From 9861672f5a91869fc2bf0df513198387637d92ba Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thomas Walker Lynch Date: Thu, 14 May 2026 19:01:55 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] docs --- document/A1.html | 497 +++++++++++++++ document/A2.html | 830 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ document/About computer security.html | 497 +++++++++++++++ document/google.txt | 10 + document/temp.txt | 32 + document/white-paper.html | 81 +++ 6 files changed, 1947 insertions(+) create mode 100644 document/A1.html create mode 100644 document/A2.html create mode 100644 document/About computer security.html create mode 100644 document/google.txt create mode 100644 document/temp.txt create mode 100644 document/white-paper.html diff --git a/document/A1.html b/document/A1.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06a423e --- /dev/null +++ b/document/A1.html @@ -0,0 +1,497 @@ + + + + + About Computer Security + + + + + + + + + + +

Introduction

+ We live in a dangerous world, so we need security. The threats we face are real: hostile nations seeking weapons of mass destruction, terrorists who would hurt us, spies stealing our technology, blackmailers encrypting our data for ransom, and scammers using the Internet to rob our grandmothers, to mention only a few of the threats we face. +

+ What has made our nation a shining light in the face of such threats has a lot to do with the group intelligence effect. To give an example, when people come to a 4H fair and buy a contest ticket to guess the weight of a pig, it is usually not the agricultural experts who come the closest. Nor is it typically a lucky contestant. Rather, the most accurate value is consistently gotten by averaging all the individual guesses. This is group intelligence. +

+ In the US, anyone can express an opinion, and they typically do. Any citizen who is qualified can invest in projects, and even if unqualified, can join in with crowd-funding. We have an active marketplace of ideas, and this has made us strong. +

+ As a researcher, I commonly download source code for the Linux operating system and modify it to see if ideas for improving it actually work. I currently have a "subu" security algorithm up on GitHub. I am one of tens of thousands of independent actors adding intelligence to software development. What an irony it is that Android, which is based on Linux, utilizes a closed root system. Yet, can a person even imagine the modern smartphone market without the foundation of Android? Open architectures are the engine of our digital economy. +

+ Yet, as explained in this white paper, our current approach to cybersecurity is threatening to dismantle this open ecosystem. We appear to be heading down a path toward a novel type of authoritarianism. In this new system, instead of the state asserting control directly over individuals, they are preparing to assert control over their computers. Instead of suppressing speech directly, the architecture is being shifted to limit who can communicate with whom over the Internet, and to dictate what the nature and utility of that information can be. +

+ In my opinion, the dangers we face indeed possess a high probability of spelling the end of the anonymous participant on the Internet. However, this does not have to lead to computer authoritarianism; we can secure our networks while preserving group intelligence. +

+ This paper does not provide the complete Reasoning Technology proposal, as the intellectual property is still being worked on, and the deep technical details are better suited for a different venue. Rather, this paper explains the structural trap the industry is currently falling into, and specifically analyzes recent Congressional bills to demonstrate how current legislative efforts are inadvertently accelerating this descent. +

+ +

How experts think about safety

+ +

Linear risk

+ In this model, each term is a product of the cost and the probability that the cost will be incurred. Then all the terms are summed to get a total expected cost. +

+ + + T = Î£ (t_i × c_i) + + +

+ Here t_i is the probability of the event and c_i is the cost. As an example, consider that there is a 0.2 probability that a person forgot their password, and it will cost 900 seconds to recover it. (Here 0.2 is 20%, 1 out of 5 times). There is a 0.1 probability that a person made a typo in the user name which results in 45 seconds of time to figure out. There is a 0.3 probability that a person will type the password wrong, costing 15 seconds. There is a 0.05 probability that a person will get the password wrong 3 times and be locked out for a day, and thus a 0.65 chance that they type it correctly, taking 5 seconds to log in. +

+ + + T = 0.2 × 15 + 0.1 × 45 + 0.3 × 15 + 0.05 × 86400 + 0.65 × 3 + T = 4334 seconds + + +

+ Statisticians call this the expected time it will take to log in, though this specific time is not among the actual individual scenarios. After many times of logging in, the average time will tend towards this value. The reason this time result is so high is because, though it is highly improbable, it is overwhelmingly expensive to have 3 wrong attempts. +

+ The true dollar expense depends on how much a person's time is worth and how much of the waiting time can be filled with other tasks. If it is work time, it will be one value; if it is time with children, another. At $100 an hour with no fill-in tasks, the average login cost comes to $7,223. And people wonder why computers are so frustrating. Now imagine spending 8 years dealing with ID.me. +

+ If this login model is implemented across millions of people, one would hope the company is protecting more than the aggregate login cost per user, otherwise they are costing users more than the value they hold on the system. +

+ +

Catastrophic failure

+ When a person is sitting in an airplane, they probably hope the airline engineers were not thinking in terms of averages, and indeed the engineers were not. Instead, they planned for a very low probability of catastrophic failure. +

+ + + P = 1 - Î (1 - p(t_i)) + + +

+ Here p(t_i) again represents the probability that a specific failure t_i could happen. P is then the probability that the system will fail due to any one of the independent parts t_i failing. The symbol Î means to take the product. +

+ As an example, consider a small business where a Wi-Fi password gets guessed with probability p(t₁) = 0.02, the manager clicks a scam email with probability p(t₂) = 0.10, and a thief sneaks into the back room with probability p(t₃) = 0.01. +

+ + + P = 1 - (1 - 0.02)(1 - 0.10)(1 - 0.01) + P = 0.13 + + +

+ There is a 13% probability that the system will be compromised. That is far higher than would normally be tolerated for a catastrophic risk. Here the biggest contributor was the human variable. +

+ This is called the failure equation. Notice that it scales exponentially with the number of terms, making it disproportionately more difficult to drive the total failure rate down as systems grow more complex. For a small, simple computer system it is possible to reach P = 0, but even then it is exceedingly difficult. When it comes to security, small and simple is beautiful. +

+ That scenario is unlikely to be found for a system that serves the general public. Most security engineers simply implement existing protocols. Those protocols use algorithms that we assume to be formally proven to be correct, although that is often not the case, and it is certainly not the case for common algorithms used on the Internet. Even for correct security protocols that are correctly implemented, hackers have consistently found physical ways to vary timing, monitor power consumption, or grind the tops off chips to break into systems. +

+ +

The role of perspective

+ It is typical that fraud cases act as linear risk failures from a credit card company's point of view, as they statically plan for some fraud to occur every year. However, those exact same risks are viewed as a catastrophic failure from the individual card holder's point of view. The entire purpose of insurance is to put card holders into the same boat as their card companies. +

+ Computer security is almost always treated as an uninsured catastrophic risk situation. There is typically no contract with users, and legally there sometimes can be no contract, to make up for losses after a security lapse. +

+ +

Dynamic behavior

+ In computer security, a single failure is not treated as an isolated event; it spreads like a disease. It is assumed that once an attacker has figured out a way in, the attacker will scale that solution mechanically or sell it on the dark web. Consequently, once a failure occurs, the catastrophic failure equation changes, with a near 100% probability of repeat for the failure term. +

+ +

Helps the bad guys, hurts the good guys

+ Most security systems are breakable or bypassable in the face of extreme innovation and effort. Once broken, an organization starts adding layers of friction on its way to the Marianas Trench. +

+ Good-intentioned users do not expend effort to break systems. In contrast, bad actors do. Thus, the trend over time is for security to severely hurt the productivity of good people, while bad actors make use of hard-won know-how to easily bypass it. +

+ +

Emergent properties from secure systems

+ +

The Marianas Trench paradigm

+ To make a computer secure, disconnect it from the Internet, turn it off, lock it in a safe, hire a firm to take the user, the safe, and armed guards around the world on a ship; then drop the safe into the Marianas Trench. +

+ Then to access said computer later, mount a deep sea salvage operation, raise said safe, unlock it, connect the computer to a generator, plug in Starlink, type in the user name, and oops, the password was forgotten. +

+ Of course the password was forgotten, because when it was made the system forced the inclusion of capitals, numbers, and special characters, so unless a person named their dog Xr$nzD4s7, they will not remember it. So then travel back home, get out a notebook and look at the password. +

+ We have all experienced this in some form or another, grace our IT friends. Thus, we all know intuitively that security comes at the expense of utility. The Marianas Trench paradigm is the asymptotic eventuality for all computer systems that have security as their top priority. +

+ +

Reliability and Security are Competing Forces

+ Security requires the centralization of control where logins, passwords, and identification information are accessed and verified. Central points of control are open to single points of failure. They are also honeypots that attract the most sophisticated of attacks. Once the cat is out of the bag, there is no putting it back, regardless of how capable the security staff is. +

+ +

Economic Progress and Security are Competing Forces

+ Productivity comes from efficiency, and the economy depends upon increased productivity. For reasons just outlined, security is at odds with efficiency. Therefore, overbearing security throttles the economy. +

+ For security to be viable, the net economy must be greater than the economy suffering the theft: E - S > E - T. Often, the drag is so severe that S > T. There comes a point when less net forward progress is made on secure systems than insecure ones. Security becomes worse than the theft it prevents. +

+ +

Extraordinary maintenance problem

+ When software has a bug, a patch can be written by most any developer, then issued as an update. In contrast, when security software has a bug, the problem must first be understood by experts, who might not even reside at the company. Often alternative approaches must be architected. Essentially it is starting over. +

+ Security fixes are often not as easy to apply because an insecure system might have become compromised. Patching a system that has a backdoor installed on it will result in a patched system with a backdoor. If data has been stolen, no patch can take the stolen data out of the hands of those who took it. Furthermore, customer support can typically do little or nothing, as security features often cannot be turned off. +

+ +

Engineers Design to Spec, Leaders Carry Vision

The Biometric Fallacy

+ The startup Pay By Touch incinerated $130 million on the premise that fingerprints are passwords. Yet sounding like a cool tech was enough to command a lot of funding. +

+ The physical reality: A person leaves their "password" on every water glass, door handle, and table they touch. Security engineers design to specifications and can lose sight of the forest for the trees. They can build a mathematically perfect verification algorithm while remaining structurally blind to the physical reality that the "secret" is being left on a restaurant table. Leaders provide common sense vision. If a person is a leader, they should not be afraid to ask questions about the base metrics of performance and expect answers that they understand. +

+ +

The Technician's Crouch

+ In 1996, at a presentation to the SBC board, a man proposed a smartphone technology investment. One of the board members invited their "tech guy" to "interpret." Feeling his expertise was being challenged, the technician argued defensively that phone switches were the future and smartphones were a fad, simply because switches were what he understood. Two years later, the switch-centric giants like Nortel went into bankruptcy, and the world moved to the smartphone. Off switches were being handled by voice over IP. +

