Steal This Show

In this holiday episode I met up with super early Bitcoin adopter Brad Mills (https://twitter.com/bradmillscan) to discuss the strange new world we're entering as Bitcoin reaches new all-time highs, and the global financial system enters a period of unprecedented stress. Why were the very first Bitcoiners drawn to Bitcoin, before anyone else believed in it? Could there be common characteristics amongst these earliest adopters which might make them a strange kind of community? What is the world they'd like to see Bitcoin bring about? And, perhaps most important, how will the world change with a bunch of newly minted, left-libertarian billionaires looking to shake things up? We were supposed to discuss the Weird World of DeFi, but that's gonna have to wait for a future episode because we got sidetracked discussing Brad's interesting history, what led him to Bitcoin, and the strange future implied by a bunch of wild-eyed libertarians running around as freshly minted millionaires. I hope you enjoy the episode!

In this episode, I met Emerson Brooking, (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/emerson-t-brooking/) a fellow at the Digital Forensics Lab and author of LikeWar (https://www.amazon.com/LikeWar-Weaponization-P-W-Singer-ebook/dp/B0795FB3ZY) , to take a deep dive into the topic of online disinformation. I put to Emerson my feelings that what people are calling the 'post-truth' world has in fact been in gestation long before the internet, and that a lot of the arguments about today's epistemic disorder come down to sour grapes over the apparition of new information incumbents capable of creating and distributing disorderly narratives, at scale. His responses surprised me. If you're interested in digging deeper into this topic, you can check out the latest episode of my new documentary project, SCHISM, at http://youtube.com/SCHISM, or follow the link in the show notes. Now, on with the show.

In this episode, we meet Alex Kehaya (https://twitter.com/afkehaya?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) of VPN Orchid (https://www.orchid.com/) to discuss the company's radical new decentralized approach to improving privacy for internet users. As you'll hear, Orchid's model solves a lot of the problems associated with traditional models —  providing better anonymity and privacy, and reduced exposure to the honeypot problem that's always plagued centralized services.  This episode will be of great interest to anyone looking to augment their online privacy without relying on a single centralized service — and the potential for decentralization to improve our digital lives.

In this episode, journalist and writer Joseph Menn discuss the seminal hacking crew Cult Of The Dead Cow. CoDC was one of the key forces behind the creations of 'hacktivism', which tries to contribute political change via formal and informal hacking operations. Of particular interest here is how CoDC's work has more than occasionally dovetailed with American foreign policy -- especially with regards to China. Joseph Menn is on Twitter @JosephMenn (https://twitter.com/josephmenn) , and his book on the Cult Of The Dead Cow (https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Dead-Cow-Original-Supergroup/dp/154176238X) is available at all good bookshops.

In this episode, we talk to Troy Murray (https://twitter.com/Danny_Desert) about snglsDAO (https://snglsdao.io/) : a BitTorrent and blockchain-based system for distributing and monetizing video content, the crazy amounts of money SingularDTV (https://www.singulardtv.com/) raised in their ICO, and why the ICO system seems to have provided a bad incentive to develop actual products. Find out how snglsDAO is intending to take power away from centralized services like YouTube, why that goal suddenly seems incredibly urgent, and why a Distributed Autonomous Organization is the right way to go about it.

In this episode Jamie talks with Evan Henshaw Plath, aka @rabble (https://twitter.com/rabble) , about how he sees the world during and after Covid-19 - and the role for decentralised technologies, bitcoin, and survivable communication systems in whatever comes next. Evan's currently building Verse (https://verse.app/) , a social network built on the Scuttlebutt protocol.

In this episode, we meet up with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, to discuss how Taiwan eliminated Covid-19 with only 7 deaths (https://www.wlns.com/news/taiwan-was-so-ready-for-the-pandemic-that-it-only-had-7-deaths/) . Find out how information technology was instrumental in Taiwan's success, from helping source and distribute masks, to enabling citizen engagement through direct democracy. And finally, we dig into how this ongoing experiment with direct democracy in Taiwan has helped avoid the deadly plague of conspiracy theories, social polarization, and what some people are now calling the 'epistemic crisis' we're experiencing in the West.

