05.09.2024
Revenge on the internet
Encryption can be broken with a $5 wrench. The legal actions against Telegram and X show the fragility of free expression in the face of state power, argues Paul Demarty
On August 24, a certain Pavel Durov was arrested at a Paris airport.
Durov is Russian by birth, but has accumulated numerous citizenships over the years - including that of France in 2021. His arrest was on account of his ownership of the Telegram messaging app-cum-social network, whose strict and fanatical defence of user privacy has made it a bugbear of governments around the world and given it enormous clout among those who fear their governments, be they criminals, dissidents or mere paranoiacs. The French indictment is grandiose, essentially naming him as a co-conspirator in innumerable crimes alleged to have been organised on the platform.
On the other side of the Atlantic, X - the website formerly, and largely still, known as Twitter - ran into trouble in Brazil, where it was banned by the supreme court, principally under the direction of chief justice Alexandre de Moraes. He has been on a crusade for some time now, clamping down on the spread of “misinformation” after supporters of the far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro, attempted their own January 6-style coup, with much the same level of success. X CEO Elon Musk, as is his habit, engaged in a childish war of tweets with the august justice, and the Brazilian decision has been largely welcomed by liberal opinion in the west, given Musk’s increasing ardour for far-right lunacy.
The coincidence of these two events is instructive, and perhaps when future historians write about the first decades of the internet they will date the death of its first great ideology to August 2024.
Pirate utopia
The canonical expression of that ideology is a manifesto published by John Perry Barlow in 1996 entitled ‘A declaration of the independence of Cyberspace’, though it was hardly novel then. Barlow - once a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - addressed his text portentously to the “governments of the industrial world”. Its tone is defiant. Regulation of cyberspace is not only unwanted, but impossible. The net is “naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” The libertarian assertions pile up: “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”1
Barlow was protesting against the US Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included extensive provisions for censoring obscene publications on the internet. Barlow got his way - the supreme court gutted that section of the act. The remainder, ironically, includes the one clause that effectively allows social media companies to let their users run riot - the infamous section 230, which makes users rather than platforms legally liable for content.
For these original cyber-libertarians, however, the dream was not a future where the internet was effectively carved up between a few giant corporations. It would be a pirate utopia for freaks and geeks; a great, chaotic bazaar and cultural melting pot, such as one hopes to find at Burning Man or, indeed, in the parking lot outside a Grateful Dead concert. Between the lines, it was not as universalist as it wanted to look. Pirate utopias are not for everyone: they are for pirates. It was in the rapidly expanding ranks of IT professionals that this idea truly spread, that with the correct know-how one could, at least partially, secede from the bureaucratic world all around.
This required defence mechanisms, of course. Essential among them was encryption. Cyberspace runs on information, but the relative ease with which nodes in the network can communicate presents the problem that the powers that be can simply listen in and see what everyone is up to. Encryption makes that - if not impossible - considerably harder. In its modern forms, it is possible to obscure almost all aspects of a message, with the single exception of the sender and recipient, in ways that are punishingly difficult for third parties to circumvent.
Secure encryption was always the main selling point for Telegram. Durov founded it after he was bought out - under duress - from his first great success as a businessman: a social network targeted at Russia and the wider post-Soviet world called VKontakte. After the Maidan events of 2014 and subsequent military confrontations between Russia and Ukraine, the site came under increasing pressure from the Russian government to cooperate with its clampdown on regime critics. Durov, a die-hard libertarian capitalist, resisted, and was edged out. He left Russia, and began to accumulate passports.
Telegram was his answer. Unlike VKontakte, all messages were to be encrypted end to end - that is, they could only be read in practice by the sender and receiver, in possession of the required encryption keys. It has become a major hit, and a source of controversy in the west since it began to blame all its misfortunes on Russia. Durov has continued to refuse all but the most desultory cooperation with the proper authorities. That has made it popular with political dissidents, especially on the eastern European far right, but also with straightforward criminals. Much on-the-ground information and rumours about the current Ukraine war circulates first on the platform, in both Russian and Ukrainian circles.
