Interview with Harry Halpin
This article is translated from German from an original article on 1E9 magazine.
Do anarchism and Swiss banks go together? In the world of Harry Halpin, they do. With his startup Nym, he wants to bring privacy back to the internet and empower people. We talked to him about data protection as a human right, the vision of crypto anarchism and the collapsing power of governments and corporations.
An interview by Krischan Lehmann
“Your private life is entirely your business,” it says in a double-spread newspaper announcement from 1986 for the then-upcoming German census. “What you do, think or vote does not have anything to do with us”. This advertisement campaign cost the German government 46 million Deutschmark, the most expensive campaign by any German government to date, and was considered necessary because of the risk of widespread boycott of the census. About half of the German population refused to participate in the census. Mostly out of fear that answering the 33 questions would make them a “transparent person” (“gläsern Menchen”), and that digitization would lead to the erosion of civil rights, making people subject to the whims of the economy and the technocratic institutions.
From today’s perspective, with everything we know about the mass surveillance by the NSA and widespread election manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, the resistance of these German citizens in the 1980s looks both reasonable and at the same time almost naive. Germany can still be called a privacy refuge when compared to the rest of the world, and yet even here, the worries of IT experts has become a constant background noise. A steady news stream of data leaks, weak points, and security holes have left us systematically desensitized to privacy problems. To put it another way: with the introduction of large social networks and cloud services privacy has lost its value. What was previously part of private life becomes today´s Instagram story. We are still somewhat critical of sharing data with governments, but when it comes to large internet companies, we throw our data at them like it is nothing: “Alexa, turn on the TV”.
“Nym fits much better in our pre-internet brains, where we were used to having some place where the whole world is not constantly listening” says Harry. That was where our conversation had arrived at in my interview with our guest, CEO and co-founder of Nym, Harry Halpin. He wants to make the internet cool again, and to give people back their private life. His project is Nym: a decentralised network that washes away the metadata of internet users, secure and powerful enough to withstand the prying eyes of even the most powerful intelligence agency.
1E9: You have been a scientist for many years and now a founder of a start-up. You describe yourself in the first line as a crypto-anarchist, what exactly do you mean by that?
Harry Halpin: Crypto anarchism, at first might sound dangerous. And it probably is for old fashioned institutions. But really, it is about a healthy common sense: We can not trust and rely on governments and other state actors to protect our data and have our best interests in mind. History confirms this. When there is an emergency, the state can simply change these laws in an undemocratic way. Most of the laws have an emergency clause in them. For example in the USA after 9–11, there was a state of emergency declared, and similarly in Germany after the Reichstag was burned down, and there are even examples from the Roman Empire. In the current COVID times, we live in a permanent state of emergency and I fear that our institutions are developing the dangerous habit of breaking the rules, even when intentions are good.
Here is where cryptography comes into play. What many people do not know is that in the meantime, it has become so developed that even intelligence agencies are grinding their teeth.
HH: Exactly. The only way that our rights and private sphere can be defended is with cryptography. It is not without reason that until only recently, cryptography was a state secret. Some academics back then defended themself from the NSA by releasing Public-Key-Cryptography to the public. Until then, these systems could only be used by computer professionals. With Nym we want to take the struggle for more privacy to the next level and give people the possibility to contribute to privacy as a collective good and to be part of an economically sustainable private internet.
How do you guys deal with the issue that privacy can be misused for criminal activities?
HH: In principle, I think that humans have evolved to true and cooperative social beings, but of course anonymity can be misused. It can also save your life, for example, the life of whistleblowers in repressive countries, which there are more than enough of in the world today. The surveillance and lack of privacy on the internet make it possible for criminals to take advantage of internet users. I’m more than convinced that the sum of positive use-cases greatly outweighs possible criminal activities.
