Cypherpunk Bitstream

Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0f: The Law Won't Save You

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:15 +0000

In this episode episode we discuss Protonmail, lack of legal protection for privacy services, legal loopholes, and jurisdictional arbitrage.

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0e: Culture Corruption

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sat, 03 Jul 2021 03:00:00 +0000

In this episode we discuss cultural changes and contradictions in popular opinions which were formed over the last decade. We talk about cancel culture and the role of moderate views in the public discussion about social issues. Also, we reflect on the level of political and economic freedom around the world and how crypto-anarchism can minimize state and corporate power abuses.

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0d: Non-Compliance

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 21:15:00 +0000

We talk about non-compliance, why people are so compliant, and discuss a listener’s critique of the power episode.

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
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Bitstream
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10245 Berlin
Germany

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0c: Censorship

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 03:15:00 +0000

We talk about censorship, messengers, Scrit, Gemini protocol, the Cyberpunk Age, and asymmetric warfare.

Discuss

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
PGP fingerprint: 1C4A EFDB 8783 6614 C54D E230 2500 7933 D85F 2119 (key)

Snail mail

Bitstream
Scanbox #06965
Ehrenbergstr. 16a
10245 Berlin
Germany

Please send us feedback letters, postcards, and interesting books. You can also send us your dirty fiat by cash in the mail! We take all currencies.

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Please support Cypherpunk Bitstream by donating to:

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0b: The Roots of Parallel Polis

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 14:00:00 +0000

We talk with Martin Leskovjan and Juraj Bednár about the roots of Parallel Polis, a socio-political concept created by Václav Benda in connection with Charter 77. Parallel Polis was about creating parallel societies during the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

We also cover how it inspired and influenced the contemporary projects Paralelní Polis in Prague and Paralelna Polis in Bratislava in which Martin and Juraj are involved.

What can we learn from the Parallel Polis concept for contemporary freedom movements?

Discuss

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
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Snail mail

Bitstream
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Ehrenbergstr. 16a
10245 Berlin
Germany

Please send us feedback letters, postcards, and interesting books. You can also send us your dirty fiat by cash in the mail! We take all currencies.

Support

Please support Cypherpunk Bitstream by donating to:

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0a: Power

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 13:00:00 +0000

We talk about power: What is power? Who has it? How does it work? Individual and organizational power. State vs. non-state actors.

Discuss

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
PGP fingerprint: 1C4A EFDB 8783 6614 C54D E230 2500 7933 D85F 2119 (key)

Snail mail

Bitstream
Scanbox #06965
Ehrenbergstr. 16a
10245 Berlin
Germany

Please send us feedback letters, postcards, and interesting books. You can also send us your dirty fiat by cash in the mail! We take all currencies.

Support

Please support Cypherpunk Bitstream by donating to:

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x09: Security III — The Future of Security

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 19:00:00 +0000

We talk about the future of security: future threats, technological empowerment, defence strategy in general, and example defence technology (anon comms, delay&disruption tolerant networking, long-range autonomous cargo drones, etc.).

The is also a somewhat higher quality version of the MP3.

Discuss

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Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
PGP fingerprint: 1C4A EFDB 8783 6614 C54D E230 2500 7933 D85F 2119 (key)

Snail mail

Bitstream
Scanbox #06965
Ehrenbergstr. 16a
10245 Berlin
Germany

Please send us feedback letters, postcards, and interesting books. You can also send us your dirty fiat by cash in the mail! We take all currencies.

Support

Please support Cypherpunk Bitstream by donating to:

Bitcoin: 38mzCtXHjgq6RusYQsFy2TQiLvLK7vN5JF (also via lightning network)

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x08: Pandemic II — Police State

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 06:40:00 +0000

We talk with Arto Bendiken about the political reactions to the ongoing pandemic and their long term effects on: Economy, free speech, mass gatherings, biodefense, cash, infection control, and identity.

The is also a higher quality version of the MP3.

Show Notes

Introduction

00:01:05 Two show participients verified they are either asymptomatic, or not infected.
00:02:55 Increase of pandemics in the future.
- SOURCE: Three seconds until midnight.
- Zoonotic transmissions.
- Avian flu pandemic (30% death rate).
- Increased air travel, population density.
00:06:14 MERS, SARS, swine flu, Ebola in the last 15-20 years. (It’s not the “once in a 100 years” frequency, or “three pandemics a century”)
- Wolfe, Nathan (2011): The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age
- Various books from Laurie Garrett
00:07:32 Death Rates will increase because of age of poulation.
- immune system gets faster with age, but overreaction is also more likely (cytokine storm)
- exporsure rates are higher (travel)

Political Reactions

00:09:14 Don’t test, don’t tell
- “The disaster that befell the citizens of Wuhan and so many other cities throughout China is not primarily a virus. The disaster is having a political regime that cares more about short-term public and economic concerns than it cares about saving the lives of its citizens.”
- smuggler: matches most reactions in the West.
- Frank: in politics, it means that any candidate cannot win against the pandemic, and their opponents can always say afterwards “we could have done better”. So, the US solution for Trump might be to let it burn as quick as possible through the population, and be over and done with it before the elections. Maximizing Re-Election is key.
- smuggler: “Politicians don’t get elected by being really smart people when it comes to dealing with complex problems.” More important: Ability to backstab, put on good face, and select experts. “All of our systems, especially in the West, are not meant to deal with crisis, they are meant to deal with normalcy.”
- Arto: Some Asian countries have dealt with it pretty well.
00:14:55 Finance minister of Hesse, Germany committed suicide, probably because of COVID19-crisis: (Thomas Schäfer)
- NY Post: German state financial minister kills himself over coronavirus ‘despair’

Fear And Economics

00:15:25 Fear & Economic bailouts
- smuggler: “Every response is better than no response, even if it’s just about dealing with your fear […] what you can see is, that the first responses that are taken are the ones easiest to implement for a state.”
- Distributing free money! German states are handing out €9-15k for small businesses, with a total volume of €50 Billion. BMWI: Soforthilfe für Solo-Selbstständige und Kleinstbetriebe; IBB: Liquiditätsengpässe wegen Coronavirus- Unterstützung für Berliner Unternehmen
- This takes fear out of the system. A lot of people are still primarilary concerned about the economic effects.
- Frank: economic effects are already secondary effects.
- smuggler: pressing the red panic button, to buy time (lockdown).
00:18:21 Recap this week’s events (Mar 23-29)
00:19:55 Orthogonal narratives: “Masks don’t work”
- smuggler: You cannot tell people to wear masks, if your own hospital staff has not enough masks…
- Balaji S. Srinivasan’s Twitter Thread: Collection of weekly narratives
00:22:20 Similarities to history (1918 pandemic): - don’t panic, nothing to fear but fear itself, everything is under control, we are taking care of it, you don’t need to do anything, everything will be fine - erodes trust in authorities with progression of pandemic - lying breeds the fear - why repeating? Politicians cannot deal with crisis - polulation with crisis experience tend to respond better
00:26:28 “The Great Influenza”, Twitter Thread - “In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken, or Influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe, the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death.” p.340 - smuggler: a lot of people mistrust the media in general. General assumption: “Whatever is said publicly, is false.” Search for alternative truths. - Slate Star Codex: Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
00:29:23 False treatments. smuggler: “There’s this general inability to even think about remedies, and how things actually work, people buy stuff because it comes from alternative sources, not because it is actually well researched.”
- that’s why medical research is based on quantification
00:30:17 Conspiracy theories. Frank: “Turning the story they hear into either totally denying it, or making it worse, in this super highly coordinated conspiracy.”
- Frank: “It’s a bioweapon but it doesn’t kill anyone because the numbers are false”
00:31:28 Arto: “In the future, it will be clear that masks are a good idea.”
- “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” Feb 29, 2020, @Surgeon_General
00:33:16 Today’s numbers (Mar 29th): 10,000 Spain; 6,000+ Italy - NYPD: 600 infected, 3000 missing from work (10% work force)

Inflation

00:34:25 Inflation (free money handed out)
- smuggler’s prediction: “For Germany, up to 30% of the domestic product (GDP) this year will be destroyed.”
00:35:24 Bill Gates’ TED Talk: US$ 3-4 trillon. Might be significantly underestimated.
- Bill Gates TED Talk 2015
- Bill Gates TED Connects talk 2020
- USA is talking about US$ 3 trillon bailout.
- “A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you’re talking real money.”
00:37:30 Move into other asset classes.
- Specifically gold.
- Selling property.
- AirBnB: refinancing one apartment after the other, is not working anymore.
- overall a bad year for over-leveraging :(
- Chinese real estate: buy two apartments, get one free. (Well, almost.)
- Berlin: prices went down, apartments are cheap.
- Ukraine: luxuries houses are considered by population like the bank account.

Renationalization Of Industries And Trade

00:41:44 Capitalization of companies.
- Most have been overleveraged.
- Ability to produce is going down.
- Bail-out money from state in exchange of stock.
- CEOs not being able to draw bonuses in the future.
- Re-nationalization of companies?
- State will become a big shareholder, and board member.
00:45:15 Supply chain fragility.
- Management ideas since the 80s (stock on the road, just in time).
- Increasing strategic stockpile: Government has taken over complete trade in medical goods & pharmaceuticals (Germany).
- Future: Stock is held more closely to production?
- Competition: who keeps the workers?
- Shutdown on parcels.
00:48:00 smuggler: “Global trade is re-spun into something that is tightly controlled by the states.”
- “The economic topology now becomes the political topology.”
00:48:32 Centralization of production.
- Restriction of worker’s movement: implication to food production.
- Harvest hands are missing.
- Frank: Impossible to replace them with domestic workers.
- smuggler: Unskilled seasonal workers need to have experience to be productive. And Fitness.
- Bloomberg report on food production

Free Speech

00:51:36 Arto: “Free Speech was already on its last legs, anyway.”
- Hate Speech.
- Platform level enforcement (Facebook, etc).
00:53:00 smuggler: “Policing on the net has taken a boost with coronavirus.”
- “This idea that the state has to control the information flow is becoming much more dominant, even in countries that allegedly had some free speech tradition.”
- Combination of algorythmic and human filtering.
- Targeted to anything related to pandemic, and political speech (keyword analysis, topic analysis).
- Human side of filtering is currently off-work, so currently there’s a lot of automated, imprecise flagging and deleting.
- Also happening on cloud-servers (Google Documents, GMail).
- Trying to rebuilt the Great Firewall of China (防火长城 fanghuo changcheng).
00:56:27 Twitter was essential in understanding what was happening in China.
- Leaked Videos, Photos, etc.
- Many sources are removed already!
- New Twitter “safety guidelines”: - Now, we will require people to remove Tweets that include the following: - Content that increases the chance that someone contracts or transmits the virus, including: - Denial of expert guidance - Encouragement to use fake or ineffective treatments, preventions, and diagnostic techniques - Misleading content purporting to be from experts or authorities
00:57:53 Frank: “They’re putting out false information themselves (like … with the masks), and it’s also the case that we don’t know the truth. I mean, that’s the whole problem of a developing pandemic, that a lot of the truth about the virus, and the disease, is actually not known at this point, not even by experts, they’re all trying to figure it out.” - Twitter is becoming an Epistemic Arbitrage. - No possibility to openly discuss. - Undermining process to come up with the least wrong data in the future. - Situation is highly dynamic.
00:59:41 Twitter was used for collaboration between scientists, publishing pre-prints, distributed peer-review (quickly debunking, too). - Preprint: Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag - Debunked: Trevor Bedford’s Twitter Thread

Political Symbolism

01:00:50 Traffic shaping as political symbolism.
- smuggler: “Information control becomes a political symbol.”
- EU calls to reduce video quality on Netflix, etc.
- Politican making demands based on not understanding how these services work.
- Companies can gain reputation by responding quickly to these political demands.