+ Technicians optimize for the survival of their current tools and silos. They are rarely big-picture visionaries. Lawmakers must trust their common-sense judgment, and expect entrenched technology interests to propose further entrenchment. The goal is structural architectural integrity for the economy, rather than adding more layers that make life difficult for a person. +

+ +

The coming security apocalypse

+ +

The situation with public key cryptography

+ All security today is built over communications that are secured by public key cryptography. There is no formal proof for any public key cryptography algorithm in use today that demonstrates that at a computation theoretical level it actually works. +

+ Thus, catastrophic failure could arrive at any hour, and then all security on the Internet, current ID schemes, bitcoin, etc. would be broken. This lack of proof problem speaks to public key cryptography at the most fundamental level, and thus applies to existing hardware, software, and systems. When quantum computing comes online, Shorâs algorithm will break public key cryptography. +

+ +

The situation with biometrics

+ Fingerprints are left on door knobs and glasses. A fingerprint cannot be used as a secure password. Our faces are shown in public and in modern times are captured by cameras in buildings on street corners, through the front windshield when we drive under traffic cameras, and by anyone who gets within a few hundred meters and can take a snapshot. +

+ Generative AI is already a reality and a practical technology. With generative AI a signal with a life-like model can be created and given to a computer in place of a camera output. Today there is no long-term secure biometric system. +

+ +

Why do we want to ID computer users

+ +

Policing money

+ A product of the 1970s War on Drugs. To stop the outflow of illicit payments, the state began monitoring the movement of value. This transformed the bank from a private vault into a state monitoring station. All money being transferred had to have a name attached to it. +

+ +

Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT)

+ The United States is one of only two nations that utilizes Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT) instead of Residency-Based Taxation (RBT). Because the IRS must track every dollar a citizen touches globally, the US is the lead architect of the global financial "Phone Home" system. This requires every bank on the planet to report on American dealings (FATCA). +

+ This structural requirement is the hidden driver for an interoperable, global digital ID. Every dollar is now a suspected launderer, a drug payment, or a tax-evading "sneak." In a CBT world, the source and identity of the money are more important to the state than the payment itself. +

+ +

We are reaching a critical instability point where we need ID to organize our databases

+ Due to the explosion in number and size of databases, IDs are needed to keep the databases coherent and accurate, and to unify them. This is desired both by the tech companies and law enforcement. +

+ +

State (The Sovereign Sinks & Secret Ledgers)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

State Database / Agency	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
State DMVs / Real ID	Facial biometrics, physical characteristics, home address.	The foundational physical anchor; increasingly weaponized by law enforcement for automated facial recognition sweeps.
IRS & Social Security (SSA)	SSN, income, employment history, family structure.	The ultimate financial gatekeeper; defines the "Right to Work" and the legal existence of the citizen.
Incarceration (3 Layers)	Local jail bookings, State DOC records, Federal BOP data.	Creates a permanent, multi-jurisdictional underclass. Often networked via private aggregators, ensuring data persists even after exoneration.
Child Welfare (e.g., CCWIS)	Abuse allegations, family history, psychological profiles.	Interstate data sharing ensures subjective stigmas follow citizens across borders.
FBI (NGI Database) / CODIS	Fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, DNA, arrest records.	Permanent biological tracking; high risk of false-positive algorithmic criminalization.
DHS / Customs (CBP)	Passport data, international travel history, border scans.	Controls physical freedom of movement; tracks global associations and jurisdictional shifts.
Voter Registration & Courts	Party affiliation, voting frequency, civil judgments.	Publicly accessible state data aggressively scraped by commercial brokers to fuse political identity with consumer profiles.
EDGAR (SEC)	Corporate submissions, quarterly/annual financial filings.	Publicly exposes the financial footprints and corporate affiliations of executives and major shareholders.

+ +

Commercial (The Surveillance Brokers & Shadow Financials)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Data Broker / AdTech	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
ChexSystems & EWS (KYC)	Account history, bounced checks, suspected fraud profiles.	The "Shadow Credit Score" used to deny banking. Crucial Note: Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks are legally prohibited from telling a citizen what is in their fraud file.
Meta (Facebook/IG) Graph	Social graphs, political leanings, private communications.	A de facto global ID database; continuously scraped by AI algorithms to feed state intelligence.
Acxiom / LiveRamp	Up to 3,000 data points per person (offline & online).	Creates a "connected identity" linking web browsing to offline purchases.
Experian / Equifax	Credit health, employer data, loan default likelihood.	Dictates financial participation; heavily targeted by hackers.
CoreLogic	Complete property, mortgage, and historical tax records.	Aggregates physical residence history across millions of property transactions.
LexisNexis	Demographic info, behavioral analytics, public court records.	Sells targeted audience segments to private entities and law enforcement.

+ +

+ Monotonic failure: each database is a honeypot, and once data is stolen, the damage cannot be undone. The KYC/Fraud database point is particularly chilling for a Congressional briefing because it highlights a system where the citizen has zero due process, they are judged, convicted, and digitally exiled by a black box they have zero permission to look inside. +

+ +

International scammers

+ Though we police money internationally, to the great consternation of out of jurisdiction banks, many of whom will no longer serve Americans, quizzically we take no enforcement action on international scammers who steal from our senior citizens through phone calls and spam mail. Russian hackers who were found creating conflict on the Internet. By IDing those on the Internet, we can deny access and prevent bad actors from entering the ecosystem in the first place. +

+ +

Current ID efforts

+ +

Base Categorizations of ID Technology

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Category	Technologies Used	The Structural Flaw
Physical Hardware Gates	mDL (Mobile Wallets), Smart Cards, NFC/RFID	Demands mandatory capital expense (Smartphones) and exposes users to tracking.
Biometric Anchors	Facial Recognition, Iris, Fingerprint	Biological identifiers cannot be rotated or changed once compromised.
Cryptographic Ledgers	PKI, X.509 Certificates, eIDAS Wallets	Requires a centralized "State Bishop" (Certificate Authority) to grant trust.
Algorithmic Profiling	Age-Gating, Credit Scoring, AdTech MAIDs	Fuses offline identity with unregulated commercial surveillance markets.

+ +

State Sanctioned ID efforts

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Initiative Name	Jurisdiction	Core Technology	The Structural Failure
EU Digital Identity Wallet	European Union	Public Key (W3C/OpenID)	Mandatory cross-border tracking. Vulnerable to quantum collapse and centralized CA compromise.
Aadhaar	India	Biometric Match	World's largest biometric honeypot. Fails physically: manual labor wears off prints, excluding the poorest.
GOV.UK One Login	United Kingdom	AI Biometric Match	No offline parity. Deepfakes and injection attacks bypass liveness checks, locking citizens out.
e-ID	Estonia	Public Key (Smart Cards)	Total digital dependency. "State Bishop" architecture means a single chip failure or CA breach deletes the citizen.
Singpass	Singapore	AI Biometric Match	Fuses private banking and state services. Synthetic media renders the gatekeeper mathematically blind.
gov.br	Brazil	Biometric Match	The "Water Glass" Lift: high-res biometrics are static. Once copied, the citizen's identity is permanently breached.
Login.gov & ID.me	United States	AI Biometric Match	Outsourcing core rights to private VC firms. Honeypot creation. Generative AI makes the biometric barrier obsolete.
Apple/Google Wallets (mDL)	US (General)	Public Key (SE)	The Mandated Shackle. Gives Silicon Valley monopoly control. Vulnerable to supply chain hardware attacks.

+ +

A house built on sand

+ Every one of these technologies collapses under the scenario where identity is proven via credential data that can be observed and duplicated, because any system relying on a replicable digital signal structurally fails to distinguish a legitimate human being from a perfect mathematical or physical simulation. +

+ Even Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) falls victim to this structural failure because it merely replaces a physical secret with a mathematical one, while still transmitting the proof across the same channel as the data. Possession Is Not Identity: A public key system proves that a person possesses a private key; it does not prove who that person is. If an attacker uses a memory injection to scrape a private key or intercepts the signing process, the resulting bit-stream is mathematically perfect. +

+ The server has no capability to distinguish between the rightful owner and a thief because the "signal" of identity is simply another string of data bundled with the transaction. Because current architectures mix control signals and data, a person's "identity" becomes observable to the system itself. If the math can be seen, it can be simulated. +

+ +

Evolution of ID technology

+ Based on concepts of bureaucracy, mandated expense, and the biometric fallacy, we are looking at Dante's 7 Levels of ID Heck: +

Stage 1: The Bureaucratic Number (The Card) - Dehumanization through serialization. Every human is reduced to a state-issued number; the fake ID industry becomes the only "free market."
Stage 2: The Mandated Shackle (The Smartphone) - The first government-mandated capital expense. Forcing citizens to pay for a commercial product to exist in society. The "Corporate Smartphone" (Mic/Camera/GPS) ends privacy.
Stage 3: The Biological Theft (The Biometric) - Treating a biological "username" as a "password." Security theater. A person leaves their physical "password" on a coffee cup or a door handle.
Stage 4: The Aggregation Sinkhole (The Database Explosion) - Convergence of all state and commercial human data. The "Aggregation Force" creates a single point of failure for a person's entire life.
Stage 5: The Algorithmic Gatekeeper (The Profiling) - Automated "Evil Thought" detection. Using the ID as a key for age-gating and "child safety" (California model).
Stage 6: The Interoperable Web (The Global Wallet) - The end of jurisdictional escape. EU/UK cross-border standards. If a person is banned in one place, they are invisible in all.
Stage 7: The Digital Exile (The Marianas Trench) - Total disconnection from the "Right to Exist." De-banking and removal from the digital society. The "Attractor" is reached: a system so secure that even the rightful owner cannot access their life.

+ +

Current Legislation

+ The following bills represent the current trajectory of federally funded digital identity infrastructure: +

H.R. 7270 (The Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act) - A bill creating federal grant programs through the Treasury to incentivize states to adopt Mobile Driver's Licenses (mDLs) and centralized biometric verification systems.
S. 884 (Improving Digital Identity Act) - A bill establishing an interagency task force to develop a nationwide, interoperable digital identity architecture, heavily reliant on existing state DMVs and biometric ledgers.
H.R. 4589 (National Digital Identity Act) - A companion proposal pushing for the commercialization and federated sharing of state identity databases with private sector verifiers.

