We used to be able to buy lots of things locally and discreetly with cash. Now, stores on the Web have underpriced and replaced small specialty shops. Buying certain chemicals, tools, or publications on the Web in your own name can now attract attention that many adults don’t want to entertain. A thoughtful person might dislike that strangers are recording and analyzing all of her credit card purchases in hopes either of manipulating her commercially or detecting an arguably criminal pattern to advance their own careers. A better informed person might also dislike that those records are open to many hundreds of unauthorized employees of the retailer, credit card company, and Internet Service Provider; friends of those employees; former friends of former employees; persuasive people who are prejudiced, greedy, or have grudges; and youngsters who run hacking scripts that they downloaded for free. Privacy is not only precious, it’s looking smarter every day.

You can offer this service to a large number of people and with strict rules. A large pool gives more privacy to each neighbor. The service will work best if you can keep the bookshelf or table somewhere that passers-by don’t see. They won’t be tempted to steal a package. Who knows what dainty “Chef Angelico” has ordered? Your rules constitute a contract with the people who use the service:

• Take only a package that you ordered.
• Order nothing that might harm people nearby, e.g., no live spiders.
• Order nothing illegal, e.g., no ivory.

If a neighbor breaks your rules and orders an anaconda that escapes, can somebody hold you legally liable? Will you get into trouble? Maybe. If you’re worried, ask a lawyer.

You will probably have to teach people using your service how to buy on the Web with more privacy than they usually have. Suggest that they think about whom they want privacy from: the retailer, their credit card company, the post office or private delivery company, or their Internet Service Provider? All of the forementioned? Anyone can learn to:

• Order from her favorite retailer using a Web browser (Safari, Opera, Midori) that she usually doesn’t use, so that her cookie doesn’t reveal her real name.
• Buy a gift card bearing the brand “Visa” or “Mastercard” with cash at a supermarket or drug store.
• Make up names that other neighbors are unlikely to think of.
• Download and use the Web browser Tor so that the retailer doesn’t see her IP address when she orders.

For a highly sensitive purchase, a neighbor might consider taking more care. Stores that sell gift cards have cameras outside and inside. If your neighbor parks near the store in a residential area that doesn’t have cameras, her car’s license plate won’t be photographed. If she wears a hat with brim into the store, store cameras won’t photograph her face.

Give people lots of reasons to visit the Spot. That way, neighbors coming to pick up a package won’t give away their temporary private identity to you or other callers. On one shelf, for example, offer lots of books and DVD’s to borrow. Put out clothes, shoes, CD’s, or gadgets that you are ready to give away. Offer tins of brownies, art work, musical recordings, sourdough culture, and plant cuttings. Love your neighbor!

I’m publishing these things under the CC0 license, which means Creative Commons No Rights Reserved. People who own included copyrighted or trademarked images that I’ve used under the Fair Use Doctrine retain all their property rights. Use my stuff however you want; don’t bother the other nice people.

The lesson sheets were to help our volunteer teachers remember the main points of each program that they were teaching. I had them laminated.

We made cardboard keys to illustrate how, in public-key encryption, the secret key and public key are related. Each key is about six inches (15 cm) long. Each key has two layers. Within each set, the layers of the secret key and the public key mate. There are several copies of each public key. The volunteers showed how intricately each key mates with its partner, but not with any keys from another set. The guest kept her secret key, then passed copies of her public key to other people at her table. She learned that her friends encrypted email to her with her public key. Only her secret key, which she keeps safe and secret, can decrypt email intended for her. Some kind of physical model is essential, I think, for us lay people understand public-key encryption. Our cardboard keys helped some people picture the process.

Some of our posters are large. It’s more economical to have those items printed at an independent shop, rather than a large chain, such as FedEx. In Northern California, the print shops want the image in pdf. In most cases, I’ve included the Scalable Vector Graphic file (svg) so that you can edit the files as you like. The Inkscape program creates and edits svg graphics files, is free, and works on Windows, Apple, and Linux computers.

You can also use the svg files to create small images that you can use as stickers. You may be happier creating and taking sheets of assorted stickers to your local print shop, unless you have a very good printer at home. Ask your local print shop owners where they buy their paper. You’ll find sticker paper at good prices there.

Lesson sheets

Strong passwords
Web browser security
Cryptocat, encrypted instant messaging
Truecrypt, encrypted files and drives
Encrypting email
Tor, the anonymizing Web browser

Public-key Crypto and PGP

The secret key is on the far left of each set. The other keys in the set are the public keys that the owner distributes. The last public key in each set is flipped over, so that you can see how it mates with its corresponding secret key. Yes, the idea is simplistic and the execution is rough. On the other hand, anybody can make them.

pdf file, Simple history of public-key cryptography, page 1
svg file, Simple history of public-key cryptography, page 1

pdf file, Simple history of public-key cryptography, page 2
svg file, Simple history of public-key cryptography, page 2

pdf file, Poster about Pretty Good Privacy
svg file, Poster about Pretty Good Privacy

Strong Passwords

pdf file, Strong Passwords with Australia theme
svg file, Strong Passwords with Australia theme

pdf file, Strong Passwords with Uncle Sam
svg file, Strong Passwords with Uncle Sam

pdf file, One weak password can hurt many people
svg file, One weak password can hurt many people

Tor, Open Wireless, Facebook, etc.

pdf file, Tor, the onion router
svg file, Tor, the onion router

pdf file, Poster about open wireless movement
svg file, Poster about open wireless movement

pdf file, Why no Facebook?
svg file, Why no Facebook?

