What motivates the “tech” right?

To support my index of resources about neoreaction and adjacent far right movements which overlap with “tech” culture, I have taken the liberty of capturing commentaries from other people tucked into Xitter, Facebook, et cetera. These are not quite the same as my reading, but both are illuminating in exploring how “tech” executive culture itself understands the shift. Emphasis in quotes are the authors’, not mine.

Aaron Bartley

Twitter thread | 3 February 2025

Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?

I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:

1. The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn’t into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
2. Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
3. Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
4. China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.
5. Lastly, they resent their employees deeply for the political concerns they’ve been raising about climate change and DEI. They blame the “radicalizing” influences of elite institutions and want the government to shut these institutions down or reform them heavily.

(Edited: As Mike Puma and Frits Abell have commented, the over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.)

A couple of supporting links from JK:

• Blockchain in 10 minutes — my no-math primer on the tech behind cryptocurrencies
• The Twin Insurgency — my single favorite examination of What Is Going On, addressing that final point about the plutocrats & criminals trying to hollow out and exploit state capacity

What Happened Here

Unpopular Front | John Ganz | 4 February 2025

A small taste of this sophisticated Marxist read:

I think we can all agree the key difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is the alignment of a reactionary fraction of Silicon Valley tech oligarchs with Trump, or rather, the transformation of a significant part of tech capital from an ostensibly progressive, liberal section of capital into a reactionary one.

Very simply put, here’s what I believe happened: In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary.

[⋯]

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt.

Where did the tech right come from?

Jasmine Sun | 30 January 2025

Here’s a 4-part grand theory of the tech right.

“Tech disposition”

First, there is a unique “tech disposition”. David E. Broockman and Neil Malhotra surveyed 700 founders:

1. they’re more liberal than most Dems on social issues + taxes, but very conservative on regulation + labor (even outside of tech)
2. pro-market values trace to adolescence & cannot be explained by demographics or economics
3. these beliefs do not resemble other economic elites

First, technology entrepreneurs are far from monolithically conservative; rather, they overwhelmingly support Democrats. This is not an artifact of our survey sample: campaign contributions from technology industry employees and ultra-wealthy technology entrepreneurs to Democrats have long exceeded those to Republicans. Although it is not surprising that individual wealthy Democrats exist, we show that the wealthy in an entire industry support the party pushing for higher taxes, deviating from the norm among the wealthy at large.

However, our findings are not so simple as that most technology entrepreneurs are liberals. Our second group of findings is that most technology entrepreneurs share a particular set of views across policy domains; that this set is conservative on many issues; and that this set is distinctive to technology entrepreneurs, being rare among other wealthy individuals, other Democrats, and other wealthy Democrats. In particular, on issues related to economic redistribution, globalization, and social issues, technology entrepreneurs are typically as or more liberal than Democratic citizens, Democratic wealthy individuals, and Democratic donors; they are also more liberal on all these issues than millionaires in the mass public. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs indicate support for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes. However, technology entrepreneurs are very skeptical of government regulation. Indeed, technology entrepreneurs’ views on regulation closely resemble those of Republican donors, and are more conservative from those of other millionaires in the mass public, Democratic citizens, and wealthy Democrats. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs also think the government should make it easier to fire workers. These large differences persist even between technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats and other Democratic constituencies.

This finding is surprising in light of popular accounts that describe technology entrepreneurs as falling within categories familiar in American politics: as typically liberal, typically conservative, or typically libertarian. However, we show that most technology entrepreneurs have a pattern of views that does not fit in any of these categories, has not been seen elsewhere, and is not predicted by prior work: a majority of technology entrepreneurs explicitly describe their views as supporting redistribution of wealth but opposing regulation of business, approximately double the share as in any other group of citizens, donors, or wealthy individuals we surveyed.

Our third set of findings concerns suggestive evidence for the theoretical mechanisms we posit for why technology entrepreneurs have this unique pattern of views. Our theoretical argument, elaborated below, is that the wealthy from a particular industry may have a unique set of political views because of the distinctive set of political predispositions of the individuals who select into each industry, and further, the experiences they will tend to have working in it. Consistent with this argument, we show that technology entrepreneurs share a distinct pattern of values and predispositions that correspond with their views in related policy domains. For example, with a series of pre-registered comparisons and survey experiments, we show that it appears technology entrepreneurs’ opposition to government regulation can be traced to positive predispositions towards markets and entrepreneurship. We also cast doubt on alternative explanations for their views related to demographics, geography, and pure self-interest.

[ Sun’s thread includes screencaps from what appears to be a slightly different version of the linked paper; I have quoted the corresponding section of the paper I have access to — JK ]

Mark Andreessen’s recent [New York Times] interview with Ross Douhat is very illuminating. Andreessen describes this exact disposition: “pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was the implicit deal of the Clinton-Gore era:

As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.

The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.

Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.

Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.

Social justice

Second, social justice fused with labor, nonprofits, & the state — fueling a wave of employee activism and speech / DEI / climate requirements. Structural issues demanded process solutions. Tech’s hatred of bureaucracy trumped their support for social justice.

See again the Douhat interview with Andreessen:

Andreessen

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat

But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen

Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

See comments from Paul Graham:

For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word “inclusion” in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an “inclusive language guide.”

This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence. But these bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used these statements as the initial filter and only even considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You’re not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.

Dem pivot

Third, Dems started to pivot away from key Clintonite ideas:

1. neoliberal economics would be good for america
2. digital tech would spread good liberal values

Henry Farrell calls this the collapse of both the “neoliberal” and “Palo Alto consensus”:

If that has changed, it is not simply because progressives have moved away from Silicon Valley. It is because both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions.

A lot of attention has been paid to the intellectual and political collapse of neoliberalism. This really got going thanks to Trump, but it transformed the organizing ideas of the Democratic coalition too. During the Trump era, card-carrying Clintonites like Jake Sullivan became convinced that old ideas about minimally regulated markets and trade didn’t make much sense any more. Domestically, they believed that the “China shock” had hollowed out America’s industrial heartland, opening the way for Trump style populism. Reviving U.S. manufacturing and construction might be facilitated through a “Green New Deal” that would both allow the U.S. to respond effectively to climate change, and revive the physical economy. Internationally, they believed that China was a direct threat to U.S. national security, as it caught up with the U.S. on technology, industrial capacity and ability to project military force. Finally, they believed that U.S. elites had become much too supine about economic power, allowing the U.S. economy to become dominated by powerful monopolies. New approaches to antitrust were needed to restrain platform companies which had gotten out of control. Unions would be Democrats’ most crucial ally in bringing back the working class.

Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems, which were built on the cheap and not designed to deal with a complex world where people could do horrible things in hundreds of languages. And there are now a lot of people who think that Silicon Valley platforms are bad for stability in places like the U.S. and Western Europe where democracy was supposed to be consolidated.

My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.

I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.

The Biden admin was far more pro-unions, tech regulation & antitrust. Dems probably needed to adjust (neoliberalism isn’t popular), but this broke the tech / liberal coalition — they were seen as abandoning business to back the activist class.

Douhat

So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?

Andreessen

They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

Trump

Fourth, tech found a home in Trump’s less ideological, more deal-friendly Republican party. Traditional conservatives were a poor fit, but Trump runs the country as a cult of personality — institutions be damned. and isn’t that what “founder mode” is? From Pirate Wires:

As President Trump begins his second term, he has the support of many business leaders, especially the entrepreneurs and founders who make up the ascendant ‘tech right.’ Why did this faction emerge and rally behind the president? Some point to policy issues such as regulation, taxation, government contracting, and antitrust. Others note that self-interest and perhaps self-preservation motivate its members as much as principle or policy.

But sincere converts to the tech right share at least one thing in common: a belief in founders — change agents capable of upending stale industries — taking on Goliaths, and reaching into the future to unite it to the present. The tech right sees founders, and the qualities they embody and inspire in others, as the key to company success. Conversely, founder-less institutions don’t work, like a body without a head — or perhaps, without a soul.

With its support of Trump, the tech right is just applying this model to politics, the ultimate stale industry, and Washington, D.C., the ultimate Goliath. In Donald Trump, the tech right and the American people see a leader. More to the point, we see a founder.

Other factors

There were other contributing factors: post-2016 techlash, defense money, mean journalists, COVID, plain old opportunism in the new Trump admin. Vocal Trump support from Andreessen, Sacks, Musk ignited a preference cascade.

But I maintain that SV elites’ deepest commitment is not right or left, but to unfettered innovation (& the wealth / growth that results). It’s the spirit of “get out of my way & let me cook” — they’ll align with whichever party makes that possible.

My overall thought on the sort of cultural versus material debate is like, the left liberal camp still underrates the cultural stuff. I think you're right that considering the counterfactual, would Zuckerberg be being like, “Meta is too feminine now” if Kamala won — obviously no. At the same time, when I read PG’s essay, I was like, oh, this is a complaint about bureaucracy as much as it’s a complaint about politics.

It's this cultural thing of builders in, prigs out. There are all these memes like “high agency” or “founder mode” or “live players” or “you can just do things.” My friend Clara, who edits Asterisk Magazine, was telling me about some conference where someone called it “Robert Moses libertarianism.” What does that even mean? And I think this is incoherent, except for that Moses was really going founder mode. He was a high agency guy. He’s very effective, right? And there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who’s super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.

That relates to why I see progress as like the primary coalition rather than like left or right. Or as Lonsdale calls it, the “builder class.” There is economic self-interest, obviously, but it’s also an aesthetic preference.

Another consequence is that this is causing real rifts between maga right and tech right — most notably over H1-B, but IMO that’s a sign of more fights to come.

The more traditional conservatives — not Hanania, that is — go on to express skepticism about the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort); its willingness to endure short-term social harms for long-term economic gains; and its overall bias toward disruption — whatever chaos may come. They’re suspicious of tech’s talk about “human capital” and its flirtations with fascism. The essays read like a warning to fellow reactionaries: Can the tech titans be trusted to preserve American values? Or are they riding the Trump train on the way to a robot-ruled transhumanist utopia? Take slogans like Accelerate or die! — there’s nothing “conservative” about it.

How secure is Tor?

Today I retweeted a tweet from Kenn White (@kennwhite):

SV [Silicon Valley] tech writers flip out after discovering Tor was created by the Navy & gets State Dept grants.

Wait till someone tell them about Arpanet.

For the uninitiated, Tor is a service for making online communications anonymous, to foil things like state efforts at surveillance. ARPANET was a technical precursor to the Internet created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US military. This is a reference to the suggestion that many have made that US government funding for Tor is a sign that it may not be as secure as it purports to be.

I forwarded this tweet because it nicely summarizes the double-edged naïveté implicit in being shocked by Tor's funding. On the one hand, one can read seeing the hand of state surveillance lurking under Tor because of its funding sources as a manifestation of a kind of paranoia. If that connection indicts Tor, don't the Pentagon origins of ARPANET indict the whole of the Internet? On the other hand, the forces arrayed for state surveillance are demonstrably so powerful that one is tempted to ask “is that too paranoid, or is it just paranoid enough?”

On my Facebook feed, this inspired a lively discussion between Vinay Gupta, a “global resilience guru”, and Billings, a web security professional who reminds us that he is not speaking for his employer here. They are both people I respect very highly.

The discussion seemed useful to share with the world, so with the discussant's permission, here's a lightly-edited version.

If you just can't get enough of this stuff, I also have Quinn Norton's article Clearing The Air Around Tor, which gives a pretty accessible explanation of the mechanics behind Billings' argument that the mechanics of Tor suggest that its funding sources do not indict its security.

And an update:

Yasha Levine has a question they couldn't ask at a Tor presentation:

There was a lot of talk on stage today about using Tor as a tool of freedom and liberty on the Internet. But there is another side of Tor that was never mentioned: Tor as a regime change weapon — a tool of soft power used by the United States government to destabilize countries it considers hostile to its economic interests: Iran, China, Russia, Belorussia. This regime change function is why Tor continues to receive over 90 percent of its funding from US government agencies like the State Department and the Pentagon, agencies that are responsible for so much of the death and destruction in the world today.

So my question is: How do you people at Tor reconcile these two sides of your product? Is Tor about Internet Freedom? Or is it about empire and regime change?

---

Gupta
The thesis that internal conflict in the US government is so enormous that the NSA is unable to stop the US Navy funding something which effectively makes many of the NSA's operations impossible seems, to me, to be a less likely hypothesis than “Tor is another Crypto AG.”

You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

Wikipedia: Grypto AG back-doored machines

By the way, just to clarify, I'm not accusing Tor of being consciously cooperating with the NSA. Rather, I think their technology must be flawed on the basis that the USG would not fund them if Tor did what it said on the can, and there is very good evidence that the USG loves people to use broken cryptography presuming it to be secure.

None of this involves a detailed technical analysis of Tor: it's a political rather than a technical analysis. And I could be wrong.

But so could they.

