[spectre] Fwd: <nettime> Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

[Inke Arns]

For all those wh couldn't attend the Chaos Communication Congress 
last year (2005) - like me - here's the lecture by Frank Rieger from 
CCC (sent to Nettime by Geert Lovink). Enjoy ;-)
Inke


>Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 11:47:29 -0500
>From: Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl>
>Subject: <nettime> Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the 
>World of Tomorrow
>To: <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>
>
>(Between Xmas and New Year, Rop Grongrijp (NL) and Frank Riegel (DE)
>held two impressive but surpringly depressive speeches at the 22nd
>Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin. Below you'll find Frank
>contribution. Forwarded to nettime with the permission of the author.
>/geert)
>
>From: frank at ccc.de
>
>A forum to debate this text can be found at the authors weblog at
>http://frank.geekheim.de/?page_id=128
>Conference program: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/
>
>We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.
>By: Frank Rieger
>
>Losing a war is never a pretty situation. So it is no wonder that most
>people do not like to acknowledge that we have lost. We had a
>reasonable chance to tame the wild beast of universal surveillance
>technology, approximately until september 10th, 2001. One day later, we
>had lost. All the hopes we had, to keep the big corporations and
>"security forces" at bay and develop interesting alternative concepts
>in the virtual world, evaporated with the smoke clouds of the World
>Trade Center.
>
>Just right before, everything looked not too bad. We had survived Y2K
>with barely a scratch. The world's outlook was mildly optimistic after
>all. The "New Economy" bubble gave most of us fun things to do and the
>fleeting hope of plenty of cash not so far down the road. We had won
>the Clipper-Chip battle, and crypto-regulation as we knew it was a
>thing of the past. The waves of technology development seemed to work
>in favor of freedom, most of the time. The future looked like a yellow
>brick road to a nirvana of endless bandwith, the rule of ideas over
>matter and dissolving nation states. The big corporations were at our
>mercy because we knew what the future would look like and we had the
>technology to built it. Those were the days. Remember them for your
>grandchildren's bedtime stories. They will never come back again.
>
>We are now deep inside the other kind of future, the future that we
>speculated about as a worst case scenario, back then. This is the ugly
>future, the one we never wanted, the one that we fought to prevent. We
>failed. Probably it was not even our fault. But we are forced to live
>in it now.
>
>Democracy is already over
>
>By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for
>lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no
>interest in real democracy. The "democracy show" must go on
>nonetheless. Conveniently, the show consumes the energy of those that
>might otherwise become dangerous to the status quo. The show provides
>the necessary excuse when things go wrong and keeps up the illusion of
>participation. Also, the system provides organized and regulated
>battleground rules to find out which interest groups and conspiracies
>have the upper hand for a while. Most of the time it prevents open and
>violent power struggles that could destabilize everything. So it is in
>the best interest of most players to keep at least certain elements of
>the current "democracy show" alive. Even for the more evil conspiracies
>around, the system is useful as it is. Certainly, the features that
>could provide unpleasant surprises like direct popular votes on key
>issues are the least likely to survive in the long run.
>
>Of course, those in power want to minimize the influence of random
>chaotic outbursts of popular will as much as possible. The real
>decisions in government are not made by ministers or the parliament.
>The real power of government rests with the undersecretaries and other
>high-level, non-elected civil servants who stay while the politicians
>come and go. Especially in the bureaucracies of the intelligence
>agencies, the ministry of interior, the military, and other key nodes
>of power the long-term planning and decision-making is not left to the
>incompetent mediocre political actors that get elected more or less at
>random. Long term stability is a highly valued thing in power
>relations. So even if the politicians of states suddenly start to be
>hostile to each other, their intelligence agencies will often continue
>to cooperate and trade telecommunication interception results as if
>nothing has happened.
>
>Let's try for a minute to look at the world from the perspective of
>such an 60-year-old bureaucrat that has access to the key data, the
>privilege to be paid to think ahead, and the task to prepare the policy
>for the next decades. What he would see, could look like this:
>
>First, paid manual labor will be eaten away further by technology, even
>more rapidly than today. Robotics will evolve far enough to kill a
>sizeable chunk of the remaining low-end manual jobs. Of course, there
>will be new jobs, servicing the robots, biotech, designing stuff,
>working on the nanotech developments etc. But these will be few,
>compared with today, and require higher education. Globalization
>continues its merciless course and will also export a lot of jobs of
>the brain-labor type to India and China, as soon as education levels
>there permit it.
