I attended the 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference, which was in late July 2016. At the beginning of August, it was my turn to give a speech at my Toastmasters club, and I choose to share a story that I learned at the conference.
Toastmasters is a nonprofit organization which helps to organize local, in-person clubs which provide opportunities for their members to practice public speaking. Members of a Toastmasters club each get a guide book which present a curricula that each participant follows at their own place to focus their attention on practicing different elements of presentation every time they give a prepared speech in their club. At the same time, other club members at other places in the curricula will offer feedback on individuals’ presentations based on whatever they might be studying at their place in the program. For this talk in my place on the cycle of their coaching system, I was prompted to present on a multi-part complicated issue which would need care in organizing. Toastmasters meetings are timed, so I would have to organize my talk to divide my time for subpoints to leave time to have all elements of the talk converge at the end. The challenge that I wanted for myself was speaking on technical topics which would be unfamiliar to my audience, but which I could mention in a longer narrative that the audience would remember without feeling burdened by technical details. Here is text I wrote to organize my talk.
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Hackers on Planet Earth is a conference held every two years at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The goal of the conference is to facilitate community discussion about pressing issues in digital rights. Unlike similar digital rights conference, this conference, called “HOPE”, is managed with less corporate sponsorship, more activist presentations, and no formal product advocacy. This is a conference for volunteers who care. One of the hot topics discussed this year was the recent events around a certain secret online marketplace.
Ross Ulbricht was convicted to 40 years in prison for hosting a website called the Silk Road. The Silk Road was a darknet market in which individuals could meet for business transactions. Although all sorts of legal sales transactions happened in the Silk Road, the website also oversaw sales of not less than hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit drug exchange. It was because of drugs that the website and its operator came to the attention of law enforcement.
When Ross Ulbricht was arrested his case introduced several concepts which were not widely known among the general public, and I would like to introduce those concepts using his story as a teaching example. The concepts I will introduce are encryption, the dark web, private Internet usage, and cryptocurrency.
“Encryption” refers to privacy in communication, and especially online communication. All Internet users use encryption, like for example, anyone who logs into online email accounts, bank accounts, or makes a purchase online gets certain protection through contemporary software to prevent anyone from spying on what the are doing. There are two aspects of encryption which are not broadly known, and which I would like to share. First, it is possible and relatively easy for anyone to encrypt almost everything that they do online, so that if anyone is spying on them, then it can be hidden with a little effort using publicly available, free software. The second trait to note is that encryption is very good, and anyone who chooses to do so can easily encrypt their routine web communication with free software that is more secure than what is used for bank accounts or any other very private corporate purpose. Also, the software is so powerful that no one, not even the most powerful technology organizations with all the funding in the world, can spy on encrypted messages sent with this free, public software.
The “dark web” means several things. At minimum it is the characteristic of being a webpage which is not indexed in major search engines. More often it refers to that, plus additionally, there is some sort of check on entry. The check might be a password restriction, or it might simply be a restriction against people who are not using a “private Internet browser”. In the media, “dark web” usually refers to an online place where illegal or illicit activities happen. The Silk Road was an “onion” website which means that anyone who was protecting their identity could visit the website. Beyond that, there was no password or other check. A range of activities happened in the Silk Road, including any sort of discussion that might also be found in any other forum.
“Private Internet usage” can mean a range of things, but for most people, this means the use of Tor software because that is the most popular way to use the Internet in privacy. Tor is a free software service that, when used, prevents any spying between the user and the websites they access. A common use of Tor is among journalists especially when they discuss sensitive topics. For example, most computer-savvy LGBT activists in countries where it is illegal to be gay use Tor to communicate and manage their publishing. For most users, they turn on the software and use the Internet just like anyone else would, while the software keeps their privacy in the background. In addition to keeping privacy in regular Internet browsers, Tor users have special access to onion web pages. Most onion webpages are just like any other website on any topic, except that in onion websites, there is almost no corporate participation. Also all readers have a concern for privacy in common and a common desire to avoid tracking and advertising.
Cryptocurrency is a sort of Internet money. Like any currency, it gains value when more people will accept it as a medium of exchange. Among cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the most popular and stable. Major differences between cryptocurrencies and standard currency include cryptocurrency not being backed by any government, not being traceable in wire transactions, and not being countable in anyone’s possession. Through various mechanisms, anyone can conduct cryptocurrency transactions, send large amounts of money to other individuals, and it is not possible to detect either the fact of the money originating somewhere, moving, or arriving somewhere. The start, the transaction, and the finish are completely hidden even when all steps of the exchange are closely observed by law enforcement.
The Silk Road operated because people used encryption software to access the dark web, where they would privately browse the Silk Road marketplace and make purchases with cryptocurrency. Even after the Silk Road was shut down and computer information was seized, the investigators still did not gain access to transactions of records from the marketplace, or who had visited them, or any other information which was not intentionally made public by the people visiting the market. Ross Ulbricht’s conviction was an unusual sort of conviction. He was presented as a drug lord, and that is a fair term to describe him and his crimes. However, these things might also be true –
- He never possessed drugs
- He never sold drugs
- He had no information which could identify anyone selling drugs in the Silk Road
- He had no information which could identify anyone buying drugs in the Silk Road
- He had no records of what was bought or sold
- He did not develop the software for the Silk Road
- He did not open the Silk Road
- There might have been multiple people operating the Silk Road, and there are no records to say who was involved
A stereotype of major traffickers in narcotics is that they operate violent illegal operations to produce and ship drugs. Ross Ulbricht was arrested in a San Francisco public library where he used the free wifi, and public wifi hotspots were the basis of whatever he was doing. The future of organized crime might not be thugs with guns, but rather a single person sitting quietly in a public place drinking coffee. Probably many users of the Silk Road accessed it at public hotspots like libraries and coffeehouses. New technologies are coming together in new surprising ways that influence society. It is difficult to explain the significance of this, but as an example for comparison, more people consumed drugs from the Silk Road than in the famous 1967 Summer of Love event, which is remembered for being a time when widespread drug use become temporarily popular suddenly in a way that society did not anticipate. The Internet is facilitating intense social changes rapidly which are not being appreciated as present, and this Silk Road story is one among the many surprising, high-impact, and little-discussed events which are happening.