Cypherpunk Ethics

Radical Ethics for the Digital Age

Patrick D. Anderson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000613513
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age.

Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power.

Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003220534-1

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—AQCN AKYY WC

Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful

In September 1992, a group of approximately 20 computer activists convened in a Berkeley-area living room to discuss their growing concerns about threats to privacy in the digital age (Levy 2001; Greenberg 2012). All who were present at the meeting understood the fundamental truth about digital communication: that it is highly susceptible to third-party interception. When a computer in New York communicates with a computer in Los Angeles, the protocol leaves a permanent, visible record of the connection, and the information transmitted over the network (the content and the metadata) may be surveilled by anyone who happens to be monitoring the transmission. Concern about surveillance was not merely a theoretical matter, for between the 1960s and the 1990s, the US government had been involved in several surveillance scandals (Bamford 1982; Burnham 1983; Levy 2001). With technological and political changes making mass surveillance almost inevitable, these activists agreed that digital cryptography—the “art and science of keeping messages secure” (Schneier 1996, 1)—was the most important tool, the only effective tool, for preserving privacy and free speech in a world increasingly dominated by computers and fiber optic networks. With digital cryptography, or crypto for short, computer users would be able to encipher their communications and their economic transactions using algorithms that not even the most powerful computers could unlock, thereby preventing government agents, corporate spies, and other criminals from monitoring or intercepting information sent across the newly public internet. While the group originally considered the tongue-in-cheek title Cryptology Amateurs for Social Irresponsibility, they eventually settled on a more fitting name: the cypherpunks.

In the weeks that followed their inaugural meeting, the cypherpunks created a listserv through which they could share ideas. One of the first documents to be shared on the cypherpunk listserv was “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” written by Eric Hughes, who, with John Gilmore and Timothy C. May, cofounded the movement. In the manifesto, Hughes (2001) articulates the basic philosophical insight of the cypherpunks: that digital communication systems were, by their very nature, antithetical to privacy. Defining privacy as “the power to selectively reveal oneself,” Hughes notes that computers undermine this power. “When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanisms of the transaction,” he writes, “I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself” (81–82). Hughes observes that “governments, corporations, and other large, faceless organizations” have no incentive to grant computer users privacy; in fact, it is in their interest that computer users have no privacy, for the more information such organizations have, the more power they wield (82). Calling for all computer users to follow the cypherpunks’ lead, Hughes declares that he and the other cypherpunks “are defending our privacy with cryptography,” for encryption “removes information from the public realm,” restoring the power of individuals to selectively reveal themselves to the world (82–83).

Around the same time that the cypherpunks were organizing in the US, the International Subversives, a small group of underground hackers in Australia, turned the question of privacy back against the governments, corporations, and other large, faceless organizations that seemed to threaten the individual (Assange 2011; Dreyfus and Assange 2012). While the cypherpunks concentrated on the ways that the internet permitted institutions to freely access information about individuals, the International Subversives explored the ways that the internet permitted individuals to freely access information about institutions. With their newly acquired modems, the Subversives set out on nightly cyberspace adventures, finding security weaknesses in various academic, corporate, and government computer networks. Some of their targets, such as Melbourne University, were local, but these were primarily used as springboards for accessing other networks around the globe, especially networks within the US. The networks of Lockheed Martin, NASA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Pentagon’s Eighth Command were all penetrated by the Subversives at one point or another (Greenberg 2012, 106). The International Subversives never stole information nor did they destroy any of the networks to which they gained access, but they learned that the world’s most powerful institutions practice extreme secrecy because publics would oppose their activities if such activities came to light.

One member of the International Subversives, Julian Assange, joined the cypherpunks in the mid-1990s. Assange learned about the power of crypto to protect personal communication online, and he agreed with the other cypherpunks that encryption was a necessary means for preserving privacy and free speech in the digital age. But he also saw another use for crypto: institutional transparency. Drawing upon his previous experience seeing behind the veils of institutional power, Assange (2006) composed “Conspiracy as Governance,” a short essay in which he argues that “collaborative secrecy”—or conspiracy—is “the key generative structure of bad governance” (1–2). Powerful institutions perpetuate themselves by seeking and concentrating more power, often in ways that would be opposed by adversaries. Applying this insight to modern governments, Assange argues that secrecy is the central enabling factor for all authoritarian rule. “Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization,” he writes. “Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power” (2). Authoritarianism can be resisted, Assange insists, by undermining its most important tool: secrecy. To do this, Assange (2016) argues that encrypted document submission systems can be established, and potential whistleblowers—the people inside the institutions who witness unjust plans or actions—can be encouraged to leak documentary evidence of organizational wrongdoing. By using crypto, therefore, Assange concludes that it is possible to promote transparency and undermine secrecy, thus limiting the capacity of governments—and corporations—to carry out injustices.

Today, we habitually treat issues of personal privacy and issues of government and corporate transparency as largely distinct, but cypherpunks synthesize these issues, combining the original cypherpunk defense of privacy with Assange’s call for transparency into a concise slogan: “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful” (Assange et al. 2012). For the cypherpunks, privacy and transparency are intimately connected because they both influence the overall flow of information in our modern networked society (de Zwart 2016; Anderson 2021). “The cypherpunks,” Suelette Dreyfus observes, believe “in the right of the individual to personal privacy—and the responsibility of the government to be open, transparent and fully accountable to the public” (Dreyfus and Assange 2012, xii). As cypherpunk Andy Müller-Maguhn puts it, the cypherpunks aim to “use public information” and to “protect private information” (Assange et al. 2012, 141).

