Comment by nbadg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nbadg | Hacker News Reader

This is a really interesting article, and it's nice to see a lengthy discussion of treating sites like Reddit, Facebook, etc as a kind of digital nation-state.

But one point in particular bothered me (and perhaps I'm misreading it):

> It’s incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not just to avoid using it yourself for criminal purposes, but to design it so that it’s not useful for criminal purposes.

Isn't a network, by definition, useful for criminal purposes? Perhaps the author means not more useful for criminal purposes than for legal ones, but what exactly might that mean? And by whose laws are we describing criminality?

I also think this argument is tremendously problematic, maybe even self-defeating, in the context of encryption. If we, as the author proposes, were to have a network designed from the beginning to be capable of eventual decentralization [1], doesn't that imply heavy use of cryptography? I can't imagine a digital network where you can create privacy (and therefore agency) any other way.

And yet clearly, government entities like the FBI are publicly railing against encryption as a useful tool for terrorists and criminals. Plenty of people, myself included, find this policy debate to be frighteningly under-informed, but if your goal is to avoid government attention to maximize the chances for success, it's not our opinion that matters, it's the FBI's. So I think think this kind of friction is unavoidable, implying the smart money is on people who can cleverly minimize its impact.

[1] On a related note, I'm working on exactly this problem, at a protocol level. If you're curious, check out our documentation repo https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse

Almost anything is useful for criminal purposes. The point is that if something is unusually useful for criminal purposes (e.g. megaupload), then it will be heavily scrutinized. Just because crowbars are useful for crime doesn't get them regulated. Anthrax, on the other hand, does.

You are correct that privacy without cryptography is infeasible. Urbit definitely does make heavy use of cryptography. Some government agencies may not appreciate this, but the point of the cryptography isn't primarily so that the NSA can't read it, but that other people don't impersonate you. It's important to not only not violate the current letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law.

The goal isn't simply to minimize government attention to maximize the chance of "success". "Success" that doesn't accomplish the rest of our goals isn't success at all, so there are some things that Urbit can't compromise on.

The distinction between "useful" and "unusually useful" for criminal purposes is a very important one. It might be worth highlighting more explicitly in the article, since it sounds like you may be the author.

> "Success" that doesn't accomplish the rest of our goals isn't success at all

I'm not talking about survival, I'm talking about success. In the article you draw a distinction between failure by death ("range safety") and failure by incorrectness ("mature non-republic"); the remaining option, then, would be success -- including meeting your goals.

My point is that survival is implicit in this definition of success, and from a risk management standpoint, political pressure from entities like the FBI is a very real threat. Many of us understand that the FBI's argument is enormously problematic, but that's largely irrelevant: they think it's valid, and that's all that matters when they're the ones applying real-world political pressure.

Put plainly: the FBI is advocating changing laws to make strong end-to-end cryptography illegal (unless the feds have access, which by definition isn't E2EE). This pressure is a real-world fact; what are you doing to mitigate it? Or what about Turkey, where it's already quasi-illegal?

It's certainly a tradeoff which admits no perfect success. Yes, any network that isn't hosted on the FBI's own servers can be used for some sort of crime. Fortunately, in our real republic as it stands, there's a relatively wide margin of safety between government-pwned networking on the top, and a darknet on the bottom. Let's hope it persists.

I'm not the author, but I do work for Urbit.

Sure, success is impossible without survival. But survival without e2e crypto can't be success, which is why it's baked into the system. Some risks are avoidable while some aren't.

How do we mitigate this risk? Don't give the FBI any reason to worry about us in particular. Don't market to unsavory types. Be above board and make a useful service that lots of people use. Nothing more complicated than that.

The exact opposite should be true, and Anthrax is the perfect example. We should be building great shit because great shit betters humanity, agnostic to possible criminal misuse of said shit.

Anthrax has no utility beyond criminal activity, and honestly I would consider anything that utilizes anthrax in that way to be criminal at all; thats terroristic. Crime is extrinsically motivated, terror intrinsic, and the use of Anthrax can only be physical harm, there is no greater reward to the applier.

But Megaupload is a tool that lets us share ideas and forms of art that people in some parts of the world may not have had the opportunity be exposed to otherwise. Even if it can be used for crime, that is not the only function it is capable of performing. Megaupload is exactly the model for products we should be building, because the sharing of ideas helps elevate us as a society. The minor and short term side-effect of piracy is irrelevant.

Anthrax has noncriminal uses -- science, for example. Sure, they're unusual, but they're there.

I'm not arguing whether or not megaupload was a good service, or whether or not the government should have cracked down on them. The fact is that the government did crack down on them, and the reason is because they positioned themselves as a great avenue for piracy. If they wanted to survive, they should have either not been so pirate-friendly or found a jurisdiction that didn't care about piracy.

Maybe it would be impossible to accomplish megaupload's goals without being pirate-friendly. Urbit's goals can be accomplished while staying well within the letter and spirit of the law, so there's no point in jeopardizing its success.

It's awesome that you can accomplish your goal without compromising to abate criminal possibilities. I'm just saying that that's a compromise that should never be made, at least in the digital sphere.

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