Billings
Well, except I actually know and work with core Tor developers and they both edit the code and are definitely not government shills. These people are not poor security engineers either (quite the contrary). The fact is that parts of the US Navy intelligence apparatus and others have used it to cloak their own activities and have a vested interest in keeping it secure. If only government stooges used it, then you'd know anyone coming out of a Tor node was a government stooge. If they do use it, they don't want to be tracked either.

Gupta
So we're left with the hypothesis that the Navy is paying them to thwart the NSA. I just don't buy it: a vastly more historically plausible analysis is that the NSA is good techniques for circumventing Tor, and is quite happy for the Navy to continue selling people rope, with which the NSA can later hang them. That's consistent with historical intelligence practices and the available evidence.

Billings
and the reason why the stolen Snowden docs reference often the NSA bitching about Tor is just COINTELPRO and Snowden works for them? The NSA basically says that it is a good thing that most people are so poor at opsec and they can break stuff in other places because they can't break Tor itself.

That said, if an entire nation state apparatus walks to watch Tor, they can probably watch enough end nodes eventually to nullify much of the anonymity. Tor folks are pretty aware of that and have spoken about it publicly. Without any evidence though, I generally treat people saying Tor is secretly broken as FUD, especially when the other evidence we do have contradicts that.

To quote from NSA targets the privacy-conscious:

As revealed by the British newspaper The Guardian, there have been repeated efforts to crack the Tor Network and de-anonymize its users. The top secret presentations published in October last year show that Tor is anathema to the NSA. In one presentation, agents refer to the network as “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity”. Another is titled “Tor Stinks”. Despite the snide remarks, the agents admit, “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time”.

I admit that this is a personal bugaboo of mine, since I know many of the Tor folks personally (and their integrity) but most of these discussions seem to run along the lines of “but but but they get most of their funding from the US government and no one ever told me that the Navy started Tor so it must all be a trip/track/setup by the government.” Other than the fact that they get money from the government, I've yet to see any proof of this offered though. I recognize Vinay is drawing the distinction with them knowingly being tools and unwittingly being tools though.

Gupta
Snowden has released nothing about cryptography so far: nothing about which ciphers can be broken. This is probably because the NSA keeps its data in tiny little boxes, and people in one box don't get to know what's going on next door. The psychology of reflexive defence of Tor while ignoring the funding paradox is simply exactly the mindset which security people love to exploit when breaking things.

Dream on.

Billings
If Tor was something the NSA had broken, they would not be doing internal presentations and circulating reports bitching about how they couldn't easily de-anonymize people using Tor. That is unless you're arguing that rank and file NSA spooks don't know the initiatory secret of the secret inner order, which knows that Tor is broken but doesn't bother to tell the NSA. I mean, these are internally circulated documents between NSA folks, not for Congress, etc.

Billings
To be clear, Snowden has released everything as of a year ago. Greenwald and the technical people, like Schneier, haven't released the information that they have. BTW, the defense isn't reflexive. My day job is in security for a browser used by hundreds of millions of folks.

Gupta
Wait, wait, hoooold on. “The NSA” is not a monolithic object. It's a sea, a foam, of little security compartments. Snowden has (as far as current data suggests) no access to the math, the crypto, the network analysis and all the rest of it. He's got brute infrastructure stuff because that's what was in his compartment.

Billings
So the NSA (meta) allows its agents to fail to catch people by not telling them that Tor is actually broken to the point where said agents to presentations, author reports, etc. to other NSA agents complaining about Tor?

Because we have seen those complaints.

Gupta
The entire point of the NSA's security compartments is so that a Snowden or a spy can't get the entire ball of wax. It's routine for one part of the org to slave for decades on a problem that another part of the org has already solved, for example. Their approach is not polite, it's battle testedly irrational. And well documented.

Billings
Of course, is the NSA was well compartmentalized, a 29 year old contractor wouldn't have hoovered up probably more than a million documents from different programs. Clearly, he was able to get past plenty of walls.

Gupta
Consider Coventry: the UK had broken the codes, they knew the bombing was coming, and they took the hit anyway. That is what cryptography is about, really. It's that depth of strategy that's the core to understanding what you see in front of you.

Nothing on the math, nothing on ciphers they've broken = he was nowhere near the crown jewels.

Billings
Or Greenwald et al simply haven't found it juicy or safe enough to release yet. They are redacting to avoid, in their opinion, getting folks killed or endangering “acceptable” things.

I still think if Tor was that broken by the NSA, their agents would be actively breaking it, not complaining to each other internally about how they had to do various work arounds to figure out who folks are.

So, if they're saving that trick and keeping it for the 40^th level NSA wizards, then their agents still haven't broken Tor because they don't get to know.

Gupta
Your model of the NSA is not the same as my model. I think my model of the NSA is better founded on historical evidence. I just can't see (knowing what we know about the history of cryptography as used by intelligence agencies) how you can justify your faith in the security of a tool they are paying for. The sweet spot has always been “let the Rubes think they are using encryption” and then read their messages and gather at will. That has not changed in centuries.

Billings
So it comes down to “We have no evidence it is broken but because government groups pay for much of it, it is inherently untrustworthy” then? I'm not saying it isn't an argument that rational folks would make, just not one I'm buying.

Gupta
Do we have no evidence that it's broken? Surely “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time” is clear reporting that, indeed, Snowden's team can get some Tor users some of the time. How many? How much does that matter? Do we have statistics on this? So that's the first line.

Billings
Except we also, from the same slidedecks and other events, know how they denonymize users. I could find you articles if you wish but it basically comes down to “people suck at operational security and do a bunch of other stuff to identify themselves, no matter that they went through the Tor network on the way.” See how they tracked down the Dread Pirate Roberts or that fellow running a Tor hidden service in Ireland. Poor opsec, which is a relatively well understood issue. We are also aware of a number of attacks involving watching a certain percentage of end nodes or of running a certain number of nodes, en masse, and correlating traffic. Again, the guys working on Tor aren't idiots, are aware of these problems, and working to address them. You saw yesterday's news about Tor middle nodes, right?

Tor security advisory: “relay early” traffic confirmation attack | The Tor Blog

Gupta
The second line is this: deception is the normal practice of intelligence agencies. To take what they are doing at face value, to believe one leak as the entire story? “Now we understand?” My god. Read the history of intelligence operations. Look at “The Double Cross System.” Look at Angleton. The Cambridge Five. You can't just puddle through this stuff taking a single NSA document as an absolute verification of Tor's relationship to the NSA: that's what one team knew at one time, in fact, it's not even what they knew it's what they chose to write down. You just can't look at intelligence data this way and be on secure ground. It's not how these people operate.

Billings
Differences of opinion are simply uninformed, as opposed to making rational decisions that don't happen to match yours.

