“You don’t catch terrorists by monitoring Facebook.”
In memoriam: Arjen Kamphuis (born 1972) was a Dutch information security expert, co-author of Information Security for Journalists and a campaigner for digital privacy who disappeared in Norway in August 2018; London Real remembers him.
In short: Arjen Kamphuis was a Dutch information security specialist, co-founder and chief technology officer of the consultancy Gendo, and a leading figure in the crypto party movement that taught ordinary people to protect their privacy online. In this late-2013 London Real conversation, filmed the day after a London crypto festival and published in January 2014, he told Brian Rose why he thought Edward Snowden was a hero, how to use tools like the Tor browser, what mass surveillance was really for, why Bitcoin’s design impressed him, and why copyright law had lost public trust. Kamphuis disappeared in Norway in 2018.
Key takeaways
- Privacy tools need privacy habits. Arjen said the Tor browser protects you only if you behave accordingly; logging into Facebook through it gives the game away, and a false sense of security is worse than none.
- Nothing to hide is not the point. He argued that what counts as wrong changes over time, and that society needs lawyers, doctors, journalists and activists to be able to communicate privately.
- Encrypt to protect others. Ordinary people who encrypt their email help those who really need encryption, such as whistleblowers and journalists, to hide in the crowd.
- Snowden was a hero by choice. He called Edward Snowden a hero because he knowingly gave up a comfortable life for a greater good, while insisting the story was the information, not the man.
- Surveillance served trade and control. Arjen believed mass surveillance was mainly about industrial espionage, diplomatic advantage and monitoring democratic opposition, not catching terrorists.
- Bitcoin’s design was the breakthrough. He was impressed by Bitcoin’s fully decentralised design, warned it could collapse if its cryptography were broken, and predicted a decentralised digital currency would have a big future.
- Just start. His advice to young people was to get involved without waiting for permission or payment, and to give something back to the communities that teach them.
Crypto parties and the Tor browser
Brian Rose introduced Arjen Kamphuis from Shoreditch as an activist and cryptography expert, and the partner of former MI5 officer Annie Machon. The conversation was filmed the day after Arjen spoke at a one-day crypto festival in London, which had been organised with Goldsmiths on a budget of about 80 pounds and drew around 500 people.
Arjen explained that crypto parties brought experts and beginners together to install and learn privacy tools, which he said should be taught in schools. He described the Tor browser, which routes traffic through three relays around the world so that websites cannot see who you are, but stressed that tools come with habits. If you log into Facebook or LinkedIn through Tor, you have identified yourself, and a false sense of security is worse than none.
Why privacy matters even with nothing to hide
Arjen noted that Edward Snowden had been an outside contractor with administrator access, and asked who else inside the system might sell what they could see. When Brian raised the argument that people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, Arjen pointed out that in the Netherlands in the 1940s owning a radio could get you shot, and that what is considered wrong can change.
He said the bigger issue was social rather than individual: a society needs confidential conversations between people and their lawyers, doctors, journalists and elected representatives. He described cases of innocent European citizens rendered to secret prisons through mistaken identity, and Brian spoke about prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay without trial for 12 years.
Edward Snowden and what the NSA knows
Asked directly whether Snowden was a hero, Arjen said yes, because he knowingly gave up a well-paid job and a comfortable life in Hawaii for a greater good. He agreed with Snowden that the story was the information, not the man, and urged people to spend two hours learning to encrypt their email, so that those who really need encryption can hide in the crowd.
He believed only a small fraction of the Snowden documents had been published and supported releasing them slowly. He said the revelations so far showed what the NSA could do, but the more important story would be what it knew about world events since the 1960s. He was most struck by the agency’s approach of collecting everything first and finding a use later.
Software, sovereignty and the tech companies
Arjen described years of work on Dutch government IT policy, arguing that a democracy cannot run on software it is not allowed to inspect. He said a 2007 policy favouring open standards was undermined by outside political pressure. He dismissed the new encryption features offered by large US technology companies as window dressing, because US law still required them to hand data to the NSA on request.
He hoped that lost sales abroad would push US technology firms to lobby for limits on surveillance, and cited Germany’s plans to build more of its own systems. On his own habits, he used Startpage instead of searching Google directly, and kept separate browsers for anonymous browsing, everyday work and logged-in social media.
Merkel’s phone and what surveillance is for
Brian asked whether spying on allies such as Angela Merkel was simply normal diplomacy. Arjen said the fact that her phone had reportedly been tapped years before she became chancellor suggested a wider practice of building files on promising politicians. In his view the main purposes of mass surveillance were industrial espionage, trade advantage and infiltrating democratic opposition groups.
Brian, a former City trader, compared it to working on recorded phone lines. Arjen said Europeans’ trust that their governments would never go bad was a sign of how well the post-war project had worked, but had also become a weakness.
Bitcoin, money printing and copyright
With Bitcoin newly above $1,000, Arjen said he admired its decentralised design but warned that a flaw in its cryptography could wipe out its value within minutes. He compared it to paper money, which also relies on collective trust, criticised large-scale money printing, and predicted that some kind of decentralised digital currency would have a big future, while advising against putting all your savings into it.
On copyright, he said creators deserved to be paid and that he happily bought each new version of the game Civilization. His objection was to how copyright law was made: written with industry lobbyists, passed through trade deals and almost impossible for parliaments to change. He proposed terms of around 10 to 15 years, and warned that thoughtful citizens deciding they were no longer morally bound by the law should worry governments far more than teenage downloaders.
Journalism, advice and getting involved
Arjen described helping the team behind George Galloway’s crowdfunded documentary The Killing of Tony Blair to protect their work, and said serious journalism in the West in 2013 had become information guerrilla warfare against one’s own government. He also warned that the NSA’s vast data stores made it a target for criminals and foreign spies.
His advice to his younger self was to trust that he would meet remarkable people, such as Annie Machon, to follow his instincts rather than the safe option, and to look after his knees. To young people he said: value privacy, learn it, and give something back. He said his most interesting work, including advising Dutch ministers, began with simply getting involved without waiting for a mandate.
Frequently asked questions
Arjen Kamphuis was a Dutch information security expert and digital rights campaigner. He co-founded the technology consultancy Gendo, worked for IBM earlier in his career, advised on Dutch government IT policy and co-wrote the book Information Security for Journalists with Silkie Carlo.
Arjen Kamphuis was interviewed by Brian Rose in late 2013, the day after he spoke at a crypto festival in London. The episode was published in January 2014.
Arjen Kamphuis disappeared on 20 August 2018 after leaving his hotel in Bodo, northern Norway. His kayak and some belongings were later found in a nearby fjord. In 2019 Norwegian police concluded he had most likely died in a kayaking accident, but his body has never been found.
Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer turned whistleblower, was Arjen’s partner. In this interview he said they had known each other since 2007. Machon also appeared on London Real.
A crypto party is an informal, free gathering where people who understand encryption and privacy tools help beginners install and use them. Arjen described them as being like a Tupperware party with more laptops.
Yes. He said Snowden was a hero because he knowingly gave up a comfortable life for a greater good, but he also said the story was about the information Snowden revealed, not about Snowden himself.
He was impressed by Bitcoin’s fully decentralised design, but warned that if its cryptography were ever broken its value could collapse within minutes. He predicted that a decentralised digital currency, whether Bitcoin or a successor, would have a big future.
He believed creators should be rewarded, but argued that modern copyright law was written with industry lobbyists and passed through trade agreements in ways parliaments could not easily change. He suggested copyright terms of around 10 to 15 years.
In this interview he recommended the Tor browser for anonymous browsing, PGP for encrypted email, and Startpage as a more private way to search. He kept separate browsers for anonymous browsing, everyday work and logged-in social media.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript of Brian Rose’s interview with Arjen Kamphuis
00:00:00 Episode preview
[London Real promo removed]
00:01:01 Brian Rose introduces Arjen Kamphuis from Shoreditch
Brian Rose: Welcome back to London Real. I am here on location in beautiful Shoreditch, London, always extremely colourful, with a little bit of street art, or corporate art, it’s hard to know which. This week on the show we have Mr Arjen Kamphuis, who is an activist and an expert in cryptography. He was actually in London before we shot the episode for a crypto party that he hosted with Ms Annie Machon, who was on the show in the episode titled Whistleblower. You might know about her: she had a very interesting past with MI5, and she was quite outspoken about the NSA and security before all of Edward Snowden’s revelations became apparent.
