Kurt Opsahl [Filecoin Foundation] x Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

there we go hey hey everybody uh so my name is Kurt opsol uh who am I well I've been an internet lawyer since uh 1997 represented a lot of the early internet companies in the first.com boom uh I was the General Council of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that was an organization formed in 1993 before even there was a web uh I'm a veteran of the crypto Wars and fought for many years and continue to this day to fight to prot protect your digital rights to privacy speech anonymity Innovation trying to make the better world uh I'm now policy council with the filecoin foundation which is the decentralized storage layer for web 3 and the distributed web all right so once upon a time not long ago uh there was a uh Cipher Punk was born born in 1992 or at least the the term was coin then as a sort of a portm of Cipher and cyberpunk which had recently uh been been popularized as in uh my uh books and the movement was a dream of the 9s it was a time of of techno optimism uh new technologies were coming out they're becoming more available to a wide number of people it was becoming uh possible to have a powerful computer in your home or what seemed like a powerful computer at the time and using encryption and privacy enhancing Technologies could use to make and protect that better world so by empowering users to encrypt and authenticate and by decentralizing to keep the powers at Bay the dream was how can we use this how can we make that world and that was a means to this better world that was the so what was the origin well there was a tonic shift in cryptography around that time so um we heard a little bit earlier some of the earlier speeches about some of the history of cryptography I'm fast forwarding to the Cold War era but at that time a lot of cryptography was symmetric keys uh it was a military technology am munition uh in many ways uh or considered to be am munition so that led to Regulatory regimes and it started getting some widespread uh commercial use with Dees which the data encryption standard in in the 70s came out as a public standard so becoming a little little bit more available but because the keys were symmetric and the same key was used on both sides you had sort of a problem is that you had to have another Channel a way of getting that key to each side of the the communication and that was a difficult task to do with strangers difficult task to do without being uh risk of having that key being intercepted and then came Diffy Helman and this was the public key photography by allowing for a key exchange where strangers could exchange key information and have a secure Channel between each other and sign messages to show that it was coming from the person that you thought it was coming from or at least from the key that you thought it was coming from from and they could do this over an insecure channel so this revolutionized the ability to use encryption and oops there we go this shift in key exchange allows for these two things so secure encryption so allows for people who are strangers to have an encrypted communication between each other that was a lot of the primary use and where a lot of the the initial crypto wars were about also extraordinarily importantly it allows for digitally signing things uh and that is used a lot in U crypto currencies today but it is this ability to authenticate things in a cryptographic way that says I am the person who has this secret key information and then in 1991 uh Zimmerman Phil Zimmerman introduced pretty good privacy to facilitate these communications it was a program that was used a lot for uh on top of email to be able to send an encrypted email uh which you know email at the time had zero encryption it was basically an open book and then you could layer this on top of it and this helped inspire a dream of mass adoption allowing this technology to get to a lot of people well pgp was fairly criticized as being quite complex difficult ux to use it was enabled you to do these sort of things it wasn't very easy and it wasn't going to become the widespread adoption but that set the stage for the cipher punks and there was the cipher Punk ethos you just heard a lot about that in the in the last talk I'm going to hit a couple of the same points uh and first you know a couple man manifestos in the early years Timothy Mays Eric Hughes and uh John Gilmore who was also a founder of eff where I worked were on the early Cipher Punk mailing list they came out with some manifestos to say what it what it was uh and what it believed in and it was on a computer technology advancing is on the verge of providing the ability of individuals to comma with each other in a totally Anonymous manner uh and then saying you you to protect our privacy to ensure that each party get a knowledge only which is directly necessary for that transaction this is another thing that's coming up in a lot of uh cryptocurrency projects and there of zero knowledge proof areas and this allows you to choose what you are revealing or not revealing revealing that which is necessary keeping secret that which is not this is part of the dream that we still have and should still have uh some adjacent manifestos around that area there was a hacker Manifesto for allowing people to explore with computers my crime was curiosity trying to understand how computers work another one of great prominence at the time was the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace telling the industrial world the Giants of Flesh and steel to back off to leave the internet alone so one of the key principles think privacy was a very Central One privacy that is necessary for an open Society in electronic age in the manifestos and the part of that is also anonymity or pseudonymity to allow reputation for a identifier for a secret key for a pseudonym and build trust around knowing that that was the same person or the same key rather than do it based on identity and extraneous information it was also very much about decentralization providing user to user tools peer-to-peer avoiding the single points of failure and the rich targets that a centralized system can make and the code was designed to guarantee with physics and Mathematics this a quote from John Gilmore not laws what these principles can be maintained and be available to all of us to not rely only on the existing governmental system but also back that up with code so was this naive um I think the core principles absolutely were not they were righteous values they were ones that can help bring about the brighter future that we want to have they're better than the Alternatives they are uh harder to abuse and this is a good goal this is a goal that we should continue to have uh I think where it it did come a bit naive or a bit more challenging was there was a notion it was inevitable that once this technology had come about that would be inevitably able to change the world that the Giants of Flesh and steel would become powerless to stop it um and the incentives it was not maybe fully recognizing the incent intive structures that made it difficult now people would say well I would love to decentralize but I trust myself and it's so much easier for me to do things in a centralized way it takes a lot of humility to say that we all cannot be trusted with the power of having a single point of failer having a having being the person at hold even if you are that person so what are the what are the