# On the ethics (and pragmatics) of cryptography | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [81]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2012-02-04 (from the career record), http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-ethics-and-pragmatics-of-cryptography-2985. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Crypto ethics behind later ledger and identity designs.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia (2012): Blog essay taking apart the cypherpunk dream of a code-made society, and sketching the few cryptographic...
  - Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility of access to information as an aspect of cyber policy (2012): Cyber policy essay: past a point, more surveillance data has negative value, because a state can collect... (suggested by machine)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: ESCROWNYM / cryptographic ethics / People’s Cloud (100%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: code is law (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); CheapID (2 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); critical infrastructure (3 here; 54 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated); PGP (1 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); citizens (2 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): code is law
- Importance: core-text score 0.47 (1.00 is the top), number 118 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [82] [On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia | The... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/82.md): same career work: On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia
  - [763] [FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 2/4 - "Survival & Politics" (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/763.md): same career work: On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia
- On the same works, just before: [21] [RCDS cyber (Tibbs) (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/21.md); [77] I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we... (2011); [6] [Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/6.md)
- On the same works, just after: [86] [Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/86.md); [332] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris... (2012); [342] FSFI - Smári McCarthy (2012)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: On the ethics (and pragmatics) of cryptography | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution, document, 2012-02-04, http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-ethics-and-pragmatics-of-cryptography-2985; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [81], https://guptaoption.com/texts/81.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-ethics-and-pragmatics-of-cryptography-2985) (Jan 2015 update. Note this post is three years old: it was written a year before the Snowden revelations. But it has a more-or-less accurate threat model regarding the NSA’s technical capabilities and intentions, so the piece is not out of date.) I have a knack for crypto. Actually, to be honest, I have a knack for Lego. My mind maps the things you can do with a simple set of tools/rules and then generates simple, easy ways of doing impressive things. Good examples of this: the hexayurt or the Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps system. Applied to cryptographic applications, it resulted in CheapID and the infamous, lost PKI stockmarket software I wrote once and erased in fear. Here’s our fundamental issue: there are (at least) three actors we need to consider in cryptographic applications design. They are The User, The Mafia and The State. Most cryptographic applications designers (CADs for now) are politically naive Libertarians, and make one of two errors. They confuse the User and the Mafia, or They conflate the Mafia and the State This is a debate seen most clearly in electronic currency circles. It comes down to taxes. There are two models: this currency is for not paying taxes, because the government are basically a mafia that extracts taxation. Or this currency is not for paying taxes, because we don’t care if our users are organized crime or not, the government are worse. These are subtly different models. To model the government as a Mafia is a different thing than to model the users as potentially containing Mafias that cannot be extracted from the system. One or other assumption percolates much CAD thinking. I’ve been close to the Government. It’s not a mafia. I’ve been slightly less close to the Mafia. They’re not like users. There is a very clear need to create a system which: Protects users from the Government Protects users from the Mafia Protects users from each-other Does not protect The Mafia from The Government Now, framing cryptographic applications politics in this way is enough to give most of the people involved in the field conniption fits. The apolitical simplifications made in cryptography and cryptology are actually of the “let us assume the horse is a sphere” variety, and when you build social systems around those kinds of mathematical constructs, inevitable failure results. PGP’s web of trust had, at most, half a million users. Facebook’s web of trust has a billion and rising, while providing users absolutely no protection at all from anybody – they’re being predated by advertisers, by the State, and by each-other with no meaningful safeguards. So let’s distinguish the Mafia and the State, briefly. Anybody can declare themselves The Mafia by establishing coercion in collaboration with others The State is a special instance of cooperative coercion which may have features like popular support, a criminal justice system with rules, or control of critical infrastructure like hospitals Many of the activities of the State continue with 100% transparency, unlike the

