net.wars

All change

One of the reasons Silicon Valley technology company leaders sometimes display such indifference to the desires of their users is that they keep getting away with it. At Facebook, now Meta, after each new privacy invasion, the user base just kept getting bigger. At Twitter, despite much outrage at its new owner’s policies, although it feels definitely emptier the exodus toward other sites appears to have dropped off. At Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman has used the term “landed gentry” to denigrate moderators leading protests against a new company policy…well, we’ll see.

In April, Reddit announced it would begin charging third parties for access to its API, the interface that gives computers outside its system access to the site’s data. Charges will apply to everyone except developers building apps and bots that help people use Reddit and academic/non-commercial researchers studying Reddit.

In May, the company announced pricing: $12,000 per 50 million requests. This compares to Twitter’s recently announced $42,000 per 50 million tweets and photo site Imgur‘s $166 per 50 million API calls. Apollo, maker of the popular iOS Reddit app, estimates that it would now cost $20 million a year to keep its app running.

The reasoning behind this could be summed up as, “They cost us real money; why should we help them?” Apollo’s app is popular, it appears, because it offers a cleaner interface. But it also eliminates Reddit’s ads, depriving the site of revenue. Reddit is preparing for an IPO later this year against stiff headwinds.

A key factor in this timing is the new gold rush around large language models, which are being built by scraping huge amounts of text anywhere they can find it. Taking “our content”, Huffman calls it, suggesting Reddit deserves to share in the profits while eliding the fact that said content is all user-created.

This week, thousands of moderators shuttered their forums (subreddits) in protest. At The Verge, Jay Peters reports that more than 8,000 (out of 138,000) subreddits went dark for 48 hours from Monday to Wednesday. Given Huffman’s the-blackout-will-pass refusal to budge, some popular forums have vowed to continue the protest indefinitely.

Some redditors have popped up on other social media to ask about viable alternatives (they’re also discussing this question on Reddit itself). But moving communities is hard, which is why these companies understand their users’ anger is rarely an existential threat.

The most likely outcome is that redditors are about to confront the fate that eventually befalls almost every online community: the people they *thought* cared about them are going to sell them to people who *don’t* care about them. Reddit as they knew it is entering a phase of precarity that history says will likely end with the system’s shutdown or abandonment. Shareholders’ and owners’ desire to cash out and indifference to Twitter’s actual users is how Elon Musk ended up in charge. It’s how NBC Universal shut down Television without Pity, how Yahoo killed GeoCities, and how AOL spitefully dismantled CompuServe.

The lesson from all of these is: shareholders and corporate owners don’t have to care about users.

The bigger issue, however, is that Reddit, like Twitter, is not currently a sustainable business. Founded in 2005, it was a year old when Conde Nast bought it, only to spin it out again into an independent subsidiary in 2011. Since then it has held repeated funding rounds, most recently in 2021, when it raised $700 million. Since its IPO filing in December 2021, its value has dropped by a third. It will not survive in any form without new sources of revenue; it’s also cutting costs with layoffs.

Every Internet service or site, from Flickr to bitcoin, begins with founders and users sharing the same goal: for the service to grow and prosper. Once the service has grown past a certain point, however, their interests diverge. Users generally seek community, entertainment, and information; investors only seek profits. The need to produce revenues led Google’s chiefs, who had previously held that ads would inevitably corrupt search results, hired Sheryl Sandberg to build the company’s ad business. Seven years later, facomg the same problem, Facebook did the same thing – and hired the same person to do it. Reddit has taken much longer than most Internet companies to reach this inevitable fork.

Yet the volunteer human moderators Huffman derided are the key to Reddit’s success; they set the tone in each subreddit community. Reddit’s topic-centered design means much more interaction with strangers than the person-centered design of blogs and 2010-era social media, but it also allows people with niche interests to find both experts and each other. That fact plus human curation means that lately many add “reddit” to search terms in order to get better results. Reddit users’ loss is therefore also our loss as we try to cope with t1he enshittification of the most monopolistic Internet services.

Its board still doesn’t have to care.

None of this is hopeful. Even if redditors win this round and find some compromise to save their favorite apps, once the IPO is past, any power they have will be gone.

“On the Internet your home will always leave you,” someone observed on Twitter a couple of years ago. I fear that moment is now coming for Reddit. Next time, build your community in a home you can own.

Illustration: Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman speaking at the Oxford Union in 2019.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Snowden at ten

As almost every media outlet has headlined this week, it is now ten years since Edward Snowden alerted the world to the real capabilities of the spy agencies, chiefly but not solely the US National Security Agency. What is the state of surveillance now? most of the stories ask.

Some samples: at the Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock summarizes what Snowden revealed; Snowden is interviewed; the Guardian’s editor at the time, Alan Rusbridger, recounts events at the Guardian, which co-published Snowden’s discoveries with the Washington Post; journalist Heather Brooke warns of the increasing sneakiness of government surveillance; and Jessica Lyons Hardcastle outlines the impact. Finally, at The Atlantic, Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian journalists who worked on the Snowden stories, says only about 1% of Snowden’s documents were ever published.

