Читать книгу Julian Assange - Julian Assange - Страница 12

5

CYPHERPUNK

The International Subversives were different from other hackers. Some hackers were noisy, leaving footprints everywhere. But we were silent and contemplative. We operated like ghosts, haunting the halls of power, passing like ectoplasm through keyholes and under doors. I always felt hacking was like looking at a painting. You see the canvas, you see the achievement, the movement of the paint and the drawing-out of themes. But what you were really looking for, if you were like us, was the flaw. And once you found it, the flaw in the picture, you worked on it until it became larger and took over. At one point, we wanted to take over the world of communications. Can you imagine that, not as a science-fiction trope or a crazy comic-book imagining, but as a real possibility in the mind of a bunch of teenagers? It sounds ridiculous, but we found our own keyholes into the inner workings of vast corporations, and we installed others, until we found we would be able to control their whole system. Turn off 20,000 phone lines in Buenos Aires? No problem. Give New Yorkers free telephone calls for an afternoon with no good reason? Do it.

But the stakes were high. There were many trials for the hackers before my own. The legislation was new and was finding its feet, and we watched those steps with our breath held and our self-esteem high, knowing it would be our turn next. We saw ourselves as a group of young freedom fighters under fire from forces that just didn’t get what it was all about. That’s how we saw those trials, though to others, to Australians in thrall to American corporations or to secret servicemen crazy at being outwitted, we were the dangerous harbingers of a new kind of white-collar crime. We sniggered at that – through the vanity and confidence of youth, no doubt – thinking collars were meant for dogs, or for those who might take their self-strangulation for granted. But it was getting serious. He wasn’t yet my friend, but Phoenix of The Realm was someone I was aware of, another Melbourne hacker chased from the dim light of his bedroom to the harsh light of the courthouse.

Phoenix was arrogant – he had once telephoned a New York Times reporter, calling himself ‘Dave’, to boast about attacks Australian hackers were making on American systems. The reporter wrote about it, putting ‘Dave’ and the other hackers on the paper’s front page. Some hackers were more withdrawn, but Phoenix liked the attention. He ended up getting the wrong sort, facing forty criminal charges in a case that had a shadow of US pressure hanging over it. I went to the court that day and sat anonymously in the public gallery, watching the face of Judge Smith with a rising sense both of public threat and private honour. I thought the case might prove a pivotal day for our brand of explorer, and I wanted to witness it. As it turned out, Phoenix did not get a custodial sentence. I breathed freely, if breathing freely is ever something one can do in an Australian court. As Phoenix left the dock I went down to offer my congratulations.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, only worse.’

When you’re a hacker, you live above, or beneath, or within, or beyond the scope of your everyday friends. That’s not a boast or a value statement: it’s just a fact. You live otherwise from the norm, not only using a nom de plume or a nom de guerre, but a series of masks within masks, until eventually, if you are any good at all, your activity is your identity and your knowledge is your face. After a long time with computers, there’s a measure of detachment that makes you homeless within your own home, and you find yourself only really yourself with others like you, people with cartoon names whom you’ve never met.

Even though most of my hacking friends lived in Melbourne or its suburbs, like me, I usually met them online on bulletin board systems – a bit like chat rooms – such as Electric Dreams or Megaworks. The first BBS I set up myself was called A Cute Paranoia – a further sign of my well-balanced nature – and I invited Trax and Prime Suspect onto it as much as they could manage. I was nineteen in 1990, and had never spoken to those guys, except modem to modem. You build up a picture of the reality of a person without ever really meeting them. It can give in to paranoia, and too much secrecy, and too much alienation, I suppose, and it would be fair to say I thought Trax and Prime Suspect were odd. I wasn’t in the least without oddness myself, as people would always be quick to tell me. But I trusted these guys’ instincts. My endless travels across the Australian landscape – and education system – made me something of a social outsider, but in Trax I found a kindred spirit. Like me, he came from a poor but intellectual family. Both of his parents were recent immigrants to Australia, still retaining the German accents that had embarrassed Trax as a child. Prime Suspect, on the other hand, came from an upper-middle-class background and on the surface was a studious grammar-school boy bound for university. But Prime Suspect was a damaged young man. The only thing that had saved his parents from an acrimonious divorce battle was his father’s death from cancer when Prime Suspect was eight. Widowed and stuck with two young children, his mother had retreated into bitterness and anger. And Prime Suspect in turn had retreated into his bedroom and into his computer.

