# Finding the Simplest Path to Digital Sovereignty & Security by Paul Gardnerstephen (Devcon5)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 20:50
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-jKzSSdqNy04
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKzSSdqNy04

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/finding-the-simplest-path-to-digital-sovereignty-and-security

Paul Gardnerstephen presents his talk on Finding the Simplest Path to Digital Sovereignty & Security.

Speaker(s): Paul Gardnerstephen
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: digital, winter, democracy, security, technical

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Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
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## Transcript

first of all I need to make a little apology the title that you see here is not the title that I advertised on the agenda talking with folks this morning we've done a little bit of a bait-and-switch we're looking at exactly the same problem but from a little bit of a different perspective from a community perspective of you know how why do we even need to do this and so I just want to talk about the simple reality that we need to confront the digital winter is coming so some of the things that we can't cover in this talk if you have a look at the the two videos that I've made from talks of while it was at CCC camp a couple of months back and then earlier in the year the next comp in Christchurch in New Zealand talking about the the megaphone device and so everything that I'm talking about you know the megaphone is what we are doing to address this whole issue around the coming digital winter so what on earth am I talking about with a digital winter and it's actually tightly interrelated with the freedoms that we have enjoyed in you know modern liberal democracies really kind of came about at the end of World War two right that the Pax Americana for all of its other problems kind of pushed this idea of individual freedom and so we had you know this huge growth in technology and art and culture all sorts of things that came about because of that freedom and so around the 70s and 80s you know the real digital spring happened where digital devices started being useful people started having computers at home and at work and using them and mobile phones came along and this was really fantastic and with like so excited about what this will mean when it comes to fruition we could see the flowers we could smell what was going on we could see that something exciting is going to happen and then later in the 20th century and really sort of until about now we've been enjoying the fruit of that in fact the fruit is so plentiful is sitting on the ground we don't even have to reach up to the tree you know we have a device I mean he doesn't have a mobile phone with them I'm curious one of you excellent everybody else has a mobile phone with it because it's so easy and so convenient and so tasty right it does all of these things that we want the trouble is in the digital summer and we I think we've just passed the you know we're at the endpoint of the digital summer everything is plentiful everything is easy but the seasons March on and we have seen the use of technology by nation states by all sorts of you know malevolent forces being used against people depriving people of you know this food source on which they have become dependent so you know you cut communications off during elections now to avoid you know unhelpful criticism of government and we've seen this kind of thing more and more and you know the attacks on press freedom at home in Australia right we have our government basically backing police raids on journalists to try and find out who their secret sources are because they embarrassed the government and so this is a growing problem and so this is why I say that we've actually I think in the last decade we're actually no longer in the digital summer were in the digital autumn there are leaves that are going funny colors the you know at the moment there's still plenty of fruit on the ground and there's still some fruit on the trees but we can see the writing on the wall the freedoms the digital freedom the digital sovereignty that we once enjoyed in the 1980s and early 1990s is now largely a thing of the past and the thing about the digital autumn is actually dangerous because autumn is the most beautiful time of year with trees right we have these beautiful golden red colors no people go for drives to see the autumn leaves we see them on the ground it covers the ground everything looks fantastic we still get a still plenty of food coming from these late harvests and so we're lulled into a false sense of security saying oh it's it can't be that bad winter is still a long way off we'll figure out ways to deal with you know these you know increasingly diminished digital freedoms on the ability for us to maintain communications in the face of adversaries the ability for us to create hardware that we truly own that does what we want there's not actually meaning we pay for but but I can see an Apple device there with its happy piece of fruit facing me at the moment and this is fantastic you know that Apple devices are beautifully built lovely to use but particularly for talking about the phones do you really own an iPhone or do you merely pay for an iPhone and have its physical form in your hand to enjoy but only to the extent to which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy and only in the ways in which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy and so these freedoms are being restricted and I think there is a very real chance that we are going to go into a digital winter and the trouble with the digital winter is once you're there and decide that you should have prepared for the digital winter it's now too late you are fighting for your survival you are fighting to maintain the remaining digital capabilities that you have supply chains I no longer trust able or no longer working we're no longer present at all depending on how the future pans out now if we had a another global scale unrest at some point this whole you know interconnected global supply chain that's largely focused in a few