pdf file, Buy with more privacy
svg file, Buy with more privacy

Miscellaneous Exhortations

pdf file, You have no privacy
svg file, You have no privacy

pdf file, No masters, No bullies
svg file, No masters, No bullies

pdf file, Mass surveillance
svg file, Mass surveillance

pdf file, Cryptogoddess with flower and key
svg file, Cryptogoddess with flower and key

pdf file, Cryptogoddess text with flower
svg file, Cryptogoddess text with flower

pdf file, Kiss happens
svg file, Kiss happens

pdf file, Best friends keep secrets
svg file, Best friends keep secrets

Doctor Who

pdf file, Gallifrey encrypts
svg file, Gallifrey encrypts

pdf file, Tardis with fish fingers
svg file, Tardis with fish fingers

Great Programs and Groups

I had four images here that used the logos of Cryptocat, Truecrypt, EFF, and Tor. I deleted all but the Tor image. I know that the Tor developers encourage people teaching and promoting Tor to use variations of their trademark. I think that displaying big posters using the Cryptocat, Truecrypt, and EFF logos at a small, educational, private gathering such as a CryptoParty is protected under the Fair Use Doctrine, codified in Sections 107 through 118 of U.S.Code, Title 17. I don’t, though, want to annoy people whose work I admire by publishing posters using their copyrighted logos here. So, make your own huge posters using the logos of Cryptocat, Truecrypt, and EFF!

pdf file, Tor logo
svg file, Tor logo

We focused on seven topics. First was strong passwords: how to create them and encouragement to write them down and keep them in our wallets. We helped most people install Https Everywhere in their Firefox Web browsers. This add-on gives the user an encrypted connection to any Web page that offers it. People also learned about the search engines DuckDuckGo and StartPage, which, unlike Google or Bing, don’t track people.

We also learned how to encrypt files with Truecrypt, a free program. Next, how to encrypt email messages using Gnu Privacy Guard, Thunderbird, and Enigmail. These three programs are all free. They work together. This topic was the most challenging, because it takes time to install the three programs and to picture how public-key cryptography works. We passed around cardboard sets of secret and public keys. Each set was painted a different color. Each person could hold a secret key, then give to other people copies of her public key. We also had three posters setting out a simple history of public-key cryptography and Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy.

We also showed the encrypted instant-messaging program Cryptocat to those interested. In our crowd, those interested were exclusively teenagers. Cryptocat installs right into the Web browser, so it is attractively easy. The last topic was Tor, the Onion Router. Tor lets you browse the Web anonymously.

Our presentation of each topic was really only a diluted introduction. The superficiality seemed to worry only a few volunteers. Our guests very much wanted to quickly master using the programs. To counteract blossoming and unjustified self-confidence, we ended every lesson with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the software. For example, encrypting an email message with the standard method that we taught still leaves the sender, the recipient, and the subject line in clear text, open to all snoops to read. That information could, sometimes, be embarassing or even dangerous. We tried to make plain that we were giving people only a start on a long process of continued learning, discipline, and caution. This message was not easy to get across. It is, I think, like selling a vaccination. “You need what’s in this vial, but the injection will hurt. What’s more, it won’t work unless you continue to seek out and endure more pricks and pain.” I am very much hoping that we did more good than harm.

Our ten volunteers ranged in age from 12 to 55. Our roughly twenty guests ranged from, let’s say, three to 70.

One guest left frustrated, I think, because he learned that he wouldn’t be able to exchange encrypted emails with his wife until she went through the same long process of installing programs and creating a key pair that he had just gone through. I’ve offered to make a house call and teach his wife.

We had advertised only to several small groups of people: the apartment complex, some neighboring families, and families at a local school. I learned that yield from members of the general public will not be high. So, CryptoPartiers, advertise widely.

We created posters both educational and hortatory for the event. Also, lots of stickers. We didn’t, alas, manage to print the stickers in time for the event. I’ll soon post copies of our graphics. I would like to see CryptoPartiers develop a pool of graphics we could all share.

We were newcomers to crypto teaching other newcomers. Our rawness showed. Some volunteers who used Windows machines got mixed up by Macs. Or we felt stymied when configuration routines went awry. I’m proud, though, of how kind everyone was. I think that everyone was pleased by the crowd’s sincerity and generosity of spirit. We all learned a lot about crypto and teaching crypto. At the next event, we volunteers will be more polished. May our next students be as patient and determined as this group.

When I learned several years ago about this sudden rise in honeybees’ mortality, I wondered if I could do something to help. Like thousands of other people reacting to this news, I’ve become a beekeeper. My neighborhood has built and distributed beehives hoping to give our local honeybees safe places to live during this difficult time. I’ve tried to get many people involved at every stage. The project has required only rudimentary skills and has been inexpensive. It’s been very rewarding. Here is how to do it.

A Little Research

First, find out whether and where your town allows beehives. More town agencies and county boards have updated their rules to permit small-scale beekeeping as more people have wanted to start it.

Next, join your local beekeeping association. Ask experienced beekeepers to let you watch them work. The association may have a list of members who like to help newcomers. Sign up. My mentor graciously answers all sorts of questions that occur to me suddenly. (“Will mice sneak in the beehive’s entrance?”) Thanks, Anita! Subscribe to the commercial and government-published beekeeping magazines and newsletters for your area. Watch out: reading this stuff will expose you to cascades of cloying puns.