We were all misfits in our different ways, but our differences equalised in the strange impersonal universe of the hacker. Under our own and each other’s tutelage, we had graduated from being funsters to being cryptographers. And in company with a whole international subculture, we had become aware of how cryptography could lead to political change. We were cypherpunks. The movement started around 1992 and was held together by a mailing list, a meeting point for our discussions of computer science, politics, philosophy and mathematics. There were never more than about 1,000 subscribers, but those people laid the foundations of where cryptography was going: they showed the way for all the modern battles over privacy.

We were engaged in establishing a system for the new information age, the Internet age, that would allow individuals, rather than merely corporations, to protect their privacy. We could write code and would use that ability to give people jurisdiction over their rights. The whole movement tapped into a part of my mind, or you could say my soul: I realised through the cypherpunk movement that justice in the future might depend on us working for a balance, via the Internet, of what corporations consider secrets and what individuals consider private. As it used to stand, before we seized the tools, privacy was only a matter of advantage for corporations, banks and governments: but we saw a new frontline, in which people’s power could be enhanced with information.

The Internet, as you can see if you look at China today, was always capable of being a zone of selective censorship, and so was every area of computer culture. The cypherpunks get too little credit for breaking the whole thing open and keeping the tools from becoming weapons, exclusively, in the hands of commercial opportunists and political oppressors. The media was so busy warbling about hackers they missed, right under their noses, how the best of them had become cryptographers busy fighting for the freedoms of information that they themselves claimed to be built on. It was a lesson on the moral infirmity of the media: by and large, they took what power was offered to them, and did not, at the dawn of the Internet era, fight to establish freedom of access or freedom from censorship. To this day, they take the technology for granted and miss how it materialised. It was the cypherpunks, or the ‘code rebels’ as Steven Levy called us, who prevented the new technology from merely becoming a tool used by big business and government agencies to spy on populations, or sell to them. Computers could have come preloaded with commercials. Smartphones could have come embedded with surveillance devices. The Internet could have been repressive in a great number of its facets. Emails could have been generally interceptable and lacking in privacy. But a turf war went on, invisibly to most commentators, a battle that guaranteed certain freedoms. It is the basis of today’s understanding – a cypherpunk commonplace – that computer technology can be a major tool in the fight for social change.

At one time, governments wanted to make cryptography illegal, except for themselves in support of their own activities. And this was preparation for how certain governments now view WikiLeaks: they wish to keep control of technology so that it might only serve itself. But this misunderstands the freedoms inscribed into the technology. We fought for it, so that powerful bodies could not merely use data to suit themselves. The whole struggle was about that and still is about that. For some in the libertarian movement, this was essentially about privacy as capitalist freedom, the right to be free of big government, to have your data kept back; but this is my book and I’ll tell you what it meant to me.

