Date: December 27th, 2012
Event: 29th Chaos Communication Congress (29C3)
Venue: Congress Center Hamburg, Germany
Link: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5385.en.html
Video (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mnuofn_DXw
Video (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsePZj_Yks
Video (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5OQz0Ko8c
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen.
I'm very happy to be here, but German is not my native language, therefore I will continue talking in English.
It's an honor to be here. So the Chaos Computer Club to me is like family. And it is such an honor to be able to speak to everyone here, and it is ridiculous that they asked me to give the keynote.
I hope that I am not wasting 3000 collective hours of the smartest people on the planet with what I have to say in the next 60 minutes.
[applaud]
I want to start by thanking everyone that is in the audience for being here.
And for some specific people, I wanna call out Laura Poitras who is this woman here next to the woman with the camera, because she produced and edited the videos we are going to see. I've been working with her quite a lot and she's a very inspirational wonderful artist who I love deeply. And I'd like to start by playing a video, which is part of an art project we are working on, that many people are working on, and if we could play that first video I think it would be a good way to start this off.
Fantastic. So, now we have an idea about what my talk will be about, right?
Just in case there is any question that I was going to change horses midstream.
...
This is a location, it's called Bluffdate, Utah.
And this is one of the largest data centers, that we know of, that the NSA is currently constructing.
And there is a question, of course, about what is is that they are trying to build, why they are building it, what exactly they plan to do with this space and how they will use this space.
And I'm going to talk a bit about this.
Nice.
And, what I'm hoping to point out is, that this is eveyone's department.
So, in this case, what we see is the construction of the actual Bluffdale, Utah site.
So this is the slow process.
But there's not really anything in particular one might object to, in this process, it's just the construction of a very large building.
And I'm gonna read some addresses now, that were passed out when Bill Binney, Laura and I did a show at the Whitney.
'2651 Olive Street, St. Louis Missouri, 63103 United States' '420 South Grand, Los Angeles California, 90071 United States' '611 Folsom Street, San Francisco California, 94107 United States' '51 Peachtree Northeast Atlanta, Georgia 3030 United States' '10 South Canal, Chicago Illinois, 60606 United States' '30 East Street, south west Washington DC, 20024 United States' '811 Tenth Avenue, New York New York, 10019 United States' '12976 Hollenberg Dr, Bridgeton, MO '
These addresses are potentially domestic interception points for the NSA in the Unites States.
One of them is confirmed, according to Marc Klein who blew the whistle and discussed the fact that the NSA was doing domestic surveillance.
I and many other people believe that the purpose of this data center is to build something to store and process massive interception. Where some of the calculations by Bill Binney, who was an analyst with the NSA for almost 40 years.
He thinks that this center will be used to store this information for probably somewhere around a hundred years.
And so in theory we might say that that's no big deal, we have nothing to worry about.
I very much want to make sure that we cover in this talk that's going to happen right now, that this right here is in the back of everyone's mind. A data center designed to store things for a hundred years seems like a reasonable theory for this.
And if you read the information that is present about it, you will in fact see that that seems like, it's probably an understatement.
And probably, since there are more than just a single facility like this, that there's the possibility that a hundred years is a short version.
And that's an extremely scary proposition.
So, part of the reason I wanted to show you that, I wanna lead with that, but I wanna tell you a quote, which is
'Nothing strengthens the judgement and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility'
which is a quote by a feminist known as Elizabeth Stanton.
This I think is a useful thing when talking about things not being our department.
Because what do we have to do with the NSA? What do we have to do with this giant data center that's being built in Bluffdale?
Well in essence part of the thing that is so scary is that with the internet and with communications systems as they exist today, there really isn't a geographical border.
That really changes what we can and cannot care about in the ways that we used to. The fact of the matter is that the NSAs interception, those interception points they will carry not just the Americans' data, they will carry everyone's data for the internet.
So caring about this data center is in fact a very serious thing that we need to consider.
Because in fact it does impact everyone.
But even if we didn't use the internet, it impacts the people that we care about in a transitive way.
