Our next guest is Jameson Lopp, the co-founder and CTO of CASA,
which provides key management services around Bitcoin.
Very excited for Jameson to tell us about living completely off the grid.
Over to you, Jameson.
All right. Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. Let me see if I can share my screen here.
How does that look?
Great.
All right. So yeah, I'm Jameson Lopp, co-founder, CTO of CASA,
been focusing on Bitcoin security for quite a while.
And when Sam asked if I could give a talk about privacy,
I said, sure, you know, I could talk for an hour or two.
I've done this a few times, but then he said, you've only got 20 minutes.
And so I said, well, I'll see what I can do,
but we're just going to have to do the highlights right here.
And really, the point that I'm going to try to get across is that we are under attack
and corporations, nation states, other organizations and their quest for omniscience
are slowly stripping away our privacy.
And we're essentially the frogs that are being boiled in the pot of so-called progress.
And we can't expect these entities to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.
Rather, we must recognize that our failures are our own fault
because privacy only extends as far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society.
And so we have to continue to push the boundaries of what's possible,
make it easier for people to attain privacy
and try to push our own friends to help us in being more private together.
What really led me down this path?
Well, I had been interested in privacy
once I got into the crypto space for obvious reasons,
but it was really after I had a SWAT team show up at my house
and shut down the whole neighborhood in 2017
that I consciously decided to set out on a mission
to start my life over with a renewed focus on privacy.
This has been a long and arduous journey
because there really were not many resources out there
for how to achieve what I wanted to do.
And it's important to note that my quest has not been for perfect privacy.
If I wanted perfect privacy, then I'd have closed all my online accounts,
possibly resurfaced as a fresh pseudonym,
stopped appearing at events like this,
and rather, my goal was to achieve the best possible realistic privacy
while still retaining my reputation,
still being able to openly participate in this ecosystem.
And that's been a much more challenging thing to do.
And privacy, I've learned, is a very complicated topic
because a variety of the aspects are going to be specific to your jurisdiction.
And a lot of the privacy guides out there are written for Americans.
This is probably because Americans tend to be under more attacks
with regard to things like frivolous lawsuits,
being tracked by private investigators, targeted for asset seizures,
and jailed for things like Homeland Security charges.
It's actually kind of a weird trade-off where we have terrible privacy,
and we have a lot of potential attacks against us,
but we also have some interesting legal applications
that enable us to take advantage of some loopholes
and get stronger privacy than you can in many other countries.
So what are some examples? Why are we here?
Well, the point here, if you're not familiar with this story,
is that Justine Sacco, who was a not very well-known woman
with about 200 Twitter followers,
she posted a very bad joke as she was boarding a plane.
And she went to sleep on that 11-hour plane trip
and woke up to find that she was the number one Twitter topic worldwide,
with celebrities and bloggers all over the globe denouncing her
and encouraging their followers to do the same.
Her employer, which was a New York internet firm,
immediately declared that she had lost her job
as Director of Corporate Communications,
and at least one Twitter user showed up at the Cape Town Africa airport
to photograph her arrival.
And, of course, upon arriving at her family's home,
she was nearly disowned.
What's the point?
The point is that even in the United States,
the point is that even in the information age,
it does not take much for you to attract the ire of millions of people.
And when you start to achieve this level of attention and scrutiny,
that's when your privacy can become a big issue,
and the lack of privacy can cause various aspects of your life to break down.
But this is specifically a crypto privacy conference.
So one of the things that I've done over the years
is try to keep track of physical attacks
that have happened against people in the crypto space.
And we've seen this ebb and flow over the years,
but essentially people who are well known in the crypto space,
especially for dealing with large amounts of money,
tend to find that they get attacked from a privacy standpoint,
and sometimes even from a physical standpoint.
Though the physical instances are fairly rare,
what we have found is that in many cases,
if you're open about owning or trading a lot of crypto assets,
then you will find yourself at the very least getting digitally attacked.
And then often that digital attack can lead to uncovering of other flaws in your life
that result in a lot of terrible things happening.
So this is just a handful of news articles that I've shown
of the more extreme physical attacks that have happened to Bitcoiners in the space.