Identity Verification For Platforms

01:02:45 Keyword and topic analysis to prevent “false information”.
- USA: EARN IT Act (freedom of liability).
- EFF: The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online
- Started against child pornography, now widened to prevent spread of false information concerning the virus.
- smuggler: “If you make it mandatory for everything to be dynamically scanned, what you of course have to give up, is End-to-End Encryption.”
- Proposed by US Senate, but hasn’t been passed (yet).
01:04:44 United States Dept. of Justice: Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act: network of jurisdictions.
- US + Eu + whoever else signs
- Push on clearname (legal name, “real” name) push on all platforms
01:05:30 NetzDG (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz = Network Enforcement Act, also known as the Facebook Act): against hatespeech, used for actual police raids.
- Action day every two months, where police arrests people who conducted hate speech on social media.

Prevention Of Political Turmoil, Coups, Etc.

01:06:06 smuggler: “a crisis like that is a crisis of all systems.”
- “There are quite a a few people who are afraid that the situation will be exploited to force changes in the political system by non-legal means, we’re talking coup d’êtats, revolutions, etc.”
- Current examples: at least two states
- Revolutions don’t bring better people into power.
- Political stablization by surveillance.
01:08:15 China’s political situation
- Precarious for presidency (习近平 Xi Jinping, since 2013)
- Perceived mismanagement at beginning of crisis.
- Competence is prerequiste of staying in power.
01:09:15 Frank: “To me it seems like again, we have this conflict between free market and basically a centralized economy.”
- Cutting streaming: people need the bandwidth to do work.
- Identity verification and certificates.
- Arto: “Credentials serve as a proxy for you being an expert.”
- Every conspiracy theory comes with a doctor (or other degree).

Disappointments In Libertarian Ideals And Voluntaryist Communities

01:11:00 smuggler: “The vast majority of people, seen individually, are unable to deal with the unknown and with actual crisis events. And it doesn’t make it better or less good to introduce the state, or control the markets, or whatever […] in a way, if the majority of your population is idiots, it almost seems that having somebody with a slightly higher IQ telling them what to do, being the right approach. I’m not saying it’s ethically correct…”
- Markets are not rational.
- “What we’re really seeing is that there’s a problem that in crisis, mass atomic individualism breaks down to the collective of idiots. […] It’s something people have always told me, but I’ve never believed that.”
- “When it comes to the vast majority, I’m seriously disappointed.”
- “A lot of people I would consider freedom-lovers […] are now demonstrating that all they were about was they want to be contrarians.”
- Atomic Individualism approach showed that it’s failing, like the nation-state.
- Most important right now to work on voluntary, resilient groups.
01:15:50 Arto quoting: “There’s a silver lining to this crisis: now you know which of your friends are idiots.”
- Spanish: ser (used to talk about permanent or lasting attributes) vs. estar (used to indicate temporary states and locations), both meaning “to be”.
- Meme: “Radical anarchists are urging people to obey the state”
- H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
01:17:45 Frank: “I was hoping that every libertarian understands that, and stays the fuck at home […] voluntarily. I don’t understand why people didn’t do it, especially the libertarians, […] if the state mandates a lockdown, they throw a corona party at home to protest.”
- Personality differences.
01:19:50 Frank’s Addict Theory.
- Most people act like addicts. Their drug, comfort, is threatened through crisis.
- Reaction of addicts: total denial (“There is no problem”), or justifications to keep up repeating old behavior (nobody wants to change behavoir)
- Also addict like: Ego-centricity (Doesn’t matter if granny dies!)
01:21:33 Responsible individual action fails.
- Bigger complexity. smuggler: “Externalizing the whole crisis management, and crisis preperation to the state, has been a real disaster. But the alternative - which is, atomic libertarians - they’re failing as well.”
- Arto quoting: “I wonder how libertarians are dealing with the fact that the current crisis is annihilating their entire ideology”
- How to make peace between individual liberty and being forced to take collective action against certain external threat?
- The right response for problems like these: many people coordinating their activity towards the problem, and is has to happen fast, but doesn’t have to happen perfect.
- Problem: Large parts of the population not cooperating (if 20% do not cooperate, it doesn’t matter what the leftover 80% do, especially in pandemic scenario).
- The 80% is not the issue, the 20% is.
- Level of Enforcement?
01:26:45 Failed to build communities that are able to respond (only Twitter crowd, and a few conferences). - Arto: “The atomized individual is nothing but plankton for Leviathan”, paraphrase of Jack Donovan (“In a sea of billions, a man alone is plankton”, Chapter: Belonging is Becoming, in: Becoming a Barbarian, 2016)
01:28:00 Arto: Doesn’t consider himself libertarian anymore. - Arto’s Talk at HCPP 2018: Post-Libertarian Realpolitik, Slides
01:28:18 smuggler: Implementation is failing. - “When it comes to the group, we’re failing.” - “We’re all holed up individually.”

Communities And Pandemics

01:30:04 Frank: Communities that live together in one place (TAZ, no one is living there as of now).
01:30:40 Arto: Villages in Carpathians. - Remote and defenseable. - “Often solutions are so old-fashioned and boring, that they even escape notice in our focus on the cypherpunk future.”
01:31:48 smuggler: Community in the rocky mountains. - Dailymail: ‘You’re not welcome!’: Worried residents tell rich ‘virus refugees’ flocking to the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen to stay away to stop the spread of coronavirus in their communities - How do resilient structures look like, and where they should be positioned? - Build resilient structure long before the crisis hits.
01:32:48 Arto: “Even though we started preparing early, there wasn’t enough time to do a good job of it.”
01:33:11 Frank: Cannot compare these communities. - Community would relatively early cut off outside contact. - Units that are interfacing with outside world, but that are mostly seperated. That’s what you need for pandemics.
01:34:15 Arto: Housing together with weaker and more risky people. - Arto is living currently with 11 people in the house. - Not everyone has the same level of risk awareness. - Frank: “The chain is only as strong as the weakest link.”
01:35:18 “The Great Influenza”: Historic examples of communities where communities isolated themselves early. - Australia is shining example, only succumbed in 3rd wave: “Australia had escaped. It had escaped because of a stringent quarantine of incoming ships. Some ships arrived there with attack rates as high as 43 percent and fatality rates among all passengers as high as 7 percent. But the quarantine kept the virus out, kept the continent safe, until late December 1918 when, with influenza having receded around the world, a troopship carrying ninety ill soldiers arrived.” (p.375)
01:37:39 Threats with spreading behavior. - Foxes and Henhouse. - Rippling effects. - Proctecting everybody requires cohersive regime, so some deaths must be taken as toll. - Isolation can only be short-term remedy, later: controlled exposure, requires discipline of community. - Atomic anarchist thought.
01:38:33 Cohersive state = single point of failure. - Arto: Epidemiologists make same mistake as central planners, they assume what they propose can be done. Projections based on these assumptions. - Failures: Political will (half-assed implementation), population is not complying, information asymmetry. - Some states seem to handle it well, but story is not over yet (Resurgence): Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China. - “People think of Wuhan as the worst case, actually, it’s be the best case.” - Hubei province, less than 1% of population was infected. Western numbers will be way higher. - Lockdown happened with about 500 cases, US is still not locked down.

Positive Things

01:42:05 Positive things! - Open-Source Ventilators, bottom-up. - Arto: Most deaths will be in third-world countries, these things might make a big difference there. - Future: no idea what that will look like, just no cohersive state. - smuggler: Not re-create central command, lack of information isn’t removed by distribution. - Quick responses, quick recovers. - smuggler: “When it comes to the ventilators, for example, a year ago that was more or less illegal behavior […] and now, we’re basically relying on that. Same is true for mass production, same is true for people volunteering for illegal drug trials, and stuff like that.” - Future where positive actions can be amplified, and negative actions can be pertailed. - Frank: “How can we self-organize into communities where we bubble up truth quicker? […] Sometimes you have to kick the noise out. […] It’s also not true that there’s no problem with false information and noise, there is a problem with that. […] I just believe that censorship is not a solution to the problem.” - smuggler: knowing reputation, knowledge is also pretty localized to specific topic. “Social media is not a replacement for human relationship.”
01:48:10 smuggler: “You learn by having a relationship with the person. When I listen to you, Frank, or you, Arto, I kinda know how you think, where your weaknesses in thinking and where your strengths in thinking are, so when I listen to you I can make my own conclusions from what you say, […] so your information is really valueable.” - The vast majority of senders are people where you don’t have this background information. - Arto: There’s no shortcut to get that information. - Transitive trust. - In current situation, these things become more visible.

Ventilators And Taking Action

01:49:30 smuggler: “We really have to embrace those problems […] in the past, there have been a lot of ‘Oh, it’s not really a problem’, you know we can put it away and the market will solve it. What is really important to learn from this whole sitution, I think, is that, we know that the problems exist and it’s up to us to create solutions, because if we don’t create solutions, the solutions that will come are shit. I’m not talking about the three of us, I’m talking about the community of people who actually want to have more liberty. We have to embrace the problems and we have to solve them, and we cannot just externalize them to another mythical entity, you know, not the state in this case, but the market in which apparently no one is participating from our communities.”
01:50:29 Arto: Lviv is particularly bad with medical supplies. - Lviv infectious diseases hospital (Львівська інфекційна лікарня) had a total of 4 ventilators. - Grassroots effort to tackle COVID19: (Lviv IT Cluster)[https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/lvivskyj-klaster-zapuskaye-masove-testuvannya-naselennya-na-covid19/], about 100 members, they import test kits and will provide mobile testing stations, they purchase PPE and ventilators as donations for hospitals.
01:53:18 smuggler: “The market works great, if the value system and the direction of solution is clear. And then, it’s amazing, then people say: I can copy this, I can copy this…” - If values / solutions are unclear, people will rather create more problems, than solve problems.
01:54:15 Distributed mass production of open-source ventilator designs. - Intubation is complicated procedure, not easily learned, special requirements on equipment. - What is possible? - Limits: man-power

Mass-Gatherings

01:55:08 Mass-Gatherings and COVID19. - Protests have been outruled, mass-gatherings, conferences have been cancelled. - smuggler: Crypto-Travelling-Circus is completely dead at the moment. Effects? - Frank: maybe there’s more code written now. ;) - smuggler: After lockdown, they might stil want to have lists with legal names for gatherings and events. Permits are likely. - Restart by checking Immunization of participients (Certificate of Immunity?). - smuggler: Protests and demonstrations are a building block of democracy. - This has been taken away: “If you don’t know there’s currently a pandemic going on, it could also be confused with being a coup d’êtat, where basically nobody is allowed on the streets anymore, you cannot have protests anymore, you can’t meet people, you can’t go to the government office and demand your rights to be honored…” - Democracy incompatible with pandemics?

