With the recent conviction and sentencing of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, privacy and the right to use privacy technology are back in the spotlight.
Pertsev was convicted of money laundering by a Dutch court on May 14 and sentenced to 64 months in jail for his role in developing crypto mixer Tornado Cash. Many privacy advocates decried the conviction, calling it unjust and a government overreach.
More recently, on June 25, it was announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accepted a plea deal with the United States government that would see him plead guilty to one criminal count in exchange for his freedom from the British prison where he had been held since 2019 and an expected sentence of time served.
It’s clear that privacy, civil liberties, surveillance and freedom of speech remain important issues for the crypto community, which came together to fundraise money for both Pertsev’s and Assange’s legal fees. One such crypto project active in supporting civil liberties is Nym, which offers a suite of privacy products built around its mixnet technology.
On episode 39 of The Agenda podcast, host Jonathan DeYoung catches up with Harry Halpin, co-founder and CEO of the Nym privacy project, to unpack the state of privacy and surveillance in 2024. Halpin met with DeYoung at the recent Consensus conference to discuss Pertsev’s conviction, the surveillance dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), the censorship risks of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and more.
AI makes surveillance much easier
Many of the concerns people have with AI are centered on issues of data integrity, misinformation and copyright infringement, or they are concerned that AI will take humans’ jobs — or perhaps even take over the world. However, according to Halpin, there is another concern that is not as widely understood: AI makes surveillance much easier.
“AI surveillance is very dangerous in so far as, as you said, very small amounts of information can be used to identify you and track you,” Halpin said. He pointed to the example of metadata from phone records, which the U.S. government was revealed to have been collecting on a vast scale in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Related: Chelsea Manning and Nym co-founder say privacy tech must be decentralized
The information provided by phone record metadata allows governments to “track your physical presence, what shops you’re going to, when you’re awake, when you’re asleep, who you’re with, who you’re talking to, who your friends are,” Halpin said, as well as “preferences such as sexual preferences, religious preferences, political preferences.”
“Essentially, the whole point of surveillance is to create a kind of digital double of you that they can use to both observe and then control and predict your behavior, and maybe even nudge it and make you do what they want you to do. And AI has made that much more easy than it used to be.”
According to Halpin, mixnets — which Nym is using for its soon-to-launch virtual private network (VPN) service — help counter AI surveillance by “mixing the data up, scrambling it and adding kind of noise to the underlying signal. And this basically makes it impossible, or at least incredibly difficult [...] for AI to de-anonymize someone.”
CBDCs present a major censorship risk
Another hot-button political and potential privacy issue stems from central bank digital currencies. While some claim they modernize fiat currencies, others say they are surveillance and censorship nightmares in the making.
“All the CBDC designs I’ve seen, with the possible exception of the EU and Swiss designs, are privacy nightmares,” said Halpin. This concern echoes what attorney Marta Belcher told The Agenda back in May 2023 when she argued that “a cashless society is really a surveillance society. And what we’re seeing worldwide is this push to make transactions surveilable. And that includes things like pushing central bank digital currencies.”
Halpin pointed to the fact that the U.S. government can put countries like Iran and Cuba on its “shit list” and block their access to much of the global economy. “That could happen to, for example, people that don’t believe in vaccines [...] or who believe the U.S. government has too much surveillance or have dissenting political beliefs.”
“We don’t want a world where people get their financial freedom restricted arbitrarily by a centralized bank, and that’s what CBDCs allow.”
To hear more from Halpin’s conversation with The Agenda — including his thoughts on the politicization of surveillance, the effects of international sanctions on privacy projects, and more — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!
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