It is helpful to learn a little about the biology of honeybees. The children’s book, the Magic School Bus in a BeeHive by Joanna Cole, may sate your curiosity. If not, you may enjoy: Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy and Jurgen Tautz, The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism Honeybees’ lives are so intricate that knowing a little more can help you appreciate their dancing, fanning, building, and guarding. Also, people you tell about the project are going to ask you their elementary questions. (“What does the queen do?”) Now you can answer them.

Learn also a bit about Colony Collapse Disorder, the bothersome organisms that are infesting honeybees, pesticides that can harm them, and practices that can weaken them. Beekeeping magazines and newsletters cover these topics in every issue. People who have heard about the trouble afflicting honeybees want to know more. People who haven’t heard are appalled to learn that the critters who make their honey are suffering. They want to know more. The material is controversial and confusing. Feel free to admit to that. We may never know what caused this crisis.

Decisions

Think about what kind of beehive suits you. Many newcomers to beekeeping are choosing top-bar hives. I did, too. I’m using a French beehive called “La Ruche Populaire,” developed by Emile Warré in the 1940′s to revivify rural beekeeping. The main virtue of the Warré hive is its simplicity. It is cheap to build and maintain. The hive boxes are only 13 inches by 13 inches (33 cm) square. When one is full of honey, it weighs only 25 pounds (11.4 kilos). That’s much easier to lift than a 75-pound (34 kilos) box from the Langstroth beehive that most U.S. beekeepers use. The Warré hive opens up beekeeping to small people, disabled people, children, and old people. To so many of us! Harvesting honey from a top-bar hive is also simple. You don’t need a centrifuge. You need only big boxes or bowls, potato mashers, a paint straining cloth, and a bucket.

The other virtue of the Warré hive is that it may accomodate the instincts of the honeybee–rather than the convenience of the beekeeper–better than other designs. That feature appealed to me because my priority was to coddle the bees.

You next should think about what style of beekeeping suits you. Will you visit and open each hive often to observe it and medicate it? Will you visit once a month, rarely open it, and never medicate? The more time you spend tinkering with each hive, the fewer hives you can take good care of. I decided on the latter, laissez-faire style, because I think it may be better for the bees. I have been impressed by Serge Labesque’s methods. He lives in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, California. He wants to help honeybees in his micro-climate evolve adaptations that will let them co-exist with the bee-bothering moths, beetles, mites, fungi, bacteria, and viruses that humans have disseminated. Nowadays, bee colonies in each place suffer from the bee pests of every place. Labesque thinks that helping evolution take place means not putting pesticides or antibiotics on the bees or in food given to them. Dosing honeybees with powders and potions has become standard practice by commercial beekeepers. Labesque and many other beekeepers refrain. It’s an experiment. I participate. You’ll make your own decisions.

Buy or Build

Yes, you can buy beehives and beehive kits. Builders make them from all sorts of wood–pine, cypress, cedar, tupelo–and even polypropylene. Both the already-built Langstroth and Warré wooden hives are expensive. I never considered plastic because I wanted to house the bees in a shelter as similar physically and chemically to a tree as I could.

I chose to cut my own boards and get help in assembling them. The cutting was an adventure, because I had only a little experience with power saws. The assembly was fantastic. I held a party that combined construction with honey tasting and a teach-in. More about that below.

To cut many boards to the same length and width, the ideal tool is a table saw. Picture a circular saw mounted inside of, perpendicular to, and protruding from a heavy iron table. I asked the handiest person I knew in my apartment complex for help in buying the saw. Thanks, Jasen! He sent me to craigslist.com. I bought a third-hand, $100 beauty. Thanks, Joe! Look at this massive monster! Another neighbor muscled it into my garage. Thanks, Aaron! It needed cleaning, alignment, a belt, and a tiny half-moon disk called a Woodruff key…. What a trip!

A table saw can easily amputate your hand. It can drive wooden shards into your eyeball faster than you can duck. It can choke your lungs with fine powder. It can deafen you. Before you start, watch a skilled person use his table saw. Thanks, Barry! Follow every safety precaution in every book you get out of the library about table saws. When I’m geared up, I’m wearing a $12 knee-length lab coat, a respirator, ear mufflers, and space-girl goggles. I’m a dork and I still have all my fingers.

For me, the adventure of learning all this stuff was fun. I was in no hurry. A few hours here and there spread over many months got the job done. Getting lots of help gave me a chance to tell more people about the project. Remember, everyone wants to save the honeybees!

Free Wood

I proceeded as thriftily as a could. I used exterior-grade pine from a inexpensive lumber store. I used only solid wood, no plywood. In the United States, plywood layers are glued together with formaldehyde compounds that emit formaldhyde gas. The formaldehyde may hurt bees. No thank you. Some lumber stores sell zero-emission plywood. I chose not to spend money on it. The wood to build my first complete Warré hive cost me about $90. I decided to be more thrifty.

I asked for left-over boards from contractors, cabinet-makers, workers at construction sites, fence builders in my county, and store managers who were discarding pallets. I had mixed luck. A contractor and a cabinet maker gave me some useful boards and long two-by-fours (38 mm by 89 mm), out of which I cut all the top bars. Thanks, Roy! If you forage for discarded wood, make sure to leave behind wood that has been pressure-treated. That means it has been saturated with chromated copper arsenate, a compound that delays rotting (the copper) and kills insects (the arsenic). It is most likely bad for bees. In the U.S., pressure-treated boards are marked with indentations. Also, avoid pallets that are stamped “MB.” They have been treated with the pesticide methyl bromide. Pallets baked in a kiln to kill hitchhiking pests have an “HT” stamp. As far as I know, that wood is safe for bees.

