The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

I have a knack for crypto. Actually, to be honest, I have a knack for Lego. My mind maps the things you can do with a simple set of tools/rules and then generates simple, easy ways of doing impressive things.

Good examples of this: the hexayurt or the Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps system. Applied to cryptographic applications, it resulted in CheapID and the infamous, lost PKI stockmarket software I wrote once and erased in fear.

Here’s our fundamental issue: there are (at least) three actors we need to consider in cryptographic applications design. They are The User, The Mafia and The State. Most cryptographic applications designers (CADs for now) are politically naive Libertarians, and make one of two errors.

1. They confuse the User and the Mafia, or
2. They conflate the Mafia and the State

This is a debate seen most clearly in electronic currency circles. It comes down to taxes. There are two models: this currency is for not paying taxes, because the government are basically a mafia that extracts taxation. Or this currency is not for paying taxes, because we don’t care if our users are organized crime or not, the government are worse.

These are subtly different models. To model the government as a Mafia is a different thing than to model the users as potentially containing Mafias that cannot be extracted from the system. One or other assumption percolates much CAD thinking.

I’ve been close to the Government. It’s not a mafia. I’ve been slightly less close to the Mafia. They’re not like users. There is a very clear need to create a system which:

1. Protects users from the Government
2. Protects users from the Mafia
3. Protects users from each-other
4. Does not protect The Mafia from The Government

Now, framing cryptographic applications politics in this way is enough to give most of the people involved in the field conniption fits. The apolitical simplifications made in cryptography and cryptology are actually of the “let us assume the horse is a sphere” variety, and when you build social systems around those kinds of mathematical constructs, inevitable failure results.

PGP’s web of trust had, at most, half a million users. Facebook’s web of trust has a billion and rising, while providing users absolutely no protection at all from anybody – they’re being predated by advertisers, by the State, and by each-other with no meaningful safeguards.

So let’s distinguish the Mafia and the State, briefly.

1. Anybody can declare themselves The Mafia by establishing coercion in collaboration with others
2. The State is a special instance of cooperative coercion which may have features like popular support, a criminal justice system with rules, or control of critical infrastructure like hospitals
3. Many of the activities of the State continue with 100% transparency, unlike the Mafia which relies on secrecy to protect it form the State
4. There are a plurality of States

Now this teases apart a useful distinction: the State should be able to operate transparently in (nearly) all circumstances. Mafias, more or less by definition, require secrecy to operate. One could possibly argue that a Mafia which is strong enough to operate Transparently is a State, but that’s a political argument with some fundamental weaknesses which I don’t care to make. My definition of the State is that the State is any entity which can retroactively grant immunity for crimes (cf. Weber’s “monopoly of force” model) but this is an aside.

We are now in a position of attempting to navigate our lives with a hostile State. Even if our own countries (hello Switzerland, hello Norway) are pretty decent, the US and it’s enormous technical monitoring apparatus watch us all through our cell phones and our internet connections. The panopticon is watching you read this blog post through your ISP, and it doesn’t really matter what The Law or Your Government says, because the web server is in America and they’re probably tapping the undersea cables globally anyway, at least for some traffic. The calculus of competing virtues argument for leaving America to heal after 9/11 changed with the signing of the NDAA which ratified the death of the American Constitution, moving the issues resulting from 9/11 from being a temporary breach to a permanent state of affairs.

In this environment, we must therefore examine maintaining our civil rights without passive (or occasionally active) support from the State.

Now, I want you to look at that construction carefully. We have, at least in America, agreed on a set of inviolable rights. These rights are not simply legal rights, they are Rights which define what can be legal. They are the Law above the Law, and graven in stone. The current US government is clearly acting illegally by asserting that it is free to murder its own citizens and hold people without trials, and there is no question that a technological implementation of basic civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure simply maintains existing legal practices in a more complex operating environment. We are not talking about implementing cryptoanarchy or end-running around the right of the State to exist. Rather, we are discussing maintaining already socially and legally established rights in the face of a wayward government.

This is an extremely critical deviation from normal cryptographic applications developer practices. Most of the so-called cipherpunks wanted to implement a new political system called cryptoanarchy using software. That new political system is full of potential problems, and is untried. Defending an existing known-good political equilibrium using software is a fundamentally different enterprise.

