Devil in the Stack (eBook)

Prologue 0: If

I remember the moment code began to seem interesting to me. It was the tail end of 2013, and in the excitable tech quarters of New York, London and San Francisco, a cult was forming around an obscure “cryptocurrency” called Bitcoin. We know the story well by now. The system’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, had appeared out of nowhere, dropped his ingenious plan for near-untraceable, decentralized money into the web, and then vanished, leaving only a handful of writings and 100,000 lines of computer code behind. Who would do such a thing? And why? Like a lot of mesmerized onlookers, I decided to investigate.

There didn’t seem much to go on, until a chance encounter in a coffee line at a Bitcoin meetup in the East End of London opened me to something new. The man I met was a Finnish programmer. He told me that while Satoshi had taken pains to cover his tracks, there were clues in his code if you knew how to see them. There were also antecedents: the Bitcoin mechanism was a work of genius, but its creator built on the groundwork of others, some of whom he had contacted during development. My adviser pointed me to an Englishman named Adam Back, one of a loose group of cryptographer hacktivists who came to prominence in the 1990s as self-styled “cypherpunks.” I set off on the cryptographer’s trail.

The cypherpunk agenda, when it appeared toward the end of the eighties, was at once simple and complex. Humanity’s impending lurch online would be an epochal gift to anyone with a political or economic incentive to surveil, the rebel cryptographers warned. We stood at a fork in the technological road, with the broadest path pointing to an Orwellian future of industrial scale intrusion and forfeiture of privacy, in which no facet of our lives was too intimate to be colonized by anyone with the right programming skills. To repel the bad actors massing to swarm cyberspace, citizens would need tools in the form of cryptographic software. Cypherpunks aimed to supply these tools.

Essential to online privacy would be a payment system that mimicked the anonymity of cash by making transactions hard to trace. Feverish effort went into designing such a system, but the task was daunting. Code derives its power from being digital, at root numeric and therefore exactly and infinitely reproduceable. How would you make digital money that could be transferred at will but not copied; whose electronic movements were registered on a ledger but without recourse to a corruptible central authority? By the end of the 1990s most Cypherpunks had abandoned the quest as Sisyphean, even if some bright ideas were floated along the way. And the travails were not wasted. Eleven years after Adam Back described a cryptographic spam-filtering algorithm called “hashcash” in 1997, it would star in Satoshi’s dazzling system. Now I learned that Back had been contacted by the Bitcoin inventor—anonymously, he said—to arrange attribution for the prior work.

Back was living in Malta, so we spoke on the phone. He was friendly and, on the surface at least, open, claiming to be as puzzled as me by the mystery of Bitcoin’s founder. Yet the longer we spent sifting the evidence, the more surprised I was to feel my interest pivot from Bitcoin’s wraith-like founder to the cosmos of code “he” inhabited. Up to that moment I knew nothing about computer code save that it consisted of light-speed streams of binary numbers a microprocessor could interpret as instructions. How a human engaged this datastream was obscure to me; how a deluge of numbers became action in physical space was beyond my imagining. Yet here were details being proffered. And they were dumbfounding.

I heard that coders used a range of “languages” to communicate with the machine, and that there were thousands of these human-computer creoles, including a few dozen major ones, that each had its own culture, aesthetic and passionate claque of followers. By this account programming languages were not only communication tools, but also windows into the world, ways of seeing and being with definable and sometimes conflicting epistemological underpinnings. When a programmer aligned with a language, all this baggage came with it. And when they sent a program into the world, the baggage went there too. For these reasons there could be rivalry bordering on animus between communities—a tension coders half-jokingly referred to as “religious wars” on the grounds that no one involved was ever going to change their mind or attachment. If the names of these languages tended to suggest either roses or unconscionably strong cleaning products (Perl, Ruby, COBOL, PHP, Go, Fortran…), their whimsy emerged from an electrifying “open-source” creative model through which coders provided their skills to the community, usually unsung and uncredited and with all results shared, free and owned by all in a way one prominent business executive decried as “communism.”

Satoshi chose a language called C++ for the writing of Bitcoin. This was because the “C” family of languages offered little by way of shortcuts or safeguards for the naive or unwary. A no frills approach made C++ harder to use than most alternatives but consequently faster and more efficient—important in a system its creator hoped would become ubiquitous. One programmer likened C to a shotgun, powerful if it didn’t blow your foot off, while Back and others discussed the Bitcoin code like learned exegetes, citing evidence that C++ was not Satoshi’s “native” language, or that he had learned to code in the 1980s, just as one might with a literary text. Programmers sprinkle comments throughout their code for the edification or amusement of peers, and Satoshi had been found to wander between US and British spellings, suggesting that “he” could be “they.” By the end of my inquiry I tingled with questions about the coder’s singular art.

Neither I nor anyone else figured out who “Satoshi Nakamoto” was at that time—at least not in public. But for me the story didn’t end there. I’d written about Bitcoin and blockchain and imagined my brush with code done until, a couple of months later, someone reached out on Twitter. They knew who “Satoshi Nakamoto” was, they told me, and none of the individuals discussed so far fit the bill. On the contrary, “he” was a trio consisting of two Russian coders led by an Irish mastermind who’d studied computing at a Siberian technological university and now worked for Russian state media. My informant purported to be a Brazilian male model whose previous girlfriend dated one of the Russians. He didn’t know much, he said, but could provide a first name for one Russian and full ID for the Irishman.

The latter was real. And active on social media. Wary but intrigued, I settled in to watch for clues. My Twitter source also existed offline, but when I asked to speak or meet, he stalled before following Satoshi back into the microcosmic ether. Aspects of his story made sense. One of Bitcoin’s key promises to supporters—of the political left and right—was to upend the global financial order, an upheaval likely to serve Russia well. For multiple reasons Bitcoin was easier to credit to a team than an individual. And yet crucial details of what I heard were impossible to affirm or rebut. Needing perspective, I called an ex-colleague who now edited BBC TV’s flagship current affairs program. Like me he was cautious, suspicion complicated by inability to see a motive for such an elaborate hoax, if that’s what this was. We arranged for me to meet with Thomas Rid, then professor of Security Studies at Kings College London, whose research and writings had established him as an influential thinker on cybersecurity. Rid pledged to bring a Russia expert associated with the British intelligence agency, GCHQ.

We met in the windswept grounds of Somerset House on the north bank of the Thames, the kind of assignation point favored in the novels of John le Carré and Graham Greene, Cold War thrillers I’d devoured as a child and was disconcerted to find returning to currency. The experts arrived and I described what I was seeing. They listened, probed, tried to find precedents for this situation. None fit cleanly. Rid’s companion saw Russian markers in the choice of a “Brazilian model” as conduit: someone not so exotic as to be absurd but distant enough to resist validation. This meeting was early in 2014, so little was understood about Vladislav Surkov, the Americanophile former theater student and advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin, a fan of Black Sabbath and Tupac Shakur who quoted Ginsberg by heart while treating efforts to demolish American culture as an intellectual parlor game. To this end Surkov had developed an infowar technique called reflexive control, by which one entered the mind of a foe completely enough to feel their anxieties, fears, longings and delusions, learning to tweak these vulnerabilities until the target was ready to turn on itself. In this scheme, anything that undermined trust in institutions like the media was worth pursuing. Planting stories to be debunked was an anchor of Surkov’s strategy.

But the big picture wasn’t focused yet. We decided the Russian secret service was directly or indirectly behind the Twitter approach, aiming to hone the mystique of a leader who had made his country a poster child for kleptocratic dysfunction. So I reported back to the...