So I'm hoping that in the course of the next 50 minutes I will be able to convince you that these things are your department.
And I sort of want to start to talk about what Rop and Frank had talked about for the last few years.
Have any of you seen these talks that they have given, such as the “We lost the war” talk and “How the society might collapse?” Can I see a show of hands for that? Ok, so about half of you.
I wanna say that they talked about this and they said that, you know, we have lost the war, the surveillance state war.
Basically so many people have decided to go to 'the dark side', as it's been called, that is working on deep packet inspection, censorship equipment, surveillance equipment, targeting information etc.
This is, in fact, what has happened.
If you look at the jobs that pay very well, that people are aware of, they usually are systems of control types of jobs.
There are research positions obviously that exist in the world, but it pays better to work for a Lockheed Martin than it does to work for a university.
So people will choose, I think for sometimes good reasons, or for understandable reasons, to do these types of tasks.
And sometimes people will even make moral arguments saying things like 'because of Stuxnet we were able to avoid violence or bombing of a factory' of course the reality is that these things are not used alone, they are used together and in concert with bombings of factories.
So, it's certainly worth mentioning that these guys, Frank and Rop, as well as many other people who did not stand up and tell the congress about their ideas, that these people were really on to something.
And unfortunately now we actually live in the world that they were describing that was coming. And it's an incredibly scary world and in the last few years, I've had the misfortune of being targeted by a large section of this world. And I can tell you that it's been quite an uncomfortable series of days.
Just one day after the other is the way to take it, or the way to deal with it and this is not a comfortable or easy way to live.
And when Frank and Rop talked about his they still had some kind of hope in their voice and I think that that was important.
So what I wanted to do was to try to take that hope and to focus on it.
And to try to take it and say that despite the fact that there are these oppressive systems of control, and despite the fact that we do now live in a surveillance state, that it may still, and i think reasonably, be possible to resist
the surveillance state and to turn things around if we wish.
And I think that there may come a time in which that is not true, I don't believe that that time has yet arrived.
So, Frank wanted me very much to stress this notion, that we can make a choice about what we do with our time.
That is this notion of the dark and the light side.
I personally don't think that the sort of black and white, white hat - black hat ethics make any sense, because I don't define my ethical or moral framework by making comparisons to black and white 1950s cowboys movies, and I'd like to say that there's some nuance there.
But there are some simple things that you can do to decide if you're working on something which is oppressive.
And one of them is just to ask yourself if you're working on a system that helps to control others, or if you're working on a system that helps to enable others to have control over their own lives.
And this is a really simple test. If you're working on deep packet inspection that will be deployed on people who do not get a say in it, you probably are working for the oppressor.
It's not guaranteed, because there are many layers of indirection. Blue Coat probably doesn't think of themselves as being a tool in a military dictatorship's toolbox.
But the reality is that when the Assad government or when the Burmese military dictatorship or their alleged free market companies in Burma use Blue Coat, which they both do, they have for some time and they will probably continue to, Blue Coat is in fact part of that system of control.
Now are they responsible? That's a good question. I don't have an answer to that, but I do have an answer to whether or not I think that they play a role in it, and that is that they do.
What role? Well it remains to be seen.
And what I'm hopeful about is that some people, especially the people in this room, have actually made the choice that is the opposite of that, they've decided to work on systems that help enable people to be free.
When, for example, we see that Mitch Altman from Noisebridge has dedicated his life to teaching people about electronics, and to open hardware and free software, we see that he is enabling people in a positive way. And this is something that we as a community I think should really step up commending people who do this.
Bunnie Huang who builds open hardware, he is a hero, you can applaud that if you wish, the thing is that I probably can't do it but I wrote a name, a list of names of people that inspired me over breakfast one day, and it's pretty long so I'm not gonna read all of it, but the same is true for lady Ada, Christine Corbett and amazing people everywhere.
People who don't have names, who are basically anonymous in the community, but we should look to them, and we should look to them with pride and we should look to them with support and mutual aid and solidarity.
