Love and cryptography

How secure software and encryption helped an old-fashioned novel emerge

If I can tell anything about him, it is about his soft look and amazing smile. He is taller than me. He is well versed in computers. He speaks English with a terrible accent. He values ​​his privacy.

In 2016, a few years after our simple and enjoyable love affair began, we ran into a problem. We decided to live together, and decided that I was emigrating to Europe. But for this we needed to prove to the public services the strength of our relationship. Instructions on how to do this gravitated to modern forms of relationships: social networks, emails, chats, photos of a happy couple. He read these instructions and showed them to me. We laughed. Our relationship has left virtually no trace in the digital world. We didn’t have anything like that.

We met a few years before at a party with alcohol after a hacker conference. Our mutual acquaintance introduced us - by my name, by his pseudonym. I immediately liked him. We chatted a bit, but I had to run. I made an appointment with him at the end of the week, and missed her due to illness.

Well, I thought, it didn’t work out.

We suddenly met a few weeks later on a public IRC channel, and I recognized his nickname. IRC is a large chat system, something like Slack for the command line. In general, Slack is just a fashionable interface for IRC with all sorts of new nishtyak, but without new privacy. The IRC server knows everything that they say, being on it, like Slack. I wrote that I still want to talk, but he said that he doesn’t happen in IRC often. I gave him my Jabber address, and offered private correspondence. And now we were able to chat.

Jabber differs from most protocols by decentralization. There is no Jabber company with Jabber servers, as is customary with Google or WhatsApp. This means that you can use servers raised by anyone in any country. My only way of communicating with this mysterious person (which I could not stop thinking about) was this Jabber address, and he configured it to reject all unencrypted messages. Jabber itself is not involved in encryption, but the OTR (Off-The-Record) protocol creates an encryption layer inside other communication systems. Everything looks like I’m calling you, but we communicate in a secret language, known only to both of us. Someone can connect and eavesdrop, but they won’t understand us. OTR has another property, Perfect Forward Secrecy. It ensures the creation of new encryption keys for each new session, so even if you decrypt one of them, it will be decrypted only that time. It will not give the person interfering in the conversation access to past or future messages. It looks like when I call you, every time we would invent a new secret language for communication - a language that you and I would immediately understand.

We began our intimate and private conversation in our text world for two. And this conversation is still ongoing. Most Jabber clients are smart enough to figure out that if the conversation is encrypted, you don't need to log in, and in our case it is. All these early chats have disappeared. Some I remember, some I remember, but most disappeared, like talking in the rain.

I remember that I constantly complained to him - about journalism, sources, stories, writing, about the need to do something important. He always seemed to listen sympathetically to what appeared in the strange body language that existed in the pauses of the chat. He was practical, positive and inspiring. I remember that I told him how disappointed that I am a woman trying to write long subjective articles, and that I feel that a lot of things are inaccessible to me from a social point of view. He asked me about the details, and I gave him a list of all the reasons why, I think, my gender limited my work. He was silent for a while, and then reposted my list to me, but in the form of a task list. I looked at the screen and sighed. I wanted to cry, but at the same time I felt that the time had come. I took this task list and turned it into my last,the best material for wired . But he does not remember this and simply believes me when I say that it was. In our century, when all communication is automatically documented, this episode has remained ephemeral and lives in the moving sands of human memory - just as all relationships once behaved.

“It seems to me that what we keep in our heads is more important,” he wrote to me recently on WhatsApp. "Well, about the accuracy of this - pff." This is his disregard for his digital accuracy, and it means something. In every second logging there is some legal certainty, but they lack impressionism, which is better conveyed by memory. I fell in love with him not by his specific words or sentences. I fell in love with him gradually, over time, in between words supported by words. Sometimes we don’t like to lose words, but forgetting also removes support for a fixed past - a past that cannot be captured in a log file anyway.

The first weeks turned into months, he became my imaginary friend, a man whose existence no one else knew. We spoke daily, usually through OTR, always in encrypted mode. When we transferred files through unencrypted programs and sites, we always encrypted it using command line utilities and transferred passwords through OTR.

It was not very easy and required long, esoteric commands like

> openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in for-you.mp3 -out for-you.mp3.enc

It turned out that although our communication went through the open Internet, these messages were only meaningless pieces of text without the passwords that we shared in the chat. I read poems into his microphone and sent them to him. I sent him images. I don’t remember exactly, and I can’t find them anymore, but I remember that I really liked it.

I wanted to find a way to communicate by phone. We used TextSecure and RedPhone (later turned into Signal ). We sent pictures to each other - usually I told him, and usually these were funny things that I met throughout the day.

I found myself in London, and jokingly (and seriously) tried to get him to visit. He hesitated, and made another proposal - to meet a little later in Luxembourg. A few weeks later I was at the Gare de L'Est, the eastern station of Paris , with a cash ticket in my hand, and I took the express train to the main station of Luxembourg.

