UPDATE: [16 September, 2014] This post was originally written just after
these events occurred, in July of 2012. However, I self-censored and
did not post this article until nearly two years later,
in June 2014,
as shown by the git commits for this blog,
due to fear of what people whose voices count far more than mine would say to
Tor’s funders, and the consequences which this might have had for myself and
my colleagues.
Just before putting this post online and sharing it for the first time, I
received an encrypted email from one of the organisers who works for said
funder. It pointed me to an
article
stating that Shanna Winters, after all these years, lost their job as a
Congressional aide, and went to go work for the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA), which is the largest driving force worldwide behind using
Intellectual Property law and the DMCA to justify internet censorship.
In addition to not wishing to anger Tor’s funders, I self-censored due to a
nauseating feeling of what some might call “a sense of professional respect”
for the Congressional staffer I was virulently ranting against. While it is
true that I despise this person, their profession, a good chunk of the
population of Washington D.C., and even the very idea behind the majoritarian
insult-to-freedom that Capitol Hill represents, I was unwilling to post this
article because I worried that it could be contrued as a politically-fueled
argumentum ad hominem against a particularly trollish Congressional staffer,
rather than what I meant, underneath my geeky humour and snide remarks, it to
be: an attack against the idea that a world in which censorship takes place
could ever be considered stable.
The rest of this article is my uncensored account, as I recorded it then, of
visiting Congress for the first time.
· · ·
One of Tor’s funders convinced me to visit the Hill. I explained that this was
a terrible, no-good, very-bad idea. I think they thought it would be funny.
This one pickled tampon of a woman, what’s her name… Shanna Winters. Chief
Counsel to the Subcommittee on The Courts, Internet and Intellectual Property,
chaired by Congressman Howard Berman. There were five of us developers,
introducing ourselves, like five minutes into the meeting, and I said,
“Hi! I’m Isis; I’m with the Tor Project, and through RFA I’m working on
OONI, which is going to be a globally deployed censorship detection framework,
the results of which will be published as open data.”
So many friendly buzzwords. How could she possibly be against all of the
buzzwords? Immediately, Winters asks, “And what about porn?” I thought that
she’d misheard me, so I said, “I’m sorry?”
“What about porn?”
“Uh… I’m afraid I don’t understand the context. What about porn?”
I refrained from asking what kind of porn she was into.
“Does your tool provide people a way to get around blocks?”
“No and yes. No: it provides data on how the block has been implemented. Yes:
that data can be used by projects which create censorship circumvention tools
to better adapt their tools to the context at hand.”
“But you agree that porn should be blocked?”
I stared at her. Then I stared at her some more. And then I was just
speechless, because I couldn’t tell if she was trolling. I just stared at
her. I don’t think I blinked.
I continue to stare for another full minute, running through a checklist of
strategies and calculating probability distributions for items including:
- Have they studied game theory?
- Can I explain game theory?
- Will they understand what a Pareto suboptimal outcome is?
- Can I explain that there are two Pareto suboptimal outcomes to the game
they are playing?
- Do they understand networking?
- Do they understand catastrophe theory?
- Can I explain state transformation matrices and unstable states?
- Wait, do they understand math?!?
- If they don’t understand math, how do I explain anything to them?
- Wait, how do they know anything?
- Do they know anything?
I must have stared at her¹ for a solid minute trying to assess if I should
attempt to explain to her that censorship is an unstable arms race with two
Pareto suboptimal outcomes:
One, a network connected to the rest of the globe with (mostly) no blocks of
any kind, with hackers working on all kinds of things, including better and
safer technologies, as well as ways to break and exploit those technologies.
Or, two, you have no hackers, no circumventions, no trite cyberwar, no pr0n,
whatever, because you have no network. None. Not even unencrypted HTTP over
port 80. Because as soon as there is a path to a server with something
interesting on it, I assure you, we’ll get to it. We’ll use pluggable
transports to transmogrify our traffic; we’ll hijack and spoof identifying
headers for anything you whitelist; we’ll even pop your boxes if we have
to. As long as there is a network, you’re going to have hackers. And as long
as that network doesn’t allow everyone to ask any and all questions about the
world, receive answers to those questions, and explore ideas (yes, even
sexually explicit and politically unsavory ones, you uneducated, endemic,
parochial, fascist in a blue velvet powersuit). You might think you’re
omnipotent sitting up there on your little Hill, and unfortunately that may
near well be the case — with your frequent and flagrant tramplings of
free-means-absolutely-free-for-everyone-everywhere-at-all-times speech,
consent, and voluntary association,² the torpidity you instill with your
bumbling, opaque hands and greedy state corporatism into the market, the
numerous existential threats you pose to humanity and its successors through
your rape of the commons and inhibition of scientific progress… you might
think. But you’re not. Because the one thing you won’t ever censor, you won’t
ever build a prison for, you won’t inhibit is ingenuity. As I said, two Pareto
suboptimal outcomes.
¹ Is it permissible to use gendered words when you
do mean to disrespect a fascist bitch?
² I’d add “human” “rights”, but I really don’t want
to digress into semantics.
]: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/fightthem.png