Because it's not just negative stuff. Not everybody in here works for FinFisher, right, and, in fact, probably more people in here work against FinFisher, thanks for that, to that end, we can make a choice about what we like to do. And it is possible to make a living making free software for freedom instead of closed source proprietary malware for cops.
...
But there's a cost to that and so I want to point out something in this next video.
I'm going to be silent while it plays unlike the last one, ant it's a minute long, so if you could play that
'Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizen's emails?'
'No.'
'Does the NSA intercept Americans' cell phone conversations?'
'No.'
'Google searches?'
'No.'
'Text messages?'
'No.'
'Amazon.com orders?'
'No.'
'Bank records?'
'No.'
'What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?'
'Within the United States that would be the FBI lead. If it was a foreign actor in the United States the FBI would still have to lead and could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States you would have to go through a court order and the court would have to authorize it. We're not authorized to do it nor do we do it.'
I think you can all understand the subtext there, which is that I'm protected but you're not. I bet that makes you feel really great.
So that data center we were looking at, what he just testified in front of congress about, that was General Alexander, he's the most powerful person in the world, probably, even more powerful than the president of the Unites States or any leader of any other country.
He controls the intelligence infrastructure for the entire NSA and he has ties to the rest of the intelligence community as well.
So what he's basically saying is that, if there was an American hypothetically in America, they'll probably be fine. Which really doesn't make me feel good because there are seven billion people on this planet, and just a few of them are Americans, why should they be treated specially in this regard?
So that giant data center that we see, it's for all of you. And it's also for me, because despite the fact that I'm an American, being associated with Wikileaks is like, well, it's not a good time in America.
So there's this thing to be said here, which is that, that guy is a fucking liar, first of all, because we know for a fact, we know for a fact from Mark Klein, that the NSA was in fact doing dragnet surveillance of all of those things.
So straight up, the guy is a liar. But then on top of being a liar, which is bad enough in this context, he doesn't even bother to pretend that you have any value at all. And that you have rights. And that your privacy is important. And that your human dignity matters, because of where you happen to be born. And what flag he imagines you flying. That to me is very depressing and I feel like it actually gives the rest of humanity that lives in America a very bad name, and so I'm very sorry for that.
But I want to talk about some other things that tie together with that, because if we just think about massive surveillance in isolation, we, I think, will have quite a problem, quite a series of problems, in fact.
So let's talk about some things that all have commonality with the surveillance state.
First of all, data retention and retroactive policing, which is clearly a human rights violation, in Europe it's clearly the case that this type of activity taking place creates suspects out of everyone.
And being a suspect is to already not be free, in my experience, and in fact, in the 1800s, There was a British author who wrote 'to be free from suspicion is one of the first freedoms that is important for being free in the rest of your life'
When you are followed around, when you are being investigated because of the whim of someone, this is the beginning of the end of your freedom.
So, it seems that data retention is the beginning of the end of many of our freedoms in bulk.
And that is a very scary thing. And when people do retroactive policing, it is when they apply that lack of freedom in a very specific way, and then they take these actions, they depend, of course, on which state you happen to be in and which fiber-optic cables happened to be in use when your bits were crossing it.
But how does this actually play out?
It depends, right? And it depends in a very specific sense, so for example drone killings, and I'm not just talking about Anwar al-Aulaqis' innocent
16-year-old son in Yemen, but drone killings of thousands of people.
The targeting information is fed to the CIA and to other groups from surveillance listening points, from intelligence factories.
So there is a direct relationship between surveillance and support of straight up murder.
That is something which sounds scary, but what makes it even scarier is that the way that these drone killings are carried out is that the central committee who gets to decide who lives and dies, or Obama's assassination Star chamber, that central committee, which sounds a lot to me like some of the Soviet rhetoric I remember from my childhood, that central committee decides non-democratically who gets to be assassinated.
And it's just a hop or two away from surveillance.
So when you assist the surveillance state, you literally are helping to kill fucking children.
That's something which is maybe not going to help me sleep at night.
And you can choose not to be a part of that. Almost every person in here, I think, has made that choice.
But if you're on the fence, I guess you can guess where I would suggest you go.