I'd be more strongly convinced that, for example, maybe one of the Tor founders, like Roger, might be a secretly paid agent maintaining Tor access for government this whole time (though I don't believe it) than proof by lack of proof.

Gupta
These people are your opponents. They're very, very good at these games. We know a little about what they were up to 50 years ago from WW2 releases. Do not assume, not for one minute, that the games we are entangled in now are any less sophisticated, Machiavellian and manipulative than they were in WW2. The UK government ran every single spy the Germans had on UK soil. This is the caliber of the deceptions operated by the same mechanisms we are being asked to take at face value re: Tor's funding streams. I cannot buy it.

Billings
Yes, I think your position is clear. Me? I require some actual evidence beyond “they get money from the government” as proof they are pwned.

Gupta
It is very easy to assume that our model of the technological capacities of the NSA is accurate, too. But on the math side they've had close to a 20 year head start on the two occasions when we have good evidence of their know-how (hardening DES against differential cryptanalysis, and RSA being developed at GCHQ). Is it possible that they're unwinding Tor with math we won't see in public for another decade or more? Quite possibly. Could they be routinely owning all of the network nodes that relay traffic they want to see, using some kind of low-level hardware exploits or even plain old OS bugs? We don't know. But unless you ignore the entire history of intelligence agency operations around cryptography you cannot take this story at face value. It's not remotely justifiable.

It's really cute to tell the story of US government needs a security tool so they hire hackers to build one, and it protects us and it protects them just the same. But, for god's sake, when has the USG EVER created a level playing field in something as sensitive as cryptography? It just DOES NOT HAPPEN. Not the way the institutions work. I cannot believe the level of political debate around the Tor funding stream: it's as if nothing was learned from watching the past 50 years: everything since ENIGMA is admissible as baseline data on the NSA's modes of operation. Use it.

Billings
Who is taking it at “face value”? My evaluation is based on a lot of sources, including week to week working with developers at Tor as they ship their Tor Browser based on the code of Firefox, where I work. If people offer actual evidence that Tor is broken, I'll evaluate it but I haven't seen any.

Gupta
facepalm

Billings
Rational people can hold a differing evaluation of the evidence, Vinay.

Gupta
Wrong standard of proof. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Your adversary is doing everything humanly possible to make sure that you do not get evidence that the system you are working on is broken. Their entire modus operandi throughout their history is to leave systems in place which people assume are secure, and then read whatever it is they like that goes over those wires. That's the goal state for the NSA. They're good at cracking systems, and they're good at concealing those systems have been cracked. Those are two halves of a whole.

Billings
Good at concealing it from their own agents too, it seems. Anyway, I'm done here. We're just repeating ourselves and I have no expectation of convincing you. I expect people will use Tor if they feel they can trust it and to use ... nothing ... if they feel they can't. No one is going to be convinced by further debate here.

Gupta
Yes. That's standard operating procedure for most of these agencies. Of course they conceal things from their own people, and lower level folks die in gutters because they didn't know the higher clearance data that would have saved their lives. Standard standard standard. That's how intelligence works.

Billings
I will say that if the NSA has broken Tor but they don't tell their agents, pretend it isn't broken, and ignore everyone but people like Snowden or Chinese master spies in order to maintain that facade then, for all functional versions of reality, it isn't broken until someone becomes important enough to blow their cover. I'm not Osama Bin Laden. If the NSA wants to watch me but not tell their agents they can break Tor so I'm anonymous to them through it, then I'm still effectively anonymous. (That said, I'm not doing anything that would actually get me in trouble so there is that.)

Gupta
Parallel construction. You peel the data out of the cracked system, and then you use it to target efforts using in-the-open technologies or you “stumble” on some lucky happenstance that lets you nail your targets. This is much more the way these things are done.

Billings
Well, clearly you're smarter than everyone else in the security community. You should contract out.

Gupta
I did. You do know that I did a contract for NSA, don't you? Designed a genocide-resistant biometric ID card scheme pointed at Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cheap ID

Never had a clearance, never went through the wire, and never worked on anything that I did not publish: that was the deal I cut.

Billings
Yes, you mention it once or twice a year. I'm aware.

All I do is work to make sure your web browser stays unowned.

Gupta
So just consider that I might know what I'm doing, and have done my research on a rather broader landscape than the technical security analysis which most of the people playing this game are doing. The actual domain of operations is far wider than most people consider, and the result is that we lose nearly every round of conflict we have with the State about civil rights. We have to think more deeply, and we have to trust far, far less.

Billings
Your concerns and mine are slightly different as a home owner with a mortgage, a spouse, a daughter entering college in a month, and other typical midlife stuff. The state isn't my enemy. Aspects of it may be but I value law and order as well as general stability. I'm not a revolutionary and have little desire to be if it means actual open warfare, death, and suffering for folks. I don't want to live in a fascist police state but I also don't want to live in some anarchist or libertarian dream world either. I'm also a pragmatist, as doing this stuff for a living will make you.

Gupta
Doing which stuff for a living?

Billings
Working in information security as my day job ... When you contact [my company] about a security bug or a zero day, I'm one of the main people with whom you deal and I'm the process guy that works to make sure things get fixed and out the door in an organized fashion, as well as evaluating the issues (with the developers). I also started the first Oakland hackerspace, which isn't directly security related but you'd be amazed at the kind of people who come through our door.

Gupta
I spent my last six months writing software for representing complex strategic situations for analysts to discuss. Would have been FOSS too, but the project ran into Issues. Hence I have a different perspective on these things.

Billings
I understand that you do and I'm not saying your perspective isn't rational. On the other hand, if people disagree with your assessment, it isn't simply because they are uninformed or ignorant of history and security. They may just be reaching different conclusions.

Jonathan Korman
It's almost as if reasonable people may differ.

Gupta
Indeed. But there is a fundamental issue here, which is that we need to be pretty clear about what assumptions we are making when we tell users what is secure and what is not. The analysis which says Tor can be trusted is based on an implicit world model. That world model is useful. As long as people know “we assume X, Y and Z” they can decide if they agree with those assumptions.

“We assume that USG funding of the Tor network does not impact Tor's security in any way” is not something the Tor guys are in any hurry to put on their home page. That bothers me. The responses of the security community around Tor to questions about the funding stream? That bothers me even more.

Here's what responsible handling of that issue looks like; “Yes, Tor is funded by the government. We believe it's because they use Tor, and that their need for Tor outweighs any negative impacts Tor has on their ability to spy on us.” Up front, clear communication about the very real security Need To Know that the USG's funding of Tor represents. Because if the community is wrong, and that money flows because the State can easily compromise Tor in some scenarios people are going to jail or getting assassinated all over the world. We need to consider this early in the process of advising users on their risks.