As has been noted here recently, it seems as though everywhere you look surveillance is on the rise: at work, on privately controlled public streets, and everywhere online by both government and commercial actors. As Brooke writes and the Open Rights Group has frequently warned, surveillance that undermines the technical protections we rely on puts us all in danger.

The UK went on to pass the Investigatory Powers Act, which basically legalized what the security services were doing, but at least did add some oversight. US courts found that the NSA had acted illegally and in 2015 Congress made bulk collection of Americans’ phone records illegal. But, as Bruce Schneier has noted, Snowden’s cache of documents was aging even in 2013; now they’re just old. We have no idea what the secret services are doing now.

The impact in Europe was significant: in 2016 the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation. Until Snowden, data protection reform looked like it might wind up watering down data protection law in response to an unprecedented amount of lobbying by the technology companies. Snowden’s revelations raised the level of distrust and also gave Max Schrems some additional fuel in bringing his legal actions< against EU-US data deals and US corporate practices that leave EU citizens open to NSA snooping.

The really interesting question is this: what have we done *technically* in the last decade to limit government’s ability to spy on us at will?

Work on this started almost immediately. In early 2014, the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force teamed up on a workshop called Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring (STRINT). Observing the proceedings led me to compare the size of the task ahead to boiling the ocean. The mood of the workshop was united: the NSA’s actions as outlined by Snowden constituted an attack on the Internet and everyone’s privacy, a view codified in RFC 7258, which outlined the plan to mitigate pervasive monitoring. The workshop also published an official report.

Digression for non-techies: “RFC” stands for “Request for Comments”. The thousands of RFCs since 1969 include technical specifications for Internet protocols, applications, services, and policies. The title conveys the process: they are published first as drafts and incorporate comments before being finalized.

The crucial point is that the discussion was about *passive* monitoring, the automatic, ubiquitous, and suspicionless collection of Internet data “just in case”. As has been said so many times about backdoors in encryption, the consequence of poking holes in security is to make everyone much more vulnerable to attacks by criminals and other bad actors.

So a lot of that workshop was about finding ways to make passive monitoring harder. Obviously, one method is to eliminate vulnerabilities, especially those the NSA planted. But it’s equally effective to make monitoring more expensive. Given the law of truly large numbers, even a tiny extra cost per user creates unaffordable friction. They called it a ten-year project, which takes us to…almost now.

Some things have definitely improved, largely through the expanded use of encryption to protect data in transit. On the web, Let’s Encrypt, now ten years old, makes it easy and cheap to obtain a certificate for any website. Search engines contribute by favoring encrypted (that is, HTTPS) web links over unencrypted ones (HTTP). Traffic between email servers has gone from being transmitted in cleartext to being almost all encrypted. Mainstream services like WhatsApp have added end-to-end encryption to the messaging used by billions. Other efforts have sought to reduce the use of fixed long-term identifiers such as MAC addresses that can make tracking individuals easier.

At the same time, even where there are data protection laws, corporate surveillance has expanded dramatically. And, as has long been obvious, governments, especially democratic governments, have little motivation to stop it. Data collection by corporate third parties does not appear in the public budget, does not expose the government to public outrage, and is available via subpoena any time government officials want. If you are a law enforcement or security service person, this is all win-win; the only data you can’t get is the data that isn’t collected.

In an essay reporting on the results of the work STRINT began as part of the ten-year assessment currently circulating in draft, STRINT convenor Stephen Farrell writes, “So while we got a lot right in our reaction to Snowden’s revelations, currently, we have a “worse” Internet.”

Illustrations: Edward Snowden, speaking to Glenn Greenwald in a screenshot from Laura Poitras’ film Prism from Praxis Films (via Wikimedia).

Review: A Hacker’s Mind

A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Norton
ISBN: 978-0-393-86666-7

One of the lessons of the Trump presidency has been how much of the US government runs on norms that have developed organically over the republic’s 247-year history. Trump felt no compunction about breaking those norms. In computer security parlance, he hacked the system by breaking those norms in ways few foresaw or thought possible.

This is the kind of global systemic hacking Bruce Scheneir explores in his latest book, A Hacker’s Mind. Where most books on this topic limit their focus to hacking computers, Schneier opts to start with computer hacking, use it to illustrate the hacker’s habit of mind, and then find that mindset in much larger and more consequential systemic abuses. In his array of hacks by the rich and powerful, Trump is a distinctly minor player.

First, however, Schneier introduces computer hacking from the 1980s onward. In this case, “hacking” is defined in the old way: active subversion of a system to make it do things its designers never intended. In the 1980s, “hacker” was a term of respect applied to you by others admiring your cleverness. It was only in the 1990s that common usage equated hacking with committing crimes with a computer. In his 1984 book Hackers, Steven Levy showed this culture in action at MIT. It’s safe to say that without hacks we wouldn’t have the Internet.

