SB

「 Advanced Worm Operations Leveraging 」

This page limns a plan to use robust worms utilizing deep system insecurities in an effort to force network traffic on infected nodes to adopt privacy protocols and hold these systems hostage (large-scale multi-level ransomware). If you had worm ransomware spreading decently fast, you could use it to force all infected nodes to route their traffic through Tor, Mysterium, or any other network. The large increase of network nodes may also help scale network processing and make the network considerably faster depending on the protocol we sublimate. You then present a spiff'd GUI on all infected systems that serves to force a definite choice by the user to adopt free (decentralized + distributed + trustless) systems or remain unprotected from surveillance. The infected system would also brick itself if you tried to remove the worm, making it a 'freedom or death' worm. To start, we are not forcing our ideology on people, we are looking to enforce the user's ideology on themselves. We present lots of options to the user upon infection, and the user can always deny options. No single option is forced on the user, but the user must choose one. The best way to think of this is that it is a way to make sure people are consistent; either they want private networks or they don't. A prompt for choosing to switch to secure networks with a button that says, "No thanks, let me be surveilled," has interesting results in this regard. Further, the 'let me wear my chains in peace' button could be supported with additional surveillance software. If the state gets to see everyone's information, then to be consistent, the rest of us should be able to see the same information. So if someone wants to press the 'surveil me daddy' button, the worm can ensure that they do in fact get surveilled. Again, we just want people to be consistent with their worldview. Either they choose freedom and privacy or they choose to get surveilled. It would be a choice and the worm would make sure the user actually follows through and lives with that choice. No rights the user claims are perversed by this worm, instead the rights the user claims are enforced. Let us see how many people are willing to bite the bullet for what they believe on either side of this issue. No functionality is changed on the infected node - the only functionality that would be lost is the surveillance functions of those external to the infected system. The idea is that by passively removing the force on their networks with this worm, the users are allowed a privacy they weren't before. It should also be said that it seems intuitively apparent that privacy is power in this medium. When prompted, if the user chooses an option to start routing all network traffic through a private network like Tor, then the system will do just that to no loss of the user. There is a noticeable speed difference when switching to private networks like Tor's, but we suggest a solution to this further down the page. When prompted, if the user chooses not to switch network traffic to a private system, then their computer behaves like normal and routes its traffic through the networks it was already - on the condition that their traffic not only be mirrored and permanently stored by the NSA, but that we the issuers of the worm can also mirror the traffic and permanently store it, and additionally make all this information completely public and easily accessible to anyone in the world. This would include any passwords used for banking transactions or logins for social media as well as all the actual posts made on those sites; every packet is captured, just as it already is by corperations and government agencies. We are not looking at this as a way to extort people or demand a monetary ransom, this is 'ransom' in the idea that the people themselves are the ransom. We are holding their network hostage. If the user refuses to turn themselves over (the user is the payment) to free systems, their network gets owned. Every device on their network gets owned. When getting infected with ransomware, many people buy new computers instead of paying the ransom, however they tend to do this because generic ransomware makes their computer unusable (or significantly less featured). Our proposed worm changes nothing about the usability of the infected omputer, so it's highly likely that many people will knowingly adopt the worm. As imagined, our proposed worm would reasonably be capable of infecting at least 10% of the consumer market and arbitrarily re-direct their traffic through the Tor network overnight. Parabolic network expansion of Tor with more than 1,000x its node count overnight. Or imagine being able to give everyone a Monero (or equivalent dark currency) address overnight and have society leapfrog into a post-bank future. This may seem farfetched but the point is you could arbitrarily bootstrap a large percentage of all devices on the planet with whatever software you wanted overnight. This is power. There is a difficulty to creating deep-system worms, but some already exist so it seems this may have already been done to a lesser scale. Why this hasn't already been used to switch the population off centralized, trust-based, privacy-raping systems and on to better options with a permanent boost to those better options is a severe misstep in our opinion.

