Pellucid Stack: a polemic on the incorporation of semantic web technologies in surveillance and digital activism (2019)
How there is a concerted effort by Big Tech and The Government to merge as one in creating a surveillance state.
Contents:
Introduction
The internet managed to create a world wide web of information accessible by anyone around the world, provided that they have internet connectivity, this allowed for a mass distribution of information. This is known as the Information Age. Working within the framework of an institutional education system such as school or university, is regarded as a luxury; and those who were in need of such knowledge could only be disseminated via a qualified professional such as a professor, lecturer and or scholarly source. In order for someone to publish their information in a digestible way for mass consumption, their work would have to be submitted to a third party, a publisher or be a part of a distribution arrangement. The internet bestowed anyone the ability to become independently educated on any topic, regardless of someone’s status or relationship to a professor or a public library, learning has been streamlined to the point where a user can query anything from the inanest to the most scientific peer reviewed study at the click of a button. The web as we know it has evolved drastically, an iterative process defined by advancements in its protocols and technology, for clarity of purpose we can reference these periods of time as either Web 1.0, Web 2.0 or Web 3.0.
The internet before 1999 is considered to be Web 1.0, Web 1.0 based websites had extremely limited interaction, and is regarded as the “read-only” web, due to bandwidth limitations and the infancy of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), this had led to the static nature of its web pages. Web 1.0 had limited affordances and mainly served to provide users with the ability to search, read information or to house primitive e-commerce websites that allowed businesses to present their products to a potential customer, in the way a brochure or a catalogue would.
The year 1999 marked a new era of the web, aptly dubbed Web 2.0 also known as the “read-write” era in order to combat the lack of discourse that the ‘read only’ web provided. Websites such as Blogger and LiveJournal which were both launched in 1999. This allowed those who were not tech literate to participate and interact with the web. This newly introduced ability to create and contribute content and to interact with other users has dramatically changed the landscape of the web in such a small time, and the inclusion of co-operation appears to be a welcoming response to the limitations of the Web 1.0 stack.
The creator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee describes the Web 3.0 as the “read-write-execute” web, or the Semantic Web, and this is where it’s abstractions begin to occur. Web 2.0 is revolutionary in the way that we are able to easily collaborate on information, but in doing so one of the downsides of rapid data accumulation is the inability to properly sort through this data. So to remedy this problem The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started to use metadata to let other computers understand information on internet. The Semantic Web would make computers do more work in finding, sharing and combining information that is online. Metadata is useful because it is “data about data”. For example, a library might group a book by its genre and keep a catalogue of their books. In the context of metadata, the catalogue of books could include information such as the author and the subject it is classified under. When a digital camera takes a picture, it holds metadata pertaining to the date and time, GPS location and other technical information like the exposure and focal length. Metadata can be removed by using features of the program on which it was created. or by using a “scrubbing” tool
The inference of metadata
Metadata is one of the primary methods of sorting datatypes on the semantic web, if we did not have metadata we would be inundated with information with no way of sorting through it, metadata collection is also one of the primary methods of surveillance, the majority of what we understand in regards to government surveillance comes from NSA contractor Edward Snowden, arguably the most famous whistle blower, collecting tens of thousands of documents that explicitly describe the NSA’s surveillance activities. The first story to break was on how the NSA collects the mobile phone records of every single American citizen. The government in defence said that the only information that was collected was the metadata of phone conversations and not the transcripts of the conversations themselves. It would be the equivalent of hiring a personal investigator that would give you a report on where a target went, what they did, who they spoke to, the duration of the conversation, etc. Eavesdropping would provide you with a transcript whereas surveillance would provide you with everything else.
Some could argue that the collection of metadata is still abiding to a notion of privacy, but we must consider that when we attribute data being akin to content whereas the metadata is context, metadata can present itself as being more revealing than data, especially when the data is aggregated. Content may be more important if an individual is currently under surveillance, but when the surveillance has been scaled to an entire population, the metadata becomes more useful and important.