You can paint or varnish the outside of your hive to make it pretty. You don’t need to, though. Leaving the wood bare means that it will be more porous and allow more ventilation. Cold, dripping water from condensation trapped inside can stress bees in cold climates. On the other hand, weathering by sun and rain may damage your roof sooner than if you had painted or varnished it. I chose to go bare. I was getting tired of worrying about toxic chemcials. Many paints emit volatile organic compounds and I didn’t want to research and spend money on zero VOC paint.

For a Warré hive, the other materials necessary are burlap and wood chips or sawdust. I got burlap redolent of Kenyan coffee beans from a coffee roaster and unscented burlap from a fabric store. I already had wood chips that I had bought for a previous project from a stable owner at her cost. My table saw generated lots of sawdust. I used only sawdust from cutting solid wood, because I didn’t want to expose bees to the toxic gases that synthetic materials can emit.

Whose Bugs?

If you have space on your own property for the number of hives you want, lucky you. My apartment complex wouldn’t allow beehives anytime before the year 3,000. I needed to recruit owners of single-family houses to donate space in their yards to the beehives.

If you need to house your bees on someone else’s property, two questions arise: the terms and how to recruit.

Decide on your terms before your recruit. Will you own the wooden hives or will the hosts? Will you own the bees or will the hosts? Who will be responsible for which beekeeping tasks? Who will own the honey? Who will harvest the honey? Will the hosts pay you for pollination services or will you pay rent to the hosts? Will the hosts commit to not using pesticides that hurt bees? Write it all down. Make your hosts read it if not sign it.

I chose to retain all ownership and do all the work. No money changes hands. I tell my hosts that if they want the honey, they can harvest it. Otherwise, it belongs to the bees and me. My beehive hosts have to leave out drinking water for the bees, tell me if they see a swarm, and refrain from using pesticides that hurt bees.

To recruit, I emailed a notice to almost every email list that I subscribed to. I asked every home owner that I knew and asked them to ask around. One constraint that I imposed was geographical. I wanted to save time and carbon emissions by keeping the beehives as close to my home as possible.

Assembly Day

I advertised the Assembly Party widely, too. I had three goals for the party. I wanted to get my boxes of boards assembled into three complete Warré hives; teach people a little about the biology of honeybees and their current plight; and help fearful or indifferent people develop affection for honeybees.

I recommend borrowing many extension cords, surge suppressors, folding tables, corded and cordless electric drills, screwdrivers, staple guns, and hammers large and small. Provide more pencils, fasteners, and copies of the building plans than you think necessary. I wanted lots of young children to come, so I planned building tasks and activities for them. A Warré hive has top bars held in place with very small nails. Young children can at least help mark where those nails go. Ten year olds can help drive those nails, mark screw positions, and hold boards in place for teenagers and adults. Many children were exultant at their success; some, alas, felt redundant.

Only three of the adults who helped were experienced carpenters. Three women who had never used an electric drill were brave, learned how, and drove many screws. Teenagers helped the young children. Some elderly neighbors shared their passionate opinions about honeybees, pollination, and large scale agriculture.

The teenagers set up a picnic blanket covered with pillows and children’s books from the library about honeybees. We also set up a laptop computer on the picnic blanket and showed the NOVA movie, Tales from the Hive, over and over. We had a mascot plush animal, a 14-inch fuzzy, soft honeybee. The three, four, and five year-olds spent a lot of time with the plush honeybee. We invited them to suggest names for the mascot and write their ideas down. I also invited adults and children to sign up to visit the hives with me once bees had moved in.

We set out lunch and snacks. I offered five different varieties of honey for people to taste and honey straws for the children. We had honey made from the nectar of orange, blueberry, raspberry, and avocado flowers, and something called “pine honey.” Bees make “pine honey” by gathering the sweet exudations of scale insects that steal sugar water from the phloem of pine trees. Wild!

How Do You Get Bees?

Yes, you can buy honeybees. The members of your local beekeepers’ clubs make bulk purchases from the suppliers every spring. Get on the list.

You can also catch local honeybees who, after their big population increase in the spring, find their current home too small. Those honeybees swarm and begin to look for a new comfortable cavity. Volunteers in your local beekeepers’ club collect those swarms and offer them to club members who want to fill empty hives.

I chose not to buy. Every time out-of-state honeybees enter California, there is a risk that they will bring in a new disease or parasite to further plague our bees. Another advantage of a local swarm is that it comes from a colony that has survived a winter. In my area, winter weather is mild. Still, a swarm comes from a colony fit enough to get through a whole year of pests, suburban pesticide applications, rain, and whatever hardships honeybees endure–unbeknownst to us–in the privacy of their dark corridors.

I am learning this week that signing up to receive a swarm means being on call to rush to a stranger’s house. Experienced beekeepers are teaching me how to wrangle a swarm into a box, drive it to my empty hive, and transfer the new colony. Thanks Wayne, Vicky, and Jeremy! This process is strange and beautiful, like helping an extra-terrestrial mother give birth.

Consider helping these strange and beautiful animals. May we all thrive and prosper.

Want to take back some privacy, but still enjoy the power of a high-end smartphone? Consider buying the smartphone with cash, at the full retail price. Then, consider paying for the service anonymously, with cash, on a pay-as-you-go plan. In the United States, we still have this freedom. In many other countries, people must register and show evidence of their name and address when they buy a mobile phone or a SIM card.

