[p2p-research] Google gets into the DNS business

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 06:04:37PM -0700, Matt Boggs wrote:
>> While I'm on my Google wave...no pun intended. 
>>
>> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/pondering-googles-move-into-the-dns-business/
> 
> It is ridiculous that people would willingly give over more and
> more of their services to a single commercial entity, which at
> worst is a one stop shop for the TLA of your choice, government
> subpoena or data mining for marketing purposes.

This may reflect a deeper shift in our society. For most people, the Google 
corporation is now effectively the de-facto government that structures their 
lives online. So, how can we make Google a good government? :-)

Well, Michel recently posted this link, which is a start:
"YouTube - Reclaiming Democracy: How Communities are Saying "NO" to 
Corporate Rights"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oiERH83SfY

But connected to this again is Manuel de Landa's points on always having 
meshworks and hierarchies:
   http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

 > Running your own caching DNS resolver is a) trivial b) the only
 > way to prevent your ISP monkeying with your DNS queries trivially.
 > (I reside in a country which must record connection info by law,
 > and block sites in a blacklist, currently implemented via DNS).
 >
 > The only way to make sure your ISP is not sniffing or altering
 > your data in transit is to route all your traffic through a
 > VPN (e.g. OpenVPN) tunnel to a (V)server, preferably in a different
 > jurisdiction.

Well, one could also put a willingness to use Google for convenience or 
free-of-direct cost down to "digital fatalism" in just assuming you have no 
privacy online.

Here is how I see it, probably having an even higher level of paranoia than 
you. :-) Vitamins like D3 and B12 can help supposedly. :-)
   http://www.brainnutritionfacts.com/tag/paranoia
"We recently had a patient at the hospital where I work who became 
psychotic, or lost touch with reality, believing that the CIA wanted to 
assasinate him, and hearing voices whispering death threats through the 
hallways.  The only cause that could be found was vitamin B12 deficiency. 
Once we gave him injections of vitamin B12, he slowly improved and could 
once again tell the difference between reality and what only existed in his 
mind."

So, here is some extreme paranoia for your discomforting. :-)

The fact is, any ISP can log and decrypt all the data anyone sends through 
it from a specific location if they really want to. One can assume the 
decryption can be done now either at high cost by supercomputers or in a few 
years at low cost by newer computers -- maybe even quantum ones. That 
assumes the encryption algorithms are any good and don't have backdoors 
making it trivial to decrypt stuff. Historically, countries have kept copies 
of intercepted messages from other countries in wartime and maybe years 
later could then decrypt them and find out a lot about the past that may be 
useful in the present day. Maybe what you outline with VPN might keep stuff 
private now, but would it keep it private ten years from now with decryption 
computers 1000 times faster or cheaper (Moore's law) than what we have now?

Let's say someone unintentionally but illegally downloads just *one* 
copyrighted song now (2009) using VPN technology (say, a background tune on 
a youtube video they look at for other reasons), out of all their other 
endless legal activities. Ten years later, in 2019, that logged data gets 
decrypted routinely, and the government knows that person broke a copyright 
law ten years ago. Well, is that a prosecutable crime in 2019?
   "Legislative history -- Copyright felony act"
   http://www.cybercrime.gov/CFAleghist.htm
It may depend on the interpretation of the "statute of limitations" as well 
as other laws passed over the next decade. But, even if the statute of 
limitations has passed, evidence of a past crime might seem like at least 
"probable cause" to investigate further in the then present day (2020) by 
seizing all of that person's computing systems. That might even be painful 
for a cyborg, to rip out any brain implants. So, even today's laws can all 
become a way of doing selective enforcement against people in the future if 
the government does not like (even to the point of doing forcible brain 
surgery on them). This sort of issue outlined in this slashdot article may 
become all too common as law enforcement can look back on data recorded ten 
years ago and decrypt it:
""Accidental" Download Sending 22-Year-Old Man To Prison"
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/05/1511258/Accidental-Download-Sending-22-Year-Old-Man-To-Prison

After September 11, 2001, examining cell phone calls was a big thing -- 
showing how they are routinely recorded (a fact not widely know at the time, 
but obvious after).