Electronic Voting, Remote Elections

02:00:15 Electronic Voting - US: push for electronic voting (easy manipulation possible).
02:00:52 Secrecy of Vote: voting by email - EU Parliament mistakenly sent mail to all members, instead of counting party. - Remote working doesn’t work so well for parliament work. - Impact on system.
02:02:05 Frank: “We’re not prepared for a pandemic in terms of processes.” - The Law is not in place to be done in a remote way. - There’s no way to not go to the notary in person (even for authorizing someone else). - Hire someone who is immune?

Antibody Gophers And Plasma Farms

02:03:18 Arto: People who have anti-bodies and can prove it, will be in high demand. - For serum (blood), and as gophers. - Blood plasma trade from Wuhan survivors (plasma farms). - China influencing geopolitical alliances through plasma trade? - Dark Markets add blood category?

Burning Through Population

02:06:02 More reckless people have more influence now. - Frank: “States who let it burn quickest through their population, are the ones who will be first in line when the economy restarts.” - Arto: Overwhelmed hospitals will give them reason to rethink. - Brazil uses the burning through. - smuggler: might fix the pension system.
02:07:58 Three models: - complete lockdown (Wuhan approach, Examples: Singapore, South Korea). - complete burn-through scenario (mass casualties, Examples maybe Sweden and Brazil?). - those who cannot decide between either (Western countries, Examples: Germany, USA).

Lessons From SARS

02:09:30 Asian countries who are SARS veterans reacted differently. - Greenfeld, Karl Taro (2006): China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic - Very valuable lessons in there. - Strategic stockpiles (Singapore vs. USA).
02:11:23 Vaccine Developments - Bill Gates TED Connects talk 2020 - at least one year

Cash

02:13:00 smuggler: Cash= Regulartory reactive control; Everything Else= Future Bio Defense - Assumption: Spreading of cash= spreading of contaminants. - Immedeate move by some states: restrictions, move to electronic payment systems. - Restrictions on cash before social distancing, limitation of how many people can be in the shop at the same time, disinfection of cards, queues, no PPE… etc. - Contactless payments by card. Problem: PIN number, but: allowed amounts without PIN have been upped. - You do not control the money on your card, you just have a claim for this amount to your bank.
02:17:10 Assets with direct control, without third party. - Cash (might be difficult to spend, tho). - Gold (Coins!), or Silver Coins. - Executive Order 6102, 1933: USA might confiscate Gold again in 2020. - Cryptocurrencies. Problem: Not widely accepted (at your local supermarket?), and strong dependecy on working exchange, communication, and energy infrastructure. - smuggler: “Our Value Transfer Systems are not as resilient as we would like them to be, and not at all trustworthy.” - “Perfect opportunity” to push cashless. - Arto quoting: “All the Fiat currencies are sinking, just at different rates.”
02:20:05 Possible solutions - Move to crypto, scan QR codes? See problems above. - Frank& smuggler’s SCRIT: cheap, super fast, offline capable, untraceable ecash. Backable system with gold, Bitcoin, etc. - Buying physical gold is really hard at Berlin at the moment, gold-backed SCRIT might be a very good solution.

Biodefense

02:23:00 Long-term implementations, strategic security response. - Temperature checks. Not so effective for COVID19. - Rapid testing. Might become mandatory at border crossing. - Arto: Some Chinese hacked this screening by taking drugs to lower temperature. False Positives. - Actively circumventing the measures: first case in France was Chinese woman fleeing China. - smuggler: “It’s fascinating how people are either not believing that they might be a risk, or really not giving a shit and then breaking sensible rules…” - Arto: SARS lesson, doctors showing symptoms rationalized it away (human denial). - “Coronavirus gives you the urge to travel” memes - Setting up border camps for mandatory quarantine plus rapid testing, three times negative and you can go in (Hongkong, Singapore, China, some Balkan countries). - India: internal ID plus health checkpoints.
02:29:15 Freedom of travel. - Germany: restricting travel to certain states. - Italy and Spain: restrict leaving house! - Spain: Dog-walking is a legit reason to leave house, renting dog business.

Face Recognition And Masks.

02:31:28 Future of Face Recognition with masks. - Airport CCTV upgrades: Thermal imaging. - AI face recognition also works with masks: - Hikvision Fever Screening Thermal Camera - Thermal Body Temp Measurement Solution - Dahua - temperature pattern is biometric indicator - use overlay infrared and visual light to see partially through a lot of mask types. - Privacy Extremists Masks: should be impenetrable with infrared, and helmet-like - Biometrics take 150-250 points (most: eye, nose, mouth)
02:34:00 Abortion of face recognition rollout in the West? - EU considering ban., further reading: The EU’s agenda to regulate AI does little to rein in facial recognition

Shifting Old And New Behaviors

02:34:48 smuggler: “If masks become standard attire […] it would undermine a lot of biometric data to social networks.” - Standard cell camera won’t pick up on your ID (random snapshots). - Arto: Hongkong forbid wearing of masks because of the protests, now masks are mandatory. Things change! - Why is it psychological hurdle for Westeners? - Influencer and celebrity campaigns.
02:37:12 Handshakes, a thing of the past. - It’s a dirty habit.
02:37:30 Guided by mainstream behavior. - Frank: At one point it will be weird, when you don’t wear a mask. - Arto: Tipping point should be low, 20-30%: Social tipping points - Frank: Might be temporary, masks are uncomfortable, habit might not stick. - Arto: Community responsibility in Asian countries is higher. - smuggler: Designs are old and for special purposes, maybe something new will emerge. - Positive side of the Pandemic. :)

Infection control and identity, physical privacy

02:40:42 Testing, and contact tracing, enforced quarantine, isolation. - Larry Brilliant’s TED talk: “Early detection, rapid response.” - As soon as you have positive tested people: - First measure: Isolation. - Second measure: Test them in isolation until release. - Call people on person’s contact list and put into isolation as well. - Contact Chain: Contacts of infected person or also contacts of contacts? Depends on how fast testing is, and symptomatics and spread of disease. - SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing should be 2 hops (including contacts of contacts). - Introverts might have an advantage here. - Cellphone or wearable with contract tracing app: Device exchange
02:46:00 First Option: Broadcasting System on Phone or Wearable. - South Korea Contact Tracing App: Bluetrace. - Register with phone number, connected with key of health authority. Broadcast via Bluetooth. - Gives health authorities list of contacts and means to contact them. - South Korea is watching quarantined citizens with a smartphone app. Thousands in coronavirus lockdown will be monitored for symptoms—and tracked to make sure they stay at home and don’t become “super spreaders.”
02:48:00 German Contact Tracing App: Still in application rounds.
02:48:20 Second Option: Cellphone Location Tracking.
- Example: Israel.
- Data is always available to cellphone provider, this data is used.
- 2-10m radius for COVID19, and indoor/ outdoor problem - cellphone data is not precise enough.
02:49:46 Third option: GPS logging.
- either directly broadcast to health authority, or store it for a day.
02:50:35 Privacy risks:
- enormous networks of social interactions, with recording.
- Records of location data, either centralized or hard to control.
- A lot of countried where people are immedeately findable by state.
- Arto: Pre-requisite is connection between legal person and the device. In Ukraine, SIM cards are still anonymous.
- smuggler: “The reason it is done is because it simulates actionism.”
- Cellphone location weakness: doesn’t work for contact tracing. Goal might be to enforce social distancing and dissolve large groups.
- Contact tracing weakness: catching too many people.
- Frank: “It would be a total privacy nightmare, but […] it a good solution to a pandemic problem, which means every epidemilogist is asking for it, and […] it only really works if basically all people use it.”
- Likely to end with a global soliution?

Enforcing Isolation

02:54:50 Quarantine, and enforcing isolation.
- Hongkong quarantine bracelet solution: wearing bracelet plus app, bluetooth signals, user has to send selfies wearing it.
- might be all into one app: Testing, and contact tracing, enforced quarantine.
02:57:00 Isolation method: Cordon sanitaire.
- Make sure person has less contacts.
- Enforcement by: binding device to body of person (bracelet, wearable), cannot be removed withour destroying it (tamper detection).
- Device is connected with phone, which knows location. Person with device cannot walk away from phone: Geofencing. (GPS location, cellphone network location, tracking bluetooth beacons and WiFi hotspots; all of these can be verified).
- Circumvent the system: demanding video of user (biometric recognition and background analysis with lightning).
- Using fitness trackers, some can already do biometric binding (heartbeat), example Apple iWatch.
- Rollout for future prison system.
- Don’t forget to drop your cellphone if you drop the wearable.
- Location history and social graph becomes available to authorities.
- Also incorporating sound environment.
- Using ultrasound beacons instead of bluetooth beacons.

Future: Global Scale, Cybercrime

03:03:30 Global Standardization.
- smuggler: “There’s an enormous amount of work and competition right there, because […] the smart people in the field know, that if their technology works the best, they will become the recommended standard for […] the WHO.”
- South Korea makes it Open Source, and wants their app to become standard.
- Theirs is pretty bad on beacon tracing, but it’s not the worst system.
03:04:54 Cybercrime and cyber-warfare.
- smuggler: “Right now, there’s this rush to roll it out, and there’s almost o consideration spent on things like the privacy of the user, centralization of data, or the possible effects those systems have for a cyberattack. Just imagine you’re able to attack the contact tracing system of another country and create a shit-load of false alarms- or, if you’re able to surpress the working of such a contact tracing system, so that the authorities cannot quickly contain pandemics. So, there’s a huge cybercrime and cyber-warfare aspect, in addition to the privacy aspect.”
- Can it be prevented? Are there better solutions?
- Overall method is correct.
- Network effects are important, you want an integrated global system.

Future: Population control, Personal Life, Law

03:08:10 Crowd suppression and population control.
- Can be used by police to find suspects or crime rings.
- If it becomes mandatory, these systems will be easily combineable with CCTV.
- People without beacon can be detected.
- Enforcement will be easy.
- Internal checkpoints in places where people gather.
- Combine with access to apartment buildings (as already done in China): keyless entry. Which is conveniant, and convenience is the ultimate drug.
03:11:02 Effects for personal life.
- Knowing secret meetings, churches.
- Dating possibilities: matching infection status.
- Blackmail for cheating and going to brothels will be easy.
03:11:42 Law and juristic scope.
- Most countries already have infectious control laws set in place.
- In theory you can already be arrested, sent to prison, etc., but it’s not enforced yet.
- Frank: “There’s a lot of laws in the books which seem benign, but when you can 100% enforce them with modern technology, then it becomes a total nightmare.”
- smuggler: “For me, really, the future as it looks right now is everybody will have contact tracing and isolation enforcing apps, and/or wearables, and if nothing dramatic happens, these systems will be bad for privacy and freedom, globally.”
- 100.000 people in Italy violating lockdown
- Italy is increasing fines up to €4.000, and if you break the curfew and are infected, then you can face up to multiple years in prison.

Future: Escaping devices, Building Alternatives

-03:14:30 Escaping your devices. - Dumb phones/ burner phones, won’t be acceptable anymore. - Arto: “If you plan to go to any civilized area, there will be- automated or not- checkpoints, to see that you are tracked. So, it won’t be that easy, except in the countryside, to actually escape your devices. And that’s a big change from today.”

-03:15:20 Prevention and Alternatives. - Big question: can the technology rollout somehow be prevented? Can we build something without the privacy downsides? - smuggler: Even countryside might not be excluded. Voice recognition. - Companies already focussing on third-world country solutions. Tracking beacons are available around US$10, managed by signup stations, no cell needed.

