by Jim Dwyer
Just over Ilya’s right shoulder was a column of UNIX code including three incantations of a vaguely salacious abbreviation:
TOUCH
GREP
UNZIP
MOUNT
FSCK
FSCK
FSCK
UMOUNT
It was a version of the old UNIX code dirty joke having to do with mounting a file drive for some purpose, then inspecting it (File System Check=FSCK). Dan had written it on the blackboard a few months earlier, and somehow it had never gotten erased. The column was getting a lot of traffic on the Times website, moving onto the most e-mailed list, and it was being displayed prominently. Alerted that a risquéish image had slipped into the paper, the Times photo department cropped the online picture to remove the offending scrawl.
The guys were mortified but amused: they had simply gone into the first empty classroom to pose, and the photographer had taken a few dozen shots from all angles, including many that did not show the blackboard. When the page was being laid out, an editor picked one without noticing the ribald gibberish. It was a rip-roaring laugh along the geek telegraph wires—Max texted to friends, “Dan got four F-bombs in the Gray Lady”—but the Diaspora Four swore to all the friends hailing their derring-do that they hadn’t realized what was written behind them on the blackboard. Anyway, pledges rolled in at a prodigious pace.
—
Through the afternoon, tides of friends washed in and out of the Wolfs’ loft, joining parents and relatives. The Grippis came. All eyes were on Kickstarter, or at least Max’s were stealing looks at it: the family computer stayed lit, and every time the page refreshed, a new astounding total appeared. A runaway train had come to the party. Even Max’s little cousin Sam, just past toddler, knew how to check the page. If the graduate and his friends strayed from the computer, Sam was sure to charge over with the latest report.
“Max!” he called. “You got another thousand dollars!”
Rafi and Ilya turned up, not only to congratulate their friends on their graduation but to have company as the totals swelled and their modest plans for three months of ramen were being torn up. Whatever notions Max and Dan might have harbored about a project that might somehow continue once the ten thousand dollars ran out, for Rafi, Diaspora had been strictly a summer project. He had not committed to anything beyond that. The waves of money that crashed against the Kickstarter site were a kind of chaotic force that he could not easily analyze, nor was he sure how to harness. They really hadn’t done a thing yet.
Max broke into the reverie of his dismay with an announcement: “Guys, there’s an e-mail from Randy Komisar.”
What to do about the venture capitalists? Max’s uncle Michael Wolf knew the stature of Kleiner Perkins in Silicon Valley, but he also thought that to build the kind of project they had in mind, they would need help—free labor and brainpower—from a community of software developers. If venture funding was behind Diaspora, why should volunteers contribute their sweat?
Komisar was just checking in to pass along a message that he had received that morning from another person at his firm, and Max read it out loud: “‘Are these the guys you were telling me about at the partners’ meeting?’”
The message, Max announced, had been sent to Komisar by none other than Bill Joy.
A name not widely known outside technology fields, Joy was legendary as an author of software code that was a cornerstone of all modern computing. He also had been an important shaper of the protocols that allowed networking. Fortune magazine had called him the Edison of the Internet.
To such circumstances, the reserved detachment of even the coolest, most detached of the group had to yield. Rafi threw his arms around Dan and hugged him.
—
One of Max’s closest friends, a high school classmate named Dan Goldenberg, had come from Boston for graduation. Early that evening, he was on a bus back. He texted Max: “The bus has wireless, and the girl sitting near me has her laptop open to your Kickstarter page.”
—
By the end of the night, they were over $100,000 in contributions, and they had another three weeks to go in their Kickstarter fund-raising period.
When it was all over, they had been given $200,642 by 6,479 people from around the world. Another 40,000 signed up to follow them on Twitter.
