The Dark Net (29 page)

p.54
‘Some of them were supporters of . . .’ Breivik used the pseudonym Sigurd Jorsalfar to write on an EDL forum in 2011. He may have attended an EDL demo in 2010.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/07/26/norway-gunman-anders-brei_n_909619.html
;
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/anders-breivik-and-the-english-defence-league.html
; in
2083
, he claims to have had more than 600 Facebook friends from the EDL – and he even claims to have ‘supplied them with processed ideological material’. Tommy Robinson has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of Anders Breivik’s links to the EDL.

p.55
‘It took these parties years . . .’ Wiks-Heeg, S., The Canary in the Coalmine? Explaining the Emergence of the British National Party in English Local Politics’,
Parliamentary Affairs
, vol. 62, no. 3; McGuinness, F.,
Membership of UK Political Parties – Commons Library Standard Note
, 3 December 2012.

p.55
‘Stephen Yaxley-Lennon . . .’ ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a pseudonym first used by a former Luton Town FC football hooligan.

p.55
‘Tommy and his friends decided to . . .’ Copsey, N.,
The English Defence League
, p.8.

p.56
‘It attracted hundreds of people . . .’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1187165/Nine-arrested-masked-mobs-march-Muslim-extremists-turns-violent.html
.

p.56
‘Together with a friend . . .’ The earliest days of the EDL remain the subject of some debate. By the time Tommy set up the EDL Facebook page, the UPL had a Facebook page (‘Ban the Terrorists’) with over 1,500 fans. Paul Ray, another early member, has claimed that ‘The original EDL was instigated by myself coming together with members of UPL (United People of Luton) and other anti-Jihad activists around the country who finally had enough of the danger posed to our local communities and the country as a whole.’ This is denied by Tommy, who said Ray had very little to do with the EDL in the beginning.

p.57
‘But the group’s reputation grew . . .’ Bartlett, J. and Littler, M.,
Inside the EDL
, Demos.

p.60
‘According to Hel Gower . . .’ In 2009, the EDL Facebook admins started banning people who used racist language, in response to growing media scrutiny of the group. Dozens were purged, and coalesced around another blog, mainly to complain about the touchy and politically correct admin. An old but good article is A. R. Edwards’ ‘The Moderator as an Emerging Democratic Intermediary: The Role of the Moderator in Internet Discussions about Public Issues’,
Information Polity,
2002.

p.63
‘It’s an online collective mainly based . . .’ It is now on its thirty-second incarnation, as it has been closed down so many times.

p.65
‘Tommy Robinson told me that almost every . . .’ The purpose of infiltrating a group is usually to get access to more private conversations, and then make them public. In 2012, one antifa group claimed to have found and infiltrated a hidden EDL group, The Church of the United Templars, which was being used ‘as a platform for grown men to post pictures of themselves dressed as Templar Knights and dream about violent attack on Muslims and “saving England”’.

p.67
‘Even then, he says . . .’ Anders Breivik’s writing also reveals how important he believed it was to ensure that nationalists make themselves difficult to identify. In
2083
, he advises: ‘Avoid using channels they can monitor for activities involving planning of the operation. Use aliases when corresponding while doing research. Use software which masks your IP address and other technology while researching via the internet (for example the Tor network,
anonymize.net
or Ipredator). Be extra careful when researching for bomb schematics (fertiliser bombs) as many terms will trigger electronic alerts. You can consider using other people’s networks remotely via laptop by parking outside their apartment/house. You can also buy an anonymous laptop and browse free from your local McDonald’s etc. Use software to remove spyware, cookies etc.’ (
2038: A European Declaration of Independence
, p.853).

p.68
‘Its self-confessed aim is to find and identify . . .’ People associated with Nick Lowles had managed to infiltrate the RedWatch Yahoo group in 2004, and claim that the purpose of doxing was to subtly encourage other people to physically attack them, without actually inciting them directly.

p.68
‘It is infrequently updated, but retains . . .’ RedWatch was first published by the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 as a printed bulletin in the 1990s (probably March 1992). The website was launched in 2001. Perhaps the most significant incident, which first brought notoriety to RedWatch, took place in April 2003, when Leeds schoolteachers Sally Kincaid and Steve Johnson had their details appear on RedWatch and soon afterwards their car was firebombed. On January 2004, the question of the legality of RedWatch was brought up by Lord Greaves, and was answered by Baroness Scotland in the House of Lords. The website was last updated on 12 September 2013, and is now only infrequently updated; who it is that currently updates and maintains the site is unclear.
http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/article/2522/redwatch-raided
.

p.68
‘Doxers seem to know no limits . . .’ The Communications Act 2003, for example, makes it an offence to send an electronic communication that is grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or of menacing character. It is also an offence to use such a network to send for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety a message that the sender knows to be false. However, it is often difficult to secure prosecution under this piece of legislation, because of the difficulty of determining how serious and realistic a menace really is.

p.68
‘People go to great lengths . . .’
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/27/the-mujahedeen-hackers-who-clean-facebook-and-the-facebook-privacy-breakthrough.html
.

p.69
‘He was a football hooligan, and now . . .’ In January 2014, Robinson was convicted of mortgage fraud and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. At the time of writing – June 2014 – he is out on early release.

p.69
‘Creating our own realities is nothing new . . .’ The American academic Eli Pariser has documented something he calls online ‘the filter bubble’: people increasingly surround themselves with information that corroborates their own world view and reduces their exposure to conflicting information. Pariser, E.,
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
. In the UK, we already have what is called a ‘reality–perception gap’. For example, in a 2011 survey, 62 per cent of respondents thought of ‘asylum seekers’ when asked what they associate with immigrants. In fact, asylum seekers are only 4 per cent of the immigrant population. Perceptions and reality part company: and social media can make this worse. It certainly has in these groups.

