Indestructible Communication: Bridging the Gap for Privacy-PreservingTechnologies and Network States

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] okay hi everyone thanks for being here um thank you first of all to Betina and the whole HTC team for organizing this amazing event and accommodating us despite our technical troubles

um to give this talk so we're gonna talk to you about the need for indestructible communication so internet is a communication and information technology right but it's not currently as we know it indestructible however this is does not mean that it will always stay the same and we together Jarrell and I with the internet defense Alliance are gonna work towards a better internet and more reliable one so before we cut to the chase I just want to quickly ask the audience um has any one of you ever been disrupted uh in your connection to

Internet by a governmentally imposed shutdown nice it's man's yes yes um but very few so who's live next has been indirectly touched or disrupted by internet shutdowns somewhere else your family your friends your business somehow working with people in jurisdiction where they were shut Downs more hands obviously this audience is not necessarily the the ones targeted by shutdowns usually although we're gonna see later that it can touch every one of us but last question who thinks that Network States since networks there is a

Hot Topic currently who thinks the network states can exist with the current Internet stack as it is centralized there's some maybes there's there is some maybes again so um exactly I think and I'm pretty sure um everyone agrees other than this but this is also an agreement that there cannot be any network State without decentralized internet infrastructure and why is that it goes without saying but internet is currently centralized so if we look at the internet stack all layer of it is centralized and controlled by one or few organisms

organizations governments countries and so on internet is unreal reliable as a result and dependent on hierarchy and controlled it is as well outdated right so um the internet as we know at the stereoscope has been the case for many many years and it is quite naive in my opinion to think that this is not gonna evolve and change as much as everything else is evolving and changing and in our case in the crypto scene decentralizing right so internet currently is outdated and we have to Envision another form an evolved form of Internet what will be the internet that we're gonna have the connectivity that we're gonna experience

10 years from now 20 years from now 30 years from now and build towards that vision internet is as well fragmented like nation state model so no matter in which country you are um your connection to internet through your phone through Wi-Fi is um an extension of the territory in which you are so the control of your connectivity is done by the government or the controlling entity of where you are and this as well in my opinion is outdated my first encounter with internet shutdown happened in 2019 and this was when in Iran there were protests against

the increase in fuel prices and protests there get intense pretty quickly and we were following I wasn't in Iran at that time but we were following very closely the news seeing how protests are going how they're evolving how the repression of the protests are going talking with family and friends and then one day I wake up and no messages are going through so naturally I think WhatsApp is down then I think oh signal is down to Instagram like everything is down there may be a problem and that's where when I realized and through netblocks which shares and gathers these data and on Twitter mainly also on their website and it's quite reliable that there is a national outage a total

shutdown of connectivity in Iran it was the first time it was happening so internet is always controlled there it's censored there are a lot of things you cannot access with other VPN but never before there was no access at all and this access we didn't know how long it was going to last and it lasted a whole week where we couldn't hear from our people when we couldn't hear news on TV because there was no information going back and forth it was extremely tough time and once connectivity started growing again first it was never like before and second the momentum was gone so no one talked about what happened it was very little

news coming out very little pictures videos coming out and you can see in the previous Slide the picture low resolution because I mean high resolution videos are not really transiting through that connection so um and a lot of people died a lot of people were killer people were arrested we never had numbers that were reliable on on what happened so that's the result of a shutdown is basically a lot of criminality and this uh feel like street art picture from inside of Iran shows it well so during this one week um they beta tested the national intranet Network so they have this

intranet Network in Iran that is based on the Chinese model and during this week they saw whether or not life can continue without access to global internet only through this intranet that is highly surveilled and and controlled by the government and this intranet is called the cyber space protection plan and this tag says that it equals a guarantee of crime fast forward last year 2022 September October November a lot of protests again in Iran and yet again internet shutdown but this time shotgun wasn't as radical as before it was during certain hour it was only

on mobile network it was only in certain regions so that life can Banks or other infrastructure that had dependencies on global internet can continue functioning so the toll on the economy is less although it had a lot of toll on small and medium-sized businesses but um from that time onwards until today and probably in the future connectivity will never be like before in Iran resiliency is low Tech so people figure out other ways to kind of live their lives right so they had other communication channels more immediate interactions more physical interactions

