metaprogramming and politics

Gandalf and Frodo did the right thing when they went for destroying the power of the all-seeing eye. The idea of a central power that knows everything undermines our ability to self-govern and influence important changes in society, it undermines a foundation of democracy.

As against Sauron, it seems like an impossible fight to try to protect our communication against present-day espionage cartels.  I see glimmers of hope, though. Certainly not much in the political space. Somehow our politicians are themselves too interested to use the eye on select targets — even if only the ones which Sauron allows them to see.

My bigger hope lies with technologists who are working on designing better communication systems. We still have time during which we can reduce Sauron’s sight. But to begin with, how do we prevent passive spying attacks against our communications?

A good part of the answer lies in the Trust on first use principle. The mobile Threema application is a good example: when two people first connect with each other, they exchange communication keys and afterwards use it to perform end-to-end encrypted communications. The key exchange can happen in full sight of the eye, yet the subsequent communication will be illegible. No question, the eye can notice that the two are communicating with unknown content but if too many of them do that this fact becomes less significant.

Of course, the all-seeying eye can send a Nazgul to stand in the middle of the communication to deceive both ends and listen in. But it needs to do so from the beginning and continously if it wants to avoid the victims from noticing. And those two can at any time meet to verify their encryption keys and would realize there  was a Nazgul-in-the-middle attack.

By contrast, both SSL and GPG operate with a trust model where we can hear Sauron’s distant laughter. The one is tied to a thousand or so “root authorities”, which can be easily reined in as need be. The other mandates and propagates such a high level of initial mistrust between us that we find it simply too inconvenient to use.

Societies and our social interactions are fundamentally build on trust. Let’s design systems which build on initial trust and which help to identify after-the-fact when it was compromised. If the eye has bad dreams, then i am sure massively deployed trust-on-first-use communication systems are among them.