countries is going to become unavailable to most countries how do we maintain the ability of people to create digital artifacts to meet their needs when you can't even manufacture a new device or it might be that it's we don't have outright wall we just move further into this you know rights restricted dystopia that we seem to be heading into of you know all of these actors wanting to restrict what we can do with the digital device for economic reasons for political reasons initially doesn't matter what the reason is so we need to prepare before the digital winter comes so that we don't starve before the digital winter ends because the digital winter left to its own course won't end quickly if we don't have and if people around the world don't have the means to communicate to self-organize to hold governments to account we will actually just drive deeper and deeper into the digital winter who was read or seeing the The Chronicle of Narnia series liner which in the wardrobe right if we don't act we're actually headed for a digital wit not just a six-month digital winter we are headed for a hundred years of snow and ice under a variety of white witches because as these actors deprived of enterprise acid they're deprived us of the ability to create our own digital futures they will continue to set the agenda and work against us having the ability and the freedom to do these things you might say that I'm being horribly you know pessimistic about things but look back at the history of individual freedoms in this world the time that we have had since World War two is an aberration in the world never before in the history of humanity has there been as much personal freedom in at least some countries as there has been in this post-war period now what somewhat ironic is that it was created in order to further commercial gains for the United States in particular but it had this side effect of creating freedom but if we look back prior to that you know European history prior to that we had endless wars Asian history prior to that plenty of wars African history prior to that plenty of wars and across the world very limited freedom for the average person to live to try and make the world a better place but we are not without hope I am convinced that we can bring about a second digital spring or possibly that we can even avoid the digital winter by if you like creating a digital food source so that yes it might get cold they are chilling times at the moment but that as we hold governments to account as we empower citizens and we empower everyone to be a functioning civil society because communications is the basis of civil society and transactions are of course merely a form of communications so we need to find ways to sustain these capabilities we need to think very differently about how we do things because what's clear is that the current approach that you know of devices of phones they are so complex that they are just this beautiful garden in which adversaries can plant the weeds that will undermine those things that will choke out the real important uses and deprive us of the the sovereignty that we need the agency that we need over these devices so how can we make sure that we come back to a digital summer or that we can avoid a digital winter altogether we need to act now we need to start thinking how can we create devices that are independent of the internet that are independent of vendor support that are possible to be secured and for their security to be maintained going forward in the absence of a global Internet of you know global support even you know from the communities that we know today if things become more balcan eyes than the internet it may not be possible to have global open source projects anymore how can we reduce that capability burden currently maintenance burden down to the level where one or a few determined users are actually able to you know to make something which will be sustainable and in sustainable in the face of you know determined adversaries whose intention it is to deprive us of these things and so this is where the megaphone project has come in so this is why this phone it's bizarre we've made a phone device is quite larger than mo we're obviously going to make it smaller this is how large it is just from making it in the lab for 500 euros right but miniaturization is totally doable but this device is based on the Commodore 64 architecture because this is the week I think what is the simplest ie the easiest to maintain the easiest to inspect the easiest to detect compromise in that can still do useful things because you go back further than the early home computers in the 1980s they weren't user-friendly they weren't usable there were mainframes that were kind of crazy complicated or there was extremely simple hobby devices but the early 80s marked the first time where you know you could have productivity software on your computer at home and it was usable and yet it was still just tens of kilobytes so you know the prototype dialer app that we've made for this thing is about 28 kilobytes written in Commodore 64 basics so this is extremely easy to inspect you know we in terms of can one determined user maintain it well wonder - well one possibly slightly determined user a student working for one semester 20 hours a week wrote the dialer from scratch and he had never touched a Commodore 64 in his life before so we know that it is possible to make these kinds of devices what we need to do is to grow the community that's looking at these things and think about how we can make hybrid devices where the simple trustable architecture can enslave a modern complex untrustable processes so that we don't have to lose any functionality and that's the next iteration of the megaphone that we're working on at the moment does exactly that we're putting a Raspberry Pi that can run Android as a slave processor the 8-bit computer pretends to be the touch interface and the the video output and everything so that the Android thinks no that it's no it's a ship in a bottle right it just continues as it was we have to make no changes we don't have to recompile it at all so we have no capability maintenance burden whilst someone else is maintaining the Android port or even if it's unsupported can run it