03:20:22 New Tech Acceptance Campaigns.
- Similar to vaccination campaigns.
- Countries just need to invite organizations, and create legal enforcement rules.
- Regional variations possible.
03:21:12 Third world countries.
- Escape of enforcement might be possible temporarily in third world countryside.
- Third world countries will take heaviest death toll.
- Death toll Spanish flu- India: 2 Million; USA: 670.000
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped rolling out for COVID19 already, maybe more charities will follow.

Bugs, IoT, LoRa, Specialized Wearables

03:23:26 Implementation problems in first world countries, and bluetooth bugs.
- More privacy friendly options are bluetooth-based.
- Secondary option in Hongkong, because of technical troubles: Let WhatsApp broadcast location.
- Arto: Android and Bluetooth is extremely buggy: Recently discovered bluetooth flaw, unpatchable in Android <8.
- Critical Bug: Bluetooth Android RCE (remote code execution)
- smuggler: It’s a huge attack target with bad attack vectors.
- Cellphone location tracking is not precise enough.
- GPS tracking system have too many requirements for cooperation of the phone, and require a lot of bandwidth (when moving).
- Reliability issue is not high on agenda.
03:27:54 New attempts: IoT, LoRa, specialized wearables.
- smuggler: “I’m pretty certain, that for this specific thing we will get a new technology, that will not be bluetooth.”
- New attempts using IoT sensor network technologies, LoRa (short for long range) broadcasting.
- Cheaper than bluetooth, fast, not built into cellphone.
- Long-term outcome: specialized wearables.
- Arto: “It at some point will make sense [to deploy wearables], after people are frustrated with the limitations of cellphone tracking, on both sides of the aisle. Both the state being frustrated with the technical limitations, and the people with the privacy restrictions, and spyware.”
03:31:00 Hardware: Artos experience with tracking equipment.
- Live-Action wargame requires tracking.
- smuggler: If we get wearables, distance with less than 30m reach for contact tracing is ok, specialized beacon broadcasting can be cheap, charging by body movement possible.
- Hardware side will be solved easily, what matters is software.
03:33:30 The Liberty Test, and smuggler’s work.
- smuggler is currently working as a consultant for wearables.
- smuggler’s privacy preserving contact tracer design for COVID-19
- smuggler: “A lot of the precursors you have to do to prevent cyberattacks and security issues with such a system are actually mitigated by simply taking a privacy friendly approach. You can mitigate a lot of these issues much cheaper than on the other systems. This field is actually one of the big battles. If you’re bored in isolation, and don’t know what to do, fight for your liberty!”
03:35:36 Reach out!
- Reach out to us if you’re a company working in that field! We have code :)
- smuggler can be contacted for consultant work, and code
- Arto’s company Conreality has expertise with hardware and software questions.
03:36:09 Building from scratch vs. using existing solutions.
- Arto: Use Singapore solution and work on that, maybe.
- smuggler: “If you’re able to roll something better out, in the meantime you have some leverage in the negotiation scope. But yes, it has to be fast, it has to be quick, it has to be better than the rest.”
- smuggler’s paper recommendation: Cho et al. 2020: Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19. Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs
- Estonia. Cellphone Location Tracking. Ministry is quite approachable.
- Switzerland? Marketing towards privacy and liberty, high presence of technical devices, small enough county.
- Everybody is under pressure right now.
03:40:33 Positive Things.
- Military and public good coincide in pandemics.
- Pandemic protection: Competition between states will reshuffle.
- Influence of Russia vs. China in buffer states is increasing.
- Influence of US in EU is breaking down.
- China tried to cover up SARS, this time they wanted to cover up, maybe they will think about a different approach.
- Countries with smaller organizational units seem more effective (Singapore).
- smuggler: City State Idea might get more support.
- Arto: EU doesn’t exist anymore, in a meaningful form.
03:43:33 City States, Small Organization Units, and Local Enforcement.
- Frank: Organizational unit of future will get smaller, best would be with voluntary association.
- Venice, as a city state republic and semi-autonomous neighborhoods, during the great death
- smuggler: “Every ghetto a TAZ.”
- Drug gangs in the Favela Cidade de Deus in Western Rio de Janeiro enforcing lockdown.
- 中央指导组 zhongyang zhidao zu, the CCP’s “Central Guidance Group”, and their 社区干部分 shequ ganbu fen, community cadres, enforced curfew locally in China.
03:45:00 A difficult year to get through.
- Frank: “The war is gonna be over before most people realize there was one.”
- Listeners: Please send us your stories and positive effects of the pandemic you observed! Or, prove us wrong :)

Donation Report

03:47:30 Donation Report.
- We have enough toilet paper for now. :)
- Fanmail! Yay! Thank you so much!
- Donations give us market feedback. Over 3000 active listeners, but this time 2 donated. They get to decide the direction of the podcast.
- More donations mean we can work more on stuff that matters, like doing the podcast, but also projects like Scrit and a privacy preserving contact tracer, otherwise we have to spend time to do “work work” (which is ultimately not that important).
- Without interesting projects there will be no interesting podcast.

Arto, Frank, and smuggler answer your questions.

03:51:10 Question: We take internet for granted, but in the current situation it could be taken down, or even more controlled by the State. What do you think of ‘parallel networks’ like mesh networks, disaster radio, etc. as an empowering alternative?
- Disaster.radio
- Sneakernet
- Drones
04:01:53 Question: Do you see the your cypherpunk fashion (face mask, etc) being mandatory by the state, even in Europe? (the irony) - Mandatory face masks in Czech Republic - Frank and smuggler’s historic first public mask-wearing talk “Bitcoin in the Counter-Economy” in London 2012, slides: “What’s up with the masks?”
04:04:04 Question: With the world economy now collapsing, either we stay complacent and watch our freedom getting taken away, or we unite and take the opportunity to build something better. Bitcoin gives us this chance, and only possibility to beat the government. Fear: fight once with Bitcoin, and if this fight is lost, it’s over for most people. Bigger vision is missing. Doubts about coinjoin.
04:20:00 Question: Why are you no Austrian Economy friends? Maybe too left-leaning?
04:43:06 Discussion: Bitcoin vs. US$, the € is about to collapse. Bitcoin has interesting stock-to-flow ratio. Bitcoin is sound money in the Austrian sense.
Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance. What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time

Reading Recommendations

Wolfe, Nathan (2011): The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age
Various books from Laurie Garrett
NY Post: German state financial minister kills himself over coronavirus ‘despair’
Arto’s bookshelf
Quillette: Don’t test, don’t tell
Brazil and Bolsonaro: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil/brazils-bolsonaro-questions-coronavirus-deaths-says-sorry-some-will-die-idUSKBN21E3IZ
Balaji S. Srinivasan’s Twitter Thread: Collection of weekly narratives
Arto’s “The Great Influenza” Twitter Thread
“masks don’t work for normal people”: US Surgeon General, New York Times, Scott Alexander, etc
- https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus-surgeon-general-trnd/index.html
- “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” Feb 29, 2020, @Surgeon_General
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html
- Slate Star Codex: Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Bill Gates TED Talk 2015
Bill Gates TED Connects talk 2020
Quote: “A trillion here, a trillion there, soon you’re talking real money.”
Bloomberg: From Spain to Germany, Farmers Warn of Fresh Food Shortages
New Twitter “safety guidelines”
EFF: The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online
United States Dept. of Justice: Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act
NetzDG (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz = Network Enforcement Act, also known as the Facebook Act)
Meme: “Radical anarchists are urging people to obey the state”
H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
“I wonder how libertarians are dealing with the fact that the current crisis is annihilating their entire ideology”
Arto’s Talk at HCPP 2018: Post-Libertarian Realpolitik, Slides
Rocky Mountains Communities, Dailymail: ‘You’re not welcome!’: Worried residents tell rich ‘virus refugees’ flocking to the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen to stay away to stop the spread of coronavirus in their communities
“The atomized individual is nothing but plankton for Leviathan”, paraphrase of Jack Donovan (“In a sea of billions, a man alone is plankton”, Chapter: Belonging is Becoming, in: Becoming a Barbarian, 2016)
Grassroots effort to tackle COVID19: (Lviv IT Cluster)[https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/lvivskyj-klaster-zapuskaye-masove-testuvannya-naselennya-na-covid19/]
- Secrecy of Vote: EU Parliament mistakenly sent mail to all members, instead of counting party.
Blood plasma trade from Wuhan survivors (plasma farms).
Book on SARS: Greenfeld, Karl Taro (2006): China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic
Executive Order 6102, 1933: USA might confiscate Gold again in 2020.
SCRIT: cheap, super fast, offline capable, untraceable ecash
AI face recognition also works with masks. - Hikvision Fever Screening Thermal Camera - Thermal Body Temp Measurement Solution - Dahua
dog walking: https://www.thelocal.es/20200319/why-everyone-in-spain-wishes-they-had-a-dog-during-the-coronavirus-lockdown
EU considering ban., further reading: The EU’s agenda to regulate AI does little to rein in facial recognition
Wear a mask, tipping point of social acceptance should be low, 20-30%: Social tipping points
Larry Brilliant’s TED talk: “Early detection, rapid response.”
South Korea Contact Tracing App: Bluetrace, register with phone number, connected with key of health authority. Broadcast via Bluetooth.
South Korea is watching quarantined citizens with a smartphone app. Thousands in coronavirus lockdown will be monitored for symptoms—and tracked to make sure they stay at home and don’t become “super spreaders.”
Hongkong quarantine bracelet solution; using Whatsapp to broadcast location
Isolation method: Cordon sanitaire.
100.000 people in Italy violating lockdown
Critical Bug: Bluetooth Android RCE (remote code execution)
Arto’s company Conreality for live-action wargames.
smuggler’s privacy preserving contact tracer design for COVID-19
smuggler’s paper recommendation: Cho et al. 2020: Contact Tracing Mobile Apps for COVID-19. Privacy Considerations and Related Trade-offs
Venice, as a city state republic and semi-autonomous neighborhoods, during the great death
Drug gangs in the Favela Cidade de Deus in Western Rio de Janeiro enforcing lockdown.
中央指导组 zhongyang zhidao zu, the CCP’s “Central Guidance Group”, and their 社区干部分 shequ ganbu fen, community cadres, enforced curfew locally in China.
Disaster.radio
Mandatory face masks in Czech Republic
Frank and smuggler’s historic first public mask-wearing talk “Bitcoin in the Counter-Economy” in London 2012, slides: “What’s up with the masks?”

What’s next? Points of Actions For The Active Listener!

Reach out to us if you’re a company working in that field! We have code :)
Listeners: Please send us your stories and positive effects of the pandemic you observed! Or, prove us wrong :)
Donate, you can directly influence what we discuss, and give us time to work on interesting projects to talk about.
As per usual: Send us interesting Articles, Books, Questions, Masks.
Discuss on BBS.

Discuss

We’re on bbs.anarplex.net with our own board to discuss!

Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Guest

Arto (Twitter), Conreality.

Contact

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x07: Pandemic I

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 01:25:00 +0000

Frank Braun talks with Arto Bendiken about the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). How did we get here and what convinced us to prep. Paranoia, case fatality rates, and vaccines. Secondary and tertiary effects. Normalcy, authority, and confirmation bias.

