Month: January 2024

The proposal, part of a bigger push for what Xi Jinping has called a more “sovereign” Internet, was supported by Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. The E.U., the United States, and various technical bodies (including the I.E.T.F.) stood in opposition. The simmering divisions came to a head in 2022, during the election for the post of secretary-general of the I.T.U., which pitted Rashid Ismailov, a Russian official who had worked at Huawei, against Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official. Bogdan-Martin won the election, and the threat of New I.P. appears to have receded, at least for now. But, for a moment, the Internet as we know it appeared to hang in the balance. An apparently arcane dispute over technology standards was really part of the clash between two very different visions of the economy, society, and the relationship between citizens and state in the digital era.

One morning, in November, 2011, two men on a white motorcycle parked in front of Keldy and Mino’s house and took photographs. They said they would be back later to evict them. Around this time, Keldy received a call from Luis Fernando. “I’m in the middle of something sensitive,” he told her. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk.” In January, 2012, Luis Fernando and his wife were shot and killed while driving in their car. There was no time to mourn. Other family members were being threatened. “I’m asking the authorities to help me,” her brother Óscar said, according to a police report filed that June. “I don’t know what to do and my fear is that they’re going to kill me.”

Meiklejohn’s hundreds of purchases, bets, and seemingly meaningless movements of money were not, in fact, signs of a psychotic break. Each was a tiny experiment, adding up to a study of a kind that had never been attempted before. After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.