Brian Rose: Arjen does a lot of things, and one of the big things he does is try to encourage you to think a bit more about cryptography. I’m on the bandwagon as well: I’m soon going to be switching over to PGP to encrypt all of my emails. He talks about when to use the Tor browser and when not to use it. If you know what the Tor browser is, you’re probably in a good place. It’s a browser that pretty much swaps the IP addresses of all its users around in a big random bag, so people can’t tell where you’re coming from, and it’s something you want to use when you’re concerned about your security. Something Arjen says is that when he’s logging into Facebook, or places that already know his information, he doesn’t bother with these cryptographic techniques, but when he’s doing something where he’s not necessarily identified, he does. It’s something I think we all need to get familiar with. It’s a reality now: we just have to face the fact that you could be being watched, or your information could be being recorded and used against you in the future. It’s good to have guys like Arjen on the show to instruct us.
Brian Rose: I also asked him point blank if Edward Snowden is a hero. I asked Annie the same thing. I personally don’t think he is, but I also don’t know what the word hero means, and Arjen makes his case for why he thinks he is, and he made some great points. He also talked a bit about Bitcoin. Arjen is a very intelligent guy. He knows his tech extremely well, and he’s a coder as well, so I think he brings a slightly different perspective on privacy than even last week’s guest, Rick Falkvinge. I hope I got that right. I’ve been butchering names on the Continent lately, and I promise to stop as soon as possible. I really hope you enjoy the show. He’s the partner of Annie Machon, who we’re big fans of on London Real, so if you like this show, go and search for hers. It’s called Whistleblower.
00:04:20 London Real promos and sponsor read
[London Real promo removed]
00:09:10 Introducing Arjen Kamphuis of Gendo
Brian Rose: My guest today is Mr Arjen Kamphuis, who is the co-founder and CTO of Gendo. Is that pronounced right?
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes.
Brian Rose: Which is a management consultancy that specialises in technological innovation, and I believe you advise people on the strategic impacts of new technology. I think you have a lot to say about cryptography, copyright law, government IT policies, maybe even Edward Snowden and Bitcoin. Jesus, we’ve got a lot to talk about. Welcome to London Real.
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s great to be here.
Brian Rose: Thanks for being here. You know, you along with two other people send me emails with PGP encoding. It’s you, it’s Annie Machon, our former guest, who is your partner as well, and I just had Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party.
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes.
Brian Rose: So you three are the only ones sending me messages with PGP. I keep thinking I need to get with the programme and do it myself.
00:10:07 Crypto parties and the CryptoFestival
Brian Rose: You were hosting and spoke at the crypto festival here in London yesterday, which I think was all about getting on board with cryptography. Can you tell me what was going on yesterday, some of the things you talked about, and then what I should be doing when it comes to basic security?
Arjen Kamphuis: Okay. There has been a phenomenon going on for the last year and a half called crypto parties. Experts in information technology, information security and crypto tech get together with people who are interested but not yet capable of using it or understanding all the details, and they spend a couple of hours, or a whole day as yesterday, teaching, and also getting feedback on what’s easy to use, what’s difficult to use and what we need to improve. So it’s a back and forth between experts and non-experts, trying to get everybody to a higher level in using technology that can safeguard your communication and your anonymity when you do things online, whether it’s sending email or web browsing. There’s a whole range of activities and a whole range of technologies that can safeguard your privacy, and regrettably this is not taught in schools, which is really sad and strange and a massive failure of education. So many individuals have basically taken it on themselves to say, well, if the government isn’t going to do it, we’ll just get started, in living rooms and little cafe corners, wherever we can.
Arjen Kamphuis: Usually these gatherings are literally about a dozen people. It’s like a Tupperware party with more laptops.
Brian Rose: It sounds like fun, man.
Arjen Kamphuis: It is fun. It’s very informal, it’s all non-profit, nobody gets paid for anything. It’s just something you do because you think it’s important. We had a crypto party before the summer, in June, and there I met somebody from Goldsmiths University who was very enthusiastic and said, we need to take this up a notch. He went to work, found some other people, and they created this one-day festival without any budget. I think he said yesterday that in total they spent about 80 pounds, but 500 people showed up on their free Saturday to learn and talk about information security, privacy and everything connected to it.
Brian Rose: Wow. I really wanted to come. I apologise: I shot a Silicon Real episode on Friday, and then Max Keiser was in the house. My girlfriend wants to come too. Everyone I talk to kind of wants to know what’s going on with these things. I’ve started using the Tor browser a little bit. I might or might not have used the Silk Road in the past to transact. No comment there. But I don’t really know some of the basic things I should be doing. For the people listening who know nothing about what you’re talking about, are there some basic steps you think people should take for basic security?
00:12:55 The Tor browser, and why behaviour matters
Arjen Kamphuis: A few basic things. I think you should at least have a Tor browser installed on your laptop, alongside other things, so that you can sometimes use something else. If you’re logging into your Facebook account, you’re not going to have privacy anyway, so use whatever browser you like. But maybe you want to go to some news sites that are a bit more edgy, and you don’t necessarily want your internet provider, your government or your employer to know which sites you’re looking at and what news you’re reading. Use a Tor browser for that.
Brian Rose: For people who don’t know, what is the Tor browser, if you had to explain it in a minute?
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s basically a clone of an existing web browser, Firefox, but it has some extra bits in it that make sure your internet traffic, between your laptop and the web server you’re communicating with, goes through several other computers on the internet in a very random, non-geographic pattern. That makes it impossible for the web server on the other side to see that you are you: that you’re surfing from a certain computer, from a certain IP address in London, which could ultimately be connected to your identity. The Tor browser will reroute the traffic literally across the entire planet, over three different steps that don’t even all know where each other are. So there are several layers between you and the outside world, and that keeps your privacy fairly secure, unless you start logging into something, because then of course you’re giving it away. So the technology does a lot, but it also requires you to behave in a certain way. That’s where I think a crypto party really adds value. Not only do we help people install the software, because you need to set it up properly and sometimes it’s a bit finicky, but all the tools also come with certain sets of behaviours, and those are just as important as the tech itself. The Tor browser, used incorrectly, doesn’t give you any protection at all, and if you think it does, you have a false sense of security, which is even worse than having no security at all.
Brian Rose: Okay. What’s an example of it not giving you the security?
Arjen Kamphuis: If you used the Tor browser but then logged in under your real name, with your real passport, so to speak, into Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or any of those kinds of online services that are fully NSA-monitored, then even though your traffic goes through three different countries and your IP address isn’t known, you’re still telling the person on the other side, this is me, I’ve just logged in with my password. So now you’ve identified yourself. The technical stuff is still trying to keep you anonymous, but you’ve basically given away the game. This is the case with many of these privacy-enhancing technologies. You need the tech set up properly, which isn’t always as user-friendly as it should be; this is still a work in progress. But it also requires a little bit of discipline, or just knowing what to do. It’s that combination of things that gets exchanged when a bunch of people get together at a crypto party, or at a festival like yesterday, a whole-day thing with parallel tracks and 500 people coming to learn. Many more people should be using all this stuff, to have some privacy when they choose, when they feel it’s important. I think everybody has something they might not want to share with the entire planet, or with four and a half million Americans with a security clearance.
Brian Rose: Is that how many Americans have a security clearance?
Arjen Kamphuis: Nobody knows the exact numbers, but that’s indicative. Of course, the other big problem is that we now know, because of Mr Snowden, that external contractors, not working for the US government but for a private company, have full access to the most intimate US government security documents.
Brian Rose: Right, because he was working for Booz Allen Hamilton.