Alice, Bob and Carol are about as sophisticated as the political constructs inside of most cryptographic applications get. The State is Carol, and the Users and the Mafia are Alice and Bob, with no distinction made. This is simply using the wrong level of abstraction to get the results you want.

CheapID hinges on a single political insight: the hatred of Nation State intelligence services for each-other could be used to protect citizens from all states. That insight is then used as a political factor in designing a global identity card standard. Many see this as madness, but at least we are addressing the questions at the right architectural level.

Finally, we must address the issue of secure endpoints. The smallest and cheapest system capable of resisting technical intrusion so your messages are read between the keyboard and your cryptographic application is a military base with three levels of doors, metal-box rooms mounted on springs, and guards watching each-other. The fantasy that consumer-grade laptops offer security is just that.

Now, with all this said, we need to start rethinking the mass deployment of cryptography to foil the thieves in the wires, and to protect the human and civil rights we all have. But we must implement what we know works, and not an untried and untested new political equilibrium, no matter how attractive, just because it’s what drops out of the code.

Code is law. Make law wisely.

You need a Jefferson at the Keyboard to Write the New Constitution, whether the language is C or English.

I think only somebody like me could decide to have a mid-life crisis. I’m good at crisis. I decided to have one of my own.

My life is, by any standards, a fucking mess. I finally found an image which really does it justice: I’m a chisel. A very hard, very flat chunk of grey metal that’s hammered into stone.

Facet One – my health
I got pneumonia in Colorado when I was about 30. Up until that point I’d been rock solid for about ten years. Haven’t been right since, and I haven’t fixed it. I’ve gotten slowly fatter and lost more lung capacity with each year, and taking the time out to make repairs has just never been a priority.

Think about that. Six months off, regular tai chi, maybe some acupuncture and odds-are that my body would reset the congestion in my lungs. It’s been ten years, and I haven’t got to it. I’ve made time for a withering look at every major planetary crisis we have, although I’m a little light on nanotechnology and geoengineering (fortunately that’s what Cascio is for dealing with, thank god) but otherwise, deep global coverage. And I’ve put off resting and taking care of myself for a decade.

That has to stop. I have to stop using food as a buffer for stress* and start actually doing the things I know how to do to take better care of myself.

This is going to mean shedding responsibilities and, occasionally, letting people drown because I’m too tired to catch them.

I’ve been Mr. Reliable for too long. New approach needed. One which prioritises sleep over saving the world sometimes.

* for stress read existential horror

Facet Two – beauty
I was never exactly good looking. I saw some pictures of me from around 25 recently, and the thought did occur to me that I’d been better looking than I remembered – and it was a long, long time ago. But that’s an aside.

What I really wanted to talk about was beauty.

At least two of the women I’ve loved and been loved by were beautiful in the most powerful way. I miss them. What I miss is not the simple sculptural quality of looking over at your girlfriend and thinking that god was having an on day when she was made, but something much more subtle.

Beautiful people care about themselves.

You don’t wind up without that kind of surface if you don’t care about it. It’s a constant attention to the body, to the emotions, to the environment, to good food, to rest, to many other things, that takes somebody who could be good looking, and turns them into somebody beautiful. It’s a practice, one might say an artistic one, and it’s something I do not do at all in any way. I occasionally dress appropriately, I play with images of myself and roles, but I don’t think I’ve invested five minutes in actually trying to look good in 10 years. And this is not simply about sexuality, but about an attitude to myself.

The thing about being beautiful is that it’s expensive and often very, very fragile. Hot is durable, beautiful is fragile, people in the worse conditions can manage hot. But beautiful, in the sense I mean it, is spacious. It goes away under pressure. Only the very, very best can maintain it without the underlying blowtorch heat, but it’s not sexuality.

It’s giving a damn, for years, about how you live in your body, and how your body signals the person you are to the world.

I let my ideas and my work do the talking, as is appropriate for a man of my kind. But, actually, to do the things I had to do, to become the person I had to be, I treated my body as a locus of action for my will, not an end-in-itself.

When I was very young, about 20, I fell under the influence of a famous curator Jasia Reichardt who suggested, with some seriousness, that I become an artist. I had a knack for form in computer graphics, and at the time, the early 1990s, people like William Latham were making serious strides.