And to really put it in more numeric terms,
there does seem to be a correlation between, of course, the price, the exchange rate,
which of course is going to affect things like mainstream media coverage
and general understanding and knowledge of the crypto asset space.
I think that basically what happens as we have these waves of adoption
is that you also have new waves of criminal adoption,
specifically criminals who want to better understand
what the risk-reward trade-off is of trying to attack people for their crypto assets.
So this is going to continue to be a cat-and-mouse game as security always is.
And I fully expect that these numbers will go up again once there's another bubble.
This, I guess, ended in about 2018,
and it's basically been a flat line ever since then.
We haven't had many physical attacks, but I think it's only a matter of time.
So why do we need privacy protection?
Well, privacy is basically the other side of the coin for security.
I kind of consider it to be a first layer of protection against attackers
because if the attacker does not know information about you,
then they can't use that information against you to find weaknesses
and exploit various chinks in your armor,
whether that's digital, physical, it doesn't really matter.
The less that you can keep in public, the stronger you're going to be.
I mean, it is kind of a security through obscurity method,
but it obviously works from a majority of the common use cases
of people who are not ultra celebrities.
And of course, there are a variety of different levels of privacy protection.
Most people, I would say the average person,
doesn't really care about any of these potential attackers,
while other people may be only really interested in the first level of protection.
So I can really talk about the first three levels of protection,
but ultimately, of course, if you want to hide from nation states
and actors that are funded by nation states
and entities that essentially print their own money,
then you're going to have to search elsewhere
because there aren't really any guides written about that.
It's not really a feasible thing for many people to achieve.
So the resources that I actually used as a base for my journey
were the books called How to Disappear and How to Be Invisible,
though there is a newer book that I'll recommend at the end of the presentation
that I consider to be far superior.
My primary takeaways of the research that I did is that
you give away a lot of personal information to many different entities,
your merchants, service providers, and so on.
And these entities are the weak points because they tend to be highly prone to
data loss, social engineering, hacking,
all types of ways that really turn the protection of your data
into something that you cannot really rely upon
regardless of what promises are being made to you.
So you should really assume that over a long enough period of time,
these companies will get hacked or social engineered,
or something will happen and your private data will become public data.
And the general solution, quote unquote, to many of these data leaks
is to use proxies.
And there can be all types of different proxies,
not just the electronic networking type,
but you can also create legal proxies and even human proxies,
essentially creating firewalls between yourself and your real data
and the information that you're sharing with the world.
Now, normally, this is the part where I would start to dig into the specifics
of how to create proxies and shields and protect every possible aspect of your life
that can be vulnerable to data leaks.
But unfortunately, that would take far longer than we have.
And you can educate yourself on your own time with the resources
that I'll be pointing to at the end of the presentation.
So let's just skip to the sort of takeaways of the things that I learned
that were not really made clear to me when I was doing the research.
And one of those things is that after you believe you have achieved
the level of privacy you want,
it's almost pointless to have that in place unless you actually test it.
The only way to know the strength of any system is to attack it.
So if you're only going for, you know, layer one of, you know,
sort of protection against common web searches,
you can probably test that yourself pretty well.
Maybe have some friends and family or internet savvy people
see what information they can find about you using publicly available data.
If you want to go further, you might want to do what I did,
which is hire some private investigators,
because they tend to have access to databases that the average person does not,
you know, requires various credentials to get into.
If you can stay safe from a private investigator,
then you're going to be better off than 99.9% of the people in the world.
You want to take it even further,
you might hire some sort of pen tester or white hat hacker.
And if you want to go really extreme,
you might actually want to even test to see how well your own friends and family,
or at least the people that you are trusting as your inner circle,
manage to hold up against common type of social engineering attacks.
So what are some of the limitations, though?
Like I said, none of the guides that you're going to find
are going to protect you from nation-state attackers.
It's not really feasible,
and I don't think it's something that many people really want to go to the expense of doing.
But what I found in practice is that almost anyone that you trust,
because you end up having to trust some people,
the goal of this is not to go be a mountain man and a hermit living in a cave,
but ultimately some of those trusted points are going to be the weak points.