they reduced their Reliance on internet for a lot of things change their habit immediacy is not an expectation anymore and they were prepared so every phone in Iran has vpns installing it and people know how to update the routes and and I think you should pause there and like just acknowledge that everyone in like a society knows what a VPN is and think about like how different our reality must be when we are existing like the Western World and we know everyone in our lives for the most part 90 doesn't know what a VPN is like that's very real exactly like every single person although they may not fully understand how it works but even my grandmother has a VPN on her phone so it comes as a

default um and internet shutdown I mean this is a funny slide to me I mean it's kind of sad as well but it's not that digital detox retreat so it's not like oh it's shut down so today I'm gonna rest um no when internet is shut on other things are as well so satellites connections are jammed so you cannot watch news on TV your phone connection don't go through it's hard maybe to call with mobile you need landline so people are like put at home instead of like being in the streets um it disrupts all layers of your life and nowadays that we're so used to communicating through internet and especially sharing pictures and videos

this is extremely disruptive this picture that you see on the left over there is a picture I took at the Customs Border in Iran where you have to when you enter Iran register your mobile phone with Customs so they take it they register it and only when it's registered fully you can use it with a SIM card in Iran otherwise it's entirely blocked from the network so they do that in order to be able to know which phone belongs to whom and I'll let you speculate on their underlying reason why they do that but on this picture it says that any iPhone 14 and Beyond cannot be imported and used in Iran

and I was surprised because there was never a restriction beforehand on the model of the phone you can register and I ask friends around who are not necessarily in Tech and they said oh because iPhone 14 can connect to starlink this is not the case yet so we know that iPhone 14 has a possibility to connect to satellite connections for very specific purposes but nonetheless the thought or the rumor is that it may happen that a day that our mobile phones are acting as satellite internet nodes and beforehand obviously governments who want to control internet want to also

get rid of this very mobile devices that may allow people to circumvent this National connection I can I pause this here for a second like yeah like I think just to make everyone know what that that like Alliance means I think we've all been off the grid before in some remote area and you've looked at the top corner of your phone and you've seen the SOS signal a symbol on it and that is let Apple spending 450 million dollars so that if you're ever lost since you bought an iPhone if you're ever really lost and Off the Grid and away from cell tower reception they could still track where you are they could get your information to authorities you could make a quick call and transmit low data over like I think it's 1.4 gigabyte band Hertz uh to

uh gigahertz uh bandwidth to these satellite networks so if that's like the Simplicity of the technology in your real life is like that's what you're communicating and obviously everyone would want that at some point to have these devices that can connect right but it also raises other questions that I'm not gonna get into right now but if your phone can connect to form of internet then other powers may have data on you that some some other powers don't want a lot of shutdowns have been everywhere so it's not only Iran I gave the example of Iran because I'm familiar with it and it's a big one but we can see already that from January this year until May 21

countries shut down internet to control its population illegitimate illegitimate manners so I gave the example of Iran there is example of turkey after the earthquake the I think censored Twitter because there was a lot of criticism of the government happening there so any form of descent is highly controlled with China others India a very big repeat offender and obviously shutdowns or drastic slowdowns have negative effects on the economy um that goes without saying but also on human rights that often get violated without any form of accountability or ways to raise awareness to make it stop relationships are impaired access to

knowledge is highly impaired so imagine students or people that are needing this form of knowledge or anybody else culture health and moral and health specifically in rural areas where they rely on WhatsApp for instance to talk to doctors or have doctors see their cases are also suffering a lot but we don't have to go very far to see International dance happening or the threat of shutdowns and this is a picture from a protest in France a few days ago against police brutality and systemic racism and the protest got like spread across France very suddenly and became violent

and as a result macron said that internet should be cut off it was obviously very poorly received by the public that said that this is an authoritarian move and its cabinet attempted to kind of mitigate the situation by saying that macron didn't mean a total blackout all he wanted or he wants is a targeted censorship or shutdown for instance Snapchat maps in order to curb protesters ability to organize Gathering and we are right now in France like how is that better than the blackout like how is that okay to censor like Maps or SnapChat or like social media to like