The hacker’s habit of mind can be applied to far more than just technology. It can – and is today being used to – subvert laws, social norms, financial systems, politics, and democracy itself. This is Schneier’s main point. You can draw a straight line from technological cleverness to Silicon Valley’s “disrupt” to the aphorism coined by Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen, whom Schneier quotes: “Power interprets regulation as damage, and routes around it”.

In the first parts of the book he discusses the impact of system vulnerabilities, the kinds of responses one can make, and the basic types of response. In a compact amount of space, he covers patching, hardening, and simplifying systems, evaluating threat models as they change, and limiting the damage the hack can cause. Or, the hack may be normalized, becoming part of our everyday landscape.

Then he gets serious. In the bulk of the book, he explores applications: hacking financial, legal, political, cognitive, and AI systems. Specialized AI – Schneier wisely avoids the entirely speculative hype and fear around artificial general intelligence – is both exceptionally vulnerable to hacks and an exceptional vector for them. Anthropomorphic robots especially can be designed to hack our emotional responses.

“The rich are better at hacking,” he observes. They have greater resources, more powerful allies, and better access. If the good side of hacking is innovation, the bad side is societal damage, increasing unfairness and inequality, and the subversion of the systems we used to trust. Schneier believes all of this will get worse because today’s winners have so much ability to hack what’s left. Hacking, he says, is an existential threat. Nonetheless, he has hope: we *can* build resilient governance structures. We must hack hacking.

Microsurveillance

“I have to take a photo,” the courier said, raising his mobile phone to snap a shot of the package on the stoop in front of my open doorway.

This has been the new thing. I guess the spoken reason is to ensure that the package recipient can’t claim that it was never delivered, protecting all three of the courier, the courier company, and the shipper from fraud. But it feels like the unspoken reason is to check that the delivery guy has faithfully completed his task and continued on his appointed round without wasting time. It feels, in other words, like the delivery guy is helping the company monitor him.

I say this, and he agrees. I had, in accordance with the demands of a different courier, pinned a note to my door authorizing the deliverer to leave the package on the doorstep in my absence. “I’d have to photograph the note,” he said.

I mentioned American truck drivers, who are pushing back against in-cab cameras and electronic monitors. “They want to do that here, too,” he said. “They want to put in dashboard cameras.” Since then, in at least some cases – for example, Amazon – they have.

Workplace monitoring was growing in any case, but, as noted in 2021, the explosion in remote working brought by the pandemic normalized a level of employer intrusion that might have been more thoroughly debated in less fraught times. The Trades Union Congress reported in 2022 that 60% of employees had experiened being tracked in the previous years. And once in place, the habit of surveillance is very hard to undo.

When I was first thinking about this piece in 2021, many of these technologies were just being installed. Two years later, there’s been time for a fight back. One such story comes from the France-based company Teleperformance, one of those obscure, behind-the-scenes suppliers to the companies we’ve all heard of. In this case, the company in the shadows supplies remote customer service workers to include, just in the UK, the government’s health and education departments, NHS Digital, the RAF and Royal Navy, and the Student Loans Company, as well as Vodafone, eBay, Aviva, Volkswagen, and the Guardian itself; some of Teleperformance’s Albanian workers provide service to Apple UK

In 2021, Teleperformance demanded that remote workers in Colombia install in-home monitoring and included a contract clause requiring them to accept AI-powered cameras with voice analytics in their homes and allowing the company to store data on all members of the worker’s family. An earlier attempt at the same thing in Albania failed when the Information and Data Protection Commissioner stepped in.

Teleperformance tried this in the UK, where the unions warned about the normalization of surveillance. The company responded that the cameras would only be used for meetings, training, and scheduled video calls so that supervisors could check that workers’ desks were free of devices deemed to pose a risk to data security. Even so, In August 2021 Teleperformance told Test and Trace staff to limit breaks to ten minutes in a six-hour shift and to select “comfort break” on their computers (so they wouldn’t be paid for that time).

Other stories from the pandemic’s early days show office workers being forced to log in with cameras on for a daily morning meeting or stay active on Slack. Amazon has plans to use collected mouse movements and keystrokes to create worker profiles to prevent impersonation. In India, the government itself demanded that its accredited social health activists install an app that tracks their movements via GPS and monitors their uses of other apps.

More recently, Politico reports that Uber drivers must sign in with a selfie; they will be banned if the facial recognition verification software fails to find a match.

This week, at the Guardian Clea Skopoleti updated the state of work. In one of her examples, monitoring software calculates “activity scores” based on typing and mouse movements – so participating in Zoom meetings, watching work-related video clips, and thinking don’t count. Young people, women, and minority workers are more likely to be surveilled.

One employee Skopoleti interviews takes unpaid breaks to carve out breathing space in which to work; another reports having to explain the length of his toilet breaks. Another, a English worker in social housing, reports his vehicle is tracked so closely that a manager phones if they think he’s not in the right place or taking too long.

This is a surveillance-breeds-distrust-breeds-more-surveillance cycle. As Ellen Ullman long ago observed, systems infect their owners with the desire to do more and more with them. It will take time for employers to understand the costs in worker burnout, staff turnover, and absenteeism.