Arjen Kamphuis: As an external consultant, working in Hawaii, with access as a systems administrator. It doesn’t get much more access than that. He had access to all these documents, and thank God for it, because now we have the information. But the wider implication, of course, is: who else is in there? This guy chose to use his access to inform the world, but maybe there are a dozen other people in there who say, I could make a little money on the side by selling this, and maybe they get approached by the Chinese government or a big drugs cartel. If I were a big drugs cartel and I needed information, and I literally had a hangar full of suitcases of cash, so cash is not my problem, why would I build my own spy infrastructure if I could just take a few of those suitcases, give them to somebody, and they would give me the keys to the kingdom of the US global information infrastructure?
Brian Rose: That sounds like a pretty good deal.
00:17:55 “I have nothing to hide”, rendition and Guantanamo
Brian Rose: What do you say to the classic argument when someone says, Arjen, I have nothing to hide, I’m not doing anything illegal, so I don’t need to encrypt my passwords or hide what I’m doing from the world?
Arjen Kamphuis: My first response now is always: really? Your life cannot be that boring, and if it is, I truly pity you. The second thing is, I’m not doing anything wrong. Well, what’s wrong and what’s not is a shifting thing. We’ve had periods in fairly recent history in Europe when it was wrong to hide your Jewish neighbours, or wrong to listen to BBC radio. In the 1940s in the Netherlands, if you had a radio, you could be shot. So you might not be doing anything wrong today, but 15 years down the line it might be retroactively considered wrong. Nobody knows what the future is going to be, so right there I think is a reason to at least have the option of dialling it up and down. But that is still a very individualistic view of the broader issue. The much broader issue is that even if you truly have such a sad life that you want to share every bit of it with everybody all the time, without having control, then okay, that’s your prerogative. But maybe two years from now you’ll need a lawyer, because you have been falsely accused after the police screwed something up horribly. Now you want to have a confidential discussion with that lawyer, so the lawyer needs to be able to have secure communications with you. Or your doctor, or the teacher of your children, or the politician who is hopefully working on your behalf, or the journalist who is exposing something your government or a big corporation is doing. So it’s not necessarily about every individual in society. It’s about how we organise this in society. Most people are not hardcore activists or human rights lawyers or doctors, but they do need all those other people in society to have that privacy, and the ability to shield some information from the government or big corporations, so that all of society actually gets to be a much nicer place to live. And historically, when governments and nation states go bad, privacy tends to be one of the first things to go.
Brian Rose: It’s funny, because we haven’t had a recent experience of that. You talk about the Nazi party, or McCarthyism in America in the 1950s, or the former East Germany, fairly recently, up to 1989, where you could be in real danger, even killed, for things you said to your neighbours. But I think a lot of the Western world, or the American world, doesn’t remember that, and they don’t realise that when things do get bad, that’s one of the first things that goes out of the window.
Arjen Kamphuis: Well, of course now we have a situation, certainly in the entire West but really in the entire world, where if somebody in the US security apparatus is of the opinion that you might be involved in terrorism, with no actual proof or actual deed required, you can be rendered anywhere in the world, and anything can be done to you. This has been done to people: German citizens, Italian citizens, British citizens who were completely innocent, cases of mistaken identity. They literally get snatched off the street, wake up two days later in some CIA black site, and then three years later, after lots of torture, somebody figures out, oops, mistaken identity. So the idea that I’m not doing anything wrong this week, therefore I am ultimately safe: I wish it was true, but regrettably we’re not there anymore.
Brian Rose: There was a 60 Minutes show recently where they went down to Guantanamo Bay, with all the people being held there. I see how some of these people potentially committed horrendous crimes. I was in New York City for 9/11, and it was a horrible time. But they’re being held without trial, and they’ve been held without trial for 12 years. This is America, and you don’t get a trial. It’s just hard to comprehend that these things you assume the West gives you access to cannot exist, not to mention the rendition and the different things that can happen.
Arjen Kamphuis: My understanding is that against most of the people there, there isn’t even very concrete evidence of what specifically they are supposed to have done. If you start handing out cash bonuses in a tribal area for handing over terrorists, then suddenly everybody who has a naughty neighbour will hand over that naughty neighbour and get $5,000 in cash, which, if you’re Pakistani or Afghan, is several years’ salary.
Brian Rose: That’s a lot of money.
Arjen Kamphuis: So now all kinds of little local disputes get settled by handing over 19-year-olds to the US security apparatus, who then do God knows what to them. So yes, I think this whole thing went wildly off the rails.
00:22:55 Was Edward Snowden a hero?
Brian Rose: I want to ask you something I asked Annie when she was here, your partner Annie Machon. This is about Edward Snowden. I asked her if Edward Snowden was a hero, and I want to get your opinion. I don’t think he’s a hero, but I don’t really know what the word hero means, because it’s a very strange word. You could argue that no one’s a hero; even heroes hate the term once they’re told they’re heroes. But do you think Edward Snowden is a hero?
Arjen Kamphuis: I think he’s a hero in the sense that he very consciously made a choice to make his own life a hell of a lot more difficult for a greater good, so I think that’s a pretty good definition. He had a wonderful life, a wonderful job, a salary that most people will never reach before the age of 30, a beautiful girlfriend, a beautiful house in Hawaii. He was living in paradise by every conceivable metric most ordinary people would have of what paradise would be, and he chose to dump that, knowing full well that the rest of his life was going to be difficult because of it. He chose to do that instead of keeping his mouth shut, keeping his head down and just carrying on with his job. So yes, in that sense I think he is very much a hero. Also, he’s not actively seeking a lot of publicity for himself, because, as he’s always said, and I completely agree, it’s not about him. It’s about the information, and we should be paying attention to and trying to understand all the documents and information that come out, and their implications. So while we should certainly thank him, and maybe honour him in some way, ultimately it’s not about him. It’s about the information he has given us, and now it’s up to everybody else to make sure that his efforts and the risks he’s been taking, and is still taking, were not for nothing.
00:24:50 Encrypt so others can hide in the crowd
Arjen Kamphuis: So at the very least we should read all we can and try to understand, and maybe do something else. Maybe say, okay, I’m going to make life a little bit more difficult for people who want to listen in to me. I’m going to use some of the crypto stuff as a very minimal first step. I’m going to spend the two hours it takes to understand some of the basics, set it up on my computer and start using it a little bit. I will encrypt my email, not because I’m doing something very dangerous or illegal, or I’m an activist or a super journalist living at the bleeding edge, but merely because if I send more encrypted emails, and everybody else starts doing it, then the people who really need it will be able to hide better in the crowd. So merely by encrypting your email, for instance, you’re helping the next Edward Snowden, the next Glenn Greenwald, or the next activist, to be better at their job.
00:25:40 What the Snowden files might still reveal
Brian Rose: How much more information do you think Edward Snowden has to reveal? Do you think it’s just the tip of the iceberg?
Arjen Kamphuis: Oh, absolutely.
Brian Rose: What are we getting now, like 10%, do you think?
Arjen Kamphuis: Oh no, much less than that. There are tens of thousands of documents, and we’ve only had about 200.
Brian Rose: He’s a very good poker player, or chess player. A lot of people would just say, here it all is, but he’s being very strategic.
Arjen Kamphuis: I think he has thought through very well what he was doing. I don’t agree with everything Glenn Greenwald does, but given where most of the world was in thinking about these matters, I do think it’s good to start slow and get everybody into a mental place where they’ve now heard a couple of things over the last half year, and they’re slowly getting to a place where you can hand them some of the big stuff.
Brian Rose: It is intelligent that they’ve dripped it out, because as humans we pick up on one big thing at a time. The slow leak has helped. But do you think Greenwald brought attention to certain things and should have brought attention less to others?