It is incredible that the internet has developed into essentially a data collector
HH: Venture Capitalists in the USA were especially interested in data protection and privacy back in the day because it was hard to make any money with computers without secure payments. Then came the surveillance state, where advertising became the business model of the internet. And finally came the conviction that it is necessary for the US government to engage in total surveillance of the whole world as a matter of national interest. If you want to start a new digital company, you need to fit into these business models. But the rise of Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, have opened up new opportunities to raise capital and develop different business models for the internet. People truly believe that we can reshape the internet.
When did you get interested in the topic of surveillance?
HH: I found out from my lawyer that the US and UK governments had files about me from my time as a doctoral candidate when I was taking part in protests against climate change in the UK. There was nothing bad in the files, a lot of it was blacked out, but when I tried to get my first job I suddenly had problems. Undercover police came and tried to scare off the person trying to hire me. That might sound totally crazy but these things really happen. Later I found out that these methods are far more widespread than I thought. Apparently, the British intelligence agency keeps a blacklist with Trade Union organisers, anti-racism, and environmental activists. I was shocked that something like this could happen in Western Europe and started to get more involved in working on privacy.
Later, I had the privilege to visit Amir Taaki (bitcoin developer and activist) in Syria where he was fighting on the side of the Kurds against the Islamic State. I then saw how surveillance led to drone attacks on civilians. Suddenly, privacy became a matter of life and death. I was also supervising a Russian doctoral candidate that had experienced a lot of repression. I figured it was time to catch up and surpass this decade-long lead that the state has when it comes to surveillance, and to create tools that people can use to defend themselves.
Before we talk about Nym let’s stay on the topic of the internet itself. What is the philosophy of the internet that you researched at University?
HH: I discovered the internet by being part of political protest movements, in the early social media websites like Indymedia and mailing lists. As I started to work with Internet protocols in 2003 there were things like RSS, OpenID, etc. The discussions that I had with developers were technical, but also dealt with the deep philosophical and political thinking in the design of the internet — it’s role as a universal communication space, and also as a decentralised space.
Through these kinds of conversations I came to spend some years working in France with my friend, the philosopher Bernard Steigler, who passed away last year. We tried to develop a framework for the inherent philosophies of the web. This work was not just about the ability of the internet to withstand nuclear war, but about freedom, the individual’s right to privacy, free speech, and access to knowledge. We wanted these early values of the internet to be defended and sustained and held a series of conferences where we talked about these values. We have to continue to write these values of the internet in our protocols. And that is what we have done with the mixnet protocol from Nym.
How did NYM start?
HH: As bitcoin launched I was working on a data protection project in France that was funded by the European Commission. I asked myself, wouldn’t it be cool if we could take what we know from the laboratory and execute it in the wild? I worked for years in Silicon Valley and saw up close how little corporations are willing to change their business model to protect the privacy of the users. Suddenly I realised that with the crypto developments sparked by Bitcoin there was a unique opportunity. I did not have any experience with venture capitalist financed startups, but we quickly realised that European venture capitalists are very privacy-friendly. Our first investors came from Germany and we released our software at the Chaos Computer Congress that I have been attending ever since 2012.
When you look at the internet today, there is, on the one hand, this big trend of decentralization from bitcoin and the crypto world and on the other hand, we have enormous platforms that collect all kinds of data, abused for political manipulation. How do you see this development overall?
HH: I am very optimistic. Fake news, for example, is really not a new phenomenon. The Soviet Union financed “Radio Moscow” and the USA “Radio Free Europe”. The internet does enable this kind of propaganda, a term I prefer over “fake news”, and of course the internet is a vent for unsocial behavior. But if we look at history, the reformation in Germany also led to years of civil war with many victims. Despite this, when we look back, nobody would say that they should have prevented people from reading the bible or writing books. It is obvious that the net win of mass literacy for society was extremely positive and the same goes for the internet today. Yes, this is a very dangerous moment but at the same time, it is also the best moment to be in the world because together with other people, those politically philosophically and technically involved with the internet, we can really bring humanity forward. This is a very big political and philosophical project and crypto anarchists are at the front line.
