Strengthening Civil Liberties with Politically Neutral Networks

Transcript

uh ladies and gentlemen I'm going to bring up your next speaker to talk about strengthening civil liberties with politically neutral networks uh please make them feel very very welcome put your hands together for Jared hope thanks man this is a click off yeah cool all right thanks for having me uh yeah strengthening civil lities with politically neutral Networks you'll never know how much it costs the present generation to preserve your freedom I hope you will make good use of it if you do not I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it John Adams the second President of the United States September 11 200 one two planes

hit the World Trade Centers World Trade Center 1 2 and 7 all collapsed at the speed of gravity as if the steel and conqur beneath them didn't exist they fell squarely onto their footprints and as they landed fear was struck into the hearts of the masses and so too was an ERA born uh an era was created of technological tyranny and the surveillance censorship state was born underlying this uh the NSA uh introduced a new Mass surveillance program where Congress was completely unaware it took two great men Thomas Tam and Thomas Drake to come forward in 2004

2005 uh to reveal this to the public uh with Stella wind coupled with uh the Patriot Act it allowed the United States to do draget surveillance on ordinary citizens as well as any data that came in contact with any American company server effectively enveloping en enveloping the entire planet yet there was no real real meaningful reform and yet again the public was not aware of this this until the Snowden revelations in 2013 the freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of citizens and it's my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that Define exactly where and when a government may

not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called Liberty and in the internet Revolution is called privacy Thomas Drake would go go on to say that the United States had fully unchanged itself uh from the Constitution and that we still do not appreciate this it is an alien form of government and netha to democracy it is a crime against the sovereignty of us we the people and as the US does the rest of the world follows it take no excuse for the authoritarian regimes of China and Russia to start implementing their own in in the same image as the United

States and our Western liberal democracies were no better uh in in fact the 5i all implemented this and the UK has taken this further than anybody else and ratifying it into law we live under Mass surveillance and today this continues under the uh um fisa section 702 at least two large ma Mass surveillance programs are in effect both prism which uh utilizes the uh data from Big tech companies and social media companies such as Google Facebook Etc um Mass Harvest all information uh on you and uh Upstream which is very similar but with telecommunications

including companies like Verizon and AT&T another Hot Topic that's happening right now in the same pattern of thoughts is the United Kingdom's Online safety Bill uh here they are trying to end end to end encryption making your ability to do private Communications obsolete I'm Australian and we've kind of beat you guys to to this a many years ago we implemented an anti- encryption law if you're not really understanding the problem right now uh I think Glen Greenwell summarized this perfectly the capacity of this agency to spy on people and to know everything they do is so extreme and awesome that at any moment pure totalitarianism could be imposed on the American people and they would have

no place to hide even though he was talking about America this applies to each and every one of us in developed countries and in developing countries the problem is is the power gap between those who control this technology and the rest of us has become so immense if I know every single thing about you what you love what you hate what you fear what your planning what your behaviors are and you know nothing about me then I wield an immense power over you I can always stay many steps ahead of you I can manipulate your behavior uh and change the way that you think Thomas strength put it more succinctly they want to own you it is a power relationship of Superior and

inferior now the same logic that's behind this is now what's being implemented with Central Bank digital currencies even without cbdcs we are already seeing how political dissidents regardless of how you think of their opinions already being economically exiled the introduction of cbdcs will be this same technology except applied to the economic sphere the economy operates independently or in spite of the state and the ability to distort the the economy and regulate the economy with uh CBD style smart contracts will be a full new uh a new a completely new form of tyranny that I'm deathly afraid of

actually uh coming into fruition I feel something I'll point I was going to put here but whatever um and two like Mass surveillance cbdcs are poised to en envelop the world Ah that's right um not only uh are we worried about these particular countries but the IMF is also looking at integrating a cbdc together with the cop26 agenda uh they are intending to create a Global Financial system there will be no escape and if you are economically exiled you're you're straight out of the economy closer to home and to our industry in