Arjen Kamphuis: I’m not sure, because I don’t know what’s in the other documents, obviously. I also think that when you have such a document, even if it’s only two or five pages of text, actually analysing it and understanding its context and implications can be a lot of work. It can literally mean days and weeks of work. So if he does two documents a week, he’s probably working very, very hard with a small team of people he can trust. I’m not sure it could be done faster, and I can’t really judge whether his priorities are right, because I don’t know what else is in there. I am mostly curious myself about this: what we mostly see now is the capabilities of the NSA. What are they capable of doing from a technical perspective? How many people can they tap? How many fibre-optic cables can they follow? That has already been completely shocking for most people. People in information security circles suspected much of this, but it was never provable, and now it’s provable. But I think the much juicier bits, which I hope will come, are not what the NSA can do, it’s what the NSA knows. It’s the information they have about basically every major world history event since the early 1960s.
Brian Rose: Right. So you would like a little more focus from Glenn Greenwald on what they know, as opposed to their capabilities.
Arjen Kamphuis: Well, maybe there are much more spectacular capabilities we haven’t heard about, and I would certainly want to know. But I think the much more socially impactful stories in the end will be about what the NSA knows about the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of this century that we haven’t been told yet.
Brian Rose: Kind of like the WikiLeaks information was interesting because you got to hear what was going on.
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes, but this could go much, much further, because this could be way above top secret. I don’t know what’s in the other tens of thousands of documents because I haven’t been told, but if any of that stuff is in there, that would be real fireworks: if we have to massively rewrite 20th-century history about who started what war and who knew what when. A whole series of wars started; what was really going on? You could start with the Gulf of Tonkin and go all the way to the most recent wars in Iraq and everything in between. That could be political fireworks.
00:29:19 “Collect it all”, and the Dutch open software policy
Brian Rose: Definitely. Annie said she started getting phone calls when the Snowden news came out, but she had been talking about this stuff for years. Was it the same with you? When Snowden happened, did it put a lot of attention on you for talking about these things? And what surprised you about what he came out with?
Arjen Kamphuis: Two questions. I’ll take the last first. I was somewhat surprised, although not completely, by the scale of things, and by the fact that the question of what are we actually achieving here by doing all this doesn’t seem to be a question that anybody within the NSA is really interested in. They just say, let’s have it all, and we’ll figure out a use afterwards, which I think is a horrible way of doing things.
Brian Rose: That was their stated mission statement, wasn’t it?
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes: grab it all, just grab it all. Which is so far from any reasonable way such an institution should behave in a nominal democracy that it’s quite unbelievable. And I found it most unbelievable how unashamed they were about that. There are no limits to what they are willing to do, even if there is also no justification for it. There’s no proof that this makes anybody safer or makes the world a better place in any way, shape or form. You don’t catch terrorists by monitoring Facebook. Terrorists don’t do their work on Facebook. The clever ones, who are really dangerous and capable of massive, complex global operations, don’t work over Facebook. So if you’re doing that, there’s something more going on. We’ll get to that later.
Arjen Kamphuis: The other thing is, I don’t think it drew a lot of attention to me personally. I worked in the Netherlands for several years developing IT policy, with the idea that we are running our entire society on software when we don’t know how it works under the hood. It does something for us, like word processing, but maybe it does other things, and there’s no way to know. And we now run our entire society on it. Every second that a major city functions, it’s because all these computers are doing just about everything. But the software is essentially under the control of a foreign private party, or a foreign power, as we now know. I saw this over a decade ago as a very fundamental problem. It was very hard to explain. We got some traction, partly because of the cost of the software, and in 2007 it made it into policy in the Netherlands. This is something I worked on for several years. Then that policy was basically killed by massive political pressure from outside, because of course the Netherlands stopping buying billions of euros’ worth of US software couldn’t be allowed to happen. One of the reasons we always gave for wanting that policy was not just to save billions of euros, but also to say: look, if our society is going to run on computers, and we want to live in a democratic society, then it follows logically that our elected representatives need, at least potentially, to have some insight into what these machines are doing. Not that they all become programmers personally, but there needs to be some mechanism by which somebody I can trust, within my country, whether my country is the Netherlands or Germany or the EU, but not outside the sphere where I have some political influence, has the possibility of technical oversight. If that isn’t there, then we’ve basically handed somebody else control over our society, so we shouldn’t do that.
00:32:21 Tech companies’ new encryption and the backlash
Brian Rose: Right now we’re seeing companies push back. For a long time the Googles, Twitters and Facebooks of the world said, we don’t give information away, and then it was found that they did. Now everyone’s coming up with new crypto ways of keeping the information away from the NSA. Twitter has a new protocol; I forget what it’s called. How much of that is window dressing?
Arjen Kamphuis: Entirely window dressing.
Brian Rose: Because they’re trying to get credibility with their users and their shareholders. But you’re not buying it.
Arjen Kamphuis: Well, they’ve been mostly misinforming them for a decade or more, possibly 20 years, and now they see the potential marketing fallout from all this and the loss of trust. So now they say, we’re going to do more crypto, and two-factor authentication, lots of technical terms. But there is nothing that Twitter or Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Apple, or any of those companies, or Sony if they have a US subsidiary, can do if the NSA calls them with a National Security Letter and says, we want all the information on this person, this IP address, this country. They have to hand it over. It doesn’t matter whether they want to or not; that’s just how the Patriot Act works. There is no choice. So I’m not even that interested in blaming a certain individual working at a certain company. Some of them actually received money to basically betray us, so that’s not so nice. But the biggest problem is the US government, which just wants it all, as the NSA says, and is therefore willing to destroy everything in the process, including the trust that the 95% of us on this planet who are not US citizens can have in these American companies. So when a general tells the US Congress, this is all not a problem because it’s just about foreigners, then of course the 95% of us on this planet who are foreigners say, okay, well, obviously we cannot trust your companies anymore. They may actually be providing beautiful tools, good software, nice systems or services, but you are telling us directly that we can no longer trust them for the foreseeable future. So even though Google’s services may be really convenient and technically not that bad, we can’t trust them, so we need to figure out something else. And even if that means extra cost or inconvenience, too bad. We need to move.
Brian Rose: So even these new things, like two-factor authentication, don’t make a difference, because they can still get subpoenaed by the NSA? The NSA can’t collect all the information as easily, but they can still get whatever they want?
Arjen Kamphuis: No, no, it doesn’t make a difference for the NSA at all. Imagine it’s a building, and on the front we now put a much bigger front door, and a moat and a drawbridge. But the problem is the NSA never goes through the front door. They always go through the back door, and that’s still open, by law.
Brian Rose: And that’s what they found: they were right in the back door. They were tapping the cables on the transatlantic links and just monitoring the unencrypted information.
Brian Rose: Do you see this changing any time soon? I speak to Americans, and most of them are kind of indifferent. They don’t seem to be massing for any kind of change. Do you see that changing?
Arjen Kamphuis: I’m hoping it will change. I think that if Europe, large chunks of Asia and Latin America stop buying US IT software, products and services, and we’re talking about tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars a year here, that’s got to hurt somebody. So some of the massive lobbying power of the big US IT companies will hopefully now be directed at Congress, to say, stop this stuff, shut down the NSA, or neuter them, or do something, because we’re getting killed in the global market. Germany has just announced that they will essentially build their information technology future, whether for their government or for their big industrial infrastructure, themselves, because they simply say, we can no longer trust this stuff, and it’s too important. We happen to be a fairly good engineering country, so let’s take all the money we used to give to America for software and just hire programmers and do it ourselves.
00:37:22 How Arjen protected his own privacy
Brian Rose: I know both you and Annie have Swiss .ch websites. What are some of the basic things you stay away from on a regular basis? Do you stay off Google browsers? Do you stay away from Gmail? Are there certain things you just won’t touch?
Arjen Kamphuis: I use many of those. But, for instance, I put Startpage between me and Google when I search. It’s a little thing anybody can do.
Brian Rose: What is it, Startpage?
