Mutual Assured Transparency

Total transparency or the lack of any reasonable expectation of secrecy for any organization on Earth I think more than anything else is the true potential of ProjectSAFE. Any useful privacy or hope of a good life depends on this. So also any chance for useful stability.

Organizations may not want it but they will be bound, over time even in law, by mutually assured transparency. Acting as if they had or could expect secrecy will be considered unreasonable even in law. No organization, no state, no agency, no corporation, there will be no exceptions. Arguments about how to transition to this state should not delay it in anyway.

But there is a time limit. Is it just coincidence that the firm that is the greatest pusher of DRM paranoia and SOPA-PIPA-CISPA…has its own files hacked and very likely now this will be used in the next more vigorous push for spyware and moving away from transparency or preventing impending transparency.

But in truth Project SAFE is exactly the opposite…

I can put my files out into the MAID, and nobody anywhere, anyhow, anyway will ever have access to them.

That goes for Sony Pictures, That goes for governments, that goes for advertising agencies, That goes for everybody and every entity… And there will be no exceptions.

SAFE insures privacy much more than it insures transparency.

Without persistent anonymity you won’t have any privacy. Granted, someone could spy you looking at your data or formulating it or guess at some of it and dump it with your name attached under persistent anonymity but you won’t even have access to any kind of liberty or privacy if we cannot defeat organizational secrecy with transparency. I am saying transparency is a prerequisite for the privacy and by utility should be prioritized as its is a prerequisite for our goal of privacy. Without it we will deal with states that simply bar you from access to electronic devices and want to criminalize any hint of defiance.

In the States right now we have people who think government or a state is a business- not as in government profiting and competing with private industry under socialism, no its much worse than that. They are often MBA types in middle bureaucracy positions- administrators. Under government as a business (or just another business that can’t push business or businesses around) who are its customers and who are it owner? These MBA types don’t think of it as a cooperative where the owners and the customers are the same people. They don’t don’t see it as a service with any kind of mutuality. They think they are preventing the taxation and preserving the coercive force of an upper class whom they view as their employers or in some cases relatives. For them, although they either haven’t our couldn’t think it through, the point of the state is to squeeze you or oppress you. States and concentrated power do this naturally and have to be structured against this at the very least. But to them, and their rank are unfortunately increasing, nepotism is the order of things and things that don’t look like it or don’t enhance bullying are wrong. Things that should get them locked up they literally see as the right thing to do.

Cooperatives and mutuals have voluntary membership. This is the opposite of statism where membership is forced.

I am all for mutualism. I see a multitude of mutuals as a democratic alternative to statism. However, while forced membership is imposed on people, it is at odds with non-aggression principle. This prevents universal principles being valued and practiced, as exceptions become the norm.

Without universal principles, society is vulnerable to corruption. We see this all around us these days.

I don’t really see how this thread is related to SAFE? Like @jreighley said, SAFE doesn’t provide transparency at all. SafeCoin will be as anonymous and private as cash. Private SAFE data cannot be decrypted by anyone but the owner(s). It’s pretty much an anyone-can-do-whatever-the-hell-they-want internet.

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Perhaps that is why Warren always posts in “off topic”

I have zero idea why he finds project SAFE interesting. It is antithetical to most things he proposes. He really wants to crack down on the way that people organize themselves and behave – While MaidSAFE is going to increase people’s freedom to do as they wish and organize as they wish without interference or notice from Tyrants like him… If he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get it… Kinda amusing though…

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@Traktion yes cooperatives, and we know some people have a less cooperative vision of the state many of those who go on and on about free markets actually think of the state as their private/contract enforcer.

@Seneca, this new black market enabler is fine as far as it goes but if it can’t be used to evolve beyond efforts like Wikieleaks where sponsored media is supposed to decide what we are aware of (when its at odds with their money) then we have to realize states and corporations will become increasingly aggressive and entitled. An ability to trade what we want wont much matter.

@jreighley right, SAFE is supposed to make it easier for people to abuse other people with impunity? I don’t think its me that confused about the purpose of SAFE. If it works it will enable a level of anonymity that will expose and reduce corruption. Its such a simple concept. Oh yes you can put your data in a secure box but co-conspirators can out you in a way you can’t track using the same types of protections that provides a limit on abuse. If there are only 5 or 6 people involved in something underhanded, it may be possible to pin an exposure on someone, but in the bigger more important efforts where there are thousands it will be much harder.

I expect SAFE to match instant global dissemination with true anonymity. Entities always leak info, even just by mistake and this will amplify and disseminate that info.

SAFE does nothing to restrict people’s freedom to behave however they choose to behave. It only provides freedom. If is a very lousy platform to deliver tyranny of any kind, 'warren’ted or unwarrented. :wink:

By decentralizing data storage it makes Hacking MUCH harder. And thus makes leaking massive databases of information nearly impossible. Somehow you come to the conclusion that MaidSAFE it makes everything transparent. I don’t know where you get that idea. Snowden only could leak what he could get access to and he could only get access to it because it was stored in a centralized manner… If NSA, or Sony Pictures or anyone else where using MaidSAFE or anything of the like, leaks and hacks would not happen. At least not to scale.