>
>So the western societies will end up with a large percentage of
>population, at least a third, but possibly half of those in working
>age, having no real paid work. There are those whose talents are
>cheaper to be had elsewhere, those who are more inclined to manual
>labor. Not only the undereducated but all those who simply cannot find
>a decent job anymore. This part of the population needs to be pacified,
>either by Disney or by Dictatorship, most probably by both. The
>unemployment problem severely affects the ability of states to pay for
>social benefits. At some point it becomes cheaper to put money into
>repressive police forces and rule by fear than put the money into
>pay-outs to the unemployed population and buy the social peace.
>Criminal activities look more interesting when there is no decent job
>to be had. Violence is the unavoidable consequence of degrading social
>standards. Universal surveillance might dampen the consequences for
>those who remain with some wealth to defend.
>
>Second, climate change increases the frequency and devastation of
>natural disasters, creating large scale emergency situations. Depending
>on geography, large parts of land may become uninhabitable due to
>draught, flood, fires or plagues. This creates a multitude of
>unpleasant effects. A large number of people need to move, crop and
>animal production shrinks, industrial centers and cities may be damaged
>to the point where abandoning them is the only sensible choice left.
>The loss of property like non-usable (or non-insurable) real estate
>will be frightening. The resulting internal migratory pressures towards
>"safe areas" become a significant problem. Properly trained personal,
>equipment, and supplies to respond to environmental emergencies are
>needed standby all the time, eating up scarce government resources. The
>conscript parts of national armed forces may be formed into disaster
>relief units as they hang around anyway with no real job to do except
>securing fossil energy sources abroad and helping out the border
>police.
>
>Third, immigration pressure from neighboring regions will raise in all
>western countries. It looks like the climate disaster will strike worst
>at first in areas like Africa and Latin America and the economy there
>is unlikely to cope any better than the western countries with
>globalization and other problems ahead. So the number of people who
>want to leave from there to somewhere inhabitable at all costs will
>rise substantially. The western countries need a certain amount of
>immigration to fill up their demographic holes but the number of people
>who want to come will be far higher. Managing a controlled immigration
>process according to the demographic needs is a nasty task where things
>can only go wrong most of the time. The nearly unavoidable reaction
>will be a Fortress Europe: serious border controls and fortifications,
>frequent and omnipresent internal identity checks, fast and merciless
>deportation of illegal immigrants, biometrics on every possible corner.
>Technology for border control can be made quite efficient once ethical
>hurdles have fallen.
>
>Fourth, at some point in the next decades the energy crisis will strike
>with full force. Oil will cost a fortune as production capacities can
>no longer be extended economically to meet the rising demand. Natural
>gas and coal will last a bit longer, a nuclear renaissance may dampen
>the worst of the pains. But the core fact remains: a massive change in
>energy infrastructure is unavoidable. Whether the transition will be
>harsh, painful and society-wrecking, or just annoying and expensive
>depends on how soon before peak oil the investments into new energy
>systems start on a massive scale as oil becomes to expensive to burn.
>Procrastination is a sure recipe for disaster. The geo-strategic and
>military race for the remaining large reserves of oil has already begun
>and will cost vast resources.
>
>Fifth, we are on the verge of technology developments that may require
>draconic restrictions and controls to prevent the total disruption of
>society. Genetic engineering and other biotechnology as well as
>nanotechnology (and potentially free energy technologies if they exist)
>will put immense powers into the hands of skilled and knowledgeable
>individuals. Given the general raise in paranoia, most people (and for
>sure those in power) will not continue to trust that common sense will
>prevent the worst. There will be a tendency of controls that keep this
>kind of technology in the hands of "trustworthy" corporations or state
>entities. These controls, of course, need to be enforced, surveillance
>of the usual suspects must be put in place to get advanced knowledge of
>potential dangers. Science may no longer be a harmless, self-regulating
>thing but something that needs to be tightly controlled and regulated,
>at least in the critical areas. The measures needed to contain a
>potential global pandemic from the Strange Virus of the Year are just a
>subset of those needed to contain a nanotech or biotech disaster.
>
>Now what follows from this view of the world? What changes to society
>are required to cope with these trends from the viewpoint of our
>60-year-old power brokering bureaucrat?
>
>Strategically it all points to massive investments into internal
>security.
>
>Presenting the problem to the population as a mutually exclusive choice
>between an uncertain dangerous freedom and an assured survival under
>the securing umbrella of the trustworthy state becomes more easy the
>further the various crises develop. The more wealthy parts of the
>population will certainly require protection from illegal immigrants,
>criminals, terrorists and implicitly also from the anger of less
>affluent citizens. And since the current system values rich people more
>then poor ones, the rich must get their protection. The security
>industry will certainly be of happy helpful assistance, especially
>where the state can no longer provide enough protection for the taste
>of the lucky ones.