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s basically an alternative search engine, except it uses part of the Google infrastructure. It’s a much smaller organisation, and they sit between you and Google, so Google sees a question from the Startpage server, but not that it’s from you, from your individual computer and your individual IP address. That’s a little thing many people can do, so that Google doesn’t have, two or three decades from now, 30 years’ worth of your searches pointing back to you as an individual. I use many things. For instance, I’ve used Facebook, because some of the Dutch universities and colleges where I teach actually use it as a student platform, which in itself I find horrible, but I can’t change that in the short term. So I use Facebook to the absolute minimum. I have an account on it because I don’t want somebody else making an account in my name, so I made a defensive account fairly early, then didn’t touch it for years. Then, because I want to do guest lectures here and there, you have to use it at least minimally. But I keep the browser I use for that away from my normal work. I have several browsers on my laptop. One is the Tor browser. One is Firefox, which I dress up with lots of privacy-enhancing plugins, which makes it a bit heavier and slower, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. And then I have a third browser for things like Facebook and Twitter, where, because I’m logged in, I have no reasonable expectation of privacy anyway, and I accept that for that little corner of my laptop. But I keep it separate from all the other stuff. That way I think I can still have a reasonable level of privacy, in the sense that I can keep some of my other surfing behaviour away from being tracked by Facebook and those companies.
00:39:25 Merkel’s phone, industrial espionage and Western naivety
Brian Rose: We saw the German Chancellor come out recently, shocked and appalled that her mobile phone was being monitored by the NSA. When the WikiLeaks information came out, you found out that the embassy in Moscow was saying all this rubbish about the premier, or that in Egypt they were saying this guy’s insane, and now it turns out the US was spying on the G20 people in Toronto. But isn’t this Diplomacy 101? From the days of the Romans, everyone has been constantly spying on everyone else. Is a certain amount of this just part of doing business? Is Merkel really mad, or did she just have to come out and say this is ridiculous?
Arjen Kamphuis: I’m sure part of the anger was for domestic consumption, as we say. But on the other hand, it was very strange that Merkel’s phone was already tapped four years before she became chancellor. She was an up-and-coming politician in opposition, merely an elected member of parliament, not in government, and already they were tapping her phone. From that you can infer that probably every politician in the world who is seen as having potential, who might be somebody in ten years, gets their phone tapped by the US today, so that ten years down the line you have a dossier going back a decade. That is pretty far beyond the reasonable, we want to have some intelligence about what everybody’s doing. Angela Merkel was never a terrorist, or in any way, shape or form a threat to US national security. So doing it at this level, at that scale and over that time period, is way, way beyond the pale. It’s not about security matters. This is about trade negotiations. This is about industrial espionage. This is about being able to manipulate your so-called allies, who apparently you aren’t that allied with. So I think the vast majority of the spying that institutions like the NSA do has nothing to do with so-called national security, which is one of those famously completely undefined terms, like the war on terror, where neither war nor terror is defined.
Arjen Kamphuis: So why do you tap Facebook and Gmail and all that stuff? This is not about fighting terrorists. This is about industrial espionage, number one. This is about figuring out what British Aerospace is doing with Airbus, so you can get the information to Boeing so they can make a better offer to the Chinese and get the $20 billion contract. I think that’s the chief purpose of this. And the secondary purpose is repressing democratic resistance, particularly in Western societies. In other societies you can do it in other ways, a bit more brutal and direct. In the West, if there’s democratic opposition to something, you can’t just shoot those people. That would look bad on television. So what you do is infiltrate the groups, and of course that’s much easier if you know exactly who’s in the group, what they think about each other, where they are physically and where they hang out. So all the activists who organise their little things over Facebook get infiltrated all the way up to their eyebrows, especially if they’re doing something that actually matters. That’s also what it’s for.
Brian Rose: It’s a powerful tool. Think about it: if you know what Merkel is saying on her mobile phone, you can manipulate the whole situation. It’s funny, because I worked in the City of London for nine years as a trader in the banking industry, and all our lines were recorded, and have been since I started in that business 20 years ago. You call it going to the tapes, and it’s never a nice thing if you have to go to the tapes, because you have to find out exactly what you said, whether you said buy or sell, or quoted a certain price. But you’re constantly aware that everything you’re saying is being recorded, so you develop an intelligence where you don’t say some things on recorded lines, because you know they could get pulled. So in a weird way I’m a little bit more aware, because most people just don’t think twice about what they’re going to say. I bet one of Merkel’s aides would call and say, remember to push Obama on this before the meeting, because he’s having a hard time at home. Obama having that information completely changes the meeting.
Arjen Kamphuis: This is what it’s for. And I think the fact that in the West so many people have complete faith in the morality of their governments into an unknown future is actually a testament to the success of the whole Western project. We are now in a place where most citizens literally cannot conceive that their governments would ever go bad, which in itself is a big achievement. But now it’s becoming our major weak point, because when governments do go bad, more or less, we can’t respond adequately anymore. We require a level of evidence first, and by the time we have it, things have already gone completely off the rails. So on the one hand, it’s a testament to how nice a place Europe is that most Europeans are completely naive about these sorts of things, even though this was one of the most oppressed continents for a very long time. For the last half century or more it’s been a pretty good place to live.
Brian Rose: It’s been a happy place.
Arjen Kamphuis: But maybe we’ve unlearned a little how bad the world can really be, and we need to relearn it a little bit.
Brian Rose: I think that’s true all round, definitely.
00:44:50 Bitcoin
Brian Rose: Let me get your opinion on a hot topic lately, which is our old friend Bitcoin. It’s just pushed through $1,000 a coin, and it seems to be continually rising. You have a lot of knowledge when it comes to technology and cryptography. What are your general thoughts on Bitcoin? Is it here to stay? Is the value going up? Is it going to be a factor in the next few years?
Arjen Kamphuis: If the crypto of it doesn’t get broken. Somebody might find a fault in the design; that’s possible. If that happens, it goes to zero. It just goes away. If it turns out you can fake the transaction log or something, if something in the crypto breaks, then it’s all gone, and that’ll be like a flash crash, in literally minutes, planet-wide, because if one person figures it out, then the whole thing goes.
Brian Rose: I don’t think people have a concept of buying something and having it become completely worthless.
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s not unlike paper money. Paper money is in itself worthless as well. It’s just a collective faith we have in it, and we’ve now scaled it up so big, multinational, that people literally don’t think about it anymore. I get a little piece of paper that says 50, printed by the European Central Bank. There’s nothing there. It’s literally just a beautiful piece of paper; a lot of printing technology went into it, but it’s not redeemable for gold or anything like that. It’s just a promise that I can give it to somebody, that person will give me goods or services, he’ll give it to somebody else, and so on, rinse and repeat. As long as everybody believes in it, it works fine. And if it turns out we’re printing too much of these things, then at some point people will say, I’d like something else, please. I’d prefer a little lump of gold instead of your 4,000 that are basically just toilet paper. So that can happen with Bitcoin. But a lot of people are now looking into it, and nobody has found the fault yet, so it appears to be a very, very solid design, made by one or more very capable people. Really top-notch programming.
Brian Rose: You’re impressed with the tech?
Arjen Kamphuis: As far as I can understand it. I’m not a mathematician, but I can look a little at some of the stuff, and yes, it is impressive. It’s very well thought through, particularly the fact that there is no centralised point of failure anywhere. That is the central design feature: there’s nothing between you and the person you’re doing a transaction with. There are just a lot of people doing transactions. It’s a 100% peer-to-peer, decentralised system, and even if 80% of the users went away, the remaining 20%, or much lower percentages even, could still continue to function. So I think it’s a very impressive design, if it continues to function. And if a larger chunk of the world economy moves to Bitcoin, away from dollars and euros, which personally I wouldn’t trust my long-term future to either. Not really, because we’re printing like there’s no tomorrow, which historically usually means there’s no tomorrow in the long term. The Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe and places like that: we all know how this ends. When you print 85 billion dollars a month in fiat currency, we all know how this movie ends, because we’ve seen it a couple of times now.
Brian Rose: We have seen that movie end badly. Not always, but we have seen it.
Arjen Kamphuis: So I think Bitcoin has massive potential. There’s never going to be more than 21 million of them on the planet; it’s mathematically limited. But you can cut them up into thousandths and ten-thousandths, so you can still do tiny transactions with a fraction of a bitcoin, so the number actually doesn’t matter.
