Blockchain Revolution

PRIVACY, FREE SPEECH, AND FREE PRESS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
Personal privacy, free speech, and free press are essential to an open, free, and
prosperous society. On one hand, citizens must be able to communicate privately and
anonymously. On the other hand, they must be able to speak freely and securely
without fear of repercussion. Online censorship, the hacking of large institutions and
civil society, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass and targeted surveillance
and data fracking have driven citizens of well-established democracies to seek
anonymity and encryption technologies. These tools enable them to disguise their
identities and scramble their messages in transit and in storage so that only authorized
persons may access them.

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Here’s the rub—encryption technologies are either not legal for individual use or
not readily available in those countries whose citizens need them most. The
Wassenaar Arrangement, a multilateral export control regime that technologically
advanced nations agreed to, governs the export of “dual use” products, that is, those
that could be deployed for both good and evil. Wassenaar’s original goal was to keep
high-tech products out of the hands of dictators in North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq.
Anonymity and encryption technologies such as public key infrastructure were
considered dual use.
Today, in countries such as Russia and China, both individuals and corporations—
including foreign firms—must seek authorization to use them. In countries where
their use is discretionary, governments—even the Obama administration—have asked
tech firms to include “backdoor access,” that is, a secret means of bypassing the
normal authentication process (e.g., logging on with a password or other security
code) and gaining remote access to a computer and its data without authorization or
detection. It is far more insidious than Big Brother, because at least everybody knew
that Big Brother was watching.
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Here, tech firms aren’t supposed to tell users that
there’s a back door. No doubt hackers look for them, find them, and use them, too.
“The trend lines regarding security and privacy online are deeply worrying,”
wrote David Kaye, Special Rapporteur of the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights. “Encrypted and anonymous communications may
frustrate law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials, and they complicate
surveillance, but State authorities have not generally identified situations—even in
general terms, given the potential need for confidentiality—where a restriction has
been necessary to achieve a legitimate goal.”
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He went on to say that law
enforcement and counterterrorism agencies have come to downplay good old-
fashioned detective work and deterrence measures, including transnational
cooperation.
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Not surprisingly, on global measures of the preservation of political and personal
rights—that is, privacy and the freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press, and the
tolerance of other religions, immigrants, political refugees, and homosexuals—Russia
ranks 114th, and China second to last, at 160th.
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For what it’s worth, the United
States is no epitome: it ranks 28th.
Blocking Web sites without a court order has become customary in such
countries, and many censors have figured out how to thwart virtual private network
software used to prevent censorship.
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According to Reporters Without Borders,
Russia has been curtailing freedoms of expression and information and blocking
increasingly more sites since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012,
among them Wikipedia.
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China has mastered the art of the targeted data blackout,

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censoring search terms related to Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” prodemocracy
movement and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests on
Weibo, China’s Twitter clone. It managed to block nearly 90 percent of all Google
services. Imprisonment is also popular in these countries when people post content
deemed questionable by the government online. Following the Chinese stock market
collapse in July 2015, authorities arrested more than one hundred people for using
social media to spread rumors that “caused panic, misled the public and resulted in
disorders in stock market or society.”
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Governments that wish to repress the voices of citizens everywhere and have
captured technologies like the Internet to silence dissidents and block outside media
will find blockchain technology significantly more challenging for several reasons.
First, citizens and journalists could use public key infrastructure to encrypt
information and conceal their identities from would-be censors and attackers. Second,
where governments discourage and deprive good and honest journalism of funding,
journalists could raise funds on the blockchain, casting a wider net for investors
sympathetic to their cause, especially investors who preferred to remain anonymous.
Finally, governments could not destroy or alter information recorded on the
blockchain; therefore, we could use it to hold governments and other powerful
institutions accountable for their actions.
Consider crowdfunding journalists on the blockchain. If we released them from
the financial grip of state-controlled media, they could cover politics freely while
preserving the anonymity of donors. Veteran Chinese journalists could try one of the
distributed peer-to-peer crowdfunding platforms such as Koinify, Lighthouse, or
Swarm that use PKI to protect the identities of sender and recipient better than
Internet-only systems. Another great blockchain tool is the free mobile app GetGems,
which both guards and monetizes instant messaging through bitcoin. Users can send
all sorts of files securely, with GetGems functioning like private e-mail, not just
SMS.
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These apps are just the beginning of what is possible.
Another solution is a distributed platform for filing stories in an immutable ledger
that makes the ledger unique, such as what Factom aims to accomplish in the
developing world. Reporters could purchase entry credits—rights to create entries on
Factom’s ledger. As with the bitcoin ledger, everyone would get the same copy, and
anyone could add to it but no one could alter entries once they were filed. Factom has
a commit/reveal commitment scheme that serves as an anticensorship mechanism:
servers in China, for example, couldn’t prevent the filing of an otherwise valid entry
because of its content. If the reporter had attached an entry credit to the filing, then it
would get recorded. A government could identify certain entries as offensive but
couldn’t delete or block them as the Chinese government has done on Wikipedia. If an

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official court were to order a change in the ledger, an officer of the court could make a
new entry to reflect the ruling, but the history would remain for all to see.
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A third solution is distributed peer-to-peer microblogging that doesn’t go through
centralized servers. Stephen Pair, CEO of BitPay, described how to reinvent Twitter or
Facebook so that users controlled their own data. “Instead of having just one company
like Facebook, you might have many companies tying into this common database [the
blockchain] and participating in building their own unique user experiences. Some of
those companies might ask you for or might require certain information to be shared
with them so that they could monetize that. But as a user, you would have full control
over what information you’re sharing with that company.”
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There is Twister, a
Twitter clone in terms of feel and functionality developed in 2013 by Miguel Freitas,
a hacker and research engineer at PUC-Rio University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Twister leverages the free software implementations of bitcoin and BitTorrent
protocols and deploys cryptography end to end so that no government can spy on
users’ communications.
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