Even now people are working to crack GSM phone encryption. Related:
"Open Source Attempt To Crack GSM Encryption"
http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/12/05/1958251/Open-Source-Attempt-To-Crack-GSM-Encryption
"The intended approach is to create an open source project to spread the 
computation of a giant look-up table across more than 80 machines. 
Interestingly, they've openly stated that nVidia's CUDA technology will be 
used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPUs as well.""

So, for anyone who archives all encrypted phone communications around them 
(would take a lot of storage space obviously), they would be able in ten 
years or so probably to listen to everything anyone around them said now on 
a cellular phone; recording even encrypted conversations may be illegal for 
individuals, but I would expect at least any government would find out some 
way to justify it. Certainly a foreign government could probably record cell 
phone calls in the USA, decrypt them, and then pass the data back to the US 
under various agreements.

So, while encryption may be useful in delaying people's access to your 
communications, don't assume it does any more than *delay* access.

And it also won't delay access under certain legal situations in some countries:
"UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files: Terror squad arrest 
over model rocket"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/
"""
He was arrested on 15 September 2008 by officers from the Metropolitan 
Police's elite Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC), when entering the UK from 
France. Sniffer dogs at Gare du Nord in Paris detected his Estes model 
rocket, which was still in its packaging and did not have an engine.
   On arrival at St Pancras, JFL was detained under the Terrorism Act and 
taken to Paddington Green police station, a highly secure facility where UK 
police hold their most dangerous suspects. ...
   Again he maintained silence. Police then warned him they would seek a 
section 49 notice under RIPA Part III, which gives a suspect a time limit to 
supply encryption keys or make target data intelligible. Failure to comply 
is an offence under section 53 of the same Part of the Act and carries a 
sentence of up to two years imprisonment, and up to five years imprisonment 
in an investigation concerning national security.
"""

Of course, another issue is that digital evidence is fairly trivial to 
fabricate. As this book points out:
   "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad 
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
   http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
some police even routinely plant physical evidence at this point through a 
process of progressive desensitization over their careers. The logic in the 
future of digital forensics teams might more-and-more begin to go, "Anyone 
using encryption must be guilty of something, so it is then morally OK to 
plant evidence."

As Jane Jacobs points out in here book "Dark Age Ahead":
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
the failure of groups like the police to police themselves is at the core of 
the collapse of one of several pillars in our society that we have been 
dealing with. But it is a reality.

As I suggest here:
"CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
I think the safest thing to do is assume all your communications are logged, 
archived, reviewed, and monitored by the CIA (or whoever) and that everyone 
online works for the CIA (or whoever). One might call that digital fatalism 
or digital paranoia of the worst sort, :-) except, one can then take that as 
a *starting* point for action, not an ending point. :-)

So, I suggest we should assume everything we do is monitored and everyone on 
this p2p list works for the CIA. Now what? :-) Well, one can start working 
to change the nature of society in a peaceful, non-violent, and legal way 
that works for everyone using P2P and other technologies. :-) And one could 
also work peacefully and legally to changing the laws about copyrights and 
so on.

See also:
"Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse

But we seem way past that infocalypse already in some ways, like the guy 
above arrested for a model rocket still in the package. In a way, the "think 
of the children" Infocalypse (like is putting that 22 year old in prison for 
years) has already come and gone, and we are living in the world on the 
other side (everything logged, broad and vague laws on all sorts of things 
that taken together that make *everyone* criminals, selective enforcement of 
that, children being imprisoned for their own "protection" for sending 
pictures of themselves, a generated climate of fear and mistrust, etc.).

