[Festival] IFF's now on Slack!

[carlo at circular.pages.de]

During the research for my presentation on constitutionality of
the Internet I bumped into a very relevant aspect. A mistaken
assumption that the '68 generation made, that has repercussions
until today: the idea that all political work should be open
and transparent. Apparently during the period of Enlightment,
with all the experience of absolutist rule, the idea of Secrecy
of Correspondence may not only have been about giving a "right"
to the citizen but to create a platform where alternative
democratic thinking has a chance to form and grow before the
government in power can inspect and influence the process.

Given such a perspective in a world of XKEYSCORE and KARMA POLICE
it is maybe not so surprising that we hardly ever see alternative
democratic thinking actually manifesting itself in government.
You may argue that IFF is not about forming new political thinking,
which for me would mean that I am wrong on this list, but from
this new perspective I see that most government politics should
be open and transparent whereas all NGO and innovation thinking
should happen in a safe place from government scrutiny - and in
these days of globalization that includes all governments plus
their cloud-based helpers.

Whoever says they got nothing to hide may, seen with the eyes
of the 18th century, walking all over the constitution with
their dirty feet - because they are impeding others from
bringing renovation to the democracy the way democracy is
intended to have it. Lobbyism is the unnatural way to renovate
democracy. Opposition and majority win-over should be the way.
But must democracies we know have opposition powers just as
statically radicated as government powers.

Getting back to the issue in question, it is obvious that
nothing we do should happen on cloud systems. It probably
shouldn't also be on mailing lists and public IRC networks
as Bernard pointed out, because they too go straight into
XKEYSCORE. I just recently added a big chapter on
http://about.psyc.eu/IRC about the architectural reasons
why you just cannot expect privacy on a public IRC network,
even if all the participants connect using TLS. I twice wrote
IRC server implementations in my lifetime, so I should know.

In my research for recommendable tools in the name of
youbroketheinternet.org I realized that apparently Retroshare
is the only truly decentralized chat tool.. but it comes with
several drawbacks such as impossibility to moderate behaviors
in the chatroom and a DHT constantly under attack. I hope we
of secushare.org will someday be able to offer an alternative
that does not suffer of these issues, but until then the
only set-up that we can recommend as likely to be safe from
XKEYSCORE is to run ONE isolated non-federating server in a
reasonably credible and reliable hosting location and use
Tor to connect to it to impede certification-based man in
the middle attacks. In other words a .onion service. It should
obviously not offer unencrypted access.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:54:41AM +0100, Sacha van Geffen wrote:
> To the practical end of things; would you all feel comfortable if we
> would set up a private instance of mattermost
> http://www.mattermost.org/open-source-slack-alternative-reaches-1-0/
> on our servers for the festival, instead of using Slack?

That's why by applied logic I come to the conclusion that
Sacha's proposal is by far the most reasonable choice we can
make in this particular moment of history. Just promise you
will not activate or implement any inter-server federation
as that would break the security model to bits. See also
http://about.psyc.eu/Federation for a critique on the old
broken ideology of everybody running their own servers and
having them interact.

Best, CvL.


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