But I was much, much better at technology, and it became the path not taken. I consistently wrote poetry occasionally for about 10 years, painted consistently for two or three, eventually getting about as good as a mildly talented 11 year old (but with a certain outsider ferocity) and just gradually, quietly stopped creating. I don’t think I’ve made a thing that was beautiful, rather than simply useful, in most of ten years.

I was shocked when I realised that. I’ve become a caricature of my younger self, not it’s expression. The useful bits of me have grown out of all proportion to my other potentialities, because the world needed me to be useful, and I did it the world’s way albeit exclusively on my own terms.

But in the final analysis, I made the same mistake as my old friend Brian. I became a human doing.

It’s too late to spend my thirties getting married and having kids. It’s too late to lose these capabilities and to not know what I know about the world. It’s too late to be a nicer human being. I’ve meddled in the affairs of gods, demons and kings for too long, and you can’t get the edge of the underworld out of my biography. I’ve spent too much time around death, as a bulwark of life. The price of being a bulwark is looking like a bulwark.

But I can make some time for beauty, and to create again.

Facet three – war
I recently said something new about war. The greatly esteemed Kevin Carson collected a series of statements and conversations from twitter, making an essay of a rather turbulent late night thinking session.

I’m grateful to Kevin for doing that, it might have slipped by without him. So what I said, roughly, is this:

1. Government in democracies centralises authority in the elected officials representing the Will of the People, but this explicit centralisation of legitimacy is threatened by decentralisation.
2. Network-centric war has a simple goal: a total comprehension of a transparent battlespace. To be efficient with such transparency, a hierarchy has to add more value than following the guidance of a chain of command costs in communications and centralization errors.
3. In all probability, such hierarchies cannot add more strategic value than they subtract in network errors, which also kills democratic oversight of effective wars, by dismantling the the centralization of legitimacy.

To this we add a sub-argument from John Boyd, that to think clearly about war requires one to have an absolutely solid personal moral foundation for one’s fight. If we do not know that what we are doing is right, the analysis required for clear strategy also leads us to the conclusion that we are heedless murderers or simple evil, and what we know about human cognitive biases is clear. People will not ever come to the conclusion they are the Baddies if they can avoid it.

In short: you can have an accountable military, or an effective one. Groups like the IRA were never accountable to the populations they said they represented. That problem’s only going to get worse, and (for example) Special Forces in the US is in some ways being used as an answer to the costs of democratic centralization. But when one adds a “moral war” layer to this, the situation worsens dramatically: those who are convinced they are right and therefore require no oversight may also have clarity of mind based on moral certitude, while those who see shades of grey in their mandate may fog their thinking around the moral issues, and thereby lose clarity in strategy.

This is, as far as I am aware, new thinking about the interface between new military technology and democratic governance, although it applies old principles in thinking about war. It’s likely I’m retreading areas visited by some policy paper from 1985 – there’s always somebody but it’s dropped out of the debate as far as I can see. The precise dynamics of centralization and accountability in a netwar environment are going to be huge issues in the next year or two too: see Anonymous.

So back to the chisel: I’m good at this stuff. Somebody has to be good at it, and I am. I’ve made substantial contributions to thinking about security issues in several areas, and always towards safeguarding human rights. I can’t quit this responsibly, I just have to manage it.

Consider then, James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton was a true aesthete. He edited a poetry magazine that he himself hand-delivered to subscribers at all hours of the night.

He also ran counter-intelligence for the CIA and, according to Robert Anton Wilson, had President John F. Kennedy killed because he had earlier worked for the Soviet Union.

That, of course, is pure conspiracy theory, but it might explain his happy-old-man demeanour, while at the same time being written up in the history books as a miserable failure. Did Angleton have the last laugh?

Anyway, if Angleton can manage to go from a foppish fan of Ezra Pound to the man who killed the king and die with a smile on his face I’m sure I can square carrying tiny my share of the world’s troubles and keep my head together for the next few years.

Facet four…
The big new projects. Pirate Party Defence Policy Working Group which does what it says on the tin.

Edgeryders is a Council of Europe funded project on European social stability and options for young people who can’t enter society by getting a shiny new job and following their parents because they’re on about half the money our parents had. Now compare that to the seminal Framing the Collapsonomics Practice – we’ve “crossed the chasm” from being out in the woods, talking about the far future to working hand-in-glove with European-level government actors.

