DeSec? Where Crypto Meets Security, Surveillance, and Defense

If the network goes down were f*cked

Law and order across the West has been put into question of late. The general heuristic we can use to measure this is walking about cities and their parks in daylight or at night. In many places we see this proposition becoming increasingly unreliable. We can distill that the social order is constructed and maintained via 3 components:

1. Laws and social norms
2. The Enforcement (police, surveillance, etc.)
3. The Judicial (the application of laws)

How these three interact is complex and deeply integrated. When things start to fail (like parks being unusable, or stores leaving a city), it is usually a pretty obvious indicator that something is wrong. In the modern case, it seems likely pieces of the current era of applied policies are malfunctioning. And while there is a big philosophical argument to be had on the judicial side, we can focus on how crypto can shift the power dynamics of the other aspects (mainly enforcement) to improve that fabric of society. Below we discuss some of these as they largely focus on tools of surveillance and how crypto can manage/enhance those interactions and check the monopoly on these powers otherwise held by the state.

Historically, during times of degraded trust in public institutions and protocols (laws), society turned to vigilantism to solve their problems. The reality of this is the past was largely organized crime, where the power gained from solving a real problem for the communities eventually corrupted and turned into extortion and racketeering. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Perhaps with more modern solutions, such as immutable protocols and cheaper surveillance-related tech, we might be able to construct protocols that exert leverage for enforcement agencies to scale and address problems - while also controlling them to maintain whether they are actually achieving the goals and desires of the communities they are supposed to represent. Technology is all about letting the same number of people do more, while decentralized protocols can help ensure this new power is not usurped into an unintended purpose. If not, radically cheaper surveillance tools and robotics will dramatically spike the operating leverage of the state - with obvious downsides.

Ideas like the ones proposed above are scary because of the threat of abuse of power.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Enhancing the surveillance state is something that should put everybody’s back up. Crypto brought the possibility of financial freedom - it removed the state’s monopoly on money and provides a check and balance on the state’s financial behaviour. In the same way, it could also bring a check and balance to new tools of surveillance. Ubiquitous, cheap, robotics, cameras, and sensors combined with credibly neutral coordination networks can bring a check on the surveillance monopoly of the state.

In a category of projects we call DeSec, we have been exploring some ideas through interesting conversations with good people. Security-style applications are an area of opportunity for crypto because it is one of the few areas where the clients (governments, communities) are willing to pay up in an insurance-style manner (defense happily pays for redundancy much like aviation). This is a feature inherent to crypto that many optimization-based markets do not value. This characteristic is also why many crypto products are generally uncompetitive to other solutions - they constantly pay for higher levels of security/redundancy/verification when it might not actually make sense.

That being said, redundancy is not a bad thing. It is the tradeoff between deterministic fixed costs and variable future costs. In the case of Bitcoin its value and success can be derived from this overpaying for verification that enables trustlessness. In defense manufacturing, it is paying for an absurdly low tolerance rate or p of failure. In enforcement, it is paying day in and day to have data on the off chance somebody may be committing a crime.

DePin Meets DeSec: NeighborhoodWatchDAO

A lot of the value for DePin comes from an ability to shift capital expenditure burdens from the company/protocol onto the node runners in exchange for the slice of revenue (and a robustness that decentralization yields in the face of tail events). This facilitates the possibility for many types of networks to scale in ways that would not really be possible otherwise.

Leveraging these characteristics, some immediate applications could be brought to the market. One such example (shoutout Dempsey) would be a DePin style network of SoundThinking (formerly ShotSpotter) type nodes that either sells into ShotSpotter itself, has its own protocol, or both. For those unfamiliar, ShotSpotter is a network of microphones put on buildings that can triangulate where a gunshot occurred and alert enforcement agencies or first responders of the location for faster/immediate deployment of resources.

With node runners deploying all over their respective cities, such protocols could scale to support enforcement around the globe much quicker than the internal reinvestment cycles of companies such as SoundThinking might allow.

In a similar vein, there is an increasing risk of small drone incursions over potentially important airspace. As the recent incursions over Langely Airforce base showed us, this can be a difficult challenge. And while the US military may have confidential solutions to these types of attacks, for other less secure airspace other answers may be needed. Incentivizing smaller-scale radar or visual observation networks in relevant airspace to help enforcement contextualize launch points could be valuable.

A similar model could be leveraged for the observation of signal strengths. While this is a common activity for wireless providers to ensure network quality, it is often more ephemeral in nature. Persistent signal quality monitoring could be offered into these networks (as some projects like ROAM already plan to do), but it also provides an easy enforcement solution.

In recent years the cheap availability of mobile signal jamming devices amongst petty thieves has skyrocketed. These are terrifying devices as you might observe people breaking into your house and find your cell phone, nor wifi, or radio work to contact police or help.

Criminals can carry these in a belt pouch while they rob your house or steal your car. Persistent signal monitoring around cities and other areas could easily detect a jamming event and similar to ShotSpotter, alert authorities.

Similar protocols could also be created to incentivize small drone surveillance on regular intervals in problematic areas (Patrol2earn), or existing depin projects can reutilize their datasets for supporting surveillance agencies (and earn revenue for doing so cc: Palantir and the NSA). Projects such as Frodobots or DIMO may capture interesting events on camera as they hit scale.