But there are some more ties. Because let's say the drone killing just seems a little too far off, right?
Well in Uganda there's been a proposal for some time now which seems to be almost pushed back, but not quite, where they wish to make it a death sentence for being a homosexual, where aggravated homosexuality is a crime, I think that's where you continue to flip your wrist, I'm not quite sure what aggravated homosexuality means.
But this basic notion that someone would be forced to report on you or they would also go to prison, this is something which surveillance will impact greatly, and it will make a huge difference.
of course, we can talk about wider things, such as the Chinese suppression of the Tibetan people, we can talk about police backdoors and other so-called lawful interception malware, we can talk about wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, the surveillance state touches everything.
And it is more than that, it is the fact that the surveillance state, it is part of a system of control that causes much suffering.
It may also bring some good things into this world, but with the secrecy the surveillance state becomes something that is totally unaccountable.
So, we can look at some other things that are quite concerning and we can see that there are ties that are not as obvious.
The military trials of political prisoners in Egypt, the genocide of the Syrian people right now, the British and Swedish justice regarding Julian Assange, the right-wing Nazi sympathizers here in Germany that gave murdering Nazis passports and help and are still not held to account, the oppression and crackdown on WikiLeaks related or so-called WL tainted people, companies that sell equipment to brutal dictatorships and authoritarian regimes for both surveillance or censorship, sometimes both.
The reality is that secret police and spying agencies actually change our ability to govern ourselves freely, and they do it in such a way that it is not obvious, and it is seemingly impossible to resist.
Because these things themselves are secret it becomes extremely difficult for us to even know where to begin resisting.
At its core, in the United States, where this has gone, is that we have secret laws, with secret interpretations and a total lack of accountability.
Fundamentally, what these things are, is that they are oppressive vanguardist approaches, that are vanguard approaches to authoritarianism, they are insultingly paternalistic and allegedly above the law. If you've ever had the opportunity to meet some of the people that are working in this intelligence agencies that are still there, some of them are quite good, they are fundamentally awesome people, but then when it comes to their job they are in a pretty terrible place.
That is, if they wish to keep their job, they're not really free to dissent. If we look at people, for example, like Bill Binney and Thomas Drake, what we see is that when you dissend you will be crushed.
Your family life would be ruined.
There are huge costs to telling the truth, and there are huge costs to asking for a more just system. Bill Binney really actually blew my mind in a particular way. I thought surely a guy who worked at the NSA for 40 years we wouldn't have a lot in common, but it turns out that he said to me that he thought that the spying was actually an immoral thing, but that maybe during the Cold War it was a necessary evil.
That is, he thought that maybe they could prevent total atomic warfare and at the same time he recognized that it was not the right thing to do to spy on people, that should not be the end in itself.
I was really touched by that, because usually it is the case that someone would say 'Well, except for Americans. You can spy on everybody, but not Americans'.
And for him the turning point, as I understand it, was that he decided that it was wrong to spy on everybody, and when they decided to spy on Americans, it was clear that they could not be trusted to spy even on any person, any single person, and to do it in a way which would be producing justice.
That was very surprising to me and actually made me change my mind quite a lot about people who might work at the NSA.
But then it turns out that he has suffered a great deal as a result of having that opinion, so maybe it doesn't change my mind that much about the people that are still there.
But, fundamentally, human rights in theory should be something that we can work for collectively as the human race, as a group of people.
And yet it doesn't really seem that that is what is happening.
There's a lot of rhetoric about it, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people it's very difficult to talk about the benefits of these technologies in a way that doesn't seem like grouping, just simple grouping.
So it happens that we develop these sort of psychological defenses too it. So half of the people that I have met and discussed this with, when this is the first time they have considered the surveillance state, they talk about it in terms of their initial reaction where they have put in 5 minutes of thought.
And they say 'well, it doesn't concern me' or 'it won't impact me', 'in fact, the only people who are getting it are people who deserve it, you know, they are under legitimate investigation '.
I'm not actually sure what a legitimate investigation is, when you can't actually hold people to account and there are secret laws.
