Privacy Highlight: Plausible Deniability

all right hey everybody yeah uh that last panel that was a great segue into this topic um echoing John's comments uh privacy is a prerequisite for security for personal security and I think a good strategy to personal security is plausible deniability which is what we're going to talk about for the next 20 minutes or so um you guys met Roger earlier um co-founder and president of the tour project is that accurate um and I'm excited to introduce Ahmed Kapoor as well he is the general counsel of the Nim project uh they're doing really important work in privacy do you guys want to you want to quickly introduce Nim and then Roger introduce yourself again yeah so my name is Ahmed Kapoor I'm general counsel for uh Nim Technologies and I'm a professor of law at Boston University School of Law Nim provides a mixed net that provides Network level anonymity as well as something called ZK Nims which are credentialing technology that uh essentially are Anonymous credentials or ZK credentials hi hi I'm Roger uh you met me earlier at the keynote I work on Tor which is a privacy security anonymity censorship resistance system and part of the fun of tour is the variety of users around the world who rely on it we're a non-profit we're part of a broader community of people trying to make the world a safer place thank you for the work that both of you are doing for the Privacy Community uh we have limited time so let's let's Dive Right In um let's start by defining this thing we keep talking about what is plausible deny what is plausible deniability mean to you uh Roger any kickoff yeah so we inherited this phrase from the per people who put together the panels uh I might go with the phrase uh significant non-infringing use or something from a legal perspective but I mean there are a lot of different pieces to it I think the the most interesting part of the panel should be how do you frame your project in a way that you don't attract the wrong attention and in a way that it's sustainable and that you can actually succeed at reaching your users and giving millions of people safety without getting shut down or attacked by the wrong people so maybe because I'm an academic as well as a lawyer I've been thinking about the definition for a couple of days actually and asking folks that I run into um and so so far there are two sort of major definitions for plausible deniability there's the definition that you know I came into the conference thinking about which is you know some organizational actor wants to Shield their accountability uh within the organization and therefore uh you know certain activities are structured so that the head of an organization has no knowledge about what is actually happening and therefore has plausible deniability right and then there's the other definition uh which I've sort of come to to know over the past couple of days which is uh well plausible deniability is more um it's more about whether or not someone can prove you did something under a particular threat model um so whether or not the evidence that's available under a particular threat model can point to a person or a group of people having done or attribute them or attribute some group of act activities to that person or group of people so if we're going to stick with the latter which I see Lane nodding his head right so if we're going to stick with the latter I would propose that you know um at least we we try in the next 10 minutes to come up with a substitute phrase because one of my issues with the phrase plausible deniability is it makes people think you're up to no good right so really what we're doing is uh shielding our private information right and just because you want to Shield private information just because your particular threat model is Broad for whatever reason maybe the freedom to think and explore and have your thoughts for example then maybe we need a different term and let me jump on that word prove that you said like imagine you've got five bloggers in Iran and you don't know which of the five of them posted the thing and you can't prove which five so it's fine right we'll know that's bad news for all five of them so we want something we want systems that make it that protect people at a stage earlier than that so it's not about you think it was me but you can't prove it haha it's about you don't even know where to start looking yeah thank you guys that's uh really helpful framing for our short but exciting conversation I I realized I skipped my introduction earlier and normally I don't care that much about introducing myself because I want you to hear from these guys but I think it is relevant to the topic um I am a blockchain core developer um I worked on the ethereum protocol for a while uh and then more recently I'm working on a new protocol a new project called space mesh um but I mentioned ethereum specifically because in the time that I was working as an ethereum core developer um there were cases of other core developers on the project who quit because of concerns about legal liability right because as we spoke about earlier like we software developers are often very naive about kind of the legal side of things we're kind of vaguely aware that by doing the work that we're doing of course it varies very much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as an American based in the United States I do feel some degree of protection under uh Free Speech laws something else we could talk about but not all of my colleagues were or are Americans don't necessarily have those protections Roger as you pointed out even as an American if I'm you know another country might choose to um you know chase after me for because they have different laws where they are um there's a lot of naivete and there's a lot of um fear on the part of core developers of protocols things that touch upon privacy and