Today, we're joined by Jameson Lopp.
He's a Bitcoin engineer and the CTO of CASA.
Lopp is a well-known advocate for digital privacy, and his decision to live off the
grid following several cases of harassment was recently featured in a New York Times
article.
Jameson, why did you decide to pursue such a high level of privacy?
How did you go about doing it?
One of the problems, I think, with this day and age, the communication age and all the
changes that have resulted from it, is that it's very, very easy to go from being a low-profile
average person who's just going about their life to becoming a very high-profile person
who might get targeted by various bad actors.
And so, what I've tried to tell people who would immediately brush off most of this stuff
as paranoia is that it can happen to anyone.
This is not necessarily just for people who are social media influencers or trying to
be a public person.
This really is for anyone who has a digital footprint, who has a life on the internet,
who might do or say things completely unintentionally that result in a lot of attention being focused
on them by the global online community.
Okay, so what was the first thing you did?
Yeah, I started with a lot of the popular resources out there.
There are various books that are called How to Disappear, How to Become Invisible.
There are a few prominent privacy experts out there who have a lot of really good advice,
at least good advice as of 10 or 20 years ago.
It's very good advice for the analog things of how do you protect your home address and
your mailing address and the ownership of your private property.
I started off with a lot of that because that really is the harder thing to do from a sort
of resources and time and finance perspective.
So I started with that base of knowledge and started talking to attorneys who could help
me set up the legal mechanisms, the legal frameworks necessary for that.
But then simultaneously, I was also thinking about all of the different attack vectors
online and how do I ensure that none of my real information gets put into any database
at least as far as I can control?
That basically means that you have to set up other addresses, other phone numbers, other
emails, other contact information that you can still get access if someone's trying to
contact you through those means, but none of which should be pointing to where you really
are.
The ultimate, I guess, extreme part of all of this is in order to really disappear from
the sense that it's very difficult for someone, even if someone hires a private investigator
who has access to fairly protected confidential databases.
If you want that level of protection, then you really have to throw away everything in
your current life, everything that is connected to your current physical and digital identity.
And so that's what takes the most effort is how do you transition away from using your
actual house as your mailing address, from using cars and other public property that's
registered to you and your name and your address, and how do you set up everything that you
need to live your normal life in a way that is not connected to you?
And that's what takes the most effort.
You can get a good level of online privacy from marketing companies and other stuff if
you just spend a weekend configuring your computer and your home network to use things
like VPNs and Tor and various ad blockers.
But if you want to go deep dive all the way to the bottom of making sure that your actual
residence is not in any databases, that basically results in you having to start all over from
scratch and build a completely new entity that is very difficult to tie to your identity.
So in the article, there's a lot about what you did for your digital privacy, and I'm
just curious for the rest of your life externally, was there anything you had to sacrifice?
I'm sure there are parts of this, parts of your life that we're not really thinking about
that you've had to give up.
Yeah.
So one thing that I guess I haven't talked about as much, a few people have touched on
it, but I really went to kind of a level beyond that where I want not only to make it difficult
for external attackers all over the world to find me, but I actually want to protect
myself even from unintentional data leaks.
And by that, I mean the fact that people talk.
We are social creatures, and as soon as you reveal any bit of information to someone,
you have to assume that they're going to talk about it to someone else, not necessarily
because they're a gossipy type of person, but this is just what people do.
You have small talk, you talk to each other about what's going on in your neighborhood
and whatnot.
And so what I'm getting at is that where I am now, none of my neighbors or people that
I interact with, none of the service providers that I talk to, none of them know my real
name or identity.
I have a pseudonym for that.
And in order to maintain that pseudonym, that does mean that I can't have any possessions
or other things inside my house.
If someone is coming inside my house, I can't have my graduation diploma on the wall with
my real name on it, for example.
So yeah, that is even taking it to the next level, where you can make an argument that
I could probably be okay letting a few close friends here know who I really am and what's
kind of at stake and why I need to remain private.
And they would probably respect my privacy, but it's just not a risk that I'm willing
to take.