A study called “Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata,” used an application called MetaPhone to collect the metadata from 823 volunteers, the sample size was relatively small yet it captured more than 250,000 phone calls and over 1.2 million text messages. Their findings broke down that “metadata is not totally anonymous and can be used to infer sensitive information”. Analysis of this metadata had shown that it was easy to infer extremely sensitive details about people’s religious affiliations, locations, health status and many other traits from the information that was collected.
“In one example, the researchers noted that one participant in the study received a long phone call from the cardiology group at a regional medical centre. The person also spoke briefly to a medical laboratory, and received multiple short calls from a local pharmacy, and rang a self-reporting hotline for a cardiac arrhythmia monitoring device. Using public sources, the researchers were able to confirm that the person was indeed a cardiac arrhythmia suffer.”
This inference is where ethical abstractions occur. For authorities to have remarked that metadata is benign, and cannot reveal sensitive information is not only incorrect, it is grossly disingenuous, researchers easily extract personal details from metadata. Michael Hayden, ex NSA and CIA director stated “we kill people based on metadata”, A tax funded organisation has the ability to circumvent the legal process and engage in extrajudicial killings; the power to become judge, jury and executioner has become something a lot more sinister.
If we apply this line of reasoning to former president Barack Obama’s notorious policy of countless drone strikes, a practise so vicious and indiscriminate that it has permanently cemented his legacy alongside him being the first black president. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism Obama’s strikes in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen from government, military and intelligence officials” are quantitatively collected by an independent and “credible media, academic and other sources, including on occasion Bureau researchers.” Between 2004 and April 12, 2015 drones killed between 421 and 960 civilians in Pakistan, and two hostages of al-Qaida Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto which prompted the president to offer a personal apology to the families of the deceased hostages.
Firstly, to use metadata exclusively as evidence would not be strong enough to hold itself up in a court of law, metadata usually accompanies the evidence, for example, a piece of video footage showing a crime could have the date and time superimposed on it, supplementing the evidence, the evidence being used is classed as metadata based surveillance, which makes this process completely unethical and thus socially undesirable as it is merely acting on inference rather than solid evidence, and to have an agency essentially decide the fate of an individual based on an extrapolation, is simply the creation of context in the digital world as a pretext for loss of liberty in a post 9/11 age. To create context is to create “truth” and to create “truth” is to create justification under the guise of authoritarianism. Certain apps have taken precautions to strengthen user privacy when metadata is also of interest, chat app Signal by Open Whisper Systems, “is testing out a feature that would encrypt message metadata—a move that could further protect the privacy of journalists' communications with sources.”
Fourteen Eyes & the UKUSA Agreement
There have been significant efforts to strengthen global surveillance in regards to data created and stored online. The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA), is an example of this. The alliance of their relationship is essentially divided into three tiers, Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes. The UKUSA Agreement is basically an agreement for cooperation between fourteen countries, this is known as the Fourteen Eyes. The role of the Fourteen Eyes is to cooperatively collect, analyse, and share intelligence from different parts of the world. While Five Eyes countries have agreed to not spy on each other as if they were adversaries , The Five Eyes alliance also cooperates with groups of third-party countries to share intelligence (forming the Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes) respectively, however Five Eyes and third-party countries can and do spy on each other. Most information is shared via the STONEGHOST network, claimed to contain "some of the Western world's most closely guarded secrets"
Five Eyes
Australia
Canada
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States of America
Nine Eyes
Denmark
France
Netherlands
Norway
Fourteen
Belgium
Germany
Italy
Spain
Sweden
The inception of the UKUSA agreement was established from The Atlantic Conference & Charter, an informal agreement in 1941; long before the digital world had such a large stranglehold and monopoly on information, “The meeting had been called in response to the geopolitical situation in Europe by mid-1941” it was mainly used to foster a special relationship with allied countries, share information without fear of interception in World War II and assuring U.S. material support, by the end of May, after “German forces had inflicted humiliating defeats upon British, Greek, and, Yugoslav forces in the Balkans” . The creation of the Fourteen Eyes was strategically imperative to the destruction of the Axis powers in World War II, but juxtaposed to our current climate it’s incentives have drastically warped.