Of course, there were skeptics, and among the earliest to surface was Matt Rogers, writing on an influential tech blog, Download Squad. Amid some trivia—he complained that the Diaspora dudes were so immature that their video was terrible—he made some strong, loud points. Membership in Facebook was not compulsory. Its growth reflected either consent or indifference on a mass scale to the network’s predations. In other words, the people were voting with their clicks. Like the first-chair violinist playing an A note as an orchestra tunes up, Rogers’s contempt was a tone adopted by much of the criticism that followed. He wrote: “The bottom line here is that so few people will ever use this vaporware (were it ever to materialize in the first place) that it simply won’t succeed. It doesn’t stand a chance against a network like Facebook—no matter how evil it may be—because Facebook isn’t evil by accident. Its massive numbers of users allow it to be that way. If the majority of people actually cared enough about their online privacy, then they’d leave Facebook. They don’t, so it’s difficult to imagine that these kids will ever see their little cloned project become a network of 10,000 users, much less one that includes ‘every man, woman, and child’ like they actually had the audacity to state as their end-of-summer goal.”
He continued: “Basically, if you donated money to these guys, you didn’t participate in some grand assault against Facebook’s foothold on the Internet. You probably paid for an appletini or two (of thousands) that will be consumed over the course of the next few summer months . . . as they party their faces off. And why shouldn’t they? They only asked for $10,000 in pledges. They’ve just pulled off a heist worthy of a bad Hollywood movie.”
Yet among the donors to Diaspora was a savvy fellow traveler: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. He pledged one thousand dollars. When Facebook was getting started, it could not support a giant server to hold all the pictures that people wanted to share. So Zuckerberg and his friends had tried a decentralized approach for photographs—having people store them on their own computers, which would be designated as servers with a piece of software provided by Firefox called Wirehog. (Facebook’s president, Sean Parker, who had been with Napster when it got into legal trouble for peer-to-peer music sharing, said Wirehog would get into the same problems, and killed it because he deemed it “illegal.”)
In an interview with Wired on plans to improve privacy controls in Facebook, Zuckerberg said he admired the Diaspora guys for exploring the possibilities of decentralization.
“I think it is cool people are trying to do it,” Zuckerberg said. “I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, ‘We should try to do it.’”
And in another article, Wired noted that Diaspora’s goals were shared by other projects, mentioning Appleseed and OneSocialWeb, and tracked down Eben Moglen. He wasn’t picking favorites, he said, but believed that the reception to Diaspora’s plans was an important moment for the free-software movement.
“The funding is not through the capital market and not through the venture capital system,” he said, “but through civil society. This is a signal to Facebook, and I am sure Facebook is getting it.”
CHAPTER SIX
In twenty-first-century terms, the blacksmith and goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, born around 1395, was pure hacker: he drew from a palette of technologies, rag paper, metals mined near his town, and oil-based inks, then synthesized them with a machine for making type move. Thus, printed books. Months after Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” to the door of the church in Wittenberg, so
me 300,000 copies of the tract were distributed across Europe and Germany, a development unthinkable before the printing press. Democratic revolutions followed its adoption, as did representative democracy; so, too, did decades of religious war. As a force for change, few events in history could approach the invention of the printing press. The development of the Internet surely comes closest.
The surface area of digital communications has grown by the day, grafted onto the skin of the planet. From the richness of the World Wide Web grew an information economy, and then an ecosystem of surveillance. Much web development was driven by commercial incentives: build useful platforms like social networks, or restaurant recommendation sites, so you can find out what people were saying and showing to one another. Then sell marketers on a chance to form a perfect union between appetites revealed and purveyors of things to satisfy those hungers. That was only part of it. Those seeking to control or monitor communication for political purposes also gave hot pursuit.