Is there anything that was actually just surprisingly easy?
The only thing that I think that was easy was actually getting anonymous VPN setup.
There are a few VPNs out there that accept cryptocurrency.
So you can basically acquire some Monero, for example, which is really hard to track.
And then you pay for your anonymous VPN with a third party mailbox that you set up that
is not tied to your identity and pay for it in crypto that can't be traced.
And I haven't had any problems with that.
I have had problems with other services that I've set up, like basically phone number proxies
and stuff.
Those tend to be a lot less reliable than VPNs.
I even had some problems with the physical mailbox routing that I had set up.
So I set up a variety of different private mailboxes that basically forward my mail all
over the place before it finally ends up at a destination where I can pick it up.
And it actually took me a few months to get that all working correctly.
And I had about a month's worth of mail that ended up in an infinite loop between a few
of these post office boxes where they kept just sending it back and forth to each other
until I finally figured out what was going on.
Well, where does Bitcoin fit into your quest for privacy?
Well, Bitcoin does not have the strongest level of privacy.
So I mean, I don't make purchases with Bitcoin that need to be highly private.
I'm definitely keeping track of advances in the space, like with better mixing software
that's coming out.
And I'm hoping that someday in the not too far future, I'll be able to have a higher
degree of confidence that my actual funds are private.
It's just pretty much all of the crypto that I've acquired over the years has been through
exchanges that do AML KYC.
So I assume that pretty much all of it is trackable except with the exception of maybe
the Monero and even the Zcash that I've gotten over the years, I have not been using the
shielded addresses on that simply because not a lot of the wallet software out there
has made it easy to do so.
So most of that, I don't even really touch it that often in the first place.
So I mostly think of it as something that I'm waiting for the privacy to improve on
rather than using it in order to improve my privacy.
I would say that there is a fairly strong argument that some of the more conventional
payment methods I've set up are arguably more private than Bitcoin.
And by that, I mean, you're setting up anonymous LLCs that have bank accounts and then tying
other throwaway virtual debit cards to those anonymous LLCs, bank accounts and really setting
up like multiple layers of proxies and abstractions away from my actual identity.
What could your average person easily do to be more private?
The easiest thing to do, like I said, was you can spend a few hours or a weekend doing
a configuration of your computers and your network to help protect you from online marketers
and that's like the really low hanging fruit.
If you want to go to the next level, then you could, for example, try to get rid of
the tracking device that you carry around in your pocket.
So setting up a new phone that is not connected to your identity isn't too difficult.
It's a little more complicated than I thought it would be.
I thought you could just go into any gas station and buy a burner phone like they did in the
wire, but it is still possible to do that as well and that would, I think, that would
protect you from a lot of different things, not only the mobile phone companies, but any
number of applications that might be running on your phone and reporting location data
that's tied to your identity.
If your house is burning down, what is the one thing you would grab?
My dog.
He's an integral part of my security system.
The Bitcoin Magazine podcast is a BTC media produced podcast on the Let's Talk Bitcoin
Network.
This episode was produced and edited by myself and Dave.
Stories covered in this episode come from articles written by Bitcoin Magazine staff,
including Peter Chewaga, Colin Harper, Jimmy Aki, and Aaron Van Weerdum, theme music provided
by Billy Sly from the Crypto Cantina.
Special thanks to our guest, Jameson Lopp, and of course, Satoshi Nakamoto.
We are eternally grateful.
Visit BitcoinMagazine.com for more in-depth news, analysis, and resources about the most
successful peer-to-peer currency, and make sure to follow us on Twitter, at Bitcoin Magazine.
You can find more engaging crypto podcasts over at Let'sTalkBitcoin.com, and you can
follow them on Twitter at the LTV network for all the latest episodes and news.
Be sure to subscribe to the show on the Apple Podcast app, Spotify, or wherever else you
get your podcast.
And if you've got the time, please leave us a review.
It really helps us improve the show and reach new listeners.
Thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you next time.
Take care.