Love and cryptography

How secure software and encryption helped an old-fashioned romance

If I can tell you something about him, it’s 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 private life.

In 2016, a few years after our simple and pleasant love affair began, we faced a problem. We decided to live together, and decided that I would emigrate to Europe. But for this we had to prove to the public services the strength of our relations. Instructions on how to do this, to the modern forms of relationships: communication in social networks, emails, chat rooms, photos of a happy couple. He read these instructions and showed them to me. We laughed. Our relationship is almost no trace in the digital world. We had nothing like that.

We met a few years before at a party with alcohol after the hacker conference. Our mutual friend introduced us - my name, his - by pseudonym. I immediately liked it. 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.
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"Well," I thought, "and it did not work out."

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

Jabber is different from most protocols by decentralization. There is no Jabber company with Jabber servers, as is the case with Google or WhatsApp. This means that you can use servers raised by anyone in any country. My only way to communicate with this mysterious person (about whom I could not stop thinking) was this Jabber address, and he set it up to reject all unencrypted messages. Jabber does not encrypt itself, but the OTR (Off-The-Record) protocol creates an encryption layer within other communication systems. Everything looks as if I am calling you, but we communicate in a secret language known only to us two. Someone can connect and eavesdrop, but they will not understand us. OTR has another property, Perfect Forward Secrecy. It ensures the creation of new encryption keys for each new session, so even if one of them is decrypted, it will only be decrypted at that time. He will not allow the intervening person to access past or future messages. It looks like when I call you, each time we would invent a new secret language for communication - a language that we would understand right away.

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 - if the conversation is encrypted, the logs are not necessary, and in our case it is. All these early chats disappeared. Some I remember, some - he, but most of them disappeared, as if talking in the rain.

I remember that I constantly complained to him about journalism, sources, stories, a letter, the need to do something important. He always seemed to listen sympathetically, which was manifested in a strange body language that exists in chat pauses. He was practical, positive and inspiring. I remember what I said to him, how disappointed I am that I am a woman trying to write long subjective articles, and that I feel that from a social point of view I don’t have much to do. 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 paused a little, well, and then reposted my list to me, but now 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, longest, and best material for Wired . But he does not remember it and just believes me when I say 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 store in our head is more important,” he wrote to me recently on WhatsApp. "Well, about the accuracy of this - pff." Such 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 transfers memory better. I did not love him for his particular words or sentences. I fell in love with him gradually, over time, in the intervals between words, supported by words. Sometimes we don’t like to lose words, but forgetting removes the support of a fixed past - a past that still doesn’t appear in the log file.

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 passed 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 chunks of text without the passwords we shared in the chat. I read the poem into his microphone and sent it to him. I sent him images. I don't remember exactly, and I can't find them anymore, but I remember that I liked it very much.

I wanted to find a way to talk on the phone. We used TextSecure and RedPhone (later turning into Signal ). We sent images to each other - usually I told him, and usually it was funny things that I met during the day.

I found myself in London, and as a joke (and seriously) I tried to make him come 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 east train station in Paris , with a cash ticket bought in hand, and took the express train to the main station in Luxembourg.

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

Relations were still platonic, but I knew I wanted more.

A few months later we went to Berlin together. Standing on the balcony (we were at my friend's apartment), at night, I asked if I could kiss him, and he said yes.

Soon after, I was in the heart of a media storm that had happened as a result of the tragedy. My life exploded, and in the intervals between mourning and debates in the media, I lived in some terrible tragicomedy that could not be turned off. He became my shelter, his apartment was the only place where I felt safe. He cared for me, watched me eat, hug me, walk with me and let me cry on my shoulder. When our communication could be made public, he said that he did not want to participate in my fights with the media. “If a reporter calls me, I'll give him a rude shot,” 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 do not remember much about this terrible time, but I remember that I felt his silent presence, being thousands of kilometers away.

There are several of our joint photos. Few of them were made by us - we didn’t like selfies. Existing photos from our friends we asked not to upload online.

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

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

My novel taught me that our era of digital data hardens the passing time in a way that had never happened before. I have an archive of calendar entries and emails that clearly indicate 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 the last time, communicating with my mother by e-mail. But not with my beloved. For us, the time is milder. Sometimes it seems to me that he has always been with me, sometimes - that our relationship has just begun. All other relationships in my life are much more clearly fixed.

“Every time I see an old post, I feel a strange feeling - as if I like the memory of the event more than the exact record of it,” he told me.

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

I'll 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 recording, we were satisfied with trust.

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

One friend wrote in his letter:

“Before we parted ways, 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 became a couple. ”

Another wrote:

“I remember meeting Mr. **** for the first time in September 2013, when they came to visit me. They made an impression of a couple in love, and I can't remember ever having seen her happier. ”

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

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

Last May, we were again in Berlin. I dragged him to the Stasi Museum. When we got to the old director's office, I took a breath and made him an offer. Instead of a ring, I gave him a USB key (bought for cash; I wondered what was there).

He said yes.

Then he looked at me in surprise, and asked: “Was it because of this that you were nervous 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 in 1973 - American journalist, photographer and blogger writing about hackers, Anonymous, intellectual property, copyright and the Internet. Was married to journalist Danny O'Brien . After the divorce, she met with Aaron Schwarz , an Internet activist and IT visionary. Schwarz was accused of stealing intellectual property for downloading and sharing a database of paid scientific journals , and in 2013 he committed suicide , unable to bear the harassment.