A technological revolution is underway as the current version of the internet known as Web 2.0, based on centralised control by large technology companies, gives way for Web 3.0. This latest iteration is decentralised and features evolving technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) using blockchain, cryptography, peer-to-peer networks and user ownership. This shift was foreseen by Timothy C. May’s in his 1988 paper ‘The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto’ where he predicted a technological revolution featuring a truly decentralised internet free from authoritarian oversight. These features can be harnessed to protect human rights and democracy and increase trust, transparency and immutability.
DLT has immense utility because it addresses the problem of trust, providing a tamper proof and immutable ledger for data entry. Such systems protect data from third-party interference by ensuring the safe transfer and storage of data. Moreover, Web 3.0 and associated technologies can solve problems of trust and verifiability in logistics networks and supply chains, smart contracts and archive storage. Organisations implicated in human rights violations often seek deniability, in the first instance, and will usually commence a campaign of disinformation and misinformation. It can be difficult to gather and store evidence of atrocities or protect vulnerable witnesses and journalists, especially when governments are implicated and have the entire apparatus of the state at their disposal to censor information. According to Hellstern et al. (2022) databases stored on centralised systems and supported by Web 2.0 are vulnerable to attack and data leakages which can put victims at further risk of harm. However, DLTs using blockchains and other cryptographic technologies can create secure and immutable systems out of reach of third parties that would seek to tamper with the data. Metadata can be generated each time data are added and a unique hash created to provide further proof of time and location. Even if a central authority were to order a takedown of such testimony, the multi nodal nature of the architecture would make that impossible.
An example of how this technology is being used to create immutable historical archives comes from Starling Lab for Data Integrity, which represents a partnership between the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and the Shoah Foundation. This project uses cryptographic tools and decentralised web controls to protect sensitive data and promote trust. The project seeks to understand how authentication technology can promote trust in journalism, how authenticated metadata can secure chains of evidence, and how cryptography can be used to preserve and protect digital records. Case examples include raising awareness of the destruction of wetlands in Brazil, verifying the authenticity of photographs taken during the US Presidential elections, and collecting the testimonies of 55,000 victims of the holocaust.
In the UK, concerns about networks of predominantly Pakistani heritage men carrying out organised child sexual exploitation (CSE) reached national attention after Andrew Norfolk published an article in the Times newspaper in 2011. This eventually led to the commission and publication of the Jay Report in 2014, which estimated that 1,400 victims had been exploited in Rotherham, and was followed by other local inquiries and reports including a serious case review into CSE in Oxfordshire, an assurance review of multi-agency responses into CSE in Greater Manchester and an independent inquiry into child exploitation in Telford. These reports suggest that widespread networks of abusers targeting children and young people in major towns and cities have been allowed to flourish due to failures in the criminal justice system, social services and local councils.
Consistent failures to disrupt these perpetrators and their networks has led to suggestions of organised cover-ups to shield political power bases and protect organisational reputation. Finally, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that a public inquiry into gang-based organised CSE will be established with the power to compel witnesses under the Inquiries Act 2005. The recent publication of Louise Casey’s national audit into the nature, scale and characteristics of “group-based child sexual exploitation” on behalf of the Home Office may have informed this change of mind as well as Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry, which seeks to uncover “what happened, how did it happen, why was it allowed to happen?”
When suspected corruption or cover-ups are a possibility it is important to consider the technology being used to house potentially incriminating data to ensure the data are accurately logged and tamper proof. Centralised systems designed on Web 2.0 do not provide this guarantee and distributed ledger technology is the best way to achieve this. Given the questions a public inquiry might raise about the interplay of culture, religion, corruption, politics, criminality and public sector failure, it is possible that it may not take place, or will be delayed, or its remit will be so narrowly defined that it will neither reveal the true nature of the problem or identify the tools to disrupt and prevent further abuse from occurring.