+ +

A better way forward: The reasoning technology plan

+ We are currently charting a course for the byzantine ending of American civilization, but there is time to change course. We must simplify. Incentives are more powerful than regulations. +

+ +

Mandatory Efficiency and Economic Impact Statements: Any federal agency or regulated private entity implementing a new security or identity measure must provide a "Net Economic Impact" audit. This addresses the "Nobody Home" problem. If a security measure costs the economy S in lost productivity through customer service paralysis, and the theft it prevents is only T, the measure is illegal if S > T.
The Research Integrity Act (Scientific Transparency): Criminalize and fine academic and corporate dishonesty in federally funded or regulated research. Apply the Daubert principle to regulatory research to prevent "Microwaves are Candy" style industry capture.
The Digital Habeas Corpus (Database Transparency): Apply FOIA-style transparency to all databases, public and corporate, that utilize a citizen's data. Every person has a right to see, contest, and correct any entry.
Verifiable Architectural Provenance: Mandate that the provenance of all AI-driven media be identifiable via an architectural signaling standard. A person must be able to distinguish between human and synthetic media at the architectural level.
Shift to Offensive International Policing: Redirect federal resources from "IDing the Victim" to "Tracking the Attacker." Policing the borders of the internet is more effective than turning the interior into a digital prison for citizens.
Structural elimination of security dependencies: The best security is removing the need for it. Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT) requires a massive, global surveillance apparatus to track every citizenâs financial movements. Ending CBT and shifting from income tax to trade duties would structurally eliminate the need for vast swathes of the current global digital tracking infrastructure. Organizations like American Citizens Abroad (ACA) advocate for ending CBT, and similar efforts support state-side banking access for expats burdened by the current surveillance dragnet.
Reasoning Technology ID technology, RTID: Existing models force lawmakers into a false choice between massive surveillance honeypots or zero utility. Reasoning Technology has developed a foundational identity architecture that shatters this dichotomy. It works in the presence of quantum technology, works in the presence of strong AI, works without special hardware features, has minimal productivity impact, and is maintainable.

+ +

Appendices

+ +

Appendix A: "Microwaves are Candy" and the Corporate Track Record

+ The current RF/Microwave regulations entirely ignore cellular and neurological damage. When told that wireless signals are entirely safe, look at the historical track record of corporate industry assurances: X-Rays, Leaded Gasoline, Thalidomide, Asbestos, Tobacco, PFAS, and Glyphosate. The FDA must conduct and rely upon conflict-free studies. +

+ +

Appendix B: The Aadhaar Tragedy

+ India's Aadhaar system is the ultimate realization of Stage 4. A centralized biometric database that has suffered massive data leaks and routinely excludes the poorest citizens because their manual labor has worn off their fingerprints. +

+ +

Appendix C: The History of "Secure" Cryptographic Backdoors

The "Clipper Chip" (1990s): The NSA attempted to mandate a microchip with a "key escrow." Independent researchers found vulnerabilities allowing anyone to exploit the backdoor.
The _NSAKEY Controversy (1999): A secondary cryptographic key embedded inside Windows NT 4.0 highlighted the vulnerability of relying on proprietary corporate security.
Dual_EC_DRBG (2006-2013): The NSA promoted a standard containing a structural backdoor, completely compromising the "secure" networks of anyone using it.
Crypto AG & Operation Rubicon: A Swiss manufacturer of encryption machines was secretly owned by intelligence agencies to intentionally weaken algorithms.

+ + + + + diff --git a/document/A2.html b/document/A2.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..94e8872 --- /dev/null +++ b/document/A2.html @@ -0,0 +1,830 @@ + + + + + + About Computer Security + + + + + + + + + + +

Introduction

+ +

+ Not long ago, there was no Internet, and a computer was typically installed in a physically secured facility. It is still the case today that ultimately computer security is built upon conventional security. This is something that Kevin Mitnick understood well and took advantage of. Kevin went so far as to dumpster-dive for passwords. He once walked into a building, into a manager's office, and copied information from an unattended terminal. We see conventional security issues today with lost phones, harvested ATM pins, and credit card theft. +

+ +

+ The advent of multi-user computing introduced the problem of authentication, which is closely related to the problem of identification. To access a multi-user computer a person had to pass a challenge test where he or she provided a username and a password. As means of identification, each username was given to one person, and that person set the password and was asked to keep it secret. This saddled each user with the burden of remembering or safely storing his or her username and password. +

+ +

+ If a user could not reproduce one or both of his username and password, the user could not do any work on the computer, no matter how important or urgent that work was. The fear of being blocked from working caused many users to favor easy to remember passwords, or to write them down and place them into easily accessible places, such as next to a terminal. Thus began the ritual of administrators blaming users for not being more careful, when in fact the system was designed for failure. The typical reaction when the system fails? Force users to make harder to remember passwords. +

+ +

The lost password problem led to the need for password replacement policies. Thus after an attacker bypassed conventional security, the would-be cybercriminal, informally called a hacker, would attempt to either: abuse the password replacement policy, find a way around logging in perhaps due to a software defect, or obtain a password. Common methods for obtaining a password were to be involved in a project and be given one, bribe or trick an a person involved in a project to share it, guess it, or steal it. Thus began the game of modern cybersecurity. +

+ +

+ Once a user logged in, his or her data was isolated from the data of other users via a system of ownership and permission attributes attached to files. As the operating system was involved both during login and for the access of files, the operating system read the file attributes and policed access. This is still done. Even on personal devices various programs and services, and the operating system's programs themselves, run as different users. +

+ +

+ Due to data isolation, once an attacker broke into an account, the question would become one of how to break into other accounts on the same machine. Often this would entail breaking into an account with elevated permissions. Techniques included finding data that was not properly protected, or taking advantage of flaws in the system of authentication or isolation. These are known as exploits. Flaws could be due to human error in leaving sensitive data open to be read, or it could be due to finding a bug in the architecture or implementation. +

+ +

+ Then computers started talking with each other over telephone lines using screechy voices. This brought with it all the problems of distant communications that had been known from long before computers, going back to the early days of the telegraph and Marconi radio. Wired Internet has similar properties to telegraph lines and radio, while cell communication is radio. +

+ +

+ It was an obvious next step for hackers who found exploits to then write programs that would take advantage of those exploits and thus spread widely. Such a program is called a worm. As a cute example (or at least, it appeared cute at first), one day in 1987 a person received a Christmas card in character art that made a tree with a train that went around it. While it was running it read the person's email contacts and sent the same card to everyone in it. It ceased to be cute when the company's entire global computer system became saturated and crashed. +

+ +

+ A virus differs from a worm in that it solves the problem of getting a person to execute the code by embedding itself in software that the user was going to run anyway. Thus in addition to automating taking advantage of an exploit, it also must contain code to infect at least one other program. +

+ +

+ The Christmas Tree hack appears to be novel in three aspects, firstly that the damage was indirect. Instead of deleting or stealing data, it denied computer services to the company. Secondly, the damage was not intentional. The student who wrote it intended it to be cute. Thirdly, it required human participation to spread as a person had to open it, but this was not much of a problem, as who doesn't want to open a Christmas card from a friend during the holiday season? +

+ +

+ When such damage can be caused by accident, is the fault that of the person who caused it, or of the design of the software? Should we be thankful to be alerted to the software's faults? White Hat hackers are those who hack so as to find exploits before bad actors do. But then who is wearing a White Hat, and who is not? Legislation has been passed to make computer hacking without permission illegal independent of who did it or why, though a person would expect the issues raised here to affect the discretionary use of enforcement and judicial efforts. +

+ +

+ On this latter point, should legislation be used as an attempt to fix what are essentially technical problems? If legislation becomes an effective liability shield for industry, then there is no longer incentive to design secure computers. That in turn would lead to a population of computers as a whole becoming vulnerable. In such a situation problems would happen at scale all at once when more audacious hackers come on the scene, instead of happening little by little. +

+ +

Industry faces many hurdles when securing their products. One of the bigger ones is that of coordination and standards, which often must result in open software. Government input is effective in this arena. I'm reminded of Constantine telling the Christian hordes to unify and compelling leaders to come to agreement at the conference of Nicea in 325. +

+ + +

+ New forces have intensified and popularized the cybersecurity problem. These include the fact that there is a global Internet that was not designed to be secure, that e-commerce has become popular, and that the world economy has moved to an intellectual property basis so there is stiff competition among global companies and among the state institutions of the various countries. There still exist students such as the Christmas Card author who create mischief, the disgruntled employee, or the would-be thief. In addition there are now entire departments of state hackers and multinational organized crime groups involved. There are now teams of scammers in India, and complete companies of hackers for theft and profit in Turkey, and other places. There was a do-it-yourself software package for sale in Nigeria for scamming people. They enter Europe and the US, not through airports, but via the Internet. +

+ +

+ The popularity of advertising-driven social media platforms has led to unprecedented numbers of people being exposed to the state-of-the-art techniques in marketing. What long ago was the individual provocateur, or small group of provocateurs, has transformed into hidden state-sponsored multi-million dollar marketing contracts and buildings full of people who have specific goals when participating in discussions. When a corporation engages a marketing firm, that firm sends emails out to YouTube creators and other influencers suggesting a topic. Then they engage groups who are experts at creating or posting comments, which today can be AI based bot farms. A more recent approach has been for wealthy interests to buyout media outlets and even trusted YouTube channels. This latter technique being used to circumvent paid sponsorship reporting requirements, though technically they should still make such reports, it is not enforced. +

+ +

+ Marketers and corporations have a long tradition in the U.S. of accomplishing two things, taking advantage of the vulnerable, and creating a good image for themselves among the populace at large. In the opening scene of "Rebel Without a Cause", Jim Stark is brought into the police station for public drunkenness. He is shown lying on the sidewalk, inebriated and playing with a toy monkey. Throughout he is smoking cigarettes. Some saw this as a coming of age movie, others as giving children negative role models. In either case cigarette and alcohol companies ingratiated their products with teenagers. The argument was made that parents should discuss these things with their children, or not have them see the movie, though that was probably more easily said than done. +

+ +

+ Today, a teenager can seemingly spend 24/7 with his or her nose in a device watching adult material, and his or her parents will not even know what the material is, let alone have an opportunity for a sit-down to talk about it. Consequently we have a movement to control the viewing of TikTok, and in general the social media habits of young people. For industry or government to accomplish this, they are reaching for better and stronger computer security features, where the 'attacker' is a young viewer, and the guarded data is marketing data. And note the heavy irony, the conflict of interest inherent in having the modern marketing industry proposing designs for more security. +

+ +

+ This brings us back to the question of the role of legislation. As noted above, government is most effective through gathering the parties and promoting standards. On the other hand, how effective can it be to bring a group of foxes together and ask them to adopt standards for protecting chicken coops? Clearly, legislation must define the goal, build in penalties for not achieving it, and require the inclusion of a diverse set of parties in standardization efforts. +

+ +

+ E-commerce already brought us a credit card infrastructure. Pornography sites, for example, already limit access through credit card verification. However social media sites, such as Facebook, fear that if they place their services behind a pay wall, it will negatively impact their business. +

