And the tech shall set you free
What can "freedom tech" do for you?
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An inflection point for “freedom tech”
“Freedom tech.” That was the theme of the latest edition of the MIT Bitcoin Expo, a long-running and well-loved annual gathering focused on the technology that powers the world’s original cryptocurrency.
I couldn’t make it in person, so I caught the livestream of the proceedings earlier this month. As I took in the sessions, including several talks by bona fide human rights activists, I kept thinking about Salt Typhoon, the catastrophic cyberattack on US telecom infrastructure that was revealed last year.
What is freedom tech? The premise of the MIT conference was that Bitcoin qualifies, as the decentralized cryptocurrency network offers freedom from centralized monetary systems. Encrypted messaging is another prominent example. That’s why the US government’s reaction to Salt Typhoon was so remarkable.
Late last year, officials said that Chinese hackers had infiltrated several major telecom companies, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Lawmakers and government authorities were “shocked” by Salt Typhoon’s depth and sophistication. Hackers accessed sensitive communications data about more than a million people, including high-ranking government officials and members of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaigns.
Just as shocking were the steps those officials suggested Americans take to protect themselves. “US officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack,” reported NBC News. “Encryption is your friend,” Jeff Green, then the executive assistant for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told news reporters.
Not long ago, it would have been unheard of for the government to recommend encryption. The director of the FBI, James Comey, warned in 2014 that criminals were “going dark” using encryption; he called this a “significant public safety problem.” In 2016, the bureau tried to force Apple to give the FBI access to encrypted iPhone data associated with a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. Back then, internet freedom activists fought the government for the right to use encrypted messaging tools (Apple ultimately won the case). Now the government has publicly said we should use those tools to protect ourselves.
The change reflects today’s reality: the internet is a highly adversarial place. “Freedom tech” is no longer a category reserved for people living under oppressive governments. At this point, we all stand to benefit from the security these capabilities offer. And even if you live in a “free” country, the acceleration of AI technology is likely to make it tougher to stay free without using freedom tech.
Bitcoin and freedom
What is Bitcoin freedom from? That’s one of the deep questions University of Wyoming philosophy professor Bradley Rettler asked during his talk at MIT. To begin with, it is freedom from “money makers,” like governments, which make monetary policies, he said. Many of those policies have caused harm or at least failed to rectify economic calamities. Rettler cited a report from the UN that in 2022, 69 economies—in the home nations of more than 2.1 billion people—confirmed double-digit inflation.
The Bitcoin Expo featured keynotes from Evan Mawarire, an activist from Zimbabwe who spoke about authoritarianism and hyperinflation in that country, and Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, a Venezuelan entrepreneur who spoke about how his family turned to Bitcoin to protect themselves against inflation and the policies of President Nicolás Maduro.
Bitcoin is also freedom from surveillance, particularly when paired with cryptographic tools that enhance blockchain privacy, Rettler said, and it’s about more than financial freedom. Since so much of our communication and interaction now occurs online, Rettler said, the freedoms of speech, religion, press, and assembly now have digital components. They also all require the ability to transact. “If you are using a system that has managers and mediators, you might be blocked from these freedoms,” he said.
If you are using a system like that, you are probably also trusting mediators and managers to store your personal data. Salt Typhoon is only one recent example from a litany of data breaches that together call into question whether that trust is well-placed. Because even if it feels like you are transacting and interacting freely, you never know who is watching. It’s not as simple as keeping something secret from the government. We need to protect it from the world’s most sophisticated hackers, too.
Privacy is freedom
In fact, governments need freedom tech, too. Another speaker at the MIT Bitcoin Expo was Roger Dingledine, co-founder of the Tor Project. Tor prevents anyone who might be watching your internet connection from tracking your activity. Dingledine said that when he is speaking with his parents, he calls it a privacy tool. When he talks with governments, he uses a different term: “traffic analysis-resistant communications networks.”
Governments don’t think they need a privacy tool, he said. “But oh, I can send my ambassador to Israel and somebody watching the hotel network connection doesn’t learn that she’s my ambassador? Yeah, I actually do really need that.”
In other words, privacy is now basic internet security. And it’s going to get worse. “AI is greatly increasing capabilities for centralized data collection and analysis while greatly expanding the scope of the data we share voluntarily,” Ethereum co-inventor Vitalik Buterin argued in a recent blog post entitled “Why I Support Privacy.” In the future, he writes, “we may be literally talking about AI reading our minds.”
Privacy tends to be underrated by folks who don’t need it as badly, Buterin writes, adding that privacy is “more needed for people whose life situations deviate from the norm, in any direction.” That’s not only a lot of people, he says, but ”you never know when you will become one of them.” This is the kind of thinking that inspired the cypherpunk movement in the 1990s. The good news, according to Buterin, is that “we have more powerful tools to preserve privacy…than the 1990s cypherpunks could have imagined,” like zero-knowledge proofs.