prevent people from voicing their grievances against the government like for me it makes no sense and if it happens here or even if there are talks about it here it doesn't even need to happen but even if they think it's okay to mention it we're definitely going towards a very dark Direction no matter if we're in the West in a democratic country or anywhere else two-thirds of humanity uses the internet but even Within These two thirds billions are not meaningfully connected what are meaningful connections is consistent connection safe connection cheap affordable connection anything else is not meaningful and this is

according to a report by the international telecommunication unit Union which is a United Nations body and it says that if there is no meaningful connection repeating here that um economic development is stunned but also it depends inequalities and creates a surface for violence and we're gonna illustrate that violence uh through the longest shutdown to date that is happening right now in Tigre Okay so this is um thank you Fatima and uh thank you ECC and Bettina and Jerome and everyone

who's work on the team thank you for letting us re-record this it's actually quite nice to be able to talk about such heavy topics and have like the time needed to kind of get into the flow because it is pretty intense and it is like a reality that many of us in you know privileged technical circles don't really experience but we are lightly aware of and we don't actually know what the full extent of the darkest version of an Internet shutdown looks like we theorize about what it looks like and so we felt that it was important to take a lot of time to start putting forth real philosophies and real solutions and base it off of our real lived experience and fatimae as well just spoke about theirs and I am speaking my mind as a tagorean

immigrant into America who is a part of these uh fractured internet networks who is a part of communities that are shut off that have my heart and that I care about and then seeing them one day and not seeing them the next and so at the very beginning of a well in November 2020 November 4th there started to be uh some military actions taken by a federal government of Ethiopia against a population of seven million people in Northern Ethiopia called the tigrants the two guy people that is us we've been uh we've been [ __ ] around that spot for about 4 000 years not gonna lie um so we're very familiar with the geographical region with how to defend our space and you know maintain democracy is a very very proud

Democratic community and so there were some authoritarian nonsense as there always is during the pandemic long story short they're sorry to be ethnic like targeting there became a movement in the United States and Europe here as well in Paris there was some big stuff done two amplify this movement and it started to get traction okay look at that that's a good picture that's a great picture in fact that's the New York Times showing up in East Africa and taking a great [ __ ] picture and putting on the front page of their website that is the last time the New York Times was able to to actually get a good photo out of tigrei because that picture started to get some support that experience being transmitted through communication

channels to the Western World to democratic channels started to get some support it was evidence it was a story it was a narrative that was against the national dialogue the state apparatus and so we have what's happening in Tigre internet shutdown they shut down the internet for over 800 days is the longest internet shutdown in the existence of the internet it is the Pinnacle evolution of Siege Warfare which is exactly what they use from a point of starvation all the way down to weaponized sexual violence every single crime they committed every single woman that was violated every single man that was violated every single child that was violated every murder that was carried out was hidden under a blackout of communication hierarchy they blacked out

the internet and said we are going to kill 800 000 ethnic to grians we are going to sexually violate over two hundred thousand of them we are going to scorched Earth tactic this entire twenty twenty thousand square foot or square mile territory and no one is ever going to hear about it and you know that no one is ever going to hear about it because they watch stuff like Syria and they watch stuff uh that happened in Myanmar with the rohingya people and in uh in other locations during like the Arab Spring and they saw how the apathy of the West would allow them to maintain a two-year long internet shutdown and the fact is I'm saying numbers like 800 000 and 200 000 those are like generous uh those are not those are conservative

estimates made by Western authorities so these are people who are like I'm sure not that many people died and these aren't like soldiers though these are like civilians this is a population of seven million that lost about 10 percent of its population in two years and that is largely because you look at how oh man I don't know if you guys even read that uh the actual like information database of our world is comprised under hierarchical understanding of like Global geopolitical movements and so if you look and you type in the same three word or the same uh sentence which is that's death Ukraine war I memorized all my [ __ ] so I can tell you guys what's going on death Ukraine war death take it I War so what you're going to have here is a uh as of yesterday in article 14 hours