The cypherpunk ethos allowed me to think about how best to oppose the efforts of oppressive bodies – governments, corporations, surveillance agencies – to extract data from vulnerable individuals. Regimes often rely on having control of the data, and they can hurt people or oppress them or silence them by means of such control. My sense of the cypherpunk ethos was that it could protect people against this: it could turn their knowledge into an unreachable possession of theirs, protecting them in the classic Tom Paine way of securing liberty as a bulwark against harm or aggression. We aimed to turn the tools of oppression into the instruments of liberty and that was a straightforward goal. Eventually, in 1997, this would lead to my developing a new tool called Rubberhose, in which encrypted data can be hidden beneath layers of fake data, such that no single password will ever provide a gateway to a person’s sensitive information. The data is essentially unreachable, unless the person to whom the data refers wishes to make an effort to reveal it. It was a way of keeping important information secret not just by encrypting it, but by hiding it, and it was an application of game theory. For the general good, I wished to break the power of interrogators, who could never be sure that the last of the keys had been exhausted. WikiLeaks, I should say, was founded on the notion that the very presence of sources would be infinitely deniable. One day, I imagined, this technology would enable people to speak, even when powerful forces threatened to punish all speakers. The cypherpunks made this possible by arguing, from day one, against all treaties and laws that opposed the right to encrypt.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our problems at this time included constitutional issues. At one point, in the early ’90s, the US government tried to argue that a floppy disk containing code must be considered a munition. We scarcely knew, as we went about what felt like world-changing business, but on a small scale, that we would be tied up so quickly in freedom-of-speech issues. But we were. Sending certain strips of code or going on a plane with a bit of code tattooed on your arm essentially made you an arms trafficker. Government absurdity has always stalked the effort to make freedoms clear.

I was finding these things out for myself, in Melbourne, in the company of my friends Prime Suspect and Trax. They were the ones who spoke most directly to me in my happy submersion, because they were submerged, too. Prime Suspect said that when he first got his Apple II, at the age of thirteen, he found it to be better company than any of his relatives. Strangely, our bedrooms were more connected to the world than our classrooms, because of one very crucial and amazing thing: the modem. None of us aced our exams or was top of the class. None of us shone in the halls of academe. It just wasn’t in our natures. Something in us rebelled against rote-learning and exam-fixation. In short, we felt we had bigger fish to fry and the private means to do it. This lays down another plank in the house of correction for computer hackers: we are arrogant. Compared to policemen, lawyers, army generals and politicians, of course, the computer hacker, you might argue, is a paragon of self-doubt. But we were young and we felt we knew things. That’s for sure. We did feel certain and we did feel abundant in our small way. And arrogance in youth might be counted the budding flower of self-defensiveness.

From early on, the International Subversives wanted to attack military systems, and I invented a program called Sycophant that would run through a computer system harvesting passwords. Each night, through the summer of 1991, we wandered through the corridors of the US Airforce 8th Group Command Headquarters in the Pentagon. We tramped through Motorola in Illinois, padded through Panasonic in New Jersey, tiptoed through Xerox in Palo Alto, and swam down into the twilight lakes of the US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. There would come a day when people would run revolutions out of their Twitter accounts, and it would feel entirely natural and democratic, but, back then, it was new and totally subversive to feel the pulse of history through a flashing cursor. The journey between the two has been a story of our times.

In the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier, my friend, the author Suelette Dreyfus, captures perfectly the scale of ambition that was expressed by our new breed of nerd cognoscenti. And our group, the International Subversives, was going further than any of the others in Australia, further than Phoenix and the other members of The Realm. By the time I was twenty we were attempting to enter the Xanadu of computer networks, the US Department of Defense’s Network Information Centre (NIC) computer. Under my handle, Mendax, I was working most closely with Prime Suspect. Here’s Suelette:

As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might ‘trust’ each other – a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.

NIC assigned domain names – the ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ at the end of an email address – for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US military’s own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.

NIC also published the communication protocol standards for the Internet. Called RFCs (Request for Comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the Internet to talk to another . . . Perhaps most importantly, NIC controlled the reverse look-up service on the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name – say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address – the IP address. All the computers on the Internet need this IP address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. NIC decided how Internet computers would translate the alphabetical name into an IP address, and vice versa.

If you controlled NIC, you had phenomenal power on the Internet. You could, for example, simply make Australia disappear. Or you could turn it into Brazil.