Basically, we have to make a kind of Pascal’s wager: if there is a one in a million chance that the internet can save humanity from the massive climate crisis, from mass surveillance, and the economic crisis then we should really do something rather than surrender and give up.
That sounds very idealistic
HH: Yes, and our team is too. We are 12 people, and are essentially up against the thousands of programmers from Google, Facebook, and Apple with almost unlimited resources. The World Wide Web was created by a systems administrator in a CERN-Lab in Geneva, developed as a side job. And when Tim Berners-Lee told people about it they did not take him seriously. But it is not impossible for David to beat Goliath.
Everyone in Silicon Valley knows that the internet giants are not innovative at the moment. When was the last time you saw something like Google maps for example? The same goes for the states of the world: When was the last time surveillance prevented a terror attack? It is clear to see that our day’s Goliath, namely the Silicon- Valley giants, and the massive government institutions that believe in secret services and mass surveillance, have all become weak. They will not survive these new types of technology.
Do you really think that the states that we know will no longer exist?
HH: Yes. They have existed, in principle, ever since the Peace of Westphalia, and it is becoming harder and harder for the concept of representative democracy from the 18 century to fit the realities of the 21st century. I cannot say what is going to come next, but I think that it will be more democratic, feminist, and creative. We have already seen the first experiments: from the Pirate Party to the Kurdish movement in Rojava.
When new forms of direct participatory democracy meet the transnational communities of the internet, then real reforms or even revolutions can happen. Some of the systemic problems inherited by nation states from the divine rights of kings of hundreds of years ago can perhaps finally be solved. Back then, nobody thought that a royal ruler would simply disappear but that is exactly what happened. I think that we will have representative democracy behind us soon too and we will see new sophisticated democratic forms develop, but also more individual freedom and sovereignty. They do not have to cancel each other out.
The question is of course how all this can happen without people falling behind, people in poverty or with other social problems
HH: Of course we should take care of the weak and poor! But I think that can happen without a centralized infrastructure that often supports the poor but at the same time does not give them the freedom to improve their situation. I don’t know how it is in Germany but in the UK I saw how the old working class is basically “half unemployed”. There is a difference between thriving and surviving. The people want to thrive. They have dreams and want their freedom.
I am an anarchist and influenced from the political left such as Rosa Luxenberg, Karl Marx but also from the anarchist tradition from Pjotor Alexejewetsch Kropotkin or Michail Bakunin and despite that, I think also a more liberal approach with a focus on individual freedom has a lot to offer. It is often underestimated that people are free individuals. We should accept that! Some problems are better solved in a decentralised manner and with a free market.
When you announced on Twitter that the Nym network will be financed with a crypto token there were some critics…
HH: We decided on a market-based solution for Nym because we want a global solution and have seen with the TOR project that altruism simply does not scale well. There are about 7000 nodes in the TOR network and many of them are not dependable. TOR is in principle great but if you can’t depend on it working then you won’t use it. Also, we have oriented ourselves on the incentive structure of bitcoin and offer those who run nodes financial rewards, because they in return provide something that otherwise the market would not, namely a private sphere. We have combined idealistic concepts from many different political camps, an abstract discussion, and put it into code, with a unifying concept of freedom.
At the moment the political situation does not look great for freedom of speech, it is currently under pressure.
HH: I am very skeptical of extreme liberalism. I am also very skeptical of a lot of extreme left slogans that are being used right now. Of course, we should learn how to be nice to each other but I do not think that we are going to solve the problems of poverty and racism with these slogans. We need structural change that is not forced from the top. Simply because people are not going to go along with that.
Let’s take a look at the Nym network from the user perspective. How will a typical user journey look like?
HH: Ideally totally invisible. Everything would work in the background. You use a chat app or your browser and the internet will simply be private. We want to allow people to use their internet as they could before Google turned on their mass surveillance. It is not a crazy idea that when I am in a room I don’t want someone listening to our meeting. I do not want to have to use a faraday cage to have a private meeting. The future of the internet should not seem radically different than the one we have now.
