

(Trying To) Face Down The Evil At TechCrunch Disrupt - coloneltcb
http://uncrunched.com/2013/09/09/trying-to-face-down-the-evil-at-techcrunch-disrupt/

======
ryguytilidie
The problem is that we all have so much to lose and it makes this so easy for
the government. I have a wife, I own a home, I need my job to keep these
things and many people will do anything to keep their job and these things. If
you're a founder and your options are give the government what they want to no
pushback from your userbasr, or to not give the data and face harassment,
audits, suspicious legal problems and things like that. Even as a pretty moral
guy I have a hard time imagining putting my livelihood on the line for the
very little reward if the alternative is possibly losing my home. The
government knows how 95% of us NEED to work and keep an income going so they
know they can do whatever they want because the leverage is 100% on their
side. The only way I see this changing is if people on the Internet/citizens
of our country start caring that the NSA is spying on all of us and realize
that this harm is way worse than a plane crashing into a building, as horrible
as that was.

~~~
yafujifide
It sounds like you've gone all-in with the US government, and now you can't
criticise it without risking everything.

It is possible to internationalize yourself and your assets in such a way that
no one government can threaten you with taking everything away. I suggest
taking a look at these internationalization resources:

[http://www.internationalman.com/](http://www.internationalman.com/)
[http://www.sovereignman.com/](http://www.sovereignman.com/)
[http://nomadcapitalist.com/](http://nomadcapitalist.com/)

Once you internationalize yourself, your fear of government will be
substantially reduced and you can be free to take a stand.

~~~
dobbsbob
Unless you're living off bitcoins there is no such thing as protected offshore
savings. They bribe low level workers to leak supposedly secret info and you
wind up in jail. Remember the leaked bvi docs? Swiss and Liechtenstein dvds
full of depositor info? Almost every country bends over to sign tax treaties
with the US. Swiss numbered accounts are meaningless since the war on
terrorderp. They (gov thugs) also specialize in blackmail, your finances
aren't their only target

~~~
yafujifide
I am living off bitcoins.

~~~
samstave
How?

~~~
yafujifide
Mostly by converting them to dollars when I need.

~~~
acabal
So... you're actually living off dollars.

~~~
aero142
You're not making an attempt to understand the conversation, just being
pedantic. He said he was keeping his money in bitcoins to make it so that his
money was harder to seize. Yes, he is spending dollars, but the savings is in
bitcoins.

~~~
acabal
It's not being pedantic, it's crucial to the problem of Bitcoin. If I'm trying
to live outside of government meddling, and yet I'm spending in dollars, then
I may as well keep my savings in monopoly money. Why? Because converting to
dollars (outside of a guy handing you cash in a shady park) requires a bank
account, which in turn requires government involvement--and that's exactly the
problem the OP is trying to avoid.

You think keeping Bitcoins prevents the government from seizing your assets?
Well if you trade in dollars, then they don't HAVE to seize your Bitcoin
assets. They can just stop you from converting to dollars, and effectively
achieve the same result. All the Bitcoins in the world are worthless if you
trade in dollars and can't convert Bitcoins to dollars. And if you think MtGox
is going to stand up for you when the government comes knocking on their door
and demands they stop honoring withdraw requests for your account, then you're
wrong.

Bitcoins are cool, they're useful today, and they have potential. But until
you can buy a sack of flour from the corner store with Bitcoins, they're not
an effective way of evading government meddling. They're just a proxy currency
for people who don't understand better.

~~~
aero142
You've now expanded your argument a lot further than original. I'm not a
bitcoin hoarder so I won't try to defend that approach. Your original comment
said that he was living off dollars, as though they are equivalent, which I
don't think they are. You are right that until bitcoins can be spent directly
for goods you are limited. Dollars are not the only thing you can trade them
for. If you piss off the US government, they have to work very hard to shut
down every exchange in every country in the world. I don't think it's a rock
solid plan, but it's not just "living off dollars".

------
deveac
For all the moaning and complaining I've seen on HN over the persistence of
this topic, the conversation still hasn't gotten loud enough, and hasn't gone
on long enough.

As much as MA rubs me the wrong way, I applaud him here. What an incredibly
non-trivial and important use of his public platform with those guests.