[passage 2](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-ethics-and-pragmatics-of-cryptography-2985) Mafia and the State, briefly. Anybody can declare themselves The Mafia by establishing coercion in collaboration with others The State is a special instance of cooperative coercion which may have features like popular support, a criminal justice system with rules, or control of critical infrastructure like hospitals Many of the activities of the State continue with 100% transparency, unlike the Mafia which relies on secrecy to protect it form the State There are a plurality of States Now this teases apart a useful distinction: the State should be able to operate transparently in (nearly) all circumstances. Mafias, more or less by definition, require secrecy to operate. One could possibly argue that a Mafia which is strong enough to operate Transparently is a State, but that’s a political argument with some fundamental weaknesses which I don’t care to make. My definition of the State is that the State is any entity which can retroactively grant immunity for crimes (cf. Weber’s “monopoly of force” model) but this is an aside. We are now in a position of attempting to navigate our lives with a hostile State. Even if our own countries (hello Switzerland, hello Norway) are pretty decent, the US and its enormous technical monitoring apparatus watch us all through our cell phones and our internet connections. The panopticon is watching you read this blog post through your ISP, and it doesn’t really matter what The Law or Your Government says, because the web server is in America and they’re probably tapping the undersea cables globally anyway, at least for some traffic. The calculus of competing virtues argument for leaving America to heal after 9/11 changed with the signing of the NDAA which ratified the death of the American Constitution, moving the issues resulting from 9/11 from being a temporary breach to a permanent state of affairs. In this environment, we must therefore examine maintaining our civil rights without passive (or occasionally active) support from the State. Now, I want you to look at that construction carefully. We have, at least in America, agreed on a set of inviolable rights. These rights are not simply legal rights, they are Rights which define what can be legal. They are the Law above the Law, and graven in stone. The current US government is clearly acting illegally by asserting that it is free to murder its own citizens and hold people without trials, and there is no question that a technological implementation of basic civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure simply maintains existing legal practices in a more complex operating environment. We are not talking about implementing cryptoanarchy or end-running around the right of the State to exist. Rather, we are discussing maintaining already socially and legally established rights in the face of a wayward government. This is an extremely critical deviation from normal cryptographic applications developer practices. Most of the so-called cipherpunks wanted to implement a new political system called cryptoanarchy using software. That new political

[passage 3](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/on-the-ethics-and-pragmatics-of-cryptography-2985) cryptoanarchy or end-running around the right of the State to exist. Rather, we are discussing maintaining already socially and legally established rights in the face of a wayward government. This is an extremely critical deviation from normal cryptographic applications developer practices. Most of the so-called cipherpunks wanted to implement a new political system called cryptoanarchy using software. That new political system is full of potential problems, and is untried. Defending an existing known-good political equilibrium using software is a fundamentally different enterprise. Alice, Bob and Carol are about as sophisticated as the political constructs inside of most cryptographic applications get. The State is Carol, and the Users and the Mafia are Alice and Bob, with no distinction made. This is simply using the wrong level of abstraction to get the results you want. CheapID hinges on a single political insight: the hatred of Nation State intelligence services for each-other could be used to protect citizens from all states. That insight is then used as a political factor in designing a global identity card standard. Many see this as madness, but at least we are addressing the questions at the right architectural level. Finally, we must address the issue of secure endpoints. The smallest and cheapest system capable of resisting technical intrusion so your messages will not be read between the keyboard and your cryptographic application is a military base with three levels of doors, metal-box rooms mounted on springs, and guards watching each-other. The fantasy that consumer-grade laptops offer security is just that. Now, with all this said, we need to start rethinking the mass deployment of cryptography to foil the thieves in the wires, and to protect the human and civil rights we all have. But we must implement what we know works, and not an untried and untested new political equilibrium, no matter how attractive, just because it’s what drops out of the code. Code is law. Make law wisely. You need a Jefferson at the Keyboard to Write the New Constitution, whether the language is C or English.

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End of [81] On the ethics (and pragmatics) of cryptography | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [86](https://guptaoption.com/texts/86.md) Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the... (2012); the most closely related, [82](https://guptaoption.com/texts/82.md) On Un-Designing the Cryptographic Utopia | The... (2012); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.