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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.

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