Billings
What was Tor's response when you asked them about this in a friendly and mannered way?

Mostly, what I see, is people tweeting (140 chars or less) “OMFG, Tor gets government money and is OWNED!!!!” That isn't going to engender much of a conversation with them.

Gupta
Never gets that far. Every contact I've had with Tor over funding has started with pathologically hostile defensiveness because the problems are really severe. Tor doesn't exist without the State, and if you doubt the State's intention in this matter, the whole project is revealed to be a honeypot for Satan. Who can consider, in all good conscience, that they may have been coopted by what they despise?

Billings
Huh. I've talked to them about it and it was perfectly friendly. Of course, I didn't open it with implicitly calling them government stooges either.

Gupta
They were probably friendly because you basically agreed with their interpretation of the situation. When pushed from the outside, understandably, they are a little more freyed. Because if they are wrong about this, they are putting all of their users in danger and acting as a Cat's Paw for the NSA.

Not a comfortable position. Not at all.

Billings
Actually, I assume they were friendly because I know them, have talked to them for years, and, again, didn't implicitly imply anything about them. I simply asked about their funding, the questions that have been raised before, etc. I waited for the eye rolling to stop and we chatted. It wasn't a big deal. Of course, if your argument is that they are unknowingly pwned, then it really doesn't matter what they say, does it? That argument says that they can have the best intentions but their technology is so broken (without anyone knowing) that it doesn't matter.

You also have to realize how many tinfoil hat script kiddies and so forth troll them every time this issue comes up on twitter in 140 chars or less without even pretending to want a real discussion. In a lot of ways, it really doesn't matter what they say because a lot of folks make up their mind without even talking to them about it. I'm not sure why the Internet collectively forgets where Tor funding comes from every 12-18 months since Tor publishes all of their tax filings and grants on their website.

Gupta
bah internets.

“Wait, we're using your software to protect us from the government, and it's funded by the government? What the fuck?” Yes, actually, I can see exactly where the script kiddies are coming from. The simple form of this argument is pretty compelling. It may be wrong, but it's not the wrong kind of analysis.

The burden of proof is actually on the Tor project to tell us why we should expect them to be secure, given the agency which funds them. It's a critical security issue which needs open, fair, comprehensive analysis to manage.

I'd even go so far as to call it a flaw: “funded by the enemy.”

Billings
I think they point to their open and vetted code, going back years, along with their complete financial transparency.

Gupta
That doesn't tell us anything about the government's motivations.

Billings
The US government isn't my enemy. The NSA may be but they aren't the entirety of government. I'm a US citizen with ancestors that fought for the Union in the Civil War and in the Revolution. I'm not ready to declare the USA my enemy.

What does it matter what the government's motivations are if the code is secure and isn't inherently flawed? That argument only works if the NSA or someone truly has super secret mathematical voodoo that can crack Tor that they haven't told their own rank and file about and don't use in most cases where they hit Tor (or share with the FBI). The government handed over the project a decade ago.

Gupta
You can be doing your part of the puzzle exactly by the book, and still be part of a bigger picture in which your perfectly innocent, perfectly well-intentioned effort is being used to throw people in jail. And the point is not whether you, or the Tor team consider the USG as their enemy: everybody involved is on US terrorist watch lists, their communications are intercepted and so on. The government treats you as the enemy. And an awful lot of Tor users are living lives which, if subjected to full prosecutorial scrutiny, would wind up in jail cells: bitcoiners for tax evasion, anonymous for site compromises, and so on. Tor is used by an awful lot of people with something to hide, and if it does not hide them effectively, it's software which is deceiving users into acting irresponsibly, regardless of how carefully the project attempts to communicate real risks.

Billings
and yet strangely, we have a lack of prosecutions of these people ...

Gupta
Today.

Gupta
“Where did they get the names?”

Wikipedia: IBM and the Holocaust

Billings
So, given that we're never going to have any evidence proving Tor is insecure or secure in the near term, you're arguing that it simply can't be trusted because of its funding sources. Correct?

Gupta
The fact that people are being put on increased surveillance lists simply for searching for privacy tools matters.

Billings
If so, it really doesn't matter what they say.

Gupta
I'm not arguing anything simply. I'm arguing in depth and with moderate sophistication.

Billings
I'm not sure what evidence that the Tor Project could provide you that would satisfy you as to its safety since even you admit that they may be unwitting tools. There is no response that can satisfy in that case. They could all honestly say that they aren't government stooges and mean it and it wouldn't change anything. Hard to prove a negative.

Gupta
In that case, they have a problem: a glaring security question (“why does the highly intrusive spying-obsessed US government fund you?”) which you suggest can never be answered. Now tell me this: faced with such a conundrum, should users choose to trust Tor or not?

Billings
They've answered that question more than once. You just don't believe/like their answer. I'm sure I can find a blog post by them or an interview with Andrew or Roger that discusses this.

Gupta
I was asking you. I know where they stand: it's their project.

Billings
I use Tor all the time.

Gupta
Do you think users should trust Tor, if this security issue can never be resolved as you suggest?

Billings
I think a calculus can be made and that Tor can be used, yes. Otherwise, why would I use it?

Gupta
So, to be blunt, this is what I feel: with thinking at this level, we will simply never evolve tools for meaningful privacy in the future. We are simply fucked.

There is simply no model I can imagine in which the burden of evidence does not fall on Tor to explain why the US government funders are getting more out of Tor's existence than it (apparently) costs the NSA. That's the core riddle at the heart of the Tor Funding Paradox. If the answer is “gee, looks good enough to me!” then we're simply defenceless against any kind of subterfuge. We're like sitting ducks.

Billings
You've gone and read the responses from the Tor Project and its leader to this question when previously asked?

Gupta
The US government has killed roughly a million people in the past 15 years, and right now it's flying killer robots all over the world to politically assassinate people based on evidence gathered by network intercepts. If the answer, in that context, is “gee, I think we can trust them” then there is simply no hope of a meaningful political response to the world we live in.

What do they have to do? Start putting hippies in death camps?

(other than, you know, the 1+ million people in jail for non-violent drug offences, in an environment which considers prison rape to be a standard part of the punishment protocol for certain demographics)

Billings
You're turning this conversation from a conversation about Tor and its trustworthiness into a referendum on US policy and whether I or other folks approve or support it in various aspects or how we exist as both US citizens and folks with issues with aspects of US government and behavior. That's not a useful conversation here and not one that I would consider to be an intellectually honest turn. I meant to bow out 20 comments ago so I think I will do so now.