And it's just a way that people operate.
So I've even had bankers, trust officers, attorneys,
people who I've explained my entire situation to and said,
this is all very important to keep high level of privacy.
They've just made unintentional mistakes.
They've accidentally put data into databases.
They got sucked into other marketing databases.
And it's just information wants to be free.
It's so difficult to keep information from flowing.
So it's, as a result, almost impossible to have 100% perfect privacy
if you're having to tell absolutely anyone the real location
and other information of your private life.
So it's almost an exercise in futility.
But you can still get, I would say, 99% of the way there,
even though you can never really have a perfect guarantee.
So it's also important to review every step of what these service providers are doing.
I've had to go back to a few over time
and basically tell them to stop doing certain things
because they were leaking data and they didn't even realize it.
Privacy is also expensive.
I've had to spend, well, over $1,000 a month.
I mean, obviously, you can spend as much as you want to,
depending upon what you're really going for.
For me, because I wanted to have things like driver's license
and other official documents not be at my normal day-to-day residence.
You know, I had to get multiple residences.
But even if you're only doing the sort of electronic,
you know, internet level of privacy,
then you're probably still going to want to end up spending a few hundred dollars a month
for some services that will help protect you on that front.
Privacy is also kind of weird at first,
at least for me, because I didn't want to give my real name,
phone number, address, whatever, to various services.
It's not too hard, of course, to do that online.
But when you start having to do that to people face to face,
that's when you kind of have to get into almost a social engineering mindset yourself.
But one of the things that I took away from the research that I did
is that, you know, this is a mindset you have to get into
and you have to realize that the vast majority of time,
it's not illegal to lie to people.
Unless you were getting into some sort of legal contract
that, you know, requires your real identity,
or unless you're speaking to some sort of government agency,
it's almost always legal to lie to some other entity
and give them a fake name or phone number as long as you're not committing fraud
and trying to, you know, protect yourself against,
you know, having legal repercussions because of whatever crime you're committing.
Also, debt is anti-privacy.
This is kind of obvious, right?
It is because creditors aren't going to lend out money to someone that they can't find
and try to penalize or get their money back if anything goes wrong.
From a purchase standpoint, you know,
buying things like, you know, a house or a car or whatever with cash,
it can really sting.
You know, people tend not to have that much cash sitting around.
I have done things like use Bitcoin collateralized loans to try to get around that.
Now, that's tricky as well because, once again, getting into some sort of loan
is probably going to require AMLKYC.
Thankfully, the level of privacy that I went to, you know,
I have the ability to go through AMLKYC and still not give away my day-to-day location,
but that is on, of course, the fairly extreme end of things.
Also, I froze all my credit reports,
and that's actually a pretty easy thing to do that will protect your privacy,
but this can become an issue.
Once again, if you're doing anything credit related,
for example, renting an apartment, which I needed to do,
and I found that even offering to prepay, you know, a year in cash,
if you're renting from basically a large corporation,
then they're probably not going to allow that.
So, if you want to be able to do, you know, cash-based apartment rental
or something like that, you're probably going to have to go with a landlord
that is, you know, a small-time landlord.
They may only own a handful of properties,
and they'll be more willing to work with you on stuff like that.
Insurance, similarly, anti-privacy.
This is not really something that you can get around.
You know, many landlords require insurance.
Banks require it for mortgage homes.
And, of course, governments require insurance for vehicles.
So, thankfully, insurance is not a public information.
It's not like if you buy a house or a car
and those are publicly registered things that anyone can look up.
But that is, you know, one weakness where even what I've done
is get insurance essentially under the names of corporations.
You know, you still have to have your name listed somewhere on the policy
as, you know, insured driver or insured occupant or whatever.
So, haven't found a perfect option for that
other than perhaps to live or live somewhere
that's owned by someone else completely who insures it.
But, you know, that involves another level of trust and proxies.
On the Internet side of things,
I highly recommend people just spend a weekend
and figure out how to set up a VPN and tour.