>
>Traditional democratic values have been eroded to the point where most
>people don't care anymore. So the loss of rights our ancestors fought
>for not so long ago is at first happily accepted by a majority that can
>easily be scared into submission. "Terrorism" is the theme of the day,
>others will follow. And these "themes" can and will be used to mold the
>western societies into something that has never been seen before: a
>democratically legitimated police state, ruled by an unaccountable
>elite with total surveillance, made efficient and largely unobtrusive
>by modern technology. With the enemy (immigrants, terrorists, climate
>catastrophe refugees, criminals, the poor, mad scientists, strange
>diseases) at the gates, the price that needs to be paid for "security"
>will look acceptable.
>
>Cooking up the "terrorist threat" by apparently stupid foreign policy
>and senseless intelligence operations provides a convenient method to
>get through with the establishment of a democratically legitimized
>police state. No one cares that car accidents alone kill many more
>people than terrorists do. The fear of terrorism accelerates the
>changes in society and provides the means to get the suppression tools
>required for the coming waves of trouble.
>
>What we call today "anti-terrorism measures" is the long-term planned
>and conscious preparation of those in power for the kind of world
>described above.
>
>The Technologies of Oppression
>We can imagine most of the surveillance and oppression technology
>rather well. Blanket CCTV coverage is reality in some cities already.
>Communication pattern analysis (who talks to whom at what times) is
>frighteningly effective. Movement pattern recording from cellphones,
>traffic monitoring systems, and GPS tracking is the next wave that is
>just beginning. Shopping records (online, credit and rebate cards) are
>another source of juicy data. The integration of all these data sources
>into automated behavior pattern analysis currently happens mostly on
>the dark side.
>
>The key question for establishing an effective surveillance based
>police state is to keep it low-profile enough that "the ordinary
>citizen" feels rather protected than threatened, at least until all the
>pieces are in place to make it permanent. First principle of 21st
>century police state: All those who "have nothing to hide" should not
>be bothered unnecessarily. This goal becomes even more complicated as
>with the increased availability of information on even minor everyday
>infringements the "moral" pressure to prosecute will rise. Intelligence
>agencies have always understood that effective work with interception
>results requires a thorough selection between cases where it is
>necessary to do something and those (the majority) where it is best to
>just be silent and enjoy.
>
>Police forces in general (with a few exceptions) on the other hand have
>the duty to act upon every crime or minor infringement they get
>knowledge of. Of course, they have a certain amount of discretion
>already. With access to all the information outlined above, we will end
>up with a system of selective enforcement. It is impossible to live in
>a complex society without violating a rule here and there from time to
>time, often even without noticing it. If all these violations are
>documented and available for prosecution, the whole fabric of society
>changes dramatically. The old sign for totalitarian societies -
>arbitrary prosecution of political enemies - becomes a reality within
>the framework of democratic rule-of-law states. As long as the people
>affected can be made looking like the enemy-"theme" of the day, the
>system can be used to silence opposition effectively. And at some point
>the switch to open automated prosecution and policing can be made as
>any resistance to the system is by definition "terrorism". Development
>of society comes to a standstill, the rules of the law and order
>paradise can no longer be violated.
>
>Now disentangling ourselves from the reality tunnel of said 60-year-old
>bureaucrat, where is hope for freedom, creativity and fun? To be
>honest, we need to assume that it will take a couple of decades before
>the pendulum will swing back into the freedom direction, barring a
>total breakdown of civilization as we know it. Only when the oppression
>becomes to burdensome and open, there might be a chance to get back to
>overall progress of mankind earlier. If the powers that be are able to
>manage the system smoothly and skillfully, we cannot make any
>prediction as to when the new dark ages will be over.
>
>So what now?
>
>Move to the mountains, become a gardener or carpenter, search for
>happiness in communities of like minded people, in isolation from the
>rest of the world?
>
>The idea has lost its charm for most who ever honestly tried. It may
>work if you can find eternal happiness in milking cows at five o'clock
>in the morning. But for the rest of us, the only realistic option is to
>try to live in, with, and from the world as bad it has become. We need
>to built our own communities nonetheless, virtual or real ones.
>
>The politics & lobby game
>So where to put your energy then? Trying to play the political game,
>fighting against software patents, surveillance laws, and privacy
>invasions in parliament and the courts can be the job of a lifetime. It
>has the advantage that you will win a battle from time to time and can
>probably slow things down. You may even be able to prevent a gross
>atrocity here and there. But in the end, the development of technology
>and the panic level of the general population will chew a lot of your
>victories for breakfast.