Gupta
At a certain point, one's trust in the Government has to be tempered by some realistic perspective on what they are doing.

Gupta
You are essentially saying that you believe the USG's answer to why Tor is trustworthy: “we're using it ourselves, no doubt you can trust us.” Ok, that's fine, but they're also doing this whole “killer robots working on network intercepts” thing on the other hand, at which point maybe we need to re-evaluate the veracity of their initial statements. It's sorta hard to trust mass murderers, isn't it?

Billings
Vinay, please don't construct a straw man and put words in quotes and pretend that I'm saying them. You can infer lots of things but please don't put words in my mouth and then argue with them.

Gupta
At what point do we say “the people that just stalled the global eradication of Polio to do secret genetic testing of a town in Pakistan to find one terrorist leader” are maybe not the best people to trust when we need security software funded?

Is there no connection in your mind between the vast scale of US deception on the field of intrigue to the software that we are discussing? Is there some kind of firewall which separates “how the US government does security work” from “how Tor is positioned?”

This is not a straw man at all: this entire question boils down to “do you trust the US government to tell you the truth about why it funds Tor?”

(I was not using “quote” to indicate you had said something, but to paraphrase complex arguments made by a hypothetical government employee)

Gupta
Add a PS for me, please?

Why don't leaked NSA documents mention Tor funding sources? “Tor stinks” but no query of the US government funding?

That smells so weird to me. So fucking weird.

---

There's more from Vinay Gupta in a long Storify of a Twitter thread: Tor and security versus espionage thinking.

Blackbird Dice

A few months ago I played John Harper's beautiful little story game adventure Lady Blackbird. The game is a marvel: in sixteen pages it delivers character relationships, a vivid and interesting setting, a simple game engine with a novel dice pool mechanic that plays swiftly and encourages good roleplaying, and an adventure setup that is open-ended but has a strong narrative drive. (It's a little like a very streamlined version of Fate, if you're into that sort of thing.)

My tabletop roleplaying group wrapped it up in an evening — Lady Blackbird was happily reunited with her lover, the Pirate King — but it was obvious that we could have done a long campaign with just those rules. The game is a marvel.

It left me with an itch to use that rules engine again. Then game designer Will Hindmarch ran a Kickstarter for his cyberpunk roleplaying campaign Always/Never/Now; the Kickstarter video was incredibly seductive to a middle-aged geek like me.

Hindmarch's Kickstarter updates have been tantalizing. He's late on the project, but I'm kind of glad, since it's obvious that it's a result of him obsessively refining and expanding the project. I know the feeling, so I'm happy to wait.

In the meantime, I've done a little preparatory project to be ready for when the game is published and I gamemaster it. The Blackbird dice mechanic has you count odds and evens on your dice. Essentially you're just flipping coins, though rolling dice is more fun and convenient than flipping coins. But spotting odds and evens is a tiny bit of cognitive load in this deliberately simple game mechanic, so I've made the dice you see pictured. Since Always / Never / Now is a cyberpunk game, I've taken blank dice and painted half of the sides with shiny silver nail polish and half with matte black.

Roll and count the chrome.

Because yeah, I am that kind of geek.

Piracy

There are times when I think that the media companies have no one to blame but themselves.

Apple had to trick the music industry to save it, with their “easier than stealing, and almost as cheap” solution.

But the people who control video rights are still too dumb to take my money.

Update: The same idea, again referencing Game of Thrones, from The Oatmeal.

Update: Again with Thrones, making a joke that only fans will get.

Update: A wry commentary on why pirate DVDs are usually better than the ones you pay for.

Independence Day

I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.

---

Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite, with my soft spot for lefty activism) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence. The nation was born not when people used force of arms to secure the nation, either for the first time or the last time. Rather the nation was born when the idea of the nation was first named clearly.

It's easy to forget what a rhetorical achievement the Declaration really is. The world of 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

Here's David Hume working to name a moral theory for equality, taking pains to say that there's nothing special about a king.

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights, taking pains to say that this makes sense if you think about it carefully.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here's Thomas Jefferson summing it up in the Declaration, asserting that these things are obvious givens.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

There you go. There's the fundamental principles of human rights, democracy, state legitimacy, and revolutionary action, rolled up in two hundred and three words.

I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But—forgive me getting feminist for a moment—those two uses of the word “Men” really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one; he was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. Check out his rough draft of the Declaration in which this is the longest complaint against the King of England.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

So I believe that Jefferson understood the radical implications of the idea that all people are equal, but didn't think to fit it into the language.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing — it's really good stuff.

---

Bonus posts:

• Me on Hollywood movie stars and liberal patriotism—plus those movie stars reading the Declaration
• Brad DeLong and Don Herzog on Jefferson, rights, and Nature's God

• Hilzoy on Abstract Words, Too Noble To Neglect
• Fredrick Douglass on What is the 4^th of July to a Slave?; you can hear a podcast of it read aloud ... or the marvelous Baratunde Thurston reading both Douglass and Jefferson

Unsolicited product endorsement

I used to work with Nanci Houlgate, and in addition to her other skills she turned out to be a very accomplished baker of elaborate and delicious cakes and cookies. She just opened her Etsy store Baked, and I'm already trying to think of an excuse to buy something.

She does have pirate cookies, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day is less than two weeks away ...

Arrr!

It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day today, me hearties!

Arrr!

Independence Day

I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.

---

Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite, with my soft spot for lefty activism) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence. The nation was born not when people used force of arms to secure the nation, either for the first time or the last time. Rather the nation was born when the idea of the nation was first named clearly.

It's easy to forget what a rhetorical achievement the Declaration really is. The world of 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

Here's David Hume working to name a moral theory for equality, taking pains to say that there's nothing special about a king.

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights, taking pains to say that this makes sense if you think about it carefully.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here's Jefferson summing it up in the Declaration, asserting that these things are obvious givens.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

There you go. There's the fundamental principles of human rights, democracy, state legitimacy, and revolutionary action, rolled up in two hundred and three words.

I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But—forgive me getting feminist for a moment—those two uses of the word “Men” really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one; he was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. Check out his rough draft of the Declaration in which this is the longest complaint against the King of England.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

So I believe that Jefferson understood the radical implications of the idea that all people are equal, but didn't think to fit it into the language.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing — it's really good stuff.

---

Bonus posts:

Me on Hollywood movie stars and liberal patriotism—plus those movie stars reading the Declaration

Brad DeLong and Don Herzog on Jefferson, rights, and Nature's God

Hilzoy on Abstract Words, Too Noble To Neglect

Fredrick Douglass on What is the 4^th of July to a Slave?