One way out is through enforcing the law: In 2020, the ICO investigated Barclay’s Bank, which was accused of spying on staff via software that tracked how they spent their time; the bank dropped it. In many of these stories, however, the surveillance suppliers say they operate within the law.

The more important way out is worker empowerment. In Colombia, Teleperformance has just guaranteed its 40,000 workers the right to form a union.

First, crucially, we need to remember that surveillance is not normal.

Illustrations: The boss tells Charlie Chaplin to get back to work in Modern Times (1936).

The arc of surveillance

“What is the point of introducing contestability if the system is illegal?” a questioner asked at this year’s Compiuters, Privacy, and Data Protection, or more or less.

This question could have been asked in any number of sessions where tweaks to surface problems leave the underlying industry undisturbed. In fact, the questioner raised it during the panel on enforcement, GDPR, and the newly-in-force Digital Markets Act. Maria Luisa Stasi explained the DMA this way: it’s about business models. It’s a step into a deeper layer.
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The key question: will these new laws – the DMA, the recent Digital Services Act, which came into force in November, the in-progress AI Act – be enforced better than GDPR has been?

The frustration has been building all five years of GDPR’s existence. Even though this week, Meta was fined €1.2 billion for transferring European citizens’ data to the US, Noyb reports that 85% of its 800-plus cases remain undecided, 58% of them for more than 18 months. Even that €1.2 billion decision took ten years, €10 million, and three cases against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to push through – and will now be appealed. Noyb has an annotated map of the various ways EU countries make litigation hard. The post-Snowden political will that fueled GDPR’s passage has had ten years to fade.

It’s possible to find the state of privacy circa 2023 depressing. In the 30ish years I’ve been writing about privacy, numerous laws have been passed, privacy has become a widespread professional practice and area of study in numerous fields, and the number of activists has grown from a literal handful to tens of thousands around the world. But overall the big picture is one of escalating surveillance of all types and by all sorts of players. At the 2000 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, Neal Stephenson warned not to focus on governments. Watch the “Little Brothers”, he said. Google was then a tiny self-funded startup, and Mark Zuckerberg was 16. Stephenson was prescient.

And yet, that surveillance can be weirdly patchy. In a panel on children online, Leanda Barrington-Leach noted platforms’ selective knowledge: “How do they know I like red Nike trainers but don’t know I’m 12?” A partial answer came later: France’s CNIL has looked at age verification technologies and concluded that none are “mature enough” to both do the job and protect privacy.

In a discussion of deceptive practices, paraphrasing his recent paper, Mark Leiser pinpointed a problem: “We’re stuck with a body of law that looks at online interface as a thing where you look for dark patterns, but there’s increasing evidence that they’re being embedded in the systems architecture underneath and I’d argue we’re not sufficiently prepared to regulate that.”

As a response, Woody Hartzog and Neil Richards have proposed the concept of “data loyalty”. Similar to a duty of care, the “loyalty” in this case is owed by the platform to its users. “Loyalty is the requirement to make the interests of the trusted party [the platform] subservient to those of the trustee or vulnerable one [the user],” Hartzog explained. And the more vulnerable you are the greater the obligation on the powerful party.

The tone was set early with a keynote from Julie Cohen that highlighted structural surveillance and warned against accepting the Big Tech mantra that more technology naturally brings improved human social welfare..

“What happens to surveillance power as it moves into the information infrastructure?” she asked. Among other things, she concluded, it disperses accountability, making it harder to challenge but easier to embed. And once embedded, well…look how much trouble people are having just digging Huawei equipment out of mobile networks.

Cohen’s comments resonate. A couple of years ago, when smart cities were the hot emerging technology, it became clear that many of the hyped ideas were only really relevant to large, dense urban areas. In smaller cities, there’s no scope for plotting more efficient delivery routes, for example, because there aren’t enough options. As a result, congestion is worse in a small suburban city than in Manhattan, where parallel routes draw off traffic. But even a small town has scope for surveillance, and so some of us concluded that this was the technology that would trickle down. This is exactly what’s happening now: the Fusus technology platform even boasts openly of bringing the surveillance city to the suburbs.

Laws will not be enough to counter structural surveillance. In a recent paper, Cohen wrote, “Strategies for bending the arc of surveillance toward the safe and just space for human wellbeing must include both legal and technical components.”

And new approaches, as was shown by an unusual panel on sustainability, raised by the computational and environmental costs of today’s AI. This discussion suggested a new convergence: the intersection, as Katrin Fritsch put it, of digital rights, climate justice, infrastructure, and sustainability.

In the deception panel, Roseamunde van Brakel similarly said we need to adopt a broader conception of surveillance harm that includes social harm and risks for society and democracy and also the impact on climate of use of all these technologies. Surveillance, in other words, has environmental costs that everyone has ignored.

I find this convergence hopeful. The arc of surveillance won’t bend without the strength of allies..

Illustrations: CCTV camera at 22 Portobello Road, London, where George Orwell lived.

