Welcome to the world of tomorrow

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This article is under license CC BY-ND 2.5 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the “nom de plume” of Cassandra, born in 2005.

An article from way back in 2005 written by Frank Rieger, 17 years have passed and it seems more relevant than ever.

This article was written on December 20, 2005 from Frank Rieger

Cassandra Crossing 257/ Welcome to the world of tomorrow

We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow

L'item was first published in 2005 on the datenschleuder. #89, the quarterly magazine of the Chaos Communication Club. Translation by Maria Monno and Tommaso Canepa. Text and translation are published below Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license.

Losing a war is never a good situation. It is therefore not surprising that most people do not want to accept that we have lost. We had a good opportunity to tame the ferocious beast of global surveillance technology until approximately September 10, 2001.

A day later we had lost.

All the hopes we had to keep big business and “security forces” at bay and develop interesting alternative concepts in the virtual world have evaporated along with the smoke from the Twin Towers.

Just before that, everything seemed to be going not too badly. We had survived the Millennium bug with little more than a few scratches. The outlook for the entire world was moderately optimistic, after all. The “New Economy” bubble had given many of us fun things to do and the fleeting hope of a buck just around the corner. We had won the clipper-chip battle, and encryption laws, as we used to know them, were a thing of the past. The trends of technological development seemed most of the time to go in the direction of freedom. The future appeared as a clear road towards the Nirvana of eternal broadband, towards the domination of ideas over facts and the dissolution of national states. Big business was at our mercy because we were the ones who knew what the future would look like and who had the technologies to create it. These were the good times. Save them as a bedtime story to tell your grandchildren, because these times will never return.

We are now entering another type of future, one that we imagined would be the most pessimistic scenario. This is the "bad" version, the future we never wanted, the one we fought to prevent. We failed. It probably wasn't even our fault. But now we are forced to live there.

Democracy is already over

By their very nature Western democracies have become a breeding ground for lobbyists, industrial interests and conspiracies who have no interest in maintaining true democracy. However, “the show must go on”, the fiction of democracy must be continued. It is a convenient fiction, which keeps those individuals occupied who might otherwise become dangerous to the status quo. The show of democracy provides those to blame when things go wrong and keeps the illusion of participation alive. The system also produces regulated and structured conflicts to deliberate which interest groups and conspiracies should prevail over others for a while. In most cases this system prevents the onset of overt and violent power struggles that could destabilize everything. It is therefore in the interests of most actors to keep at least some elements of the current “democracy show” alive. The system as it now stands is useful to even the most evil of conspiracies. Certainly those features of democracy that might reserve unpleasant surprises, such as direct elections on key issues, are those least likely to survive in the long term. Obviously, those in power long to minimize the influencing power of the chaotic and unpredictable will of the people as much as possible. Real government decisions are not made by ministers or parliament. The real power lies in the hands of undersecretaries, or other high-ranking, unelected civil servants, i.e. those who remain in their chairs while politicians come and go. Especially in the bureaucratic apparatus of intelligence agencies, the Ministry of the Interior, the armed forces and other points of centralization of power, long-term plans and decision-making power are not in the hands of the incompetent and mediocre political actors, who are elected more or less at random by the people. Long-term stability is of enormous value within power relations. So it happens that even when the politicians of the states suddenly start to make war on each other, their intelligence agencies continue to cooperate with each other and to trade the results of interceptions as if nothing had happened. Let's try for a moment to look at the world from the perspective of any sixty-year-old bureaucrat who has access to valuable data, the privilege of being paid to look into the future and the task of preparing policies for the coming decades. What we would see would be more or less this:

First,

paid manual labor will be wiped out by technology, even faster than today. Robotics will evolve enough to replace a large portion of the remaining low-end jobs performed by humans. Sure, there will be new jobs, like assisting robots, working in biotechnology, designing stuff, creating nanotechnology, and so on. But they will be few compared to today, and will require a high level of education. Globalization will continue its course without mercy and will also cause the export of many intellectual jobs to India and China, as soon as education levels allow it. Thus it ends up that a large percentage of the population of Western societies, at least a third, but it could even be half of those of working age, will find themselves without real paid employment. On the one hand there are those whose talents and skills can be found elsewhere more cheaply, on the other those more inclined to manual work: not only the less educated, but simply all those who can no longer find decent work. This segment of the population needs to be appeased in some way, with Disney or with the Dictatorship, most likely with both. The problem of unemployment severely affects the state's ability to pay for social benefits. Because we reach a point where it becomes cheaper to invest in the armed forces of repression and establish a government of terror, rather than pay benefits to the unemployed to purchase social peace. Criminal activities suddenly seem more interesting when you can no longer have a decent job. Violence is an inevitable consequence of the degradation of social standards. Universal surveillance could soften the consequences for the benefit of those who remain in possession of some wealth to defend.

