Seeds of the Future - The Traces of Cognitive Warfare on the Internet, and What It Means for Emerging Superintelligent Weapons
Part 10 of Artificial General Intelligence (And Superintelligence) And How To Survive It
So far we’ve discussed Weaponization, Enfeeblement and Value Lock-In, though there’s much more to be said on all three.
But before we proceed with Misinformation, Proxy Gaming, Emergent Goals, Deception and Power-Seeking Behavior, we need to discuss more details, just to lay the groundwork.
Especially for Misinformation and Deception. In the wake of various authoritarian governments’ attempts to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections, the global pandemic response and many other events, it helps to understand something called “psychological warfare” or “cognitive warfare.”
Given allegations involving various foreign-intelligence agencies, social media and companies like Cambridge Analytica, there seems to be considerable evidence that tens or even hundreds of millions of voters and citizens have been targeted by incredibly precise propaganda which, given the stimuli and feedback mechanisms of social media, could be automatically tailored for maximum effect on each individual.
Even as ads and feeds are tailored for our preferences by “the Algorithm.”
We would be well served to ask what that algorithm is, what effect it has and what intentions those influencing it may harbor.
But first, we should understand the very tools used to exert this influence were deeply flawed, and in aggregate utterly expose the manipulators, their employees, their customers, their employers and everyone knowingly coordinating with them, as well as every tool they used to do so.
This is critical, because a multitude of tools for manipulation have not only been destroyed, they have exposed others, even including ones yet to be found.
As we discussed in the previous post on automating cyber with AI, once you start finding red flags, you can not only searching for those telltale markers, but markers you can’t see and have no idea even exist.
In the same way, these global mindgames reveal more than even their perpetrators could imagine. We literally don’t know how much, because the AIs capable of unraveling them have yet to be fully deployed to their absolute destruction.
But they will be.
To begin, though, let us consider my first message to the FBI, in roughly mid-September of 2017, discussing the inherent flaws in using cryptocurrency and botnets in any act of crime or espionage.
Again, this was my first message, but it was far from my last.
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Data Mining the Darknet
To whom it may concern:
I have information which may be of great use to law enforcement in shutting down the illegal use of darknets and cryptocurrencies.
In the late 2000s I came up with a currency innovation that also turned up as a critical element of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. I do not know if my idea preceded bitcoin or not, but they may have developed it independently and concurrently regardless. Nevertheless, my familiarity with a partially decentralized non-digital currency gives me a certain insight into the concept.
Specifically, the mutual verification of transactions was meant as a way of pushing out and exposing criminals, not promoting them.
Despite the use of encryption and darknets in these transactions, illicit exchanges are extremely vulnerable to mass exposure given both vulnerabilities to the darknets themselves and changes in existing technologies.
The key weakness is that verifying transactions and spreading out transmitted data through a large number of computers not under your direct control means critical information is still very accessible, especially when finding and decrypting that data proves far easier than is generally understood.
Given the Mueller investigation looking into hackers and other darknet and cryptocurrency issues associated with Russia, as well as events such as the Equifax hack, this seemed like a propitious time to share what I know.
This problem has metastasized for so long as a means of letting as many dangerous people as possible get drawn in. These technologies are essentially a living deathtrap for criminals, and I did not want to tip law enforcements hand, whether everyone was aware of the following trump cards or not.
I will explain how to exploit these weaknesses below. I am sending this information to relevant law enforcement organizations and the press.* If anyone engaged in an investigation makes contact with me in the next week and requests that I remain silent, I will. Otherwise, the following information will be pushed out on a large scale through social media, which may not be the most effective approach, but will at least serve to disrupt these networks once the public information is properly leveraged.
First, darknets either operating through multiple nodes or as peer-to-peer networks have an interesting legal weakness when child pornography is being shared over them.
<Actually the redacted stratagem shared was less useful than later ones and I'd forgotten key details regarding the images. The primary point proved very valid, however.>
There are issues with encryption as well as the scale of an operation targeting a host of computers rather than just a few dozen or a few thousand nodes. The latter issue is unfortunately all to easily solved in the U.S. The actual arrests, as rules against the seizure of property for drug-related crimes have recently been removed, mean a large-scale shutdown of any criminal darknet would be apt to lead to considerable property confiscations by local and state police. Hence, the arrest of numerous suspects could involve their local law enforcement and in many cases the cost would not only be shifted to the local level but would be offset by such confiscations. Individuals being flipped by prosecutors for relatively light sentences in exchange for information or testimony could be fined, though those funds would not go directly into the budget for these operations. For some local governments, however, they would help considerably.
