{"id":3994,"date":"2016-11-12T20:17:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-13T00:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=3994"},"modified":"2016-12-11T20:41:16","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T00:41:16","slug":"designing-life-for-episodic-tyranny-2-social-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2016\/11\/12\/designing-life-for-episodic-tyranny-2-social-networks\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing life for episodic tyranny | 2: Social networks"},"content":{"rendered":"

For background, see also Part 1: Secure toolchains<\/a><\/em>
\n
\nMotivation<\/strong>
\n<\/p>\n

Imagine a Stasinario<\/em>: while in a Tier 3 environment, you expect your social networks to be subverted, with people pressured to report on one another, and casual gatherings discouraged or explicitly outlawed. \u00a0Your contact with local colleagues and neighbors is always tinged with the certainty that eventually, one of them\u00a0will report on the others, if only to stay out of trouble themselves.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
Assume\u00a0that a few community members will be willing informants, and that\u00a0everyone\u00a0else\u00a0would rather not inform, but will periodically be questioned by an\u00a0adversary trying to prevent organizing or information-passing of any kind. \u00a0When questioned, you\u00a0will\u00a0be punished for sharing any information that can be shown to be false. \u00a0<\/span>What sorts of preparation can you make in advance, for both\u00a0offline and online gatherings? [Input needed from people facing this in closed systems, and in\u00a0heavily-monitored activist movements.]<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\nSocial design options<\/b>
\n<\/p>\n

\n
1. Make gathering information more expensive. \u00a0Add plausible noise to the system; report frequently rather than rarely? \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0Human ddos\/noise: instead of LOIC [Anons], have collective noise generation pointed at some unethical public db or data-collection.\u00a0 1) setting your devices to signal to such networks; 2) sending your info \/ generating random info to send there;\u00a0<\/span>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0 2a.\u00a0For human \/ minority-tracking databases: \u00a0blacklists, registering refugees, or migrants from specific regions\/religions.\u00a0 Consider self-registration, auto-registration of valid-looking but random identities.<\/div>\n
\u00a02b. Try\u00a0SETI@Home style noise, where a large number of devices compute\/produce small amounts of signal sent out along a given channel<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
3.\u00a0\u00a0Social steganography? Embed real discussions among a few friends with lots of chatbots? so it’s hard to know which comments are real to find participants to trace or lean on.\u00a0 [Or even change which apparent participant in a channel is the real person communicating, over time].\u00a0 Possibly not helpful if subversion happens at the human level using the tapped-in comms device.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
4. \u00a0Find ways to confound tracking and data-tracing.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a04a. Make mixing (or air-gap) services widely \/ anonymously available\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a04b.\u00a0\u00a0Fake geo-tag generation. Fake GPS data from a group of users’ phones so it can’t be seen that they are all gathering together. Emit randomized (but logical) GPS coordinates when requested if turned on. ++<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
5.\u00a0 Randomized salting of communication, to provide plausible deniability for those who pass on wrong information, and to spot-check members of a group for currently being a leak.<\/span><\/div>\n
Ex: Encrypted group chat has pairwise encryption now.\u00a0 No guarantee you get the same message as someone else in the group?\u00a0 You could implement round-robin disinformation where one member of a group chat gets different info than the rest [and you could randomly select who gets bad info to see if outsiders sweep in \/ show up at the wrong place]<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
6.\u00a0\u00a0Signalling: Be open about some of the above preparation, so that all parties know there are less certain returns on relying on such information.<\/span>\u00a0 Share how to build a system like this [specifics?] that anyone can adopt unilaterally without active coordination.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
7. \u00a0Open books: imagine ways to share access to your toolchain to friends, self-surveillance to let everyone observe there is no or limited collaboration with dangerous parties.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
8.\u00a0\u00a0Collective multi-national insurance? to offset risks of a bubble of tyranny\u00a0in one place: a pool that will help you relocate, find jobs\/home in another jurisdiction…\u00a0 Similarly: flesh out details of potential future costs, currently handled by the public, that might become individual costs under f \u2013 in case you have to start paying for them yourself.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a08a.\u00a0 Related: collective libersurance<\/em>: investing in a libertarian solution, that stops relying on government to provide those shared services (EPA protection, health insurance, &c) : leaving less on the table for a governmental shift to distort.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a08b.\u00a0 Counterpoint: you might be prevented from doing this? if the government is explicitly propping up one industry (coal) over another.\u00a0 Gov occupies a bunch of fields that individuals can’t use.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
9.\u00a0\u00a0Reduce reliance on your region’s\u00a0infrastructure. Practice living through blackouts, emphasize taking your gadgets off-grid on a regular basis, ensuring they still work.\u00a0 Ditto for plumbing.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
10.\u00a0\u00a0Preserve mulinational free-trade zones, black markets, networks outside of national jurisdictions, not as terribly large or strong, but with reasonable burst capacity and robust to crushing.\u00a0 So that there is always a functioning side channel.\u00a0 [Ex: ?? falls in Lat Am, Kowloon City]<\/span><\/div>\n

\nRelated ideas<\/b>
\n<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
1. Fix security holes in current distributed communication.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0 1a.\u00a0 Metadata about who’s using what network and when is still sharable;\u00a0 WeChat is not very secure – even being in a channel can make you guilty and rounded up.\u00a0 IPFS is great as far as it goes, but their routing mechanism still shows the node-interconnection-graph, which as with bittorrent can show who seeds\/shares\/acts as a hub.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0 1b.\u00a0 Iterated\/ decentralization? needed.\u00a0 A mostly-decentral system with central elements can be more vulnerable than a robustly-central system that acknowledges this as a weakness and prepares for it.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
2. Consider multinational\/extranational decision-making and stakeholding, so no core stakeholder group can be entirely dominated by a central national actor<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
3. Keep doing this work transparently and publicly. \u00a0Increase security for discussing & updating & suggesting new ideas.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For background, see also Part 1: Secure toolchains Motivation Imagine a Stasinario: while in a Tier 3 environment, you expect your social networks to be subverted, with people pressured to report on one another, and casual gatherings discouraged or explicitly outlawed. \u00a0Your contact with local colleagues and neighbors is always tinged with the certainty that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-12q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3994"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4000,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3994\/revisions\/4000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}