Social Science Literature Summaries on Money, Crypto, and Blockchain (Part 3)
Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy (2002)
Disclosure: This is another edition to summaries of social science literature. Please note that these summaries are intended to scratch the surface and function more as guidelines to book chapters. One should not solely rely on these summaries to gain knowledge but rather use them to elicit an appetite for a particular book or research topic. In no way do these summaries replace the rich content and contexts of the literature presented here. I encourage you to read some of the books mentioned here cover-to-cover if you want to gain in-depth knowledge on open source software and the history of cryptography.
Chapter 1 — The Loner: We learn about Whitfield Diffie, his intellectual interests, and the works that have influenced him in his pursuit of cryptography (Claude Shannon Information Theory, David Kahn’s book, “The Codebreakers”). Diffie meets Martin Hellman; a strong intellectual bond is formed between the two.
Chapter 2 — The Standard: Here the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is discussed. The role of figures like Walt Tuchman from IBM and Horst Feistel’s Lucifer algorithm (cryptographic product for the commercial sector). Also talks about the invention of differential cryptanalysis.
Chapter 3 — public key: Diffie discovers public-key cryptography. This permits two individuals with no previous communication to generate a key (this is what transforms plaintext into coded text and vice-versa) without third party interference (during initial context). Diffie and Hellman meet Ralph Merkle.
“Diffie and Hellman ended in their paper with the observation that throughout the history of codes, it had often been amateurs who came up with the innovations in cryptography” (Levy, p. 89)
Chapter 4 — Prime Time: Enter Ron Rivest, Leonard Adleman, Adi Shamir. NSA attempts to control private research on cryptography. For example, when an academic conference on cryptography was being organized, Joseph Mayer (who worked at the NSA) sent a letter in response to the IEEE planned international symposium on Information Theory at Cornell that would include papers on encryption. Bobby Inman assumes NSA dictatorship and wages war against academic cryptographers. A campaign is launched to censor crypto researchers legislatively. the idea of “Academic freedom” becomes questioned.
“Perhaps the existence of these thousands of papers circulating around the world, in addition to thousands of reprints and photocopies of the Diffie-Hellman papers, should have been a signal to the NSA that the crypto toothpaste was out of the tube, and no decrees or scare tactics could generate the requisite physics to squeeze it back in.” (p. 114)
Chapter 5 — Selling Crypto: This chapter discusses attempts at commercializing crypto. At first, in the 1980s, there was little faith in its commercialization. However, in 1983 — Rivest-Shamir-Adleman formally joined the world of commerce by creating RSA Data Security Incorporated. The innovation of MailSafe also follows. Jim Bidzos is the business brain behind the commercialization of crypto. Once the RDA Data Security Inc. began to take off, this triggersed the NSA’s radar.
Chapter 7 — Crypto anarchy: The rise of cryptoactivism. Phil Zimmermann began writing his own public key encryption program (Pretty Good Privacy), helping make the RSA encryption work on a personal computer. Zimmermann’s effort to create a crypto program and distribute it to the public (circumventing government control) marked a new dimension in the ongoing battle between the NSA and the cryptographers who worked outside its reach (p. 204).
Chapter 9 — Clipper chip: Clinton Brooks (assistant deputy director of NSA) cautioned NSA on how cryptography was going public, ultimately threatening their mission (especially now that companies were increasingly starting to implement RSA and sell commercial crypto). Brooks was authorized to find some solution to this problem (this would become the key escrow). Feds offer the telephone company, AT&T a deal. They wanted AT&T to make the key escrow the standard and install the government designed chips in their device (this became known as the Clipper chip). With the arrival of the Clinton administration, in 1994, the president officially endorsed the Clipper Chip. The Clipper chip would have required all encryption users to hand over their decryption keys to the government. This would have been the end of freedom until Mathew Blaze, a security researcher, found a technical flaw in the chip. Eventually, in 1999, the Clinton administration approved the export of crypto without a requirement for key escrow.
Chapter 10 — Slouching toward crypto: Describes how Ian Goldberg and David Wagner discovered a flaw in the random number generator that was used for temporary key generation in the web browser, Netscape. Eventually, we see crypto entering e-commerce fields more and more.
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman (2013)
Introduction — A Tale of Two Worlds: Coleman argues that FOSS rearticulates elements of the liberal tradition and represents a liberal critique from within liberalism (where hackers sit at the center and margins of the liberal tradition (p. 3). Coleman also discusses the idea of “productive freedom”, the “expressive self” (in reference to Charles Taylor). She argues that FOSS communities have been able to escape ideological polarization (i.e. liberal vs. conservative dichotomies) and she shows us how in the next few chapters.