security um what do we what do we do about this situation and so last point the chilling effect that the tornado cash sanctions uh and and their jailing of one of the core developers of that protocol had last year uh we all believe in building software to solve these problems to to increase privacy to make the world a better place um what message do you guys have for the people building these these sorts of things yeah so we take two approaches in the tour world one of them is we have allies in the legal policy world like eff and ACLU and bits of freedom and so on and we need to strengthen them at making sure that that we have the rights and that it's clear uh that we should be able to write software to to make people safer so that's the first step the second step is proactively go out to these law enforcement or governments or whatever organizations and teach them how these tools work teach them what Tor is why it's important that it needs to continue existing why it has a lot of different users and those use cases are important so going to what you might refer to as the adversary and this is tricky like I I talked in the in the keynote about the Department of Justice case I didn't mention there were like five Department of Justice lawyers but there were 15 Secret Service people who walked in and sat around the back of the room they never took their sunglasses off they never said a word and that's just I mean maybe that's just normal like that's terrifying yeah maybe that's normal resting Secret Service face or something but that's not it it it it takes practice and skill and courage to go do that but you have to you have to get them to understand you as human beings and to realize that you're doing this for good reasons so just to tack on to that since the question was you know would we suggest that the developers do um I um I completely agree with Roger's points but I don't expect your average developer to both maybe you should donate to the ACLU and eff but I don't really expect you to engage with government Regulators on on the regular right and especially not the doj please see me if you have any thoughts on doing that that was a joke okay so um but I think one thing that you can do is educate yourself right just as Roger's saying we need to educate The Regulators and the governments generally on what exactly is going on what are the trade-offs in a lot of their policies of enforcement and their substantive regulatory policies we have to educate ourselves to really understand what the difference is between you know content of code and the conduct that you perform out in the world conduct more looks at you know who you're talking to who you might be conspiring with who you are selling your code to and how what are your Communications what are the representations you're making out into the world whereas content is more at least in my mind sort of the more sort of pure just sitting in sitting in front of a screen and coding I think that so long as you're sitting in front of a screen encoding more or less you're going to be okay and more or less I say right um and but I think it's really up to coders uh to educate themselves on the regulations and the laws and frankly um you know at Boston University City I've taught a class on privacy security and Technology to a combined class of computer science majors and law students and I found the computer science Majors to be just as capable of understanding everything that I was talking about so don't sell yourself short right and just educate up so one strategy that seems to make sense is engaging with the quote-unquote adversary as you mentioned I think that makes a lot of sense I think we should all be doing that we should be having those conversations making them understand our motivations for building the things we're building and you know making it clear that we're doing this to make the world a better place another strategy which you highlighted is educating yourself which I think is important um there will still be those Among Us who choose the path of kind of like pseudonymity or anonymity as software developers we have quite a few pseudonymous folks in our community I'm just wondering if you guys have any thoughts on this is pseudonymity anonymity a good idea is it um I don't know what what advice would you have for people who are considering going that direction well um in term is it a good idea I think it's something that you have a right to do and therefore I support it right uh and I think that's different um than answering the normative question of like is what I'm doing a good idea um is uh and that really turns on what your goal is right um what is the Strategic goal so if a bunch of uh if every developer working on a privacy project went underground um my guess is that that would draw a lot of attention and my guess is that attention would not only harm the group of developers uh that went underground but also harm the rest of us right um and so I'm I'm a little on the fence in terms of you know recommending that folks go underground per se I know Roger has a pretty strong opinion on this and I kind of agree with it um and so I'm just gonna that's my way of saying Roger what's your opinion on this yeah so if you can I'm a big fan of transparency if you're in a situation where you can identify yourself and proudly say this is what I'm doing and this is why it is okay for people to be doing this you should it will help you a lot in the long term in terms of community building and Trust building we've seen there are some anonymity systems out there that where all the developers are pseudonymous or Anonymous and you don't hear that much about them they don't get the level of peer review and scrutiny they don't have the community around them that systems like Tor has so I mean it depends what your situation is if you're in a country where you really shouldn't be involved