I still did not know the real name of this person. I didn’t even know that Luxembourg is a different country. We had a wonderful weekend. I told him, “I want to show you a movie to help understand my culture and compatriots,” and I showed John Carpenter’s film “The Big Trouble in Little China". We sat on the couch next to us, with a laptop lying on our hips and watched a movie. In the end, he said that he really liked it. In the afternoon we walked in the city, sat in the parks and ate takeaway together. We talked about the Internet , activism , journalism and computers. By the end of the weekend I knew his name, but still called him by his pseudonym - a habit.

Relationships were still platonic, but I knew that I wanted more.

A few months later we went to Berlin together Standing on the balcony (we were in my friend’s apartment), at night, I asked can I kiss him and he answered yes.

Soon after, I found myself in the heart of a media storm that occurred as a result of the tragedy. My life exploded, and in the interval between mourning and the debate in the media, I lived in some terrible tragicomedy, which could not be turned off. He became my shelter, his apartment was the only place where I felt safe. He looked after me, made sure I ate, hugged me, walked with me and let me cry on his shoulder. When our connection could be made public, he said that he did not want to participate in my showdown with the media. “If a reporter calls me, I’ll be rude to him,” he told me. I laughed and agreed. I also did not want to participate in this. But when I left, he was with me, communicating through the encrypted channels we built. I don't remember much about this terrible time

There are several of our joint photos. Few of them we did ourselves - we did not like selfies. We asked our friends not to upload photos that existed with our friends.

We know that the vague and soft anonymity of our relationship will not last forever. I doubt that we will have an excess of digital communication channels. Our phones track the paths we follow, and they are stored for a long time in the databases of telecommunication companies (and, more recently, in the WhatsApp logs). Their cell towers and GPS logs look like paths in a maze without walls, and these lines converge and diverge, and again converge. But what we said during these walks is not preserved, even among ourselves. Only feelings, memories and paths remain.

These paths already ran across three continents when we traveled together and often visited friends. We do not keep relationships secret. Our friends and acquaintances know that we are a couple, with a slight bias in information security. I was very happy introducing him to my friends and family (first by pseudonym, then by name). I am extremely proud of him, and at times I am still dizzy from the fact that I spend time with him.

My novel taught me that our era of digital data cures the passing time in a way that has never happened before. I have an archive of calendar entries and emails that clearly show the time and place of everything I did. I know when my child came to me, when I last saw my friend in New York, what I wrote for the last time, communicating with my mother by e-mail. But not with my beloved. For us, the time is softer. Sometimes it seems to me that he was always with me, sometimes - that our relationship has just begun. All other relationships in my life are much more clearly fixed.

“Each time I see the old mail, I feel a strange feeling - as if I like the memory of the event more than the exact recording of it,” he told me.

He did not mean mail from me. We never wrote each other an e-mail.

I will tell you something else about him. He does not tolerate nonsense. He is committed to clear and appropriate communication and honesty. He rarely sees meaning in hints, especially on important occasions. We try to talk to each other directly. Over the years, through our encrypted tunnels, we told our stories and explained to each other. We became quiet voices in each other's heads. In the absence of a perfect record, we were satisfied with trust.

So it was in 2016, when we had to document our relationship to the pleasure of a modern government. At the end of the instructions, according to which we could make such a record, we found one old-fashioned version - letters from friends and relatives confirming our love. We collected them.

One friend wrote in his letter:

“Before our paths diverged, we ate chips together, drank too much coffee and laughed a lot. Seeing them here today, I realized how happy they are together and how glad I am that they have become a couple. ”

Another wrote:

“I remember how I met Mr. **** for the first time in September 2013, when they came to visit me. They made the impression of a couple in love, and I can’t remember to ever see her happier. "

I don’t know if any of the officials read these letters — today, unfortunately, they prefer the metadata of real information — but we read. Seeing your friends and family confirm your love is the best selfie in the world.

I got my citizenship, permission from the government to live with my beloved in Europe and moved to him.

Last May, we were back in Berlin. I dragged him to the Stasi Museum . When we got to the director’s old office, I took in air and made him an offer. Instead of a ring, I gave him a USB key (bought for cash; I won’t tell you what was there).

He said yes.

Then he looked at me in surprise, and asked: “Because of this, have you been on your nerves all week?”

"Yes! This is terribly unnerving! ” - I said, and we went to drink coffee. That's how it happened.

But you have to take my word for it.

Queen Norton, born 1973 - American journalist, photographer and blogger writing about hackers, Anonymous, intellectual property, copyright and the Internet. She was married to journalist Danny O'Brien . After the divorce, I met with Aaron Schwartz , an Internet activist and IT visionary. Schwartz was accused of stealing intellectual property for downloading and sharing the database of paid scientific journals , and in 2013 he committed suicide by not surviving bullying.