The funding of Diaspora was but one of the nearly uncountable simultaneous wrestling matches going on around the world for control of cyberspace. The year that Diaspora roared into view was a season of overture, of gathering disruption in countries that had been lodged in cultural and political permafrosts. The same Internet that had commissioned the four NYU students to save the world from Facebook was also pulling down the pants of despots and strongmen in swaths of the Arab world. In fact, it was using Facebook to do so. In Egypt that summer, a page on Facebook, Kullena Khaled Said, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. It commemorated a young man who died from a severe beating while in police custody. The administrator had disguised his location by sending his communications through routers in many countries, deploying Tor, a tool specifically created to circumvent surveillance. Tor stands for The Onion Router, because the multiple layers of relays were the baffling element that hid the identity of the user.
Said an Egyptian activist, Esraa Rashid: “No one from the opposition or the government knows who started the page.”
Neither, for that matter, did anyone from Facebook. In fact, that anonymity violated Facebook’s terms of service, which does not permit fake accounts. After the page had been up for months, and just as it emerged as a trumpet summoning crowds to Tahrir Square for protests, Facebook unilaterally shut down the page. The administrator had to be a real person. Rules were rules. The group scrambled and got an administrator who was beyond the reach of the Egyptian government. The page was restored.
That episode provided a glimpse of how Facebook, and the other transnational giant, Google, had become the global equivalent of shopping malls in the United States. They were territories that had become laws unto themselves: banning or restricting political protests, demonstrations, and solicitations as they—and they alone—saw fit, employing sweeping approaches that could not be used on the public streets because of free-speech protections.
A crusading blogger, Wael Abbas, had been posting videos of torture by authorities since at least 2006, and one of them, involving the sodomizing of a bus driver who refused to pay a bribe, led to the prosecution and conviction of three police officers. In 2007, Abbas’s YouTube account was shut down and more than one hundred videos removed; later, YouTube, which is owned by Google, restored the account and said that it had acted because sufficient context for the videos had not been provided. (A video of a cat stepping into a bowl of milk was self-explanatory; apparently not so for videos of handcuffed men being beaten by men in uniform.)
—
In countries all over North Africa, the ground was heaving as the trapped forces of candid, vigorous speech suddenly found in the Internet a seam in the geological formation of their societies.
Having grown up in the sclerotic civic life of Yemen, where the same man had been president, as of 2010, for thirty-two years, Walid Al-Saqaf, an energetic computer scientist, took up journalism graduate studies in Sweden. He created a web page of uncensored news about Yemen.
“Day and night you listen to propaganda from government sources,” said Al-Saqaf. “The only sources with some breathing space, free space, [are] online.”
Back in Yemen, he awoke one Saturday morning and checked into the site. But nothing loaded. The browser hung in the suspended animation of “File Not Found” messages, no matter how many times he tried.
Tunisia, which liked to call itself the flower of North Africa, was proud of its thriving modern economy, stability, and relatively progressive posture on social issues. Women had rights that were the equal of those enjoyed in Western countries.
Yet since gaining independence in 1957, it had known only two presidents; the incumbent, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had taken power in 1986, when his predecessor had been declared unfit for office. “In America, people cannot name their presidents. In Tunisia, during your lifetime, you know one. Or 1.5,” an activist, Houeïda Anouar, said. “A guy in one of the opposition political parties said in his whole life he had two minutes on TV.”
During a hunger strike by people calling for reforms, Anouar spoke every day with the doctor who was monitoring their health, made videos, and then would upload them to a blog. One day, the blog had been hacked: the figure of a man in black and white with a red hat had been inserted onto the page. Anticipating such an attack, she had backed up the blog, and simply replaced the damaged pages. Three times she had to restore the blog from a backup, Anouar said. “Then they blocked access to the website,” she said. “I had mirrors outside the country”—that is, her website existed in duplicate on servers in places where Tunisian authorities had no power.
“That was when they blocked the Internet to my house,” she said.
Censorship was becoming a global norm. More than forty countries were filtering Internet content in September 2010, nearly double the number that were doing it in 2007. “Saudi Arabia held back on widespread deployment of the Internet until they could install a filtering system for their country,” said Rob Faris, the director of the Berkman Center at Harvard University, a think tank that specialized in digital freedom. “Iran was an early adopter. China produced its own solution.”