+ +

It would not work to have young users to identify. What would have to be done is for all users to identify, then those who identify and are too young, or those who do not identify would be treated differently from those who identify are old enough. Registration would happen once, resulting in an old person certification token placed in the user's wallet, or even better from the point of view of industry, the token would identify the user. Presumably the wallet would be automatically queried via public key cryptography when visiting any website. +

+ +

In summary, we desire to be productive and have a good experience when computing and when online. With this goal in mind, cybersecurity professionals have developed a security stack consisting of the following layers (the first item being the base): +

+ +

Physical security
Authentication/Identification
Data isolation
Network integrity
Audited/controlled resource use
Well designed software
Streetwise users, and protection against those who are not
Sophisticated virus scanners
ID/E-commerce facilities
Golden flower garden social media forums guards
Cybersecurity laws and enforcement

+ +

+ With each new security problem, we gained a new layer on the security stack. Each layer represents logic that can have bugs and must be maintained. Maintenance can be more difficult than for typical production software. Problems typically cannot be ignored, as they either + prevent work from being done, or must be addressed as being urgent because they are related to security. These layers must interoperate, leading to an exponential explosion in the number of cases to be checked and maintained. +

+ +

+ Because sometimes security measures are misconceived, layers overlap, and technology changes quickly, some of the features found on the security stack will be security theater, defined as being measures taken that look protective, satisfy a checklist, or create an impression of safety, but do little to address the underlying threat. Examples include password rotation policies that force users to invent forgettable passwords, CAPTCHAs that waste seconds of human life while machines sail past, and identity checks that verify nothing but a credit card number stolen from the same dark web they claim to fight. +

+ +

The stack is straining under the weight; when things do not go right, the productivity loss has become palpable. This is most apparent to those on the outskirts of our system, the very people who need help to engage, but they are being pushed away. We need simplification, not more layers. Yet, more layers are being called for. +

+ +

The garden of golden flowers

+ +

+ A group of people working as an entity can potentially be more intelligent than any individual in the group. This is why we often work together. It does not always work out, but when it does we metaphorically have a garden that produces the golden blossoms of productivity. +

+ +

+ Today working together often means logging into our devices and meeting online. Cybersecurity is then key to protecting and cultivating the garden. However, misapplied cybersecurity itself can prevent the gold flower cultivation it was said to protect. +

+ +

Group intelligence

+ +

+ In 1906, statistician Francis Galton attended a livestock fair. There was a contest with a prize to be awarded to anyone who could correctly guess the weight of an ox. The closest guess did not come from experts, nor was it a lucky guess from a contestant. Rather, the closest number was the average of all the guesses. +

+ +

+ Francis Galton’s experience was not a fluke. As another example in 2009, DARPA placed ten red weather balloons at random locations across the United States and offered a prize to the first team to locate all ten. The winning MIT team used a decentralized, social-network-based approach that rewarded people for sharing information widely. They found all ten balloons in under nine hours. No centralized intelligence agency could have matched this. The open network solved what a closed system could not. +

+ +

+ In 2006, Netflix offered a million dollars to anyone who could improve their recommendation algorithm by ten percent. Thousands of teams competed. No single team could crack it. Teams began merging their approaches, and the winning solution was a blend of several groups’ work. Again, group intelligence accomplished what isolated expertise could not. +

+ +

+ While regulators and major banks failed to foresee the 2008 financial crisis, a decentralized network of bloggers, independent analysts, and anonymous forum participants correctly identified the housing bubble years in advance. The crowd saw what the centralized institutions missed. The cost of not listening was measured in trillions of dollars and millions of lost homes. +

+ +

+ In the United States, anyone can express an opinion, and they typically do. Any citizen who is qualified can invest in projects, and even if unqualified, can join in through crowd-funding. We have an active marketplace of ideas. This is why Americans have been living in a garden of golden flowers, with generation after generation bringing forth innovations. +

+ +

+ As a contrasting example, consider the Soviet Union, where all project investment went through centralized committees, and company management was merely an extension of the state. Or consider East Germany, where the Stasi monitored private conversation itself. Authoritarian systems suppress group intelligence, and thus fundamentally fail to benefit from it. The flowers wither in these systems. Let us not duplicate such systems online. +

+ + +

Observed qualities of golden flower gardens

+ +

For a group to innovate, the contributors must feel comfortable to speak. +Groups can follow neutral rules of order; however when even a mild amount of intimidation is applied, the required chemistry will be suppressed. Intimidation can be physical coercion, censorship, social pressures, rewards or punishments for certain outcomes, or even something as simple as desiring to be somewhere else. +

+ +

+ In addition the following qualities tend to be present in productive groups. These are not requirements, but lacking any one of them drastically lowers the probability of success. +

+ +

+ shared minimal basis of understanding. There is enough common ground for signals to travel: a shared language, shared concepts, a common reference frame. At the livestock fair, the common basis was the English language, knowing what an ox is, what weight means, and what a pound is. +
+ articulation capacity Some members, or at least one member, can translate raw data and wild ideas into intelligible articulated proposals. +
+ culture of sincere intent The group’s prevailing mood is that of a genuine desire to reach a better place. This is an emergent property of the group as a whole. A few cynics might even be a positive influence by bringing counterpoint and promoting discussion, while a gadfly, or even a bad-faith actor, if not too overbearing, can be worked around. +
+ diversity of awareness profiles Constituents perceive reality differently, perhaps due to having different backgrounds, different cognitive frames, and/or different lived experiences. However, hostility between members can destroy the milieu. +
+ success metric The group must possess some capacity to check, test, or filter contributions more easily than it produces them. Usually the success metric is chosen in advance, so it is part of the structure of the conversation. In the ox example, the ox is weighed, and the closest guess is measured against a ground truth. The proof is mechanically checked. Each person knows the success metric before he or she contributes a guess. +

+ +

+A strange property of our universe is that it is often more difficult to find a solution to a problem, than it is to recognize that a proposed solution works. It is harder to reach into a pile, pull out a peg, and search the board for the right hole, than it is to see that the peg does or does not fit. A well known property of mathematical proofs is that it is more difficult to find a new one, than it is to walk through and check each step. The former is a creative process, while the latter is a mechanical exercise. This is why it is often possible to define a success metric in advance. +

+ +

A voting procedure is not a success metric. With voting a count is made of group members’ individual opinions of whether a proposal should be selected. Each member applies their own criteria, which can be subjective. Sometimes a success metric cannot be found or agreed on, and voting might be the best option for the group, but not having a predefined success metric reduces the probability that the group will form a garden of golden flowers. +

+ +

The stereotypical image of a group online is a Zoom meeting. However, online groups include social media of all types, and situations such as seeking customer support. For electronic meetings not all participants need to be present at once. For example, the members of an email list. Once we allow that not all members are present at once, we can include people and the companies they interact with, for example, when a person orders from Amazon. Fundamentally, if a computer and a network are involved, the activity can probably be characterized as a cybergroup interaction. +

+ + +

Attacking the garden

+ +

An attacker can focus on one or more of the first 9 levels of the cybersecurity stack presented in the introduction: physical, authentication, data safety, network integrity, denial of services, exploits, phishing attacks, a virus, or e-commerce security when that is involved. +Such attacks can prevent any or all individuals from participating, deny them access to required resources, steal work product, cause latent damage for example by installing a virus, or leverage access to gain entry into meetings as an actual, spoofed, or imaginary person. +

+ +

The 10th level, the "Golden flower garden", an attacker can make contributors uncomfortable to speak, or attempt to annihilate one or more of the qualities that lead to productive meeting that were listed in the prior section. We probably do not need to expand upon this further here, because as of the date of writing all of us have experienced Internet trolls. +

+ + +

Cases of security doing harm

+ +

Unenlightened cybersecurity policies can do as much damage to the group dynamic as hackers. This section provides real world examples.

+ +

A case of cybersecurity mixed with sludge

+ +

All large organizations have a tendency to break up into separate tribes. Almost always the customers are a separate tribe from the employee tribes. This leads to out group dynamics between the company and customers, which anyone familiar with the Milgram Experiment will be able to explain, is not a recipe for success. In 2021 Cass R. Sunstein used different words, but described this effect in the book "Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do About It" (also subtitled "Bureaucratic Burdens and Why We Should Eliminate Them"). +

+ +

Sludge combined with cybersecurity is a potent dysfunctional dynamic.

+ +

Consider the case of an international bank on the east coast that advertises on their home page that they offer accounts to any American anywhere in the world. This makes good sense as many of their customers are in the military, military people are all over the world, and often times family members do the banking.

+ +

As noted in the introduction, many organized attacks come over the Internet from foreign countries, so some government servers, and company servers will reduce the threat exposure by blocking international traffic. The IT experts at said international bank were doing this exact thing. So one department advertised, ‘from anywhere’ while the IT department had simultaneously blacklisted some countries. Let us call this ‘Snafu 1’. +

+ +

Sara, an American in a foreign country went to the site, and finding she was blocked, opened a VPN, then signed up for an account. She reasoned that perhaps they required VPN use, as how else would ‘Americans anywhere’ make sense? +

+ +

But in fact, the bank did not support VPN access, quite the contrary. Let us call this ‘Snafu 2’. Upon logging in again to see the status of her application, the VPN use set off a security alert. She was asked to call to establish her identity. +

+ +

Upon calling Sara felt she was being treated as though she was suspected of doing something wrong, and resented that. The bank had advertised for international customers. They had her documents. The security person then asked to see her social security card to verify the social security number she had given. The Social Security Administration runs an electronic social security number verification service for this very purpose. Social Security cards themselves have no biometric data on them. So this was security theater, and Sara being an expert in the field knew it. Let us call this ‘Snafu 3’. +

+ +

Sara dug through her records and decided that her social security card must be at the family home in the U.S. and said as much. In fact she had not seen it in years and said as much. They told her to call back when she had recovered it. The attitude, the blocked IP and VPN flag, the snooty customer service and effete security, Sara decided that she had enough. So she said that she was withdrawing the application. +

+ +

+ The customer service person who was relaying from the security person felt she had been patient and reasonable with Sara. She resented working with so many ungrateful customers, while being evaluated on how polite she was during calls, so she became passive aggressive. With alacrity she told Sara that she would be glad to withdraw the application, "but you have to wait on hold while I do it." There was no reason for the hold, and Sara recognized it for what it was, but she remained. Snafu 4. +

+ +

+ After several minutes the customer service person returned and said in a cheerful voice, "it is done". Sara then replied that she was so happy to learn that "you are capable of doing something." That remark hit home, and the customer service person hung up. Sara then went to a review site and left a devastating, but accurate, one star review. As a security measure, that review site sends all new reviews to the company being reviewed. +

+ +

The bank sent an account statement. Then they sent a letter that they were canceling the account, yet there had never been an account. Furthermore the bank filed a KYC fraud report. Surely this would teach Sara not to insult them. +