Cryptocurrency winter

There is nowhere in the world, Brett Scott says in his recent book, Cloudmoney, that supermarkets price oatmeal in bitcoin. Even in El Salvador, where bitcoin became legal tender in 2021, what appear to be bitcoin prices are just the underlying dollar price refracted through bitcoin’s volatile exchange rate.

Fifteen years ago, when bitcoin was invented, its adherents thought by now it would be a mainstream currency instead of a niche highly speculative instrument of financial destruction and facilitator of crime. Five years ago, the serious money people thought it important enough to consider fighting back with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

In 2019, Facebook announced Libra, a consortium-backed cryptocurrency that would enable payments on its platform, apparently to match China’s social media messaging system WeChat, which are used by 1 billion users monthly. By 2021, when Facebook’s holding company renamed itself Meta, Libra had become “Diem”. In January 2022 Diem was sold to Silvergate Bank, which announced in February 2023 it would wind down and liquidate its assets, a casualty of the FTX collapse.

As Dave Birch writes in his 2020 book, The Currency Cold War, it was around the time of Facebook’s announcement that central banks began exploring CBDCs. According to the Atlantic Council’s tracker, 114 countries are exploring CDBCs, and 11 have launched one. Two – Ecuador and Senegal – have canceled theirs. Plans are inactive in 15 more.
politico

The tracker marks the EU, US, and UK as in development. The EU is quietly considering the digital euro. In the US, in March 2022 president Joe Biden issued an executive order including instructions to research a digital dollar. In the UK the Bank of England has an open consultation on the digital pound (closes June 7). It will not make a decision until at least 2025 after completing technical development of proofs of concept and the necessary architecture. The earliest we’d see a digital pound is around 2030.

But first: the BoE needs a business case. In 2021, the House of Lords issued a report (PDF) calling the digital pound a “solution in search of a problem” and concluding, “We have yet to hear a convincing case for why the UK needs a retail CBDC.” Note “retail”. Wholesale, for use only between financial institutions, may have clearer benefits.

Some of the imagined benefits of CBDCs are familiar: better financial inclusion, innovation, lowered costs, and improved efficiency. Others are more arcane: replicating the role of cash to anchor the monetary system in a digital economy. That’s perhaps the strongest argument, in that today’s non-cash payment options are commercial products but cash is public infrastructure. Birch suggests that the digital pound could allow individuals to hold accounts at the BoE. These would be as risk-free as cash and potentially open to those underserved by the banking system.

Many of these benefits will be lost on most of us. People who already have bank accounts or modern financial apps are unlikely to care about a direct account with the BoE, especially if, as Birch suggests, one “innovation” they might allow is negative interest rates. More important, what is the difference between pounds as numbers in cyberspace and pounds as fancier numbers in cyberspace? For most of us, our national currencies are already digital, even if we sometimes convert some of it into physical notes and coins. The big difference – and part of what they’re fighting over – is who owns the transaction data.

At Rest of World, Temitayo Lawal recounts the experience in Nigeria., the first African country to adopt a CBDC. Launched 18 months ago, the eNaira has been tried by only 0.5% of the population and used for just 1.4 million transactions. Among the reasons Lawal finds, Nigeria’s eNaira doesn’t have the flexibility or sophistication of independent cryptocurrencies, younger Nigerians see little advantage to the eNaira over the apps they were already using, 30 million Nigerians (about 13% of the population) lack Internet access, and most people don’t want to entrust their financial information to their government. By comparison, during that time Nigerians traded $1.16 billion in bitcoin on the peer-to-peer platform Paxful.

Many of these factors play out the same way elsewhere. From 2014 to 2018, Ecuador operated Dinero Electrónico, a mobile payment system that allowed direct transfer of US dollars and aimed to promote financial inclusion. In a 2020 paper, researchers found DE never reached critical mass because it didn’t offer enough incentive for adoption, was opposed by the commercial banks, and lacked a sufficient supporting ecosystem for cashing in and out. In China, which launched its CBDC in August 2020, the e-CNY is rarely used because, the Economist reports Alipay and We Chat work well enough that retailers don’t see the need to accept it. The Bahamanian sand dollar has gained little traction. Denmark and Japan have dropped the idea entirely, as has Finland, although it supports the idea of a digital euro.

The good news, such as it is, is that by the time Western countries are ready to make a decision either some country will have found a successful formula that can be adapted, or everyone who’s tried it will have failed and the thing can be shelved until it’s time to rediscover it. That still leaves the problem that Scott warns of: a cashless society will give Big Tech and Big Finance huge power over us. We do need an alternative.

Illustrations: Bank of England facade.

Review: Tracers in the Dark

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
By Andy Greenberg
Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0-385-548/09-0

At the 1997 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, the computer scientist Timothy C. May, a co-founder of the influential Cypherpunks mailing l|ist, presented the paper Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet. In it, he suggested that the combination of the Internet, anonymous digital cash, and the possibility that anyone could be a “mint” (in the money sense) created the conditions for BlackNet, a market in stolen secrets, assassinations, and other illegal goods and services. In trying to stop it, he said, regulators and governments would invoke the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: nuclear terrorists, child pornographers, money launderers, and drug dealers.