Show Notes

Introduction

00:01:40 What set this whole thing in motion?
- Both Frank and Arto are already in lockdown mode, and prepared.
- It’s ~6 weeks since both of them started “buying some insurance”.
- Arto prepared for 11 people.
00:05:25 What made you think it’s going to be a big deal? (Risk assessment)
- Observations from Wuhan.
- Lessons from Spanish Influenza 1918-1920.
- High infectiousness, showing no symptoms while being infectious.
- People suddenly dropping in the streets.
00:08:00 Book: “The Great Influenza”
- Few media coverage on strange cases, like the woman dropping on the vegetable market.

2020, A strange year

00:09:10 First week of February: cancelling all travel plans (Arto Bendiken).
00:10:00 “An earthquake happened in Wuhan, and the tsunami will follow. It is hard to see the tsunami until it comes close to the shore, but it will follow.” (Arto citing Steve)
00:11:05 Analytical preparation, emotional process (fear) comes later.
00:11:40 Reactions by others: accusations of panicking.
00:12:03 Convincing others to prepare?
00:12:28 People buy insurance for things that are less likely to happen.
00:14:43 NN Taleb’s Tweet on Paranoia: “When paranoid, you can be wrong 1000 times & you will survive. If non-paranoid; wrong once, and you, your genes, & the rest of your group are done.” - Not everyone takes action on something so far away.
00:15:40 Balaji S. Srinivasan’s Three categories of people: “1) Post-headline people: only believe things that are already in print 2) No filter people: forget it, they’ll believe anything :) 3) Pre-headline people: will listen to a rational argument and look at primary data”.
00:17:05 Authority bias: Credentials, degrees, other people’s opinion.
00:18:10 Talking to family and friends about situation when there was still time to prepare.
00:18:40 Cassandra Myth (Iliad)
00:19:15 Uniform set of responses: you’re panicking and making it worse, dismissal
00:19:53 Bill Gates warned about pandemics long ago, but was dismissed as a college dropout and IT guy. (Confirmation bias, ad hominem attack)
00:21:09 Bill Gates: “The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race”.
00:21:20 Albert Camus: These things have a way of reocurring out of the blue sky.
00:21:50 Increased risk factors: base risk plus big cities, international travel.
00:22:03 On average, three pandemics a century.
00:22:21 Ebola outbreak was a close call. Hongkong Flu (1 million dead), late 1960s.

Economic cost

00:23:14 Many animal to human transmissions were contained early by slaughtering millions of animals at the slightest sign of sickness. (Economical cost!)
00:23:53 Vaccines and public health system. (Smallpox)
00:25:47 We are still in the beginning of the economic impact.

Common thinking errors and biases

00:26:45 Bias to focus on things that are caused by humans. Helplessness when confronted with pandemics.
00:27:37 Man-made virus from Wuhan lab?
00:28:19 Illegaly sold lab test animal at wet market? (野味 yewei, bush meat; 街市 jieshi, wet market)
00:30:08 Cognitive bias: systematic error of thinking. Man is the rationalizing animal. (Example: seeing faces in clouds)
00:31:31 Examples of observed biases: authority bias, confirmation bias, combinations of these.
00:32:25 Normalcy bias (nobody wants to be bothered to change routines).

The Virus: An Abstract Threat, vs. Zombies

00:33:05 Max Brooks (World War Z): Fear of pandemics is so deep, cannot be discussed rationally. Zombies = Pandemic.
00:34:50 Virus is an abstract threat, there will be 1 trillion copies of it by infection.
00:35:14 Plague: people did not even know what caused infection. (Germ theory)
00:36:45 Are Zombie enthusiasts better prepared for a virus pandemic?
00:37:55 Trying to find out what’s going on fundamentally vs. latching onto experts.
00:38:48 Engaging brain about status vs. primary data.
00:39:30 People starting with the premise that they are not smart enough to understand what’s actually going on, not making any effort of their own.
00:40:40 Trying to understand incoming data, for example the first papers coming out of Wuhan.
00:42:05 Impossible to keep up with current findings, research, and papers.
00:42:40 More data globally, in the beginning filtering was easier.

Problems with “Confirmed cases”

00:42:42 Mon, March 16th: currently 170.000 confirmed cases, 5000-6000 dead.
00:42:49 Confirmed cases != infections
00:43:17 Impossible to keep up with new cases.
00:44:00 “Confirmed case count”= comes with limitations (manpower, test kits).
00:44:55 Again, not enough test kits (USA, Berlin). Wuhan could test only 3000/day in the beginning.
00:45:20 “Confirmed cases”= lag in data.
00:46:35 “When people focus on these official measures… that are limited by staffing, test kits, by political considerations, then that’s not a good way… of understanding what’s going on.”
00:46:55 “That’s why it was so good to get this leaked information, leaked videos, from Wuhan. That way we got a sense of what was actually going on.”
00:47:30 The plural of anecdote is data.
00:47:41 Investigative Reporting.
00:48:00 Actions speak louder than data: Measures against the virus were severe. 1 Mio people in lockdown, 10% of global population.

Mathematical Modelling

00:48:42 Mathematical Modelling… common problems:
- people cannot understand exponential function.
- people compare to flu last year.
- countermeasure lag: it takes time to show effect, politics make new changes 2 days apart, makes no sense.
00:51:12 Case fatality rate.

World Health Organization (WHO)

00:51:22 Role of WHO: gives recommendations for guidelines, funding by member countries (China among them), driven by political considerations.
00:52:15 Public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC).
00:52:25 WHO got rid of the term “pandemic”.

Case Fatality Rate (CFR)

00:53:25 “Naïve” Case Fatality Rate (CFR), released by WHO. First, 2.1% (mostly China); revised 3.5%, and going up.
00:55:20 SARS initial outbreak CRF ~2%, but by the end of the outbreak, it was ~6% (resolved CFR).
00:56:49 Makes no sense to compare past cases to current cases (open cases vs. resolved).
00:57:45 CFR for age groups: not taking into consideration system overload (needed care might not be provided).
00:59:22 CFR only says so much, 20% require hospitalization, many of those need ICU.
01:00:00 Hospitals in Italy are already overwhelmed, will worsen until end of the week.
01:00:40 Italy’s CFR is already higher than China’s.

Secondary and Teritiary Effects

01:00:50 Cases overload the medical system, secondary effect: death rates go up.
- Patients with other diseases might not get medical help.
- Empty hospitals beds waiting for the next pandemic are unlikely.
- Economic impossibility, health care system already occupies significant percentage from GDP.
- Makeshift hospitals.
01:03:20 Investment options.
- Stock-market implosions.
- Crypto-market implosions.
- Flight to cash.
01:04:28 Supply chain problems.
- Goods coming from China.
- Food also comes from China.
- Just-in-time economy (supermarket have no more backrooms, but once or twice a day a truck delivery).
- Tesco is already limiting purchases like toilet paper.
- Respirators (EU: FFP2 & USA: N95, or FFP3 & N99): China restricted exports.

Overreacting

01:08:15 “It’s always about efficieny, never about risk of failure.”
01:08:28 Pandemic response bears a similar problem like IT security.
- Overreaction with swine-flu might had been the reason it never got that bad, that’s why it was called an overreaction later.
01:09:23 “It’s a bit like prepping: no matter how bad it gets, you want to be overreacting in retrospect, otherwise, you didn’t prep enough. And, you’re not gonna hit exactly on target, so you wanna err on the side of overreaction.”
01:10:01 Control theory (robotics): accuracy vs. speed.

Respirators and Masks

01:12:30 “You don’t have them [the respirators] until you have them in your hand” … “It’s like cash”.
01:13:10 Only stock up on masks if you intend to not avoid people.
01:14:23 Ukrainian border confiscated protective gear when trying to cross border to Poland (export is forbidden).
01:15:21 Idea that you don’t need respirators:
- “You don’t know how to properly use them!”
- “Doctors need them.”
01:15:50 Why didn’t hospitals stock up in January?
- True: Doctors need respirators more.
01:16:30 How can wearing a mask not help?
- If everyone wears a mask, that means every infected person wears a mask, and this decreases chances of transmission. (Hongkong)
01:17:25 “Wearing a respirator makes it less likely you’re getting infected yourself, … and wearing a surgical mask … helps not infecting other people, so it makes total sense that everyone wears at least surgical masks”.
01:18:40 Men’s issue: shaving gel and razors (beards and masks don’t go well together).

Prepping

01:20:40 People tend to be dismissive of people with health problems, who might need medication or health care, and the elderly (“It kills only old people!”).
01:22:02 Ukrainian health care system is monopolized by state (surgeries, child birth, vaccine). “A public hospital is the last place I want to go [in the Ukraine]”.
01:22:22 Contingency planning differs on country.
01:23:25 “The real carnage is going to be in third-world countries, just like it was in 1918”. (USA: 675.000 vs. India: 2 Million, Spanish Flu)
01:24:20 Lviv Infecitous Diseases Hospital messaged it would be well-prepared with 20 isolation beds (and plans to expand to 300), 4 ventilators, 0 ECMO, 10.000 surgical masks and respirators.

Medical supplies

01:25:40 No difficulty to buy antibiotics in Ukraine, whereas in other countries it’s highly regulated (prescription vs. over the counter).
01:26:37 Chloroquine is promising in treatment of COVID-19 (malaria drug).
01:27:39 Paracetamol is not easy to buy in bulk. India also has restricted export (Indians source precursors from China, too).

Location

01:28:40 Arto’s housing situation: countryside Western Ukraine, foothills of Carpathians. Frank: Berlin suburbs.
- Location cannot be changed later.
- Time is a constraint.
- Economy is going down.
- “If you wanna prep now, and you don’t already have a place to go… I don’t see why you should go there now”.
- Consider threat model: main risk for both is electricity going down.

01:32:51 Where do you stay put, and with whom?
- Acquire resources to stay put: food and drinking water, some personal protection for supply runs.
- Nitrile gloves
- Any mask will be useful, at least you won’t touch your face.
- Disinfectant: WHO guide how to make your own, primers might still be available.
- Goggles: Construction glasses or swim goggles.

Scenario

01:36:30 Think about your scenario: staying inside apartment for a long time.
- food, water, protective gear
- what could go wrong- how do I deal with it?
- If electricty goes down: gasoline cooker, cheap carbohydrates (no freezer/ storage), pressure canning (no freezer, conserving meat).
01:40:30 Most likely scenario: you stay indoors, everything works (electricity, water, internet)
- first, get prepared for this scenario.
01:41:00 If electricity goes down for extended periods, water goes down. The big problem is not drinking water, but sanitation.
- Off-the-grid bucket loo with trash bags and wood shavings as absorbant, and wet wipes to clean. (BranQ portable toilet)
01:43:00 Water filter
- Micropur Forte
- Katadyn Filter
- Foodgrade Canisters for tap water and disinfect with Micropur Forte.
01:44:06 “I tried to focus on stuff that I normally eat anyway, … I just got a lot more, so it doesn’t go to waste. Other things like rice bags, I got as an insurance, but the rest I would eat anyway.”