Brian Rose: I have an engineering degree from MIT, and I only realised last week that the number doesn’t matter. It’s 21 million coins in total, but that could be 210 million tenths of a coin, or 2.1 billion hundredths. So it doesn’t even matter.
Arjen Kamphuis: It doesn’t matter very much, as long as you can do the transactions and break it down into small enough chunks. Then you’re fine. And there are lots of reasons for many people in the world not to trust any of these centralised institutions, whether it’s a government, a transnational ECB-type institution or a bank. It turns out that all of them are incompetent or corrupt to the core. Your mileage may vary from institution to institution, but none of them seems to have a good grasp of the nature of this crisis, what caused it, whether we can even fix it at all, and what’s still possible in terms of numbers. The political systems keep making empty promises: the crisis is going to end. Then you look at the numbers and nothing’s happening. All the pension promises being made all over the world are completely mathematically impossible in terms of the economic growth they require, which there are no resources on this planet to deliver, so it’s probably never going to happen. So why wouldn’t you go to a system which also has risks? It’s still volatile; it’s not free from risk. And of course if you have all your money on your laptop, then don’t have your laptop stolen, and don’t have your laptop hacked into. So it comes with a whole new set of problems. It’s not problem-free.
Brian Rose: Have you heard about the guy who had his bitcoins on his laptop, with the codes on it? They weren’t worth very much at the time, and he threw it in a landfill, and now he’s digging for seven and a half million.
Arjen Kamphuis: Oops. We’ve heard all that.
Brian Rose: All right, so you’re encouraged by the potential of Bitcoin, but you’re not loading all your savings into it either.
Arjen Kamphuis: No, no, no. But I think something like Bitcoin, whether it’s Bitcoin or a new version that will be developed if and when this one breaks, will have a big future. If that happens, somebody will fix that and maybe a few other things, and there’ll be a Bitcoin 2.0, or maybe we’ll call it something else. But something like this, an electronic, crypto-based, 100% peer-to-peer, 100% decentralised global currency, I think has a big future. So I agree with Rick Falkvinge’s analysis that it’s possible a big chunk of the world economy will at some point be running on bitcoins, which mathematically means the value of a bitcoin could go to $100,000 or more.
Brian Rose: Rick was saying two to five million dollars a bitcoin is where it starts to become a viable currency. I’m a bit sceptical that the very first iteration is the one that’s going to be with us for the next hundred years.
Arjen Kamphuis: No. It’s very possible that somebody will find a tiny hole somewhere and then the whole thing comes apart. But I think that would be a specific crypto implementation fault, which is fixable, and the concept is much more powerful than any fault we can find with this specific implementation of the idea. So, unless our governments and banks start doing things very differently from what they’ve done for the last 200 years, so we can regain some of the trust we’ve lost, this is going to have a really big future.
Brian Rose: I think that’s very well said. The concept is here to stay, whether or not this version is the one we end up with.
00:52:35 Money printing, gold and finite resources
Brian Rose: It’s interesting. I used to have a trader in the City who would always say, Brian, if cold fusion is invented and proven tomorrow, the value of oil will go to zero. He always kept everything relative. So it’s like you’re saying: if there’s a fault in this tech, all of that goes to zero. People ask me, should I put all my savings in Bitcoin, and I say, look, treat it as another risky asset. Put 5% of your worth in it, but don’t put 50%, because you just don’t know what can happen. But it’s interesting: these days it has gone up by a lot.
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s the same with gold. If you look at what’s happened to gold over the last decade, it’s been going up and down, but if you look at the longer term, and I’m not an investment expert at all, seriously, what I’m seeing is just the consequences of too much money printing. It’s very basic, elementary-school mathematics. If you make more green papers that say $100, full faith and credit, but the amount of stuff on the planet doesn’t increase significantly, there’s no more gold or oil. In fact, we’re running out of most of those things, even things like copper ore, phosphorus and natural gas, those last two of which we need for fertiliser, which is rather important for feeding 7 billion people. If we’re running out of all of that, and the only thing increasing in volume is green papers with dollars or euros on them, then that’s not going to be worth much.
Brian Rose: Your point is made. I think the dollar is here to stay for a while, so we’ll disagree on that. I think it’s going to be around, but I completely understand what you’re saying about monetary policy.
00:53:50 Copyright, games and Hollywood
Brian Rose: I want to get your thoughts quickly on copyright. I know it’s something you talk about. We had Rick here last week, and he obviously has opinions on it, with the Pirate Party. I asked him a very basic question, and this might be a good way for you to explain your thoughts. Look at Hollywood’s perspective, and take Grand Theft Auto 5. Have you played Grand Theft Auto?
Arjen Kamphuis: I know the game.
Brian Rose: It came out and had a big debut. It sold Lord knows half a billion or a billion dollars’ worth of software that they spent years creating. Obviously some people paid for it and some people pirated it. What are your thoughts on the copyright industry? Should they have a copyright on it? Should it be free information? And the final step: should someone be prosecuted for passing that copyrighted information around?
Arjen Kamphuis: I think a game, where the development costs are high, is probably one of the trickier cases.
Brian Rose: Like a movie.
Arjen Kamphuis: Even a movie has significant costs. The fundamental problem, I don’t think, is whether you recognise that here’s a bunch of programmers who worked very hard for several years and made something really beautiful. It sounds reasonable that they would be rewarded for all that effort and creativity. That sounds very reasonable to me. I think the big problem is on the other side. And this is not something I thought of; it’s actually the opinion of several law professors in Europe who are experts in copyright law, whom I’ve had conversations with over the last five years. They explained to me that the nature of copyright now, in the Western world certainly but really globally, is such that the laws get written by lobbyists and experts from private companies, and get rammed through voting systems and procedures under the guise of trade negotiations, where most of the parliamentarians cannot even read the text they’re voting on. And once these new legal frameworks are in place, there is no mechanism for elected representatives, the people who are supposed to work on my behalf in the political system, to change those laws again. So the laws are not made according to the normal democratic protocol of transparency, oversight, majority vote and all those nice things, and once they’re locked in, they cannot be changed by the very mechanism we have devised to change laws we don’t like, or that we think need to be tweaked a little as our insights develop.
Arjen Kamphuis: When that is the situation with copyright law, it fundamentally becomes a question of whether I should still feel morally bound by that whole legal concept. So several years ago, after several of these conversations with these professors, I decided that from now on I’m going to treat my respect for people’s copyright on a case-by-case basis. Take GTA, for instance. It’s not my game, but I’ve been playing Civilization, which is another computer game, for 20-plus years. Whenever a new version comes out, I buy it. I’m very happy to drop €60 or whatever, and then five years down the line they make another version and it’ll be beautiful. I don’t have much time to play these days, but once every three years I’ll give them €60, and I’m very happy to do that. I think that’s a very fair exchange for the enjoyment I get out of such a game with friends. However, Disney’s right to lock up the drawing of a mouse until 2045? I don’t think that’s reasonable. I don’t think that serves society, and copyright needs to serve society. If it doesn’t, if it merely serves a bunch of private companies, then we have a real problem. That doesn’t mean we can just violate everything all the time. There is a big middle ground here. But I think what particularly the music and movie industries have done has really damaged our ability to have faith in these legal systems, and that creates an atmosphere in which more and more people say, look, if the law isn’t even democratically made, then I’m simply not going to follow it.
Brian Rose: So it’s an anachronism, copyright law?
00:58:38 Copyright terms and the rise of the Pirate Party
Arjen Kamphuis: Well, the way it’s made is just not in tune with how it’s supposed to be, and with what we’ve agreed on as democracies. That needs to change, and if it changes and we get copyright laws where the interests of society and of individual parties are truly in balance, I think that would mean, for instance, a copyright term of, say, 12 years, instead of the life of the author plus 75, which is completely insane with modern technology. The original copyright term was 14 years, and that was in the 1700s, when technology was moving incredibly much slower than today. So I think ten to 15 years, somewhere there, is a reasonable copyright term for most works. The same for patents: ten to 15 years, and maybe in certain areas we might stretch it to 20 or something like that. But locking up elements of culture or science for decades, or even over a century, doesn’t serve society. So I think that needs to change, and if it changes, we can seriously have the discussion again. Most people I know who make digital copies, or who download or even upload, don’t mind supporting artists or creative people, or even companies that enable creative people. What they do mind is, for instance, buying a digital song and then only being able to play it on an Apple iPod and not on an Android phone, because it’s locked with some stupid digital lock.