TRUTH AND BEAUTY (and don’t forget our video archive builds on the base established by Tea in the Park, an activity we did a couple of years ago where we had a picnic every Sunday for eight months or so, without ever putting up a web site. We just met, week after week, drank tea and got to know each-other. It meant spending a lot of time outside, too, getting familiar with a whole different perspective on London – as folks who were independent from the cafes and stores, with our own music and our newspapers and our thermos flasks, watching the spending world go by.

Truth and Beauty builds on that implicit base of “it’s almost like doing nothing, except that you get to know people really, really well.”

Time. We’re all too busy. We don’t really know even in our closest friends in the way that people who live in villages know their entire community. I got very used to seeing the same faces every few days when I lived in Cloughjordan and the work they’d done on community development there really paid off in huge ways in terms of quality of life and happy people.

So the next phase of TRUTH and BEAUTY is to bring back the Sunday Brunch, much along the lines of Tea in the Park, but this time with added… indoorness. I suspect if the weather’s nice we’ll wind up in St. James Park just round the corner a lot of the time, but we’ve got many months before warm summer evenings arrive so, until picnic season, Hub on Sunday afternoons.

First one will be this Sunday, and it’ll be a general get-to-know-you and thinking together on what we’d like to do with our Sunday Brunches at the Hub.

See you on Sunday! Shall we say, aspirationally, 11AM onwards?

PS: Truth and Beauty on Tuesday 24th will be Dash May (who badly needs to send me blurb!) talking about his artistic practice, including a lot of work on biological systems, and why the Axolotl (regenerating newt-like thing) is such a fascinating beastie.

PPS: I have decided to spend a chunk of this year learning to take pictures, and I promise-promise-promise not to just turn it into functionalist documentation of work. Promise.

David Bovill of Liquid Law

PPS: the point was that, at heart, nothing is wasted. It all comes around again.

I want to talk a little about techno-political theories of change, and outline where the paths of Julian Assange and I diverged.

Although I don’t talk about it very much, I was a cypherpunk in the 1990s. I contributed a little to a software project to protect human rights workers in China. I collaborated with some individuals on a software project to build a Kiva-like microfinance engine on top of e-gold, and narrowly avoided getting entangled in a lot of legal badness when the project exploded. I’m going to return to that story in a minute, but let’s turn back to Julian Assange.

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

Julian Assange, late 2006

Now there are two things you can infer from this, if you read between the lines.

1. Some of the “leaked” material will actually be obtained by computer intrusion (hacking/cracking) and passed off as being leaked by insiders
2. Assange’s model is fundamentally economic and logistical: it’s about transaction costs in a Coase/Benkler style.

WikiLeaks is acting as a marketplace for illicit information, literally a clearing house. This model, with its unconscious capitalist/economics language bias, is the key reason to doubt the long-term effectiveness of this strategy.

Here’s why: the “daylight” model of increasing the transaction costs for conspiracies against the people, in a manner which extends good journalistic practice for the digital age has a simple countermeasure: make security cheaper. By pushing up demand for secure communications, the price of supply goes down. Ah, you say, but leaks circumvent security: actually, no. Digitally tagging files by doing things like rearranging whitespace and swapping words around helps track documents so you know which person leaked. Similar approaches can be taken for images and video. Security isn’t just about stopping people from listening, it’s the whole spectrum of information assurance techniques.

All we’re doing is breeding better conspiracies.

There’s also good reason to believe that Assange simply picked the wrong target. There are a vast number of commercial conspiracies – cartels and industrial espionage being two really useful examples, plus omnipresent government corruption over civil contracting matters. Hitting these networks hard might actually have achieved a lot of popular support for wikileaks in the popular press, and the politically powerful middle class support base which actually decides elections might have come along for the ride. But doing stuff that makes it less likely for the western democracies to win wars makes everybody in those democracies uneasy, consciously or not, and leaves wikileaks politically and more importantly emotionally exposed. People just don’t like it. And it’s not just because Julian Assange is a zealot.

Now let’s consider the “nightside” model, in which we think of wikileaks as simply being a publishing front for computer crackers to launder stolen documents as more-legitimate leaks. By creating a single exchange point, they’ve created a point of regulation. Pushing down the cost of publishing a cracked document, and providing filtering to take out (say) the names of innocents involved in a situation also creates a new political bottleneck, which (of course) the authorities have chocked down on as hard as possible. The other argument is that wikileaks primary threat is not the governments of the west, but vastly more unscrupulous agencies (Mossad, the Chinese) who might find their own uses for an allegedly journalistic endeavour.

