"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Outlandish Josh

Published on Mon, 2005-09-12 15:35

Towards Revolutionary Communications For The 21st Century

Towards Revolutionary Communications For The 21st Century

Step I - Private Communications

This is a post about private communications. This communication itself isn't private. It's a blog. Although I've sent the link around to a number of people via email, anyone can read it, whether they're a casual reader of mine or a google-sent random. I'm using this public communication to talk about secure private communications. Down the line I plan to use private communication to talk about public communication. Sneaky, oui?

If that tickles your funny bone...

The Pitch
Here's the deal cats and kiddies. We need to be able to talk to one another in private and with trust. Since the dawn of time this has meant doing things in person, careful of where you're doing the talking and how loud. That's not going to change, but this is the 21st Century. If we rely on face2face for secure communications, we're one step behind the bad guys.

Basically, we need to take advantage of mediated communications, and to do so securely. There are three basic steps to take. First of all we need to establish security, that it's even possible to have communication protected from eavesdroppers and interlopers. Secondly we need to establish identity, that we are who we say we are. Third, we need to establish privacy or exclusivity, a means of keeping the pool of con-versants trustworthy.

I personally think that we're going to need to communicate around certain legal and regulatory barriers in the coming decades in order to get things done. We're going to need to coordinate across zones of jurisdiction, even internationally. We're going to need to be able to converse without fear. We're going to need to maintain the element of surprise. I'm going to write more about why I think we need to learn more about private communications (in addition to the massive experiments already ongoing with public communications), but for now I'll just get right down to the hurdles as I see them.

Security
Cellphones can be easily tapped by amateurs. Landlines are more and more vulnerable to wiretap without notification or judicial oversight, and can also be tapped by moderately skillful professionals. I'm not saying that your phone is tapped. That's not very likely, although depending on how things shake out it could get more probable.

But anyway, phones are on their way out. The problem is that when we get to the internet, the world of websites and forums and blogs and email and IM and Voice Over IP -- the world where our revolution is supposed to have its fertile roots -- the situation gets a lot more troubling.

Law enforcement agencies filter email traffic in bulk for keywords. They can read your or anyone else's email on US networks at will. For that matter, so can any high school geek who sets his or her mind to it. IM conversations are just as vulnerable to eavesdropping. If you converse online without encryption, anyone who wants to can easily listen in. This isn't generally too much of a problem -- most conversation is too banal to worry about -- but sometimes you want to make sure no one is looking over your shoulder.

Identity
Beyond the threat of unknown third parties, there's the question of identity, of verification. How do I know that you are who you say you are? Do you want me to send you an email that seems to come "from" you but says things you'd never in your lifetime say? I can do it in five minutes. So can thousands of other technically-literate humans. People with decent social-engineering skills (grifters and con-men and identity thieves) can do much worse.

As we move through our lives and this process, we meet new people all the time, people who are eager to help, who are eager to get involved, but people who we do not know. In large-scale public campaigning, these people must be trusted by default, and vetted more or less on the job. It's the only way to go forward.

However, when attempting to establish a more tightly-knit and enduring community of inquiry and action some additional qualifications are needed. We'll need to be able to vouch for one another as real people.

Privacy
Moving to the realm of group communications, many have been stung by posting something in a forum or a blog that the wrong people end up seeing, maybe when they Google their own name or maybe the author's. We need to be conscious of who is a party to our conversations. More than that, we need to be empowered to make it a choice. We need to control the dimensions of the sphere of information.

This goes to the question of trust, of vetting, of privacy. Beyond simply knowing someone is who they say they are, we also will need to be able to include or exclude people from our communications. Some people are disruptive. Some are unqualified. Some may even harbor malicious intent.

It's also true that in any oppositional system we have adversaries. Beyond taking steps to prevent them from disrupting our communications, it's also tactically powerful to preserve the element of surprise. Large-scale conjoint action from an unexpected cohort of diverse activists can really make a big impact, especially when the establishment doesn't see it coming. Running a major national campaign in the 21st Century will require the virtual equivalent of the old "War Room," where strategy can be frankly discussed without telegraphing things to the opposition.