As suggested here:
   "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
  http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please 
try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political 
awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each 
step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 
‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the 
beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what 
all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must 
some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a 
farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

Still, even assuming the worst, we can work towards something better with 
what we have, our imaginations, our community, our technology, and so on. 
Even within the USSR and repressive government, it transformed eventually. 
Things like humor were part of that transformation. So was optimism (one can 
be paranoid as well as humorous & optimistic at the same time. :-)

Consider:
   "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn
   http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"""
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in 
comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay 
involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will 
get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards 
have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play 
is to foreclose any chance of winning.
   To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the 
world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment 
will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden 
crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by 
unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse 
of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history 
of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, 
because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so 
ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of 
someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone 
halfway around the earth.
"""

Also, as long as people get adequate vitamin D3 in prison, think of what a 
positive force they could be on prison culture, and then afterwards; example:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela

So, welcome to my paranoid world. :-) Google *is* the government already. 
Encryption only at best delays access to anything you do online by a few 
years and at worse makes people investigate you immediately. Everyone is a 
criminal because of vague and broad laws that are selectively enforced. Any 
obvious defiance will get you put away for twenty years in a place without 
sunlight that may destroy your health and sanity (and that's if you are 
lucky and not just taken out in an "accident"). Now what? How do we build a 
better world within those constraints? Perhaps by using humor, optimism, and 
imagination? :-) As well as free-to-the-user Google services? :-)

I'm really a tremendously conformist person in most ways -- you don't get a 
stamp on your forehead that says "Princeton" unless you are willing to jump 
through endless hoops on command. :-( My idea of a happy work life at this 
point is just going to a research lab everyday (an IBM Research like in the 
1970s when people like Gerry O'Neill came to give talks about space 
settlemest?) doing something worthwhile and having a nice meal for lunch 
talking to colleagues. I would not have spent decades outside the system 
trying to make changes if I did not think they were essential to our very 
survival (especially because of the risk of nuclear war). Frankly, I 
probably would have preferred to be a "loser" earning US$200K with the rest 
of my class (even Michelle); see this humorous item to understand that comment:
   "Larry Ellison's [pretend] Commencement Address at Yale University"
   http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=851104
But I just could not look the other way enough, so realizing the whole 
pyramid thing was a rickety building about to come down at any moment drove 
me out of that mindset. And that's really a bad place to be, mentally. The 
happier reason to make change is just because it will make a happier world 
for everyone, not because it is desperately necessary to avert catastrophe. 
Focusing on the positive will probably help more people more of the time, 
and is just more positive psychologically. The question today, with all this 
computers and other high technology is more, how can we all direct that to 
some positive social ends?

A "technological fix" with encryption like you suggest does not really 
address the core issues of a changing society. The core problem IMHO is 
scarcity-based assumptions at the core of the current political process (as 
well as economic processes like around even Google), but politicians and 
business people increasing having to make decisions about using and 
improving an infrastructure that can produce vast abundance.

A bunch of market-based religion thrown in there too makes things harder:
   "The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
   http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

Really, if everyone nullified bad laws in the jury box, everyones stopped 
buying lots of junky products (or  good products produced in unsustainable 
ways), and everyone would vote only for truly progressive candidates, we 
would not be needing to have this discussion. How long would the war on 
drugs last if, say, juries stopped convicting people on drug charges? Why 
don't people do those things? Good question -- the beginning of knowledge, 
perhaps. What is about people's beliefs that get them to act that way, to 
support bad laws, bad products, and problematical politicians? (Compulsory 
school is part of that, most likely, according to John Taylor Gatto.)

Progressive candidates in future elections might include ones that take on 
corporate personhood and limited liability (Ralph Nader?) and who seriously 
rethink the economics and laws of an industrial age society so they match 
better the reality of an information age society (Marshall Brain? Others?). 
Maybe a Techno-Green party? :-) But Marshall Brain sees an end to privacy 
though; not everyone agrees, so even within that party are fault lines for 
schisms.