Productive freedom → “This term designates the institutions, legal devices, and moral codes that hackers have built in order to autonomously improve on their peers’ work, refinetheir technical skills, and extend craftlike engineering traditions. This ethnography is centrally concerned with how hackers have built a dense ethical and technical practice that sustains their productive freedom, and in so doing, how they extend as well as reformulate key liberal ideals such as access, free speech, transparency, equal opportunity, publicity, and meritocracy” (Coleman, p. 3)
Chapter 1- The Life of a Free Software Hacker: Here, the definition of “free software” (in Richard Stallman’s sense) is explained. Coleman enlightens us on how hackers relate to this definition and also talks about how hackers became exposed to hacking (usually in their early life). In addition, the quotidian lifeworld of hackers is described using the conference space; the hacker dynamics that form between virtual and non-virtual domains are examined.
Chapter 2 — A Tale of Two Legal Regimes: Coleman looks at free software as not as something that absolved “copyright” but provided an alternative to it. Story of the GPL license. The rise of Torvalds’s Linux and the threat of open-source experienced by Microsoft. We learn about Netscape’s adoption of open source. The battle against copyright laws [the DMCA and the Sonny Bono act].
“No simple connection between democracy and social media can be sustained (Ginsburg 2008; Hindman 2008; Lovink 2007; Morozov 2011; Rossiter 2007), nor is that what I am advancing here. Instead, we should recognize the viable alternatives in a moment when intellectual property law is itself undergoing rapid transformation.” (Coleman, p. 63)
Chapter 3 — The Craft and Craftiness of Hacking: Here, Coleman discusses the cultural sensibilities of hackers. Namely, she describes the significance of humor and cleverness in hacker cultures. She also discusses how tensions between collectivism and individualism arise, how they partially get resolved, and the elitism and meritocracy that is evident in hacking circles.
Chapter 4 — Two Ethical Moments in Debian: Looks at how Debian transitioned to a stable institution. She focuses on two cultural terms — “nomos” and “crisis” — to understand how Debian organizes itself through labor to illustrate the ethics of the community and its governance model.
Chapter 5 — Code is Speech: Coleman examines the politics of avowal and popular protest. Examines how F/OSS developers like Schoen reconfigured what source code and speech mean ethically, legally, and culturally, and the broader political consequences of these reformations. Also looks at the controversy over intellectual property, software, and accessed (via the arrest of Johansen and Sklyarov). Discusses how code finally becomes recognized as speech.
Conclusion — The Cultural Critique of Intellectual Property Law: Coleman covers how FOSS refigured the politics of intellectual property law. She argues that open-source developers are careful with politics, representing it is neither left nor right (they are described as apolitical) but in terms of the ideology of freedom. Discusses how open source software and its core values have entered into other fields, including IBM, IMC, Creative Commons.
Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press by Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar (2013)
Chapter 1- From Order to Disorder: The authors call their approach in this text an “anthropology of science”. Latour’s fieldwork spans two years in the Stalk Institute for Biological Studies (California) where scientists engaged in neuroendocrinological research. The authors observe and collect data on every possible aspect of scientific life (from documents to discourse). There is an emphasis on linguistics as part of data collection and methodology and theory derives from semiotics. They criticize philosophers of science as being too focused on how truth is discovered by scientists rather than how these truths come to be constructed in the first place. This book is mostly interested in providing a systematic description and analysis of how the daily activities of scientists in the laboratory lead to the construction of facts. The argument is that “truth” is not something that is “out there” that gets discovered but actually gets constructed by various actors.
Chapter 2 — An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory: The production of facts is made possible by certain “inscription devices” (i.e. spectrometer). This is a tool that can transform a material substance into a diagram that is used by scientists to produce publications and statements that later become “facts”. The production of a phenomenon (they call it “inscriptions”) depends not only on the inscription tool used but also on the way these tools get implemented in the laboratory. The laboratory is described as a system of “literary inscriptions” (how laboratory activities get transformed into published statements).
“For the observer, then, the laboratory began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription.” (52)
Chapter 3 — The Construction of a Fact: The Case of TRF(H): Investigate how certain processes remove the social and historical variables on which the construction of facts is dependent. Use a historical perspective related to the case of TRF(H), focusing on the period of 1962 to 1969 to explain how TRF(H) became “fact”. They look at two scientists who both discovered RFH and examine the events that led to Schally’s rejection and acceptance of Guillemin’s erroneous results. Show how the acceptance of Guillemin’s findings was influenced by social factors (age, reputation, resources). Discuss how two things happen at the point of stabilization of facts: splitting and inversion.