Like all futurists, May was building on existing trends. Digital cash already existed in an early form, and governments were already invoking the Four Horsemen in opposing widespread access to strong encryption (they still are, in debates about the UK’s Online Safety bill. Still, his paper also imagined Wikileaks.

Almost certainly the unknown creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakomoto, knew the cypherpunks list. In any event, at the beginning, bitcoin appeared to be – and the community surrounding it sometimes billed it as – sufficiently anonymous and untraceable to enable May’s BlackNet. Tl;dr: not for long.

In the highly readable Tracers in the Dark, veteran Wired journalist Andy Greenberg tells the story of step-by-step technical advances that enabled law enforcement, tax authorities, and others to identify and arrest the owners and users of sites dealing in illegal goods like Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Welcome to Video, and take the sites down.

The essential problem for criminals seeking secrecy is, of course, that the public blockchain indelibly records every transaction for all to see for all time. Not only that, but the bigger the pile of data gets the more useful information it yields to analysis. Following the money works.

Greenberg’s series of detective stories begins and ends with Sarah Meiklejohn, now a professor in cryptography and security at University College London. As a graduate student circa 2012, she began studying how bitcoin was being used, and developed clustering techniques that ultimately made it possible to understand what was happening inside the network and identify individual users and owners. Following in her footsteps are an array of interested detectives: the fledgling company Chainalysis, Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and international police. She herself declined a well-paid offer to join them; she sees her role as that of an impartial researcher issuing a public advisory.

At every step the investigators had help from the criminals themselves, who over and over again were remarkably sloppy about their own security. Ross Ulbricht, was identified as the administrator of Silk Road because he’d once posted his real email address to a coding forum. Alexandre Cazes, the owner of AlphaBay, was successfully arrested because he kept helpfully posting details of his many female conquests to an online forum, helping the agents following him build a detailed understanding of his whereabouts.

Each takedown has been followed by efforts to improve blockchain privacy. But even so, investigators have years’ worth of leads they can still follow up. And by then, as Danish entrepreneur Michael Gronager says toward the end of the book, referring to the then new, more resistant technologies Monero and Zcash, “Any of these systems, anything that’s developed, you always see a couple of years alter, someone finds something.” Nothing’s perfect.

Appropriate privacy

At a workshop this week, one of the organizers posed a question that included the term “appropriate”. As in: “lawful access while maintaining appropriate user privacy”. We were there to think about approaches that could deliver better privacy and security over the next decade, with privacy defined as “the embedding of encryption or anonymization in software or devices”.

I had to ask: What work is “appropriate” doing in that sentence?

I had to ask because last weekend’s royal show was accompanied by preemptive arrests well before events began – at 7:30 AM. Most of the arrested were anti-monarchy protesters armed with luggage straps and placards, climate change protesters whose T-shirts said “Just Stop Oil”, and volunteers for the Night Stars on suspicion that the rape whistles they hand out to vulnerable women might be used to disrupt the parading horses. All of these had coordinated with the Metropolitan Police in advance or actually worked with them…which made no difference. All were held for many hours. Since then, the news has broken that an actual monarchist was arrested, DNA-sampled, fingerprinted, and held for 13 hours just for standing *near* some protesters.

It didn’t help the look of the thing that several days before the Big Show, the Met tweeted a warning that: “Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.”

The arrests were facilitated by the last-minute passage of the Public Order Act just days before with the goal of curbing “disruptive” protests. Among the now-banned practices is “locking on” – that is, locking oneself to a physical structure, a tactic the suffragettes used. among many others in campaigning for women’s right to vote. Because that right is now so thoroughly accepted, we tend to forget how radical and militant the Suffragists had to be to get their point across and how brutal the response was. A century from now, the mainstream may look back and marvel at the treatment meted out to climate change activists. We all know they’re *right*, whether or not we like their tactics.

Since the big event, the House of Lords has published its report on current legislation. The government is seeking to expand the Public Order Act even further by lowering the bar for “serious disruption” from “significant” and “prolonged” to “more than minor” and may include the cumulative impact of repeated protests in the same area. The House of Lords is unimpressed by these amendments via secondary legislation, first because of their nature, and second because they were rejected during the scrutiny of the original bill, which itself is only days old. Secondary legislation gets looked at less closely; the Lords suggest that using this route to bring back rejected provisions “raises possible constitutional issues”. All very Polite for accusing the government of abusing the system.

In the background, we’re into the fourth decade of the same argument between governments and technical experts over encryption. Technical experts by and large take the view that opening a hole for law enforcement access to encrypted content fatally compromises security; law enforcement by and large longs for the old days when they could implement a wiretap with a single phone call to a major national telephone company. One of the technical experts present at the workshop phrased all this gently by explaining that providing access enlarges the attack surface, and the security of such a system will always be weaker because there are more “moving parts”. Adding complexity always makes security harder.