>
>This is not to discount the work and dedication of those of us who
>fight on this front. But you need to have a lawyers mindset and a very
>strong frustration tolerance to gain satisfaction from it, and that is
>not given to everyone. We need the lawyers nonetheless.
>
>Talent and Ethics
>Some of us sold their soul, maybe to pay the rent when the bubble
>bursted and the cool and morally easy jobs became scarce. They sold
>their head to corporations or the government to built the kind of
>things we knew perfectly well how to built, that we sometimes discussed
>as a intellectual game, never intending to make them a reality. Like
>surveillance infrastructure. Like software to analyze camera images in
>realtime for movement patterns, faces, license plates. Like data mining
>to combine vast amounts of information into graphs of relations and
>behavior. Like interception systems to record and analyze every single
>phone call, e-mail, click in the web. Means to track every single move
>of people and things.
>
>Thinking about what can be done with the results of one's work is one
>thing. Refusing to do the job because it could be to the worse of
>mankind is something completely different. Especially when there is no
>other good option to earn a living in a mentally stimulating way
>around. Most projects by itself were justifiable, of course. It was
>"not that bad" or "no real risk". Often the excuse was "it is not
>technical feasible today anyway, it's too much data to store or make
>sense from". Ten years later it is feasible. For sure.
>
>While it certainly would be better when the surveillance industry would
>die from lack of talent, the more realistic approach is to keep talking
>to those of us who sold their head. We need to generate a culture that
>might be compared with the sale of indulgences in the last dark ages:
>you may be working on the wrong side of the barricade but we would be
>willing to trade you private moral absolution in exchange for
>knowledge. Tell us what is happening there, what the capabilities are,
>what the plans are, which gross scandals have been hidden. To be
>honest, there is very little what we know about the capabilities of
>todays dark-side interception systems after the meanwhile slightly
>antiquated Echelon system had been discovered. All the new stuff that
>monitors the internet, the current and future use of database
>profiling, automated CCTV analysis, behavior pattern discovery and so
>on is only known in very few cases and vague outlines.
>
>We also need to know how the intelligence agencies work today. It is of
>highest priority to learn how the "we rather use backdoors than waste
>time cracking your keys"-methods work in practice on a large scale and
>what backdoors have been intentionally built into or left inside our
>systems. Building clean systems will be rather difficult, given the
>multitude of options to produce a backdoor - ranging from operating
>system and application software to hardware and CPUs that are to
>complex to fully audit. Open Source does only help in theory, who has
>the time to really audit all the source anyway...
>
>Of course, the risk of publishing this kind of knowledge is high,
>especially for those on the dark side. So we need to build structures
>that can lessen the risk. We need anonymous submission systems for
>documents, methods to clean out eventual document fingerprinting (both
>on paper and electronic). And, of course, we need to develop means to
>identify the inevitable disinformation that will also be fed through
>these channels to confuse us.
>
>Building technology to preserve the options for change
>We are facing a unprecedented onslaught of surveillance technology. The
>debate whether this may or may not reduce crime or terrorism is not
>relevant anymore. The de-facto impact on society can already be felt
>with the content mafia (aka. RIAA) demanding access to all data to
>preserve their dead business model. We will need to build technology to
>preserve the freedom of speech, the freedom of thought, the freedom of
>communication, there is no other long-term solution. Political barriers
>to total surveillance have a very limited half-life period.
>
>The universal acceptance of electronic communication systems has been a
>tremendous help for political movements. It has become a bit more
>difficult and costly to maintain secrets for those in power.
>Unfortunately, the same problem applies to everybody else. So one thing
>that we can do to help societies progress along is to provide tools,
>knowledge and training for secure communications to every political and
>social movement that shares at least some of our ideals. We should not
>be too narrow here in choosing our friends, everyone who opposes
>centralistic power structures and is not geared towards totalitarism
>should be welcome. Maintaining the political breathing spaces becomes
>more important than what this space is used for.
>
>Anonymity will become the most precious thing. Encrypting
>communications is nice and necessary but helps little as long as the
>communication partners are known. Traffic analysis is the most valuable
>intelligence tool around. Only by automatically looking at
>communications and movement patterns, the interesting individuals can
>be filtered out, those who justify the cost of detailed surveillance.
>Widespread implementation of anonymity technologies becomes seriously
>urgent, given the data retention laws that have been passed in the EU.
>We need opportunistic anonymity the same way we needed opportunistic
>encryption. Currently, every anonymization technology that has been
>deployed is instantly overwhelmed with file sharing content. We need
>solutions for that, preferably with systems that can stand the load, as
>anonymity loves company and more traffic means less probability of
>de-anonymization by all kinds of attack.