+ +

+ As a result of the KYC report, Sara’s brokerage sent notice saying they were terminating her account. They returned the funds to the linked account. The broker thought it the most prudent thing to do, as her identity was in question. When she asked why, they said, "by law we are not allowed to say." That is the telltale of a KYC report, as it is true, banks are supposed to keep records on clients and share them with other financial institutions, and they are by law not allowed to tell the clients what is in them. One by one, at other places where Sara had financial accounts, the companies asked her to update her information. +

+ +

I take as the moral of this story that lawmakers have not taken into account that human beings are realizing the dictates of their legislation, and human beings have good days and bad days. Also, each person was blessed by God with different talents. In some cases a person who was gifted with an analytical mind and went into security was not also gifted with high social IQ. All people, even those still recovering from childhood traumas, have jobs to pay the bills. And all this is modulated by corporate dynamics, which by themselves can be hard on people. +

+ +

In addition financial institutions now have a contradictory mission. On the one hand they serve customers and investors as a banking entity. On the other hand our government is forcing each of them to be a police agency. The natural result is an organization that does not do either well. +

+ + +

+ The story of Sara is not an isolated incident. Many organizations, in their efforts to protect their systems, inadvertently block legitimate participants, damage trust, and damage golden garden dynamics. +

+ +

GitHub’s "Too Many Requests" block

+ +

+GitHub is the premier meeting place for collaborating programmers, where they get together, ply their trade, improve by learning from each other, and often produce group intelligence level innovative software, and solutions to problems. GitHub is owned and maintained by Microsoft. +

+ +

+ For over a year, GitHub users around the world reported seeing "Too Many Requests" errors during normal, low-volume browsing. A person might follow a link or open a page, with no pattern of abuse, and still be blocked. Engineers later discovered the cause. Temporary abuse-mitigation rules that had been added during past emergencies were left in place long after the threats subsided. These rules used composite fingerprinting signals. During a crisis the signals were accurate, but over time they began matching completely legitimate logged-out users. Roughly half a percent of suspicious-fingerprint requests were blocked, and those blocks were absolute. There was no appeal, no explanation, only a wall. GitHub later apologized, noting that emergency controls "don’t age well as threat patterns evolve and legitimate tools and usage change." +

+ +

+ In terms of the garden, every blocked user was a seed that never sprouted. Some were open-source contributors, others researchers, students, or citizens accessing public code. The protections were silent and invisible, there was no message saying "you’ve been blocked," only an error. This is exactly the kind of sludge that pushes legitimate participants out of the commons, and it happens because security was deployed as a fire-and-forget switch, not a tended garden. The qualities of shared minimal basis of understanding and the comfort to speak were undercut: people couldn’t even enter the garden, let alone speak. And this happened on Microsoft’s watch, we aren’t talking about startup struggling to find resources. +

+ +

The Bendigo Bank VPN lockout

+ +

+ An Australian Bendigo Bank customer logged into internet banking while using a commercial VPN, something he had done many times before. His account was instantly locked and flagged as logging in under a known scammer’s IP address. Customer support told him the only way to restore access was to take his computer to a store for a "professional virus scan" (at his own expense, around $150) and bring the receipt to a branch, or sign a statutory declaration witnessed by a Justice of the Peace waiving the bank’s liability for future losses. The branch manager insisted, "Maybe you do have a virus." The customer pointed out that the bank had no way of knowing which device he used. He could have logged in from a library computer, so scanning his personal machine was meaningless. The bank refused to budge. +

+ +

+ This is a perfect parallel to Sara’s experience. A legitimate customer using a privacy tool was treated as a criminal, subjected to Kafkaesque demands, and ultimately driven away. The bank’s security posture ‘VPN equals suspicious’, therefore ‘VPN equals guilty’ is the opposite of cultivation. It didn’t protect the garden; it salted the soil for anyone who values their privacy. The bank created security theater (virus scan, statutory declaration) that had no actual security value, purely to shift burden and liability. The culture of sincere intent was replaced with suspicion-by-default, and the comfort to speak was crushed. +

+ +

There is another face mismatch case of a perfectly healthy man who works in high-tech not being recognized by ID.me, being initially rejected, and then not allowed to contact a human being there due a requirement of being recognized first, continuing over an 8 year period. The deadlock was finally broken only through the intervention of a Congresswoman.

+ +

When the face doesn’t fit

+ +

+ Autumn Gardiner, who has Freeman-Sheldon syndrome (a genetic condition affecting facial muscles), went to update her driver’s license photo. The DMV’s facial-recognition camera repeatedly rejected her image. Staff kept trying, calling more people over, while she stood there feeling humiliated. "Here’s this machine telling me that I don’t have a human face," she said. She is not alone: an estimated 100 million people worldwide live with facial differences, and research documents widespread lockouts from airport gates, banking apps, social media filters, and public services. +

+ +

+ This is security by blunt instrument excluding people on the fringes. Literally a camera that decides who looks human enough to participate. The garden loses more than diversity of awareness profiles; it loses entire populations. The facial recognition system was deployed with no consideration for edge cases, no fallback, no human override that respected dignity. It’s the security equivalent of a fence with no gate. And it’s not a hypothetical: real people are being told by machines that their faces don’t qualify. This destroys diversity and comfort to speak before a conversation even begins. +

+ +

The harm done by byzantine security

+ +

+ The people of the Eastern Roman Empire called themselves Romans. The label "Byzantine" was applied retroactively in 1557 by the German historian Hieronymus Wolf. He needed a term to describe an empire that, over a thousand years, had mutated into a system defined by an impenetrable, suffocating labyrinth of administrative bureaucracy. Today, the word "Byzantine" describes a system so excessively complicated that it becomes hostile to the people navigating it. +

+ +

+ To understand how this hostility manifests at the individual level, consider the case of Antiochus, an elderly citizen living in the 6th century under Emperor Justinian. At that time, the chief administrator, John the Cappadocian, implemented a tax and legal code of staggering complexity. The administration relied on opaque calculations to estimate the wealth of citizens, functioning much like a modern automated risk algorithm. +

+ +

+ One day, the administration’s calculus flagged Antiochus. The assessment claimed he possessed a cache of undeclared gold. Antiochus, finding himself the target of an unappealable administrative decision, was required to produce the gold to balance the ledger. He had none to give. He was caught in an impossible verification loop: he could not prove the absence of something that did not exist. +

+ +

+ We have a direct, eyewitness account of what happened next from another administrator of the era, John Lydus. Because Antiochus failed to satisfy the administration’s criteria, he was subjected to the state’s physical enforcement protocol. Agents suspended the elderly man by his hands with stout ropes. The administration refused to believe his pleas, choosing to trust their internal assessment over the reality of the citizen. Lydus recorded the event with cold clarity, noting that he was a spectator to the murder, for he knew Antiochus personally. The man died hanging from the ropes, a victim of a system that demanded an impossible proof of compliance. +

+ +

+ When an administration uses extreme complexity, every citizen is inevitably in violation of a rule. What government and the technology industry is building today is the digital equivalent. As the security stack grows to eleven layers and beyond, it creates an architecture of Byzantine security. This is defined as a defensive framework so layered with opaque policies, automated compliance checks, and overlapping authentication demands that it ceases to be a protective barrier and becomes a mechanism of systemic exclusion. +

+ +

+ The negative consequence of Byzantine security is the creation of a digital underclass. Those who cannot perfectly navigate the eleven layers of the stack are pushed to the outskirts of the network. They are silently exiled, their accounts locked, and their communications severed. When a system prioritizes an impenetrable checklist of security theater over human usability, it methodically sterilizes the network, deliberately cutting off the very group intelligence that makes the system valuable in the first place. +

How experts think about safety

+ +

Linear risk

+ In this model, each term is a product of the cost and the probability that the cost will be incurred. Then all the terms are summed to get a total expected cost. +

+ + + T = Î£ (t_i × c_i) + + +

+ + + T = 0.2 × 15 + 0.1 × 45 + 0.3 × 15 + 0.05 × 86400 + 0.65 × 3 + T = 4334 seconds + + +

+ Statisticians call this the expected time it will take to log in, though this specific time is not among the actual individual scenarios. Rather, after many times of logging in, the average time will tend towards this value. +

+ Pay special note to this interesting effect: Although the normal mode login is merely 5 seconds, the average time approaches 4334 seconds. This average time result is so high because, though it is highly improbable, it is overwhelmingly expensive to recover after having to wait a timeout period, or to contact support. +

+ The true dollar expense depends on how much a person's time is worth and how much of the waiting time can be filled with other tasks. If it is work time, it will be one value; if it is time with children, another. At \$100 an hour with no fill-in tasks, the average login cost comes to \$7,223. And people wonder why computers are so frustrating. Now imagine the cost of an expert spending 8 years dealing with ID.me. +

+ +

+ Cybersecurity engineers almost always base their cost estimates on the normal mode time, here 5 seconds, rather than the actual expected cost, here 4334 seconds. +

+ +

+ If this login model is implemented across millions of people, a person would hope the company is protecting more than the aggregate login cost per user, otherwise they are costing users more than the value they hold on the system. However, as normal mode times are being used, this is what is happening. +

+ +

Catastrophic failure

+ + + P = 1 - Î (1 - p(t_i)) + + +

+ + + P = 1 - (1 - 0.02)(1 - 0.10)(1 - 0.01) + P = 0.13 + + +

+ There is a 13% probability that the system will be compromised. That is far higher than would normally be tolerated for a catastrophic risk. Here the biggest contributor was the human variable. +

+ This is called the failure equation. Notice that it scales exponentially with the number of terms, making it disproportionately more difficult to drive the total failure rate down as systems grow more complex. For a small, simple computer system it is possible to reach P = 0, but even then it is exceedingly difficult and expensive to do so, and in most cases few experts would believe it had actually been achieved. When it comes to security, small and simple is not only beautiful, it is the only hope. +

+ The scenario of small and simple is unlikely to be found for a system that serves the general public. Most security engineers simply implement existing protocols. Those protocols use algorithms that we assume to be formally proven to be correct, although that is often not the case, and it is certainly not the case for common algorithms used on the Internet. Even for correct security protocols that are correctly implemented, hackers have consistently found physical ways to vary timing, monitor power consumption, or grind the tops off chips to break into systems. +

+ +

The role of perspective

+ +

Dynamic risk profiles

+ In computer security, a single failure acts as a contagion rather than an isolated event; it spreads like a disease. It is assumed that once an attacker has figured out a way in, the attacker will scale that solution mechanically or sell it on the dark web. Consequently, once a failure occurs, the catastrophic failure equation changes, with a near 100% probability of repeat for the failure term. +

+ +

The security paradox

+ Most security systems are breakable or bypassable in the face of extreme innovation and effort. Once broken, an organization starts adding layers of friction on its way to the Marianas Trench. +

