On Wednesday, I went to hear Lee Felsenstein speak on the Jhai PC project. Some questions that people have hurled at me recently were answered; quite a few new ones were raised. I spoke briefly to Lee Thorn, the head of Jhai, who said that the last he heard, some $6000 had been raised over paypal. He’d just received a check for $500 through the post, and was very puzzled about how people had found out about it. I somehow goofed managing to tell him. Now I feel like Peter Parker or something. I’m going to keep tracking the project. So many of my friends sent in money that I feel I have an obligation to both report on what they’re doing, and keep some semblance of objectivity. I don’t know whether they’ll succeed or not, but they seem to be learning about something important. Twenty-five thousand dollars doesn’t seem too much for an experiment like this; twenty-five dollars would seem too much if it affected the villages negatively. It’s a tricky row to hoe.
I’d arranged to meet Dave Del Torto at the meeting. He’s one of the main figures behind CryptoRights, a long-mooted organisation which has just collected $250,000 in funding. This will relieve a lot of people who I think got a little drained listening to Dave constantly hussle for cash at geek conventions. I spoke to him briefly about CR’s plans now they have the backing. As usual, what follows are my disordered notes, which I’ll shuffle up into a coherent piece for the Irish Times for next Friday. There’s little editorialising here: I’m just jotting down what I thought DDT said. Don’t take as gospel.
Some background: Dave was one of the first employees of PGP, worked under Chaum on anonymous digicash, organises the cypherpunk meatspace meetings here in the Bay, and is co-author of RFC3156.
DDT got first involved in crypto in the early Eighties. He was an architect doing hacking CAD at Berkeley; he was looking for a way of authoritatively signing blueprints and got suckered into the research during that exciting period in cryptography. His father is a mathematician, who had left a project when the DoD wanted him to work on securing nuclear launch codes. So DDT was familiar on both the practical uses of Deep Math, and the dangers thereof.
Cryptorights started at Financial Cryptography 1998, during the moment of the solar eclipse (so we can precisely pin this down to 1436, Thursay 26 February 1998). DDT was talking to John Gilmore and ???? about the necessity of an organisation to defend cryptographer’s rights, as well as spread information about crypto to human rights organisation. “Security for Human Rights Workers and Human Rights for Security Workers”, as the slogan goes.
The funding for Cryptorights came from the Alexa users vs Amazon and Alexa privacy settlement. Lawyers on both sides voted unanimously to vote Cryptorights the highest sum of quarter of a million. (So, ironically, this is another project that Brewster Kahle has funded – albeit by a class action lawsuit against his own company).
The main thrust of their work is providing authentication, security, and privacy to civil rights groups working in repressive regimes. I’d heard about DDT’s work teaching PGP to legal groups in Guatemala; they also work with environmental investigators in St. Petersburg, and peace groups in the middle-east.
DDT ran through his plans for future R&D projects. They’re pretty ambitious – it’s partly that, I think, that led to them getting the grant money. You can see a lot of them listed at CryptoRight’s research pages. DDT spoke of some others, but I’m going to have to double check on which were embargoed. There’s stuff there like a wearable computer for humanitarian groups, and a global non-governmental public key infrastructure. The most practical of these, and fortunately I think the first project they’re taking on, is Highfire, the Human Rights Firewall system – a little net applicance that provides secure channels and authentication systems for NGOs.
They’re very aware of the dual-use of some of this tech: they have a lot of military groups looking over their work. They’re going to keep it all open source. They’re not anti-spooks, says DDT: they’re anti-bad guys. A lot of the time, the bad guys switch from law enforcement and back again. Last year’s members of the secret police are next year’s narcotraffickers. There are good people, too, on both sides.