~~~
patcon
Amen. He has world's of respect from me on that front.

~~~
HNaTTY
I'll jump on the respect train. Michael Arrington is an ideal person to
influence people here. We all may have similar convictions, but he isn't just
influencing software development, he's influencing software that is at a
seminal stage, making it more likely that version 1 of the next Facebook clone
will take security into account.

If PG and a few others joined with him, there would be momentum, just like
that.

------
cromwellian
I think this continues in the tradition of the Silicon Valley Dunning-Kruger
effect, in which the wealthy elite pundits of SV have illusory ideas about
their competence or ability to solve deep social or political problems.

There is no quick tech-fix for this issue, nor do SV companies really have any
power to pressure the government with threats of civil disobedience. The real
work of changing the laws will require traditional politics, getting new
representatives elected who have a commitment to stop NSA abuses. Recognize
that most of the existing legislators have already bought into the system save
a few, so any moves they make are really just to placate the news cycle.

SV companies could use their tremendous financial reserves to fund candidates
who promise to fix the laws, they could pull on the purse strings of the
existing legislators, but really, with the 2014 elections, and politicians
fixed over Syria, Obamacare, and other issues, I doubt any of the campaigns
see this as a winning wedge issue.

I guess what I'm saying is, change will be slow, the NSA didn't evolve this
capability overnight, it's been building it secretly since WW2, and they are
not likely to relinquish it just because some protests from techies in the
valley.

Some people in the SV 'bubble' like to imagine our SV entrepreneurs as some
kind of Atlas Shrugged super-men, and you know, if Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Tim
Cook, and everyone else just went all "John Galt", the government and everyone
else would have to cave.

------
pron
_I’m scared of our government and I’m disgusted by what little Silicon Valley
has done to fight it._

No! This is so, so wrong. I totally get the sentiment, but the reaction is
misdirected and might do more harm than good. A (centralized) government is a
major power base in society, but it is not the only one. What democracy has
done is try and take power away from disparate parties, and concentrate much
of it in the hands of an elected body. This doesn't always work well, but this
main idea is a good one. Government, like any large human undertaking, is an
ongoing endeavor that has to be constantly maintained and reformed. But
_fighting_ it rather than fixing it is a terrible notion.

I know Americans are inherently distrustful of government – this has to do
with America's peculiar history – and in itself, a healthy skepticism towards
government is healthy for a democracy. But a general "anti-government" stand
will take us back to a much less free, less just, form of organization:
feudalism. In feudalism, power is held by private individuals (lords) or
organizations (noble families, the church, and I guess in modern times -
corporations) that accrue it by amassing money and/or other forms of
influence. These power bases form alliances that suit them, with the implicit
goal of maintaining their power and withholding it from others. And one thing
is certain: these powers are hardly accountable to the public; not even like
the most sinister of democratic governments.

The author's particular grievance is mass aggregation of personal information;
(almost) everyone agrees that's really bad. But is government the only guilty
party? Is it even the biggest offender? I'm pretty sure Google collects and
analyzes more personal information than the US government, and it's far less
accountable. It doesn't even have secret courts. It's also far more dangerous
as a power because of something I've mentioned before: Power is far more
dangerous when it manipulates people into surrendering it voluntarily; a truly
dangerous power inspires love, not suspicion (as is the case of Big Brother:
he is loved, not feared and hated).

To fight things like personal data gathering we should work _with_ the
government to fix it rather than fight it, because the universe hates a
vacuum, and by trying to fight the government and take away its monopoly on
some forms of power, we may find that we've simply put it in far worse hands.