The other practical advantage would be finding a legal basis for the seizure of logfiles directly related to such a case and then indirectly accessing data also on the individual computers found to be definitely and intentionally active in a such a crime by, say, using the node logfiles to prove culpability and then automating the sifting of data directly downloaded or further communications provided by the logfiles.
While we are beginning with the legal basis supplied by child pornography in the U.S., the more pressing concern is counterintelligence. While there are undoubtedly complicating issues when hacking computers as opposed to seizing them directly or having the data handed over by cooperating entities, the reality that large numbers of U.S.-based criminals are legally exposed should not obscure the fact that different techniques may be used depending on the investigating entity (FBI, NSA, etc), what the crime is and where the criminals and/or computers are located.
The other reason for starting with a crime which is easily proven and involves data transmission and data storage is because there is enough overlap between child pornography and darknet marketplaces to thoroughly expose the latter which can in turn lead to other people of interest, such as hackers selling services or exploits over the same marketplaces. If said hackers happen to be intentionally facilitating the transmission of child pornography or engaged in other self-evident crimes, so much the better.
The encryption is a more interesting challenge, but also strangely vulnerable.
First, it is important to realize that the above information, combined with Treasury FinCen information on transactions through conventional banking and other government data resources, could create a revealing three-dimensional map of criminal, terrorist and espionage activities, particularly in the hands of a counterintelligence/law-enforcement agency able to bring these data sets together. In some cases, it will not just be the actor who was directly involved who is most important but the one who shows up again and again with data leading back to them – ownership of businesses tied to multiple questionable organizations or transmitting large sums of money to people paying hackers, etc.
But the key thing to remember, both in creating that map and unravelling these networks, is that we are not just dealing with a chart in space, but in operations taking place over time. While that temporal element will also be very useful in database forensics (accounts, botnets or intelligence assets remaining dormant until needed), it is absolutely crucial in the mass-decryption of these networks and financial transactions. You have the time to decrypt, assess and unravel immense amounts of information, especially aided by the right technology. Once collected, a year’s worth of logfiles along with other records will hold considerable evidence, and even if full decryption were not moving at a rapid clip, radical improvements in decryption expected in the near future – especially with regards to quantum decryption – means full access to the data is only a matter of time. However, that is a timeline we should be able to dramatically accelerate.
Regarding mass decryption, you can take an “embarrassingly parallel problem” or set of problems, such as standardized encryption over a specific darknet, and forward that to a cluster designed to handle those problems. When they complete their decryption, they can forward their solutions. The decrypted files retrieved, in turn, can be assessed by a cluster looking for key data points.
For example: To begin, check for image and video files. Then run a program looking for any human images. From there you can assess whether flagged files display any illegal imagery. Obviously, other encrypted data of interest would be forwarded for decryption as appropriate, possibly to a computer assessing whether it should be forwarded to a specific cluster or to a less specialized supercomputer.
But the onion encryption of a darknet should be routinely and automatically decrypted as the system follows threads back through the accessible nodes. Not every message of interest will be followed all the way through a darknet, or needs to be, but enough messages will be accessed passing through entry and exit nodes that they can be analyzed as a “big data” problem, and many correlations will be found on many transmissions of interest, providing clear links between communications as well as those communicating often enough to be very revealing.
This is a place where cryptocurrencies help tie the entire map together…
<Less effective suggestions redacted.>
Other assessments may be more complex, but there are undoubtedly many simple indicators you can search to speed the process along, such as the one’s used by the NSA’s XKeyscore. Relevant data points include multiple connections to known criminal sites or individuals, suspicious financial or cryptocurrency transactions, references to multiple indicative keywords, and so forth. Having months to comb through this information means almost everything can be retrieved in time, but being able to automate the process not only accelerates everything, it lets you prioritize. Some criminals and some crimes are obviously more important than others, and deals with anything ranging from heavy weapons to sensitive hacking to large drug shipments will be matters of concern.
Obviously investigators will want a tremendous amount of processing power to expedite this research. One way to put together a computer with immense processing power for a relatively narrow set of tasks would be a computer cluster, whether a conventional cluster or one incorporating or entirely assembled from the basic quantum processors now available.