Be aware that these steps are only the beginning. Your carrier gets the smartphone’s identification number (IMEI) every time you use its network. It also gets your SIM card’s identification number (IMSI). If you bought both anonymously, it won’t know immediately whom it is eavesdropping on. Unfortunately, your call and text recipients, email accounts, and movements will soon give clues to your identity. Additional steps will appear in a future article.

The cellphone service providers do have a sound business reason for wanting to know the real name and address of a customer on a long-term contract. The carrier is extending credit to the customer. She may have made only a small down payment for the phone. She gets her bill after she has made calls and downloaded songs for a month. If she doesn’t pay her bill, or cancels the contract without paying the full price of the phone, the carrier has lost money.

Pre-Paid

Paying in advance, though, for service on a cellphone that was bought at the full retail price completely removes that business justification. The company is extending no credit. In the retail shops that I checked recently in the San Francisco Bay Area, some carriers saw it that way, but others didn’t. A T-Mobile salesman happily offered his most expensive smartphone, bought with cash at the full retail price, on a pre-paid plan with complete anonymity. “I had a customer who wanted his service under the name ‘Micky Mouse’! It was fine with me.” T-Mobile’s future is so uncertain, though, that he might have been happy to sell me the whole store anonymously.

The most obtuse carriers that I have spoken with are AT&T and Verizon. Sales clerks at both companies’ retail outlets wanted customers seeking a pre-paid plan for a top-of-the line smartphone–bought with cash at full retail–to pay a big deposit. AT&T wanted $500. Verizon wanted $400. Perhaps they are using their market power to squeeze money out of people eager for a top-of-the-line smartphone? They also wanted a government-issued identification card with a photo and a Social Security number. Clerks of both companies said that their Credit Department insisted on having this information.

What nonsense! The deal is all cash, no credit.

Now you might be wondering, “How do foreigners here get an AT&T contract? They have no Social Security number.” AT&T and Verizon answered: foreigners must show a passport.

A Fictitious Foreigner

Your empathy and honesty may persuade an obtuse company’s sales clerk to make an exception for you. He may also exercise more discretion if he is on duty alone in a quiet store. Lay on the counter four or five hundred dollar bills. You want a prepaid plan and want to pay the deposit. Confess your passion for privacy. You are eccentric, but because the company will be completely protected from risk, you think the arrangement is fair to the company.

The sales clerk needs to fax to his Credit Department something that looks like a foreign passport with a name, foreign place of residence, and a photo. Offer to him a sheet of paper that you printed, showing a passport that you scanned and doctored: fictitious name, address, numbers, and a photo of someone you don’t know from the Web. Remove any ambiguity: “I created this document. My name is really not Viktoria Kovacs. I am not from Hungary. I just love my privacy.”

Could a police officer construe your behavior as fraud? With difficulty, I argue. The telephone company suffers no harm and you have no criminal intent. If you are worried, ask a lawyer.

You might as well pick a fictitious local address near your real address. The carrier will know which cell towers you are using, even if you turn off the phone’s GPS radio.

A Pay Phone in Your Pocket

You can make your monthly payments for your service either with cash at the carrier’s retail store or, until we get good digital cash, on the carrier’s Web site with an acceptable gift card, which–ahem–you have bought with cash. The telephone companies accept gift cards from Visa, MasterCard, or American Express that have an expiration date. If you pay your bill on on a Web site, though, you may reveal your location (IP address) and your real name (cookies), unless you take additional measures. Additional measures will appear in a future article.

Here is a blank passport page (2 MB) to get you started. If you don’t have a good graphics program, see GIMP. It is free.

Device Classes 4 and 5

I am a privacy advocate, computer hobbyist, writer, and mother of three teenage daughters. On my smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers, I install software that keeps my identity and my location (IP address) private, encrypts my communications, and encrypts the data on my devices. I think that these measures are fundamental to defending my dignity and autonomy. I install the same software on my daughters’ devices. I teach my daughters that many profit-seeking people and a few unscrupulous people might otherwise use information about them in ways that could harm them or make them unhappy. The solution is not to throw up our hands and declare that “Privacy is dead!” Instead, we take responsibility to make the devices that we own protect us.

I want to take these measures legally. I am a writer, past contributor to The Economist magazine, and author of Kidding Ourselves (Basic Books, New York, 1995). I have benefitted from the copyright law’s protection of my writing. Of course, the de facto protections that copyright can offer to writers are shrinking. Nonetheless, I do not abuse my practical ability to copy other people’s writing, artwork, or music. I don’t copy those works unless I have the permission of the writer or artist. I teach my daughters to exercise the same respect. They don’t make infringing copies, either.

Hypocrisy is painful. I prefer to avoid it. I want very much to be able to install privacy, security, and communication software on my devices–and my daughters’ devices–without violating legally protected rights of the manufacturers and programmers of the devices. My interest in privacy and security and their interest in protecting their work really do not seem to be in conflict. To me, this customizing is like putting stronger bumpers on my car. I am the owner, making what I bought work better for me.

Examples of the software that I install:
Cydia, a store containing third-party software for Apple devices: http://cydia.saurik.com
Tor (the Onion Router): http://torproject.org
OpenSSH: http://thebigboss.org/guides-iphone-ipod-ipad/install-and-use-ssh
Orbot, Tor for Android phones: http://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/
full-device encryption, such as Luks: http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
Firefox modified to use “Https Everywhere,” “No Script,” and “Disconnect”: http://donttrack.us/
CyanogenMod: a higher performance operating system for Android phones: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

The U.S. Copyright Office has already made an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the jailbreaking (“rooting”) of iPhones. I had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install Tor. I also had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install OpenSSH, available on Cydia. This program gives me a terminal window with a command line and an encrypted channel to other computers. It lets me use my iPhone to communicate with a computer in Tokyo that I administer as a relay on the Tor network. I now have a little computer in my pocket from which–wherever I am–I can do lots of administration work on remote computers, such as my account on a Stanford University server and my account on a Hurricane Electric server in Fremont, California, which hosts one of my Web sites. It also lets me see the entire file system of the iPhone itself and correct corrupted files.