~~~
sseveran
Google can't collect my information if I don't give it to them. They can't
install splitters at major NAPs, demand that Microsoft give them their data on
my or use it to prosecute me. If they engaged in a campaign against their
users by leaking embarrassing data they would be prosecuted since doing that
is illegal. If the government does it there is basically no recourse.

~~~
pron
Like I said, the most dangerous forms of power are obtained by manipulating
people to surrender it voluntarily. The fact that Google is, at the moment,
not nearly as vilified as the US government allows it to grow its particularly
dangerous form of power uninterrupted.

The fact that Google cannot force Microsoft into handing over your data is
insignificant. Either Microsoft will eventually become a non-power, or both
Google and Microsoft (and Facebook and others) will share power as it suits
them – just like feudalism.

The fact that Google cannot currently directly use violence or incarceration
against you is circumstantial. When the federal government was week, the
robber barons commonly used violence against people (the Pinkertons, for
example), and the robber barons never had as much power as Google does now
(knowledge is power). Weaken government enough, and this, too, may come to
pass. But the worst part is that it doesn't have to: in modern Western
society, information alone can often be used almost as effectively as physical
violence, at a much greater scale and at a lower cost.

With the power and influence Google holds, I'm not entirely sure they will
always be so readily prosecuted for their transgressions. I assume that even
now they're trying to remove whatever regulations apply to them, and are
certainly fighting any future regulation that may inhibit their aggregation of
power.

------
asveikau
The quote from the alleged NSA document is in fact interesting (ellipsized
here):

> Who knew in 1984 ... the zombies would be paying customers

I feel that this misses an important point in the book. I am reminded of this
dialog with the prole who rents Winston an apartment (no spoilers about what
happens):

> ‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.

> ‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And
> I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. ...’

Any time there is some technology facing broad adoption, you can imagine some
holdouts saying this. Televisions. Cell phones. Smart phones. "Too expensive.
I don't see a need for it." The implication is there was one point in time
where the people willingly adopted the means of surveillance. One would expect
that it offered them something in return.

------
astral303
It's one thing to ask (which is very welcomed), but it's another thing to put
your literal money where your mouth is. Where's the influx of capital to EFF
and other entities challenging the US govt legally? Where's the funds going to
legislative lobbying that's on par with other large industries?

~~~
twoodfin
Exactly. If this is such a slam dunk 4th Amendment case (I don't think it is),
then all you need is enough money to hire the lawyers to get it up through the
courts. That's a figure in the millions, not the billions.

Or to put it another way, a small fraction of the amount of money the tech
community spent to elect the guy who could end any of these programs and/or
fire those responsible with a phone call.

------
anonymous
"... considers us meaningless sheep to be herded at will."

For a minute I thought Arrington was referring to his previous employer, one
of the players in the domain name racket, specifically the people who run
Pool.com. If ever there was a "service" who viewed users as "zombies", they
are it.

Then there's all the herding that TC does, funnelling its readers toward
"preferred" money raisers. TC has taken the conflicts of interest inherent in
the typical tech media "puff piece" to a new level altogether. If anything
needs to be disrupted, it is TC's manipulation of "news".

It's really difficult to take this guy seriously if you know anything about
his background. But I guess that excludes most of us "zombies". TC is a pillar
of herdlike "thinking". Operations like TC/UC and the ones Arrington
criticizes in the "article" share more in common than he may want to admit.
Both rely on brainless, herdlike behavior in order to carry out their business
plan. If anyone is going to effect a change upon the status quo, it must be
users. But the SV that Arrington feeds on has no incentive to educate users to
become independent thinkers. Herds are easier to manipulate and, you guessed
it, easier to monitor. And Arrington himself is the furthest from an
independent thinker I can imagine. He is a parrot.

~~~
larrys
"Pool.com. If ever there was a "service" who viewed users as "zombies", they
are it."

What is your specific complaint against Pool.com ?

~~~
anonymous
How do you know there is only one specific complaint?

------
peterjancelis
Too bad MA isn't in full control at TC anymore. Making a huge stand on this
issue and attacking the parts of SV who are selling out could really put them
on the map again.

~~~
greyman
My thoughts as well. I actually miss Mike as a tech reporter and editor. He
wasn't perfect, had his quirks, but still overall I wish he would return to
the scene.

------
aantix
Curious, has Paul Graham funded any startups with the direct intent of
fighting the NSA and/or enabling better privacy?

~~~
betterunix
Startups are _not_ the answer here. Privacy is not something you can buy as a
service; Hushmail should have proved this beyond any doubt. Privacy protecting
technologies hamper typical startup revenue models based on targeted
advertising, and would necessarily have to do so in order to provide the
privacy we actually need in the face of the NSA. There is also the matter of
the NSA maliciously sabotaging privacy protecting technologies.