+ +

Emergent properties from secure systems

+ +

The Marianas Trench paradigm

+ +

Reliability and security are competing forces

+ +

Economic progress and security are competing forces

+ Productivity comes from efficiency, and the economy depends upon increased productivity. For reasons outlined above, security is at odds with efficiency. Therefore, overbearing security throttles the economy. +

+ +

Extraordinary maintenance problem

+ When software has a bug, a patch can be written by most any developer, then issued as an update. In contrast, when security software has a bug, the problem must first be understood by experts, who frequently do not even reside at the company. Often alternative approaches must be architected, which is essentially starting over. +

+ Security fixes are often difficult to apply because an insecure system has a high probability of having become compromised. Patching a system that has a backdoor installed on it will result in a patched system with a backdoor. If data has been stolen, no patch can take the stolen data out of the hands of those who took it. Furthermore, customer support can typically do little or nothing, as security features often cannot be turned off. +

+ +

Engineers build things, leaders provide vision

+ +

The biometric fallacy

+ The startup Pay By Touch incinerated $130 million on the premise that fingerprints are passwords. Yet sounding like a cool tech was enough to command a lot of funding. +

+ +

The technician's crouch

+ In 1996, at a presentation to the SBC board, a man proposed a smartphone technology investment. One of the board members invited their "tech guy" to "interpret." Feeling his expertise was being challenged, the technician argued defensively that phone switches were the future and smartphones were a fad, merely because switches were what he understood. Two years later, the switch-centric giants like Nortel went into bankruptcy, and the world moved to the smartphone. +

+ +

The coming security apocalypse

+ +

The writing on the wall: public key cryptography is doomed

+ All security today is built over communications that are secured by public key cryptography. There is no formal proof for any public key cryptography algorithm in use today that demonstrates at a computation theoretical level it actually works. +

+ The above analysis is the situation today independent of quantum computing. That is another kettle of fish. When quantum computing comes online, Shorâs algorithm will break all of public key cryptography, proven or not. What are legislators planning to do, take police authority over all quantum computers? +

+ +

Biometrics are security theater

+ Fingerprints are left on door knobs and glasses. A fingerprint cannot be used as a secure password. Our faces are shown in public and in modern times are captured by cameras in buildings, on street corners, through the front windshield when we drive under traffic cameras, and by anyone who gets within a few hundred meters and can take a snapshot. +

+ +

Why do we want to ID computer users

+ +

Policing money

+ +

Citizenship-based taxation (CBT)

+ This structural requirement is the hidden driver for an interoperable, global digital ID. Every dollar holder is now a suspected of being a money launderer, a drug dealer, or a tax-evading "sneak." In a CBT world, the source and identity of the money are more important to the state than the payment itself. We secure the portal to pay taxes, not because the account holder wants to prevent others from paying his or her taxes, but rather because the government needs to know where the money came from. +

+ +

Individual revenue taxation

+ + +

At the critical point before instability

Earlier in this white paper, I mentioned the Stasi, who had files on one third of East German citizens. Civics teachers used to present that fact as though it were horrific, but it is child's play relative to the amount of documentation we are keeping on U.S. citizens today. +

+ +

+ Due to the explosion in number and size of databases, IDs are needed to keep the databases coherent and accurate, and to unify them. This is desired both by the tech companies that make their money by matching advertisements to people, our bureaucracies, and by law enforcement. +

+ +

State (the sovereign sinks & secret ledgers)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

State Database / Agency	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
State DMVs / Real ID	Facial biometrics, physical characteristics, home address.	The foundational physical anchor; increasingly weaponized by law enforcement for automated facial recognition sweeps.

IRS & Social Security (SSA)	SSN, income, employment history, family structure.	The ultimate financial gatekeeper; defines the "Right to Work" and the legal existence of the citizen.

Incarceration (3 Layers)	Local jail bookings, State DOC records, Federal BOP data.	Creates a permanent, multi-jurisdictional underclass. Often networked via private aggregators, ensuring data persists even after exoneration.

Child Welfare (e.g., CCWIS)	Abuse allegations, family history, psychological profiles.	Interstate data sharing ensures subjective stigmas follow citizens across borders.

FBI (NGI Database) / CODIS	Fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, DNA, arrest records.	Permanent biological tracking; high risk of false-positive algorithmic criminalization.

DHS / Customs (CBP)	Passport data, international travel history, border scans.	Controls physical freedom of movement; tracks global associations and jurisdictional shifts.

Voter Registration & Courts	Party affiliation, voting frequency, civil judgments.	Publicly accessible state data aggressively scraped by commercial brokers to fuse political identity with consumer profiles.

EDGAR (SEC)	Corporate submissions, quarterly/annual financial filings.	Publicly exposes the financial footprints and corporate affiliations of executives and major shareholders.

+ +

Commercial (the surveillance brokers & shadow financials)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Data Broker / AdTech	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
ChexSystems & EWS (KYC)	Account history, bounced checks, suspected fraud profiles.	The "Shadow Credit Score" used to deny banking. Crucial Note: Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks are legally prohibited from telling a citizen what is in their fraud file.

Meta (Facebook/IG) Graph	Social graphs, political leanings, private communications.	A de facto global ID database; continuously scraped by AI algorithms to feed state intelligence.

Acxiom / LiveRamp	Up to 3,000 data points per person (offline & online).	Creates a "connected identity" linking web browsing to offline purchases.

Experian / Equifax	Credit health, employer data, loan default likelihood.	Dictates financial participation; heavily targeted by hackers.

CoreLogic	Complete property, mortgage, and historical tax records.	Aggregates physical residence history across millions of property transactions.

LexisNexis	Demographic info, behavioral analytics, public court records.	Sells targeted audience segments to private entities and law enforcement.

+ +

International scammers

+ +

Current ID efforts

+ +

Base categorizations of ID technology

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Category	Technologies Used	The Structural Flaw
Physical Hardware Gates	mDL (Mobile Wallets), Smart Cards, NFC/RFID	Demands mandatory capital expense (Smartphones) and exposes users to tracking.

Biometric Anchors	Facial Recognition, Iris, Fingerprint	Biological identifiers cannot be rotated or changed once compromised.

Cryptographic Ledgers	PKI, X.509 Certificates, eIDAS Wallets	Requires a centralized "State Bishop" (Certificate Authority) to grant trust.

Algorithmic Profiling	Age-Gating, Credit Scoring, AdTech MAIDs	Fuses offline identity with unregulated commercial surveillance markets.

+ +

State sanctioned ID efforts

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Initiative Name	Jurisdiction	Core Technology	The Structural Failure
EU Digital Identity Wallet	European Union	Public Key (W3C/OpenID)	Mandatory cross-border tracking. Vulnerable to quantum collapse and centralized CA compromise.

Aadhaar	India	Biometric Match	World's largest biometric honeypot. Fails physically: manual labor wears off prints, excluding the poorest.

GOV.UK One Login	United Kingdom	AI Biometric Match	No offline parity. Deepfakes and injection attacks bypass liveness checks, locking citizens out.

e-ID	Estonia	Public Key (Smart Cards)	Total digital dependency. "State Bishop" architecture means a single chip failure or CA breach deletes the citizen.

Singpass	Singapore	AI Biometric Match	Fuses private banking and state services. Synthetic media renders the gatekeeper mathematically blind.

gov.br	Brazil	Biometric Match	The "Water Glass" Lift: high-res biometrics are static. Once copied, the citizen's identity is permanently breached.

Login.gov & ID.me	United States	AI Biometric Match	Outsourcing core rights to private VC firms. Honeypot creation. Generative AI makes the biometric barrier obsolete.

Apple/Google Wallets (mDL)	US (General)	Public Key (SE)	The Mandated Shackle. Gives Silicon Valley monopoly control. Vulnerable to supply chain hardware attacks.

+ +

A house built on sand

+ Even Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) falls victim to this structural failure because it merely replaces a physical secret with a mathematical one, while still transmitting the proof across the same channel as the data. Possession does not equal identity: A public key system proves that a person possesses a private key; it does not prove who that person is. If an attacker uses a memory injection to scrape a private key or intercepts the signing process, the resulting bit-stream is mathematically perfect. +

+ The server has no capability to distinguish between the rightful owner and a thief because the "signal" of identity is merely another string of data bundled with the transaction. Because current architectures mix control signals and data, a person's "identity" becomes observable to the system itself. If the math can be seen, it can be simulated. +

+ +

Evolution of ID technology

+ Based on concepts of bureaucracy, mandated expense, and the biometric fallacy, we are looking at Dante's 7 Levels of ID Heck: +

Stage 1: The Bureaucratic Number (The Card) - Dehumanization through serialization. Every human is reduced to a state-issued number; the fake ID industry becomes the only "free market."
Stage 2: The Mandated Shackle (The Smartphone) - The first government-mandated capital expense. Forcing citizens to pay for a commercial product to exist in society. The "Corporate Smartphone" (Mic/Camera/GPS) ends privacy.
Stage 3: The Biological Theft (The Biometric) - Treating a biological "username" as a "password." Security theater. A person leaves their physical "password" on a coffee cup or a door handle.
Stage 4: The Aggregation Sinkhole (The Database Explosion) - Convergence of all state and commercial human data. The "Aggregation Force" creates a single point of failure for a person's entire life.
Stage 5: The Algorithmic Gatekeeper (The Profiling) - Automated "Evil Thought" detection. Using the ID as a key for age-gating and "child safety" (California model).
Stage 6: The Interoperable Web (The Global Wallet) - The end of jurisdictional escape. EU/UK cross-border standards. If a person is banned in one place, they are invisible in all.
Stage 7: The Digital Exile (The Marianas Trench) - Total disconnection from the "Right to Exist." De-banking and removal from the digital society. The "Attractor" is reached: a system so secure that even the rightful owner cannot access their life.

+ +

Current legislation

+ The following bills represent the current trajectory of federally funded digital identity infrastructure: +

H.R. 7270 (The Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act) - A bill creating federal grant programs through the Treasury to incentivize states to adopt Mobile Driver's Licenses (mDLs) and centralized biometric verification systems.
S. 884 (Improving Digital Identity Act) - A bill establishing an interagency task force to develop a nationwide, interoperable digital identity architecture, heavily reliant on existing state DMVs and biometric ledgers.
H.R. 4589 (National Digital Identity Act) - A companion proposal pushing for the commercialization and federated sharing of state identity databases with private sector verifiers.