the past year we've experienced new attacks uh both in tach which led to the threat of coercion or the um the willful silencing uh of blocks uh and block transactions effectively creating transaction uh censorship as well as economic blockades around crypto also known as operation checkpoint 2.0 these attacks will continue and they will get more sophisticated and they'll become more Global we need to prepared for these my fear is that it's been 20 years since we became aware of Stellar Wind and yet no meaning re uh meaningful

reform has come to fruition in fact the whistleblowers activists and journalists alike had always been seeking for reform and yet I think reform is not coming we have to we have to hold on to our rights ourselves and the set of rights that I'm primarily concerned with is civil liberties they have their roots in Western tradition going far back as ancient Greece have being uh evolved by John Milton in the 1600s and enshrined by political philosophers during the Enlightenment uh such as John L and voler freedom of speech is the Liberty that allows you to express your opinion

uh your political descent even against uh a a political adversary the freedom of thought is is basically the same thing if you are suppressed you're unable to even think you will start regulating your own behaviors and certain topics will become completely unavailable to you or over Generations the right to associate is the ability to create uh political bodies or even religious groupings where you get to create a political body that can oppose tyranny and economic freedom is the ability to uh make your own uh uh your own decisions within an economy and participate uh free of any intervention but we can feel more

Vindicated in advocating for this as the Freedom House have uh have seen for over five decades that the demand for uh freedom is universal and whe whether it's the Atlantic Council uh the Fraser Institute uh the United Nations development program time and time again we see civil liberties Freedom being strongly correlated uh with prosperity in upholding these we can create a stronger and better world but what underpins civil liberties is a notion or a prerequisite of political neutrality in order to be able we expect from our institutions uh as well as the mediums of exchange to be biased to what we're saying otherwise we

we suffer the consequences um from a larger power actor and we can do this oh I'll get to that n uh if you're still not quite understanding the value of neutrality it might be even easier to see on on the world scale uh post World War II the United States was in the uh position of securing world peace and also afforded to it was the luxury of being the US dollar being the deao world Reserve currency yet through repeated economic sanctions over and over again uh trust and confidence to be lost in the US dollar leading to roughly over 20 uh countries or approximately 60% of the world's GDP M uh setting up reroutes

around the US dollar this is a phenomenon also known as dollarization there's some other factors like rampant money printing they cre externalities to governance and as a result they're experiencing Capital flight away from the US dollar it is no longer as useful as it used to be as a world Reserve currency yet what I am advocating for as uh neutrality in our networks uh has already been uh advocated for before at a lower level at the internet service providers as well as uh packet routing uh in 2003 great people such as the co

co-creator of the IP Tim bernes Lee um with the web as well as like Lawrence leig the co-creator of the um the uh fre free fre free culture movement sorry about that um there's bipartisan support uh almost unanimous bipartisan support for maintaining this network neutrality yet unlike net neutrality we have haven't been able to rely on the laws we haven't seen reform that we need but we can implement this by effectively uh encoding it or forcing it into our protocols advances in terms of packet routing uh and such as mix Nets as well

as uh zero knowledge proofs allows us to strip personhood uh from the participants in that Network allows us to offis skate who is talking to who and what even the content is not dissimilar to end in encryption that you expect from your private messenger but we can actually do this uh for almost any kind of transaction that we expect the implication of which is that if you introduce political neutrality into such a network then you're effectively coercion resistant uh against a global uh adversary that's trying to introduce political bias into your system and if that's the case uh then you're effectively self- Sovereign or

thework as Sovereign against this coercion and this becomes a really interesting property because then you can get back to uh a 1996 idea by John bow where he declared independence of cyberspace uh moving fast forward into to today uh in 2017 2018 both the United Nations and the United States de Department of Defense had both recognized National sovereignty over Cyprus space with the dod seeing cyberspace as a fifth domain uh of conflict next to land sea air and space now here's the here's the