Second,

Climate changes increase the frequency and degree of danger of natural disasters, creating an emergency condition on a global scale. Depending on geographic characteristics, large areas of the Earth could become uninhabitable due to drought, floods, fires or other disasters. This generates a multitude of undesirable effects: large numbers of people need to move, agricultural production collapses, industrial centers and cities could be damaged to the point that evacuation remains the only sensible choice to make. The loss in terms of unusable or uninsurable property will be staggering. The resulting wave of internal migration to “safe areas” will become a significant problem. To respond to natural emergencies it is necessary to have resources, qualified personnel and specific equipment constantly available which would drain the government's already scarce funds. The conscripted parts of the national armed forces could be transformed into disaster relief units, since after all they spend their time loitering with no real work to do except securing fossil energy resources abroad and helping the border police.

Third,

migratory pressure from neighboring areas will increase in all Western countries. It appears that climate disasters will hit the regions of Africa and Latin America more ferociously, at least initially, and it is highly unlikely that local economies will react better than those of Western countries, with globalization and other problems that they are expected. Thus the number of people who will want to migrate to an equally uninhabitable elsewhere at all costs will increase significantly. Western countries certainly need a certain amount of immigration to fill their demographic gaps, but the number of people who want to enter will be much higher than desired. Managing an immigration process tailored to demographic needs is a thankless job with which things can only get worse. The almost inevitable reaction will be a real Fortress Europe: strict border controls and fortifications, frequent and omnipresent identity checks, fast and ruthless deportations of illegal immigrants, biometric checks at every corner. The use of technologies for border control can become quite effective once the last bastions of ethics have fallen.

Fourth,

There will be a point in the coming decades when the energy crisis will deal its greatest blow. Oil will cost a fortune, as production capacity will no longer be able to meet growing demand. Natural gas and coal will last little longer. A Nuclear Renaissance could alleviate the worst of suffering. But the key question is that a total revolution in energy infrastructure will be essential. Whether the transition will be violent, painful and destructive for society, or just annoying and expensive, will depend above all on how long before the oil peak we decide to invest in new energy systems on a global scale. Procrastination is the surest recipe for disaster. The military and geostrategic race for the remaining large oil reserves has already begun and will cost a lot in terms of resources.

Fifth,

we are on the brink of a phase of technological development that may require draconian restrictions and controls to prevent social disorder. Genetic engineering and other biotechnologies such as nanotechnology (and potentially free energy technologies if they exist) will put immense power in the hands of capable and well-informed people. Given the increase in collective hysteria, most people (and certainly those in power) will certainly not continue to believe that common sense can avoid the worst. There will be a tendency to control, with the aim of keeping this type of technology in the hands of "trusted" companies or entities. These controls, obviously, will need to be strengthened; Surveillance of suspicious individuals must be implemented to obtain in-depth knowledge of potential dangers. Science may no longer be “harmless” and self-regulating, but something that needs to be carefully monitored and regulated, at least in critical areas. The measures needed to contain a potential global pandemic of the Strange Virus of the Year are in fact only a subset of those needed to contain a bio- or nanotechnological disaster.

Now, what comes of this worldview? What social changes are needed to address these trends from the perspective of a sixty-year-old power broker?

The strategy is to focus everything on a huge investment in internal security.

Presenting the problem to the population as a choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives, that is, between a freedom that generates uncertainty and danger or an assured survival under the protective umbrella of the trusted State, becomes increasingly easier as the crisis develops . The wealthier segments of the population will certainly need to be protected from illegal immigrants, criminals, terrorists, and implicitly also from the anger of less wealthy citizens. And since our current system values the rich more than the poor, the rich are sure to get the protection they want. The surveillance industry will certainly be happy to lend a hand, especially where the state is no longer able to provide protection that suits the tastes of these fortunate ones.