in a complete isolated manner we can still you know play pokemon pokemon go requires internet right but we could you know there's a whole bunch of things that we can do offline we could have encrypted email clients and things that are in the complex processor if we need to we also needed to think about saying well you know we actually could do email on 1980s computers let's take that spirit of you know crazy optimization that exists on the commodore 64 in particular and say well that's actually let's make an email program that is sufficiently functional to be useful but that can run in the secure 8-bit environment so we can go down we can suspend the running of the 8-bit computer we've designed this in and we have what we call matrix modes we have the nice cream let us come down and then you can inspect the entire state of the machine and it's frozen at that point so there's nothing that malicious software can do to hide and you could actually have a printout of every byte of your email program for example and compare that if you're you know particularly paranoid mode to not even you know do not just confirm that it was once secure but that right now it is unsullied uncompromised and i know of no other approach to you know digital sovereignty in secure computing that's able to deliver that the full sovereignty back into the hands of the owner of the device so that you can truly own the device you can repurpose it you can do whatever you want with it and our next challenge is how we can try and create a viable business model around that we're actually looking at creating bespoke mobile devices for people living with disability because this is a horribly underserved sector at the moment there are people who you know for example if you have cerebral palsy you might not have fine motor control so using a touchscreen is really hard because under your hand only has really coarse movements but they might be able to for example use a joystick interface so we can make the 8-bit you know supervisor the Bacall the little brother can pretend to be the touchscreen panel but driven by a joystick you're right here is now a phone like device that someone who could never use a smartphone before can now use and it can run all the Android apps that they want they can participate fully the digital world and that this is a use case that as I say can be economically profitable socially profitable and that the community the broad non-technical communique this is great this is a we need this kind of technology because it bridges the digital divide it gives agency to people who need agency and we can no further show that the digital sovereignty you know really helps in that space and say okay we can actually make a predictive text input model that just kind of is general for folks that might like that kind of device but you know what I can actually modify that I can change the code on this simple machine because it's simple I don't have to rethink about how do i compile android i can modify it in real time on the device and say oh look now i can do this and i can now do input 40% or 400% faster than i could with the one-size-fits-all kind of approach so we think that there are viable business models around making this kind of device and this is actually really important to us because remember we're in the digital autumn who knows the Aesop's fable of the grasshopper in the end not many maybe have a read so the the general story is this grasshopper is you know playing his fiddle and having a great time in the summer while our ant is busy putting food away to the winter because the grasshoppers are but there's always more food there's always more time we don't need to do anything now the ant knows winter is coming and so then when winter comes and the ants are well fed and warm and well supplied and the grasshopper is begging the ants for food let us not we are the community who are aware of this need we know winter is coming let us not merely be idle as the grasshopper was but let us work diligently and have fun while we're doing it to create these technologies that will help us to survive a digital winter where everything is stacked against people being able to communicate and maintain civil society and it might even be that in that process we can stop the digital winter in its before it even happens are there any questions feel free to come up to the microphone hello the set do you think this is a profitable project with trouble hearing no microphone maybe that sounds quite okay okay that's it do you see do you think this is a profitable project do you remember what happened to open moco predicted open moco open moco M okay okay yeah yes so they're making cellular modems and all this I love what they're doing right the more things we can do on the more fronts the better but if the cellular networks are not available we can't use open moko cellular transmissions have been used in the past so when Russia was invading Crimea and the Russians were targeting Crimean artillery by their mobile phone emissions so we need I love openwork oh and I want to see it continue and do great things but we need to have a whole variety of things so that if there is any one particular attack that you know society civil society can be resilient to it we need not a monoculture but we need to have a diversity a complete ecosystem of different things I don't want everyone just to make megaphone so I want people to make all manner of sovereign devices so that we are truly resistant so that if even one gets some terrible you know disease to use the ecological model and is wiped out the rest are there and more keep coming up cool if there's any further questions I'll be outside I'm easy to find we have 15 seconds how do we get friends and family to care about this if we if we have believed this story how do we get family and friends to care about it this is hard this is what I think the disability angle is a good one and just the need for family and friends to communicate with one another and not have to pay for the privilege I think is actually the best angle to get family and friends to think about it works in Vanuatu I can't see why it can't work here in you know in other countries as well so I need to clear the stage but happy to catch people outside you