…Privacy-Man and Crypto-Girl are not wearing pants

The last weeks have been hard for the Internet. Not the network on a technical level but for the people it consists of, the so-called Layer 8, basically: Us.

When the news about the actual dimensions of the activities of different government agencies in the Internet hit us, many of us were left in a state of shock and awe, a state of pure and utter disbelief: The NSA (and it’s cousins from other countries) did all those things we never thought possible. The dystopia had become reality.

We know now that the NSA records basically everything, even – no, especially – the pieces of data they cannot decrypt yet. “Yet” being the most relevant term here. Cryptography as we use it today is always a bet on the opponent not having huge amounts of processing power to solve difficult mathematical problems. But given what we know about how bad a lot of encryption is implemented and the amounts of resources and people government agencies can throw at the problem, many encryption algorithms and commonly used key sizes will soon be no more effective than some kids using secret ink to write their little notes to each other.

But the cries of the netizens were mostly left unheard or at least unacknowledged: The mainstream media reported it and basically moved on and when asking the people on the street, most don’t really care too much, either because they have more urgent matters to focus on (such as how to make rent while still being able to buy food for their kids and themselves) or because they just don’t believe that the activities of the NSA and similar agencies harm them. The majority of people are no terrorists and the promise of safety and security (as empty as it may actually be) carries a lot more value to them and their life than abstract concepts like surveillance.

In one aspect the mainstream and some Internet activists are in line though: Both always knew that the intelligence apparatus could listen in. Emails have always been more postcards than actual letters with envelopes and the so-called metadata would still stay visible even if the email itself was encrypted.

We have always known that it sounded wrong that – while every DRM-type encryption on movies, video games or music was broken in days if not hours – the data we put out there could easily be defended through certain simple to use crypto tools. But we always had a fallback that made it all OK, we had our super heroes.

Super Heroes are not a new thing, they predate movies and comic books and all those things we might nowadays associate with them: Hercules? Super Hero. Siegfried of Xanten? Super Hero. Joan of Arc? Super Hero. Our ancient (and less ancient) myths are full of those larger than life characters that could tilt the earth just enough to make things OK again (though admittedly many of them had their fair share of tragedy and defeat as well).

In the Internet narrative, the role of the Super Hero was filled by hackers. Hercules, Siegfried and Joan were now called Mitnick, Applebaum or Assange but they filled the same role: To make things OK again. In a digital world full of problems that changed our perception of privacy, secrecy and transparency we rested the responsibility to push back against the “evil” on their shoulders. A responsibility many hackers just too gladly took.

In the hacker narrative, the governments and companies were mostly movie plot villians: Often slightly clueless, twisting their moustaches while explaining their evil schemes to the protagonist who then pulled out his or her secret weapon from his or her tool belt and defeated the enemy. The end.

Our media mirrored that narrative closely: Movies like The Matrix and many others have pictured the hacker as the high priest of the digital age, the battle mage making the impossible possible with a few keystrokes and sometimes a little soldering. Amongst the most successful TV shows these days are a big number of CSI like shows that recreate basically the same mythos of the wizard with a keyboard who can zoom into any grainy picture 10 times to uncover the truth and who traces IP packets all over the planet from a fancy looking graphical tool.

And whenever the weight of the world, the truth of our digital communication and possibilities of the intelligence apparatus came up, we turned to the hackers and we begged: “Save us!” And they answered.

We got Tor, we got more encryption algorithms and tools than we could count. Harddisk encryption reached mainstream audience, OTR was built into many Instant messenger clients and worked transparently and mostly simple to use. The hacker’s magic bag of tricks seemed to be able to create tricks, hacks, workarounds and security layers faster than any company or government could churn out threats.

And that is why this scandal has hit us, the Layer 8, the people who actually live on the Internet and not just see it as a glorified teleshopping channel, so hard: We lost our super heroes. We looked and realized that Privacy-Man and Crypto-Girl are not wearing pants, that their tool belts seem to be empty.

We see CryptoParties popping up all over the place in a last ditch effort to save the old narrative, believing that we can get the Genie back into the bottle by explaining how people can pull themselves, their opinions and goals out of the spotlight. By creating a new age of secrecy and disconnectedness that would keep the intelligence out of our lives.

But only communicating in the dark, hiding one’s opinions and connections will not help our democracies. Because a strong democracy is based on communication on networking, on the constant exchange and discussion of controversial ideas. What is often called “digital self-defense” will in the long run not save democracy but just help a different system of oppression to take its place – it is in fact just running away from the problem.

What can we do?

Get over our self-constructed myth of Super Heroes and back to work. I do agree with Jeff Jarvis in arguing that companies should do more to fight for their users. it is in their interest because in the end the scandal falls down on their feet: Google, Facebook and all those companies might just be following the laws when they give the NSA and other agencies access to their user’s data but still get all the flak for it happening. But more importantly, we need to start changing our perception on intelligence agencies and our laws.

Intelligence agencies spying on other countries and their citizens can, in this digital world, only be compared to using weapons to attack the other country. Our globalized world gets smaller every day with people’s social connections increasingly neglecting to care about national borders. We can no longer accept to have publicly funded agencies playing the secret aggressor against the world.

We need global treaties on intelligence disarmament, we need to change our local laws to no longer accept spying on people by a government agency just cause those people have the wrong passport. The equation is simple: If your agency spies on my and mine spies on you and they collaborate, they spy on everyone. If we don’t want that to happen (and I refuse to believe that we do) we need to get rid of the old school cold war type intelligence agencies that are build on a foundation of xenophobia and hate. We are better than that.

The old narrative of Super Heroes protecting us against evil have always kept “the evil alive”, have stopped us from dismantling it. We didn’t care to get rid of our intelligence agencies because we didn’t need to care about them. They were stupid and we had hackers and their tools. From that perspective maybe this collapse of our narrative is a good thing, helps us to shift our focus from implementing tools helping a small elite to circumvent certain threats to starting a political campaign to fix the actual issues. I hope we will.

Ceterum Censeo intelligence apparatus esse delendam.

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