One could argue, that with the emergent threat of cyber-warfare, it is in the interest of countries that already have established channels of discourse and co-operate in countless of ways outside of sharing intelligence. That it would only be the next logical step for them to a form a union dedicated to the accumulation of intelligence. However according to whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Fourteen Eyes has been another facet of the NSA mass surveillance program PRISM “an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to "unmask" and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.”
American citizens are by default constitutionally bestowed basic levels of privacy in many avenues of their life, just to name a relevant few:
The First Amendment protects the privacy of an individual’s beliefs,
The Fourth Amendment provides protection against unreasonable searches.
The Fifth Amendment protects those from lawfully influenced self-incrimination, which also doubles as being a method of protecting one’s personal information.
Legally this means that as the United States is a member of the Five Eyes, it would be unconstitutional to conduct rigorous surveillance on its own citizens, but due to its long standing and close knit relationship with the United Kingdom, and how intertwined the surveillance resources are, the NSA can intensively spy on behalf of the United Kingdom and even has “the phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing”.
Cyber-Oligarchy: the corporate usurpation of free speech
On September 6th 2018, American radio show host, journalist and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was systematically suspended from a myriad of social media platforms, most notably: Facebook, Twitter, Apple Store, YouTube, PayPal and Spotify. Citing hate speech and the promotion of violence. Facebook unpublished four pages for “repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”. Jones has accused the media platforms of unfair censorship. The banning of Jones had only confirmed his theories of being "listed as a thought criminal against Big Brother" martyring him and reinforcing his status of being a pariah, this was reflected in his metrics, temporarily creating a Streisand effect; a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. following big tech’s unilateral banning of InfoWars and Alex Jones from their platforms, downloads of the InfoWars application skyrocketed, launching the application to #1 in the Apple App Store surpassing conventional mainstream media applications such as CNN.
WikiLeaks states that “InfoWars has frequent nonsense, but also a state power critique.” In 2017 representatives of Twitter, Google and Facebook were instructed on the US Senate floor that is their duty to “act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
A colloquialism that has been added to the lexicon of many millennials and Gen Z who are active participants in social justice movements is to be called “cancelled”. It is used to demonstrate that the actions of the user were so out of character, for example they made a racist or sexist remark on social media. That they have essentially become exiled from their digital life, although this is not a legally binding court order, it echoes the Orwellian concept of the “unperson” those who have been ‘cancelled’ usually work on an arbitrary and incontestable policy, mostly used to simply censor opposition, their existence is expunged from the public record and memory. We can draw parallels of the “cancelling” of Alex Jones to the evolution of the public execution in Discipline and Punish, whereas the public execution is evolved from a graphic scene “as a hearth in which violence bursts again into flame.” To then becoming “the most hidden part of the penal process.” (Foucault, 1975)
One could create a compelling argument, that due to the nature of social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, being owned by private companies, that it would be incorrect to suggest that the act of mass suspension or ‘shadow banning’ and other methods of silencing dissent could be regarded as censorship, and websites such as Twitter and Facebook are private companies that can do whatever they please with their property. But to simply suggest that the free market provides carte blanche, ignores a substantial fact that the megacorporation’s of Silicon Valley have had long lasting ties with US intelligence agencies. Google just to name a few assisted the United States Department of Defence to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analysing drone footage. and received huge grants from the NSA and CIA to assist in mass surveillance under the unclassified Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The tech boom of the early 2000s generated a new ruling class with a domain over the way information is disseminated, this cyber-oligarchy, blurring the relationship between corporation and states, and its influence in cyberspace, leads users into ignoring the procedures in which the state often uses private enforcement and state funded technology to restrain the exercise of power and liberty online, “in a corporatist system of government where there is no distinguishable separation between corporate and state power” , corporate censorship becomes state censorship, and bribery becomes pre-packaged in the form of lobbying.
