Wikileaks and the security of communities

go listen to this

it's just under an hour and a half long. and it's worth it.

what you're listening to, incidentally, is the keynote speech for the HOPE conference, which is a semiregular conference in NYC, the 8th of which is winding up today.

the keynote speaker was announced, as of yesterday, to be This Man, who, as the actual speaker tells his audience of computer whizzes and feds early on, will not be able to make it, because of the overwhelming interest of the latter group.

The target audience of this speech, in fact of this conference, is knowledgeable about computers to a stunning degree. i don't understand a lot of the specific technical stuff Applebaum is talking about. and i'm ok with that (though i'd still like someone to walk me through securely installing Tor) because the social dynamics at play here are at least as interesting.

These are computer geeks with political and rhetorical savvy: The likelihood that Assange would make it into the US was very small at the time when his keynote was announced. BUT saying he'd be there guaranteed that a helluva lot of intelligence operatives and agents of various persuasions would show. which provides a really lovely teachable moment about how hierarchical and authoritarian structures are obligated to respond to stimuli in predictable ways, and that those patterns tend towards assuming people are "leaders" of organizations which can be structurally "decapitated."

this, no matter how many times those supposed leaders explain that they are not so much calling down the rain as observing the direction of the wind, and though they may be supa dupa fly, they do not have the keys to the jeep, as it were.

So the guy with the microphone isn't Assange, he's some guy named Applebaum who I never heard of before. And he takes that first teachable moment, and turns it into a different one, about the resilience of community, and how "leaders" and figureheads aren't the source of a community's power, but emergent properties of it. He doesn't say it in quite this way, but in that moment, the State had responded in its predictable way, and has succeeded, sort of. The speech is the moment immediately after, where the community is running around like a hydra with its head cut off.

The community that Applebaum invokes has far more interesting implications than its defanged contemporary usage. it's not a synonym for "identity grouping." it's an obligation, and a security protocol. and if you neglect your community, that compromises the security system. which, in cryptographese, is called an attack.

Applebaum talks about someone who performed this kind of attack. (more background & etc.)
i don't know if the parallels with avoidance speech mourning practices is intentional, but it's striking. saying someone has no name anymore, in this context, has profound practical implications. they're no longer a trusted node. this in a set of systems where identity verification is everything, and is the source of one of the only widespread means of strong encryption.

keep listening for the parts where Applebaum talks about community.
dissidents, especially computer geek dissidents, get painted as antisocial like nobody's business, and there's something truly beautiful about hearing the idea of collective interresponsibility, and the drive to keep your people safe, invoked so passionately by someone with such a broad understanding of his collective, and so much of the wherewithal to aid in that safety.

it's worth saying, frequently, that the current wars are not about far off places we don't understand, but about us, and what we allow to be funded, and how far we can expand our universe of empathy, and what our societal response to crisis is. it's worth saying that war is a process by which destruction and suffering are manufactured domestically, for foreign consumption. so i always appreciate when someone  bothers to say it.

and then listen to the part where he invokes Harvey Milk. because it's a really wonderful reminder that coming out was never just about saying "hey, i have an immutable individual identity! if the status quo can assimilate it i'll stop bugging you!" It was actually about asking the people who wanted to see you dead if they would like say it to your face, when you ran into them at family gatherings. it was about strategy, and it was about passion, and it was about community, and it was about making it personal.

in the end what i get out of this, even when i can't understand the jargon, is that caring about people is powerful. tangibly so. and that being able to care about and and trust people is a valuable security resource, and a tool with almost limitless social potential.