machine-envy

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is about darknets, anonymisation and crypto-anarchy. Horray!

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), when he revealed that the political party dedicated to copyright reform would be supporting a controversial new commercial “darknet”, Relakks. “Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect citizens from the effects of current routine surveillance”, says Falkvinge.

“So, for a fee of €5 per month, Relakks offers to provide that protection increasingly being eroded from our civil liberties…”

Read the rest of the piece here.

I contacted Ben Laurie, who among other things is a longtime supporter of TOR, for some last minute advice, which was so last minute, it didn’t make it into the piece. On TOR adoption, he had this to say:

“Tor is an interesting problem - it seems that although many individuals of good standing are prepared to endorse tor or run tor nodes almost no companies are. It seems to me that if a less thorough hatchet job had been done on anonymity (only paedophiles and terrorists have any need for it, after all) then companies would be able to get behind it and it could become a pervasive tool.”