Really what we need is something like GnuPG, but easier to audit, easier to
use, and with a standard that is not constrained by a need for backward
compatibility (and which clearly follows constructions given by researchers,
rather than using ad-hoc techniques).

~~~
api
There could be startups here, but they would have to have different revenue
models like directly charging for apps instead of monetizing eyeballs.

------
Aloisius
I'm not sure mass surveillance is necessarily _evil_ , but it certainly is
something we should fight against. It seems to me that there are essentially
four routes we can take:

a) The legal route - donate to EFF and friend
[https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/) \- and hope that in 8-10 years it
takes this thing to get through the courts, all this will be found illegal.

b) The legislative route - stage protests, pour money into congressional and
presidential candidates who believe privacy is a right, fund lobbyists, find
candidates that believe in privacy and push them to run, punish officials with
expensive reelection campaigns for those who don't.

c) The encryption route - make encryption easier to use, push forward stronger
minimum encryption standards, push for IPv6 (mandatory IPsec support), push
for an end-to-end encryption standard for HTML with encryption/decryption done
by the browser for elements on a page/posted content (for things like
webmail), constant vigilance against vendor-introduced security weaknesses,
etc.

d) The disinformation route - flood the internet with enough noise that it
becomes cost prohibitive and technically unfeasible to have any confidence in
the results coming out of any big data analytics system monitoring internet
communications.

    
    
      .
      

Now, the encryption route seems to be what people around here generally focus
on since it is a technical solution to the problem and most of us are
technical people. It unfortunately is also the most difficult since it
requires end-user participation and trust in everyone from your OS vendor to
your CPU vendor.

The disinformation route is also a technical solution, but it can be carried
out by a much smaller group of people though some of us might have issue with
effectively spamming the internet and in order to create the right kind of
disinformation, you have to know what they're looking for in the first place
and the resources to fake interactions that looks similar.

The legal route is something we can all do. It is slow, but donating money to
lawyers is relatively painless for most of us.

The legislative route requires organization and mass participation. So far,
people aren't angry really enough about it to do anything. There is no
charismatic leader leading the charge. As far as I know, there isn't even a
PAC we could donate to that would fight the good fight.

------
f055
Government isn't some abstract being - it's people. Some of whom were elected
by the majority of other people. So as usual, people did this to people. We
are all accountable. The question is, do we _really_ want to change things? Or
just keep on arguing on the Internet?

~~~
DamnYuppie
Um the US government employees 10's of millions. Few of them were elected.

~~~
anigbrowl
No it doesn't. It employes about 4.5m people, including the entire military:
[https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-
docu...](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-
documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-
employment-since-1962/)

------
scrabble
_" Who knew in 1984…that this would be big brother [picture of Steve Jobs with
iPhone}...and the zombies would be paying customers [pictures of people with
phones, tablets]?"_

It might just be me, but it seems as though this comment could easily be taken
out of context. It's a metaphor. And the speaker wasn't saying that the
government was Big Brother either.

~~~
mcphilip
If you read the Spiegel article [1] where this quote comes from do you still
think it's just a metaphor? I take the comment as snark, but also a troubling
indicator of a depraved culture in some circles of the NSA.