Threat model: Electricity, Water, Internet going down

01:44:50 Threat model and scenario.
- Social distancing might help burn the pandemic out.
- Viral shedding after recovery can be up to 37 days.
- Countries will handle situation differently.
01:47:10 “… if the situation gets particulary bad, which it might over here [in Ukraine] at least, I would expect some more outages, for the internet connectivity, there’s multiple options for that, so I expect at least one of them working.”
01:47:44 A lot of people getting sick means a lot of people not working, especially in grid systems workers might not be able to fix things in time.
01:48:24 “For the internet, we will see how well that works if everybody’s sitting at home watching netflix, or porn in full HD.”
01:48:59 Mobile internet.
01:49:17 Mitigate risk for short downtimes.
01:50:40 Wuhan pictures from people queuing for water.
01:51:11 Mitigate risk of having to go to the store a lot.
- not because of food shortages, but it’s a risk for virus exposure.
01:51:48 Going out for walks, just don’t meet anybody (countryside).
- avoid contact, don’t touch anything
- droplets in common areas that you pass on the way out (hallway, elevator).

Prepping and timing

01:53:25 “Although I’m now pretty well prepared compared to most people, it kinda caught me cold-handed… because I was always interested in prepping, and I was always planning on prepping more for when SHTF, but I never really executed that much. But when I started six weeks ago, I realized how much harder… it was than I imagined, and also how much harder it was because… of such a short notice, and it was getting harder to get things, for example the respirators. It would have been so easy to stock up on all of this stuff. For example, the ridiculous situation that you had to ship me antibiotics from Ukraine although I was in Ukraine in January, I should have just bought all the prescription medicine a prepper needs.”
01:55:37 Early Infections in Italy, Seattle, etc. happened in January/Feburary. COVID-19 death in Spain 2 weeks before the first confirmed case there. (Lack of indicator)

Food and Cans

01:56:56 Cheap carbohydrates, easy to store. (“Insurance”)
- Potatoes, rice, buckwheat.
01:57:10 Newly acquired freezer to stock up on meat.
- Canned meat as backup.
- Pressure Canning, if you have time, or already own a pressure canner.
01:58:15 Add variety, if you switch to carbohydrates.
- Canned veggies and canned fruit.
- Salt, Pepper, Spices.

Deliveries

01:59:18 Deliveries still working.
- Disinfecting parcels.
- All delayed (surge of deliveries, momentarily overwhelmed).

Fat

02:01:05 Freeze butter, or make Ghee.
- Olive oil might be adulterated with industry/ vegetable oils.

Timescale

02:02:55 “Right now, people in the last week or two stopped laughing… and stopped repeating this mindless It’s Just The Flu, Bro… in any case, they’re still expecting this will be over soon. … And authorities are still telling them it will be over soon, prepare for a few weeks.”
- even emergency measures expire in about a month (bars and club are closed only until April, etc.)
- People stay at home close to 50 days. (Wuhan)
- China is looked upon as having “beaten the virus”.
02:04:57 “It’s always better if you’re dealing with a foreign virus, than with a domestic virus”.
- In Iran: Zionist conspiracy.
- “Virus doesn’t care!”
02:05:40 Once China resumes work, and life, there will be another wave.
- re-imports to China (from Italy for example)
- fully stopping virus is not so easy.
- virus will become endemic.
- multiple waves.

Dystopian future vs. helpful tracking and tracing

02:07:26 Countries which deal well with it: outbreak, containment measures, a lot of testing, tracking, and contact tracing -> situation under control, problem: reintroduction from other countries.
- China is currently trying to automate contact tracing.
- Location tracking.
- Surveillance cameras with face recognition.
- Helpful scaling of tracking vs. dystopian nightmare.
02:10:10 The Virus can travel up to 4,5m, passenger infected others through a long-distance bus ride.
- video camera in bus.
- position of citizens is known at all times.
- re-engineering passenger’s travel was possible.
02:12:20 Controlling coming waves, keeping the country in lockdown is not a solution unless we transition to a permanentely remote economy.
02:12:30 Appeal from engineer perspective.
- Social Scoring system is already established.
- put people on specific quarantines if they were in contact with an infected person.
- government AI tells you if you should leave your apartment today, or get a test.
- scaling without the disruptions from now would be possible.
02:14:04 Germany outruled events with more than 50 people, but if you do an event with less people, you need to create a list of all attendees. (old school approach)
- pressure into direction of more surveillance.
- pushing ban on cash forward as well.
- China destroyed cash on basis of contamination questions.
- some chains in Germany went cashless because of the virus.

Acceptance pipeline

02:16:39 “Acceptance pipeline”, dealing with grief: it won’t be over soon.
02:17:10 Pipe dream: Many place hope on vaccine development.
- vaccines are for healthy populations.
- vaccine is far away: more than 12 months, at least.
- might not be easy to develop (7 different coronaviruses, 15 years of development but currently no vaccine for either).
- not so effective: 20-60% for common flu vaccine.
- high mutation rate.
02:20:30 Accepting that there’s no easy fix.
- what are you going to do to plan for it?
- avoid infection as long as possible (6 months).
- look at vaccine development like a lottery win.
- by the time the vaccine is developed (18 months), whatever will happen has already happened.
02:23:12 It’s hard to plan to stay in apartment for 18 months.
- instead, plan for a world with Coronavirus, and a lot of lockdowns, and a lot of infections.

Learning from past pandemics

02:23:35 Learn from past pandemics (1918 Spanish flu, 3 waves).
02:24:04 Spanish flu: passed through ships, first cases (first wave) very mild, less than influenza, less than COVID-19. Second wave, 5 months of carnage. Worse than COVID-19, at least currently. Third wave, somewhere in between.
- future waves might be more lethal.
- or become endemic, less lethal.
- it would be prudent to plan on a worst-case scenario where it takes a couple of years.
- “something worth paying attention to is going on.”

Economic changes

02:27:50 Practical preparations for 6 months is difficult (economically).
- savings rates in Western countries are shit.
- people are out of jobs already (events cancelled, tourism breaks down).
- bankruptcy.
- no more fundraising tours.
- airlines discharge employees.
02:29:29 Good thing: remote work will be more accepted.

Prepping List

02:30:00 Supply run gear for securing supplies
- goggles (and anti-fog spray), respirator (or surgical mask), rain poncho (or whole body protection suit), gloves (most important).
02:32:20 Surfaces: virus can be contangious on surfaces a few days (up to 9 days).
- Buttons, handrails, etc. (disposable gloves).
02:33:38 Coming from outside to inside.
- Shoes (rain boots can be easily disinfected).
02:34:10 Sourcing is already hard, will become more difficult.
- switching to local production.
- repurposing existing production facilities.
02:34:50 Power issues.
- solar panels, butane, propane, camping stove, space heaters on butane.
- fuel: gasoline, diesel, firewood.
- prepare for next winter.
02:36:00 Sanitation
- TP!!!
- plumber might not be available: be prepared to unplug it on your own.
02:37:05 Disinfectant
- Alcohol-based wet wipes
- since disinfectant is nearly everywhere sold out, switch to local production and DIY.
02:37:45 Medical
- The Prepared List/ Medical
- Broad-band Antibiotics: prevent secondary infections (pneumonia, 50-60% CFR). Doxycycline, Bactrim, Zithromax.
- India is restricting 26 medicines& pharmaceuticals, including paracetamol.
- China is restricting personal protective equipment (PPE) export since a month, maybe also medicine.
- If you take any prescription medicine, stock up for a few months at least.
- Stock up on painkillers (Ibuprofen and other non-steroids like aspirin, might be a risk factor for COVID-19).
- Prepare to treat yourself.
02:43:13 Pregnancies.
- Prepare for home birth.
- Access to healthcare resources will be restricted (Check-ups).
- Sourcing books.
- Remote consultation with midwives.
- Might be a common situation this year.
02:44:45 Chronic diseases and cancer patients.
- Might be unable to receive treatment.
02:46:34 Hygiene and Sanitary Items.
- Condoms.
- Tampons, Pads.
- can also be tradeables
02:47:05 Tradeables.
- see above, and:
- Alcohol.
- Cigarettes.
- Lighters.

Wrap-up

02:48:05 Send us your questions!
02:48:32 Expert: Jon Stokes, ThePrepared.com. Founder of Ars Technica.
02:49:20 Book Recommendation: Barry, John M. (2004): The Great Influenza. The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
- Arto’s Twitter thread with quotes from the book
02:51:15 Book Recommendation: Hatfill, Steven; Coullahan, Robert; Walsh, John (2019): Three Seconds To Midnight.
- US-specific, but general sections are great.
02:51:50 “Bottom line here is: People underestimated this systematically. … Systemic error of thinking, they underestimated it, and they continue to underestimate it, even though they are no longer laughing, they continue to underestimate it. … This is something that has not happened in any of our lifetimes, there’s no listener who has seen anything that has been on the order of this, and it would be very good to get out of our normalcy bias.”
- recognizing a lethal situation as a lethal situation.
- go through the acceptance pipeline.
- err on the side of overreaction.
- it’s not about calculating the odds, we have no way to know which scenario will play out, so prepare for a few.
- it’s not just about us, it’s also about other people (keep granny around!), that also depends on your actions.

Donation Report

02:55:11 Donation Report and Minimum Wage Calculation.

Reading Recommendations

Barry, John M. (2004): The Great Influenza. The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Goodreads
Hatfill, Steven; Coullahan, Robert; Walsh, John (2019): Three Seconds To Midnight Goodreads
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2020): Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens - Coronavirus: A Note
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas: How to react to Pandemics
N.N. Taleb on paranoia
Homer: Iliad (Cassandra Myth)
Gates, Bill (2015): The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race
Gates, Bill (2015): The next outbreak? We’re not ready. TED2015
Gates, Bill (2020): Responding to Covid-19 — A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic?
Bill Gates on pandemics
Camus, Albert (1947): La Peste. (The Plague)
Arto’s Coronavirus reading list
Arto’s thread of The Great Influenza quotes
Max Brooks’ quote of World War Z fame
B.S. Srinivasan on post-headline people
“Naïve” Case Fatality Rate (CFR)
The Virus can travel up to 4,5m
Centers, Josh: The Prepared List/ General
Rader, Tom: The Prepared List/ Medical
Desinfectant antiviral Handrub: WHO Guide to Local Production

Discuss

We’re on bbs.anarplex.net with our own board to discuss!

Hosts

Smuggler (Twitter)
Frank Braun (Twitter)

Guest

Arto (Twitter)

Contact

Email: bitstream@taz0.org
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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x06: Security II

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 09:10:00 +0000

We talk about major threats to security, mainly focussed on future threats and the reaction from security services. Some keywords are: Nuclear proliferation, robotic warfare, technology regulation, surveillance state, bioterrorism, and omniviolence.

Show Notes

Section I Future of Security

Introduction: Emotional Reach, Classifying the Population, Keeping the Legitimacy

00:02:16 Crimes that really matter: How do security forces select the crimes they battle against, which ones are ignored.
00:02:33 Limitations of Crimefighting: War on drugs is ongoing, street robberies, etc.
00:03:30 State is focussing on crimes that risk itself, and on high public image.
00:04:30 Public percerption is high when public can identify and empathize with the victim (child abuse, burglary).
00:05:45 Germany: First case of predictive policing was burglary.
00:07:40 The victim matters / vulnerability: People do react less with assault of a 20-30 year old man, than with the elderly, women, or children.
00:09:13 Child porn is the universal crime where everybody gets behind the police, …and that is used for higher surveillance. Child pornography is the abdomination of the 21st century.
00:10:15 A lot of murder, a lot of kidnapping, a lot of burglaries etc, undermindes the belief in the state. Other crimes do not affect the trust so much, i.e. insurance fraud. Nobody’s sorry about big corporations being scammed.