Economics thinking leads one astray when dealing with matters of political power.

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” – Mao Tse-tung

I was writing software to run cryptographic financial markets in the late part of the last millennium. I’d worked extensively with the e-gold guys, and started to do some real analysis on how to do something very, very interesting. I was thinking about low-cost financial instruments for sustainable development, and rapidly discovered that there was a very, very real risk that my work was going to wind up empowering mafias.

I got The Fear. I was an illegal immigrant writing software to build secure, anonymous, untraceable financial instruments on top of a dodgy digital currency run out of a south sea island banking system, and (worse) Florida. I slapped some sense into myself, and left the project behind, and cryptography with it. It just didn’t feel safe because I was already running one risk (being an illegal immigrant trying to find status to stay in the US) and I was breaking The Rules (1. only ever break one law at a time. 2. never break the law with somebody you don’t trust. 3. never break the law with somebody protected from the consequences. 4. don’t get caught. 5. never break the law with somebody dumber than you are. 6. cons con cons (aka “you cannot cheat an honest man.”), 7. never steal anything worth less than two years salary. 8. don’t do it for the thrill.)

These are the things you learn growing up on a Scottish housing estate in the 1980s.

So I quit crypto. Not being able to go to The State for help, if the situation I’d been in escalated to Men With Guns, left me with a clear understanding: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being. Now, let me say that again: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being.

This is the start of my divergence from the classical cyperpunk’s anti-State crypto-anarchist market capitalist stance. I realized that I needed them to protect me from the Mafia, because I saw just the very shady outline of the Mafia two or three handshakes out from where I was, in a position where I couldn’t get help without getting deported. If they’d gone from three handshakes away to one handshake away, I’d have had to make a decision: ask for help and lose my country, or go it alone and risk losing my life or worse.

It’s not until you get a sense of those situations yourself that your ethics become clear. But I realized that I needed the State.

Years later, I realized the State needed me. I did a biometrics technology package, aimed at situations like Iraq, which embodied many of the fundamental core cypherpunk principles (anonymity, cryptographic assurances of judicial process, cryptographic implementation of personal privacy) in a proposed biometric ID card standard. I was working for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with oversight from the National Security Agency. I worked in the public domain, you can see the CheapID proposal here, and I considered myself to be doing good. The Pentagon have always supported the hexayurt project, they’ve always treated the concepts of appropriate technology with respect, and while none of that washes away the evil done, I’ve never seen the fanged end of the beast.

But I know it is there, and I tread carefully.

Recently I invented the Riot Snorkel in direct response to the abuse of pepper spray and cs gas for suppressing peaceful protest in America. In the long run, that might be a pretty harsh anti-State action, and I’m aware of the risk it’s going to get people hurt in the long run by depriving police of an effective first move in quashing protests. I took a calculated risk, and invested some of my political capital to draw a line in the sand: “you should not be doing this, and I’m standing up.” That’s a political step I made to frame a wider project: getting some of this radical political stuff implemented as the only realistic way of governing ourselves on the planet, given the failure of mainstream democracies to protect the environment, help the poor, or even stay at peace in times where no legitimate reason for war exist.

Understand: follow my engineering advice, and pepper spray and cs gas stop working. I didn’t put that out there without thinking through the risks at a political and personal level pretty carefully. I did it to protect democracy, in my own way, in my own time.

So this is where Assange and I part ways. He used an economic analysis, and came up with a way of making conspiracy expensive. I used a military use-of-force analysis, and came to the conclusion that I needed the State’s protection, and in fact we all do. As a result, I’m guardedly loyal to the State, and I want the best State possible. I’m absolutely enthusiastic about the A Thousand Nations approach of building some new countries with new governance arrangements and seeing what works (“a Cambrian explosion in governance!” as they say) but, in the here and now, we need Better States.

So here’s the model I use, parallel to Assange’s transaction costs model.