This is, of course, a live issue because of the Online Safety bill, a sprawling mess of 262 pages that includes a requirement to scan public and private messaging for child sexual abuse material, whether or not the communications are encrypted.

None of this is the fault of the workshop we began with, which is part of a genuine attempt to find a way forward on a contentious topic, and whose organizers didn’t have any of this in mind when they chose their words. But hearing “appropriate” in that way at that particular moment raised flags: you can justify anything if the level of disruption that’s allowed to trigger action is vague and you’re allowed to use “on suspicion of” indiscriminately as an excuse. “Police can do what they want to us now,” George Monbiot writes at the Guardian of the impact of the bill.

Lost in the upset about the arrests was the Met’s decision to scan the crowds with live facial recognition. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of this technology. There will be no more recurring debates about ID cards because our faces will do the job. Nothing has been said about how the Met used it on the day, whether its use led to arrests (or on what grounds), or what the Met plans to do with the collected data. The police – and many private actors – have certainly inhaled the Silicon Valley ethos of “ask forgiveness, not permission”.

In this direction of travel, many things we have taken for granted as rights become privileges that can be withdrawn at will, and what used to be public spaces open to all become restricted like an airport or a small grocery store in Whitley Bay. This is the sliding scale in which “appropriate user privacy” may be defined.

Illustrations: Protesters at the coronation (by Alisdair Hickson at Wikimedia .

Strike two

Whatever happens with the Hollywood writers’ strike that began on Tuesday, the recent golden era of American TV, which arguably began with The Sopranos, is ending for viewers as well as creators.

A big reason for that golden era was that Hollywood’s loss of interest in grown-up movies pushed actors and writers who formerly looked down on TV to move across to where the more interesting work was finding a home. Another was the advent of streaming services, which competed with existing channels by offering creators greater freedom – and more money. It was never sustainable.

Streaming services’ business models are different. For nearly a decade, Netflix depended on massive debt to build a library to protect itself when the major studios ended their licensing deals. The company has so far gotten away with it because of (now ended) low interest rates and Wall Street’s focus on subscriber numbers in valuing its shares. Newer arrivals such as Amazon, Apple, and Disney can all finance loss-making startup streaming services from their existing businesses. All of these are members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, along with broadcast networks, cable providers, and motion picture studios. For the purposes of the strike, they are the “enemy”.

This landscape could not be more different than that of the last writers’ strike, in 2007-2008, when DVD royalties were important and streaming was the not-yet future. Of the technology companies refusing to bargain today, only Netflix was a player in 2007 – and it was then sending out DVDs by mail.

Essentially, what is happening to Hollywood writers is what happened to songwriters when music streaming services took over the music biz: income shrinkage. In 2021, veteran screenwriter Ken Levine, gave the detail of his persistently shrinking residuals (declining royalties paid for reuse). When American Airlines included an episode he directed of Everyone Loves Raymond in its transcontinental in-flight package for six months, his take from the thousands of airings was $1.19. He also documented, until he ended his blog in 2022, other ways writers are being squeezed; at Disconnect, Paris Marx provides a longer list. The Writers Guild of America’s declared goals are to redress these losses and bring residuals and other pay on streaming services into line with older broadcasters.

Even an outsider can see the bigger picture: broadcast networks, traditionally the biggest payers, are watching their audiences shrink and retrenching, and cable and streaming services commission shorter seasons, which they renew at a far more leisurely pace. Also a factor is the shift in which broadcast networks reair their new shows a day or two later on their streaming service. The DVD royalties that mattered in the 2007-2008 strike are dying away, and just as in music royalties from streaming are a fraction of the amount. Overall, the WGA says that in the last decade writers’ average incomes have dropped by 4% – 23% if you include inflation. Meanwhile, industry profits have continued to rise.

The new issue on the block is AI – not because large language models are good enough to generate good scripts (as if), but because writers fear the studios will use them to generate crappy scripts and then demand that the writers rewrite them into quality for a pittance. Freelance journalists have already reported seeing publishers try this gambit.

In 2007, 2007, and again in 2017, Levine noted that the studios control the situation. They can make a deal and end the strike any time they decide it’s getting too expensive or disruptive. Eventually, he said, the AMPTP will cut a deal, writers will get some of what they need, and everyone will go back to work. Until then, the collateral damage will mount to writers and staff in adjacent industries and California’s economy. At Business Insider, Lucia Moses suggests that Netflix, Amazon, and Disney all have enough content stockpiled to see them through.

Longer-term, there will be less predictable consequences. In 2007-2008, Leigh Blickley reported in a ten-years-later lookback at the Huffington Post, these included the boom in “unscripted” reality TV and the death of pathways into the business for new writers.

Underlying all this is a simple but fundamental change. Broadcast networks cared what Americans watched because their revenues depended on attracting large audiences that advertisers would pay to reach. Until VCRs arrived to liberate us from the tyranny of schedules, the networks competed on the quality and appeal of their programming in each time slot. Streaming services compete on their whole catalogue, and care only that you subscribe; ratings don’t count.