For example, the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 which covered abuse in care homes, public schools and the Catholic church, failed to seriously address this type of gang-based abuse. Moreover, intimidation of witnesses, both victims and professionals, remains a significant cause for concern. A large scale human rights atrocity of this nature requires the establishment of a National Archive for the Survivors of Grooming Gangs as that proposed by Donna Rachel Edmunds. This could have a prosecutorial role as well as serving a national memorial to all those affected. Moreover, an archive of this nature supported and protected using Web 3.0 and DLT using the latest cryptographic technology would provide an immutable record that would be protected from censorship, sabotage and cyber-attacks.
However, the transition to Web 3.0 does not come without its concerns. Criminal networks and other bad actors can take advantage of its decentralised nature to act remotely and hide their activities under a cloak of anonymity. Decentralisation has enabled the development of the Dark Web Marketplace (DWM), where online platforms enable financial crime and other illegal trades including human trafficking and child pornography, facilitated by new payment methods and financial assets, including Anonymity Enhanced Cryptocurrencies (AEC), posing significant challenges to international law enforcement. In another example of Web 3.0 misuse, criminal networks employ ransomware and attack vectors such as Denial of Service (DoS) to extort organisations and individuals by encrypting their data and demanding cryptocurrency payments in return for decryption – with no guarantee that this will be forthcoming. The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) identifies this as the greatest cybercrime threat, while the Home Office considers it a national security risk, particularly when critical infrastructure is targeted.
Although Web 3.0 comes with associated risks, its advantages in protecting human rights and immutability in public records have the potential to mitigate some of these concerns. Technological developments associated with Web 3.0 have applications that extend beyond the creation of cryptocurrencies with which most people associate it. DLT, blockchains and cryptography have the capacity to solve problems in relation to trust, authoritarian control and potential sabotage from bad actors. Moreover, they can be used to preserve data for evidential, research and historical reasons including creating a secure repository of organised child sexual exploitation in the UK.
With thanks to Richard Stuart for his technical advice in writing this article.
Dr Rowena Slope is a Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing at Bournemouth University and author of Corporate Totalitarianism: Freedom, Power and Technology in the Modern Era and Care in the Iron Cage: A Weberian Analysis of Failings in Care. Subscribe to her Substack.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Really sorry but my eyes glazed over after the first paragraph!
Fair enough. After all, people benefit greatly from electricity without wanting or needing to understand it to the nth degree.
But are you not at least curious, Dinger64?
I’m just not up on most of the phrases used in tech stuff, not against it, but don’t really know what half of it means
I’m sure I’m not the the only one
The essential point is this – for example with Bitcoin, there is a distributed ledger so there is not one single centrally stored ledger but a copy of it in many many places, beyond the ability of any one person to control, and the ledger is self-protecting so that tampering can be detected because along with the ledger some magic number is stored that is created using the contents of the ledger using some method that is hard/impossible to replicate, so if you fiddle with the ledger, it will no longer match the magic number. You can do this with other forms of information such as contracts, other documents, photos. It makes it virtually impossible to complete memory-hole things.
No you’re not the only one. The status quo, trptb, don’t want you to understand. It’s always like this with any disruptive idea. And Blockchain will be one of the most disruptive things ever, much more disruptive than the internet. Once the many applications of the Blockchain reach enough people the old control structures won’t be able to do a damn thing about it, they will have no option but to go along with it. They have attempted to own BTC, but in doing so they broke it and don’t want anyone to know that BSV is the reincarnated BTC.
In the meantime, trptb make sure that their handmaidens in government and MSM make sure that the masses associate bitcoin with nasty drug dealers and paedophiles. Which is total BS, by the way, the last thing criminals want to use is the Blockchain, because the contents of the Blockchain are not anonymous (but they are PRIVATE to those who have both public and private keys to any address).
Interesting article; thanks.
One thing is certain – if there are existing or emerging technologies that allow people to exchange anything freely without state or other interference, states and other large actors will seek to control or destroy those things. E.g. CBDCs.
I am usually pessimistic about technology in so far as improved tech makes control easier, but the internet has kind of disproved that to an extent because it has shattered information monopolies held by large media organisations.
“… if there are existing or emerging technologies…”
You mean like VPN and or encryption?