+ +

A better way forward: the reasoning technology plan

+ We are currently charting a course for the byzantine ending of American civilization, but there is time to change course. We must simplify. Incentives are more powerful than regulations. +

+ +

Mandatory Efficiency and Economic Impact Statements: Any federal agency or regulated private entity implementing a new security or identity measure must provide a "Net Economic Impact" audit. This addresses the "Nobody Home" problem. If a security measure costs the economy S in lost productivity through customer service paralysis, and the theft it prevents is only T, the measure is illegal if S > T.
The Research Integrity Act (Scientific Transparency): Criminalize and fine academic and corporate dishonesty in federally funded or regulated research. Apply the Daubert principle to regulatory research to prevent "Microwaves are Candy" style industry capture.
The Digital Habeas Corpus (Database Transparency): Apply FOIA-style transparency to all databases, public and corporate, that utilize a citizen's data. Every person has a right to see, contest, and correct any entry.
Verifiable Architectural Provenance: Mandate that the provenance of all AI-driven media be identifiable via an architectural signaling standard. A person must be able to distinguish between human and synthetic media at the architectural level.
Shift to Offensive International Policing: Redirect federal resources from "IDing the Victim" to "Tracking the Attacker." Policing the borders of the internet is more effective than turning the interior into a digital prison for citizens.
Structural elimination of security dependencies: The best security is removing the need for it. Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT) requires a massive, global surveillance apparatus to track every citizenâs financial movements. Ending CBT and shifting from income tax to trade duties would structurally eliminate the need for vast swathes of the current global digital tracking infrastructure. Organizations like American Citizens Abroad (ACA) advocate for ending CBT, and similar efforts support state-side banking access for expats burdened by the current surveillance dragnet.
Reasoning Technology ID technology, RTID: Existing models force lawmakers into a false choice between massive surveillance honeypots or zero utility. Reasoning Technology has developed a foundational identity architecture that shatters this dichotomy. It works in the presence of quantum technology, works in the presence of strong AI, works without special hardware features, has minimal productivity impact, and is maintainable.

+ +

Appendices

+ +

Appendix A: "Microwaves are candy" and the corporate track record

+ +

Appendix B: The Aadhaar tragedy

+ +

Appendix C: The history of "secure" cryptographic backdoors

The "Clipper Chip" (1990s): The NSA attempted to mandate a microchip with a "key escrow." Independent researchers found vulnerabilities allowing anyone to exploit the backdoor.
The _NSAKEY Controversy (1999): A secondary cryptographic key embedded inside Windows NT 4.0 highlighted the vulnerability of relying on proprietary corporate security.
Dual_EC_DRBG (2006-2013): The NSA promoted a standard containing a structural backdoor, completely compromising the "secure" networks of anyone using it.
Crypto AG & Operation Rubicon: A Swiss manufacturer of encryption machines was secretly owned by intelligence agencies to intentionally weaken algorithms.

+ + + + + + + diff --git a/document/About computer security.html b/document/About computer security.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06a423e --- /dev/null +++ b/document/About computer security.html @@ -0,0 +1,497 @@ + + + + + About Computer Security + + + + + + + + + + +

Introduction

+ +

How experts think about safety

+ +

Linear risk

+ In this model, each term is a product of the cost and the probability that the cost will be incurred. Then all the terms are summed to get a total expected cost. +

+ + + T = Î£ (t_i × c_i) + + +

+ + + T = 0.2 × 15 + 0.1 × 45 + 0.3 × 15 + 0.05 × 86400 + 0.65 × 3 + T = 4334 seconds + + +

+ +

Catastrophic failure

+ + + P = 1 - Î (1 - p(t_i)) + + +

+ + + P = 1 - (1 - 0.02)(1 - 0.10)(1 - 0.01) + P = 0.13 + + +

+ There is a 13% probability that the system will be compromised. That is far higher than would normally be tolerated for a catastrophic risk. Here the biggest contributor was the human variable. +

+ +

The role of perspective

+ +

Dynamic behavior

+ +

Helps the bad guys, hurts the good guys

+ Most security systems are breakable or bypassable in the face of extreme innovation and effort. Once broken, an organization starts adding layers of friction on its way to the Marianas Trench. +

+ +

Emergent properties from secure systems

+ +

The Marianas Trench paradigm

+ +

Reliability and Security are Competing Forces

+ +

Economic Progress and Security are Competing Forces

+ +

Extraordinary maintenance problem

+ +

Engineers Design to Spec, Leaders Carry Vision

The Biometric Fallacy

+ The startup Pay By Touch incinerated $130 million on the premise that fingerprints are passwords. Yet sounding like a cool tech was enough to command a lot of funding. +

+ +

The Technician's Crouch

+ +

The coming security apocalypse

+ +

The situation with public key cryptography

+ +

The situation with biometrics

+ +

Why do we want to ID computer users

+ +

Policing money

+ +

Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT)

+ +

We are reaching a critical instability point where we need ID to organize our databases

+ +

State (The Sovereign Sinks & Secret Ledgers)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

State Database / Agency	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
State DMVs / Real ID	Facial biometrics, physical characteristics, home address.	The foundational physical anchor; increasingly weaponized by law enforcement for automated facial recognition sweeps.
IRS & Social Security (SSA)	SSN, income, employment history, family structure.	The ultimate financial gatekeeper; defines the "Right to Work" and the legal existence of the citizen.
Incarceration (3 Layers)	Local jail bookings, State DOC records, Federal BOP data.	Creates a permanent, multi-jurisdictional underclass. Often networked via private aggregators, ensuring data persists even after exoneration.
Child Welfare (e.g., CCWIS)	Abuse allegations, family history, psychological profiles.	Interstate data sharing ensures subjective stigmas follow citizens across borders.
FBI (NGI Database) / CODIS	Fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, DNA, arrest records.	Permanent biological tracking; high risk of false-positive algorithmic criminalization.
DHS / Customs (CBP)	Passport data, international travel history, border scans.	Controls physical freedom of movement; tracks global associations and jurisdictional shifts.
Voter Registration & Courts	Party affiliation, voting frequency, civil judgments.	Publicly accessible state data aggressively scraped by commercial brokers to fuse political identity with consumer profiles.
EDGAR (SEC)	Corporate submissions, quarterly/annual financial filings.	Publicly exposes the financial footprints and corporate affiliations of executives and major shareholders.

+ +

Commercial (The Surveillance Brokers & Shadow Financials)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Data Broker / AdTech	Primary Data Harvested	Impact on Identity
ChexSystems & EWS (KYC)	Account history, bounced checks, suspected fraud profiles.	The "Shadow Credit Score" used to deny banking. Crucial Note: Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks are legally prohibited from telling a citizen what is in their fraud file.
Meta (Facebook/IG) Graph	Social graphs, political leanings, private communications.	A de facto global ID database; continuously scraped by AI algorithms to feed state intelligence.
Acxiom / LiveRamp	Up to 3,000 data points per person (offline & online).	Creates a "connected identity" linking web browsing to offline purchases.
Experian / Equifax	Credit health, employer data, loan default likelihood.	Dictates financial participation; heavily targeted by hackers.
CoreLogic	Complete property, mortgage, and historical tax records.	Aggregates physical residence history across millions of property transactions.
LexisNexis	Demographic info, behavioral analytics, public court records.	Sells targeted audience segments to private entities and law enforcement.

+ +

International scammers

+ +

Current ID efforts

+ +

Base Categorizations of ID Technology

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Category	Technologies Used	The Structural Flaw
Physical Hardware Gates	mDL (Mobile Wallets), Smart Cards, NFC/RFID	Demands mandatory capital expense (Smartphones) and exposes users to tracking.
Biometric Anchors	Facial Recognition, Iris, Fingerprint	Biological identifiers cannot be rotated or changed once compromised.
Cryptographic Ledgers	PKI, X.509 Certificates, eIDAS Wallets	Requires a centralized "State Bishop" (Certificate Authority) to grant trust.
Algorithmic Profiling	Age-Gating, Credit Scoring, AdTech MAIDs	Fuses offline identity with unregulated commercial surveillance markets.

+ +

State Sanctioned ID efforts

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Initiative Name	Jurisdiction	Core Technology	The Structural Failure
EU Digital Identity Wallet	European Union	Public Key (W3C/OpenID)	Mandatory cross-border tracking. Vulnerable to quantum collapse and centralized CA compromise.
Aadhaar	India	Biometric Match	World's largest biometric honeypot. Fails physically: manual labor wears off prints, excluding the poorest.
GOV.UK One Login	United Kingdom	AI Biometric Match	No offline parity. Deepfakes and injection attacks bypass liveness checks, locking citizens out.
e-ID	Estonia	Public Key (Smart Cards)	Total digital dependency. "State Bishop" architecture means a single chip failure or CA breach deletes the citizen.
Singpass	Singapore	AI Biometric Match	Fuses private banking and state services. Synthetic media renders the gatekeeper mathematically blind.
gov.br	Brazil	Biometric Match	The "Water Glass" Lift: high-res biometrics are static. Once copied, the citizen's identity is permanently breached.
Login.gov & ID.me	United States	AI Biometric Match	Outsourcing core rights to private VC firms. Honeypot creation. Generative AI makes the biometric barrier obsolete.
Apple/Google Wallets (mDL)	US (General)	Public Key (SE)	The Mandated Shackle. Gives Silicon Valley monopoly control. Vulnerable to supply chain hardware attacks.

+ +

A house built on sand

+ +

Evolution of ID technology

+ Based on concepts of bureaucracy, mandated expense, and the biometric fallacy, we are looking at Dante's 7 Levels of ID Heck: +

Stage 1: The Bureaucratic Number (The Card) - Dehumanization through serialization. Every human is reduced to a state-issued number; the fake ID industry becomes the only "free market."
Stage 2: The Mandated Shackle (The Smartphone) - The first government-mandated capital expense. Forcing citizens to pay for a commercial product to exist in society. The "Corporate Smartphone" (Mic/Camera/GPS) ends privacy.
Stage 3: The Biological Theft (The Biometric) - Treating a biological "username" as a "password." Security theater. A person leaves their physical "password" on a coffee cup or a door handle.
Stage 4: The Aggregation Sinkhole (The Database Explosion) - Convergence of all state and commercial human data. The "Aggregation Force" creates a single point of failure for a person's entire life.
Stage 5: The Algorithmic Gatekeeper (The Profiling) - Automated "Evil Thought" detection. Using the ID as a key for age-gating and "child safety" (California model).
Stage 6: The Interoperable Web (The Global Wallet) - The end of jurisdictional escape. EU/UK cross-border standards. If a person is banned in one place, they are invisible in all.
Stage 7: The Digital Exile (The Marianas Trench) - Total disconnection from the "Right to Exist." De-banking and removal from the digital society. The "Attractor" is reached: a system so secure that even the rightful owner cannot access their life.