Cypherpunks have been criticized for holding a double standard when it comes to privacy, supposedly demanding privacy for themselves while demanding transparency for others (Brin 1998). Such criticisms, however, overlook some important distinctions and thus miss the point. For the cypherpunks, privacy is something that individuals and relatively powerless organizations are permitted by right and guaranteed by encryption, while secrecy is something that powerful organizations use to hide their nefarious, unjust, and anti-democratic plans. Likewise, vulnerability describes the condition of individuals when their personal data is known by others (especially without their knowledge or consent), while transparency describes the condition of organizations and institutions when their data is made available to publics. On the individual scale, privacy and vulnerability are inversely related, and the same holds true for transparency and secrecy on the institutional scale. Societies defined by high levels of vulnerability and secrecy will be extremely authoritarian, centralized, and unjust; societies defined by high levels of privacy and transparency will be open, decentralized, and just.

To understand the cypherpunk juxtaposition of privacy and transparency, it is also necessary to recognize that their corresponding concepts, the weak and the powerful, depend upon an analysis of power. As Huey P. Newton states, “power is the ability to define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner” (Cleaver 2006, 173), and in the digital age, power and communication define each other. In Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener (1961) observes that “the present time is the age of communication and control” (39). “Properly speaking,” Wiener explains, “the community extends only so far as there extends effectual transmission of information” (157–158). In other words, the boundaries of a community are coextensive with the boundaries of the community’s communication technology. In the small town or village, most communication is oral, which limits the extent of the community but also ensures that the means of communication cannot be dominated by any centralized authority. In the large communities of the contemporary world, however, which are bound together by global electronic communication networks, Wiener writes, “the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, [and] from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication” (160). Among these methods, Wiener notes, “the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important,” for when control over such technology becomes concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, “ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels” (160). In the digital age, then, having power allows one to exert control over communication, and being able to exert control over communication increases one’s power.

It is from within this context of power and communication that the cypherpunk slogan must be understood. As Assange (2014) states, neither privacy nor transparency is intrinsically valuable but instead must be understood within “the calculus of power.” On the one hand, “the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else.” On the other hand, as institutions keep their affairs “secret from the powerless and to the powerful,” transparency becomes a means to check such secrecy (Assange et al. 2012, 141). While the internet has been celebrated for its potential to promote democracy, literacy, and autonomy for the people of the world, James Carey (2009) notes that “modern technology invites the public to participate in a ritual of control in which fascination with technology masks the underlying factors of politics and power” (150). In Assange’s words, we may be excited about “people being able to Google and search for the blogs of the world and people’s comments,” but we should not conclude that access to blogs is equivalent to “powerful insiders knowing every credit card transaction in the world” (Assange et al. 2012, 143). The two are not equal: they do not require equivalent degrees of power to achieve, and they do not result in equivalent augmentations of power for the respective parties. Having access to the records of all financial transactions in the world requires special, centralized corporate and governmental power, and it results in far more power than results from reading all the blogs in the world. Thus, by advocating privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful, the cypherpunks hope to shift the balance of power, taking power from corporate and government elites and returning it to the people.

Hackers, Cyberpunks, and Cypherpunks

To understand the characteristics of the cypherpunk movement, it is necessary to note the ways in which the cypherpunks differ from two other related but ultimately distinct technology-inspired subcultures: hackers and cyberpunks. Both the hacker ethic and cyberpunk literature exerted some influence over the cypherpunks, but there are important reasons for recognizing the cypherpunks as a movement in their own right.

The hacker subculture emerged among a group of programmers in the computer labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s; over the next two decades, it migrated to California, where the hardware and video game hackers initiated the personal computer revolution. Despite their geographical and professional differences, the hackers all seemed to share an implicit set of beliefs: that computers could improve people’s lives, that access to computers ought to be unfettered, that systems of centralized authority ought to be replaced with decentralized systems, that people should take a hands-on approach to technology, and—perhaps most famously—that all information should be free. By the early 1980s, however, the hacker ethos of openness, sharing, and decentralization had been eclipsed by business imperatives, with emerging computer and software manufacturers facing financial incentives that promoted the development of a closed, proprietary, and centralized culture (Levy 2010). Meanwhile, the revolution in personal computers carried the hacker ethic out of the labs and into private homes, where an international hacker underground emerged. Like their predecessors, underground hackers—including groups like the International Subversives—believed in open, decentralized systems and the freedom of information, but unlike their predecessors, who enacted these values in computer labs isolated from the larger society, underground hackers enacted these values in direct conflict with corporate and government authority. These underground hackers scoffed at the notion that ideas could be owned, and they openly defied centralized aut...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Crypto!
• 3 Cypherpunk Meta-Ethics
• 4 Cypherpunk Theories of the State
• 5 Privacy for the Weak
• 6 Transparency for the Powerful
• 7 Information Wants to Be Free
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index