interesting thing right if you're able to if you're able to circumvent uh or challenge the national sovereignty over their portion of cyberspace then you're you're now creating a region on the Internet or a special zone or a territory within cyberspace in which it is coercion resistant against even a national body and if you're able to do that to for one nation state you'll most likely be able to do it for many and if that's the case it becomes super interesting uh at the level of say like the United Nations you can now create something that can strengthen the rules-based order and if you implement this uh not only do you uh solve for the vertical integration

problem uh in the UN and creating uh collateralized policies uh but also it maintains the sovereignty of nation states as they could they are voluntarily or expressly interacting with these systems and they can withdraw at any moment or Fork at any moment uh if their policies are no longer fair and whether it's capital or even GE Geo boundaries that is recorded on chain it becomes incredibly L uh incredibly fascinating beyond that uh we can deploy these systems uh in terms of competitive governance uh on top of these we can create different institutions and deploy them into regions where they have internet access but maybe they don't have the most stable institutions I'm thinking uh in Southeast Asia as well as

in Latin America so while I'm not quite ready to talk about this we have been working uh working on I basically this experiment to create a privacy focused uh self- Sovereign decentralized technology stack uh it'll be called logos and is comprised of three sub prodct protocols one will be nomos which is a private modular multi-chain network uh codex which will be a private decentralized file storage as well as waku uh which is our private peer-to-peer messaging uh protocol this under depends uh the status application but we'll be using it for consensus as well as uh in the more broader scheme of things um yeah stay tuned for that I

guess we'll start talking about that towards the end of the year anyway that's pretty much it for for me I'll keep it short and sweet but uh to anyone who's out there who's willing to work on this sort of Technologies please reach out to me uh and if not please keep fighting [Applause] thanks questions where's the questions get the microphone it's just the it's just that screen M does doesn't work ah working uh I will be a small pain in the ass but for a

reason um what's the real role of venture capital in those stories since I know that you are going to fundraise more after I which I'm kind of question like why and basically what kind of a uh Partners you are seeking within the Venture Capital because majority of them doesn't give a about your civil rights yeah exactly I mean so I I can't talk about the specific details but we are trying to create a kyc list uh donation model um as the sort of primary means of doing this um I'm quite lucky that I can also help uh fund a f a first portion of this um other than that in terms of the VCS we we pretty much have

to but we want to anyway stay away entirely from like the United States uh and anyone who's not ideologically aligned with this um so a lot of the messaging we putting forward is actually very explicit in what we're trying to do uh and if you are not on board with that then um too bad you know like we're not interested in that capital and I think to amir's point uh he's he's right like a lot of that kind of capital is as a result of money printing uh and it is not ideologically aligned whatsoever and you do not want to be beholden to those parties as they will influence the network the other aspect of this is actually we're putting a lot of resources into developing out the community around this we don't want to be seen or we don't want to be the only

people that are working on this we want to make sure that a lot of people in this space are also contributing to this so we'll be focusing a lot on education and research um on on our side and then trying to get more feedback and understand how people can contribute um crypto is as you said crypto is on under attack from all sides and so as a cryptocurrency space uh like the all the talent and and work and projects people are doing are going to have to kind of band together and work together to row the boat um but everybody has tokens and the tokens encourage projects to Fork off so how do we realign the

incentives uh between projects to get them all to work together more um are you are you talking about the projects like codex um waku all the because I there's like many projects now uh I saw Aragon is doing one uh like Network States projects Etc there there's a lot of duplication there's a lot of overlap I think that's fine right cuz I mean at the end of the day like we're a learning community and we're all focusing on creating different forms of the same ideas and different Expressions um whenever that kind of idea comes up I always think about like the invention of the bicycle there was a whole bunch of different iterations of the bicycle and

how that looked some had big wheels some had small wheels you know ones were Giant wheels that were like death traps um that's exactly what's happening right now and as we all go through these different Expressions we're all going to be learning from each other uh finding out what works and refining our systems uh and eventually there will be a design that consolidates it might take many years but until then um it's very unclear like in your talk you were also talking about how like most of the ZK Community was looking at like pols yet there was a whole spance of other ways we could potentially look at that um it's the same here right like they're all just different designs and who knows what what it ends up being one on the screen if you could