To simply analyse this situation through an ideological or bipartisan lens, it would be apparent that Silicon Valley and its elites are predominately authoritarian left leaning, but to simply make that assumption based on the fact that a few liberal virtues like the concept of free speech, and the discouragement of freedom of association, likewise coupled with legitimate examples of suppression and censorship, the majority of which have been from websites learning on the right, whether authoritarian, libertarian or even centrist. One could easily make a promising claim. On the other hand, this ignores a much larger issue; if we apply Occam’s razor to this situation, it is apparent that the suppression and censorship is more of a tool used to target the revenue streams and influence of smaller and alternative media.
There appears to be a dichotomy in which the way the mainstream media conducts itself in comparison to alternative media, the legacy media’s main model of revenue, usually through advertising is to turn journalism into a business, to stay solvent there must be a motivation to maximise its profits and please shareholders. When the news is monetised, a conflict of interest is now introduced, because the priorities of the company change, when the original aim was to simply report the news as truthful and unbiased as possible, either out of a moral obligation, journalistic integrity or respect for the company’s reputation. When the news is monetised, ethically it becomes irredeemable, because there is now an ever present and almost omniscient fiscal consciousness within the company, that now effects every single employee and permeates through each piece of investigation and journalism, regardless of moral obligation, journalistic integrity or respect for the company’s reputation. The business and its direction becomes directly controlled by its investors and board of directors.
That is not to say that alternative media does not suffer from similar issues, but to infer they are of the same scale as legacy media would be disingenuous. The internet age has completely redefined what constitutes as journalism, and the criteria for becoming a journalist in the first place. Alternative media is usurping huge swaths of viewership from legacy media, and anyone remotely invested in legacy media knows that this is clearly not a sustainable business model to compete with financially, and therefore must be destroyed completely. While in the process of practising extreme consideration towards it’s optics while doing so.
The coordinated attempt from the Silicon Valley elite and authoritarian governments that wish to increase their control of the internet was constructed from a series of false narratives and extrapolations. The order of neoliberalism, parasitically infested every manner of life in the west, proselytised its inhabitants through the media, pop-culture and the government as being a quintessential model of how ‘The West’ should function, a beacon of civility and sensibility, keeping your head down and pretending everything is okay, especially when everything is not okay. This bystander effect eventually ran its course and the rejection of the neoliberal agenda paved the way for a resurgence of right-wing populism, mainly due to its anti-establishment rhetoric, Euroskepticism and the handling of economic migrants and Syrian refugees within the EU.
Around the world the charismatic talking heads who were professional statesmen and poster boys for the neoliberal order such as Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau were replaced with either uncompromising leaders, who appeared as if they were part of the general populace rather than the manufactured career politicians the public were used to. These ‘everyman’ candidates swore the end of globalisation and the promotion of nationalism to be the antidote to each of their countries problems.
The legacy media and Silicon Valley elites weaponised this right wing resurgence, manufacturing fear and branding modern conservatism as “right wing extremism”, never ceasing to politicise and attach an ideological motivation towards any significant event in the media, and proposed the only way to stop said “right wing extremism” was with more suppression of speech, and to deplatform offenders completely with no recourse or apology, these billionaire Elites poised themselves as paragons of morality, creating themselves judge, jury and executioner, completely circumventing an existing system designed to deal with extremism and terrorism and personally decide how speech should be regulated online. What would be considered standard vitriol that comes part and parcel with the anonymity of the internet now holds its weight under a broad and incontestable term such as “hate speech”.