Two spooks
The problem with the encryption approach is that it is based on a false premise, illustrated neatly by an old entry in the XKCD webcomic. On the left panel is what cryptography nerds seem to think would happen if they were arrested, with two spooks foiled because the nerd’s laptop is encrypted. On the right panel is what would actually happen, with one spook telling the other: “His laptop’s encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password.”2
The power of the state against individuals, in other words, rests not on technological superiority so much as preponderance of force. In fact, this plays out in apparently more benign ways. One of the great inventions of the crypto nerds was the cryptocurrency, which attempts to circumvent the need for trusted intermediaries in the financial system by way of a shared system of record - the famous blockchain - that can be cryptographically verified by any participant in the economy. All that discretion and paranoia, however, turns out to be useless when somebody steals all your money. At that point, you need the state or sufficiently powerful financial institutions to step in for you - but you opted out of all that in the first place. (To say that cryptocurrencies have a fraud problem is an understatement - there is little else apart from fraud going on, though they just about function as a currency of last resort for people undertaking criminal activity.)
Durov’s arrest is a daring assertion of the pre-eminence of the state in these affairs. He is unlikely, admittedly, to be beaten with a wrench; but he will be beaten with a bevy of spectacular charges. It is not over yet for him, or for Telegram; he is a very rich man, after all, and rich men are accustomed to having some influence over their legal difficulties by way of unleashing armies of lawyers after their adversaries. Still, he cuts a strange, diminished, altogether friendless character at present. Telegram is so closely associated in the western mind with Russian perfidy that it is easy to forget that his relations with the Russian state are not historically very good. Rumours abound that, shortly before his arrest, he met with Vladimir Putin in Azerbaijan, though both sides deny it. He does not seem likely to show up in any prisoner exchanges any time soon.
Durov at least has the street-smarts of the typical Russian billionaire, who make their fortunes in a dangerous crowd and must box clever with a shrewd security state. None of that is true of Musk - a self-mythologising narcissist who inherited a mining fortune and gilded it when his failing dotcom start-up was absorbed into what became PayPal. His tenure at Twitter reminds us of a detail from Fire and fury, Michael Wolff’s first book on the inner goings-on of the Trump White House: Trump, apparently, was deeply wounded by the press hostility to him. He simply could not understand why they did not appreciate what a good job he was doing. A similar sense of wounded pride seems to have driven Musk quite mad. He can buy Twitter - albeit largely with other people’s money - but he cannot buy respect, except from his army of servile fanboys.
He returns to ‘free speech’ ideals periodically to justify his actions more grandly, though he has been perfectly cooperative with several world governments. Why not with this Brazilian judge? Perhaps it is more than a mere personal feud, but there is precious little evidence to that effect. In any case, Brazil is hardly the first country to simply switch the damn website off. After all, what is he going to do about it - take the supreme court to court?
Going to war
Musk or no Musk, a truly ‘free speech’ Twitter was never on the cards, and certainly not since 2016, when the American state’s drive towards great-power war shifted gears considerably, between Trump’s anti-China sabre-rattling and the Democrats’ attempts to pin their failures on Vladimir Putin.
Both of these apparent political accidents acted as accelerants for wider strategic imperatives. As the cliché goes, the first casualty of war is the truth, which is usually nobbled some time in advance of hot conflict; and the means by which it is done away with is state censorship. Ironically, many of the privacy techniques at issue in the Telegram affair are products of the security state itself, in the interests of espionage. That has made them somewhat difficult to control without causing other problems, but not, in the end, impossible.
Marxists, properly so called, favour maximum free speech, even for hated enemies, for a variety of reasons. Some of them are intrinsic to our project: we want a society where broad masses govern all the affairs of economy and state democratically, and such a thing is scarcely possible if state and private bureaucracies can combine to silence our voices or drown them out with lies. We need to educate ourselves in political leadership now, and can only do so if we can maintain some freedom of inquiry and a culture of critical analysis and curiosity.
But there is also the matter referred to above - that the dynamics of capitalism point inevitably towards mass bloodshed. When the state interferes in these matters, it is because it wants to hide certain things from view, like the small matter of the common humanity of those it considers its adversaries. In the course of struggle, we can and should use technological measures like strong encryption, and we should exploit differences in political regimes to maintain publication, as Durov did with his many passports, and the Russian and German socialist movements did by smuggling literature into their countries from abroad in the face of repression. However, we cannot simply secede from tyranny, as Barlow once thought we could.