>
>Closed user groups have already gained momentum in communities that
>have a heightened awareness and demand for privacy. The darker parts of
>the hacker community and a lot of the warez trading circles have gone
>?black? already. Others will follow. The technology to build real-world
>working closed user groups is not yet there. We have only improvised
>setups that work under very specific circumstances. Generic, easy to
>use technology to create fully encrypted closed user groups for all
>kinds of content with comfortable degrees of anonymity is desperately
>needed.
>
>Decentralized infrastructure is the needed. The peer-to-peer networks
>are a good example to see what works and what not. As long as there are
>centralized elements they can be taken down under one pretext or
>another. Only true peer-to-peer systems that need as little centralized
>elements as possible can survive. Interestingly, tactical military
>networks have the same requirements. We need to borrow from them, the
>same way they borrow from commercial and open source technology.
>
>Design stuff with surveillance abuse in mind is the next logical step.
>A lot of us are involved into designing and implementing systems that
>can be abused for surveillance purposes. Be it webshop systems,
>databases, RFID systems, communication systems, or ordinary Blog
>servers, we need to design things as safe as possible against later
>abuse of collected data or interception. Often there is considerable
>freedom to design within the limits of our day jobs. We need to use
>this freedom to build systems in a way that they collect as little data
>as possible, use encryption and provide anonymity as much as possible.
>We need to create a culture around that. A system design needs to be
>viewed by our peers only as ?good? if it adheres to these criteria. Of
>course, it may be hard to sacrifice the personal power that comes with
>access to juicy data. But keep in mind, you will not have this job
>forever and whoever takes over the system is most likely not as
>privacy-minded as you are. Limiting the amount of data gathered on
>people doing everyday transactions and communication is an absolute
>must if you are a serious hacker. There are many good things that can
>be done with RFID. For instance making recycling of goods easier and
>more effective by storing the material composition and hints about the
>manufacturing process in tags attached to electronic gadgets. But to be
>able to harness the good potential of technologies like this, the
>system needs to limit or prevent the downside as much as possible, by
>design, not as an afterthought.
>
>Do not compromise your friends with stupidity or ignorance will be even
>more essential. We are all used to the minor fuckups of encrypted mail
>being forwarded unencrypted, being careless about other peoples data
>traces or bragging with knowledge obtained in confidence. This is no
>longer possible. We are facing an enemy that is euphemistically called
>?Global Observer? in research papers. This is meant literally. You can
>no longer rely on information or communication being ?overlooked? or
>?hidden in the noise?. Everything is on file. Forever. And it can and
>will be used against you. And your ?innocent? slip-up five years back
>might compromise someone you like.
>
>Keep silent and enjoy or publish immediately may become the new mantra
>for security researchers. Submitting security problems to the
>manufacturers provides the intelligence agencies with a long period in
>which they can and will use the problem to attack systems and implant
>backdoors. It is well known that backdoors are the way around
>encryption and that all big manufacturers have an agreement with the
>respective intelligence agencies of their countries to hand over
>valuable ?0 day? exploit data as soon as they get them. During the
>months or even years it takes them to issue a fix, the agencies can use
>the 0 day and do not risk exposure. If an intrusion gets detected by
>accident, no one will suspect foul play, as the problem will be fixed
>later by the manufacturer. So if you discover problems, publish at
>least enough information to enable people to detect an intrusion before
>submitting to the manufacturer.
>
>Most important: have fun! The eavesdropping people must be laughed
>about as their job is silly, boring, and ethically the worst thing to
>earn money with, sort of blackmail and robbing grandmas on the street.
>We need to develop a ?lets have fun confusing their systems?-culture
>that plays with the inherent imperfections, loopholes, systematic
>problems, and interpretation errors that are inevitable with large
>scale surveillance. Artists are the right company for this kind of
>approach. We need a subculture of ?In your face, peeping tom?. Exposing
>surveillance in the most humiliating and degrading manner, giving
>people something to laugh about must be the goal. Also, this prevents
>us from becoming frustrated and tired. If there is no fun in beating
>the system, we will get tired of it and they will win. So let's be
>flexible, creative and funny, not angry, ideologic and stiff-necked.
>
>---
>
>This text was first printed in Die Datenschleuder #89, http://ds.ccc.de
>in december 2005. It is published under the Creative Commons
>Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License
>(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/). Die Datenschleuder,
>the Scientific Journal for Data Travelers, is published quarterly by
>the Chaos Computer Club, Germany since 1984.
>
>
>
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