Recognising the importance of having free speech, Andrew Torba and Ekrem Büyükkaya created a social media website similar to Twitter called gab.ai, it defines itself as “A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online. All are welcome.” because gab holds such an extreme stance on individual liberty it has a large far-right user base, and is often described as a “safe haven” for neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
In October 2018, Robert Gregory Bowers was a lone gunman and white supremacist, who carried out a mass shooting in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11. He was an active member of gab and maintained an account displaying neo-Nazi phrases such as 1488 coined by white supremacist David Lane which stands for the fourteen words “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and the letter H being the 8th letter of the alphabet meaning “Hail Hitler” . In the wake of the shooting Gab suspended his profile, provided relevant information and co-operated with the FBI. Based on “hate speech” laws PayPal, Medium and GoDaddy terminated their relationship with gab . In Gab’s temporary downtime they released a statement saying “We are the most censored, smeared, and no-platformed startup in history, which means we are a threat to the media and to the Silicon Valley Oligarchy.”
Robert Gregory Bowers was not the first terrorist to have a social media account, and he will not be the last, just to name a few: Elliot Rodger perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings and also regarded as one of the first prominent Involuntary Celibates (Incels) posted his final videos on YouTube before murdering 6 others. YouTube was not victim to the same scrutiny that Gab faced.
On November 27, 2018. A 36-year-old man from Maryland is accused of raping a 12-year-old girl he met while posing as a 14-year-old boy on Snapchat. Snapchat has faced no repercussions since the incident transpired. Twitter owned live-streaming app Periscope is described as having a “minor problem” where “Users are swarming young girls and asking them to do inappropriate things” with the application powerless to do anything about it. On June 14, 2017 Republican member of Congress Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot at a congressional baseball game for charity by a left-wing activist that was an avid supporter of Bernie Sanders and posed with Bernie 2016 t-shirts on his Facebook. Facebook was not victim to the same scrutiny that Gab faced.
The suspension and no platforming of Gab because of the actions of one individual is a testament to the ongoing war on free speech and the incontestability of the term “hate speech”. To systematically erode the concept of freedom of association only helps to foster a greater divide and produce echo chambers, the “antidote to bad speech isn't censorship, the antidote to bad speech is more speech not less […] censorship always backfires and has myriad unintended consequences.”
“In the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumours about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
The same mainstream news publications that perpetuate a dubious fear of “right-wing extremism” for clicks or the impossibility of neo-Nazis returning when the KKK make up 0.0022% of the USA, are simply spooks. Hypocritical publications that most likely advocated for immediate military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iran. Without proper due-diligence, the mainstream media unilaterally shilled for immediate military intervention. They are probably the same publications that try smear UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as weak for not immediately supporting "unilateral military action without legal authorisation or independent verification risks intensifying a multi-sided conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people" after a chemical weapon attack in Syria.
Do not be fooled by wolves in sheep’s clothing, neoliberalism is a spineless disorder, if the free market signals the profitability of “performative wokeness” they will all simultaneously masquerade their neoliberal appearance and rebrand as a radical leftist because it was the trendy profitable thing to do, simply placating the left with identity politics and non-issues, but it will not take long for their true colours to show, for example, if we use Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (also known as the BDS movement), a global campaign promoting various forms of boycott against the state of Israel, mainly due to the numerous human rights abuses, establishment of an apartheid state and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, to name a few.
What seems to be a straight forward political movement to provide support to one of the worst ongoing humanitarian crises in history, has been intentionally morphed by neoliberal and neoconservative news outlets and shills of the military industrial complex into a polarizing leftist position. Under the guise of tackling fake news, “Google’s algorithms have in the past few months moved socialist, anti-war, and progressive websites from previously prominent positions in Google searches to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them from the search results any searcher will see. […] World Socialist Website, to cite just one example, has experienced a 67% drop in its returns from Google since the new policy was announced.” This reinforces the apolitical motivations of censorship, and exposes the tyrannical incentives of big business in relation to the internet.
