THE SURVEILLANCE ARMS RACE

The Eye of Sauron

As quite a few TTPers know, Cryptohippie has moved to routers for our services. What they may not know is why, and that’s simply because the surveillance arms race requires it.

Things have gotten much worse and we can’t provide serious protection without this upgrade. I’d like you to understand why.

Sauron Is On Steroids

I suspect that almost all of us are familiar with the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. In one place Tolkien called it, “the Eye piercing all shadows.” It makes a wonderful metaphor for mass surveillance systems, which now see through almost any shadow to surveil the billions of us at once.

The truth about mass surveillance is that it’s far worse than people understand. In fact, I’ve often stopped short of telling people all the facts, because it was simply too much for them to take. (Though I won’t do that today.)

There are two fundamental facts about mass surveillance that are essential:

1. Technology has advanced, making the real-time use of all that data not only possible, but cheap. All of the decisions, including the personalized content we’ll talk about below, is done with computers.
2. Customized content is so cheap and easy that it’s being done to billions of people every day.

My statement on customized content is trivial to prove: Just log on to YouTube and have your web-surfing friend do the same. You’ll instantly notice that the pages you see are not the same. In other words, they’ve been customized for you.

In the blink of an eye, Google’s data centers (they own YouTube) have checked your history and displayed the content that makes you most valuable to them.

So, yes, you are being fed personalized content, and its purpose is to manipulate you. The better Google and the rest can do that, the more money they make. These are public companies, driven to increase their profits every quarter – they have every incentive to learn how to use you better… to use you, personally, to increase their quarterly figures.

And they have acres of computers with which to do it. So, they are doing it.

And for a bit more proof, here are the stories of Facebook’s “experiment” back in 2012 (a long time ago in “Internet years”), and Google’s training video that was leaked in 2018. I found both terribly damning, and those are just the things we’ve discovered by accident.

You might also bear in mind that the Snowden slides contained training materials for manipulating Internet users, and particularly for destroying reputations. That’s all old information now, of course – everything is automated these days – but it shows, very clearly, that the NSA is in on the same game.

What Spy Master Would Turn Away?

Consider what mass surveillance offers the intelligence agency… every intelligence agency:

By sucking up Internet traffic, either directly of through Facebook, et al, you can conduct deep and persistent intelligence on billions of people at once, and for a pittance.

What agency could turn that down? And indeed the haven’t. Whether by direct gathering (NSA, GCHQ) or or making friends with Google (several of them) or by deep financial surveillance (the EU), they’re all in on the game.

The name of that game is “information advantage.” To be a player you have to get the most information, have the best big data systems to run it through, and not let anyone else know what you’ve got.

This is the situation we’re in right now, and here is a quote to establish the point, from Jennifer Sims’ book, The Future of Counter-Intelligence:

If information is power, then those who master this digital chaos first, and derive meaning from it, will likely gain critical advantages. Intelligence professionals, whether in business or in service to the state, are therefore in a silent race to develop tools for mining and analyzing growing volumes of swiftly moving information and then to use it…

“But I’m Not A Bad Guy”

I’m sure you’re not, but that’s not the point: You are a dataset, and they need you. They want to know what you eat, how you sleep, which of your children you love the most, and everything else about you. But all of that is only the first step. What they really need is to know what you’ll respond to. That’s the payoff.

Again: Intelligently manipulating individuals is not only possible, but dirt cheap. So long as you use the Internet unprotected, they will do this to you… they are doing this to you. Their machines run 24/7 and incorporate multiple data streams, learning from each on a continual basis.

Can you see why I hesitate to tell people about this?

So…

In a nutshell, this is why Cryptohippie had to move to a router model. The surveillors have gotten much, much better, and we can’t do things like protecting machine addresses without using routers. (These routers, by the way, are small and inexpensive. One is simply a USB stick.)

And for those who weren’t aware, Cryptohippie isn’t really one company, it’s several, each doing different things. Our sales company never sees network data, and our network company doesn’t get sales data.

Most importantly, our systems assure (with things like out-of-band authentication, blind signatures and others) that you don’t have to trust anyone… not even us.

Paul Rosenberg is the CEO of Cryptohippie USA and a long-time TTPer.