I would like to run all these programs on our iPad and my Samsung Android smartphone. I am considering buying an Amazon Kindle or Barnes and Noble Nook Color. I will also want to run my privacy, security, and communication software on those devices. I will have to jailbreak them. Please create an exemption in the DMCA, so that I may do so legally.

Sincerely,
Rhona Mahony

Bill McGonigle, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, decided to become a Tor volunteer when he learned that people in Iran were protesting the results of their June Presidential election. They were using the Internet to organize their meetings. The Iranian government was trying to censor their messages to one another. “I have a soft-spot for people trying to gain liberty for themselves,” he wrote in an email, “especially against tyrannical regimes. It became known that they were using Tor to get around the censorship, so at that point I put up a relay….The people I’d like to help are those living under violence-based oppression, most commonly orchestrated by dangerous and corrupt individuals posing as legitimate governments. I’d like to see an end to oppression wherever it exists.”

Get Tor

To become a volunteer, download this software.
To use Tor to protect your own privacy, download this software

How It Works

How Tor works is complicated. It uses fancy cryptography, which is difficult mathematics. It uses technical features of the Internet, which is difficult network engineering. The good news is that neither Tor volunteers nor Tor users need to know any of the hard stuff. Curious readers may enjoy technical explanations by the Tor Project programmers and classroom slides, written by Dan Boneh, a computer science professor at Stanford University specializing in cryptography. The inventors of the original Onion Router have published many papers, as has the team now working on Tor.

To get started, a volunteer–for example, Bill McGonigle in New Hampshire–downloads a software program from the Tor Project, based in Massachusetts, that lets him share a small fraction of his broadband Internet connection with people who use Tor. He chooses how much bandwidth he will set aside for Tor users. It can be as little as 20 kilobytes per second, a small fraction of a 1.5 megabyte connection. The person who wants privacy, let’s say Abigail, downloads a small program that adds a Tor button to her Firefox Web browser. When Abigail clicks on her Tor button, Tor encrypts the message that Firefox sends out, passes that message along three or more randomly-chosen volunteers’ computers, which may include Bill’s, and then connects her to the Web site she wants. Tor then encrypts and bounces the messages along the same path from the destination Web site back to Abigail. Each computer on the path know only which computer preceded it and to which computer it must relay the message. After a short time, Abigail’s Tor chooses a new, random path among volunteers’ computers for her messages to follow. The result: Abigail is using the Web anonymously. Companies, government agencies, and spies have a very hard time figuring out where Abigail is, what site she is visiting, what she is writing or learning, and, if they are monitoring the destination Web site, who is visiting it. Right now, volunteers worldwide are offering Tor on 1755 computers.

China Plays Cat, Tor Plays Mouse, or Is It the Other Way Around?

Zhan Bin, who teaches at the Business School of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, has written forcefully in his blog in favor of more openness and freedom in China.

In a recent email, he said that he uses Tor every day to read Internet sites, because the Chinese government has blocked so many. If Tor became unavailable to him, he would immediately search for a substitute. At the moment, though, there is no substitute that is as secure or useful as Tor. Tor encrypts people’s messages, unlike most other proxy services. It then passes the messages through a far-flung network of computers not controlled by any single group. It also works with different kinds of Internet communication, such as instant messaging. Because the program is open source, any programmer can build it into his software.

On September 25, 2009, the Chinese government did its best to blockade Tor, possibly in preparation for China’s National Day on October 1. The Tor Project had, from its beginning in 2006, published a list of volunteers’ computers’ IP addresses on several Web sites. The government employees who run China’s Internet gateway simply looked up the Web site and added those publicly-listed Tor IP addresses to the long list of IP addresses whose messages could not enter China. Two days later, 80 percent of those relays were still blocked. The number of Tor relays inside China that could contact the outside world had fallen from over 60–before the blockade–to zero.

By January 5, 2010, though, Zhan Bin and many other Chinese were once again able to use Tor. The number of connections from China had recovered to roughly 40,000 per hour, about half the pre-blockade number. What happened? As Andrew Lewman, the Executive Director of the Tor Project, explained in a telephone call, he and his colleagues had long anticipated and prepared for China’s blockade. Many volunteers had set up secret relays, which were not listed on the public Web sites. Those secret relays are called bridges. On September 25, Lewman and his colleagues faced a challenge right out of a spy novel. How could they communicate the bridges’ secret IP addresses to people far away–and unknown to them–without the Chinese government intercepting the list? The solution: a widely distributed dribble. The Tor Project is releasing the list of bridges, a few at a time. They are using many methods: word of mouth, email, Twitter, other new social media, and Web sites. They reveal no more than one-eighth of the list by any one method. The Chinese government will intercept, and then block, some of the IP address, but not all.

This pouncing and parrying is a game of cat and mouse. Right now, though, Andrew Lewman, Karen Reilly, and the other staff members at Tor do not feel like mice. They say that they are confident that they can continue to move people’s words and photos in and out of China. What they need, they say, is more volunteers to run bridges.