+ +

Current Legislation

+ The following bills represent the current trajectory of federally funded digital identity infrastructure: +

H.R. 7270 (The Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act) - A bill creating federal grant programs through the Treasury to incentivize states to adopt Mobile Driver's Licenses (mDLs) and centralized biometric verification systems.
S. 884 (Improving Digital Identity Act) - A bill establishing an interagency task force to develop a nationwide, interoperable digital identity architecture, heavily reliant on existing state DMVs and biometric ledgers.
H.R. 4589 (National Digital Identity Act) - A companion proposal pushing for the commercialization and federated sharing of state identity databases with private sector verifiers.

+ +

A better way forward: The reasoning technology plan

+ We are currently charting a course for the byzantine ending of American civilization, but there is time to change course. We must simplify. Incentives are more powerful than regulations. +

+ +

Mandatory Efficiency and Economic Impact Statements: Any federal agency or regulated private entity implementing a new security or identity measure must provide a "Net Economic Impact" audit. This addresses the "Nobody Home" problem. If a security measure costs the economy S in lost productivity through customer service paralysis, and the theft it prevents is only T, the measure is illegal if S > T.
The Research Integrity Act (Scientific Transparency): Criminalize and fine academic and corporate dishonesty in federally funded or regulated research. Apply the Daubert principle to regulatory research to prevent "Microwaves are Candy" style industry capture.
The Digital Habeas Corpus (Database Transparency): Apply FOIA-style transparency to all databases, public and corporate, that utilize a citizen's data. Every person has a right to see, contest, and correct any entry.
Verifiable Architectural Provenance: Mandate that the provenance of all AI-driven media be identifiable via an architectural signaling standard. A person must be able to distinguish between human and synthetic media at the architectural level.
Shift to Offensive International Policing: Redirect federal resources from "IDing the Victim" to "Tracking the Attacker." Policing the borders of the internet is more effective than turning the interior into a digital prison for citizens.
Structural elimination of security dependencies: The best security is removing the need for it. Citizenship-Based Taxation (CBT) requires a massive, global surveillance apparatus to track every citizenâs financial movements. Ending CBT and shifting from income tax to trade duties would structurally eliminate the need for vast swathes of the current global digital tracking infrastructure. Organizations like American Citizens Abroad (ACA) advocate for ending CBT, and similar efforts support state-side banking access for expats burdened by the current surveillance dragnet.
Reasoning Technology ID technology, RTID: Existing models force lawmakers into a false choice between massive surveillance honeypots or zero utility. Reasoning Technology has developed a foundational identity architecture that shatters this dichotomy. It works in the presence of quantum technology, works in the presence of strong AI, works without special hardware features, has minimal productivity impact, and is maintainable.

+ +

Appendices

+ +

Appendix A: "Microwaves are Candy" and the Corporate Track Record

+ +

Appendix B: The Aadhaar Tragedy

+ +

Appendix C: The History of "Secure" Cryptographic Backdoors

The "Clipper Chip" (1990s): The NSA attempted to mandate a microchip with a "key escrow." Independent researchers found vulnerabilities allowing anyone to exploit the backdoor.
The _NSAKEY Controversy (1999): A secondary cryptographic key embedded inside Windows NT 4.0 highlighted the vulnerability of relying on proprietary corporate security.
Dual_EC_DRBG (2006-2013): The NSA promoted a standard containing a structural backdoor, completely compromising the "secure" networks of anyone using it.
Crypto AG & Operation Rubicon: A Swiss manufacturer of encryption machines was secretly owned by intelligence agencies to intentionally weaken algorithms.

+ + + + + diff --git a/document/google.txt b/document/google.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8d36df0 --- /dev/null +++ b/document/google.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10 @@ +Case ID 8-0707000040342 +Google One +In Progress +May 11, 2026 at 04:03 PM + +Case ID 0-3074000040348 +Google One +In Progress +May 11, 2026 at 03:14 PM + diff --git a/document/temp.txt b/document/temp.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5fd3966 --- /dev/null +++ b/document/temp.txt @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +This is a helpful summary of Taiwanese history, though it lacks some critical nuance regarding sovereignty and demographics. + +Anthropologist Jared Diamond points out that Austronesian people were the first to inhabit Taiwan. This group eventually settled the entire region, spreading through the Malay Archipelago and across the Pacific. While Pickering initially referred to them as 'savages,' he later adopted the term 'mountain men' after personal contact. House noted significant travel between the East and West of the island, intermarriage was common, and the Austronesians were active traders who had even established a formal agreement with the Dutch. The Japanese sent the Austronesians to school with everyone else. Many today have college degrees. 'Austronesian' is a nicer term than 'aborigine.' + +A factor often overlooked is that Taiwan was rife with tropical disease. A Chinese general remarked to Pickering that they could not occupy the interior for long; Tainan was a poor choice of location for those unaccustomed to the climate. The Dutch paid for their presence with their lives, as did Koxinga, who died of malaria shortly after his arrival. Thousands of Japanese died of disease when they invaded and they had quinine. + +Sovereignty is not established by a mere ten-year claim of province status. American diplomat Charles LeGendre, along with Pickering and House, documented the lack of Qing control even during the decade the speaker references. As LeGendre noted, the limits of their authority were written directly onto their own maps, and more accurate French maps show even less Qing reach. Taiwan was never controlled by China. + +I think part of the confusion here is that people think of Taiwan as a small island, when in fact it is twice the size of Israel. Foreign powers never had more than regional control. + +Regarding the 1945â1949 period, describing Taiwan and China as being 'under the same government' is a blunt instrument that ignores international law. Chiang Kai-shek accepted the Japanese surrender in both Vietnam and Taiwan as an Allied commander; these were military governorships, not sovereign transfers. Notably, no one argues that Vietnam became part of China because of that surrender. This distinction is reinforced by the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which treats the status of Korea and Taiwan as parallel cases, and assigns Taiwan to no other power. This ironically echoes the CCPâs own pre-war position (see Pacific Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 1937) and aligns with the legal research of Roger Lin (Lin Chih-sheng). + +Finally, a language nuance: under the UN Charter, a nation possesses state rights. It is a non-sequitur to speak of 'giving back' a nation to a state that never possessed it. The correct terms for the two entities are 'China' and 'Taiwan.' The term 'mainland' is a political presumption that is antithetical to the historical evidence presented here. + +This is generally a nice presentation in a nutshell on Taiwanese history, but I would take issue on some of it. + +Anthropologists Jared Diamond points out that Austronesian people were the first to come to Taiwan. They also filled out the entire region, and spread down to Australia and across the Pacific. + +Pickering initially referred to them as savages, but after meeting them started calling them mountain men. House pointed out that many people were traveling between the East and West of the island. The Austronesians were also trading, and had made a treaty with the Dutch. + +Austronesian seems like a better term. + +Something that isn't discussed as much as I think it should be, Taiwan was rife with tropical disease. A Chinese general pointed out to Pickering that they could not stay there long. Tainan was an awful location choice. The Dutch paid for it with their lives, as did Koxinga who died of Malaria soon after arriving. + +It takes more than a ten-year claim of province status for sovereignty to be a reality. American diplomat Charles LeGendre, as well as Pickering and House, documented why the Qing did not control the island even during that decade. As LeGendre notes, the limits of their control are written right on their maps. The French maps show even less Qing control. Taiwan was never a full part of China. + +For the 1945â1949 period, the idea that Taiwan and China were "under the same government" during these years is a rather blunt instrument. Chiang Kai-shek accepted the Japanese surrender in both Vietnam and Taiwan as an Allied commander, so they were military governorships. Note we are not discussing Vietnam. This lack of sovereign transfer is reinforced by the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which treats the status of Korea and Taiwan as parallel cases. Ironically echoing the CPP's pre-war position, see Pacific Affairs (Vol. 10, No. 3) in September 1937. Also note the work of Roger Lin (Lin Chih-sheng) on this subject. + +Another language nuance. In UN Charter language, a nation has state rights, it is a non-sequitur to talk about 'giving it back'. And as Taiwan has never been part of China, it can't go back to where it has not been. + +The terms for the two places are "China" and "Taiwan". The term 'mainland' is presumptuous, and antithetical even in the context of this presentation. + diff --git a/document/white-paper.html b/document/white-paper.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2a71b51 --- /dev/null +++ b/document/white-paper.html @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +

How experts think about safety

+ +

Linear risk

+ In this model, each term is a product of the cost and the probability that the cost will be incurred. Then all the terms are summed to get a total expected cost. +

+ + + T = Î£ (táµ¢ Ã cáµ¢) + + +

+ Here táµ¢ is the probability of the event and cáµ¢ is the cost. As an example, consider that there is a 0.2 probability that a person forgot their password, and it will cost 900 seconds to recover it. (Here 0.2 is 20%, 1 out of 5 times). There is a 0.1 probability that a person made a typo in the user name which results in 45 seconds of time to figure out. There is a 0.3 probability that a person will type the password wrong, costing 15 seconds. There is a 0.05 probability that a person will get the password wrong 3 times and be locked out for a day, and thus a 0.65 chance that they type it correctly, taking 5 seconds to log in. +

+ + + T = 0.2 Ã 15 + 0.1 Ã 45 + 0.3 Ã 15 + 0.05 Ã 86400 + 0.65 Ã 3 + T = 4334 seconds + + +

+ +

Catastrophic failure

+ + + P = 1 - Î (1 - p(táµ¢)) + + +

+ Here p(táµ¢) again represents the probability that a specific failure táµ¢ could happen. P is then the probability that the system will fail due to any one of the independent parts táµ¢ failing. The symbol Î means to take the product. +

+ As an example, consider a small business where a Wi-Fi password gets guessed with probability p(tâ) = 0.02, the manager clicks a scam email with probability p(tâ) = 0.10, and a thief sneaks into the back room with probability p(tâ) = 0.01. +

+ + + P = 1 - (1 - 0.02)(1 - 0.10)(1 - 0.01) + P = 0.13 + + +

+ There is a 13% probability that the system will be compromised. That is far higher than would normally be tolerated for a catastrophic risk. Here the biggest contributor was the human variable. +

+ That scenario is unlikely to be found for a system that serves the general public. Most security engineers simply implement existing protocols. Those protocols use algorithms that we assume to be formally proven to be correct, although that is often not the caseâand it is certainly not the case for common algorithms used on the Internet. Even for correct security protocols that are correctly implemented, hackers have consistently found physical ways to vary timing, monitor power consumption, or grind the tops off chips to break into systems. +

+ +

The role of perspective

+ Computer security is almost always treated as an uninsured catastrophic risk situation. There is typically no contract with usersâand legally there sometimes can be no contractâto make up for losses after a security lapse. +

+ +

Dynamic behavior

+ +

Helps the bad guys, hurts the good guys

+ Most security systems are breakable or bypassable in the face of extreme innovation and effort. Once broken, an organization starts adding layers of friction on its way to the Marianas Trench. +

-- 2.20.1