With different regimes of monitoring, surveillance, and censorship, the borderless regions of cyberspace were being renationalized. The faucets and valves could be selectively turned off.
When Al-Saqaf’s website went into suspended animation, it turned out that Yemeni officials had “simply clicked a button on software they use to filter content in Yemen,” Al-Saqaf said.
The filtering software was provided to Yemen by a company called Websense, based in San Diego; eight other Middle Eastern and North African countries used filtering systems provided by companies in North America. The software can be used to block objectionable content in schools or libraries, keeping out pornography and malware; it also makes it possible for authoritarian regimes to knock out websites like the one run by Al-Saqaf. Each brand of filter maintains a database of banned sites, a blacklist of forbidden content.
“Often pitched in the first instance for use by parents, schools, and workplaces, these technologies can also be sold to make filtering easy for entire countries: Once the underlying infrastructure is set up, the censors need only activate the tool and select the categories they wish to censor,” a report by the OpenNet Initiative found. Websense stopped updating its database of blacklisted sites for Yemen when the censorship was made public, and said it was a violation of the terms of service to use it to suppress speech. Nevertheless, the genie was out of the bottle.
Al-Saqaf’s immediate concern was not who or what had made the shutdown of his website possible but how it might be reversed. He organized an anticensorship campaign, then realized that he needed a technical solution. With others, he developed a system of chutes and ladders that routed web traffic through multiple servers. That would bring the user to his unfiltered server. This, however, was a risky approach: his servers would buckle if everyone who wanted
to play online games, or run porn videos, tried to stream the content they wanted through his server.
So Al-Saqaf executed a move of digital jujitsu. He took the basic design of filtering systems—the blacklist—and turned it inside out. His filter would be a white list of essential sites, approved by him and a few trusted allies. Sites on the white list could pass through his network of servers designed to obfuscate the traffic; those not on the list would pass through normal channels, without the layers of disguise. He called it split-tunneling, and it would conserve bandwidth, a precious resource. Video games would be out. News portals, opinion sites, social networks would be in.
He called the site Al Kasit, Arabic for “The Circumventor.” It spread quickly. By the fall of 2010, some twenty thousand URLs for sites from all over the world were on his white list. Al Kasit became a tool for news consumers in Yemen and in sixty other countries, including many where people felt that impolite, impolitic speech was being monitored or blocked. Among these were near neighbors to Yemen: the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Sudan, Bahrain, Syria, Kyrgyzstan, China, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Hong Kong, Oman, India, Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
“There is a state of denial in Yemen that there is censorship,” Al-Saqaf said. Even so, he was called to a meeting by an adviser to President Saleh, who asked him to shut down Al Kasit.
Al-Saqaf was prepared. “You’ve done what you can do, I’ve done what I can do,” he said. “Here’s a gift.”
He handed the president’s adviser a CD that would set him up on Al Kasit.
“You can use it to access censored sites,” Al-Saqaf said.
—
The strongest hands played against an unrestricted Internet are not simply government regimes with a history of intolerance for dissent; the U.S. National Security Agency has tried to unravel Tor, The Onion Router, one of the most powerful circumvention tools for activists like the administrator of the Facebook page for the Egyptian opposition. It is a classic case of one hand undermining others: Tor was created in 2002 with early funding from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which had an interest in secure communications. Since the success of the project depends, in large part, on a global network of nodes, it continues to receive about 60 percent of its funding from the U.S. government. The purpose is to give practical muscle to the “soft diplomacy” initiatives of the Obama administration’s Department of State in human rights advocacy. The spy agency’s logic was that whatever useful camouflage Tor provided to dissidents, it also served as a hiding place for forces who were a danger to society. “Very naughty people use Tor,” an internal NSA presentation declared. The code name for the NSA operation to crack Tor was “EgotisticalGiraffe,” the Guardian newspaper reported, basing its account on documents released in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.