Beautiful Code [167]
Provide strong life-saving protection for activists, NGOs, and reporters working in repressive countries.[]
[] See http://philzimmermann.com/EN/letters/index.html.
Preserve the communicability of censored news and controversial ideas.
Protect the anonymity of whistle-blowers, witnesses, and victims of domestic abuse.
For dessert, catalyze the geodesic society by enabling the free and unfettered exchange of ideas, goods, and services globally.
The motley crew of hackers known as the Cypherpunks has been developing privacy-enhancing software for years, with the intent of enhancing personal freedom and individual sovereignty in the digital age. Some cryptographic software is already a cornerstone of how the world works today. This includes the Secure SHell (SSH) remote terminal software, which is essential to securing the Internet's infrastructure, and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption suite, which secures online commerce.
But these systems target very specific needs: secure server access and secure online credit card transactions, respectively. Both are concerned with securing human-machine interactions. Much more cryptographic technology specifically targeted at human-to-human interactions needs to be deployed in the coming years to combat the advancing menace of ubiquitous surveillance (which "leads to a quick end to civilization"[§§]).
[§§] Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky. Tor Books, 1999.
An easy-to-use, secure webmail system is an enabling technology—it makes possible, for the first time in history, secure and private long-distance communications between individuals all over the globe, who never need meet in person.
Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom > Hacking the Civilization
11.12. Hacking the Civilization
This computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that it includes organic life itself in its operational matrix—the Earth, and the civilizations it hosts—can be reprogrammed in powerful ways by simple pieces of code that hack human culture right back, and rewire the operating system of society itself.
Code has changed the world many times. Consider the medical advances made possible by genetic sequencing software, the impact of business software on large enterprises and small businesses alike, the revolutions enabled by industrial automation software and computer modeling, or the multiple revolutions of the Internet: email, the Web, blogs, social networking services, VoIP…. Clearly, much of the history of our times is the story of software innovation.
Of course, code, like any technology, can cut both ways, either increasing or decreasing the "returns to violence"[||||] in society, increasing the efficacy of privacy-violating technology and giving tyrants more effective tools of censorship, on the one hand, or enhancing and promoting individual rights on the other. Code of either sort hacks the very core of human society itself, by altering fundamental social realities such as the tenability of free speech.
[||||] By "returns to violence," I refer to the social and economic incentives for violating individual rights. As the authors of The Sovereign Individual point out, "The key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence."
Interestingly, even with a specific technology such as public key cryptography, the implementation chosen can significantly alter cultural realities. For example, a PKI-based implementation reimposes authoritarian properties such as centralized hierarchies and identification requirements on a technology whose entire value arguably lies in its lack of those properties. Despite this, PKI approaches deliver weaker key authentication than does a web-of-trust implementation (which also doesn't dilute other important features of public-key cryptography, such as distributed deployment).
I think that as the weavers of code, it is to a large extent the ethical responsibility of programmers to seek not only that our code be beautiful in its design and implementation, but