tell oh yeah Will Network States uh also be networks within Monopoly and violence so I mean I think this question is really interesting because it it definitely takes a weberian notion of like what a state is um I actually have essay that's coming out that looks at a whole bunch of different ranges of definitions of of of what a state is um the point being is that a monopoly of violence isn't actually a strong prerequisite and in the webar sense he also limits it to a modern nation state I I actually think it's a bit of an inversion when it comes to these Technologies so what's great

about participating in like say a network state or a decentralized technology stack like this it is actually um a form of expressed consent of the government you have to expressly transact with that system and if you're participating in securing the network you are upholding the uh Constitution as it is written in code the base policies um at any point and at any point you can also Fork away but it's kind of like an inversion because it's focusing on the cryptography it's focusing on the defense side of things um and providing value rather than creating High exit costs and trapping people within a certain I mean I'm not trapping people in a certain territory but creating those boundaries just by virtue of having territories

um uh creates these high exit costs and then like that makes it more difficult to leave these systems um the other one is am I optimistic and am I afraid of governments I mean I'm certainly optimistic I I think that like there's a real reason for why civil liberties matter and it is up to us to uphold it you shouldn't expect um a larger power that has a conflict of interest in upholding these to do it um and I think that there is a strong will for for this um whether it'll be me air uh Nim uh that's that's advocating for this or even comes out is unclear but it will certainly be if not this generation the Next

Generation cool uh another one's how can we create better identity systems uh I rarely touch identity because it's a it's a mess um I would rather keep things without that if possible but I I know a lot of it's a very contentious topic got one more over here I think and then that'll be it hi sorry yeah hey um how do you plan to deal with I think one of the things um with the history of the internet's becoming the surveillance sort of machine that it has become part of it of that story is basically the privatization of the internet through the 90s that it was like its constitutive parts were sold off to Giant corporations who then like now uh administer like the the typing of where

data goes and how it gets to where it does and that was under the pretense of like this is good like that we're giving freedom to the internet because um because if it's not the state then it's more freedom and I think in a very uh kind of like naive sense um but what ended up happening is it did create this like surveillance thing even though it was privatized and away from the states and like the the uh the incentives of capital is to accumulate more capital and whatever kind of like things it can identify in order to find more Capital to accumulate like it will take I just wonder how do you see like the the tension between that uh and surveillance and like building these more privacy Centric um applications uh Whenever

there is always that incentive for Capital to accumulate more of itself and especially from people who are the types of people who the same type of person who privatize the infrastructure of the internet are the same type of people who are making these huge investments in all this new internet infrastructure yeah yeah no absolutely so I mean I I think that the the amount of value that can be captured by this um in another talk that I do I mentioned a quote from uh World Bank uh where they basically outline uh I think the report is from 2006 it's called like where is The Wealth of Nations or something like this um but in that report they ultimately found that rule of law was by far the largest wealth generator even over

natural res resource extraction um the point being is under this system we're only describing the order that uh exists right and nothing that's um outside of that and the point being is that if you create this order then you can actually create a plurality of different governing institutions on top of that um and for me I think what we what I would like to see I don't know if it will actually happen um is that there will be some kind of evolutionary darwinian attempt of creating these different institutions but in that search will be a maximizing value of finding the optimal set of rules for Law and therefore value creation um but in terms of like the privatization absolutely I

mean one of the ISS one of the reasons why I say uh Prism Works the way it does is because these companies are not subject to the same rules or impositions that we can put on the government um and if we bake this stuff into the protocol at least if you're able if you're Technologic Savvy or if we a easy enough low barrier ux to enter into them we can at least Safeguard the individual on that level I don't know if that's a satisfactory answer but that's all I got now cool it's good yeah cool thank you very [Applause] much