Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

There is a difference between defensive violence and offensive violence. For example, do you believe that you own your body? I do, and I would defend myself if necessary. I would only use violence against those that are threatening me though. If you hold that you own your body, then by extension you own the output of the things you create with your body.

There has been much thought on this line of philosophy, it's called the non-aggression principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle)

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable.

How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright debates aside, what happens is that governments and large companies want to interfere with the privacy of what citizens are doing with their own bits. They say copying is theft while citizens consider twiddling their own bits a private matter that's none of anyone else's business. The citizens don't understand that while it's de facto legal to form a sneakernet—the actual legal status probably varies from place to place but nobody has ever been sued for sneakernet filesharing because nobody else never knows about it—it's illegal to form a filesharing network over the internet.

I don't promote or demote filesharing per se: it's just the cutting edge where the future trends will show years before they land elsewhere and that's what it makes it so interesting. A marginal slice of file sharing has already moved to anonymous darknets but in a few years and after a few more bad copyright/freedom-of-speech incidents with bad publicity, there will eventually be a breakthrough and the whole filesharing activity will go underground en masse.

When the masses go for it, the capacity and availability of invisible darknets will raise in orders of magnitude. That means there will be other providers in the anonymous networks as well, websites and services. There already are some, from anonymous wikis, anonymous project pages to anonymous forums but currently those are playgrounds. That is not so in ten years: there will be a major "bazaar" going on underground. While everything is anonymous and untraceable, everything is also secure. An online bank could very well operate in the anonymous network because the traffic is already cryptographically signed, and users can enjoy strong authentication if they wish to or remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys.

At that point the traditional grasp of internet control is lost.

The institutions governing the internet and the copyright and whatnot are faced with a big dilemma: do they dare to ban and make illegal anything that's not specifically permitted on the internet and if so, how to go about it in actuality. Do they lobby for laws that only allow ISPs to let citizens connect to a http proxy that validates all traffic to be "approved"? Do they extend the charges for any use of the invisible internet that is deemed illegal, to cover all users of the invisible internet?

We're still in the shadowdancing mode but the stakes are going higher, and in at most ten years the problem of control versus anonymity will have come out in the public.

We better know what we want, at that point.

Yes and no. Sure, we have to fight bad laws. Here's the thing: Encryption is legal now, but what good is it if we don't use it?

We need to build and use technologies that respect human rights and we need to fight to make sure that they remain legal. One without the other is nothing. There is no point fighting to keep something legal if you don't have the technology and infrastructure to use it.

Does it seem strange to anyone that the whole book isn't available for free? This doesn't appear to be intended as mere entertainment. This is supposed to be about maintaining freedom . . . it seems like a case where you'd want to get your ideas out and save the day over earning money from it.

> When the masses go for it, the capacity and availability of invisible darknets will raise in orders of magnitude.

this is predicated on the assumption that providers are not strangled by their balls by the authorities (who is in turn strangled by the balls by lobbiests/companies/vested interests).

If you could run your own routes with private equipment (such as a mesh like wireless network?), instead of having to sign up to an isp, then i see this as more viable a future.