Brian Rose: I’m a bit selective in the same way. With movies, like video on demand, if you want me to pay for your movie, then make it easy for me and make it reasonable. If it’s £4 or £7, give me the option. I want to watch it. I love watching things in HD, and the sound has to be great. I’m not going to watch something that was recorded on a digital camera in a cinema in Indonesia. I want the quality and I’m willing to pay for it. But if you don’t give me that option, then I feel like I’m going to go guerrilla and find a way to see it. I have a Netflix subscription, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a lot of money, but some money is trickling down to some of these artists. So I kind of use a similar approach, whether it’s right or wrong, deciding case by case. With GTA, I wouldn’t feel right downloading a copy. I’m happy to pay for it. I know they worked hard on it. But I think people are less sympathetic when it comes to Hollywood and some of the major studios.
Arjen Kamphuis: Absolutely. But I think the central thing governments should worry about is not that a bunch of teenagers are downloading movies. It’s the fact that people who spend quite a lot of time thinking about this, who really want to think about how you can be a moral person in a modern world, in a democracy, someone like Rick, who has thought very long and deeply about these matters, come to the honest conclusion that they are no longer morally bound by the laws of their country. That should scare the absolute Jesus out of anybody who works in government. Forget about Hollywood. Here are citizens of your nation who are thinking about morality and about their relationship with society, and who come to the conclusion that there are now areas of law where the moral position is actually to ignore the law. That should really, really worry people. I think that’s the big point people are overlooking here.
Brian Rose: That’s a good point. I missed that. According to Rick, the Pirate Party started because politicians weren’t addressing these issues, so they said, we’re starting a party because we disagree with this thing you’ve ignored over time. And if people start disagreeing more and more, and the politicians lose step with what’s happening with the people, then probably the political system disappears at some point.
Arjen Kamphuis: Or it’s replaced by something else. But yes, I think the fact that the Pirate Party exists, and is actually successful in all kinds of places, should serve as a wake-up call for the more established parties that they’ve missed something major here. All these under-40s are voting for this new upstart party that doesn’t even have a programme in many other areas of policy, but apparently this one thing is so important to them that that’s how they make their choice. But again, I think the policy failure in how these laws are created, and in how they cannot be changed because of all the big World Intellectual Property Organization, UN and trade systems that intertwine with each other so that you can’t move anything anymore, is the big failure, and that’s the one that needs to be fixed.
01:03:20 Arjen’s work and a less optimistic future
Brian Rose: Well said. What’s up for you next year? How much of your time is spent speaking to the public, like you did yesterday at the crypto festival, and how much is spent advising people on IT and technology? What’s next for you?
Arjen Kamphuis: Certainly since last summer, IT security has been the big thing.
Brian Rose: Is it popular now?
Arjen Kamphuis: It is. There’s a lot of demand. There are lots of organisations, groups of journalists, and also NGOs, particularly ones operating outside Western Europe, with a lot of demand for just getting tooled up, whether at the individual level of a laptop or looking at the infrastructure of an organisation. Some of the other work we do is looking at technological development ten to 20 years out, working mostly with big corporate clients like financial institutions, but also sometimes hospitals and government institutions, trying to analyse what it means for their organisational strategy, what kind of new people they need to bring on board and what expertise they need to develop. So there’s still a fair bit of that, and that’s actually what I started out doing when I left my corporate job over a decade ago. I must say that thinking and talking about the future in 2013 is not as much fun as it was in 2002. I think it was easier to be optimistic about the future a decade ago than now. A lot of our really big problems have grown a lot bigger, both in the failure of some of our democratic institutions, with this whole war on terror spinning completely out of control beyond anything we would have recognised 12 years ago, but also things like resource scarcity and some of the environmental problems. If you take all of that together, it becomes a perfect storm, where there’s a lot we can do and should be doing, and a lot of places where technology could help. This is of course what the techno-optimists tend to say: we can fix this with technology. I agree with them that we can, but the problem is that we don’t. We spent four trillion dollars invading Iraq instead of spending four trillion dollars on building clean energy technology. We could have done something really cool with that kind of money, and as a society we chose not to. So I agree with the techno-optimists that technology can solve a massive range of the big problems we have, but the big problem, and the big annoyance for me, is that somehow we keep choosing not to do that, and to do all these other really stupid, unproductive things.
Brian Rose: So you’re not as optimistic as you used to be.
01:06:30 Securing The Killing of Tony Blair
Arjen Kamphuis: Well, there’s a lot to talk about, that’s for sure.
Brian Rose: Can you talk about some of the other work you’re doing later today, as far as keeping certain things secure for certain projects?
Arjen Kamphuis: Sure. I’m going to be working with the documentary team who are developing a fairly hard-hitting documentary on a very important former politician in a position of power.
Brian Rose: Can we name it or not?
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes, it’s the Blair documentary.
Brian Rose: So this is the George Galloway crowdfunded documentary called The Killing of Tony Blair, which alludes to the financial killing Tony made after he left office, I think. He crowdfunded this thing. We had Max Keiser on here a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about it. We’ve had Galloway on before, and we’re going to have him back again, probably early next year. It’s going to be a really interesting film, and obviously it’s exciting that there was a big demand for this film, and you can see that directly in crowdfunding. So how are you involved in the project? Because I found it really interesting when you told me why you’re involved.
Arjen Kamphuis: I met some of the people when I was working with the Centre for Investigative Journalism before the summer. They told me some of the things they were up to, I followed it, and I found it very interesting. I discussed it with them and said, look, if you want to make sure you don’t get into trouble, that your production process doesn’t get interfered with, or if you want to have a surprise in the media, you need to be able to keep some information away from people who might want to mess with your project. We’ve already done some basics with them, and we’re going to do a bit more today, slowly tooling up the core team. Of course the team is expanding, so there are more people who need some tools and some instruction, and who need to test-drive it a little and learn some of the behaviours that go with this sort of work.
Brian Rose: And your idea is to advise them to keep everything they’re doing secret and private, so people can’t monitor what’s happening, or who they’re going to contact or interview. It’s funny: you’re almost like a security consultant for a film project. That role wouldn’t have existed five years ago, but now it’s very important.
Arjen Kamphuis: This tells you where we are. If you want to do serious journalism in the Western world in 2013, it basically amounts to information guerrilla warfare against your own government. That’s where we are.
Brian Rose: That’s the quote of the episode. That’s really well said. When it comes to Greenwald and everything he did with Snowden, if at any point that link had been exposed, there would have been no story. So it’s an essential part. We might need your services here at London Real next year, to keep everything locked down.
Arjen Kamphuis: Just let me know.
01:08:40 Echelon, mass storage and the NSA as a target
Brian Rose: I might be giving you a call. It’s fantastic to think that after Snowden we have to think about that. But then you think about what the News of the World was doing years and years ago, listening to people’s voicemails. This is something we probably should have been aware of a long time ago.
Arjen Kamphuis: Certainly. We knew from the report on Echelon back in 1999 that this was going on. It’s just that over the last decade the technology has enabled the scale to be ramped up to something completely beyond belief, where literally everything everybody does online or on their mobile phone can be monitored almost in real time. It’s pretty much at the level now where you could have somebody’s entire informational life stored away in a bunker in Utah, available at the drop of a hat to anybody within an intelligence infrastructure who wants to do something with it.
Brian Rose: Which could mean millions and millions of people, contractors and subcontractors. Who knows?
Arjen Kamphuis: Or infiltrated Chinese spies, and who knows. This is the big problem. We now have de facto evidence that the NSA can’t keep a secret. So aside from the fact that they’re doing things they shouldn’t be doing, the single biggest other problem is that they’re creating a giant, juicy target for other people to hack, because anybody who can get access to that pile of information literally has the keys to the kingdom, and obviously they can’t protect it from their own contractors.