In this episode, I talked with Ben Buchanan (https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014U0TKAA0/ben-buchanan) author of The Hacker And The State (https://www.amazon.com/Hacker-State-Attacks-Normal-Geopolitics/dp/0674987551) . We look at Ben's research into 'Shadow Brokers' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers) , the mysterious hacker group who first appeared in the summer of 2016,  attempting to auction off a treasure trove of previously unknown NSA exploits. We discuss the hackers' tense relationship with the media, possible suspects including Kaspersky Labs, and motivations Shadow Brokers may have had beyond their claims that it was 'all about the Bitcoins'.

In this episode, returning guest Abhistha (https://people.utwente.nl/s.abhishta) -- now Assistant Professor in network security at the University of Utwente  -- digs into his latest research on the real economic impact of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks such as the Mirai botnet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware)) . With the internet-of-things continuing to grow as an attack surface, and compromised devices increasing both in number and processing capacity, we take an in-depth look at the underground economics of botnets -- and why some large corporations may not be owning up to the true extent of the threat to their bottom line.

In this episode we meet Rich Myer (https://twitter.com/remyers_) s of mesh networking company GoTenna (https://gotenna.com) . Rich is developing the Lot49 (https://globalmeshlabs.org/files/Lot49%20Protocol%20Whitepaper%20-%20DRAFT%200.8.5_20190611.pdf) protocol, which both allows Lightning transactions over a local mesh network, and uses Bitcoin incentives to increase adoption of the network. Rich and I discuss the history of wireless networking and how P2P meshes could turn out to be critical in a time of crisis; why and to what extent we can consider our contemporary networks compromised through what Rich calls 'The Eye of Sauron' problem; and how Lot49 enables an internet-minimized micropoayments soltuion which could function in a distressed, post-Covid environment. 

In this episode, I talk to Sean Moss Pultz, CEO of Bitmark Inc. -- a company focused on enabling personal data sovereignty through blockchain technology. We discuss Bitmark's journey and the company's latest pivot to Spring, an app that helps users extract personal data from Facebook and put it to work in all kinds of interesting ways. We discuss Sean's thoughts on data sovereignty and data rights as a critical civics issue and look in detail at how Spring wants to empower a new level of control over personal data, providing a much-needed counterweight to big platforms who regard our information as their intellectual property. During these uncertain times, I'd love to connect with listeners more than ever. For that reason I'm temporarily opening the Patreon discord to anyone who wants to join -- just email me at jamie@stealthisshow.com and I'll send you an invite. At times like this, we all benefit from exchanging information and ideas about what we should be doing and how to survive whatever comes next.

This episode features returning guest Sam Woolley, whose new book 'The Reality Game,' examines the new frontiers of 'fake news' and the idea that the next wave of technology will 'break the truth'. We discuss the state of the art in propaganda bots, delve further into the Russian strategy of producing 'controlled instability' through ongoing, widespread informational attacks such as political bots, and talk about the rise of institutional distrust, which may well prove disastrous in the context of the current pandemic. I hope you are doing okay during this tough period. During these uncertain times I'd love to connect with listeners more than ever. For that reason I'm temporarily opening the Patreon discord to anyone who wants to join -- just email me at jamie@stealthisshow.com (mailto:jamie@stealthisshow.com) and I'll send you an invite. At times like this we all benefit from exchanging information and ideas about what we should be doing and how to survive whatever comes next.

In this Stolen Headlines, we invite show supporters Tim Reutemann (https://www.bravenewworld.nl/Speakers/tim-reutemann/) and Mendel Skulski (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/mendel-skulski-5b303638) to discuss Coronavirus - how various world governments have responded so far, and the role information technology has played in detecting, containing and eradicating the disease. Tim introduces the informal hackathon he's initiated along with this wife, as a platform for people to do something about the virus. We discuss: how Taiwan has approached containing Coronavirus, and whether the surveillance provisions set up in order to contain the disease could persist after it's resolved. And we argue about whether modern, data-driven totalitarian societies like China are proving themselves more efficient than free-market economies in addressing Coronavirus, and whether this points to any unexpected advantages this new state form may have over the Western model in the future. Tim brought the stolen headlines for this show (vi

 In this episode, we meet Andy Greenberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Greenberg) , senior writer at Wired Magazine and author of Sandworm, A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hacker (https://andygreenberg.net/) . We how Russia is developing a secret hacking programme with the ability to take out national infrastructure across the world -- and how, under a new paradigm of 'total war', essential elements of our lived environment are increasingly vulnerable to digital attack -- from banking to electricity to transport systems and beyond. Find out why Russia may now be trying to export the 'controlled instability' it has produced in Ukraine to the West, and how this could provide the country with an unprecedented 'asymmetric' military upper hand. 