Therefore, the preservation of alternative media, is the largest proponent to conserving liberal virtues such as free expression, free association and preventing the suppression of censorship on the internet; and we are approaching the point at which we will have no logical option but to render the biggest internet firms into public utilities, extending the idea of a free and open internet by preventing them from discriminating based on political ideology, if even only for fiscal reasons. I do not condone harassment, slander and libel, but to provide unelected billionaires the power to destroy individual’s reputation and identity, rather than a court of law is extremely irresponsible.
Crypto-Anarchy: digital activism and its contributions
There are many real world case studies, where the creations and contributions from Cypherpunks and other Crypto-Anarchists have helped prevent the efforts of bad actors from government or other agencies from being able to encroach on the rights of their sovereign citizens. The preservation of privacy and the usage of cryptography is not limited to those who engage in illicit activity albeit there are many instances of individuals using technology to avoid the legal ramifications of crime, cyber or not. To a myriad of people who require protection from authoritarianism the ability to conceal one’s identity is invaluable.
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”
If we trace the socio-political motivations of some of the earliest participants in prominent online movements such as the Cypherpunks, the notion of a free and open society was not bound to the constraints of ideology, and was in fact an intention of the internet and an extension of privacy rights in the real world.
(why cant substack do tables this is so cringe)
1975 — Data Encryption Standard
1985 — Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete
1991 — Phil Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy cryptosystem
1992 — Cryptography software no longer becomes a munition under U.S law
1992 — Creation of the Cypherpunks mailing list
1993 — A Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes
1993 — The first mass media discussion of Cypherpunks was in a Wired article by Steven Levy titled Crypto Rebels
1994 — Cypherpunks mailing list reaches 700 subscribers
1994 — Phil Karn sued the State Department over cryptography export controls
1995 — Adam Back wrote a version of the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography in three lines of Perl
1997 — A Cyberpunk Manifesto By Christian As. Kirtchev
1997 — Cypherpunks mailing list reaches 2000 subscribers
1997 — Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer (a network of independent mailing list nodes to eliminate the single point of failure in a centralized list architecture)
1998 — EFF builds a $200,000 machine that could brute-force a Data Encryption Standard key in a few days.
1998 — Creation of OpenSSL
2000 — Julian Assange, Suelette Dreyfus, and Ralf Weinmann create the rubberhose encryption
2001 — Creation of BitTorrent
2001 — Mixmaster anonymous remailer
2002 — Tor (anonymity network)
2004 — Hal Finney creates the first reusable proof-of-work system
2006 — Cypherpunk is added to the Oxford English Dictionary
2008 — Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list.
2009 — Release of bitcoin
2011 — Silk Road anonymous marketplace
2013 — Silk Road anonymous marketplace is shut down by the FBI
2013 — Snowden leaks on NSA warrantless surveillance
Bitcoin: The Internet of Money
Bitcoin is controversial; a polarising technology, which provides a different definition of its utility according to who you inquire. One of the main reasons I enjoy cryptocurrencies, bitcoin included, manifests itself from a nihilistic accelerationism to replace our current banking system, I attribute the current system of fractional reserve banking, where banks can accept deposits, make loans and investments, without having reserves that are accurately reflected, as to be fraudulent and by very definition to be regarded as a Ponzi scheme. I personally view Bitcoin positively from an idealist who wishes to see that this scam of verbose usury, lose its grip upon the petrodollar and the world.
The more optimistic would champion bitcoin as this revolutionary technology which by becoming your own bank, “frees” the user from the whims of the banking industry, an individualistic approach is taken and effectively an exodus is lead from the fractional reserve banking practise. An argument can be made that becoming your own bank a degree of individual liberty has been restored for the user on a financial level, and mass-participation in this process is the most direct way of usurping power from large corporations by directly taking their money out from it. Which would appeal to someone who is disillusioned with the current state of the authoritarian left and their inability to mobilise effectively. The core tenants of Marxism which is to seize the means of production with the promotion of the unification and unionisation of working people, to be abandoned due to the favouring of identity politics, infighting and inundation of theory rather than practice to be the wrong trajectory to aim for. I also grow sceptical of authoritarian leftism on an ideological basis, be that an oversimplification, that the state, an existing hierarchy would also task itself on trying destroy class and hierarchy, it all simply seems paradoxical and unrealistic. Creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto remarked the following on fiat and fractional reserve banking.
