DarkFi Squad

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The right to privacy was invented by two lawyers annoyed about cameras. In 1890 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published an article in the Harvard Law Review arguing that American common law already contained a right nobody had named. Instantaneous photography had arrived, portable cameras did not require a subject to sit still or consent, and a newspaper industry had grown up around printing what the cameras caught. They did not claim privacy was a form of property, which was how earlier cases had reasoned. They argued it belonged to a different category entirely, an interest in inviolate personality, the right of a person to determine how much of themselves enters public circulation. Brandeis returned to it 38 years later from the Supreme Court bench. Dissenting in Olmstead in 1928, on whether wiretapping a telephone without a warrant counted as a search, he wrote that the framers had conferred the right to be let alone, and he called it the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men. He lost that case. It took until 1967 for the Court to come around to his position. Financial surveillance completed that arc while the argument was still about photographs. Every payment recorded, every counterparty logged, retained indefinitely, readable under legal standards written before any of it existed.

Vlad Costea interviews Richard Werner and Amir Taaki (DarkFi).

Cryptography was classified as a munition, so MIT Press printed the source code as a book and the book was exported legally.

Athenian jurors in the 5th century BC voted with bronze disks. Each juror received two. One had a solid axle through the center, one had a hollow axle. Solid meant acquittal, hollow meant conviction. The juror held both disks by the axles with thumb and forefinger covering the ends, walked to the front, dropped one into a bronze urn that counted and one into a wooden urn that was discarded. Nobody could see which was which. The Athenian Agora excavations turned up examples of these ballots, and the design is unmistakably deliberate. The grip conceals the axle. The second urn exists so that dropping a disk is not itself a disclosure. This is a society that ran on public performance. Speeches in the assembly, rhetoric as a central skill, reputation as the currency of political life. And when it came to the moment of judgment they engineered a mechanism to remove observation entirely, because they had understood that a juror who can be seen voting is a juror who can be reached. 2,500 years later the same principle had to be argued from scratch again in Victoria in 1856, and again in Massachusetts in 1888, and it is being argued now about ledgers. The Athenians solved it with a hollow axle and a decoy urn.

Aaron Swartz was fourteen when he coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification. He worked on Creative Commons the following year. He built the tooling behind what became Reddit. He wrote a good deal of the early code for Open Library. He was one of the organizers of the campaign that stopped SOPA in 2012, which almost nobody had believed could be stopped. The consistent thread was access. He held that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly reachable and spent most of his short working life building the plumbing for that idea. He also wrote about a distinction that gets collapsed constantly: transparency for institutions, privacy for individuals. Power should be legible to the people it acts on. People should not be legible to power. These are not competing values, they are the same value pointing in the direction of whoever holds less. The collapse happens when transparency gets applied downward. A public ledger recording every ordinary person's transactions is not transparency. Institutions with resources maintain their opacity through structure and counsel. Individuals do not have that option, so a universal disclosure rule falls entirely on one side.

You were born for so much more.

Spinoza argued for freedom of expression in a book he could not put his name on.

Jung took the word persona from the Latin term for the mask worn by an actor on stage. He defines it as a compromise formation between the individual and society, a functional complex assembled for the sake of adaptation. It is what you present at work, at dinner with your in-laws, in a room where you are outranked. He was explicit that having one is healthy and necessary. Social life is not possible without it.

Experiments in living require the possibility of being wrong without a permanent record of the attempt.

Lunarpunk notices that seeds germinate underground.

You can say something to 4 people that does not survive being said to 4 million.

Secrecy is a civilisational achievement.

Georg Simmel published an essay in 1906 on the sociology of secrecy. Secrecy is one of the great achievements of humanity. Not a lapse from an honest ideal but a positive social technology, and one that arrives late in a society's development rather than early. The reasoning is about differentiation. A small group where everyone knows everything about everyone can only support one kind of person. Complexity requires that information be partial, that different relationships carry different disclosures, that what your employer knows and what your friend knows and what your doctor knows are not the same set. The capacity to hold something back is what allows a person to occupy several relationships at once without collapsing them into one. Simmel also observed that the secret expands the world. It creates a second reality alongside the visible one, and the possibility of that second reality changes the meaning of the first.

A fully transparent ledger crosses every boundary at once. Your rent, your salary, your donations, your medical payments all appear in the same public record with the same visibility to everyone.

Bentham's panopticon was never built in his lifetime, and he considered this the great failure of his life. He wrote a series of letters in 1787 describing a circular building with cells around the rim and an inspection tower at the center. The tower has blinds and lighting arranged so the inmates cannot see whether anyone is inside. The guard may be watching. The guard may have gone home. From the cell there is no way to tell. Bentham's insight was economic. Actual surveillance is expensive. The appearance of possible surveillance is nearly free and produces most of the same behavior. He called it a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.

The ballot box was invented because honest men were being ruined for voting.