Systemic Risk Categories: Crimes That Matter

First Example

00:11:34 First Example: Proliferation. Atomic weapon possession divide Good states from Bad States.
00:12:05 BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) and Proliferation.
00:12:30 Enemy States cooperated at the fall of Soviet Block and UdSSR, because of Proliferation.
00:15:20 Blind field of Proliferation: Smuggling of Nuclear Material, Technology, Warheads. Sensor Networks to detect nuclear material (isotope scanners).
00:17:40 Rumors: Unofficial and missing warhead counts (former Soviet, US, Plane incidents over Mediterrean Sea).
00:20:04 Rumors: Cold War Soviet Union Sleeper Agents with Suitcase Bombs (not all recovered).
00:22:00 Small States profit from deterrent threat of Warheads, less likely to actually use them (cannot be retrieved).
00:22:50 Terrorist Organizations and Warheads: rely on secure territory (hollowed out state): Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico.
00:24:07 Example: Afghanistan tolerating Al-Qaeda and 9/11.
00:25:15 Just having the device doesn’t mean you’re able to trigger it: where is it from, maintenance, deploy (actors who follow through, reliable remote triggers), maybe a lot of the old warheads are not usable (physical trigger method is lost).

Second Example

00:30:35 Second Example: Transnational Organized Crime (Narco Cartels, MS-13, Triads, etc).
00:32:00 Safe Havens (no-go-areas) by MS-13 and Al-Qaeda: low level of immunity and souvereignity.
00:35:35 Narco-Terrorism: Cooperations between terrorist organizations and pure criminal organizations.
00:36:50 Iran-Contra (Freedom Fighter VS Terrorist).
00:37:47 A scared population is more likely to use drugs.
00:38:25 Big criminal organizations undermine the state institutions: corruption, blackmail, threats.
00:39:35 Loyalty and Trust within Institutions is undermined, and thus the political head becomes just an illusion of power (Mexico, Miami in the 80s, etc).

Third Example

00:37:47 Third Example: Bioterrorism.
00:43:12 CRISPR sequencing, “build your own smallpox”.
00:44:00 Non-state actors: Aum Shinrikyo (Aleph) and Tokyo Subway Attacks (Sarin Gas).
00:46:19 2001 Anthrax Attacks in the US.
00:47:16 Rumor: Wuhan might be a targeted virus attack, but it’s hard and too early to tell.
00:48:14 For states: bioweapons would also attack own citizens, unlimited transmission, contagion risks high (better: easy to contain, infectious chain are short and unstable).
00:49:30 Terrorists: cannot attach threats or demands, since viruses are non-attributable. Exceptions: doomsday sects, radical environmentalists.

Wrap-Up Section I

00:50:47 Wrap-Up first Part: Crimes That Matter. All are technology supported crimes.
00:51:33 Transnational organized crime is a late development (cheap travels, cheap organization and management technologies, cheap communication), also a part of globalization.
00:52:49 Technological developments are supporting two classes of criminals: random criminals, child pornography.
00:53:05 Random Criminal: uses technology to amplyfy his effect.
00:53:25 Child Pornography: digital cameras and internet made it really problematic, because it became cheap and easy (all you need is a mobile phone).

Section II Dystopian Side

Cybercrime, Robotic Warfare, Omniviolence

00:56:38 Skimming: copying credit cards, via cheap tech from the darknet and Aliexpress.
00:58:35 Issue of non-attribution in Cybercrime: you don’t have to be very smart, you randomly target victims, plus degree of seperation (=every idiot can become a phisher).
00:59:34 High IQ cyber-criminals plus tech: bigger and much more efficient organizations are possible (Paul LeRoux).
01:01:10 Strategic thinking criminals: do no make random mistakes, access to cheap and easy components (Shenzhen), low morals, power-hungry individuals.
01:03:00 Omniviolence: Killer to killed persons ratio increases, systemic risks to countries, maybe entire planet (Example: nuclear and bio weapons).
01:04:22 Robotic warfare: Drones plus biometrics.
01:06:00 The State and Omniviolence: Intelligence services already working on it. Threat becomes increasingly realistic, while not being trivial to deal with, or understand. Thing that is most likely to shape the future.
01:07:19 Realistic scenario by now: Quadrocopter drones, single shot explosive inside, plus facial recognition (ESP32 development kit).
01:08:55 Ground based autonomous vehicles is in the future of next generation: DJi RoboMaster-s1, educational toy for children, available today. Already has face and object recognition, autonomy features.
01:10:21 Next 5-10 years: First autonomous robot school killing is realistic.
01:10:38 There happen to be people out there, who are relatively smart, and there happens to be a huge technological toolbox to select from. Given it enough intelligence, and enough energy, drive, and goals, you can be really dangerous these days.
01:11:10 Book: “Gefährliche Menschen (Dangerous Humans)” near-future dystopian world where the whole system is focussed on preventing omniviolence.
01:12:47 State tries to counteract omniviolence and others by regulating technology.

Drugs and Butterflies

01:13:07 How can you control potentially dangerous people?
01:13:50 The tech industry and self-medicating with legal and illegal drugs, and an unrealistic dream.
01:15:38 Advertisement of drugs as “rebellious”. Drugs being marketed as rebellion,… (they) don’t help you to become an actual rebel, and actually being effective.
01:16:24 Academia: The clever people trap, researching butterflies (you are being seen and heard, aurelians and lepidopterists, and your work matters).

Preventive detention

01:17:47 Preventive detention. “If I lock this person up, I can prevent crime in the future.”
01:19:05 Psychiatric detention, used to silence people and put them away (Gustl Mollath).
01:20:40 New preventive detention laws: limiting personal liberty to prevent crimes? Social and economic consequences.

Surveillance, Cryptography, and Regulations

01:21:50 Surveillance is everywhere.
01:22:33 Growth of surveillance: Commercial interest, collecting data, nudging.
01:22:50 Using surveillance data for AI training, run through neural networks (health: predict illnesses), can also be used to predict behavior.
01:24:05 Nation-States surveil the shit out of everything to increase their security status (international trend).
01:24:17 New proposals for regulation, or ban, of face-recognition (EU, some US states).
01:25:00 Limitations of face-recognition: black people with dark skin. AI training sets are mostly light-skinned.
01:26:25 Why states might be open to proposals: Accusations of racial bias, easy thing to give up (it’s commercialized already, see ClearView AI).
01:27:17 Face Recognition Apps (Russia: FindFace App), Face Recognition Spiders (原谅宝官方 yuanliang bao guanfang, https://pornstarbyface.com/, https://deepmindy.com/)
01:28:13 Navigate the tech landscape through regulations: example drone sector.
01:31:00 Regulating cryptography: access to good cryptography for average joe is hard.
01:31:22 Even for relatively smart and motivated people, … implementing cryptographic systems by people who are not specialized in that, usually goes wrong. It’s really hard to build secure cryptographic software, even with libraries out there, etc.
01:33:20 Regulations of sales controls: example chemicals, pharmarcies.
01:34:00 State will increase security in the future by regulating technology (regulating both components and knowledge).
01:34:50 Dystopian Vision, “black ball events”: Omniviolence will be prevented by total surveillance combined with AI. (Bostrom: Vulnerable World Paper)
01:36:04 Anomaly detection: preventing anyone from building potentially threatening tech, without actually understanding or knowing what this tech is.
01:36:59 Securocrat’s decisions are based on body-count and not on life quality.
01:37:20 Some cattle farmer talk: Consume, pay taxes, and put your VR goggles on.
01:40:10 Preventing people who are too intelligent, too creative, from getting anywhere in life.
01:41:00 Cambridge Analytics for the Masses, Psychography: limit access, social scoring systems (today mostly reactive).
01:42:20 Predictive Technologies: sentencing rules in US.
01:43:20 Creativity problem: detect outliers, categorize in good or bad, adjust access to technology. (Ender’s Game pilots)
01:44:44 Already using licensing by personality: bank accounts, gun licenses. Where does the reliability score come from? Future might be more automated.
01:46:50 Future: Same thing, but advanced by modern technology.
01:47:08 Reactive scores, predicitive regulation: lawyers, MDs, pilot and weapon licenses. If you have a lot of points, they won’t give you the license.
01:47:32 e-Government: maybe no human judgement in the future needed.
01:49:00 Looking at the Chinese petri dish: since Wuhan epidemic, deploying surveillance is cranked up.
01:50:37 Data Analysis, Laboratory for Surveillance: Locking down neighborhoods, limit travel within city, using drones, using CCTV cameras to check masks and temperature, booking details, location tracking, etc.
01:55:00 Wuhan as a dystopian prison: at least as frightening as the pandemic.
01:56:03 Control ratio: the amount of people you need to control a huge population is going down.
01:56:20 Conflict Turkey-Syria, Idlib region: areal control by grenade launchers, automatically engaged.
01:58:48 South Korea Border Patrol Bots: automated targeting (Sentry SGR-A1, Hankook Mirae Method-2?)
01:59:33 UAV Drones: autonomous suicide drones, waiting for target or flying into target.
02:00:09 Germany declared AI a “critical defense technology” = weapon technology for killing people.

Section III Less Dystopian Side

02:01:44 Donation Report
02:04:25 Forum/ BBS: Async.pre

Frank and Smuggler answering your questions!

02:05:49 Question Section
02:05:57 Forum: How would the average aspiring second-realmer get their nym used in legal documents or at their work place? Is that a realistic goal?
02:14:00 Forum: I’d really like to see you guys cover the art of clandestine purchasing. For example, do 3D printers have hidden tracking codes like paper printers? Discussing details on aquiring something like this with a pre-paid credit card and how to ship it to a non-attributate address would be cool.
02:15:35 Forum: One Issue that I always find very hard is receiving shipments by mail. Not necessarily very illegal items, but maybe items you just don’t want to receive at an attributable adress and that are larger than what fits in a standard letterbox. How to receive things in another name and where with the least amount of trouble and risk?
02:20:25 Forum: How to beat facial recognition during drop-operations and otherwise? What methods are effective? How often worn outside the TAZ?
02:23:25 Twitter: How to go into darknet? Virtual box and TOR? Which OS?
02:25:27 Twitter: In terms of cyber-warfare, which state (or state proxy) has the most tactical technical capacity for attacks and defense?
02:33:55 Thoughts on accelerationism?
02:37:14 Mail: I find howtovanish.com very helpful, even though it is outdated and US-centric. Are there more current and EU-centric versions of the topic, how can I make my life as anonymous as possible?

Minimum Wage Report

02:45:58 Minimum Wage Report

Reading Recommendations

“The Future of Violence” by Benjamin Wittes & Gabriella Blum. ISBN 978-0-465-05670-5
Vulnerable World Hypothesis
Slaughterbots
Superintelligence and the Future of Governance: On Prioritizing the Control Problem at the End of History
DJI Robomaster S1
Gefaehrliche Menschen
The Gustl Mollath Case
Project about facial recognition + porn + social media:
- done in May 2019 by 将记忆深埋
- interview, partially translated
- article in Chinese
Ender’s Game

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x05: Security I

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We talk about security and the current state of the security system (police, intelligence services, and the military).