“At the onset of stabilisation, the object was the virtual image of the statement; subsequently, the statement becomes the mirror image of the reality “out there.” Thus the justification for the statement TRF is Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2 is simply that “TRF really is Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2.” (177)
Chapter 4 — The Microprocessing of Facts: To understand how truth/facts are produced by scientists, it is argued that we need to pay attention to the “microprocesses” (how daily activities of the lap become scientific knowledge) and how negotiation takes place in the laboratory. For instance, fact construction gets defined by discourse exchange and debates. This often gets neglected in studies of scientific practice as we have seen from the case of TRF (H). This is not that much different from how non-science practices operate.
Chapter 6 — The Creation of Order out of Disorder: concluding remarks. argue that both scientists and non-scientists construct order out of disorder. Investigators face the responsibility of demonstrating that this process and construction has been done correctly (this is often a challenge).
“Scientific activity is not “about nature,” it is a fierce fight to construct reality.” (Latour, p. 243)
For fun and profit: a history of the free and open-source software revolution by Christopher Tozzi (2017)
Introduction — The author begins by defining the differences between open source and free software, noting its ambiguity. He lists the objectives of this book: narrating the major developments of FOSS history over the past half-century and interpreting major developments in FOSS history. Reconsiders some of the stereotypes that have affected the FOSS community. One of those is the relationship that FOSS developers have had with commercial endeavors. The book uses the French Revolution as an interpretive lens for evaluating the history of FOSS.
Tozzi ascertains that the conflicts that have shaped the history of FOSS parallel the wars that accompanied most major political revolutions. Says that the FOSS revolution included two major wars: 1) the one waged by FOSS supporters against Microsoft that tried to stamp out FOSS movement 2) Free Software Foundation fought with those in the open-source camp to define the meaning of FOSS development. Comparing these conflicts with the role of warfare in political revolutions for Tozzi provides perspectives for understanding how/why different debates have shaped FOSS.
Chapter 1 — Unix and the Origins of Hacker History: Unix developed because programmers wanted to play a game, “Space Travel”. Reviews the hacker ethic based on Levy’s and Raymond’s definition but says that these are narrow don’t do justice in capturing the full complexity of hackers. Argues that hacker culture is inseparable from the principles and practices of the academic community out of which it was born. Says we should think of hackers as revolutionaries in the “reformer” sense.
Chapter 2 — Inventing the FOSS Revolution: Talks about how hackers responded to threats of commercialization of FOSS in three ways: 1) programmers at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually created a Unix clone that was free of commercially licensed code 2) Open Software Foundation 3) Stallman’s GNU project. After Stallman founded GNU, this sparked a trend where source code’s openness increasingly became adopted as part of business models (this is of course not what Stallman intended). He talks about the evolution of free software licenses (copyleft). Explains Eric Raymond’s Cathedral and Bazaar model and why at times GNU made mistakes since it prioritized development too much. Meanwhile, Linux was using crowd-sourcing techniques and was succeeding.
Chapter 3- A Kernel of Hope: The Story of Linux: Linus Torvald was fed up that Tanenbaum’s Minx at the time wasn’t free and that GNU was charging money to use it. for this very reason, Torvalt set out to create Linux. Torvalt licenses his kernel after businesses try to steal it. The Linux ecosystem expands as open software becomes more popular.
Chapter 4- The Moderate FOSS revolution: Discusses the rise of new commercial FOSS ventures. for instance, IBM comes to support the development of GNU/Linux systems to prevent Microsoft from monopolizing software for server platforms. Tensions between FOSS and apple are mentioned.
Chapter 5- The FOSS Revolutionary Wars (Microsoft): The author discusses how Raymond painted Stallman as anticommercial, but this in fact was not the reality. He talks about the conflicts and disagreements that occurred in the FOSS community in relation to the definition of free software. Stallman refused to use the term “open source”. He then proceeds to talk about how Mozilla was conceived as a business strategy. This gained Microsoft’s attention. Mozilla ran into some complications due to poor management. Talks about the SCO Group’s legal campaigns and the collapse of the ‘Samizdat’ project
Chapter 6 — Conclusion: This chapter explores how FOSS has evolved since the early 2000s by examining five key developments of the past fifteen years: FOSS’s endorsement by large companies, including Microsoft, that previously espoused no interest in FOSS or actively combated it; the emergence of the Android mobile operating system; the introduction of Ubuntu GNU /Linux; the advent of the OpenStack operating system for cloud computing; and the use of FOSS in embedded computing devices.