The downside to this is that maintaining Internet privacy
is actually going to put you in the same class as a lot of common attackers.
You kind of become a second-class Internet citizen.
One fun fact is that I was not able to use the 2020 Census website
from any VPN or tour
because they completely shut that down and blocked it
and won't even get into the whole Census privacy thing.
That was another interesting ordeal that I had to go through.
There's also just technical issues.
You know, VPNs are not going to be rock solid.
I recommend setting up a VPN at your router level
so it protects all of the devices in your home.
However, there are some edge cases where you can have a silent failure
and you don't want to have a silent failure
where all your traffic stops going over the VPN.
You have to set up kill switches to make sure you notice when it stops.
But then, you know, your whole Internet might go down
until you reconfigure your VPN if you have a failure on their end.
As I mentioned before, third parties will make mistakes.
They'll put your real name on things that are not supposed to have your real name.
They'll commonly, you know, just ask you for information they don't really need.
And it can get...
What I've found is, you know, trying to tell someone
I don't want to give you that information is a lot harder.
It's easier just to give fake information
because you start raising up red flags when you tell people
you don't want to give away your phone number or address, etc., etc.
And on sort of the dishonest side of things,
I no longer feel bad about the deception
because I actually consider them to be adversaries.
You know, even people who are providing me with services
are adversaries from a privacy standpoint.
And I think really the only way to do all of this perfectly
is to actually hire a privacy expert to be a proxy
to set up all of these different services and things,
you know, even through attorneys and banks and whatnot.
So it's hard.
Managing one identity is already more than enough for most people,
but imagine having to manage multiple emails, phones,
physical mailboxes, bank accounts, legal entities, aliases.
It probably took me six to 12 months
to really start to get a hang of all of that and keep things separate.
But, you know, the more complexity you add,
the more possibility that you will accidentally cross-link these things.
And also, you know, when you're going into a new situation,
you have to kind of figure out, well, are they going to ask me for my ID
or can I just give them a fake name?
Because it'll be really, really awkward to get caught giving a fake name,
which thankfully has yet to happen to me.
But like regarding the cross-contamination thing, you know,
my official residents wanted information on the car to enforce parking.
My car, of course, is not owned by me.
It's owned by a different legal entity.
The previous year, I gave them the real make and model,
but the wrong license plate.
And this year, they asked for the registration.
So that became a problem.
I could no longer give them a fake license plate.
And of course, the registration had my company, one of my company names on it.
So it's probably not a big deal.
But now somewhere in some database,
you know, there's a link between that company and my identity,
which is not what I was going for.
I've also had physical remailer failures,
one where accidentally a bunch of my mail was actually going in an infinite loop
between two of my remailers,
and it took about six months to figure that out and break the loop.
But I kind of set up an onion routing network of various physical remailers.
What I learned over the past few years is that, you know,
these remailers are not always reliable.
I've had, at the edge case,
I've had mail delivered to me that was actually somehow stuck in
remail hell for like 18 months
and, you know, had some issues as a result of that, you know,
overpaid bills that were overdue, et cetera, et cetera.
And what I've really landed on is that using a remailer,
something like Earth Class Mail, for example,
that actually supports digital scanning will solve a lot of your issues
because you can at least get an idea of what mail is coming in
and whether or not you need to have it physically forwarded to you.
So the resource that I wish that I had is actually a book by Michael Bazell.
Of course, that's not his real name.
He publishes the best privacy guide that I've ever seen.
The second edition just came out.
It's over 500 pages long,
highly in-depth about every possible thing that you can imagine.
I actually learned a lot from it myself,
and it's definitely worth the $40.
So hopefully that'll give you a high-level idea
of some of the stuff that I've gone through.
You know, this is basically a way of life.
You have to decide that it's something that you're willing
to put the time and resources into.
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to maintaining privacy this day and age.
The data is flowing too freely,
and as far as I can tell, we're still on a trajectory
such that the ability to maintain your privacy
is just going to become more and more difficult.
Thank you so much, Jameson, for that practical guide
and the resources that we can use to protect our privacy
as well as highlighting the trade-offs
that you need to be mentally prepared to make.