threats that we have to face what are what is this against well we're living in a golden age of surveillance records are kept and recorded and kept in a way that never before in an ever increasing manner the we used to have some defacto privacy if you just walk down the street maybe people could see you but no one would be able to recognize you You' be effectively Anonymous when you're acting in public now you're acting in public you walk down the street here you walk down the street in many many areas there'll be sensors there'll be tracking of your phone there'll be cameras there could be facial recognition the way in which we had it was often too hard to figure out like they could send you know throughout throughout time that you could send an actual person to follow you around and record what you're doing and write it down in a little book but that was not a viable option to do for a very large number of people so technology was enabling is enabling Mass surveillance on a scale that we had not seen before and creating a danger that even higher and then this publicly available data is now collected and stored and analyzed in a way that has taken be able to not only be have a picture of a crowd in place but look at that picture zoom in with high resolution apply it to facial recognition and these powerful tools make it even harder to have privacy in public harder to have privacy when you have open Communications uh and so having something like encryption that makes it so it's a very difficult to do this on a mass scale is going to be critical to protecting our privacy in the future the surveillance that's going it's not just government surveillance also commercial surveillance and this is what data Brokers take these two things and so they'll sell the the privately collected data to data Brokers uh this has become a preferred method by a number of government organizations to just go buy the data from a data broker it's easier and cheaper to do it and it avoids dealing with pesky things like a warrant requirement or the Fourth Amendment um and these large companies that have become to dominate the Internet space uh have become a large Storehouse of that information giving another point where they can go and get vast amount of informations at the same time so to have this future users must have autonomy and that requires effective tools to protect their privacy while still allowing them to take advantage of interconnected systems so you know privacy the ideal privacy you want to have in the future is one where you can live your life when you can be connected when you can take advantage of Technology it's not living in the Woods Off the Grid that's a form of privacy but the Privacy we need for the better future is one when you can live your life in the world with your friends with your communities all around the world and still have privacy so what I ask this crowd move fast and make things together we can chart the course to a future where technology will enhance Our Lives we can make it better and Empower people to preserve the rights they hold dear and while doing some principles is with great power comes great responsibility keep it secret keep it safe fight for the users and speak Tech to power and I'll go through all all of these and also note that code is a vital back stop we still need law and policy I a lawyer I work in policy these things are very important but when the law and policy fail you need to have code as a back stop in order to stop the code from being compromised you need to have law and policy to make that more difficult to push back on these things you need all of these things working together so with great power comes great responsibility this is while you're building things while you're building the tools that people were use trying to get the mass adoption getting mat to the People Express your values in that code this will help protect and preserve civil liberties by building it in from the get-go and thinking about will this do it or not as you're developing things don't recentralize decentralized systems this was sort of the the the challenge that came from in the early 2000s where many things that had previously been decentralized on the internet were recentralized into a single place for a while email servers there are many different email providers you could run one out out of your house some people did it was difficult but nevertheless it made it very difficult to go after each individual server and get people's emails now the vast majority of people in the world use Gmail and they have a One-Stop shop so get rid of the single for fair decentralized make it resistant to mass t so Mass surveillance is harder to do keep it secret keep it safe this is making privacy and security by Design consider not only what information can be reveal when you're encrypting the content when you're using these tools think about the metadata that comes with it and what can be revealed about that person from the metadata of their communication and make sure it's not leaking additional information that will compromise the Integrity of the message even if they can't read the ACT ual words test yourself do red teams penetration tests to figure out whether there are flaws getting it out there so we don't have security fails cryptocurrencies as I say they have a built-in bug Bounty that would better to have your own bug Bing program to get that information first fix the code before it gets hacked and the security fails I've probably seen many of them in the news where there are wallets being drained things like that where a smart contract goes wrong and that undermines the confidence that people have in the system slows adoption makes it more difficult to do to make it so it's secure fight for the users and this mean with this I mean usability usability is key so that people can use this without having to be very technical sophisticated we talked a little before about pgp it was a powerful program for creating and uh de decrypting and encrypting messages but it was not usable enough to Be an Effective tool to achieve the cipher Punk dream so to make it so that LEDs can use so NOS who focus is on helping people around the world and they are not sophisticated they can nevertheless use these Technologies work with marginalized groups to ensure all of it works for everybody because those are groups that are going to need these kinds of protections the most and finally speak Tech to power code alone is not enough we also need to have the legal and policy systems in place and you can help with that as a technologist by helping them understand how technology works that even if they disagree with you on principles if they are making that disagreement into law but they understand what the technology is that's going to be better when someone has no idea what the technology is and nevertheless is trying to write some regulation about it and comes out with it with lots of collateral damage misunderstanding is worse than being against on on principle because it lead to bad bad results so help them help you so that I go to the end I will leave with this that I the Techno optimism can hold on to that dream by being optimistic but it's not the optimism of it's going to inevitably happen if we do nothing it's the optimism if that if we work hard if we build our values into the code if we try to bring it together make it usable by all the people get it out there get widespread adoption then we can have a future we would want to live in thank you