Traditional democratic values have been eroded to the point that most people no longer even care about them. Thus the loss of the rights for which our predecessors fought until not too long ago is suddenly accepted with pleasure by that majority that can easily be subdued through intimidation. “Terrorism” is the theme of the present, but others will follow. All these “themes” can and will be used to transform European societies into something that has never been seen before: a democratically legitimized police state, governed by an unimpeachable elite with the means of total surveillance, made efficient by the incredible discretion of modern technology. With the enemy (immigrants, terrorists, displaced by climate catastrophes, criminals, the poor, mad scientists, strange diseases) at our gates, the price to pay for "protection" will seem acceptable to us.

Inventing out-of-the-box “terrorist threats” through stupid foreign policies and senseless intelligence operations is a convenient way to establish a democratically legitimized police state. Nobody cares that road accidents alone cause many more deaths than terrorists. The fear of terrorism accelerates social changes and provides the excuse to make necessary the tools of suppression against future dangers.
What we now call “anti-terrorism measures” for those in power are but a conscious, long-term preparation for the world of the future described above.

The Technologies of Oppression
We can imagine most technologies of surveillance and oppression quite easily. Widespread coverage of CCTV cameras is already a reality in some cities. Analyzing communication patterns (who talks to whom and when) is frighteningly efficient. Recording movement patterns derived from cell phones, traffic monitoring systems and GPS is just the next wave that is now just building.
Recording purchases (online, with credit or debit cards) is another tasty source of data. The integration of all these data sources into an automatic analysis of behavior patterns already happens now, mostly in an obscure form.

The fundamental problem in establishing an effective police state based on the surveillance system is to keep the profile moderately low to ensure that the "ordinary citizen" only feels protected and not threatened, at least until all the pieces are in place. just to make it permanent. The first principle of the twenty-first century police state is that all those who "have nothing to hide" should not be bothered beyond necessity. But this objective becomes more complicated, given that the increase in the availability of information on even the smallest daily contraventions will increase the "moral" pressure to prosecute. Intelligence agencies have always known that effective work on the results of wiretaps is only possible if a careful selection is made between the cases in which it is necessary to intervene and those (most) in which it is better to keep quiet and enjoy the show.

On the other hand, the police force in general (with a few exceptions) is responsible for taking action against any crime or misdemeanor of which it becomes aware. Of course, they already have a good margin of discretion. With access to all the information outlined above, we will eventually arrive at a system of selective law enforcement. It is impossible to live in a complex system without violating some rule here or there every now and then, often without even realizing it. If all of these violations were documented and available for prosecution, the entire fabric of society would change dramatically. The old hallmark of totalitarian societies — the arbitrary persecution of political enemies — will become a reality within the framework of the rule of law. At least as long as the affected people can be made to appear as the enemy of the day, the system can be used to effectively silence opposition. At a certain point the transition to open and automatic application of the law and maintenance of order may take place in view of the fact that any resistance to the system will by definition be "terrorism". The development of society will come to a standstill and the imposition of law and the paradise of order can no longer be questioned.

Now, moving away from the reality of this aforementioned sixty-year-old bureaucrat, where is the hope for freedom, creativity and fun in all this? To be honest, we must start from the assumption that it will take a couple of decades before the balance will tip in favor of the deprivation of liberty, sanctioning the collapse of society as we know it. Only if oppression becomes too heavy and open will there be any hope of soon restoring a state of general progress for humanity. If the powers of tomorrow are instead astute enough to maintain the system discreetly, we cannot make any predictions as to when this new Middle Ages will end.

And what do we do now?
Maybe moving to the mountains, becoming a gardener or carpenter, seeking happiness in communities of like-minded people, in isolation from the entire world, could be the solution? The idea usually tends to lose much of its appeal in the eyes of those who have actually tried. It might work if you're the type who can find eternal happiness milking cows at five in the morning. But for the rest of us, the only realistic option is to live in and with the world, however ugly it may become. However, we need to build our own communities, real or virtual.