ago you have an Article 13 one day ago one week ago one week ago a war that was orders of magnitude way bigger and an actual confirmed genocide that started uh two years ago has the most recent article two weeks ago because it's in relation to the total deaths of the world with Ukraine and then the most recent all the way back in 2022 at the final like peace Accord agreement right all of that is like existent of patterns where we know for a fact the world's deadliest war and the most victim civilian death and the actual violations happening on a human rights level is in a space that is locked down from the internet and so the Western authorities know this is happening there's a lot of

diplomatic authorities there's a lot of Eastern like a lot of different Financial authorities and people who involve themselves in markets that Ethiopia would be very very unfortunate to exit from like a Goa and various trade markets those authorities know there's the world's deadliest war and it's not happening in Ukraine and they are benefiting in general like we all are benefiting from sharing a reality where we don't realize there's multiple Dimensions to existence and that the internet is directly responsible for the accountability in all of our Lives if any of you ever been on Twitter and you've seen people get Justice for some social uh aggravation you've seen the power of like social media and the ability of social movements we've all seen the power of diplomatic uh authorities having concrete evidence and

making sanctionable offenses and making a legal documentation around on this and so what we have now is two years later is coming back online very slowly and what we have is we're supposed to what wait for internet to solve our problem of communication now if you look at the over over time even at the beginning start of the tiger War the Ukraine war hadn't even started yet and still outperformed Us in Trends nobody had information nobody understood what was happening so like nobody cared and we can tell you like the real issue is like techno colonialism isn't like it isn't something like Grand groom of lizard people that are like we are just not gonna like pay attention to Africa there are

centuries-old hierarchical structures around information and Global progress in from certain perspectives from leveraged High leverage perspectives and these formatted already existing structures of hierarchy affect every single form of information resource that human beings in that hierarchy uh are uh suspect to so at Ida our mission and this is where we had to get into a quick wrap up by the way uh some a actual Solutions and where we see these things going because they don't think it's actually I have a lot of background in technical space I have engineering background I have a lot of uh just a little uh fooling around trying to make some things happen

background and I'll tell you the technological aspect is not the big issue like people have actually made real strides towards Hardware that can be experimented upon and create real what we are calling resiliency and the resilient internet is not necessarily an instantly communicated internet the resilient internet and why we asked the question at the very beginning around do you remember dial-up and and that experience is that a high latency Communication channel that is indestructible is definitively more valuable than an instant or low latency channel that is easily destroyed and that is the message I think that we from the like leapfrog nations of the world are trying to tell the West to say

like we see what's happening in France we see the like like logical like arguments towards freedom and safety and she showed the cyberspace protection Force like those same narratives have been pushed in Iran and in tigray to in Ethiopia to the rest of Ethiopia and so what we say is like there needs to be a non-hierarchical structure behind this so that narratives don't fall under the same powers that are causing atrocities or the same powers that have something to hide so it's pretty obvious if you go to anyone in the U.N they will give you the same line they'll say 20 30 20 20 30 must be about us connecting everyone I've written it differently because I think it should be written differently but

they will tell you that they should be about connecting everyone on the planet we are going to connect everybody that's the important thing but what does this connection bring does it bring meaning does it bring real actual like meaningful human connection does it bring resiliency no it's going to be dependent on the existent hierarchical telecommunications structure that exists that is you know there's benefits capitalism is not like to building necessarily there's just the way these structures are certainly set up and there's ways to fight back the crypto Community is one of those ways actually the crypto Community is uniquely positioned to affect real change it just requires the crypto Community to realize that they need to reformat we need to reformat our risk aversion we've lived through the actual

effects of an Internet shutdown and immediately I mean we went through the same bull market the rest of you did the last like 2 two years and during that time we also went through like very aggressive communication shutdowns and saw the holes in the cypherpunk movement and I think what we want to say is reformat your risk aversion because you guys the character Community us as a whole is very very risk tolerant of economic Lego models and trying to make any sort of like economic engine work in order to create sustainability and yet this is the first class of Cypher punks that has ever been this wealthy off of a collective idea that did not take that much time to to really make money off of that has been this risk adverse to Hardware development and making inroads into Hardware resiliency to support

