Photo of Nadim Kobeissi, August 3, 2013, by Quinn Norton, Aaron Swartz's ex-girlfriend, who writes, "And now, @kaepora revealed: brain controled cat ears & burning demon eyes".
Good Lord, @kaepora is now an advisor to the New America Foundation (joining a cast of "progressives" that formerly included net-de-deluder Evgeny Morozov and still includes darknet devotee Rebecca McKinnon). He now writes on his Twitter profile, "OpenITP Special Advisor at the New America Foundation". That's not staff or even a fellow but "special advisor" (like a consultant) but it means he can use the affiliation everywhere to further legitimize himself. It's not the first time that people from the hacker movement have sought positions in left or liberal foundations or nonprofits so that they can mainstream their radicalism.
Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) is the Lebanon-born boy wonder (he emigrated to Montreal four years ago) who burst on the hacking scene some years ago with a magic encrypted chat program called Cryptocat that at first some crypto kids were enthralled with, but then began to be taken apart and criticizied as full of holes, enabling a view of all the group chat for the previous year. He has constantly fended off critics, and likely has become stronger for it.
Bruce Schneier, whom I call an anti-security expert because he's constantly in fact minimizing cyberwar and terrorism and undermining the government's efforts to fight them (and not surprisingly, has now joined EFF), tore Cryptocat apart here -- on the basis of others' trashing -- a year ago. That whole discussion there is a good bird's eye view on all the crypto arguments and why they are always pecking each others' eyes out and why, well, if you really want something secret, you should not go on the Internet at all with it.
The Wired editor's very long comeback against Schneier (and Chris Soghoian, who also weighed in witheringly against both Kobeissi and Quinn Norton, who penned the glowing repport on his Cryptocat) is very telling: it shows you how there are hackers' hackers, and then hackers' hackers' hackers...or something. The older generation of experts and the newer generation coming of age around WikiLeaks and Aaron Swartz and Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden -- even more wild than their predecessors. It's kind of like what happened to Haystack -- in the hands of Evgeny Morozov.
Now that lavabit closed down, and Tor was so exposed (half its nodes taken down and purple dye injected into it to show who all the users were via their browsers downloaded from the Tor browser bundle), I've been wondering if all the cool kids, including Edward Snowden, have moved to Cryptocat. Cryptocat isn't the only encrypted chat program out there -- there are bunches as you can see from his talk (video below) but it's one that the cool kids use because it has cat stuff, see.
Nadim continues to heckle Jacob Appelbaum, his rival (developer of Tor and WikiLeaks representative in America, er, now Germany) on Liberationtech, the Stanford University mailing list. He continued so aggressively that finally the moderator, who is always policing speech on this, um, Internet freedom list, made more draconian speech rules to shut him up.
Basically, Kaepora was accusing Appelbaum of poor management of his circumvention software, since so many users got nailed with it, including activists in dangerous places -- they got exposed along with the child pornographers.
Now, speaking of child pornography, there was a scandal more than a year ago in which Kaepora himself was accused of enabling child pornography through negligence and indifference related to a website he was said to control.
Those bringing this to light were LibertyLynx, a pseudonomyous persona on Twitter who writes mainly about Russia and foreign policy but also follows the hacker movement and @PGPBOARD (Alan Taylor who is a major WikiLeaks' critic and maintains a running polemics and alternative to their manipulated news). You can still see some evidence of this scandal here and here, but Nadim threatened them with libel suits or abuse reports or something at the time, and they had to take down the pages. You can still more or less pick out the alleged story here -- but I have no idea of its reliability.
At one point LibertyLynx even believed that Kaepora might stand for "KP" which is the term for "kiddie porn" on the Internet. But it's more likely taken from Zelda's Kaepora Gaebora. I don't know if he himself has ever commented on the origin of his name.
What does this boil down to? It's quite possible that a very young, 20-something enthusiastic radical coder neglected his housekeeping duties on some server and/or looked the other way while it was misused by child pornographers. The reality is, as with Tor and Appelbaum, they don't care; in fact, we have to go back to our own US military for this "don't care" attitude about what clutters up and infests servers because they feel they need this sort of thing as "cover" to do...whatever it is that they do.
