Skip to main content

This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg

Excellent, readable history of the last 40 years of secrets, and of those who felt it was right to reveal those secrets. It starts with Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers and thereby exposed years of government foolishness, greed and stupidity in the Vietnam War, and it ends with the various schisms and dramas surrounding Julian Assange's WikiLeaks and its descendant organizations.

This is good book to complement the best-known recent books about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies: The Bitcoin Standard, Digital Gold and Bitcoin Billionaires. It turns out that cryptography and anonymity are just as necessary for protecting whistleblowers from political repression as they are for protecting an undebasable digital store of value like Bitcoin from repressive monetary repression.

Also noteworthy are the contrasts between Daniel Ellsberg's efforts to leak the Pentagon Papers, and Bradley (uh, Chelsea) Manning's leaks of US military secrets to WikiLeaks. Ellsberg was a distinguished military figure at the peak of his career who made a total, ethical volte face in his loyalties and opinions on the Vietnam War. He spent more than a year squirreling away documents to a copy shop owned by a friend, copying them a few pages at a time. Bradley Manning was basically an unmotivated slacker who was never going to have much of a career in the first place, and who--thanks to modern technology--was able to copy and leak orders of magnitude more information in just hours, simply by copying to CDs he labelled "Lady Gaga." The central irony, of course, is that advancements in technology help leakers more than the governments trying to stop them. 

Which brings us to how embarrassing it is to see how the US government is constantly a step slow in both its futile attempts to limit access to easily obtainable cryptographic technology, or in ham-fisted harassment of leaders in cryptographic technology. See for example the NSA fucking with Pretty Good Privacy inventor Phil Zimmerman, or the ugly example of then-senator Joe Biden trying to sneak a paragraph into a 1991 federal crime bill that would enable "back door" government surveillance of all citizens' voice and data communications. It's as if the US government still conceives of the world of cryptography from its code-breaking triumphs of World War II, long after the world has changed and unbreakable cryptography is easily obtainable by anyone.

Weird dudes abound in this book, and many of the personalities will seem unreasonably paranoid to a normie. But then again, who are we to say? Maybe their paranoia is justified. But Julian Assange, who seems like a high-functioning psychopath without social skills, wins as the weirdest of them all. 

And yet these weird dudes are capable of astounding insights. Assange uses the brilliant lens of viewing repressive governments or secretive unjust institutions as lumbering biological organisms, asymmetrically slowed and stupified by their own responses to leakers. A large secretive institution typically limits information flow across and within itself to try and stymie leaks, and this ends up disrupting the organization's communications and its ability to function--while empowering the leakers. "In a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems." Very interesting insights here.

It's also worth noting Daniel Ellsberg's description of the curse of security clearance in an interesting letter to Henry Kissinger: top secret information and higher and higher security clearance actually warp your mind, make you distrustful and arrogant ("What do those fools know, they don't have my security clearance"), and cause you to know less while you blithely go about assuming you know more.

Other notes: 

1) Adding encryption and remailing via encryption by a third (or nth) party to ensure anonymity.

2) The Tor browser, itself created by the US government, but because it needed true decentralized use by many to work, ends up becoming part of the public domain... just like the internet. 

3) Interesting also to see the cypherpunk cultural values of agency and self-efficacy: "cypherpunks write code" and "Don't spend your time arguing with politicians in the physical world about the rules of the digital one. Create the digital world and, with it, your own rules." Not unlike Bitcoin and its conceptions of personal sovereignty.

4) Then, the Icelandic modern media initiative, a proposal and collection of laws and legal protections intended to make Iceland a haven for whistleblowers and truth tellers (kind of like the Cayman Islands is for banking secrecy). Very interesting legislation, and an insightful thing for a country to offer.

5) Ironic to see WikiLeaks itself have a whistleblower problem, and experience its own dysfunction as a function of its growth, size, age--and its tyrannical leader. And to fall prey to the same biological fragilities that Assange himself wrote about! 

6) You can see some of the problems, the structural problems, of a centralized platform no matter where it sits on the secrecy side, which leads one to think that decentralized platforms are the future for whistleblower sites, personal privacy, social media, and economic platforms.

7) WikiLeaks experiences a schism: two of its founding members leave in an insurrection against Assange followed by sniping and accusations from both sides. Assange really comes off as the real jackass here though, presiding in paranoid, Nixonian style over a dissent-intolerant organization in steep and perhaps terminal decline.

8) But this decline of WikiLeaks gives rise to true decentralized solutions for leaking that lack the fragilities of WikiLeaks: centralized servers that can be attacked or seized, obvious exposure to "donation arteries" like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, which can be easily cut off, etc.

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more