Short rounds time!

First up, a surprisingly serious and detailed history of digital cryptography from Steven Levy. The previous books I’ve read by Levy have also been tech histories, but How Google Works and his Apple-related titles had a strong fanboy vibe to them, whereas this one is level headed. Unless you’re a crypto-anarchist or a cryptographic developer yourself, perhaps it’s difficult to get extremely excited about encryption methods and patent fights. The book begins with the contribution of Whit Diffie, who came of age fascinated by encryption but who was frustrated by the state throwing up an effective firewall against any information about cryptography disseminating outside the Borglike box that is the NSA’s headquarters. His single-minded obsession led to him traveling the United States looking for obscure books and papers, and from this self-assembled education came a novel idea that still undergirds encryption today. Diffie’s is only one piece of the story, though, as Levy also tracks the work of men who figured out how to make Diffie’s principle actually happen, and the way publicly-available encryption software (essential as the information age grew to encompass more and more of society) overcame the NSA’s attempts to block it — which sometimes meant deciding that getting a product out there was more important than monetizing it, as when the first iteration of PGP software was released for free so it could hit the market and be replicated open-source style before Joe Biden’s anti-cryptography bill made it through Congress. (Another unexpected presence: Carl Sagan, who is arrested with one of the book’s subjects at a protest.) Although this encryption is crucial to the workings of the internet — it’s what allows for online commerce, for one thing — I must admit the book itself doesn’t have the broader appeal of his later works, in part because it is detailed and serious, and about something that’s more abstract and technical than many people are comfortable tackling.

Relatedly, I read a paper called “From Crossbows to Cryptography“, a 1987 essay/article in which Chuck Hammill argued that technology offered weapons to take liberty from the state. Technology is an equalizer, he wrote: just as crossbows allowed untrained peasants to dispatched heavily armed knights, so can modern tech help us avoid tyranny. I’m not sure what he had in mind in ’87, and unfortunately I can’t find much else about him. I’ve seen/heard this paper mentioned in discussions on the Tor browser, blockchain tech, and the like but in his day the internet was very different — the graphical and wide-open World Wide Web didn’t yet exist. The only example he mentions is people swapping information back and forth. Of course, the ability to communicate is important (people used cassette tapes to foment revolution in Iran!), but I’m curious as to his full thoughts on the subject. Timothy May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” is a related document — a brief few paragraphs about the promise of cryptography and the arguments the state will bring against it. Interestingly, he predicts the emergence of markets like those which can be accessed via Tor.

And speaking of the devil, I recently read Dark Web Dive, which is a brief (100 page or so) introduction to the Dark Web. Forsay begins with the basics, explaining the distinction between the surface web (anything you can access from a basic web search), the deep web (which is online, but needs passwords to access), and the dark web, which is part of the internet but requires special programs and protocols to navigate. For a practical example: the interior of a post office is surface web, the interior of a post office box is deep web, and the dark web is more like knowing there’s a guy across the street who, if you use the right code phrase, will set you up with your contraband of choice. The author discusses how users find their way on the dark web (sometimes using surface web directories that compile lists of known darkweb addresses) and conduct business. He also shares horror stories from the dark web as a way of illustrating how much of it is mythologized (some stories are 1980s Satanic panic caliber), and then comments on genuine dangers before sharing information on how to access it via Tor. Amusingly, his instructions for Windows machines entail encrypting their entire drive first, launching a virtual machine and installing an operating system on it, installing Tor on said VM, installing a VPN on said VM, and then — finally — installing Tor. Perhaps his intent is to scare people fromHe frequently emphasizes the need to use a VPN prior to launching Tor, since some ISPs regard a Tor connection as a red flag. I’ve heard arguments against it, however, alleging that mixing them creates new vulnerabilities. (There’s also the fact that VPNs and the Tor network, since they’re indirect connections, load more slowly. Combining the two sounds like trying to re-experience the days of 28k dial up connections, personally.

Related stuff coming up — The People vs Tech, which was thought provoking, and The Filter Bubble, which I read two weeks ago but haven’t posted anything yet on.