The game of politics and lobbies
What should you invest your energy in then? Trying to play the game of politics, fighting against software patents, surveillance laws and privacy violations in parliament and the courts can be a life's work, and it has the advantage that every now and then you win a few battles that can slow down the things. You may even be able to avoid senseless atrocities here and there, but ultimately the development of technology and the level of panic among the population will eat up much of your gains for breakfast.
This is not to belittle the work and dedication of those who fight on this front, but you need to have a lawyer's mindset and a high level of tolerance of frustration to derive gratification from it, and this is not for everyone. Nonetheless, we need lawyers.

Talent and Ethics
Some of us sold our souls, perhaps to pay the rent when the bubble burst and good, morally simple jobs were in short supply. They sold their brains to big business or government to build the kinds of things we knew perfectly well how to build, the ones we fantasized about in a sort of intellectual game with each other, without really thinking about putting them into practice: such as infrastructure surveillance, software for analyzing video images in real time, for observing movements, faces and car license plates; such as data mining to represent large amounts of information in relational and behavioral graphs; as interception systems to record and analyze every single phone call, email, click on the web. Tools to track every single movement of people and things.

Thinking about what can be done with the result of someone's work is one thing, refusing to do it "just" because it might be the worst the world has ever conceived is something entirely different, especially when there is no other viable option to earn money. to experience in an intellectually stimulating way around. Many of the projects we fantasized about were also justifiable, after all they weren't "that bad" or they didn't constitute any "real danger". Often the excuse remained that it would not have been technically feasible in those days anyway, there was too much data at stake to get a spider out of the hole. Ten years later suddenly it's doable. Here it is.

While it would certainly be better if the surveillance industry disappeared due to lack of talent, the most realistic scenario for solving the problem is that we must continue to keep in touch with those who have sold their souls to the devil. We need to create a culture that can be compared to the selling of indulgences in the previous Middle Ages: you may be working for the "bad guys", but we are more than willing to sell you moral absolution in exchange for a little knowledge. Tell us what is happening there, what are the capabilities, plans, what terrible scandals have been hidden. Honestly, we know very little about the capabilities of modern interception systems used “on the other side of the force” after Echelon, which has since become somewhat obsolete, was discovered. All the new instruments that monitor the internet, the current and future use of profiling databases, assisted video surveillance systems, behavior analyzers, etc. are almost unknown to us or very rarely known only in brief.

We need to know how intelligence agencies work. It is of utmost importance to find out how methods that use backdoors work in practice instead of cracking keys on a large scale, and which backdoors are built or inserted into our systems for this specific purpose. Building “clean” systems will be quite difficult, given the multitude of options for producing backdoors, from the operating system and applications to hardware and CPUs that are too complex to test. Open Source only helps in theory, because who really has the time to check all the sources…

Of course, the risk involved in making this type of knowledge public is high, especially for those who work for the "dark side". This is why we need to build structures that can reduce risk. We need systems to submit documents anonymously, methods to cleanse both paper and electronic documents of “digital fingerprints”. And we certainly need to develop means to identify the inevitable cases of misinformation that will surely be spread across communication channels to confuse us.

Build technology to preserve the option of change
We are facing a phase of furious and unprecedented in history assault by surveillance technologies. The debate about whether crime or terrorism can be reduced is no longer relevant. The actual impact on society can already be felt, for example with the content mafia (aka RIAA) demanding access to all data to preserve its business model. We will need to build technologies that preserve freedom of speech, thought and communication. There is currently no other long-term solution. Political barriers against total surveillance will have a very short half-life before they are completely dismantled.

The universal acceptance of electronic communication systems has been of enormous help to political movements. It is true that keeping their secrets hidden has become more difficult and more expensive for those in power. Unfortunately though, everyone else is also experiencing the same problem. So one thing we can do to help society progress is to provide tools, knowledge and experience to ensure secure communications to any political and social organization that shares our ideals. We must not be excessively parsimonious in choosing our friends, anyone who opposes the centralized structure of power and is against totalitarianism in general should be welcome. Having some air to breathe becomes more important than wanting to know why it is used.