What is different in Nym compared to TOR-Browser?
HH: Our network is to my knowledge the only software that is resistant to so-called “Global Passive Adversary”. That means that someone with a “god” mode, like the NSA, that can see all the data packets and can watch the whole network would still not be able to tell who is speaking with whom. While TOR is very good for resistance against censorship we are offering full anonymity from third parties. We call this “Third Party Unlinkability”.
What can you do with all this?
HH: To understand this you need to look at the historical development of the internet. In the beginning, you could not do banking or e-commerce because there was no encryption. It was dangerous to send credit card numbers over the internet, then came TLS, and eBay made Amazon possible.
With privacy, it will probably follow a similar path. There are all these services that depend on people being able to communicate privately like meetings, file transfers, and also financial transactions. Take for example medical data during the Corona pandemic. I don’t want the government or even my neighbor to know when I had contact with COVID-19. That should remain private, between the doctor and the affected person.
For such applications, we are interested in and are already working with the European Commission on one application. We are also talking to a Swiss Bank, for example, who realized that Google knows more about it’s customers than it does. We can help them with that.
Switzerland has developed into a crypto mecca, why did you move Nym to Switzerland?
HH: We looked at a lot of countries. The USA is relatively hostile to blockchain technology, Germany less so, but the regulations are still not clear. Switzerland simply has the best regulatory environment for blockchain projects. Besides that, Switzerland has a good tradition of privacy and wants to promote a type of “Made in Switzerland” branding for cybersecurity technology. We get a lot of support from the local government and can talk directly with the financial authorities. We also like the decentralised nature of Switzerland. The Canton governments have a lot of power, they have some real exemplary direct democracy aspects to their governance. We are in Neuchâtel, not Zug which has a reputation as a tax haven. Neuchâtel instead was the home of the watch industry for centuries and now the local government is pushing towards blockchain. There is even a DAO in the town that collects and distributes funds for public projects.
Sounds idyllic, and quite different from your home country that was recently called a third-world country on Twitter…
HH: The USA is a third-world country, yes. Many people live in their cars or in homeless camps. The people are afraid to go into quarantine or to get tested for COVID-19 because they could lose their job and many don’t have any medical insurance at all. A civilized society should not expect people to live in this kind of misery. Just look at the distribution of wealth. A large part of the wealth is held by a very small number of families that are given huge advantages by the government. The Bush as well as the Clinton family and the Trump family all belong to this small group, and it is looking like America is turning into a new Turkmenistan or Egypt under Mubarak.
I would love to see a break from this trend, and not just through a social security system, but in a way where everyone has the possibility to be part of society and earn money. It might sound crazy but a public cryptocurrency system could be a solution. Let’s have a look at the problem with some examples: Uber makes tons of money, the stockholders make tons of money, the workers earn very little. How would it be if the workers had a share in the companies profits? If they started working for the company earlier then they would get more of the profits.
In a way, we are going back to the concept of cooperatives where workers own the means of production. That is still a very powerful vision. We now have the technology to scale globally and enable wealth distribution, instead of what has been happening so far, namely hoarding. And by the way, this is the future that crypto anarchists always wanted. It is not only about a negative future, where you have to defend yourself, but about a positive future, where normal people that might not have the luck to live in Berlin or to go to MIT for education are nevertheless able to change the world, and through the power of the internet to become financially successful.
How do you see the offline side of such a future?
HH: I think Switzerland is a good model. There is more decentralization on the local level and more competition between the local governments. I could imagine a model that the Kurds call “Democratic confederalism”. Power is decentralised in a bottom-up structure of organization. I can also imagine a rejuvenation of some of the run-down rural areas because you can now work from anywhere. Why not live where your parents come from, or where your friends are? The world that I would like to see does not create micro-utopias for the rich but instead places that people can organize themself, where the technology helps connect the most different types of people.
Read the Nym whitepaper: https://nymtech.net/nym-whitepaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/nymchan
Twitter: @nymproject