We got inside, and the feeling was overwhelming. Some people make the mistake of saying it’s like playing God: it’s not, because God, if he’s God, already has all the answers. We were twenty. The joy was an explorer’s joy at breaking through to a new frontier despite all the odds. I created a back door into the system for future adventures. This system was awesome, and I felt almost subdued at the connectivity on offer: for me, and this is relevant to my future work on WikiLeaks, I saw a perfect join between a mathematical truth and a moral necessity. Even in those early days, I saw that breaking through the portals of power was not just a matter of fun. Governments depended on secrecy and patronage networks to deepen their advantages, but it began to appear possible that what street riots, opposition groups, human rights gurus and electoral reform had always struggled to achieve, we could actually begin to bring about with science. We could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice would always in the end be about human beings, but there was a new vanguard of experts, criminalised as we were, who had fastened on to the cancer of modern power, who saw how it spread in ways that were still hidden from ordinary human experience.

Our skills made us valuable, and some of us were unable to resist the Faustian pacts we were offered. It amazed the rest of us that some hackers were working for governments – hacking was innately anarchistic – but they were, and I saw it from inside the US Department of Defense network. They were hacking their own machines as target practice, and no doubt hacking computers around the world on behalf of what they understood to be US interests. As treasure hunters with an ethical bias, we entered a labyrinth of power, corruption and lies, always knowing that we would be the ones accused of corruption if we got caught. We were a hardcore unit of three: Prime Suspect, myself and Trax, who was the best phreaker in Australia. He wrote the book on how to control and manipulate telephone exchanges.

We were anarchists, I suppose, by temperament if not by political conviction. We had started off having fun and ended up wanting to change the world. There was a developing understanding that cryptography was a liberating concept and that it would allow individuals to stand up to government, to whole governments, and that it was now possible for people to resist the will of a superpower. Our temperaments were drawn to an Enlightenment sense of liberty and we felt we were part of the way forward for technology. Many mathematicians were involved with the cypherpunks. Timothy May wrote the ‘crypto anarchist manifesto’ and John Gilmore was another founding member of the group. These guys were pioneers in the IT industry – Gilmore was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems – and they had both made money and bailed out, to focus on trying to physically realise their liberation ideals with the help of mathematics and cryptography. For instance, they wanted to come up with a new kind of digital currency, a digital coin, something that would replace the Gold Standard, which would make financial transactions cleaner and not traceable by governments. Your credit rating and your credit history would be yours and yours alone. This was the dream of cryptography: to permit individuals to communicate securely and be at liberty. (If you look at the cypherpunk alumni, you see some of them went on to invent watered-down versions of all this, such as PayPal.) If allowed to develop, I foresaw that it would permit small activist groups who were in danger of being surveilled to resist government coercion. That was the hope, anyway. That was the plan and the dream. But many of the brilliant minds of my generation of cypherpunks floated off in the dot com bubble. They became obsessed with stock options and Palm Pilots and lost the urge for real change.

Digging down into our cypherpunk mindsets, we saw that one of the great battles – our Spanish Civil War, if you like – was going to be about how we served in the effort to defend the world against the surveillance of private computer networks. Issues of freedom and the fight against oppression were located there, as surely as they once were in the hills of Catalonia, and we wanted to zip up and go out and fight the good fight against police statehood as best we could. We were idealistic, of course, and young: the usual condition of people wanting to make a difference. We would make mistakes and we would be punished for them. We also might never gain the sense of possibility again that we had among ourselves. That is life’s risk, almost life’s certainty, though we set out nonetheless.

The issue of privacy would always haunt me. It haunts me now. At WikiLeaks, I would come to seem the arch-proponent of transparency, forever described as the man who thinks all privacy is bad. But it was never my position that all privacy is bad: rather the opposite. We fought, as cypherpunks, to protect people’s privacy. What I opposed, and continue to oppose, is the use of secrecy by institutions to protect themselves against the truth of the evil they have done. This is a clear distinction. Even in this book, where I try to tell my story as best I can, there will be moments of privacy, because I owe it to some greater sense of justice, to my children, for example, not to drag them into the limelight. Some people, in love with a category error, will wish to hold me to account on this score, as if the founder of WikiLeaks must, out of some bogus sense of consistency, blow the whistle on every element of his private self.