Arrr!

I've recently learned that Steve Jackson, the famous game designer, is a collector of Pirate Legos. Unsurprisingly, he uses them to play Evil Stevie's Pirate Game.

This is a game, involving elements of both roleplaying and tactical combat, in which grown men and women sit on the floor and push toy pirate ships around, going “Arrrr!”

Sounds great.

Y'know, my nephew has quite a few pirate Legos ...

Avast!

It be International Talk Like a Pirate Day today, me hearties!

Arrr!

Pirates of the Caribbean recap

When Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the final installment of John Williams' six-opera cycle Star Wars, came out a few years back, many people were confused about what had happened in episodes I and II, so I put together a little recap of the story so far. Several people said they found it helpful, and it certainly helped me get things straight in my own head.

Similarly, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was a picture in which a hell of a lot happens, and many folks, including yours truly, came away a bit confused. With Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End opening very shortly, and the trailer looking really fun, I thought I would try my hand at recapping again.

So, in brief:

Dead Man's Chest was the story of the quest for the heart of Davy Jones. Jack Sparrow wants it as a way to escape from having to pay the debt of his soul to Jones. Lord Beckett wants it as a way to command Jones to use the Kraken to secure the sea for the East India Trading Company. Elizabeth Swann wants it to trade it to Beckett in exchange for freedom for herself and Will Turner ... who wants it not for himself or Elizabeth, but to fulfill his oath to kill Jones that he may win his father's freedom from serving aboard Jones' ship the Flying Dutchman. Former commodore James Norrington wants it to trade to Beckett to regain his honour and his sea captaincy. And Davy Jones himself wants to protect it from all of these interlopers.

The film concludes with the heart in Beckett's possession, through Norrington. Jack has perished at the tentacles of Jones' Kraken ... through Elizabeth's treachery. Everyone save Elizabeth mistakenly thinks that Jack died a selfless hero's death. Will mistakenly thinks that Elizabeth betrayed him by becoming Jack's lover. Davy Jones mistakenly thinks that Jack absconded with his heart.

Voodoo witch Tia Dalma has proposed that the crew of the now sunken Pearl attempt to bring back Jack Sparrow by traveling to World's End under the command of the mysteriously resurrected Barbossa.

Those are the basics, but there's a lot of stuff that has evidently been set up for callbacks in the next picture. I find that the best way to be clear about the details is to revisit the dramatis personæ:

Davy Jones
Evil captain of the Flying Dutchman

As cruel and frightening as the Devil himself, Jones commands a host of magical powers which make him the greatest scourge of the sea. He can bind men to him and his ship in a Faustian bargain that extends their lives but slowly transforms them into monstrous sea creatures. He can command the terrible Kraken, whose great tentacles can sink any ship. He can mark men with the Black Spot, which draws the wrath of the Kraken.

Jones has two important vulnerabilities. He may only set foot on land once each ten years. And, to escape the pain of lost love, he carved out his own heart and locked it in the Dead Man's Chest, which was concealed on Isla Cruces until it was stolen; Jones believes Jack Sparrow to be responsible for his lost heart.

Jack Sparrow
Pirate captain of the Black Pearl

Jack gained the captaincy of the Pearl through a bargain with Davy Jones, who raised the ship from the depths for Jack in exchange for the promise of Jack's soul. Once in command, Jack lost the Pearl to a mutiny by his first mate, Barbossa, regaining the ship after defeating his mutinous crew and killing Barbossa. Knowing that Jones would soon come to claim his soul, Sparrow discovered that Jones possessed a valuable key which Jack hoped to steal and use as ransom.

With Capt Sparrow's contract up, Jones sent his crewman Bootstrap Bill Turner to mark Jack with the Black Spot. Thus vulnerable to the Kraken on the open ocean, Jack beached the Pearl on Isla de Pelegostos, where he was recognized as chief of the local cannibal tribe. But when the Pelegostos attempted to cook and eat him, Jack retook the helm of the Pearl and went to consult with the voodoo witch Tia Dalma.

Tia Dalma was surprised to have Jack coming to her for aid, since he possesses a magic compass which she traded to him some time ago. The compass points to the thing which the bearer wants most; Jack used it to find the hidden Isla de la Meurta when seeking his vengeance on Barbossa. But the compass has failed him; did he not know what he wanted?

Using the undead monkey mascot of the Black Pearl as payment, Sparrow learned from Tia Dalma several of Jones' secrets: that Jones kept the key with him at all times, that the key unlocked the Dead Man's Chest containing Jones' heart, Jones' inability to set foot on land, and a location where Jones and the Dutchman could be found. (Jack also acquired from Tia Dalma a jar of dirt of uncertain value, which would later be lost in a mishap during the confronatation with the Dutchman.)

Tia Dalma's guidance brought Sparrow to an encounter with Jones and the Dutchman at a shipwreck. Sparrow tricked Will Turner into being shanghaied onto Jones' crew, and won a few days' reprieve from Jones by promising to find a hundred new crewmembers for the Dutchman.

Seeking new crewman to trade to Jones at the pirate port of Tortuga, Jack fails to recruit the requisite hundred men ... but he does take on a few new crew members, including James Norrington and and Will Turner's fiancée Elizabeth Swann. Jack tells Elizabeth that Will has been captured by Davy Jones—leaving out his own complicity—and informs her that in order to rescue Will she wants to locate the Dead Man's Chest. Handing her his compass, Elizabeth's desire to find the Chest directs its needle, and with it Jack and crew come to Isla Cruces and unearth the Chest.

But Davy Jones has also come, frightened by his loss of the key to the chest. Will escapes from the Dutchman, bearing the key, and finding Jack, Elizabeth, and Norrington digging up the Chest. These four, plus the crew of the Dutchman and Pearl crewmen Pintel and Ragetti all compete to secure the chest ... and by extension, Jones' heart.

Jack removes the heart from the Chest and puts it in the jar of dirt, without realizing that it subsequently gets stolen out of the jar.

Back aboard the Pearl, Jack faces Jones and the Dutchman, confidently thinking he can escape Jones' wrath through possession of his heart. When Sparrow and Jones learn that Capt Sparrow does not in fact possess the heart, Jones summons the Kraken to attack the Pearl. In the confusion, Sparrow first attempts to slip away in the Pearl's single remaining longboat, but then he has a change of heart and returns to aid in the ship's defense. Largely as a result of Will Turner's leadership and daring, they succeed in driving back the Kraken briefly. But knowing that the Kraken will return, Jack regretfully orders the crew to abandon the Pearl.