Luckily for us, these problems are not new. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need to start building our skills sooner or later. Through encryption, secure signatures, and a web of trust, the above concerns can be met with solutions which are technically sound, and only as fallible as the people who operate them. This is the best we can do, and it's pretty fucking good all things considered. Here's how to start:

Acquaint Yourself With GPG/PGP.
These are the common schemes for implementing military-strength encryption on your data. GPG is free and open-source, PGP is commercial, but both work on a common protocol (meaning they can usually work together) and both get the job done.

What you need to do is download some software to do the encryption. Then what you need to do is create an identity by means of generating a "key pair." A key pair is a set of keys, one which is public and which you can use to "sign" messages so they can be verified as coming from you. This public key can also be used by others to send you an encrypted message which only you can decrypt. The other end of the pair is private, and is used to decrypt messages which have been encrypted for use by use of your public key.

You then collect public keys for all your correspondents, and make sure they all have your. When you want to send out a message that is secure, you use their respective keys to encrypt the message. There are relatively friendly graphical applications to make all this happen for both MacOS and Windows. If you use a web-based email system like gmail or hotmail, you can still use this technology. It's just a matter of composing your message and encrypting it before pasting the result into the webmail message window.

If you want to know more about how it all works, try this tutorial. There's no reason not to start. Ask for help if you need it. Once you're over the setup it's really pretty painless.

Start Building a Web of Trust
As you collect public keys you can "sign" them with your verification. This means that you say the person who uses this public key is who they say they are. You get people to sign your key. That way people know that you, who says someone is who they say they are, are in fact who you say you are. Following? If you were to draw it out it would be a web. This is a web of trust. You've already got an informal one operating in your life, maybe you've even got a web of Friendsters. Let's start making real use of this stuff.

After the technical task of signing one another's keys (side note: as a best practice, this should only be done after a face to face meeting where both parties produce paper printouts of their keys to prove validity, but if you actually know and trust someone you can make your own decisions) the next logical step is building a sphere of trusted association. We need to band together. We need to learn to find likeminded people who are honest and responsible and to quickly bring them in to our community. One way to do this is through referrals. Friends of friends, associates. This can get a lot of people in the door, and it establishes a chain of accountability to boot.

This is a good way to start, but it has certain limits. Your social network, while large, probably has limits in terms of diversity. Most do. Making diversity of race, class and background an initial priority is going to be important. The right seeds need to be found or recruited.

Going beyond that, if we're talking about establishing a real community for the revolution, we're going to need some way for people who we don't and can't already know to work their way in. We're going to need a way for people who are just coming of age -- or just coming of consciousness -- to find their way in. More on this later when we start talking about public communication.

Converse with Confidence
As we create secure means of conversation and secure spaces to converse, it's time to open up the avenues of discussion. We are people of action who are in search of influence to improve the world around us. It's time to get down to brass tacks and do it. Be bold. Be a radical. Be an outlaw. Be a hero. Help us all save ourselves.

Let's start with some email. My public key and some links to resources are included below. If you want to be a part of this, use my public key to drop me an encrypted line. Include your public key so I can respond in kind. The next steps will come as they do.

If, on the other hand, you find this whole exercise stupid, feel free to ignore it. If you have questions or comments or would like to continue the public discussion, by all means leave a comment and I'll respond with one of my own or maybe a whole new blog post.

The Nuts and Bolts

My Public Key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
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=nhXP
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

General GPG info: http://www.gnupg.org/
MacGPG: http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/
GPG for Apple's Mail: here

If you're a Mac user you need to install MacGPG, then the Mail bundle. If you're a *nix user you probably know what you're doing enough to figure it out from the general GPG info page. If you're a Windows user, check out this tutorial. Google is your friend if you need help. Best of Luck. Hope to hear from you soon.

