One interesting thing I've noticed that the people behind the best filesharing networks tend to have tremendous success with their later projects.

Napster is the obvious one. After Napster went down, Shawn Fanning co-founded Rupture and Path, and Sean Parker went on to become the first president of Facebook, key investor in Spotify, and managing partner at the Founders Fund.

Kazaa is another great example. After their legal walloping, the founders and development team behind Kazaa regrouped to form Skype.

And then there's The Pirate Bay, which is still rolling merrily along, court rulings notwithstanding. Its team hasn't created any billion-dollar companies yet (we'll see what happens with Flattr), but they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries, as well as the webhosting company PRQ, which was Wikileaks' home in its early days.

I don't think all of these later successes are a coincidence. Filesharing involves hard technical problems, hard logistical problems, and intense competition. If you were an investor, a blind strategy of giving money to the best pirates you can find seems like it might be surprisingly sound.

"won elections" is a bit of a stretch. In countries with multi-seat constituancies and proportional representation, there are often minority/niche candidates.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party#National_Pirate_Pa...

I thought most people here had heard of The Silk Road onion service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_%28marketplace%29

> An online bank could very well operate in the anonymous network because the traffic is already cryptographically signed, and users can enjoy strong authentication if they wish to or remain a pair of anonymous public/private keys.

Or you can use bitcoins to accomplish the same and you don't even need banks.

As William Gibson said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed".

Bitcoin and the silk road are not the future, but prototypes of it. It will be interesting to see if they become more than that, but they are showing the way forward if society continues to go down the directions currently being perused.

The longer this fiction persists, the less chance a fundamentally decentralized crypto currency will take hold. Trusted 3rd parties will always be necessary, and that's not a de facto bad thing.

BTC can work without trusted 3rd parties, and transactions can be performed in a completely anonymous way. Not every transaction requires or even benefits from these qualities, however. For Joe User's grandma to use BTC, there are going to need to be trusted 3rd parties (e.g. banks) to manage the minutia of transacting. These 3rd parties will make things simple for grandma, and ensure that she doesn't get screwed.

The thing that worries me about this push towards encryption and anonymity is that it does afford nefarious elements a lot of safe harbor. I imagine it's fairly possible to identify individuals given a few message traces, even in an encrypted anonymous environment, and layfolks simply aren't going to have the skills to cover all their digital tracks - can even expert cypherpunks? Meanwhile, a few malevolent elements in unison could easily co-ordinate and harvest details, with enough cover to be hard to track down (and even harder to prosecute).

An alternative is a world of transparency and openness - with a huge loss of privacy, but also a loss of privacy for those who would push their own causes of power and control, and/or commit crimes.

I honestly don't know what the long-term best path would be - or if there is even a genuine dichotomy between anonymity/privacy at all. I value my privacy, but I also value the opportunity to identify the sources of problems and use the structures of society to deal with them.

The secret might be a terrorist plan, a plan to open a new business, a plan to rob a neighbouring village or a plan to arrange a surprise birthday party. You never know, but people like their privacy. Even before the internet and telephone people could talk to other people to arrange things to come, while in the outside it just looked like the folks are walking around the town.

A transparent government and officials would be nice but I think that would never happen either. There are always matters that must be processed with confidentiality in the first stages, or the system just wouldn't work. Consider the old-fashioned hard-boiled journalism: people will talk if they can remain anonymous and confidential, and by talking they can prevent something worse from happening.

Limiting the secrecy of government/public sector affairs to a certain, absolute period of time might work, though. Things should be public as soon as they're finished.

I think that equal anonymity and confidentiality is better than the current world where most people are not anonymous and the powers to be can snoop on the rest and yet retain their own confidentiality in their actions.

The world might certainly be a very dull place if nothing was private - no more surprise birthday parties as you mention, for example - but perhaps there would be equal and opposite benefits to shared knowledge/information?

The situation regarding whistle-blowing itself requires that there is something worth reporting, which wouldn't be the case if the knowledge was already available (unless, perhaps, the knowledge was available but simply not highlighted well enough for people to spot any malicious behaviour).

Totally agree with your final point - it's a very strange dichotomy that as average people are finding less and less privacy, those with privilege or power are the ones who are afforded it.

See http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Robots distributing social power? I think it will be the exact opposite. Robots will be used to maintain social power, to prevent people from every gaining it. Your robot will be like an iPhone: you will be locked out of the software, forbidden to make modifications, forbidden to hack. Your robot will produce only as much as you need to survive; you will not receive enough to gain any more power than you already had. Your robot will also spy on you, so that if you start organizing a group of people to rebel against those with power, you will be thwarted by some means (perhaps your food will be drugged to reduce your cognitive abilities, or maybe for simplicity you will just stop receiving food). The people with power will never have to worry about being unseated, because they will have total control over the means of production. The only threat to the powerful at the point will be their own incompetence; only when they are not able to make the right decisions about managing society will society have a chance to rebel.