Anonymity will become a very precious thing. Encrypting communications is necessary and desirable but helps little as long as the recipients of the messages are known. Traffic analysis is one of the most efficient intelligence systems around. Even just by observing movements and communications with computerized procedures, it is possible to find "interesting" individuals, individuals for whom it is worth investing some money in more detailed forms of surveillance. The implementation of anonymity technologies is extremely urgent, given that laws on the retention of personal data have been passed in Europe. We need opportunistic anonymity as much as we need opportunistic encryption. At the moment, all the anonymity technologies that have been deployed are instantly flooded with file-sharing content. We need solutions to this, preferably systems that can handle the load, since anonymity loves company and more traffic means less chance of being identified by any kind of attack.

Closed user groups have already taken hold in those communities that have a strong sense and need for privacy. The darkest fringes of the hacker communities and a lot of warez circles have already gone “dark”. Others will follow. The technology to build a closed user group that operates in the real world isn't here yet. We just improvised options that work in very specific cases. In general, the technology is desperately needed to create closed groups of fully encrypted users to transmit any type of content with a reasonable degree of anonymity.

Decentralized infrastructures are what we need. Peer-to-peer networks are a good example of what works and what doesn't. As long as there are centralized elements they can be taken and closed under any pretext. Only peer-to-peer systems that require as little centralized elements as possible are able to survive. Interestingly, military networks have the same needs. We need to borrow from them, in the same way that they borrow from commercial technologies and Open source.

Designing with the abuse of surveillance technologies in mind is the next logical step. In fact, many of us are involved in the design and implementation of systems that can easily be abused by surveillance. Whether they are online stores, databases, RFID systems, communications systems, or common blog servers, we need to design things securely to protect against possible future abuse of data retention or interception. There is often considerable freedom in the design. We must use this freedom to develop systems that retain as little data as possible, that use encryption, and that preserve as much anonymity as possible. We need a culture to be created around this idea. A system will only be reviewed by our peer-reviewers as "good" if it adheres to these criteria. Sure, it might be hard to sacrifice the personal power that comes with access to beneficial data. But keep in mind that you won't have this job forever, and anyone who comes after you may very well not be as concerned with privacy as you are. Limiting the amount of data collected about people in everyday transactions and communications is an absolute must if you are a serious hacker. There are many good things that can be done with RFID technology. For example, facilitate the recycling of goods and make it more effective by storing information on the composition of materials and clues on the manufacturing process in tags attached to electronic gadgets. But to be able to exploit the positive potential of technologies like this, the system needs to limit or prevent "side effects" as much as possible already in the design, not later as an afterthought.

Not getting your friends into trouble through stupidity or ignorance will also be essential. We are all used to the bullshit of forwarding originally encrypted emails unencrypted, with complete disregard for other people's data or playing with information received in confidence. This is no longer possible. We are faced with an enemy that in research works is euphemistically defined as the "Global Observer". This definition has taken on a literal meaning. You can no longer rely on information or communications that can escape or be hidden by background noise. It's all on one file. Forever. And it may come and it will be used against you. And your innocent "slip" five years ago could get someone you care about into trouble.

“Shut up and enjoy the show or go public immediately” could become the new motto of security researchers. Submitting security issues to manufacturers gives security agencies a long window in which they can use the issue to attack systems and plant backdoors. It is well known that backdoors are an encryption bypass system and that all major vendors have an agreement with their countries' respective intelligence agencies to pass on "0 day" exploits as soon as they come into their possession. In the months or even years it takes them to create a patch, agencies can use the 0 day exploit and not risk being exposed. If an intrusion is accidentally discovered, no one will be able to suspect foul play as the problem will subsequently be resolved by the manufacturer itself. So if you discover problems, before sending them to the manufacturer, at least publish enough information to allow people to discover an intrusion.

Most importantly: have fun!

Spies are people to be laughed at, because their work is stupid, boring and ethically speaking the worst on earth to earn money, a bit like threatening and mugging grannies on the street. We need to develop a culture of "let's have fun confusing them", which plays with the imperfections, flaws, problems and errors of interpretation intrinsic to the system and almost inevitable when carrying out large-scale surveillance. Artists are the ideal company for this type of approach. We need a general culture under the motto "in your face, voyeur!". Ridiculing, humiliating and degrading the surveillance system, giving people something to laugh about, must be the goal. And this also prevents us from becoming tired and frustrated. If there's no fun in beating the system, we'll quickly get tired of it and it will win.

Then we need to be flexible, creative and fun, not angry, idealistic and stubborn.

Marco Calamari

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