Indeed – I seem to remember various governments being quite keen on getting back doors to various phones and apps.
These attempts were, rightly, fought and prevented.
The existing web is gradually becoming more encrypted as time goes on.
In particular secure DNS and the removal of unencrypted parts of request packets and lookups makes it much harder to identify what an individual is searching for or who they are corresponding with.
If you’re correct, and it sounds like you know more than I do, then I am glad.
“Web 2.0, based on centralised control by large technology companies…”
Dear Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing – clearly a technical expert – the Internet is decentralised not controlled by anybody because of its structure (clue in the name) a network structure which interconnects millions of computers around the World (hence World Wide Web) and can send traffic via multiple different routes – so cannot be controlled.
And that’s why it’s not secure and tamper proof because it is an open system.
Web 3.0 will use exactly the same telecoms cables, satellite links, computer servers.
Isn’t the point that you create an agreed version of something like a document and then protect it with encryption so it cannot be changed, and lots of people download it and store it locally, so that if someone produces something that looks similar but isn’t, you can more easily prove it’s been doctored? I mean, isn’t that why people take screen shots of posts on social media? Except that those screen shots could be faked.
Yes, the internet’s INFRASTRUCTURE is effectively decentralised. But that does not mean that the DATA which flows along it is also decentralised…
Educate yourself.
Speaking of educating yourself. So according to you, whilst the electricity grid (infrastructure) is decentralised, the electricity flowing through it is not? Do the electrons have names perhaps?
Data is electricity… packets of electrons flowing down wires/fibre optics. .
And data IS decentralised. A copy of it is kept on every server through which it passes for anyone to see, and it stays there unless and until it is purged.
That’s why end to end encryption and VPN are important and why private information (aka data) such as bank account details should never be sent by e-mail. And that’s why a few tech companies do not control the web.
Consistent failures to disrupt these perpetrators and their networks has led to suggestions of organised cover-ups to shield political power bases and protect organisational reputation.
The implication of this sentence is that our marvelous rulers did indeed try to disrupt these gangs, but that their attempt failed because of the utter technological brilliance of the perpetrators. The truth, however, is that our rulers condoned and enabled the rape gangs because the victims were (and are) regarded as members of the “trash people” (to use a Marxist concept) who are scheduled to be eliminated from their homeland.
“Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) using blockchain, cryptography, peer-to-peer networks and user ownership.”
Author please note that the only Blockchain which can already handle this requirement (and which is already doing it) is the Blockchain which follows the original protocol – which is the Blockchain whose currency is Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV).
BTC was broken/stolen/put under central control in October 2018 when the Chain of Signatures was taken off the Blockchain. This transformed BTC from a Commodity into a Security.
The original protocol was reinstated in October 2019 in the form of the BSV Blockchain.
All other crypto currencies (including BTC) are worthless, centralised, glorified spreadsheets. They do NOTHING, and serve only to provide means for speculation as their exchange values to fiat fluctuate wildly.
Thanks for that info – I was not aware of that. I like the Bitcoin idea though the energy spent mining seems like a waste and I do worry about the ledger size. A few years ago I kept reading that Blockchain would be used everywhere and I spent a bit of time thinking about how it could be used in our application or indeed in the business sector we service, but I failed. I am not aware it is being used much, but the sector (reinsurance & large commercial broking) moves very slowly and seems decades behind the times.
If it fluctuates you can make money from the fluctuations.
Yes, but speculation is not the point of Blockchain. It’s just currency speculation. If you think you’re clever enough to increase your net worth in this way, knock yourself out! I hope you make money hand over fist, my friend.
Every time I read an article about Blockchain and Bitcoin (yes, even the excellent articles on Daily Sceptic), I am reminded of the articles written about the internet in the mid and late 1990s, when I was spending my late afternoons in the computer room at school, after 99% of the student base (the cool kids) had gone home. Nobody had the faintest idea what they were talking about, and I knew it, because I was one of the few people already using it.
I only wish I had bought £10000 of Google in 2004. I had been using it since 1999. I saw its value, but didn’t know about things like shares.