Show Notes

What is security

00:02:05 What is security: Security VS Safety.
- Security: unexpected events that go back to an actor,
- Safety: maintaining a status.
00:07:20 Entropy: things decay. Security is not a natural state, but must be maintained.
00:09:10 Evil people: psychpaths, predators.
00:09:50 Circumstances: acting irrationally.
00:10:25 Hackers: Red Hats, joy of overcoming security systems.
00:11:11 WASP Privilege: no exposure to threats, stuff works most of the time, no incentive to learn about security.

Systems

00:12:29 High trust society VS low trust society: Low trust comes with high cost and less functional societies.
00:16:16 Symptoms of societies with low trust: different environments are what make them.
00:16:50 Universal core values of humans: self-preservation, protecting family and friends, private zones, no drama.
00:18:05 High trust society needs maintenance, will get eroded quickly by few “bad actors”.
00:19:05 How can you turn a low security, low trust environment into a high security, high trust environment? Parallel developments also possible: high security, low trust societies.
00:19:40 Trust builds from history of interactions.
00:20:13 To change, bad memories must die (social memory). See Thomas Kuhn (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
00:22:10 Western states want to make people dependent on security (stateism) and increase state control. Thus, individuals externalize security, and state is presented as the White Knight.
00:25:15 Are we being played/gamed/manipulated by the state and state actors?
00:27:38 Just doing our jobs.
00:29:50 Machiavellianism: concepts how states can work.
00:31:20 Hegelian concepts: totalist and collectivist states and politics.
00:33:20 Look at systemic issues.

Institutions

00:33:30 Inspecting institutions: 1) Police.
00:39:00 Policemen’s selection bias: everyone is a potential criminal or at least a suspect.
00:40:20 Documentation work of police activity by example of firing weapons.
00:42:30 Bureaucracy can work.
00:47:30 Police in uniform VS civilian police: both are for peace preservation.
00:48:00 Military is directed outwards.
00:49:00 Carl von Clausewitz: war is the extension of politics [original: war is the continuation of politics by other means].
00:49:39 Border guards are the middle layer between military and police (control of territorial boundaries VS maintaining territorial integrity VS maintain security within the borders).

Intelligence services

00:50:00 Intelligence services:
Classification: Intelligence service for proper and covert action
00:51:00 Similarities and differences to Journalism: Are intelligence services also ad-driven?
00:51:48 Intelligence Agencies report only news that can be actionable.
00:53:40 Domestic and Foreign Intelligence Services.
00:54:20 Objective reporting: Not mission driven, but report driven.
00:54:41 Two classes of intelligence services: Report requests coming out of intelligence circle, or mission driven services (Bundesverfassungsschutz, for example).
00:56:30 FBI: police organization plus intelligence aspect.
00:57:05 Intelligence services are about information, other services are about action.
00:57:40 Staatsschutz and German Intelligence: police is for prevent and investigate crimes.
00:59:05 Forensics is for police, subversive or maybe illegal actions are for intelligence work. In Germany, it’s clearly seperated; in USA, not so much.
01:02:15 CIA: Considered as Intelligence Agency. Gather information is their mandate, not catch criminals.
01:05:10 Sending in intelligence to change things: huge toolkit to act available.
01:05:50 Intelligence and Military Covert Actions are not Security, but political action. However, it‘s a security issue for the other side.

International organisations

01:06:47 International Security Organizations (Europol, Interpol). No police powers, limited investigation powers.
01:08:45 Working groups: example SIS (communicating warrants in EU).
01:09:58 Organizations: example Le Circle (high-ranking intelligence chiefs), Munich Security Forum (conference with high-level security chiefs).
01:15:00 Why is their image so skewed in the public? (The „Spy Story“)
01:18:00 Rubicon Series (2010)
01:19:25 CSI Series (2000) - all about forensic analysis of crime scenes, but in reality it‘s not the dominant part, only few questions can be answered.
01:21:28 Playbook crime following the standard model VS outliers.
01:22:55 Being secretive about methods means keeping the advantage from opponents: intelligence agencies VS intelligence agencies from other countries; police VS criminals.
01:23:40 Sources 1) Scientific Fields: Criminalistics, Criminology. (Education Material for people that train police, manuals and coursework can be brought on Amazon, also check out libraries).
01:25:34 Sources 2) Reports: Indictments, Warrants (a lot are public, depending on country). Caveat: contains successes and legal processes only.
01:27:08 Sources 3) Private Conversation with Policemen, Investigators, Intelligence People to get a more accurate picture about their work.

Public private partnerships

01:29:39 Private Security Services.
01:30:45 Cybercrime Investigations: Takedown of Cyberpunker 2 (200 servers in a German bunker).
01:32:25 Private Companies helping the police in Cybercrime Investigation.
01:32:40 Analyzing digital evidence: Given to a lab from a private company. (Cyberforensics, not done by police)
01:34:18 White-Collar Crime: Fraud, Commercial Fraud cases etc. Corporate Investigators for hire: Forensic Accountants, etc. (Police work only for special investigator power, or force powers.)
01:37:10 Corporations can use private security services when police are bound legally (for example, in bribing), then sanatize the data and give it to the police.
01:41:28 Informal communication lines… like in every other industry. (But with special privileges: Police, Military, Intelligence)
01:43:04 Presumably Cardinal Richelieu: „If you give me (three, or two) six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find (seven reasons) something in them which will hang him.“, this quote might be originated by memorialist Françoise Bertraut de Motteville (1723), and was later paraphrased.
01:44:46 Real-life cases have a lot of ambiguity going on. It‘s a work of probabilities, not a binary process.
01:45:45 Can you cover up a crime as a non-corrupt policeman?
01:46:50 Private Security Services exploit the ambiguity of policework (someone bringing you from outside a full case, only verification needed, negative evidence often gets lost).
01:48:21 Political Aspect: which crimes are deemed important?
01:49:20 Lobbying and capital power: Intellectual Property Crimes.
01:50:44 Industry identifies perpretators and delivers them to police.
01:50:58 Filesharing: Machine investigating and filing reports, backchanneling, automated sting operation (example, IP-Echelon).
01:56:08 Private Agencies provide: Analysis of evidence, production of leads, investigation.
01:56:26 Money Laundering: not based on investigative results, but on information provided by for example NGOs (example, Transparency International).
01:59:28 Chain Analysis Companies produce risk scores for Cryptocurrency Adresses (public keys).
02:01:05 Face recognition to identify suspects: example, Clearview AI (finding people software)
02:02:20 Police relies on outside, unchecked influence: Private Actors (non-illegmitate).

Private Intelligence

02:03:25 Recap of Episode:
- What outside input is influencing the police
- Policy definition
- Intelligence field
02:04:22 Tax crimes: special investigators who actively try to find criminals.
02:04:39 Organized Crime: preventitive task of police (dismantling organizations, Staatsschutz).
02:05:35 Civil Disobedience: infiltration by police and private companies.
02:07:00 Private Security: 3 categories
- private intelligence services
- private security services
- private military contractors.
02:09:38 Private Intelligence is information gathering.
02:09:53 Private Intelligence VS corporate espionage.
02:11:11 First example.
02:15:00 Why is there so much cheap spy tech for sale?
02:19:53 Second example: credit suisse incident.
02:21:12 Some serious health concerns for the operators and middlemen (in-betweens).
02:24:05 Birds of a feather flock together: blurry lines of corporate, state, and private decision makers (different sides of the law).
02:26:29 Book/Thesis: Stephan Blancke (2011): Geheimdienstliche Aktivitäten nicht-staatlicher Akteure (private intelligence activities by non-state actors)
02:27:11 Private inflitrators, informants and agent provocateurs.
02:28:10 Extinction rebellion and very active activists.
02:30:30 Capture bounties.
02:32:45 A quiet business: private infiltration intelligence services (IMSI-catchers) are often ex police, ex military etc.
02:34:40 Sharing information services between intelligence: 4 eyes, 14 eyes.
02:38:05 HCPP and game theory: will the cryptoanarchists ever get something done?
02:39:00 Today’s security system is like antique byzantine, easy to understand from outside, inside not easy to understand- even for the players themselves.
02:40:25 Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road made agents run with money—is it the only case, only in this direction?
02:42:00 State systems’ marketing: “protect and serve” by angels? But, ACAB is also wrong.
02:45:55 Take personal responsibility for own security.

Outlook

02:48:40 Developments/outlook: technologies that make globalization possible, organizational technologies, reporting and communication.
02:50:25 Old days: reporting was sampling (today: big data, AI).
02:51:00 New incentive structures: financial markets. Old: financial markets were not global, slow. Today: Global financial markets mean indirect profit from activities like war, markets can be complex, distributed, longer reach.
02:52:50 Even dumb criminals can use smart technologies (Dropgangs).
02:54:00 The mastermind/ intelligent criminals VS random criminals: attribution becomes problematic (witness problem, no review pointers).
02:57:24 Book: Evan Ratliff (2019): The Mastermind. Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. (Paul LeRoux)

Wrap up

03:00:59 Donation Report

Reading Recommendations

Thomas Kuhn (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Machiavelli
Hegel
Carl von Clausewitz
Rubicon Series (2010)
Stephan Blancke (2011): Geheimdienstliche Aktivitäten nicht-staatlicher Akteure (private intelligence activities by non-state actors)
Evan Ratliff (2019): The Mastermind. Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. (Paul LeRoux)

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Hosts

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x04: Dropgangs

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 01:00:04 +0000

In this episode we talk about Dropgangs, lock boxes, dead drops, drone mix networks, and sneakernet.

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x03: TAZ

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 22:10:00 +0000

In this episode we talk about Temporary Autonomous Zones, containers, the OODA loop and reply to listener questions.

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x02: Second Realm

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:24:00 +0000

In this episode we talk about “The Second Realm”: Is more liberty possible? Parallel systems, conflict management, temporary autonomous zones, and The Sovereign Individual.

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x01: Cryptoanarchy

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 20:00:00 +0000

In this episode we talk about “What is Cryptoanarchy?”: We cover a definition of cryptoanarchy, anonymous messaging, the cryptoanarchy technology pyramid, an alternative vision for the future, and many more topics.

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x00: Introduction

contact@taz0.org (TAZ 0) — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 19:00:00 +0000

In this episode we introduce the Cypherpunk Bitstream podcast.

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Cypherpunk Bitstream

Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0f: The Law Won't Save You

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0e: Culture Corruption

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0d: Non-Compliance

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0c: Censorship

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0b: The Roots of Parallel Polis

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x0a: Power

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x09: Security III — The Future of Security

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Cypherpunk Bitstream 0x08: Pandemic II — Police State

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Show Notes

Introduction

Political Reactions

Fear And Economics

Inflation

Renationalization Of Industries And Trade

Free Speech

Political Symbolism

Identity Verification For Platforms

Prevention Of Political Turmoil, Coups, Etc.

Disappointments In Libertarian Ideals And Voluntaryist Communities

Communities And Pandemics

Positive Things

Ventilators And Taking Action

Mass-Gatherings

Electronic Voting, Remote Elections

Antibody Gophers And Plasma Farms

Burning Through Population

Lessons From SARS

Cash

Biodefense

Face Recognition And Masks.

Shifting Old And New Behaviors

Infection control and identity, physical privacy

Enforcing Isolation

Future: Global Scale, Cybercrime

Future: Population control, Personal Life, Law

Future: Escaping devices, Building Alternatives