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nerding out
Published on Mon, 2005-09-12 11:05

Andrew Rasiej for Public Advocate, NYC

Hey New Yorkers! The primary (the election that matters in this case) is Tuesday the 13th. Take a minute to figure out where to go and go vote tomorrow.

One of the things I've been processing since I got off the road is just what it takes to change a thing, just what it takes to make tomorrow not like today. It takes a lot. I've been thinking lately about just how glacial the pace of progress really is, and on some levels it bums me out. When I first got "involved," I'd hoped to have things more or less back on an even keel in time for me to make babies. That's three presidential elections (ten years) on the outside, and given everything I don't think that's going to square us to be honest.

But it doesn't have to be a hundred years struggle, either. The journey never ends, but there are people who are moving up the food chain of political power who do, in fact, get it. Back in my adopted hometown of New York City, there's a guy named Andrew Rasiej (pronounced "ra-shay") who's trying to get himself elected Public Advocate, the #2 spot in city government. And he's got the right ideas.

I have some friends who are involved in the campaign (it's drawn some talent from the NYC Dean Internet Intelligentsia), and just as I was finishing my recent post on the Hurricane, someone sent me a link to Andrew's speech on the same topic.

You can read the whole speech (it's good), but boiling it down, his points are:

  1. Our communities have become dangerously dis-integrated, especially along lines of class and race. This is the narrative of who lived and died on the Gulf Coast, and it is likely to be the narrative of who reaps the benefits from reconstruction.
  2. Our ability to communicate is dangerously fragile. If the government cannot at the very least inform, it looses all credibility. When the people are allowed to intercommunicate freely, great things can happen in absence of direct government action.
  3. There are too many people in power who are wedded to the old ways, either to pork-barrel politics, small-world insiderism, or ideological battles that have raged on for decades. The circle of participation in governance and critical decision-making must widen if the above are to change.

Rasiej is an internetista, but he's a staunch progressive too. His campaign is attempting to explore and advance ideas about how the new information ecology can be applied to government, and in doing so he and his people are finding new ways to think and talk about problems which liberals and progressives have been unable to gain traction on for ten, twenty, even thirty years. This is incredibly important. It is quite literally the way to the future.

Rasiej understands, for instance, that often the role of government is to get something started and then get out of the way, to create and maintain infrastructure and let the people use that infrastructure to the benefit of all. He understands the importance of public service, of government's role in raising the common denominator and in providing safety and security against the unexpected. He understands that "trickle down" is bullshit, that more prosperity is created when solutions are built with a many to many mindset. He understands the need to involve vastly more people as real participants in the democratic process to insure its integrity.

The reason I think all this is so vital is not just because these ideas would be good for New York City, but because a win for Rasiej would be a step towards bringing these ideas to the wider world. These ideas will work. They're based off bedrock principles: participation, transparency, public service. These principles are good. Combined with the possibilities of a peer-to-peer information ecology and contrasted with the status-quo, they imply frankly revolutionary changes. They are the way to better government and a better quality of life, to justice, liberty and sustainability.

A win for Rasiej can accelerate the pace of change in these United States. Put that man into office (an office, I might add, which hasn't done much for the city lately) and he'll turn it into a laboratory for new government and a bully pulpit to announce the results. Let us advance our cause in New York City and put the results on the world's stage, open-source style.

There's no deodorant like success. People gravitate towards what works, what was good and right and memorable, even retroactively, and politicians are no different. I see a possible future where one day public servants everywhere claim these ideas as their own, even claim they were always on board. Installing Rasiej as Public Advocate in NYC won't do the job alone, but it is a step in the right direction.

In the face of failure, people are looking for an alternatives. Citizens are looking for something that offers them more than incompetence, equivocation and greed. Politicians are looking for something that can create momentum in an environment defined the gaming of perception. People of conscience are looking for a way to meaningfully participate. We're all tired of the bullshit, and anyone who uses their brain can tell we're in for some tough challenges up ahead, that we need to get it together. But as long as the present establishment remains intact, that's not going to happen. Let's turn up the heat.