1. Inside of government there’s a range of political and personal character, ranging from saintly to outright diabolical in a very literal “evil” sense.
2. The good end of government tend to believe in things like open data, open government, rule of law, human rights and similar. It’s people a lot like you and me, but inside the State.
3. By identifying the progressive incumbents, the best of the people seated at the Big Tables, and supporting them, we can produce better government.
4. The critical periods are long-term conflicts about what to do on the biggest scale: wars, environment, civil rights etc. in which established factions form and fight for the framing of the problem of a given position.
5. The critical actors are senior bureaucrats, not elected officials. Elected officials of any substantial power are all agents of satan by virtue of constantly having to lie to people and the media “or the other, even worse guy, will win.” This is corruption.
6. Civil society – that’s you and me – can meaningfully contribute by effective support and cooperation to differentially empower progressive incumbents. We help the critical actors (senior bureaucrats) win critical conflicts during critical periods as a way of expressing our political power.
7. Mostly what they need are good ideas and proof that doing the right thing will work. Civil society can produce these, possibly using Wikipedia-type Free approaches.

I wrote about this approach at considerable length in The Big Deal, a series of long blog posts analysing how civil society could push forwards a new settlement with government in critical areas to try and create a better world. I believe in this approach.

Now, here’s why I’m laying this approach out. Next year, I’m going after #Occupy. The current political culture inside of #Occupy is dangerously shallow. If we get large scale economic breakage, and Occupy goes from being 2,000 people in New York to being 200,000 people, if it becomes the army of the dispossessed, the Tyranny of Structurelessness is going to be an immense bane, as a lot of angry, frightened people get together in a non-democratic environment and attempt to figure out where to apply their political weight to get solutions. There’s a name for that: it’s called a mob. We can, and must, do better than first-past-the-post voting every four years for leaders pre-selected by political power elites and corporate-controlled media. But we must also do better than small groups of people waving their hands at each other at emotive appeals.

Two core virtues: voting, and written discourse. They go together: you can’t vote on a speech, or an improvised dialogue, because somebody may have made a mistake and now you’re voting on their mistake, not their intention. We need clear, written platforms, and political accountability for diverting from them. We’d all prefer CHANGE Obama to MORE OF THE SAME Obama, but there’s little framework for holding him to his own high standards.

As I outlined in The Big Deal and When? we just can’t sustain political change on the basis of an inaccurate world model.

Fighting, even winning, the war against narrow self interest is not the same thing as creating viable global solutions for the narrows that the human race finds itself in.

Support progressive incumbents.

Solve problems, don’t just yell at people.

Be ready to take responsibility, because The State does a lot of work for us, and it’s going bankrupt in many places.

Frontal assault is always going to get you bitten in the face. But we can change the world, as previous generations have, by skillful politics and picking both our horses and our battles with care.

As I said at the beginning, I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we learned different lessons.

We can’t do this alone, and a counter-conspiracy is just another gang. It’s up to us to find a better, more inclusive, more whole way to address our global problems.

Because until the proposed settlement works for everybody with a veto, particularly a veto-by-violence, stuck we remain.

So that’s my game plan for next year. Thankless as the task might be, society as-a-whole is going to need a more politically sophisticated Occupy to take up the slack left by a limp press and a corrupt government. The outrage of the people needs to be both realistic and constructive, because if we tear down much more, there’s going to be nothing left. We don’t suffer from too much governance, we suffer from too little: no effective climate regulation, no effective nanobio risk regulation.

Imagine a bridge built from the more reasonable end of Occupy, right through to the strategy rooms of Whitehall and Washington DC. That’s my vision of 2012: get everybody around the same table, make them all say sorry to each other, and then get on with figuring out how to fix the world.

I have decided to do something to prevent the abuse of chemical weapons by police.

If I was a lawyer I might sue. I’m an engineer: I design.

So I am presenting a simple plan for a chemical weapons protection system which is suitable for construction by peaceful protesters.

I am aware this is a technology which could be abused, however (as I will explain in a moment) I consider this to be a reasonable risk under circumstances where widespread punitive use of sublethal chemical weapons is a routine fact of life for many peaceful protesters.

The Ethical Case
Sublethal chemical weapons like pepper spray were originally intended as an alternative to lethal force like firearms. They were sold to the public as a solution to problems like a senile man with a knife: you can disable him with relatively low risk using pepper spray, or you can shoot him with a firearm, but there’s no other way to disarm him that doesn’t put a policeman’s life in danger in close combat with a knife-wielder.

As an alternative to firearms or other likely-lethal force, sublethal chemical weapons have considerable utility.

