So It Turns Out,Issue #1
Recent rambles on the intersection of technology and society
Dear friends,
You might be wondering “why is this odd newsletter in my inbox?” Well, it’s an experiment. I’ve realized that I’m a) pretty inconsistent in keeping in touch with folks, and b) really missing writing down things that aren’t tweets or Powerpoint decks. So, this is an effort to solve both!
It’s no secret that I love digging into weird, surprising, counterintuitive stuff. And that I spend most of my time doing that while thinking about the intersection of technology and society. Hopefully some of it will be of interest to you, too (if not, tell me to unsubscribe you, or just unsubscribe — you won’t hurt my feelings!). So here are some things I’ve been thinking about recently:
1. Crypto War. Crypto War Never Changes:
You might not realize it, but your computer is a gun. Well, at least it’s a munition, sort of. Until the 1990s, almost any encryption – the math wizardry that protects your private information from being easy to read was controlled as if it was an advanced war-fighting technology. This is possibly why the dumb phrase you hear in every action movie, “military-grade encryption,” became so popular.
Believe it or not, the US Government would go around threatening anyone who tried to come up with, much less export to Non-Americans, any cryptography that actually kept thing secure. (Crypto by Steven Levy is still the best treatment of this; ping me if you want me to loan you my copy.) We even had a hilarious scheme where the NSA was going to have AT&T sell everyone special, expensive, pretty-bad-crypto chips to put in their phones that the US Government kept the secret keys to, so it could decrypt any phone call it wanted to listen in on. Turns out that this scheme totally sucked and was widely discredited, a bunch of court precedents declared that code was speech and hard to regulate, and then the Clinton Administration basically gave in on regulating cryptography, because they wanted everyone to use the Internet for e-commerce (or as kids call it these days, commerce) and needed things to be secure. So, eventually, endeth Crypto War 1.
And, frankly, for a long while this was pretty OK, even in the mind of nation states. Encryption was still relatively rarely used for things other than your credit card, because it was computationally expensive or hard to implement. And lots of people stored data lots of places that nation-states could get it easily, even if they encrypted it in transit. For example, in the US, government agencies can subpoena your emails older than 6 months without a warrant. But time did its thing, and eventually we’ve had more and more encryption added to more and more communications in transit, and more services where things are only stored at rest on devices like your smartphone, which defaults to being encrypted.
But look at it from Law Enforcement’s perspective. Some nerds gave everyone access to This Internet Thing, and it turns out bad guys use a lot too, and for things that nation-states really dislike. Such as stealing their secrets and hosting them online, or organizing terrorist groups, or sharing imagery of children being horrifically abused, or just selling drugs and pirating software. So the Crypto Wars have started again, with prosecutors once again claiming that Something Must Be Done.
But the Crypto Wars resumed in the light of the aforementioned world where everyone uses the Internet for everything and where Edward Snowden Leaked a Wiki. People now are, to put it lightly, more skeptical of the law enforcement position than a few years ago, and we sort of know how to do encryption well now.* Lots of people – Attorney General William Barr, Republicans in the Senate, the Attorney General of New York, or the Australian Prime Minister -- want back doors into your encrypted communications flying from phone to phone, or magic keys to unlock your encrypted device sitting on the police station desk. But, as Matt Blaze pointed out recently, they’re arguing now against the status quo, one that’s all-pervasive in our society.
All of which is funny, since, well, the technology on your phone now IS an advanced war-fighting technology again:
A brigade of paratroopers deployed in early January to the Middle East in the wake of mounting tensions with Iran has been asked by its leadership to use two encrypted messaging applications on government cell phones.
The use of the encrypted messaging applications Signal and Wickr by the 82nd Airborne’s Task Force Devil underscores the complexity of security and operations for U.S. forces deployed to war zones where adversaries can exploit American communications systems, cell phones and the electromagnetic spectrum.
But it also raises questions as to whether the Department of Defense is scrambling to fill gaps in potential security vulnerabilities for American forces operating overseas by relying on encrypted messaging apps available for anyone to download in the civilian marketplace.
“All official communication on government cell phones within TF Devil has been recommended to use Signal or Wickr encrypted messaging apps,” Maj. Richard Foote, a spokesman for the 1st Brigade Combat Team, told Military Times.
“These are the two apps recommended by our leadership, as they are encrypted and free for download and use,” Foote said.
Foote added that there is no operational discussions via the apps and an extra layer of security is provided because users must go through virtual private networks.
You see, it turns out that the military is Just Another Modern Workplace, and kind of needs smartphones to do its job. But when people text each other using old-fashioned SMS, bad guys can listen in, trivially easily (iMessage is more secure, but it turns out not every government-issued phone is an iPhone, many are Androids for boring procurement reasons). So the military needed to secure its people, and turned to a solution that anyone can download from the App Store, right now.
This is what Attorney General William Barr is proposing backdooring – the thing that even the Department of Defense’s deployed personnel use to avoid being spied on by Iran, etc. In other words, if you’re a cybersecurity professional in the Department of Defense, you now have to spend your days worried that the Department of Justice might accidentally put risky backdoors in the communications channels that your people use to communicate things like “here’s the meeting where a bunch of generals will be at tomorrow.” You, in other words, are desperately hoping that a bunch of civil libertarian hacker dudes win against the US government, to keep the US military safe.
And so, the Crypto Wars continue, weirder than before.
2. Crypto War. Crypto War Never Changes:
Recently, it’s become kind of trendy for military leaders to make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about how they need to change their dress and grooming standards to get more hackers into their force (after updating their Signal App on their government Samsung, so they get the cool new stickers and GIFs).
Now, a sort of naive reading of this is that these leaders are indeed, just joking, and never would do this. But I think they should really consider it!
As Americans, we love to give special attire and/or grooming standards to make people different. Heck, the reason Silicon Valley started wearing jeans in the first place was to try to flatten status hierarchies so that the techies could tell the suits the truth. And the military does it too! In the Civil War, we had cavalry that dressed up like French Algerian soldiers to signify that they learned special skills! Today, every single military specialized, elite unit has its own attire – whether it’s issuing berets, wearing flight suits even when you’re working in an office, having permission to grow beards, or simply being Too High Speed To Wear A Uniform At All. And, let’s be honest, it’s not as if every single veteran-owned clothing business doesn’t sell hoodies already – hoodies are awesome! They’re useful! They can have military logos put on them really easily!
So, a modest proposal: The US military should commission a high-quality, military-grade hoodie for Cyber Command. We can even use some of the money we saved on the Space Force uniform…
Now, if I haven’t lost your attention, may I suggest that Cyber Command officially replace the high-and-tight haircut with the Electronic Frontier Foundation mohawk?
3. Nobody knows anyone who watches esports, or apparently baseball, either:
(Disclosure: I’ve previously worked both for Activision Blizzard, owner of the Overwatch League, as well as for a team in that league)
Other news:
This gave me flashbacks to more than a few Yale Political Union guests.
The Mongol Empire as mechanism of dumpling-diffusion, 1200-1350 AD.
“We concluded we could be awesome”, says former member of Australia’s equivalent of the NSA.
And may all the celebrations you attend this year have sword bouquets.
Next time, on Dave Kasten:
Doing Judaism on the Internet?
Esports or video games, maybe?
Possibly some sort of bartending robot?
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
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