Does the Chinese government feel like the mouse in this game? Half of the Tor Project’s $514,000 annual funding comes from the U.S. government, through the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency that runs radio transmissions for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. Ken Berman, the IBB’s head of engineering, sought out Tor, according to Lewman, because he wanted to support new Internet software that circumvented censorship.

Paul Syverson, co-inventor of the original Onion Router, worked and still works in the cryptographic laboratory of the U.S. Navy. In other words, he makes codes for the U.S. Defense Department. As in a delicious paradox common to logic puzzles, after inventing the Onion Router, Syverson told his Navy bosses that the Onion Router could keep the Navy’s secrets secret only if the Navy gave away the Onion Router. Why? Only when people sending messages through the Onion Router network are indistiguishable from average Internet users, can hostile observers not tell which messages to capture and inspect. The more numerous, varied, and ordinary Onion Router users become, the more they camouflage one another. In this way, sharks can hide among minnows.

Today, because Navy officials did–maybe to their dismay–understand the unforgiving logic of espionage–anyone can read the Onion Router source code and contribute to it. It is a civilian project–the Tor Project–and a non-profit organization.

Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, computer scientists trained at MIT,  do most of the research and programming to improve Tor. They are idealistic fellows. They say in their mission statement, “…for human rights workers, journalists, democracy activists and many others world-wide, anonymity online can be an issue of life and livelihood. The Tor Project believes that we should have the same expectation of privacy online as we have in the real world….”

Yet, how does Tor look to the Chinese government, or to the government of Iran, Syria, or even Russia? Or to zealous nationalists of those countries? They may look over the shoulders of Dingledine and Mathewson. They may see the propaganda arm and war machine of the West.

Ordinary People Help One Another

In so-called open societies, though, people see the issue differently. Most Westerners disdain censorship. The Tor button for Firefox has been downloaded three million times. Lots of those freeloading downloaders–the ones with a broadband Internet connection–could also be offering the Tor service. A remaining question: do home computer users have permission to run an Internet server program that gives services to people outside their house? The answer is: maybe.

The Acceptable Use Policy of many Internet Service Providers–such as Verizon and Earthlink–explicitly prohibits residential customers from running any Internet server program. AT&T and Comcast’s iBurst do not. To check any company’s policy, type its name and “AUP” into a search engine.

What are the prohibitive ISPs worried about? That a customer will run an enterprise using most of the contracted bandwidth round-the-clock. That traffic could strain the ISP’s gear, hurt service to other customers, and get the ISP sued. By prohibiting all server programs, the company saves its employees the work of researching each customer’s case.

A little arithmetic shows how harmless and costless to her ISP Abigail actually will be if she offers Tor to the world, instead of merely using it herself. Let’s say that she has a 1 MB broadband connection. She considers setting aside a maximum at any given time of 20 kilobytes per second for a Tor bridge, since bridges are now needed most urgently. A kilobyte is one-thousandth of a megabyte. Abigail, at maximum burst, will have 1/50th of her broadband connection busy with Tor users. She is paying $50 per month. She will have to decide for herself what her conscience permits. Then she can help her grandchildren set up Tor on their computers.

A person who sets up a Tor relay gets to give it a name. Bill McGonigle, the man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who was moved by the Iranian election protesters, also admires John Lennon’s music. He calls his relay, “imagineallthepeople.”

Legal guidance for people running Tor relays in the United States
Video of a talk by Roger Dingledine

It was my suitcase that caught the attention of the TSA fellow watching the baggage X-ray monitor. He frowned. Then he waved over a stocky TSA co-worker. The co-worker picked up my suitcase and carried it down to me at the end of the conveyor belt. “Anything sharp or fragile in here?,” he asked. “Not that I can think of,” I said. What had the first fellow seen? Oh ho, the co-worker opened my suitcase and found my bamboo flutes. I had packed the flutes because I had planned to say, at the beginning of a conversation, that my unusual pastes were primitive pigments. I was going to paint the flutes with them. I hadn’t realized that on the X-ray monitor, flutes might look like clubs. The TSA forbids clubs in carry-on bags. The TSA fellow solemnly looked through each end of each flute. While he squinted, I packed my 3-1-1 bag back into my messenger bag. Oops, a snag. He couldn’t see through the third flute. It was still a stalk of raw bamboo. I hadn’t yet broken open the nodes. He picked up my whole suitcase and walked away. I didn’t see the consultation. When he came back, he wiped down the inside of my suitcase compartment with a round, white pad. He fed the pad through a machine. I suppose the machine’s purpose was to detect…explosives? Wow, I hadn’t anticipated this thoroughness. The machine sniffed, assayed, calculated…and was happy with the pad. I was free to go to Gate 82.

Janet Napolitano, Are You There?

Do TSA agents learn in their training that charcoal plus sulphur plus saltpetre make gunpowder? Don’t they watch the classic Star Trek episode (“Arena”) in which Captain Kirk improvises a cannon by finding just the right minerals–guess which ones–to mix up an explosive propellant on that distant rocky planet? Sure, my constituents were packed separately. Constituents, though, can be mixed. Sure, my constituents were wet. The TSA, though, didn’t know what they were wet with. It could have been alcohol.

It wasn’t, because I care about safety. Nothing in my past suggests otherwise. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to search me thoroughly, or superficially. And that’s why the TSA agents usually rotely follow the rules of their pantomime, rather than using educated judgment. Educated judgment is too tiring, too expensive, and needed elsewhere.