The WGA warns that the studios’ long-term goal is to turn screenwriting into gig economy work. In 2019, at BIG, Matt Stoller warned that Netflix was predatorily killing Hollywood, first by using debt financing to corner the market, and second by vertically integrating its operation. Like the the studios that were forced to divest their movie theaters in 1948, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple own content, controls its distribution, and sells retail access. It should be no surprise if a vertically integrated industry with a handful of monopolistic players cuts costs by treating writers the way Uber treats drivers: enshittification.

The WGA’s 12,000 members know their skills, which underpin a trillion-dollar industry, are rare. They have a strong union and a long history of solidarity. If they can’t win against modern corporate extraction, what hope for the rest of us?

Illustrations: WGA members picketing in 2007 (by jengod at Wikimedia).

The privacy price of food insecurity

One of the great unsolved questions continues to be: what is my data worth? Context is always needed: worth to whom, under what circumstances, for what purpose? Still, supermarkets may give us a clue.

At Novara Media, Jake Hurfurt, who runs investigations for Big Brother Watch, has been studying suprmarket loyalty cards. He finds that increasingly only loyalty card holders have access to special offers, which used to be open to any passing customer.

Tesco now and Sainsburys soon, he says, “are turning the cost-of-living crisis into a cost-of-privacy crisis”,

Neat phrasing, but I’d say it differently: these retailers are taking advantage of the cost-of-living crisis to extort desperate people ito giving up their data. The average value of the discounts might – for now – give a clue to the value supermarkets place on it.

But not for long, since the pattern going forward is a predictable one of monopoly power: as the remaining supermarkets follow suit and smaller independent shops thin out under the weight of rising fuel bills and shrinking margins, and people have fewer choices, the savings from the loyalty card-only special offers will shrink. Not so much that they won’t be worth having, but it seems obvious they’ll be more generous with the discounts – if “generous” is the word – in the sign-up phase than they will once they’ve achieved customer lock-in.

The question few shoppers are in a position to answer while they’re strying to lower the cost of filling their shopping carts is what the companies do with the data they collect. BBW took the time to analyze Tesco’s and Sainsburys’ privacy policies, and found that besides identity data they collect detailed purchase histories as well as bank accounts and payment information…which they share with “retail partners, media partners, and service providers”. In Tesco’s case, these include Facebook, Google, and, for those who subscribe to them, Virgin Media and Sky. Hyper-targeted personal ads right there on your screen!

All that sounds creepy enough. But consider what could well come next. Also this week, a cross-party group of 50 MPs and peers and cosinged by BBW, Privacy International and Liberty, wrote to Frasers Group deploring that company’s use of live facial recognition in its stores, which include Sports Direct and the department store chain House of Fraser. Frasers Group’s purpose, like retailers and pub chains were trialing a decade ago , is effectively to keep out people suspected of shoplifting and bad behavior. Note that’s “suspected”, not “convicted”.

What happens as these different privacy invasions start to combine?

A store equipped with your personal shopping history and financial identity plus live facial recognition cameras, knows the instant you walk into the store who you are, what you like to buy, and how valuable a customer your are. Such a system, equipped with some sort of socring, could make very fine judgments. Such as: this customer is suspected of stealing another customer’s handbag, but they’re highly profitable to us, so we’ll let that go. Or: this customer isn’t suspected of anything much but they look scruffy and although they browse they never buy anything – eject! Or even: this journalist wrote a story attacking our company. Show them the most expensive personalized prices. One US entertainment company is already using live facial recognition to bar entry to its venues to anyone who works for any law firm involved in litigation against it. Britain’s data protection laws should protect us against that sort of abuse, but will they survive the upcoming bonfire of retained EU law?

And, of course, what starts with relatively anodyne product advertising becomes a whole lot more sinister when it starts getting applied to politics, voter manipulation and segmentation, and the “pre-crime” systems

Add the possibilities of technology that allows retailers to display personalized pricing in-store, just like an online retailer could do in the privacy of your own browser, Could we get to a scenario where a retailer, able to link your real world identity and purchasing power to your online nd offline movements could perform a detailed calculation of what you’d be willing to pay for a particular item? What would surge pricing for the last remaining stock of the year’s hottest toy on Christmas Eve look like?

This idea allows me to imagine shopping partnerships, where the members compare prices and the partner with the cheapest prices buys that item for the whole group. In this dystopian future, I imagine such gambits would be banned.

Most of this won’t affect people rich enough to grandly refuse to sign up for loyalty cards, and none of it will affect people rich and eccentric enough to do source everything from local, independent shops – and, if they’re allowed, pay cash.

Four years ago, Jaron Lanier toured with the proposal that we should be paid for contributing to commercial social media sites. The problem with this idea was and is that payment creates a perverse incentive for users to violate their own privacy even more than they do already, and that fair payment can’t be calculated when the consequences of disclosure are perforce unknown.

The supermarket situation is no different. People need food security and affordability, They should not have to pay for that with their privacy.

Illustrations: .London supermarket checkout, 2006 (via Wikimedia.