Consider, as one example:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
"""
The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden. 
Founded in 2006, it is now the third largest party in Sweden in terms of 
membership. Its sudden popularity has given rise to parties with the same 
name and similar goals in Europe and worldwide, forming the international 
Pirate Party movement.
   The party strives to reform laws regarding copyright and patents. The 
agenda also includes support for a strengthening of the right to privacy, 
both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state 
administration.[1] The Party has intentionally chosen to be block 
independent on the traditional left-right scale[2] to pursue their political 
agenda with all mainstream parties.
"""

More on jury nullification:
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
"The jury system was established because it was felt that a panel of 
citizens, drawn at random from the community, and serving for too short a 
time to be corrupted, would be more likely to render a just verdict, through 
judging both the evidence and the law, than officials who may be unduly 
influenced to follow established legal practice, especially when that 
practice has drifted from its constitutional origins. However, in most 
modern Western legal systems, juries are often instructed to serve only as 
"finders of facts", whose role it is to determine the verity of the evidence 
presented,[2] instructions that are criticized by advocates of jury 
nullification. Historical examples of nullification include American 
revolutionaries who refused to convict under English law,[3] juries who 
refuse to convict due to perceived injustice of a law in general,[4] the 
perceived injustice of the way the law is applied in particular cases,[5] 
and cases where the juries have refused to convict due to their own 
prejudices such as the race of one of the parties in the case.[6]"

Jury nullification can be used for bad things, too, as in the last to defend 
racist crimes. But overall it is a final check on a system gone too far. All 
those US conservatives clinging to their guns for security againt government 
intrusion on liberty would find much more power in the jury box to prevent 
government excess than their wild fantasies of facing down police officers 
coming to take them to jail for some reason. Europe has less guns, but it 
has more concerned citizens, and so is, in that sense, a more free place in 
many ways than the USA.

Guns are like encryption in a sense. Like locks, maybe they help keep honest 
people honest, but they are not going to do much against organized efforts 
by government to do something to you. I've tried a few times with 
conservatives to take them step by step through the idea of how guns may 
protect their rights realistically in our society and have never gotten a 
good answer; history in the USA shows the now-despicable internment of 
Japanese-Americans went relatively smoothly even with a lot of guns around.

Related:
"The Five Boxes of Liberty"
http://www.nolanchart.com/article5030.html
"""
    1. The Moving Box — right of association, in particular territorially 
via migration
    2. The Soap Box — right of free speech
    3. The Ballot Box — right to a voice in your government
    4. The Jury Box — right to a trial by jury of your peers
    5. The Ammunition Box — right to threaten or use appropriate violence in 
self-defense
"""

One problem is that the fifth box (ammo box -- which I question the 
effectiveness and morality of, especially just compared to non-cooperation)
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
   http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
seems to have made many people complacent about all the others. Like the 
encrypted box, the ammo box does not make anything better by itself. Iraq 
showed how easy it is to tear apart a society in a way that may take decades 
to heal. You can hide all the transactions you want behind encryption for a 
time until society falls down around you, too.

But, appropriate technology can still help with social change. Anything from 
3D printers to plastic solar panels can help show the world abundance is 
possible on a vast scale:
   http://www.reprap.org
   http://www.konarka.com/

As can peer produced commons like Debian GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, or the larger 
web itself.

The biggest value of those things politically is that improvements in them 
make the scarcity mythology behind a repressive status quo more difficult to 
defend. Related:
   "The mythology of wealth"
   http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

As I suggest at the next link, it is both social change and technological 
change that may make more possible a happier world of abundance for all, 
because they are multiplicative in some sense:
   "Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
  http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en

But, this is a very different interpretation of the political meaning of 
technology, as being about promoting abundance for all, not about defending 
privilege (even private privilege that might be worth defending).

So, rather than focus on encryption, one might focus on making more free 
content of hight quality, or more free (or even non-free, sadly, like 
Konarka) designs for technology that produces abundance. Like guns, 
encryption may be useful if you want to keep some information away from 
thieves (who won't try too hard to grab any one person's credit card 
numbers), but it won't protect anything in the long term from a determined 
government. Following Manuel de Landa's idea, I suggest we always will have 
some sort of one, as we have a healthy balance of meshworks and hierarchies. 
You are trying to deny hierarchies some power with encryption, but they can 
still get it in other ways. The bigger issue is how do we keep the 
hierarchies accountable for the health of society?

So, the deeper issue is, what kind of government do we want? And what kind 
of society to go with it? And then how do we act to build that society 
within the possibilities that seem reasonable?

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/