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible. A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.”
The pragmatic approach to bitcoin is not to create this grand narrative event of hyperbitcoinization, the event in which “Bitcoin-Induced Demonetization”, disrupts fiat currency, in a similar way to hyperinflation but a “hyperbitcoinization event will be much quicker” because of the greater difficulty the government would face from “preventing bitcoins from entering the country due to the impotency of capital controls upon it […] In a hyperbitcoinization event, people switch from a fundamentally inferior currency to a superior one” everyone owns a finite resource instead of an infinitely inflatable currency. What bitcoin changes from the banking system is not the existing responsibilities and services that a bank provides, but in fact deflates them, separating the role of the individual and the role of bank, almost creating a gradient in which the individual can be as gradual as they want in the way they “licence their banking”, because of the verifiability of the blockchain an individual can be a bank with £10 of liquidity and be just as stable from a technological standpoint as a bank with millions of pounds of liquidity.
The Rise and Demise of AlphaBay
AlphaBay Market was an online darknet market that operated on the Tor protocol, it was run by the late 26-year-old computer technician Alex Cazes, it was launched in November 2014, and officially released on December 22, 2014. It was considered to be one of the most popular dark net markets with 14,000 new users alone in its first 90 days of operation. An independent darknet information website gwern.net ran by Gwern Branwen dedicated to the research and “writings on the darknet markets and Bitcoin” had placed the AlphaBay market in the top tier of markets based on a 6 month survival probability model. In October of 2015 it was recognised as the largest online darknet market.
By July 2017, AlphaBay was ten times the size of darknet market Silk Road, it had half a million users, 369,000 listings and was generating $700,000 worth of transactions a day , but its Operational Security (OPSEC) was no match for the unlimited resources of the United States law enforcement.
“Darknet markets, in theory, offer greater product reliability and remove the risk of physical violence in face-to-face encounters with drug dealers. “ A darknet website makes its money from the commissions of each customer and or vendor, by taking a small percentage of each transaction, this profit usually makes its way to a master wallet. The procedure of money laundering has evolved dramatically; the master wallet holds all.
AlphaBay was particularly significant because it accepted support for an additional cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). due to the transparency of the bitcoin protocol, the blockchain allows you to see balances of anyone, who made transactions, to whom and what time and so on. This is counter-intuitive to someone who wants to run a successful illicit drug business. As mentioned previously, due to the transparency of cryptocurrency blockchains, law enforcement was able to view the holdings of Alex Cazes with relative ease, according to the forfeiture complaint document
“CAZES' financial statement identified cash holdings of over $770,000 and $6.5 million in cryptocurrency. […] CAZES abbreviated his cryptocurrency holdings—"BTC" for Bitcoin, "ETH" for Ethereum, "XMR" for Monero, and "ZEC" for Zcash. Written next to these wallet addresses were the "private keys" that allowed law enforcement to unlock the controls and move the cryptocurrency within each wallet address to a secure government-controlled address. In total, from CAZES' wallets and computer, agents took control of approximately $8,800,000 in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Moreno [sic], and Zcash, broken down as follows: 1,605.0503851 Bitcoin, 8,309.271639 Ethereum, 3,691 Zcash and an unknown amount of Monero”
Due to the fact that cryptocurrencies can be used to purchase items of an illicit nature, a demand for a currency that is secure, private, untraceable and fungible is higher than ever, with many coins claiming said functionality but not being able to deliver, Monero is an example of actually being to deliver on its promises with a real use case to support it.
