Lavabit will always happen when servers are involved

One thing we can depend on as humans, power corrupts! Whether the Roman Empire, the British Empire or the ‘isms’ such as Communism, Capitalism etc. greed always leads to power struggles and then these are won, that society actually dies. It is simple to work out why, this piece is not about that. This piece is about a simple and logical mechanism that will protect our digital society from the ravages of the power-hungry governments and corporations that have gone or are going out of control.

Why do we keep doing these things and not changing our approach?

Insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein,

Will secure servers help (we have great encryption)

No, simple, as humans are involved, greed and corruption will happen.

Will web of trust or friend networks fix this?

No, simple, as humans are involved, greed and corruption will happen.

Ok then will a top-secret closed source highly encrypted private network work?

No, simple, as humans are involved, greed and corruption will happen.

What about the recent things like Tor etc. do they help

No, simple, as humans are involved, greed and corruption will happen. (human involvement at servers)

What will then ?

That’s easy to say but hard as hell to create. The answer is a fully maths based network that provides encryption, obfuscation and protection of data and communications. It has to be a self maintaining system and have a somewhat symbiotic  relationship with humans. It should allow humans to access its services but importantly the network should never store human readable data. Bitcoin gives us a preview of what may help, decentralisation of core services protected by logic and maths. We should not all jump on bitcoin but look closer at what it teaches us. Logic and security are obvious. Servers and centralisation are unnatural and will always fail.

This should be obvious to humankind by now!

About David Irvine

Enthusiastic human :-)