The Mysterious Death of Shannon Larratt and Encryption

The Mysterious Death of Shannon Larratt and Encryption/Privacy/Deep-Dark-Web/

- Shannon Larratt's last words:
http://pastebin.com/uGQKSVUP

- Page @Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_Larratt

- Suffered from:
Tubular Aggregate Myopathy

As with all so called suicides, I was interested in what this individual was working on or talking about prior to his/her death. I usually expect to find intelligent discussions about government and its problems, usually the individual was a dissident or a member of some type of grassroots think tank working for the betterment of humanity. Or, work with encryption and/or privacy related software/hardware.

His 'last words' on his blog was posted:

Saturday, March 16, 2013

And what was posted just prior to this? On:

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

A blog post entitled "What Could Have Been?"

What does it mention? Encryption and a budding project! We have a winner!

Here is the text:

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"A few years ago a friend and I started work on a new community site, something that could grow an IAM type site to much larger Facebook-scale levels (generating and running not just the social network but also many media projects from within its communities), while addressing many of the shortcomings that we saw in community software. It was what we’d hoped to host on myprivatepla.net (dead site; don’t bother going there) — although of course with Jason’s passing this project was shelved.

The two major shortcomings that we saw in existing engines, coming from our experiences running community sites (me with BME’s IAM, and Jason with his own IAM2 software) were scalability and trust. For the latter, we asked ourselves how a userbase could trust a website if they didn’t trust the people running it — for example, the cases where Facebook admins have poked around inside the private messages of celebrities or otherwise abused the privacy of the site’s members, to say nothing of government warrants violating privacy. Jason and I solved this by encrypting absolutely everything possible — but doing it client-side. That is, all of the encryption takes place in the browser, so by the time it makes it to the server it’s completely encrypted. If you’re sending a message from one person to another, only the people involved are able to see it in its true form.

Given how easy it was to achieve the encryption aspects, I’m frankly a little surprised that nobody has implemented something like this — even if no mainstream company wanted to support it, I don’t think it would be difficult to write a browser plugin that added this functionality to Facebook or any other social sites.

Scalability was the other concern. The original IAM software, using ten year old hardware, was seriously optimized and could handle about 20,000 users on a single server (plus a fileserver) — and I’d wager with today’s technology could easily handle well over 100,000 users per server due to its optimization bias. However, it didn’t scale cleanly past that, although there were drawing-board multi-server implementations capable of handling far more users… Nonetheless, it was far from cheap to host, and would have only become more expensive. Facebook is said to have approaching a quarter million servers (or four or five thousand users per server, not surprising given the inefficiency of code necessitated by their AJAX-heavy philosophy and extreme “live” design), and given by the desperate attempts they’ve made recently to monetize, it’s clear that it’s a challenge paying for it all — and even if you do figure out how to monetize a site that large, it’s often difficult to stay above water for the first few years before you hit critical mass. Since we were eyeballing a mainstream site, we brainstormed solutions to avoid all of this, perhaps to bypass most hosting costs altogether by changing the rules.

Since we’d built a design philosophy in which the servers didn’t have to be trusted — public key cryptography both kept content private and perhaps more importantly protected it from tampering, the idea evolved to completely get rid of all or the majority of the servers by offloading the servers to the client side as well… Since these days people’s home computers are often always online, they would act as the hosts, both hosting for the data (public and private), the bandwidth (again, both between users and to the public), and “brains” of the site. I’m sure there would be a way to achieve this via a massive browser plugin, but the thought was to do it via a standalone app that people could run.

The home server end of things drew from a lot of the technologies developed for the darknet, projects like Freenet and Tor. For example, when relevant Onionskin routing with encrypted data was used so that when data needed to moved around, it wasn’t clear what was being moved, to whom it was being moved, or what it even was. To deal with the reality that home computers, even if theoretically always on, rarely are, the home servers acted in clusters — private content (as well as acting as the server for mobile devices) was echoed across the computers of your friends. Public content replicated as it was viewed, both so that the more people wanted to see something, the faster it would get (like a torrent), but also so that content was extremely secure against censorship.

There was also a mountain of work done to define how the system worked from an interface point of view, how personal sites and business sites could be managed, how people could group together to publish content like magazines and blogs, and so on, and some of that’s quite clever (all the things that I wanted the next IAM to become — and looking back now, there were a lots of things IAM — founded well over a decade ago — did that were many years ahead of their time), but I think the encryption and distributed nature are more important and what I wanted to mentioned here before I forget.

The thought behind all of this was to create a trusted social web where every user that’s added, adds power to the system (rather than draining it, as you’d get in a central-server architecture). None of the ideas or technologies are fundamentally new, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them synthesized quite in this way. My own project is completely dead in the water for a wide range of reasons, but I sure would to see someone implement it… Whoever does may well find themselves being a big part of creating a better world."

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I'm not surprised. What a shame. Prior to reading the pastebin 'trending post' of his 'last words' I had never read about this individual. His blog name was called Zentastic. I'm not directly linking to it here because some of the content may be disturbing or unsuitable for some people and NSFW.

I wonder if his illness was induced somehow. Read sites like TheHiddenEvil and like sites where people who are involved in discussion or projects as I mentioned earlier receive strange illnesses or are driven to suicide. (If not fast tracked to suicide by an unhappy source in the darkness.)

(some example search terms: gang stalking, targeted individual, ti, microwave nonlethal weapons, cancer, heart attack attacks, spies, spy)

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Simple example in the real world:

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2002, Issue No. 4
January 10, 2002

NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW MAY NOT COMPLY WITH LAW
BILL WOULD BAN SPACE-BASED MIND CONTROL WEAPONS

https://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/01/011002.html

 Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives late last year that would ban weapons in space. But while there have been many similar legislative initiatives in the past, Rep. Kucinich's bill is distinguished by its unusually expansive definition of "weapons."

Among the weapons that it would proscribe the new measure includes "psychotronic" devices that are "directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of ... mood management, or mind control."

No explanation for this peculiar proposal was immediately available. But the text of "The Space Preservation Act of 2001" (H.R. 2977), introduced on October 2, may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2001/hr2977.html

The Kucinich bill was hailed by Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse, one of a number of organizations of people who say they are victims of government experimentation involving electromagnetic and other psychotronic weapons. See their web site here:

http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~welsh/

The bill has been referred to three House Committees.

and: http://rense.com/general19/kucinich.htm