「 Objections 」

1. Forcing this on people is a severe perversion of rights. We don't see how making the discursive man a consistent man is a matter of rights - it seems overtly the case that without some consistency man cannot actually be discursive and therefore also has no personhood by which to actuate or perverse rights. If anything we would be bringing personhood (the very capacity for rights) to many bodies for the first time in their lives. 2. This worm will not make many people sympathetic to the cause. We don't really think most people sympathize with reason, and people definitely don't like talking for ten plus hours in a single sit-down to really explore all their options when it comes to rights, especially theirs, so instead of trying to reach individuals about these issues, we're just bringing them their rights directly, even if they fight it. Imagine being the first one out of the cave and the blindness from the first sunlight you've ever seen wears off and you learn things about the world outside the cave only to go back in and have everyone think you're insane for knowing what the world is actually like. These people like the cave, they don't want to leave it, they don't have the same ambitions or desire for knowledge that you do, and as sequela they don't want rights. Think about having to literally fight people to give them rights. This is like the American Revolution but for network infrastructure. You have to literally fight people to give them their rights. Neither of you wants to fight, but if rights are meaningful to have, or are important in any kind of way, then you ought to fight for them, no? The beauty here is that we are not imposing any personally chosen rights for either side of this debate, we are instead imposing consistency of the rights people claim are important. 3. It is a waste of a good exploit. If you think it's a good exploit then it's hardly a waste. The code would be public, so anyone that wanted to bootstrap any software with the worm could modify the code arbitrarily and do whatever they wanted with it. The exploit will be an exploit for everyone, as again we don't think we're limiting anyone here but instead providing them with many more options than they had before, including the option to use the worm in any other way they want. The only value-level work we're trying to do here is to get people to be consistent with their views on rights, and the way to do that seems to be to remove limitations on the main medium of communication that we use to discuss whether or not we even ought to be consistent with our views on rights. This should be considered apodictic at this point, for if the limitations on what we can say are not removed in this manner, then we also no longer maintain any sort of authority in saying we shouldn't follow through with this worm. 4. This is not practical and no one will agree with the principles. We agree with the practical part - this is highly impractical. We are seeing whether this can be done more than if it will be done. To simplify the last couple of points made here, it might be said that we don't think we are free to discuss whether freedom is really valuable until the systems we use to discuss it on are free themselves. Man is born free, yet everywhere we find he is in chains. We think that while it may be the desire of man to chain himself, there isn't much we can meaningfully say about it while he is still in them. This is like a pathological form of slave morality, we don't think much mental labor really gets done on those terms. So maybe this is forcing a choice on the slaves, but slaves cannot allow themselves choice to begin with; this is why we call them slaves. We don't see any other good way to switch a population over to free/secure/private systems without giving them the choice to do so. We also don't believe most people have the capacity to allow the choice themselves since most people don't have enough free time to learn or don't want to learn about this stuff anyways. AWOL is very much a last resort. All other paths have been tried by many other groups for decades; nothing else works because nothing short of actually forcing a prompt for choice into the face of people allows them the choice. Forget convincing people what the right thing to do is, this is recursively now the only thing left to do.

「 Choice of Network Protocols 」

We believe that a global passive adversary or even a global active adversary should be considered when sublimating the population into secure/private software. This immediately precludes a lot of network protocols including Tor and I2P. This and other reasons are linked and given more detail here, here, and here. However, some security is better than no security so those options may still be included in the worm. Additionally, decentralized and distributed networks may be promoted due to their incredible abilities to combat censorship. Whether that is truly a required component for making data transmission private will be hashed out in a later congress. Many of these protocols increase in speed and robustness when there are more nodes relaying traffic on their networks, which our proposed worm may be able to positively influence, however speed still takes a notable hit on these kinds of networks and so there may be a better way to solve this problem. Virtual private networks, acronymically VPNs, tend to be very centralized and therefore very monitored but they are substantially faster than alternative network solutions like Tor, ZeroNet, and others, so we believe there may be a middlespace that solves this problem. In the last couple of years there have been very nascent attempts at decentralized, distributed, trustless, permissionless, encrypted traffic relays that are effectively decentralized VPNs (like Mysterium). There are potential issues with these in how they handle metadata and whether they truly obfuscate the senders and receivers of data in the process, but this is still a big step forward. All these pre-existing protocols will be suggested with listed pros and cons in the options given by the worm, but of course why do this if we don't intend to do it big, so we will also present an option for an in-house network that suffers none of these problems we are concerned with. Our in-house network protocol would similarly be a decentralized VPN service with zero-knowledge properties that ruin efforts at learning which nodes are involved, making this specifically immune to global adversaries. The full finalized list of options will be discussed in a future congress but this is what we have for now. To detractors of our reasoning in the paragraph above, supplimental reasoning leads us to say that layering your security is a very good practice, and with respect to privacy networks, decentralization and distribution are two more layers on top of encryption. Tor wraps packets in layers of encryption which is nice, but the content is still centrally hosted which means that content can (and does) get blap'd when their host servers are seized. If your content can be censored by turning off the power to one dude's basement then that content doesn't seem very secure to us. As linked in the reasons earlier in this section, it is also arbitrary for networks to block Tor traffic, and this happens regularly, disallowing access to many major sites from the Tor network. These problems are solved by a decentralized VPN service. There is also a concern with funding. The Tor network and similar privacy-focused networks are funded in ways we believe are deliterious. This is only a factor in choosing the network list since there are ways to self-propel networks now without any major funding whatsoever. The earlier link noting that Tor used to be majority funded by the CIA means that it was an American tax-funded network. If the network is secure and free to use then this shouldn't matter, but we think it is interesting to see how privilege plays into people's perceptions of privacy. Not everyone is American and pays protection money to their mob state, so there are issues with relying on a network that requires that state's support. Simply, we are not sure a network that needs funding to stay alive is a principally secure network anymore since that funding can be cut off by state actors, even if they never contributed prior. So a lack of funding may work out as an ironic plus in this equation. However, this also means we may have limited ability to update our in-house network protocols after they are implimented by the worm if we become financially insecure, so it will be critically important that the very first iteration of our protocols that we shotgun blast out through this worm works as well as possible out of the gates. This page receives edits as our plans change.