However, as we’ve seen recently in America, pepper spray and CS gas are being used in a different way: punitive torture using chemical agents (punitive chemical torture for short) is being used to punish people for protesting. This is problematic for multiple reasons, but two likely have legal force.

Firstly, torture is not a means of punishment which is recognized as legitimate under US law, European law, or international treaties on human rights. The United Nations explicitly takes a stand against it, as does the European human rights system. Therefore punitive use of torture using chemical agents is likely illegal in the spirit of the law, even if it is temporarily legal by the letter of it in some jurisdictions.

Secondly, police do not have the ability to impose summary judgement, and punishment. Even if chemical torture was a legitimized punishment for certain classes of crimes (“protesting and third class trespass, GUILTY!”) police do not have the ability to decide who is guilty or not guilty and hand out punishment: that’s the court system’s job, not the police’s. This is a very simple argument to make, and the usurpation of powers indicated by police action in this respect is much more in line with the kind of thing you might see under martial law than normative legal conditions.

So on this basis, I feel it to be necessary and important to do something to reduce the damage done by likely-illegal punitive chemical torture by police and other actors. As noted, I’m a designer, not a lawyer, so here is my solution.

Improvised Sublethal Chemical Weapons Personal Protective Equipment – Not the Riot Snorkel

In the early phases of this project, I used the nickname “riot snorkel” for what I had designed. This name is not suitable for general use, because it includes the word “riot”, but as a working title it remains. I apologize for any confusion this may cause in future. This device is designed to protect peaceful protesters from improper use of sublethal chemical weapons.

The ISCWPPE (“isc-wipe”) has three phases tiers of deployment.

ISCWPPE-1
Firstly, one takes the mouthpiece from a cheap snorkel and pulls off the snorkel. The mouthpiece is joined to three or four feet of garden hose, which is run down the back of the protester and invisibly positioned out of sight. One breathes in through the hose-snorkel when pepper spray is in play, the air intake being hidden and protected from frontal assault with a spray. This should probably be paired with a pair of goggles and a nose-clip or a face mask from standard swimming gear supplies to protect the eyes and nose. Critically, this does not obscure the face, and therefore is not a likely to be a mask which police might compel one to remove for identification purposes: I believe the ISCWPPE to be legal. The net effect is that if one is pepper sprayed, the respiratory tract and eyes will be protected from the effect of the sublethal chemical weapon. Skin burns will still be sustained, but the essential functions of the body will be protected.

ISCWPPE-2
The second level of the ISCWPPE connects the end of the pipe to a soda bottle based filter. Take a two litre soda bottle, connect the hose to the top of the bottle. An air intake goes into the bottom of the bottle, in the manner common in water pipes. The air intake tube starts above the level of the top of the bottle, so that liquid does not spill, and passes through the side of the bottle above the water line, while extending below the water line. The entire assembly could easily go in a small backpack, with the pipe from the snorkel going into the top of the backpack in a similar manner to Camelbak-type hydration packs. As one inhales, air is drawn through the water as a series of bubbles. Gravel or beads break up the bubbles, increasing the surface area. Allegedly vinegar counteracts CS gas, which is the primary modality this approach protects against. I cannot vouch for the safety of inhaling air passed through a vinegar solution (secondary drowning?) but this is terrain for analysis by medics, and possible experiment. Be careful with this! You will also need to add an exhale valve (see the standard N95 dust mask) to enable respiration. An exhale valve could also be fashioned from a tube-shaped balloon – cut off both ends, stretch over the pipe, and air can flow down the length of the rubber, but not back up. It’s a very simple, very durable valve, but may make a strange noise. Try taping a piece of such a balloon to a straw to understand the principle!

ISCWPPE-3
The third level of the ISCWPPE places a plastic bag, sealed at the neck, over the face of the protester. The out breath through the exhale valve expands the bag, producing a clear, flexible bubble around the head of the protester. Pepper spray and CS gas swirl outside of the bubble, while one is safe within. Exhaling continues to keep the bubble inflated. This bubble is at positive pressure, which will stop infiltration by any gas in the environment. However, this setup may be dangerous, as a blow to the head which rendered somebody unconscious without breaking the bag could result in suffocation.

This is all notional, first-pass work on protecting people, but I don’t know what else to do to stop that abuse of these weapons other than making them ineffective.

Take care, and be at peace.

Vinay Gupta
Director
Hexayurt Project