in any of this stuff then you don't have that that choice but when it I mean even if you are like I remember talking to bloggers in Turkey in Egypt and Iran years ago and they're like yes of course I put my name on my blog because if I didn't put my name on my blog nobody would read it like every everybody knows there are people who lie on their blog so I need to put my name even though there's risk involved in doing it so there's there's a lot to be said for uh for proudly standing up and saying yes it's me and again at first it looks like a contradiction you're working in the Privacy space and choosing to identify yourself but you're doing that in order to make your impact stronger and more sustainable so maybe maybe one of the lessons here is if you're going to go Anonymous or not then you have to go full Anon or full transparency right an abundance of transparency or an abundance of just disappearing out of the face of the earth I think yeah I'm not sure I agree with that I mean I I think there are well I generally agree with what Roger was saying I think if you do have the choice you absolutely should identify yourself because it goes a long way towards building trust you know you're putting your own identity on the line there's accountability there that there's less of that if you're anonymous or pseudonymous um you know when I kind of began working in this space in kind of broadly cryptocurrency cryptography security blockchain Etc a few years ago I had we had like pseudonymous people join my team and it was really weird in the beginning you know they'd be like yeah we can join the calls but we're not going to speak we're just going to like use text message and we didn't know their real name um I just got used to it and like now it's like fairly common in the circles that I move in as a software developer and I think it's kind of cool I kind of regret not being pseudonymous myself but that chip is sailed there's actually a good hybrid combination there where like many of the tour people are identified but as you say there are pseudonyms and the fact that hi I'm Roger I'm in front of you I have met this person I don't care what their passport says but expect them so I'll vouch for them and that means that you haven't met them but it's fine because you've met me so this peer-to-peer social network works so they're like there's an operating system called Tails that's Debian based that builds in Torah and a bunch of other things and all of the developers of tales are pseudonyms I've met many of them they're great people I don't know what their real name is I don't care what their real name is but I've met them and spent a lot of time with them at conferences so that that hybrid approach can be very powerful yeah you can definitely build a reputation around a pseudonym um all right well we're almost out of time already this the time has gone very quickly so I think my final question is we've touched upon this notion of a threat Model A few times you know anyone who's serious about security any any cryptographer will tell you you're you know you need to start by identifying your threat model um what is your threat model with respect to plausible deniability or that of your organization and what threat model should we software developers Builders building privacy security technology be contemplating what in other words what do we what do we want to plausibly deny and from whom well that's a really good question just so a couple thoughts on this so first of all uh Roger's point about the five bloggers in Iran right so maybe in that threat model you have a situation where plausible deniability is not sufficient and you need full-on anonymity right so that's that's a perfect example of that in terms of my own model or our company's threat model and Technologies personally I believe in uh almost radical transparency when it comes to these things I think transparency is a lot better uh if you are compliant frankly and you know demonstrating that over and over is a very good thing to do if you happen to have the characteristics of compliance with the regime or entity or structures that you're working within right and this is not really a case for anyone who's blogging in Iran or anti-regime Etc um but you know for myself I think we are in a comfortable position to be radically transparent yeah so I agree with all that I've talked about transparency a lot so I'm going to Pivot to uh East turkistan The uyghur Province in China you might know of it as xinjiang I talked to somebody from there who's like uh yeah your software is not relevant to me because I can't go a block without providing my passport and I'm not allowed to go past a block because I have the wrong kind of passport they stole my children and they're sending them to school to teach them how to be proper Chinese people and I see them once a week but all they do is yell at all my child does is yell at me for not being a proper Chinese person uh I can't have a laptop of my own so thinking through what your tools can help with and remembering that there are situations where your tools are not going to be enough because uh because the the world is a shitty place in some situations is an important motivator awesome yeah I think that's a great note to end on just it's it's really important to be reminded that not everyone is as fortunate as we are um and that the tools we're building you know they're for there's they can move the needle for people in parts of the world that are you know subject to less than ideal kind of jurisdictions and laws and things like this and like we're not just building these things for ourselves right we're building these things for for people all over the place um I know that's my motivation that's why I do what I do so thank you for highlighting that example I think we're out of time that was fast thank you guys thanks guys thank you [Applause]