The bad news is that the current (centralized) systems that pervade our digital lives depend on people relinquishing control of personal data and trusting authorities to keep it safe. This system is deeply entrenched, thanks to billions of dollars in profit. The initial rise of generative AI models has only increased this system’s inertia. Yes, we have powerful privacy-preserving tools, but society won’t reap their full benefits unless those tools are prioritized and implemented. Incumbent powers, meanwhile, have all the incentive in the world to use whatever means at their disposal, including AI, to stay in power.
There is conflict ahead.
—Mike Orcutt
HEADLINE WATCHER
Justice Dept. scales back crypto cases in line with Trump directives. That’s the headline from the Washington Post, but this one reverberated throughout both the traditional and crypto media. The news is based on a memo issued by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The Justice Department will “stop participating in regulation by prosecution in this space,” the memo reads. “Specifically, the Department will no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations”—unless the case falls within a separate area on which the DOJ will place special focus: which is the use of digital asset by “cartels, Transnational Criminal Organizations, Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”
“Mixing and tumbling services” is imprecise; these are umbrella terms for a number of distinct technical designs that raise distinct sets of legal questions. Centralized mixers operated by humans are different than decentralized smart contracts, like the core of Tornado Cash. So it’s not clear what this means for Roman Storm, who the DOJ is prosecuting for his role in the development of the Ethereum-based privacy tool, which North Korea used to launder stolen crypto. Brian Klein, Storm’s lawyer, told the Washington Post that he interpreted the memo “as supporting the dismissal of the case.” We’re keeping a close eye on this.
Influential crypto researcher and white hat hacker Samczsun steps down from Paradigm to focus on crypto security. The pseudonymous researcher, who has been at the VC firm for four and a half years, will now spend all of his time on the Security Alliance (SEAL), which he founded in 2023. “When I told (Paradigm cofounder) matt (Huang) that i wanted to build the solution to crypto security, he was fully supportive,” Samczsun said on Twitter.” SEAL, which coordinates crypto threat intelligence sharing and incident response services, has become a full-time commitment, he said.
If you’re interested in learning more about SEAL and will be in DC on Wednesday, April 23, you should RSVP to attend the PGP* (Pretty Good Policy) for Crypto meeting, which will feature a fireside chat between Samczsun and Project Glitch’s Mike Orcutt. If you can’t make it in person, catch the livestream on YouTube or X. The fireside will begin around 10:45 AM Eastern.
Former Ethereum Foundation developer Virgil Griffith released from prison. Griffith was sentenced to 63 months in prison in 2022 after pleading guilty to violating sanctions against North Korea when he attended a blockchain conference there. Prosecutors said he provided “technical advice on using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to evade sanctions.” Now he’s out on parole, reports The Block.
Altman-backed Praxis scouts Kyiv, Athens for tech utopia base. The “sovereign network, founded and run by 29-year-old Dryden Brown, is on a global search for 10,000 acres it can call its physical home. The project, which has raised $500 million, is backed by venture funds run by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel and crypto VC firms Paradigm and Winklevoss Capital, among other investors. According to Bloomberg, Dryden wants to “establish a city that will offer AI-augmented governance and employer-friendly labor laws he describes as ‘Elon-compatible.’”
Solana developers launch new ‘confidential balances’ token extension to improve onchain safety. The feature uses advanced cryptography to let users shield their typically public token balances and transfer secret amounts to a recipient, explains The Block.
Crypto attorney alleges US government knows Bitcoin creator’s identity. A lawyer in the US has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking “documents concerning claims made by a high-ranking Special Agent of DHS that DHS had found and interviewed Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.” The suit claims that a federal agent stated at a conference that the DHS had interviewed Bitcoin’s long-lost inventor. (via Decrypt)
Apple-UK data privacy row with UK should not be secret, court rules. In a win for civil liberties activists, a judge in the UK has ruled that a legal fight between Apple and the UK government “cannot be held in secret,” reports the BBC. The government wants the capability to access encrypted information that Apple currently cannot access. The company, taking the same position it has taken before against the US government, argues that installing a government backdoor would make the system more vulnerable to hackers.
Trump wants to merge government data. Here are 314 things it might know about you. One of the President’s many executive orders calls for the “consolidation” of the many disparate datasets held by various government agencies. The New York Times says the effort to carry out the order, led by Elon Musk, is “raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.” The Times went through 23 of the data systems that its sources say Musk’s aides want to access, identifying “more than 300 separate data fields about people who live in the US.”
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