On the second amendment and Anonymous

The second amendment to the US constitution, protecting an individual's right to bear arms, can be viewed as an attempt by the founding fathers to prevent the federal government from being able to assert too much power over local governments.

I feel that James Madison knew with certainty that laws alone could not be trusted to constrain the inevitable concentration of power that a federal government would gather. I think that he and others wanted an ace-in-the-hole to keep government honest. That ace was the second amendment.

While today the second amendment still has some deterrent power, I think its power depends on technology. If people cannot easily assemble or collaborate, their ability to exploit the second amendment to resist a tyranny is limited. If a government can easily intercept and control communications to stifle dissent, the second amendment is gelded.

As the government's ability to monitor and control its population becomes stronger, we'll start to see more and more of the tactics like San Francisco BART used - shutting down communications to limit the ability to assemble.

The question is not whether we need to fight to protect these rights, but how. Anonymous would say that we should use activism to preserve our rights, but in my opinion, that's only a stop-gap. We need to get a great deal more crafty.

You can bet governments are developing tools to control us. Tools to make eavesdropping easier. To make social engineering easier. To make detection of "terrorists" easier. As our means of communication become more diverse, the laws protecting against eavesdropping will become more and more obsolete.

Democracy doesn't defend itself. We do. And make no mistake, this is a war of survival. If we let them get too far ahead of us, and they gain the upper hand, there is no ace-in-the-hole. We risk a dark-age police-state that we may never be able to get out of.

The "enemy" in this war is somewhat unwitting. Police and security agencies just trying to do their job. Public servants that are attempting to make their jobs easier, without realizing that their slight change in regulation here or there is a slow erosion of freedom.

It doesn't matter whether it's deliberate or just a result of incompetence, we have to fight it. That means we need tools. Tools to combat the tools of oppression.

We need better privacy. We need better anonymity. We need better social networking. We need websites the government can't shut down. But I'm not sure we have the time to develop the sophisticated systems necessary to preserve Internet freedoms.

Here's where I think groups like Anonymous can help us play for time. They can make the public and public servants more aware. Make government services work for us rather than against us. Give us a chance to create the tools that will be our long-term defense against tyranny.

But hactivists like Anonymous have a responsibility to play the long game. If they act too precipitously, they risk "training" and hardening their opponents. If they act unjustly, they risk giving ammunition to the agencies that want more limits on Internet freedoms. For now, they may be our ace-in-the-hole, our modern second amendment, but I worry that they may not realize it.

Requirements - first cut

• Only accessible from a TOR-like relay network
• Runs VMs capable of hosting any size service
• VM processing, memory, and disk should be distributable
• Host parameterizes how much disk / cpu / memory / bandwidth he will share
• You earn credit by providing memory, cpu, disk, bandwidth, and exit relays
• You can consume what you have credit for
• Credit can be traded (for example for currency such as bitcoin)
• VM images move from machine to machine when one shuts down
• The owner of an image does not know where his image is hosted
• The host of an image does not know what he is hosting
• Image can be set to migrate randomly or to better performing hosts
• Cost of hosting goes up with redundancy and failover speed
• you can donate resources to projects anonymously
• All processing, storage, and communication encrypted
• Everyone hosts at least an infrastructure VM
• Infrastructure VMs are organized in such a way that they cannot be compromised
• Uses XRI-like technology for resolution of resources
• All infrastructure is redundant, fault tolerant, and compartmentalized

Initial Objective

To produce a relay-based cloud capable of hosting a minimally configured web server perhaps running in something like Dalvik VM.

I think you’d eventually want something more like a complete x86 VM, but a Dalvik VM might be an interesting POC. 

Terms of reference

The ability of any site to be shut down by the authorities severely limits freedom of expression. A computing platform that can host websites and services outside of any jurisdiction could produce some interesting results.