In this episode, I met Hugo Fruehauf (https://qeprize.org/winners/hugo-fruehauf) , one of the inventors of GPS, the global positioning system underpinning an enormous number of the technologies we rely on today. We dig into how GPS works, and how much of our world depends on it -- from cellphone networks to financial markets and the electric grid....  and the multiple attacks against it by spoofers and jammers.

We are living in a world eaten by software -- software created, owned and operated by Silicon Valley. In this episode, Jamie meets Margaret O' Mara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_O'Mara) , author of 'The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America' (https://www.amazon.com/Code-Silicon-Valley-Remaking-America/dp/0399562184) to discuss how Silicon Valley's rejection of the conventional bureaucracies and corporate structures, its turning away from the mainframe towards a decentralized attitude to innovations and development, led to a huge new empire -- one that is radically restructuring the world's institutions.

In this episode Jamie meets up with John P. Carlin (https://www.mofo.com/people/john-carlin.html) , author of Dawn of the Code War (https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Code-War-Americas-Against-ebook/dp/B079M8813N) and former Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division to discuss the ongoing network war with China -- one that's about to ratchet up, as 5G connects billions of devices via a technology heavily dependent on China's Huawei. What does it mean to wage war in the era of distributed networks? How do networks change the very idea of 'Command and Control' towards leaderless, non-hierarchical memetic structures? We dig into crowdsourced terrorism' of Al Qaeda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda) and look at some similarities with Anonymous and the QAnon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon) phenomenon. Finally, we discuss the widespread idea that there's a kind of break with authority going on in the online era—what could be described as an 'epistemological cris

In this episode of Stolen Headlines, Tim, Mattias and Jamie get together to discuss how 8Chan came to influence White House policy; why in China, the Little Red Book *reads you*; and the array of Silicon Valley companies caving to China's stringent censorship demands. Links: https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/qanon-ukraine-server/ https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/chinese-app-allows-officials-access-to-100-million-users-phone-report-2115962 https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-censoring-content-for-china-apple-microsoft-2019-10?r=US&IR=T Stolen Headlines is created in the STEAL THIS SHOW Discord channel, in collaboration with the show's patrons. Join us and get involved: https://patreon.com/stealthisshow.

In Fighting For The Perimeter: Huawei & The 5G Surveillance Empire (https://stealthisshow.com/s04e16/) . I looked at 5G as a new global surveillance surface, one largely dependent on Huawei, a company run by ex-officer of China's military. Using the documentary American Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory) as a springboard, this episode looks at how and why the West has allowed a strategic adversary to occupy key elements of its economic infrastructure. Transnational capital was supposed to create a world of free-market democracies. Instead, China has used the free market system to maintain and grow itself into a dominant ‘command economy’, based on a highly technologized form of authoritarian capitalism.  What are the consequences of hooking up our factories, nuclear power production, and networking infrastructure to a Chinese state which is openly seeking empire and hegemony?    This is a kind of precursor to the next episode in this sequence, which will look at the role information tech

This is part one of a two-part interview with Finn Brunton (https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/finn-brunton) , author of 'Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency' (https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Cash-Anarchists-Technologists-Cryptocurrency-ebook/dp/B07MDHTPB9) . In this part we dig into the secret pre-history of Bitcoin, including the World War 2 origins of public/private key cryptography, how Proof Of Work was initially proposed as a means to fight spam,  and how the 'Extropian' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism) movement - which, Finn explains, stood for 'more life, more energy, more time, more space, more money... more everything! - collected an uncanny number of the early engineers contributing to what would eventually become Bitcoin. If there's one key takeaway from this episode, it's that there's no one Satoshi Nakamoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto) -- Bitcoin's a bricolage of math, technology and ingenuity s