Digital Rights and Blockchain

The radically democratic potential of the blockchain technology is undermined by the absence of democratic control over the internet.

by Christopher Dimech

Image: Tumisu, Pixabay

 

This is a modified version of an original article which is available here.

 

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), convened in 2003 under the auspice of the United Nations (UN), established the “vision […] of an inclusive society based on the fundamental right of human beings both to access and to express information without restriction and in which everyone will be able to create, access, use and share information and knowledge“.

However, such declarations do not reflect the reality of information technology, its complex relationship with human rights and the legislation which regulates it. This is because the future of digital technology and the internet is almost exclusively discussed from a perspective of their impact on individuals as consumers, not citizens. Besides the threat to our freedom posed by surveillance programs through the utilisation of networked services, our rights in the digital world are limited. Whatever we do on the internet, we do not perform it by right but by permission from certain companies.

The sharing of information was different before the advent of the networked technology. A couple of decades ago, one could distribute information by printing it on paper and handing it out. This was the way Samizdat, a form of dissident activity across the Eastern bloc, reproduced censored and underground publications. Information was disseminated by hand, from reader to reader. Today, if you wish to share the information on the internet, you need the cooperation of companies, such as Internet Service Providers (ISP), Domain Name Registrars and Hosting Companies. And they can cut you off arbitrarily without having to provide a reason and have your service termination justified in court.

Now suppose you want to collect some money to support a cause. You could go on the street and ask people to donate without the cooperation of any company. However, if you wish to collect a sum on the internet, you have got to use a payment company which can cut you off arbitrarily. This is what happened to WikiLeaks, when companies such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa withdrew their services from Wikileaks after its revelations had attracted the ire of the U.S. government. The case of WikiLeaks is prominent, though hardly unique. The internet transactions depend on the companies which can be pressured by anyone with enough power to persecute you.

The spectrum of citizen rights is incomplete without establishing inalienable universal human rights in cyberspace as well. In practice, this means the right to conduct activities on the internet without being denied the service, unless ordered by court.

Digital currencies such as Bitcoin could be a positive tool to carry out transactions without the assistance of payment companies. It can also be used anonymously, although it is not the default mode of use. Bitcoin was the first popular and successful implementation of a digital blockchain, the underlying chronological ledger of transactions shared on a distributed digital network of computers that Bitcoin uses. Bitcoin was invented by a person (or a group) nicknamed Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007 which plunged many countries into recession. Observing the financial crisis, Nakamoto had this to say.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.

 

Today there are about 3,000 other digital currencies around the world. New units of cryptocurrencies are ‘mined’ by having computers solve complicated mathematical algorithms; once solved, a coin is created and its presence—with a digital signature certifying its authenticity—announced to the rest of the network. It is necessary to differentiate between public networks (e.g., as with Bitcoin) and private/permission-based.

Private systems, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), are network services set and owned by third parties and then leased out for computing (mining) purposes. These servers wrest control from the users even more inexorably than proprietary software. If proprietary software provides users with executable but not the source code, private servers deny users’ access to the executable, hence making it impossible for them to ascertain what the server does. Thus, private networks undermine the radically democratic potential of blockchain technology.

One of the most common misapprehensions is that crypto-currencies provide anonymity for their users. In fact, crypto-currencies (especially private ones) only offer pseudonymity by concealing users’ identity with a public key but all of their transactions are available for viewing and legal scrutiny. Governments worldwide have been ramping up regulations for crypto-currencies and hiring blockchain surveillance and research teams such as Chainalysis, Elliptic and Block Seer, to conduct surveillance on the blockchain, using for instance heuristic clustering software to yield a treasure trove of information. The reality is that total security does not exist and the blockchain technology is susceptible to attacks, including attacks that trick the network into accepting unlawful transactions.

Digital identities, health records, civil records, records management of people, corporate records, voting, governance, asset tracking, engineering-related transactions, supply chain tracking, machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions, supplier identity and reputation, can all be managed by blockchains. For this reason, the surge in interest in blockchains has caused technological surveillance to once again come to the forefront of discussion. This poses the question of whether blockchain could be used as a tool to aid surveillance of citizens and by extension as a means of suppression. Just imagine pairing the power to have immutable records on citizens with future technologies enabled by artificial intelligence (e.g., by geolocation movement monitoring, face-recognition, automatic number plate recognition, biometric surveillance). The vision is Orwellian.

As time progresses, the battle between privacy-centred techniques and state-sponsored surveillance will intensify. However with surveillance techniques on the rise, the question is whether we want a free society, or a life under total surveillance and control built by the credit-card-like system where you are expected to reveal your identity in order to engage into any activity. The only way we can have any privacy at all is by establishing democratic control over the cyberspace.

Christopher Dimech is the founder of the Shuhdha Hackers’ Club, and the Acting Chief Administrator of GNU Behistun and GNU Recutils. He is a Computer Hacker dedicated to users’ freedom and community, for users of technology to control the technology they use. He provides Pro Bono Services to Isles of the Left in the areas of Technology and Computers, and their effect on Civil and Political Rights; rights aimed to protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organisations and private individuals.