So to all my NYC compadres, please vote in the primary tomorrow. Check out Andrew's website; if nothing else read the lessons from Katrina speech to get a taste for what the campaign is all about. Let's make New York a free wi-fi zone, just like Philly, and more than just giving away the access, let's use that to empower people to get more out of their city, to connect our communities, to improve the local economy, develop independent culture, to help us work together in cases of emergency and times of trouble. I think it's an exciting opportunity. If I were there I'd vote Rasiej.

(technorati tag: )

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politics
Published on Sun, 2005-09-11 16:55

9/11/2005 -- Repost

I don't really have any fresh insights on this date, even with the Katrina paralell. So here's a repost from two years ago, still one of the better things I've written. It's obviously not completely how I feel, but it still hits. Cheers and rememberences, and here's hoping New Orleans comes back as strong as NYC.

The Inevitable Reflection (repost)

It's Monday, September 9th 2002, and I am very very sad; very heavy in the heart. I see the country I call home heading in directions that I cannot follow, and I feel as if our leaders are using 3,000 ghosts to blackmail me into going along for the ride. Heavy 9-11 memorial coverage has begun in every media outlet, and although my original idea was to steer clear of commenting on this sort of thing, I've found the overall atmosphere too aggravating to stay mum.

I'm going to make a horrible admission of guilt, but I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. On September 11th 2001, when the towers had just fallen, when I was riding my bicycle down an empty 5th avenue wondering how I would make it home, there was a moment in which I felt a strange surge of hope for the future. I optimistically imagined that everyone had been evacuated, that there would be only a few casualties, and somewhere in my heart, thinking of everything represented by the twin towers I thought, "well, they had it coming."

Today even writing these words makes me nervous. They don't sound especially patriotic, and this is a time in which people have been told to watch what they say. I'm not kidding around here or trying to take a cheap shot at Ari Fletcher. There's fear in the air. I'm scared to talk to people, scared to speak to anyone other than my friends about the brewing war with Iraq because of what they might think about my lack of chauvinistic national pride. I'm scared to exercise my rights.

Before I get too far into that, let me try to clear my name. In spite of all its faults and shortcomings, I love this country. I love the idea of it far more than the reality, just as a child will love his perfect mother more than his annoying younger brother, but I nevertheless love them both. And as one of the great metaphysical pinnacles of the American Idea, I love New York City.

The World Trade Center embodied many of the marvelous characteristics of this nation and this city that make them both such wonderful, exciting places: enterprise, diversity, technology, devotion, a brash, dashing can-do attitude. These are the things that make this country sing and hum.

But as is to be expected of any great institution, the towers also embodied a lot of things I don't especially like: greed, excess, exploitation, hegemony, corruption. Shopping malls in the basement and board rooms on the top, the whole place pulsed with careless money and the stink it brings wherever it goes.

In the days following the attacks, in spite of the fear and uncertainty, I felt an encridible lightness. Not only was Something Happening, it seemed like it might even be Something Good. It seemed that the negative elements had been exorcised from my town, and most of the positives left intact.

Individuals were waking up to their gross material excess and rediscovering the virtue of charity. Packed onto subway cars, fearful of anthrax, New Yorkers were speaking to each other freely, reaching out across divides of race, class and culture. Communities were banding together for their own collective good, to survive, to grieve, to rebuild and to prosper again. I don't know what it was like elsewhere, places removed from the direct disruption, places where the President's message to keep on shopping was perhaps remotely practical, but here in New York City people were connecting in the face of adversity, and it was incredible.

All that changed very quickly when the focus became war. Though defense is necessary for any nation, war is very rarely in the interests of the people. As it became clear that war would be the outcome of these attacks the consensus became forced, the feeling of lighness evaporated, the sense of city-wide community broke down and in my perception the healing process was stalled.