As the crew departs, Jack is confronted by Elizabeth, who reminds him that the Kraken is not pursuing any of them—it only wants Jack. She tricks him, shackling him to the mast so that they may escape. He escapes from his shackles, too late to escape the Kraken but in time to stand and face his certain death sword in hand.

Lord Cutler Beckett
Carribean agent of the East India Trading Company

Cutler Beckett, wishing to see the era of piracy ended in favour of a maritime order of global trade, set many things in motion with his pursuit of Davy Jones' heart. With possession of the heart, he will control Jones, who controls the Kraken ... meaning that Lord Beckett will control the sea.

He possesses warrants for the arrest of Captain Jack Sparrow, as well as for Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner for having aided him. His soldiers seize and imprison Elizabeth and Will, and they face the death penalty. But Beckett also possesses a pardon and a letter of marque and reprisal, both signed by the King. The former will mean acquittal from the death penalty, the latter will turn its bearer into a privateer, a pirate with England's protection.

Beckett dispatches Will to find Jack Sparrow, offering Will the pardon and Jack the letters in exchange for Jack's compass. Beckett has encountered Jack Sparrow before, knows the compass' powers, and intends to use the compass to locate Davy Jones' heart.

Beckett is confronted by Elizabeth, who has escaped from prison with the aid of her father, Governor Weatherby Swann. At gunpoint, he gives her the letters of marque.

Though Elizabeth remains at large, Beckett threatens Governor Swann with his daughter's eventual capture and hanging. In exchange for Beckett's leniency with Elizabeth, Swann grants Beckett his loyalty and political influence.

At the end of Dead Man's Chest, Beckett acquires Jones' heart through James Norrington.

Beckett's reach is enhanced by his right-hand man, the shadowy cutthroat Mr Mercer.

Will Turner
Blacksmith turned freebooter

Arrested by Lord Beckett, together with his fiancée Elizabeth Swann on the morning of their wedding day, Will faces the death penalty for having aided Captain Jack Sparrow in the events of Curse of the Black Pearl. Beckett dispatched Will on a search for Capt Jack, offering the letters of marque to Jack and a pardon to Will in exchange for Jack's compass.

Will tracked Jack to Isla de Pelegostos, there joining his crew. Jack offered the compass to Will in exchange for Will's aid in locating Davy Jones' key. Trickery by Jack put Will aboard the Flying Dutchman, where he discovered his father, Bootstrap Bill Turner, among the crew. To locate the key, Will challenged Jones to a dice wager of his soul against the key. His father joined the wager, and overbid to protect Will, thus condemning himself to an eternity of servitude aboard the Dutchman. While among the crew, Will also learns that the key opens the Dead Man's Chest which contains Jones' heart.

Will stole the key and swore an oath to liberate his father by plunging his father's knife into the heart of Jones. Slipping off the Dutchman at Isla Cruces, he was reunited with Jack and the crew of the Dutchman, including Elizabeth, who he tells about Jack's treachery putting him aboard the Dutchman. He united the key with the Chest and joined the contest for possession of Jones' heart, drawing swords against both Jack and Norrington unsuccessfully.

Returning to the Pearl with Jack and the crew, Will daringly led the defense against the Kraken, having been a witness to previous attacks by the beast. He urged Jack to use the Pearl's superior speed in a bid to defeat the Dutchman so that he might liberate his father, but Jack preferred to try to run ... unsuccessfully, as they were overtaken by the Kraken. When Jack finally ordered the abandonment of the Pearl to the Kraken, Will surreptitiously saw Elizabeth kissing Jack just before Jack's final, fatal confrontation with the beast.

Returning with the Pearl crew to Tia Dalma's shack, despondent over both the lost opportunity to rescue his father and what he imagines to be the loss of Elizabeth's love, Will joins the Pearl crew in vowing to attempt a journey to World's End to recover Jack from death.

Tia Dalma asserts that Will has “a touch of destiny about him,” and with the possible exception of Elizabeth, Will is the most skilled swordsman of all of the characters.

Elizabeth Swann
Governor's daughter turned freebooter

Confronting Beckett after her escape and Will's beginning his quest for Jack's compass, Elizabeth learned of Lord Beckett's desire for the compass as a tool to find the Chest, and obtained from Beckett letters of marque and reprisal.

Disguised as a boy, Elizabeth made her way to the pirate port of Tortuga, where she found Jack recruiting sailors (as part of his ploy to deliver new crewmen to Davy Jones). Joining the crew of the Pearl, she learns from Jack that Will has been shanghaied aboard the Dutchman. Jack convinces her that the way to recover Will is through possession of the Dead Man's Chest, and her desire for the chest enables her to locate it using the compass ... though occasional thoughts of lust cause the compass needle to drift over to point to Jack Sparrow.

When it became clear that the Kraken was inescapable, Elizabeth realized that the remaining crew of the Pearl could survive if they were separated from Jack, who bearing the Black Spot was the Kraken's true target. Distracting Jack with a kiss, she shackled him to the mast of the Pearl so the crew could make good their escape.

Jack, almost pleased, calls her “pirate” as she leaves. But she is guilt-ridden at her betrayal of him, and this guilt drives her to join the crew in their attempt to recover Jack in a quest to World's End.

James Norrington
Rum-soaked former Commodore

Onetime rival to William Turner for Elizabeth Swann's affections, Norrington lost his commission in the British Navy after his obsessive pursuit of Jack Sparrow drove him to sink a ship in a hurricane. A broken man, he became a drunkard haunting the alleys of Tortuga ... until, desperate, he joined Sparrow's crew.

Once aboard the Pearl, Norrington overheard Elizabeth offering Beckett's letters of marque and reprisal to Capt Sparrow in exchange for the Dead Man's chest, and so under cover of the confusion at Isla Cruces he stole both the letters of marque and Davy Jones' heart. The crew of the Pearl presumes Norrington dead at the hands of Jones' crew, but in fact he survived to bring the heart to Lord Beckett and thus claim Beckett's signature on the letters of marque.

Tia Dalma
Voodoo witch

Aiding the crew of the Pearl for her own hidden purposes, Tia Dalma may once have been lover to both Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones. (Tia Dalma and Davy Jones possess matching heart/crab shaped lockets.)

By means unknown, she has resurrected Jack's old rival Barbossa, who she says can lead the crew through the treacherous waters of World's End to recover Jack Sparrow from death.

Barbossa
Mutinous captain of the Black Pearl

Leader of the mutiny against Jack Sparrow, died by Jack's hand at the end of Curse of the Black Pearl, but found alive in the company of Tia Dalma at the end of Dead Man's Chest.