Transmission

In a similar edit to the surveillance section, depin networks could be used to enhance the robustness of transmission networks whether they be electrical, or digital. These kinds of networks are significantly more robust in the event of disaster.

Mesh edge networks can protect against the highly centralized CDN-centric world of internet traffic today, while decentralized power plants, coordinating smaller scale energy production can provide back-ups in the event major production centres are targeted.

This logic also applies to modern warfare. The modern forward forces will need to be even more decentralized and fragmented. As we have seen in Ukraine, the use of FPV drones is a radical development in how war is conducted. It has enabled small-scale, low-cost (even cardboard drones), and fast precision strike capability in the field. This was previously reserved for much more expensive missiles. As a result, any key hub on the battlefield (i.e. logistics hubs, transmissions/command bunkers, etc.) becomes an easy target. The best way to counter these points of failure is to use new methods of distributed communications and intelligence. This is simply a continuation of a long trend in reducing points of failure.

You want to use missiles? In this economy?

Verification

Opportunities for multiparty verification present an important angle for the increased usage of robotics in the manufacturing process. Sabotage via malicious instruction injections into manufacturing robots could present a serious risk across the entire value chain (i.e. lower lower-value components with lower risk thresholds). One solution to these types of problems is multi-party verification of the runtime code. By ensuring there is consensus on the code to be executed, it is possible to catch any malicious changes to the manufacturing process.

Similarly with verification, STAEX provides a public network to facilitate zero trust communication between IoT devices with end to end encryption and the ability to multihop tunnels. This presents a novel way in which these devices can communicate while reducing the risk of interference using traditional channels. Given the ever growing risk of malfeasance, this is an important technology for build robust networks where these devices can communicate valuable data.

Additional uses of verification fall into an idea like what Palmer Luckey described above where citizens can submit evidence (snitch2earn). Perhaps the expectation of highly sophisticated operations with covert identities and bait cars is too high of a hurdle to execute within the current legal frameworks, but nonetheless there is a ton of observed and recorded crime in this day and age that could be used to support enforcement if there was a simple place to deploy the data - especially if it came with contextualizing location/time verification cryptographically (ZK!!!).

DeSci

DeSci presents another vector of how crypto can intersect with the defense/intelligence industry. For instance, DeSci DAOs funding research into otherwise underloved areas such as materials science, biologic manufacturing (such as valleyDAO), cryogenics (CryoDAO) or longevity (Vita)/human performance enhancement (anybody wanna do peptide DAO with me?). These DAOs can actually lead to meaningful impacts in these fields of research. For instance, HairDAO is now one of the largest funders of non-alopecia hairloss research in the world.

I believe many more innovations in cutting edge research will come from this category of DAOs as more scientists abandon the calcification of traditional research avenues.

Why Protocols Matter

Protocols are needed because many of the ideas presented above are obviously surveillance tools that enhance the unilateral power of state. However, suppose they are brought to market and governed by protocols. In that case, decentralized governance can maintain a check on whether the authorities using them are conducting enforcement that represents the overall intents of the population they protect. Are the values of those with the monopoly on violence in alignment with those they govern? If they do not, the protocol can vote to no longer provide the value added information to the enforcement agency - perhaps instead opting to support private police forces or private intelligence agencies.

Skeptic’s Remark

Increasing capacity for surveillance could be a net negative for society no matter who controls it. Nevermind the actual possibility of hijacking decentralized governance, as similar to bitcoin, such a protocol would have to rely on absolute permissionless principle meaning governance minimization. But even with maximizing trustlessness, the capacity of cementing in the status quo could backfire.

Society is evolving constantly and the ability to enforce absolute rule of law could eliminate our ability to adapt. Imagine if an absolute monarch or an authoritarian in the past had this capacity. Disobedience fosters progress, albeit a very specific form of disobedience, not a street crime. How would one go about eliminating only a specific type of crime? If one maximizes surveillance tech the prevention becomes a slippery slope.

Therefore; we have to be careful in maintaining privacy while implementing technology that could help maintain established order. It is imperative for survival of our species that we actually have the ability to speak outrageous thoughts and revolt against tyranny. If the asymmetry between enforcement and capacity to revolt becomes too big we’re just enabling minority-report-like tyranny.

If we dive deeper into the asymmetry, the US right to bear arms has no meaning since at the time its goal was to induce symmetry to the potential revolt, as soon as we invented missiles, nevermind nuclear weapons, that symmetry is far gone. Naturally, the individual’s right to defend its property stands but in terms of government resistance, it’s gg.

Crypto technology has the unique ability to bring markets into places it could not reach before. Will the future be MerceneryDAO, crypto-funded defense tech, community-owned drones or is the pacifist nature of libertarianism unable to facilitate these ambitions? Maybe the answer lies in more niche ideas such as a decentralized mini-nuclear power plant monitor and drone protection network or something we have not even considered.

As usual, if you are building towards any of these verticals, we would love to hear from you and see what you're up to. Contact us at Research@zeeprime.capital