May I suggest that our new Secretary of Homeland Security reconsider the billions allocated in the 2009 budget to the Transportation Security Agency and its 48,000 employees? Many thoughtful travelers know that the rigamarole we go through on the way to our airline gates is a show to comfort the ignorant, to keep them buying airline tickets. Tell the truth, save our time, save our money. Let us resume our old carefree stroll to the gate. Spend some of the $3 billion on real police work to catch the bad guys. That would make us safer. Maybe those 48,000 TSA patriots could be put to work dismantling the wall on the border with Mexico?

Required to be Better

The Better Place car looks sensible on an island, where drivers will feel constrained by geography, not their batteries. The island must have high taxes on internal-combustion cars, a supplier of electricity willing to communicate often with the electron filling machines or their masters, and drivers who will accept a bossy electronic nanny in their car. More such islands exist in the world than one might first guess.

“The ability to drive a car is not limited by the battery or the range of the car, it’s limited by the range of deployment of the infrastructure.” Shai Agassi, Melbourne, Australia, October 23, 2008.

No Man is an Island, But Israel Is

It is time to relearn geography. Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are closed. To the west lies the Mediterranean. Politics and the sea isolate the country.

Israel imports all its cars. The tax on internal combution ones is 160 percent; on electric cars it is ten percent. A hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, counts as an internal combustion car. Agassi encouraged this difference in taxation by charming the right Israelis (including President Shimon Peres), many of whom dislike buying oil from unfriendly Arab countries.

Because Israel is such a small island, BP can meet demand for electrons with only 1000 electron stations. The country now has only 200 gasoline stations. This week, gasoline costs about U.S. $5 per gallon.

All electricity in Israel distributed on the national grid comes from the government-owned Israel Electric Corporation. The government backs Agassi’s plan; he hopes the managers of the utility will cooperate with him. If the Israel Electric grid watchers tell BP that one area or another is straining to supply demand, BP can reduce the rate of its battery recharging in that area. Agassi’s dream is that all the additional electricity demand that his cars create will come from renewable sources. Israel is a good place to experiment with solar generation of electricity. Batteries are a good place to store electricity whose time of production doesn’t match its time of consumption.

Last, according to Quin Garcia, the Better Placer running the demonstration car program, few Israelis mind being tracked by a GPS device. After all, they happily carry everywhere their homing-beacon cell phones. The computer in each BP car, running the company’s proprietary software, will tell the driver when the battery’s charge is low, where the nearest recharge or swap station is, and, perhaps, to accelerate and brake more smoothly. Who keeps, and for how long, all that data about each car’s movements? Don’t worry about it, says Mr. Garcia. Apparently, BP will leave those concerns to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s counterpart to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Denmark is also an Island

Recheck your map. Denmark shares only about 50 miles of border with Germany; the rest is seashore. Like Israel, it is easy to saturate with electron stations. The government has imposed a 180 percent registration tax on internal combustion cars to encourage electric ones. Gasoline costs about U.S.$6 per gallon. Denmark is also congenial to BP because it is marvelously rich in wind. The wind blows mainly at night, when Danes are sleeping The big utility, DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), has actually been giving away its wind-generated electricity to neighboring countries. It has now signed a deal to sell that nocturnal electricity to BP, which hopes to pipe it into the resting automobiles of sleeping Danes. This year, only 20 percent of DONG power comes from wind. The rest, unfortunately, comes from coal. Maybe DONG will build more windmills?

Australia, Demoted

Better Place announced on October 22 that Australia is not a continent, but an island, after all. At least, the eastern coastal stretch from Melbourne through Sydney to Brisbane is a population island. To the east lies the South Pacific, to the west, the sparsely populated desert. AGL Energy says it will supply green electricity for BP cars, but its nearest source is Hydro NSW, a large hydroelectric project. Australians count hydro as green, though American environmentalists do not, because it produces no carbon. Australians now crank out greenhouse gases at the highest per capita rate in the world, because of their coal consumption. It is past time to cut back. The federal government imposes a tax of 33 percent on luxury cars, defined as those costing more than AU $57,000 (US $36,700). So far it imposes no tax on inexpensive internal-combustion cars. Gasoline costs about US$3 per gallon. Agassi hopes that once his firm has set up in the population center of the country, it can expand north and southwest around the coastal rim.

When a Car is a Razor

Or a cellphone. The Better Place customer will buy the car for $20,000 or less and buy a contract. The contract entitles the customer to a specified amount of electricity per time period. BP will retain ownership of the battery, which when manufactured in volume might cost only $10,000. BP plans to get its batteries from AESC, a joint venture by Renault and NEC, that is developing and testing a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for use in automobiles. If the customer doesn’t have to buy the battery, the package is cheap. Republicans, lumberjacks, and eaters of red meat may buy it.

So far, BP has two advantages that most of its competitors lack. It understands that electric cars must be cheap to replace internal combustion cars. It also understands the importance of electron refilling stations. It has chosen to swap out the customer’s old battery quickly, then recharge it slowly in off-peak hours, to avoid straining the electric grid. Chevrolet’s Volt is merely a hybrid, with a gasoline engine to carry drivers past the 40-mile mark. It will also cost $40,000. What disappointing lack of imagination.

A competitor to watch is Daimler-Benz. In a small test-run collaboration with the German electricity supplier, RWE AG, Daimler plans to build 500 charging points in Berlin to power 100 all-electric cars: minute ones from smart and non-minute ones from Mercedes-Benz. It seems to be betting on fast charging, as opposed to Better Place’s fast swapping. What remains to be seen: is Berlin an island?

Thanks to Quin Garcia, head of Supplier Relations and Technical Alliances at Better Place, for his talk to the Silicon Valley chapter of the Electric Auto Association on September 20, 2008.