their Cypher Punk thesis to support these arguments of open markets and freedom of of currency do you think tigrei had a banking like banking industry when the internet went and the power was shut off they did not so there is a desire and a unique and innate desire in the cyberpunk movement to make its way into hardware and yet this class of Cypher punks that's made the most money on of really any and made the most inroads to Bringing more people into the cypherpunk movement has spent the least amount of money in the least amount of time and the least amount of genuine effort trying to make inroads into Hardware development and that is genuinely the biggest problem that we see so you have to ask yourself when you're building these products and which

dimension do you reside do you reside in a dimension where you can use crypto products easily where you can you know Shield your transactions and where you can create a doubt with your friends and all of that is going to be guaranteed tomorrow and you'll never have to worry about it or do you exist in a dimension where like you're trying to send your family money using crypto and then them [ __ ] took the internet down and that last resort way that you were sending your family money is now shut off this is the resiliency that we have to describe to everyone and have to understand is because once again we're going to start realizing we have to make better markets for ourselves we're all sharing the same users and I think that we should all just be honest about that we all made a big statement about how we

were going to make our way into these developing nations and Bank the unbanked and all of this stuff and that doesn't actually happen on the current structure and hierarchy of the internet that happens on an evolved form of the internet and the evolved internet is a very easy thing to uh to build it's something that requires us to build it it requires a concept of nomadology requires meeting these communities that are the next billion the next like 1.5 billion the next six 750 million in sub-Saharan Africa and saying hey you guys actually exist off a policy of nomadology colonialism is seen through Maps we see how borders have affected your actual free flow of information and culture the fact that we've built the internet to abide by those same math

Border Lines and abide by those same structures is actually bad for you and we will never get you as users and we will never create this next like uh billion users online without already uh bowing down to the structures of hierarchy that don't want you online so what the [ __ ] are we doing having any kind of conference that talks about reaching these people what are we doing in 27 17 raising billions of dollars for this industry off of this narrative when we clearly don't abide by the actual philosophy that is structuring these societies and the way they interact with technology and so here's where we is a piece from our unpublished and privately uh circulated um like Manifesto Doc it's one page long it'll be public in the near future but

realistically we don't think we think the way that we're visualizing the internet and the structure of cypherpunk movement is wrong and the internet is not a garden of forking paths Gardens have boundaries and have agendas agendas usually made by Keynes and uh it is not a central memory Corps of progress progress is subjective as you've seen the evolved internet is what it must be and that is a new form of cockroach and the idea of the cockroach is one that is resilient in imagery for against humans greatest Humanities greatest aggressions and as privileged designers of communication infrastructure we have agency design if we build for hierarchy or we rebuild for unfettered Revolution and we have to recognize that unfettered Evolution has actually never existed

information as it's been used used by US to create giant civilizations and huge amounts of uh of Weaponry for our various siled purposes is completely given to us in a hierarchical manner the axis of information has been the biggest thing that created the domination of the planet domination of different continents it was those who had access to Maps if you had access to Sea charts and Maps you were willing to spend huge portions of your treasury on that information because it gave you power and so the roach internet is really I think you have to do this thing right yeah nice the roach internet is like the last of it is us going inside the internet as a metaphorical concept sure but as a physical concept we are these roaches living inside we are privileged

technical designers we're building stuff a lot of these web 3 foundations thought not the web 3 Foundation but many of the web 3 foundations have worked with the UN they've worked with the IMF I myself have been in conversations with technical designers from the IMF when I was working at previously at cello and I know how much these people know and I know how much we know and I know that in reality the way that we move forward and create situations where like there is like this resilient future for people in Iran for people in cigarette for people in Sudan is by making capitalist arguments by saying you know what you if you help this type of development you actually create greater resiliency for your Capital markets you create the ability to do Levy sanctions against people who shut down information

networks you create the ability to open up telecommunications diversity and then when telecommunications diversity happens we have more options like iPhone 14s to globalstar to send very important messages in times of resiliency and that is why we would like to uh invite you all to come talk to us later reach out to us uh our ens is roachinternet.eth don't try and take anything from us we are here to stay bye thank you [Music]