Crypto-Anarchism

Fmr. NSA chief: Snowden defenders ‘20-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex’

"'If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?' said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to 'nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years'. 'I’m just trying to illustrate that you’ve got a group of people out there who make demands, whose demands may not be satisfiable, may not be rational, from other points of view, may not be the kinds of things that government can accommodate,' Hayden said." Continue reading →

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Bitcoin is crucial for the future of free speech, say experts

"First Amendment rights to free speech would make it a tough legal battle to prosecute WikiLeaks legally. However, government officials were able to target financial organizations such as Visa and PayPal, getting them to stop processing donations for the site. Timm also highlighted the importance that technologies like Bitmessage – the anonymous, encrypted messaging service built on the Bitcoin protocol – have in maintaining a free press. It eliminates the need for a third-party arbitrator when sending messages, enabling a zero-trust messaging system. It also hides the metadata surrounding such conversations, he added." Continue reading →

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A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (March 9th, 1993)

"People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it." Continue reading →

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Irish man facing U.S. extradition for hosting largest child porn network on the planet

"If extradited to the US, Marques faces four charges relating to images hosted on the Freedom Hosting network, including images of the torture and rape of children. He could be sentenced to 30 years in prison. Freedom Hosting hosted sites on the The Onion Router (Tor) network, which anonymises and encrypts traffic, masking the identity of users. Users on the Tor sub-Reddit were suspicious about the news, dissecting the details of the vulnerability and pointing to a previous case where the FBI had taken over and maintained a site hosting child abuse material for two weeks in order to identify users." Continue reading →

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Half Of Tor Sites Compromised, Including Tormail

"The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA. In a crackdown that FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network has been compromised, including the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail. This is undoubtedly a big blow to the TOR community, Crypto Anarchists, and more generally, to Internet anonymity. All of this happening during DEFCON. If you happen to use and account name and or password combinations that you have re used in the TOR deep web, change them NOW." Continue reading →

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The Ecuadorian Library: or, The Blast Shack After Three Years

"Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all 'gosh he’s such a liar' and 'give us back our sinister felon,' all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents. These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s 'Animal Farm' have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero." Continue reading →

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Bitcoin suitcase eats your pocket change, spits out digital currency

"A hacker called Garbage was milling around outside of the Rio convention center showing off the invention to fellow Bitcoin enthusiasts. 'Most people know about Bitcoin, but they don't have it,' he said, hailing from Kalamazoo, Michigan with his group TwoSixNine, which built the device for around $250 using a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and a portable 4G modem. It takes in your spare change through a metal coin slot, checks the current exchange rate on Bitcoin trading post Mt. Gox, and prints out a QR code on receipt paper, which contains the cryptographic hash you can use to redeem your digital gold nugget." Continue reading →

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How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood

"The goal of this video is to explain how Bitcoin works under the hood, to give a clearer idea of what it really means to own, send or 'mine' Bitcoins. First, a brief high-level overview of what Bitcoin is. At its core, Bitcoin is just a digital file that lists accounts and money like a ledger. A copy of this file is maintained on every computer in the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin system is amazingly designed so that no trust is needed--special mathematical functions protect every aspect of the system. The rest of this entry will explain in detail how Bitcoin allows such a group of strangers to manage each other’s financial transactions." Continue reading →

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The Cloud Belongs to the NSA

"The market is already providing some safer alternatives. SpiderOak, a secure cloud storage company, has seen its rate of sign-ups nearly triple over the past month. SpiderOak says even its engineers are unable to decrypt your personal data, so it is stored safely, according to CSO Online. Many of these are startups or crowdfunded experiments and may be worth keeping an eye on. Apple is expected to announce improvements to its iCloud service soon. How larger companies deal with this may affect markets in interesting ways." Continue reading →

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Does the Internet Have a Libertarian Future? Interview With Paul Rosenberg

"The entire Internet is kind of being — it’s kind of a re-conquest that’s going on. It got out of control. They weren’t expecting it. The roots actually go back to Sputnik when they essentially scared the people in power in the United States. And they kind of let the smart guys loose — and that’s not exactly an absolutely correct explanation but it’s kind of true — and the Internet grew out of it. And nobody saw it coming outside of a couple sci-fi authors. Just a couple. And it got out of control and they’re essentially taking it back. So we have a lot of problems with that. In terms of avoiding the problems, it can definitely be done. Our company does it." Continue reading →

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