Is the world a safer place now that Kaepora has a "real job" and is off the streets?
No. Because now he has all of the Soros funding and other liberal funding keeping the NAF afloat on its mission to minimize Putin, terrorism, hacking, and espionage -- just read all the NAF authors and you'll see what it's about. Don't forget that the chairman of the board of NAF now is Eric Shmidt, the executive chairman of Google; power-tweeter Anne Marie Slaughter is going to become the president of NAF (and she may have talent-spotted @kaepora on Twitter if Rebecca McKinnon didn't).
What can we expect Kaepora to do at NAF?
Well, with more institutional backing and funding, do what he essentially did to get stopped at the Canadian-US border -- make encryption that the NSA and other intelligence agencies can't get at.
Here's how Wikipedia described this:
Kobeissi was detained and questioned at the U.S. border by the DHS in June 2012 about Cryptocat's censorship resistance. He tweeted about the incident afterwards, resulting in media coverage and a spike in the popularity of Cryptocat.[22][23] Kobeissi was regularly searched and questioned whenever he flew in the U.S. in 2012.[24]
In 2012, the FBI attempted to entrap Kobeissi using Sabu – an American hacker involved with LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous – as an undercover informant.[25] Kobeissi responded on his blog: "To all young hackers out there – use your talents for research. Never acquiesce to anything illegal with anyone, even if they do it with you."[26]
Oops. #fail as they say.
You can catch up with Kaepora's thinking at the News from YCombinator page, which is always a good place to go and see what all the young hackers are saying about other hackers. Here's an interesting comment about the Miranda arrest under his name "magicpike":
Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald, to bring him to "full froth", so to speak? Make him angry, make it personal by abusing his husband, so that his reporting becomes more emotional to the point where he starts risking his legitimacy and moral authority as a journalist. Something very similar happened with WikiLeaks.
I know Glenn and I'm certain he's smarter than this, but this is an explanation I've had in my head since day one and everyone seems to have missed. And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist? He must not allow them to make it a personal fight between him and the NSA.
Well, gosh.
I'll note why I didn't think of this: because, well, Glenn is already radical and frothing anyway.
I wondered, as did others, if he in fact stage-managed the entire caper to trip-wire British intelligence into arresting his husband-mule to better appear the victim and gain sympathy -- and make Her Majesty's Government look the fool. And I also wondered if he did this to distract from some other muling caper out of Germany, involving Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras -- which as a result, we never noticed.
The appearance of a story seeming to come from the Snowden stash in the Independent then made it seem as if somehow British intelligence or Russian intelligence had Snowden files they were leaking, and now Greenwald was being put off balance. He threatened -- yes, indeed he did, despite his back-tracking later -- to deliberatley release UK stuff to get back at the British, and then this story came out in the Independent -- that he swears he didn't leak. Maybe they're just playing with his head now.
In any event, you'll want to continue to follow all the pearls of wisdom that come out from Kaepora even more now, like this notion that CFAA interpretations now make use of Tor in the US illegal.
It's terrible that the only way we get a critique of Tor is by having an equally creepy-crypto kid attack it -- so that it gets like the Cat 'n the Hat in your house, you need someone else to finally clean up after him before Mom gets home.
Kaepora thinks counterintelligence should be taught in journalism schools -- you need to chat on Cryptocat or GibberBot or other systems where "even the server can't see you talk" (and I'd like a second opinion on that)
Which makes Kaepora and everything he is allied with, well, a conspiratorial clandestine movement.
One thing I really hate about all these people's notions is that unless you slavishly follow their dickish little ideas about what is properly encrypted -- and you can see they all disagree and tear each others' eyes out -- you are harming your client, your source, your customer, your relative -- whomever you are trying to protect from encrypted chat or emails.
And that's just putting WAY too much power and trust into an artifact of technology -- and worse, its coder. No coder or piece of technology deserves such trust -- ever.
If you have a social movement that depends solely on encryption to succeed, then you don't have a social movement, you have a conspiracy and a clandestine partisan movement. It can't succeed when it is so dependent on encryption. It is antithetical to the open society you are ostensibly trying to build.
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