Brian Rose: So even if you’re going into a big business meeting, the guy across the boardroom table might know everything about you via some contact in China.
Arjen Kamphuis: This is the thing. If some information trader gets in there and starts shopping some of this stuff around to big corporations or other governments… If I were Goldman Sachs, I would long since have put a tiny bit of my money, say a couple of billion, into hiring some people on the inside at the NSA, because if you use that information for trading, spending a billion on getting the key to that pile is nothing. You’d probably make it back on the first day.
Brian Rose: There’s a famous line in the movie Wall Street, one of my favourite movies, with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko says to Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox, the most valuable commodity I know of is information.
Arjen Kamphuis: It was true then and it’s true now.
01:10:55 Advice to his 20-year-old self
Brian Rose: Arjen, I ask everyone who sits in this chair a few questions at the end, and I’m going to ask you the same. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Arjen and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
Arjen Kamphuis: What would I tell him? I was studying back then, and actually it’s not about the studying; that was all okay. It’s more that you will find some really cool people in your life, even if maybe not so much right now. That is an important thing for me. Meeting somebody like Annie, that’s a really big thing for me.
Brian Rose: How long have you known Annie?
Arjen Kamphuis: Since 2007, so for me that’s quite a long time. So, have some faith that you will meet some of these really special people. And also go with your instincts on what you really want to do, even though it’s not always the secure option, because that is how you meet these people, and the most interesting things you will do in your life come from taking these little risks and doing the non-conformist thing. So dare to do that. You won’t always be happy and you certainly won’t always be rich, but you’ll be doing interesting stuff. And the other thing is: take care of your knees, because I’ve now busted both, so the mountain climbing is a little bit over for me.
Brian Rose: How did you bust your knees?
Arjen Kamphuis: One was when I fell while climbing in Switzerland. The other was when I got hit by a car. I can still walk fine, but descending 6,000 feet with a 60-pound backpack is not something I can really do anymore without paying a massive price in pain at the end of the day. I still enjoy walking and being outside a lot, but not the more fanatical stuff I used to do.
Brian Rose: You used to do some big climbs?
Arjen Kamphuis: Yes. And it’s the descending that’s hard, not the ascending. Ascending is okay. It’s descending with full gear on that really hurts. So, walking sticks, and then I can handle it a little bit.
01:13:45 Advice to young people: get involved and give back
Brian Rose: That’s a very good answer. On the same note, what advice do you give the 20-year-old listening right now? Maybe they want to get into what you’re doing someday. Should they study technology at school? Should they go a different way? What should they be doing about their own privacy?
Arjen Kamphuis: First, I think they should value it. They should study it themselves and be critical of commercial interests and things like that. Regrettably, don’t trust the mainstream media systems, information systems and political things. But there are lots of places out there where people will help you and put you on a path, and see what you can do to help them. Be a participant in the process. Don’t just go to a crypto party to consume, but spend a bit of time thinking beforehand, and particularly afterwards: okay, maybe I’m not a cryptographer, maybe I’m not an IT specialist, but what can I do to help those people, so they can help even more people get involved? Again, the most interesting stuff I’ve done in my life happened because I got involved, not because somebody asked me, or I had a mandate, or I got paid for it. Just start. Just begin. Most of the interesting IT policy work I’ve done was not a paid job. I just chose to start talking to some MPs, and then five years down the line you’re advising the minister for trade, and then it’s a paid job. That was never my motivation, but if you wait for a mandate, you can wait a very long time, and you’re probably not going to get to that very interesting place. If you just start with whatever you find interesting and relevant, you can really go places. So I would advise that. And a big corporation as a first job can be an excellent place to learn, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with that. I had my big first corporate job at IBM, and it was wonderful. There was so much to learn there, so much access to interesting people and interesting technologies, and it was a wonderful start. But after a while you may want to do something other than essentially selling products to big banks or whatever. So it’s a really good place to start, but I don’t think it’s a place where you want to spend the rest of your life. Making the switch in time is important.
Brian Rose: Very well said. That’s really good advice. We have a parallel show here called Silicon Real, dedicated to the London technology startup industry, and I see a lot of kids graduating who want to be in a startup or start their own. I do think there is some value in going to work for one of these big corporations. I went straight to Wall Street and worked for a bank when I got out of school, and I think you learn basic things: you have to come to work every day, you have to show up, you have to do things you don’t want to do, and you have to understand how an organisation works.
Arjen Kamphuis: Absolutely, as long as you know what you’re getting into. Also, if you’re going to be advising big companies later, like me, I don’t think you can do that if you haven’t been part of such a system, and therefore understand that the manager who might be your client has to work within limitations. You can only understand those limitations if you’ve been on the inside of such a big system yourself for a while: how things in a 100,000-person company work differently than at a startup, not necessarily better or worse, just differently. You have to understand the difference to be effective.
01:17:20 Where to find Arjen, and goodbye
Brian Rose: Very good advice. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. We’re big fans of Annie Machon, who recommended you and was our guest many months ago. If you want to check out her episode, I think it’s called Whistleblower. She’s just fantastic. Everyone really liked her: great energy, great ideas. Please send her my regards, and thanks for coming on. If people want to get hold of you and find out more about Gendo, what’s the best way?
Arjen Kamphuis: The easy way is just to type my name into the search engine of your choice, and my blog and my Twitter stream and my stuff will come up, quite possibly including this YouTube video at some point when it goes online.
Brian Rose: What’s your Twitter address? Is it your full name?
Arjen Kamphuis: It’s just my full name, so just search for that. If you search for my name, my blog comes up. Previously I did a lot of writing in Dutch, and now it’s mostly English, so my blog is bilingual, English and Dutch.
Brian Rose: Nice. I was checking that out.
Arjen Kamphuis: So anybody who isn’t a Dutch speaker, which is most of everybody, can just read the English stuff. If people have questions or want to do something, just get in touch and let me know.
Brian Rose: Do you have any other crypto parties planned for London? Because I promise, and I’m saying this right now, I will come to your next one.
Arjen Kamphuis: I’m not specifically planning one, but I think the London Hackspace is going to be doing something in the next two to three months, pretty much for sure. And I spoke to some of the people at Goldsmiths yesterday, and they were very enthused by the fact that 500 people showed up on a Saturday to do this stuff.
Brian Rose: A wonderful turnout, especially on a zero budget.
Arjen Kamphuis: So I said to them, whatever we need to do this again, and soon. So certainly early next year there’s going to be some place in London, possibly even several places, where this can be done, and I’ll be happy to send you the information so you can spread it around.
Brian Rose: Yes, please do. And if people just want to do the basics, like find out about PGP email and the Tor browser, is that something they can find on your blog?
Arjen Kamphuis: If you go to my blog, there’s a post about the session I did with the Centre for Investigative Journalism, and there are a couple of links in there that people can click on, where you get a little rundown of all the basic tools and where you can download them. The post also has a video of the workshop I did, which is basically a one-hour primer on the basic concepts and some of the basic tools, what they’re good for, what they’re not good for and how to use them. So if people just go to my blog and have a look, they can find all the basic stuff to get going. But if you’re not familiar with the technology, really go and find some people, have it explained to you, and test-drive it a bit with somebody next to you. That’s always the best way. And then figure out a way to give back to that community. That’s the other half.
Brian Rose: That’s well said. That’s something you keep hitting on: don’t just go and take, go and give a little bit, and give your time. Very important. Awesome. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can come and see our beautiful faces on YouTube. Arjen’s dressed in black like Johnny Cash. It’s a good look. You can find us on Twitter at London Real TV, on Facebook, all the good stuff. If you want to get involved and help us out, just send me a message at [email protected]. And as we say, it’s about the journey. Thanks so much for coming on. I hope we see you again soon, and all the best.
Arjen Kamphuis: Thanks for having me.
Brian Rose: All right, take care.
01:20:57 Next week on London Real
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