviously fake mustache and prosthetics.
On the other hand, an effective disguise can be trivial: enter a store dressed a certain way, make purchase, exit dressed significantly different. Reversible jacket, headgear swap and glasses can go a long way, in a crowd under low-res cameras.
This is the solution, right? You get someone else to buy the phone for you. This necessarily will practically speaking be probably be someone who knows you, but it adds a layer of indirection.
The unregulated pharmaceuticals distribution market relies on burner phones and seems pretty solid despite effectively continuous attempts to conduct surveillance on them.
Perhaps not something insanely obvious like Grouch Marx moustache and glasses, but more subtle? I'm not really very well aware of how advanced face recognition, etc. is at this point in time though. But I'd guess anyone who cares enough about opsec to go through this process might also be decent at passable disguise techniques.
you can always hire someone down-and-out or someone that doesn't take part in the normal economy to buy the phone for you, though of course there are risks with that too
I'm arguing that Turing's impact on computing (most importantly, defining the Turing machine) didn't have much to do with logic. His work on logic is also important, but I don't think it's useful for a programmer.
On the other hand the fact that you're reaching all the way to Turing to exhibit a clear impact on practice suggests that for the programmer without such grand aspirations there isn't much to be gained.
(Not to take this post too serious, but I'll take the bait)
I'd argue that the solution proposed by Ethereum in this blog post is not antithetical to mainstream Libertarianism. It actually fits perfectly well into the role the majority of libertarians believe a state should take.
To begin with, from my understanding they merely proposed a solution which the community has to agree to implement. Just like modifying the bitcoin codebase.
It's still ultimately an additional layer of decentralization in between. Taken as a whole - even if Ethereum takes action against the attacker - what DAO represents would still be very very far from the representative democracy style system that libertarians take issue with.
Importantly, libertarians are not all anarchists (or 'crypto-anarchists' or 'anarcho-capitalists' to be more accurate) who believe in total decentralized control structures. Mainstream libertarians wish for a minimal state or "night-watchman" state, a not the total absence of a state.
This the most prevalent myth about libertarianism and the faulty premise of most attacks against it.
Even many hardcore anarcho-capitalists are against the idea of decentralized judicial and law enforcement systems - as they see it as unworkable.
In the book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" [1] popular libertarian thinker Robert Nozick argues that
[..] only a minimal state "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on" could be justified without violating people's rights.
Therefore supporting the solution Ethereum proposed does not make you less of a libertarian. But it does make you less of a crypto-anarchist.
Doesn't necessarily make you less of an anarchist either. Anarchy isn't an absence of rules or decisions, it's having decision making mechanisms that are non-hierarchical (now, the preferred size of those decision making structures and how to keep them from becoming psuedo (or real) States in their own right is a whole different discussion). In this case, one could argue that miners are making a decision collectively through a very imperfect mechanism (subject to possible hijacking, attacks, and tyranny of the majority), but still a non-hierarchical one.
My knee-jerk reaction is to say the libertarians rarely have power during crises anyway, and democracy insures that those who "do nothing" lose their power in the face of interventionist opponents come election time.
Not that they were libertarians, but the presidents during the 1920-21 Depression[1] acted slowly, and the economy bounced back incredibly quickly. From the article: However, by the time Harding had called his conference, the country's economy had already shown signs of rebound, and by 1922 was starting the economic boom of the 1920s[13] and merely allowed for President Harding to claim success.
Funny how things turned out. I still remember this post[1], it was profoundly disappointing to see Guido's way of thinking. Much of the damage was reversed but it still left an indelible impression that there's a lack of vision for what's going to be important if the language is to stay relevant in the future.
It should also be added that most of this work is being done publicly and is open to new contributors. You can check Voevodsky's github page[1], and most of the other HoTT collaborators are active members as well. The HoTT book itself is also being collaboratively written there.
I'm sure the people who would frequently use VR for their personal pleasure are doing so because they prefer VR instead of the practical reality that it has been really hard to find someone IRL.
Apart from the usual Manifest Destiny IN SPACE! crap, recently I've been a bit shocked to realize that there might actually be a point in trying to go to remote and harsh places.
The Antarctic being a barren wasteland makes it an attractive breeding ground for penguins precisely because it's so inhospitable to anything alive, penguins included. As long as penguins suck less at living in a barren wasteland than their predators it's a net benefit for them to be there, despite the hardships of the environment.
If we assume there is a group of humans that feel existentially threatened by other humans so much that odds of surviving in an irradiated subterranean Mars colony beat the odds of being exterminated here on Earth, it would be a perfectly rational choice for them to try and move somewhere out of reach.
There are lots of potential scenarios why such groups might come into existence, and not all of them involve outright genocide. For example, a group could form just as a result of concerned citizens wanting to go to some place very, very remote once kids start playing Pokemon with their newfangled RNA synthesizers.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-turkey-arrests-1656-social...