From the beginning the frame was set: these attacks were an act of war despite the fact that no nation-state claimed responsibility. What should have been considered the most dreadful and heinous of criminal acts, what should have been the impetus for multilateral action in creating an international legal framework to deal with these threats, what should have been the chance to bring the world together in condemnation of violence and support for peace became an excuse to drop bombs on human beings.

And now I see this memorial coverage, the victimized families coming forward to tell and re-tell their stories, the pundants sounding off their views, the footage before deemed too shocking to air finding its way to light, and it makes me sick. Sick to remember, sick to relive, sick to witness such enormous pain, to empathize with the fear and loss, but even more sick because I feel manipulated through all of it. I sense the machinery working behind the scenes that brings these flickering ghosts to life in my living room and my guts turn sour. The feeling of manipulation grows, and despite my best efforts to resist it, catalyzing cynicism creeps in, turning my sickness to rage. I watch helpless as everything that I loathe about this country, this city and this situation parades in front of me, and I'm forced by sheer emotional arm twisting to endorse it with my silence.

I watch politicians inoculating the populace with war fever just in time for the election season. I watch trillion-dollar lawsuits spring to life like the demons of greed that they are. I watch victims avoid dealing with death and am dragged along into their pathos, numbed by the overwhelming sadness they continue to exude, and I want it all to stop. It's the year that everything changed and nothing has changed at all. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and we'll jolly well have a real war again soon, plenty of coverage for the 6-o-clock news.

I can't help but think that a raw wound has a lot more use to those in power than a healed one, and while I don't believe that there's some vast conspiracy with malicious intent to keep the American people in a constant state of worry and fear, I do believe that's something the media does. I don't believe that Bush, Cheney and Co. are really evil people, but I do believe in the seductive power of subconscious desire, the human ability to rationalize. I certainly don't trust these people to do the right thing. They don't represent my interests or share my view of the world. They're not doing what I would do, and I don't believe in the end that they know better than me.

And that's where my bundle of sickness, sadness, fear, disgust, love and anger finally becomes unbearable. I feel alone with it. I adamantly disagree with every institution spouting the party line, every sentimental memorial broadcast, every mealy-mouthed patriotic speech. It's manipulative and it's disrespectful. On the other hand, I don't buy into the real paranoid whacko conspiracy theory bullshit either, so I'm basically on my own with my views. I don't see anyone with any real power saying anything I can really get behind, and that's almost enough to break me, the feeling that I am an island of rational dissent in a sea of insanity.

Except I know I'm not. I can't be. Statistically speaking, there must be others like me who feel similar to the way I do. I don't know if it's what you'd call a "silent majority" but I know a lot of other freethinking, intelligent, rational Americans are staying out of this for fear of sounding disloyal to their nation. If you're one of these, I encourage you to break your silence, expose your viewpoint, take the risk, because shutting your trap in the name of patriotism is no service to your country. We need trustworthy leaders with clear views, transparent motives and ethical opinions, but given the state of politics in this country that's not likely to happen any time soon. The best we can do is try with all our might to hold whoever we've got to that standard.

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General
Published on Sun, 2005-09-11 14:05

Work and Culture

Hey, just to forestall anyone making any effort on my behalf, I believe I've found some gainful employment for the time being. It seems the world of CivicSpace and the broader Drupal community is booming. Looks like being in on the ground floor is paying dividends. And you thought sweat-equity was for suckers.

In other news, I've been watching the HBO TV series Deadwood on DVD, which is proving to be another fine example of how the telenovela form is finally breaking into the US market. It's a good show. I tried it out mainly because my man Frank recommended it a while back and because it popped up in my mother's netflix. I got the first disc off there and ended up getting the second two last night at Blockbuster because I wanted to keep the story rolling. That's a mark of a good drama.

I'm planning on absorbing a lot of media while I'm here in Oregon. That will include some books, a lot of back issues of Harpers, the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. After being on the road all summer I feel the need to swim in the waters of other people's creativity for a while. It helps me recharge my batteries.

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General

Authentic Experience

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Nerding Out

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