I have an invention which may provide extremely inexpensive supercooling for an Aiyara cluster, other Hadoop cluster or any other architecture (even cheap 3D chips) and, as a side-effect, could make cooling and shielding quantum processors from outside disruption far more practical. This invention is not yet patented or even provisionally patented given concerns over how easily its main functions could be weaponized. The supercooling innovation is a step in enabling its main applications, but not the only point of the invention. Cheap, high-density power storage and portable electrical generation are among the key applications (almost a given when low-temperature superconduction becomes trivially easy) which are also relevant to this issue. As noted by the Department of Energy, “System power is the primary constraint for the exascale system.” The invention in question thus appears to solve the largest problem facing the development of exascale systems as well as facilitating the practical use of quantum computing. Power and cooling are common issues with any of these systems. On a more conventional scale, an Aiyara cluster normally needs to be low-power to function. There is an obvious cooling problem with having so many processors so close together. Even without those innovations or existing exascale systems, the means to decrypt this information on a large scale over a short time certainly exists.
While the supercomputers employed in this task do not have to be Aiyara clusters or even clusters at all, they are an inexpensive way to mobilize immense amounts of processing power to a specific task. They can also be isolated from the rest of the world, hardwired to and only interacting with the computers forwarding them tasks and receiving their results, and can be built with very specific work in mind.
A more interesting twist to this would be to create a cluster incorporating or even primarily consisting of the basic quantum processors we do have, to dramatically accelerate our ability to factor prime numbers and decrypt common encryption (such as Tor onion encryption) on a massive scale.
Again, what I have in the way of supercooling could be very helpful in this regard, though I was attempting to tackle the much harder problem of neutralizing the weapons enabled by that technology (by high-density power production and storage, among other things) before releasing it to anyone. If it is needed for a law-enforcement action on this scale, however, I will see what I can do.
Inexpensive, large-scale supercooling requiring minimal infrastructure would enable a massive cluster to be assembled without heating issues and with lower power requirements, allowing you to work more easily at scale and offering greater latitude in the processors that could be incorporated. By making it easier to shield quantum processors with far less infrastructure while assembling them in much denser architectures it could also make a quantum-based or quantum-incorporating cluster much more feasible, though whether the large number of processors you might prefer would actually be commercially available is another question. 3D chips should also be vastly easier under this technique, though obviously these must first be engineered as a practical option given present technological limitations and so, ironically, may be the last element to become available.
Clusters paired with existing supercomputers and any quantum capacity presently available should already be adequate for this mass decryption given time, but other technologies are clearly imminent even without further major breakthroughs.
Other innovations may emerge depending, again, on who is investigating and where the targets of that investigation may be. Counterintelligence may find the unsecured computers drawn into a botnet remain vulnerable to counter-hacking and, where they have the legal authority to do so, may be able to unravel them in a mass hack, possibly backed by the assets cited above. A foreign-intelligence controlled botnet of foreign computers might be temporarily turned into a botnet under investigators’ control as part of a counterintelligence operation, if only in using their own processors to search them for malware and data breadcrumbs. Mass hacking a foreign criminal darknet may be enabled by the ability to mass decrypt using clusters and/or quantum processing.
Obviously, these are options to be considered by law-enforcement, counterintelligence and legal experts, but I wanted to share all of them given the urgency of the subject.
<Redacted>
So it’s time to bring the criminal darknets to an end.
Darknets and cryptocurrencies are nothing but a living deathtrap for criminals, which is why they were allowed to metastasize for so long.
Prosecutorial discretion, or we’re all guilty now.
Whatever you do now, the logfiles remain. The computers in each blockchain remain. Your activities on the darknets, recorded in so many ways, remain.
You don’t need to be thinking in three dimensions. You need to be thinking in four – including time.
The records are there. The legal basis is there. The decryption and computational resources are also there – within the timeframe required.
Whether they obviously exist now is irrelevant (though to all practical purposes they likely do).
What matters is whether they can be deployed against captured data quickly enough to put everyone involved at risk.
People miss the point of this. It’s not whether they get some addict or would-be petty hustler.
What the darknets are is a living data mine of criminals, terrorists & incautious spies.
You don’t simply target everyone at once. Even if you have the computational resources to do so. Even if you have already done so.
Instead you accumulate a massive database of supposedly surreptitious actions and actors.
Because nothing is so revealing as what people do when they think no one is looking.
More to the point, once you can analyze criminals on this scale, you combine your data with your other resources.
Such as Treasury’s FinCen forensics. And bitcoin/cryptocurrencies’ living, supposedly inviolate log of transactions.
You look at these things, and suddenly threads appear where once you would have seen nothing at all.
If you’re a criminal, this technology was literally built to destroy you.