Schneier on Security

Skeptical • April 4, 2015 1:00 PM

21 August 2017.

The story begins on a cold November night, three years earlier, in the main room of a very wealthy individual’s vacation lodge near Vancouver. A small group of men and women were gathered – the 1% of the 1% of the 1% – the richest owners of the major technology, media, and other companies. A comfortably but well dressed man of middle age stood before them, summing up the conclusions they had all agreed to over the last week of intense discussion.

Then it is agreed.

Unbreakable encryption binds the power of government, but not our power. We do not need to steal patents or the plans of potentially “disruptive” competitors – we just buy them. We do not need to steal the information of our customers – they give it to us freely, with a moment of unease followed by the tell-tale click of consent.

But unbreakable encryption can hinder the power of government to investigate us, to limit us, and to punish us. An idiotic prosecutor who does not understand the grandly transformative nature of our work, a small-time politician who wants to make a name for herself – we are at their mercy, even though they are undeserving of their power and prone to abuse. One overzealous antitrust unit, one bombastic fool with old-fashioned ideas about constraining global enterprises with national tax laws, and some of our greatest efforts might come to nothing. We owe it to each other, and to humanity as a whole really, not to let that happen.

He went on to discuss their lobbying plans, and their need to leverage the genuine efforts of civil liberties groups and advocates, to pressure business-friendly politicians, to simultaneously win both sides of the aisle.

It was a hard fight, but they won. And very quickly, as one suspicious of power might have predicted, secure from the interference of a less enlightened elected government, ten individuals from this elite group began to amass sensitive, useful information on those with political power, while simultaneously refining their abilities to manipulate mass opinion. And very rapidly, and very quietly, the power of the Group of Ten grew.

But all human enterprises contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. A disgruntled worker from the dark side of the Group of Ten’s operations has turned informant for a (deliberately) underfunded section of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Or rather, had briefly turned informant before dying in a traffic accident caused by a malfunctioning stop light.

With their own communications open to the scrutiny of other government agencies and Congressional committees by law, the FBI unit finds its investigation sabotaged from within at every turn. On the brink of being completely shut down, however, they find an unlikely ally in the form of a wealthy, private benefactor – a woman known as among the most ruthless of competitors in the hedge fund world.

She offers to provide them with highly expensive, but secure, communications, facilities, and a highly skilled if morally questionable cadre to supplement their operations. Pushed to the point where the unit believes it must break the law in order to preserve it, they accept her help, but at her well-guarded home near Boston question her closely as to her motives. She glances briefly at them with hard eyes, then walks to the window to watch two of her grandchildren playing.

“A technologically advanced world ruled by laws written by private companies is one in which more power, and more money, increasingly aggregates to fewer and fewer people. It is a world in which massive inequality becomes impossible to escape; in which the select few remain forever beyond the reach of any organized and informed democratic efforts at improvement. It is a world where democratic self-government is quickly being replaced by a libertarian dystopia of little true self-government at all. What those drunk on the writings of the 18th century forget is that less government power does not necessarily mean more freedom. This is not a choice between gentlemen farmers of Virginia and power-hungry Federalists. It is easier, in this age, to maintain a government that acts within the law than it is to trust private industry to do the same. I will not be a party to the replacement of the ballot-box with the shareholder-proxy. I will not allow the hands of democracy to be tied, and its officials corrupted, while loosening those whose primary ethos is that of the marketplace. This world is not some techno-fairyland where each special snowflake is going to be cherished and nurtured. In reality, beneath the babble of the silicon evangelist, this is quite simply a war for power. But unlike such wars in the past, one side can win this without appearing to win, or indeed to fight at all. They can even preach the virtues of individual freedom, warning us of an Orwellian future should we not accede to them, all the while slowly eroding the power of those institutions most necessary to our actual freedom and actual self-determination.”

She turned back towards them. Behind her, high in the afternoon sky, the dark disc of the moon slowly crept over the sun. A total solar eclipse, the covering of a star by a much smaller, but well connected and well positioned sphere, had begun.