[1][http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-
spies-...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-
smartphones-including-the-blackberry-a-921161.html)

~~~
scrabble
I do still think there's the possibility that it's a metaphor.

As much as I don't like the recent news that's come out about the NSA, I also
don't like to falsely manipulate people's words to give them a negative
connotation. I don't like when it's done to me, so I try not to do it to
others.

As an organization the NSA seems to have some issues, but I still hold that
individuals are mostly good. I don't believe the person who wrote that had a
mindset that most people are zombies.

------
wuliwong
Wonderful write up. I was literally thinking about this very topic when I
clicked on hacker news today. I had been reading that article where Google
claims to be beefing up encryption to fight the NSA. It could just be a PR
move on Google's part and they are totally compliant behind the scenes or they
could be openly battling against the U.S. govt. like they are a hacker group.
Either way, it is unsettling. Kudos to this author, I believe he is seeing
things clearly.

------
api
I suspect Silicon Valley -- the place -- has already lost.

The cost of living there is so high -- a million dollars for a starter house
-- that operating there is unthinkable without big money and big success. And
guess who has the biggest money of all? The government. They don't even have
to earn it. They can tax it (or print it) to their hearts' content. With a
cost of living so high, only big money talks.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs)

Last time I was in SV, I was driving around and thinking "wow, this place
might well be the world's only six-figure slum." It's a place where earning
what would be a fantastic wage in most places will get you something that
people in other places would call a "crack shack." With a set-up like that,
the golden handcuffs look mighty shiny and appealing. If SV gets too "uppity,"
they just have to come in and spread some more money around. The price of real
estate hyperinflates a little more, and the handcuffs get tightened a couple
clicks.

Real estate hyperinflation and debt indenture are such effective traps for
controlling a population, it's hard for me to believe they weren't explicitly
designed. The real genius of golden handcuffs is that they look like wealth
and they make you feel rich. Wow! I'm making so much money! My house is worth
so much! But in reality you're an absolute slave to whomever is writing you
those big checks. You don't dare deviate even a little, or even say anything
out of line, for fear of losing it all. The truly rich and powerful have the
freedom to act. If you don't have that, you are poor.

But Silicon Valley is also an idea. You can go there even if you're in
Podunkistan, Arkansas. The only way Silicon Valley -- the idea -- can win is
if it "goes airborne."

------
duncan_bayne
The author is a bit confused if he thinks he's going to receive assistance to
uphold the constitution from a gun-control lobbyist; why should someone so
willing to trample over the second amendment lift a finger to help protect the
fourth?

------
devx
A while ago (before we found out what the FISA Court is up to), I thought if
nothing else at least the Justice system is pretty good in US. But now they're
systematically replacing the judges with pro-surveillance state judges [1],
too. If this isn't stopped and _reversed_ , I worry for the future of US, and
then the world.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/fbi-lawyer-
surv...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/fbi-lawyer-surveillance-
judge-valerie-caproni)

------
PaulHoule
I'll say personally of all the problems in the world, getting spied on by the
N.S.A. is one of the last ones I worry about.

~~~
skylan_q
I don't get why this post was downvoted. This is the exact attitude that
almost all people effectively have. It is important to bring up this point and
demonstrate it. They'll go as far as signing a petition, but the effort/reward
ratio isn't there for your average person to do anything about it. Unless it
pays off for each person to get involved, no one will get involved.

------
wavesounds
Are these interviews or this conference being live streamed?

~~~
Timothee
The questions to Ron Conway: [http://on.aol.com/video/real-talk-with-the-
minds-of-sv-angel...](http://on.aol.com/video/real-talk-with-the-minds-of-sv-
angel-at-techcrunch-disrupt-sf-2013-517927038#)

It starts at 12'34". Nothing much comes of it though.

------
batemanesque
this isn't the evil at Disrupt I thought he was going to address.

~~~
larrys
ApponStageGate? Perhaps that's being handled as "nothing to stare at here,
move along".

------
vbl
Tell me more about these "viscous cycles."

~~~
robinson-wall
Play the twitter "Typo or not?" game
[https://twitter.com/search?q=viscous%20cycle&src=typd&mode=r...](https://twitter.com/search?q=viscous%20cycle&src=typd&mode=realtime)

------
api
Tangent:

I was using a Microsoft surface the other day and thinking "wow, this really
doesn't suck once you get used to it." I'm starting to come off my initial
hatred of Metro.

What does this have to do with the OP?

If MS wanted to pull an outrageous coup d'etat vs. Apple and Google,
especially in the Mobile space, they could pivot the company thusly: "Here at
Microsoft, we empower you. We are the company that gives you control over your
platform and your privacy."

Yeah, that's totally not what they do now. Just saying. If they were really
genuine about it, they'd gain a shitload of mindshare real fast.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Yeah, that's totally not what they do now._

Actually, it is: see [http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/new-
microsof...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/new-microsoft-
privacy-campaign-promotes-consumer-control-148781) and
[http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-breached-your-
privacy-...](http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-breached-your-privacy-use-
bing-7000004571/), for instance.

------
lifeisstillgood
I think this is an important start to some serious soul-searching, both for
the tech community and the rest of society.

However, I don't think it is enough - and the revelation I suspect that might
kick it off, if Snowden has proof, is an attack on the Visa network. I saw
earlier the NSA had got into SWIFT, which really stunned me. But NSA watching
VISA traffic would be front page across the world. And may well be a good
explanation for why they are really trying to find out what snowden has.

Just a thought. But please carry on asking questions Mr Arrington.