Chapter 3
Into Galt’s Gulch

p.74
‘Millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin . . .’
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/26/bitcoins-gain-currency-in-berlin
(accessed 9 January 2014).

p.76
‘One day in late 1992 . . .’ Manne, R., ‘The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange’ in
Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency
, Black Inc, p.204. This story is also brilliantly told in Greenberg, A.,
This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
. I draw on Greenberg’s account throughout.

p.76
‘The all believed that the great political issue . . .’ Levy, S., ‘Crypto-rebels’,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/crypto.rebels.html?pg= 8&topic
=, 1993 (accessed 23 February 2014);
www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/march/1324265093/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary
(accessed 23 February 2014).

p.77
‘At their first meeting, May set out . . .’ Much of this was taken from a paper May had written in 1988, titled ‘The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto’. At Hughes’ house, the programmers were divided into two teams. One team sent around messages in anonymous envelopes trying to evade the attentions of the other group. By bouncing the envelopes around the group, they realised it was possible to send a message without anyone working out who it originated from.

p.77
‘But computer systems could . . .’ Quoted in Levy, S.,
Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in a Digital Age
, p.208. In 1991 Gilmore said, ‘I want to guarantee – with physics and mathematics, not laws – things like real privacy of personal communications . . . real privacy of personal records . . . real freedom of trade . . . real financial privacy . . . real control of identification.’ One early post from the mailing list gives a very good flavour of the mood: ‘The people in this room hope for a world where an individual’s informational footprints – everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion – can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish; a world where the tools of prying are transformed into the instruments of privacy.’ In his comment about democracy not providing lasting freedom, May was in fact quoting fellow cypherpunk Mike Ingle:
http://koeln.ccc.de/archiv/cyphernomicon/chapter16/16.5.html
.

p.77
‘The list was hosted by the server . . .’ Levy, S.,
Crypto
.
Toad.com
is one of the first one hundred.com domain names.

p.78
‘Tim May proposed, among other . . .’ He may even have been the first to write about the branch of steganography called ‘Least Significant Bit’ in which messages are hidden in parts of audio or video files, in sci.crypt mailing list, unfortunately now lost.

p.78
‘When Hughes put forward a programme . . .’ From Tim May, C
yphernomicon
: ‘The Cypherpunk and Julf/Kleinpaste-style remailers were both written very quickly, in just days; Karl Kleinpaste wrote the code that eventually turned into Julf’s remailer (added to since, of course) in a similarly short time.’

p.78
‘It was Hughes who coined . . .’
http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
(accessed 23 February 2014).

p.79
‘Public Key encryption transformed . . .’ Tim May offers an explanation in
Cyphernomicon
: ‘I did find a simple calculation, with “toy numbers”, from Matthew Ghio: “You pick two prime numbers; for example 5 and 7. Multiply them together, equals 35. Now you calculate the product of one less than each number, plus one. (5-1)(7-1)+1=21 [
sic
]. There is a mathematical relationship that says that x = x^21 mod 35 for any x from 0 to 34. Now you factor 21, yields 3 and 7. You pick one of those numbers to be your private key and the other one is your public key. So you have: Public key: 3 Private key: 7 Someone encrypts a message for you by taking plaintext message m to make cyphertext message c: c=m^3 mod 35. You decrypt c and find m using your private key: m=c^7cmod 35. If the numbers are several hundred digits long (as in PGP), it is nearly impossible to guess the secret key.”’ (The calculation is actually incorrect: when I asked him, May explained that
Cyphernomicon
was only a first draft, and that he’d never got round to checking it as carefully as he would have liked.) David Kahn, a historian of cryptography, called this the most important cryptographic development since the Renaissance. Also Schmeh, K.,
Cryptography and Public Key Infrastructure on the Internet
.

p.80
‘“Before PGP, there was no way” . . .’ Interview with Zimmermann,
InfoWorld
magazine, 9 October 2000, p.64.

p.81
‘In the end, they decided against . . .’ In fact, three GCHQ mathematicians had already invented public key encryption a few years before Hellman and Diffie, but GCHQ chose to keep it secret. When he became GCHQ Director in 1996, Omand decided to publicly release their original proofs.

p.81
‘In 1994 May published . . .’
Cyphernomicon
began: ‘Greetings Cypherpunks, The FAQ I’ve been working on for many months is now available by anonymous ftp, details below. Because there is no “official” Cypherpunks group, there shouldn’t be an “official” Cypherpunks FAQ, as I see it. Thus, others can write their own FAQs as they see fit. Cypherpunks write FAQs? I’ve decided to give my FAQ a name, to prevent confusion. “THE CYPHERNOMICON” is what I call it. (If the reference is obscure, I can explain.)’

p.82
‘The cypherpunks were advised to read . . .’
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00616.html
; Levy,
Crypto
, p.207. Hughes, in his own version of
Cyphernomicon
, wrote that ‘with the right application of cryptography, you can again move out to the frontier – permanently’.

p.83
‘Dyson replied, “for the record” . . .’
http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/march/1324265093/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary
. Assange’s original posts are still preserved on the Cypherpunk list archive, which is available here:
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/
.

p.83
‘“I count him as one of us” . . .’ For more on the importance to Assange of the Cypherpunk mailing list, see Greenberg, A.,
This Machine Kills Secrets
, p.127, Manne, R., pp.207–13; (Assange went as far as to publish a book in 2012 called
Cypherpunks
).

p.83
‘The experience, he later wrote . . .’
http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/march/1324265093/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary
(accessed 23 February 2014).

p.84
‘His inspiration came from another cypherpunk . . .’ It now hosts 70,000 documents, including the names of CIA and MI6 agents, suppressed photos of soldiers killed in Iraq, and maps of government facilities.