And if they did, it would be much easier to identify the leaker – Because only certain people have access to said file and the information contained in said file…

I see no way that it stops people from doing anything they are currently doing. It only allows them to do it with less risk of being exposed through a hack or a leak.

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No, that is pure rubbish. It might make easier for a black boxed machine with some AI facility at some point in the future to operate with impunity and in the dark for a time, but for any system involving more than a few people it provides a perfected TOR without a CIA back door (in theory, larger scrutiny of code awaits) so that we will have systems that go way beyond Wikileaks or what a fabled funtional ever provided.

The axe which you grind is the delusion that we just need trade to be unfettered or ever more so. We’ve seen that before with mercantile Sweden and England and if anything was worse than the concentration camps it was. So no, this wont abet the corruption of supply side unions it will rather block it with exposure. And if it doesnt, given the way we’re going you wont have any rights or privacy to worry about as it will all be legislated away under the guise of someone else right to more money at your expense. Resistance will be illegal.

If Dick Cheny is watching you in the shower you will be able to watch him in the shower and watch him watching. Because of the ever present human element in these sytems he will have no reasonable or reliable expectation of secrecy. Welcome to the era of transparent organizations. Wecome to mutually assured transparency. It was a potential inherant in cryptography and quite possibly its most important. This more perfect lock can keep us from being locked out and it will.

What is the point of this thread? Does this have anything to do with a potential or actual strategy for SAFE?
@warren, are you advocating that SAFE include some kind of forced transparency, like a pseudo-blockchain only editable by the network itself? How exactly should that be accomplished? Do you think that would be better?

I am just talking about the mathematics and physics, not the wishful thinking.

It doesn’t matter what you “should be able to do” The simple fact of the matter is that MaidSAFE insures privacy and freedom by design. It makes hacking harder by design. It make Survialence harder, not easier by design.

What you are talking about seems to be wishful thinking totally unattached from what MaidSAFE is or does. It is a privacy platform, not a transparency platform.

@kirkion, I am sorry, I dont know, but I am suggesting that this potential is implicit and not antithetical to privacy. Further that it cant be engineered out of any working SAFE type system nor should it be. Even if it seems paradoxical we dont have useful privacy for long without organizational transparency. Sunshine laws lose out to sponsorship.

Truely working privacy implies strong anonomity and an age of transparency. But I think we will discover we were transparent all along as we are more directly connected than we are accustomed to thinking.

K, so you are saying that the SAFE network as currently being discussed and implemented already does this?

If it does, I really would like to know how it does that, and how I can opt out. (No offense @Warren).

I haven’t read the entire thread but that won’t stop me commenting :wink:

@kirkion It would be opt in, for example SAFE is a platform on which blockchain like functionality can easily be implemented to provide public (or private) triple entry accounting ledgers. This would be like an app, not a change to how SAFE itself works.

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Yes people will use the system for true anonymous reporting. Better and better search will be built for that function. There will be malicious uses where people attempt to unlawfully publish others keys or ways to spoof security and also generally slander and libel, but good search should keep the malicious trivia away to a degree.

But no need to to opt in or out by default it seems your data and activity couldnt be safer. It becomes a problem for people who want to do malicious things in groups. It likely will increase the scope of what is considered malicious. Even with the rise of matriarchical power I doubt it will be kind to disproportionate amounts of inherited wealth and power. But that will only work in favor of genuine and useful privacy. Loss of secrecy is not loss if privacy, quite the converse, but there were never guarantees.

People will learn to tune out some tripe and forms of rumor as they will continue as hurtful hearsay, not every transgression justified attention. But it should cut way down on the blackmail and graft that currently the world runs on.

Dude you seriously confuse me. I can’t even figure out if you actually have an idea for the SAFE network, or are just sorta monologuing on human nature.

What “it” are you referring to here?

Same here.

I see SAFE giving us the next solid step beyond wikileaks and its filtering or vetting by sponsored media. We may move beyond the need or acceptance of a news media. Having punishment for whistle blowers or having people like Hilary Clinton, at least publically, trying to secure capital punishment for people like Assange will be over. More importantly an end to much of corporate and agency corruption. CIA,NSA. FBI will become transparent and searchable. Its this eventuality that will bring much more useful privacy and end disappearances etc and national security letters etc.

When everyone of us is under a camera all the the and having everything we do recorded (perfection of power style) this turns the camera around and means its us collectively that watches the watcher. We will debug government and corporates the way we do open source code.

Its mutually assured transparency. If power tries to take your private life out of context and harass it too in a more formal context face the same prospect. But power also faces an accumulated accounting. Its the end of dirty hand politics.

Okay Warren. I get the aim of your bluster.

But how? Technically? Are you going to install the cameras in the NSA? Sounds more like a Tom Cruise movie than a serious dialog about a software platform.

No need for that, just a tried true torrent for peoples voices to be heard. Just the understanding from agencies and board rooms that they no longer have access to secrecy. Its the people that make up these groups who will turn them in. Its ordinary people who will be able to check charismatic types.

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