Financial education is non-existent. Because the education system and the people who design it don’t want you to be financially independent.
Win some, lose some…
A bit of a scepticism required here!
From Wikipedia’s article on Web 3.0:
“Liam Proven, writing for The Register, concludes that web3 is “a myth, a fairy story. It’s what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists”.[42]
In 2021, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressed skepticism about web3 in a tweet, saying that web3 “seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now.”[11]
In November 2021, James Grimmelmann of Cornell University referred to web3 as vaporware, calling it “a promised future internet that fixes all the things people don’t like about the current internet, even when it’s contradictory.” Grimmelmann also argued that moving the internet toward a blockchain-focused infrastructure would centralize and cause more data collection compared to the current internet.[10]
Software engineer Stephen Diehl described web3 in a blog post as a “vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony.”[43]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
(Web 2.0 was also pretty much marketing hype, by the way, but that’s another story…)
Web 2.0 was marketing hype. Are you kidding? Web 1.0 was static sites with content controlled by the site owners; boring hypertext documentation. Web 2.0 was sites with content enhanced or entirely provided by users. So this site for example, and your comment in particular, are web 2.0. But more generally it includes all social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) Wikipedia and arguably Google, to mention only a few. Essentially the entire web is now web 2.0. That tech and those sites completely transformed print and broadcast media, news, politics, education, commerce and interpersonal relationships for billions of people. Not always in a good way, but definitely more than marketing hype.
You rightly ask for some scepticism. The OP says “blockchains and cryptography have the capacity to solve problems in relation to trust, authoritarian control and potential sabotage from bad actors“. Yes, they do. But because the author doesn’t use the trigger term “DIGITAL ID” the comments are all “my eyes glazed over” and “not against it but don’t really know what it means”. Every other article on the DS pointing out the benefits of being able to prove one’s identity online solicit a barrage of abuse. It seems all that is needed to introduce digital id is dollop of sleep inducing techno jargon. WEF take note…
Yep, Web 2.0 was marketing hype.
“Oh, but it means user generated content!”
Really? When did blogs start? Answer: soon after the web was invented. Do they count as part of “all social media”?
What about Friends Reunited? (Founded in 2000.) Did that count as Web 2.0?
“Boring hypertext.” Yes, Ajax made websites more fluid and improved the user experience. But they didn’t fundamentally change the capability of the web. Web forms have been around since the early days of HTML.
Gradual improvements in technology allowed user generated content to be generated more easily. But they weren’t a sudden revolution, or something that replaced the original web.
Blogs wouldn’t be lumped in with web2.0 but comments on blogs should be. Friends Reunited was (is?) definitely web2.0, which accounts for its success. Web2.0 was a realisation that allowing users to HTTP POST or PATCH quickly led to many more HTTP GETs and therefore lots more $$$ when those payloads contained ads. So it is a technique not a point in time, although it probably started with Ward Cunningham’s first wiki. And neither is it a product which any company was marketing let alone hyping. The tech was always there in the open source HTTP spec, it just wasn’t realised how to use it to best commercial effect. As soon as people did it very rapidly spread. I don’t see anyone claiming web2 “replaced” web1 because it is not referring to different versions of a technology, its the same underlying tech. It is referring to an era in the evolution of the web when an idea about HTTP use took off. And it has had a massive impact in a way that’s difficult to over-hype.
So much for history. The point is that DS posted an article advocating digital ID and nobody noticed. OK, it wasn’t put as plainly as that but using blockchain as the underlying storage for Distributed Identity is what everyone typically has a meltdown over because they lazily refer to it as “digital ID cards” followed in close order by talk of gulags and social credit systems. Perhaps everyone is just bored of blockchain now that the AI show has rolled into town. But sorting out digital ID is long overdue and if it has to be boring to overcome the haters, then so be it.
Who the heck reads Wikipedia?!
Gullible fools, that’s who!
I know, I know, but they were great quotes! 😁
The only effective use cases for blockchains are cryptocurrencies (which are only of use to libertarians, criminals or those seeking an unregulated diversifier within a portfolio) and timestamping (there is little demand for this).