Zcash was also one of the currencies that Cazes stored his profits in, Zcash was also toted as being a privacy centred coin, even utilising cryptography called Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKS) that was far more advanced than Monero’s Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) form of obfuscation; traceable ring signatures, confidential transactions and stealth addresses.
Although these layers offer extremely good privacy, they can't match the theoretical perfection of zero-knowledge, but having the best cryptography in the world is meaningless if the coin itself is not private by default. Monero offers one clear advantage and that is every single transaction is private by default. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but users are able to use an optional privacy feature to conceal the sender, recipient, and amount being transacted. Having to manually choose to be private is simply another vector of attack because it requires another step to ensure privacy, and one mistake is irreparable due to the permanence and architecture of the blockchain.
Conclusion
In order to have the capacity to torture, one must have a semblance of empathy and self-awareness, so that one can understand that they are inflicting pain on others, only then can it be done to enjoy their torment. There are a handful of species in the animal kingdom that commit acts of torture, but most worrying is the fact that our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee, is known to actively torture its prey before putting it out of its misery. Humans are also known to torture for pleasure, and evolutionary biologists will definitely a draw light to the parallels of the primitive action of creating hierarchies and slave classes, it is deliberate to torture, it is done for the sake of reprimanding or pleasure. This then creates a new dilemma, what can we do to subdue innate primal chimpanzee desires to torture and to create hierarchies, and is it even possible amongst people? We are often told that communism or any sort of benevolent Ubuntu society works ‘on paper’ or in a utopia, and once ‘human nature’ is involved it is subverted, tyrants will usurp power while still masquerading under the original ideology hence the arguments that “real communism hasn’t been tried yet.” and to be pragmatic about the situation it is true. Humans are a clear attack vector, because morality is not a strong enough indicator to prevent tyranny in an authoritarian society, people are malleable, susceptible to bribes and threats. People could never be paragons of morality as long as other parties and can influence the outcome of their actions.
I believe the only antidote to combat the manipulability of men, would be to have immutability to be entrusted in technology, code and law should work in tandem to ensure that they mediate each other’s actions, to avoid devolving into authoritarianism in the form of corporatism or government tyranny. The government should break up monopolies if they become too powerful and are able to exert control over politics, foreign and domestic, and on the other hand technology should be used to restore liberty when the government tries to infringe on the rights of others. The disruptive nature of modern day technology can directly affect industries that have made their fortune in predatory lending practises such as usury, the Ponzi scheme of fractional reserve banking is nullified with the invention of bitcoin, debt inflation and interest are not present within the protocol due to the fact that there will only be 21 million coins minted in existence.
The semantic loophole of metadata surveillance can also be circumvented with technology when the metadata is encrypted, as in the case of Open Whisper Systems. Individual liberty must be preserved, by any means necessary because it will always be the main threat in a free and open society. The idea to build a home with walls of glass is absurd. The idea to build a home without locks is silly. So why would anyone willingly conduct themselves this way in cyberspace?
The established order or the powers that be, who have created their entire heritage on the exploitation of others, from serfdom to modern day indentured servitude will not rescind power without a fight, they will attempt to discredit those who choose to put their faith in individuality rather than the will of the state that has proven on many occasions that they cannot be trusted to enact the will of the people.
Masquerading as paragons of morality, the warmongers, neo-cons, degenerates, and bourgeoisie decants of the ultra-elite, will discredit the individual and their right to privacy and control over their money, with a series of moralistic rhetoric in an attempt to rationalise their tyranny. Their platitudes will be infested with fallacies, appealing to senses of morality when these very same industries are the very embodiment of the immoral. “we must protect the children; we must defeat the terrorists.”
They will pervert the imperative of privacy, simultaneously diminishing its importance. Reclassifying the narrative, and masquerading behind post-modern deconstruction, churning academic jargon— “post-privacy, openness, transparency” and other decadent drivel designed to present the privacy focused as regressive, as if they are clinging onto the ideals of yesteryear unable to understand that world is ‘changing’, as if these principles are antiquated, and welcome overstayed.