Here is a microcosm of what a world where robots run everything would be like:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2006/08/71554

I have yet to see any evidence that this is true; all I see are anecdotes from law enforcement agencies who are pushing for less crypto, and even those anecdotes only tenuously describe "nefarious" elements. You cannot encrypt a blood stain or a fingerprint, nor can you use an anonymity system to hide the fact that a known terrorist group is increasing the volume of data it sends and receives.

So what nefarious elements do you think are going to avoid prosecution by using crypto? A few years ago, there was a case of a group of child molesters using PGP and anonymous remailers (and possibly other privacy technologies) to communicate and exchange photos of themselves abusing children over Usenet. They were caught, arrested, and prosecuted following a well-coordinated investigation -- otherwise known as "good police work." Only a handful managed to avoid identification or prosecution, and it is worth noting that this was the case with investigations of criminal organizations long before good encryption was widely available. It should hardly be surprising that such a group was ultimately caught: they were sending each other photographic evidence of their own crimes.

It is also worth pointing out that anonymity systems are used by the police to catch criminals. In the case described above, the police used the very anonymity system that the child abusers were using, and were thus able to observe their messages while maintaining the secrecy of their investigation. Similar scenarios have played out with Tor. Criminals who use the Internet will eventually figure out which IP addresses belong to the police; it will be critical for the police to use anonymity systems to mask their IP addresses (this, in fact, is closely related to the reason the Navy created Tor in the first place). It is not so much that society's nefarious elements are more empowered now; it is more that the nature of the game has changed, that new tactics and strategies will be developed by both criminals and the police to utilize and cope with these systems.

I would argue that crypto and anonymity systems have benefited society more than they have harmed it. The same crypto and anonymity technologies used by the group I mentioned above have been used by political dissidents and activists to protect themselves from abusive governments; human rights activists have used such systems to protect the people they work with. Whistleblowers have used such systems in the past, and will have to do so in the future. For people who do not have an army at their command, these sorts of systems are necessary for their protection. If you were going to report Mafia activity to the police, would you rather use Tor/remailers/etc. or would you walk into the police station in person?

There is no such thing as a world of transparency and openness, because crime is part of human nature and because political ambition is part of human nature, and both of these behaviors exploit openness and transparency. I am all for an open government, but even I acknowledge that the government will need to keep some things secret -- military plans, investigations of dangerous criminal enterprises, the locations of witnesses to crimes, and many other things must be kept secret for society's benefit. Open and transparent government does not mean "secret free," it means "secrecy when it is absolutely necessary;" it is the responsibility of citizens to ensure that their representatives in the government are not declaring too many things to be secret, and it is the job of journalists to report to the citizens what is being kept secret from them. The sooner society realizes that, the better.

I also completely agree that pretty much every technological innovation throughout history - weapons, communication mediums, etc - are used by both 'police and thieves', or whichever actors fit in the white/black boxes in the given situation.

The problem in my mind is more general - it's that crypto and concealment are just an evolution of the status quo - the arms race continues, with more 'secrets whispered in the woods', yet average people are already losing their day-to-day privacy, in vast numbers, and crimes still occur of course.

Opening everything is clearly radical and/or impossible, and it's a long-term idea/concept rather than anything feasible in the near future. Despite my ramblings, I'm a realist, and I've worked on migrating many, many legacy systems, so I'm familiar with the challenges, but this is the only process I've reasoned about so far regarding disruption of the arms race itself, as opposed to just evolution of arms, so I'm hunting for counter-arguments and these are good ones.

Enabling dissidence is a very good point, and I think it highlights the problems with hierarchy/power itself and information disparity. If neither party was able to operate without the knowledge of the other, then dissidence could take place openly without fear of hidden/unknown retribution. Trusting that the system is really 'open' and that you can see all the communications is definitely a challenge though (unsolvable?)

Regarding your final point, I'd say that although crime is part of a darker aspect of human nature (which can be encouraged, manipulated or instilled), we have been controlling our own education and evolution for generations through society and religion and choice of partners - so why can't we see this as an optimization problem, and try to guide ourselves towards a less criminal and violent nature?

(PS: the final point is a bit rhetorical - I think we have been for a long time already - cannibalism isn't hugely popular for example)

this is predicated on the assumption that providers are not strangled by their balls by the authorities (who is in turn strangled by the balls by lobbiests/companies/vested interests).

If you could run your own routes with private equipment (such as a mesh like wireless network?), instead of having to sign up to an isp, then i see this as more viable a future.

It's already possible to connect to a website over https (with a self-signed cert you've obtained through a second channel) and be pretty much certain no one is snooping. The target you're connecting to doesn't have to be obvious either.

Most governments care about business these days. Do you think any government would say "no crypto" when Coca Cola says they need to protect the secrecy of their formula, or when HBO says they need to prevent people from copying movies?

Not invisible to governments and corporations, just to your fellow citizen.

The corporate-state "owns" the infrastructure. Get your TCP/pigeons (or whatever network you can throw together) working and we can meaningfully discuss "invisible darknets".