Ruled by law and the rule of law are not exactly the same thing. Rule by decree doesn't mean that this is just, simply because it's written down, especially if the interpretation is secret.
So, after people recognize maybe that it might impact them, there is a fantastic set of things that takes place, and one of them is that people would try to minimize their role in it, saying something along the lines of 'Well, it won't be possible to sort me out and find me in this massive data set.' or 'even if I do stand out nothing will happen to me'. And then eventually, if they happen to be as unlucky as I have been in the last few years they'll say something along the lines of 'Well, the system works and no injustice will occur, because the state is benign'.
There are not many people that I have met that have gotten to that stage, who actually continue to think that for very long. It might be worth considering that perhaps we don't have to get to the point, to recognize that there is great folly in that set of thoughts, in that plan for thinking about it.
It might be the case, that the surveillance state that exists in fact is negative even if you do not yet understand fully its negative effects. So you see this also as a social defense in groups, as a reaction. I think, probably the split between WikiLeaks and Open Leaks is the greatest example of the fact that groups, even effective groups, will split and will have bad blood and they will in fact deliver utter failure. And it's very sad, tragic even, and this kind of stuff is something which, even when trying to resist it, we aren't quite aware of how these types of things happen. I mean history shows us certain ways that these kinds of splits might occur, but it isn't the case that we fully grok those historical lessons. So, it's quite sad, in fact, that we focus so much of our energy on degrading things, like someone does the great thing and someone says 'ah yes, but this one thing', and the discussion becomes about that one thing. I think, in fact, it might make sense to focus on the good things, as well.
[24:41]
It is true that sometimes people produce free hardware, but it has one binary blob, that does not mean that we should not thank this person and give them credit, in fact, to really praise them for putting in so much effort to make everything as open as possible, and it's too bad one thing isn't open, but maybe we can put in that extra effort to open up and free that one thing.
It's basically the same statement, but the way that is stated allows us to think of it as being in it together.
And it helps to keep people together, and it helps to keep people motivated to work together, in fact. I think it's a useful idea, to try to take this tact.
We also have these psychological defenses about the physical world, which I personally have experienced quite a lot.
For example this notion that warrants are required to enter your house, that your physical location is somehow protected is a very quaint notion, I certainly don't believe that anymore, it's a little sad but it doesn't seem to be the case.
In the United States there's a thing called the Patriot Act. And section 215 of the Patriot Act essentially says something and it's interpreted completely differently, that is, there's a secret interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act.
And if you asked Bill Binney about this, what he would say is that everything is fair game. That is to say that, regardless of what you thought the Constitution said or regardless of what you think the United Nations declaration of human rights says, that's not what's really going on.
And so this defense that people have, that they're journalists, so they're protected and no one will do anything to them, it's nonsense. In the United States, every journalist that is subject to the wireless tapping tentacles is surveilled, regardless of the general journalistic protection. Every member of Congress, everybody in this room, probably, especially everyone in this room.
And of course people will say something lije “ Well, don't cross the border with anything ”.
That's just so stupid. So you know for example when I crossed the border with a telephone, I'm not actually allowed to tell you what happened to my telephone. And obviously it was a mistake to cross the border with a telephone, But it was not that much of a mistake since the telephone connects to the telephon system, and every number in that phone had been used to make a received call, so it's not like on this day, it was not already in the hands of the oppressor's hand It was the case in fact that it was slightly better indexed, but it also had extra numbers just for fun I mean if you're going to have a surveillance state that is going to get people for guilt of association, you might wanna make sure that you have some jerks in your phone book, right?
[applause]
But the reality it that while I can't cross the border with anything of consequence, that is me deciding to become subdued, and that is me deciding to accept the opression
And every one here could make that choice, but I say “ fuck that ”, that's not a choice we should make. It is in fact a coping mechanism, and these kinds of coping mechanisms are a response to feeling the lack of agency, feeling a total helplessness, for example people who run through their mind things like “ how will I eat? ”, “ how will I feed my children? ”, “ how will I educate them? ” “ If I don't play along, if I don't comply, they'll make my life hell. ”
Part of the problem here, and it's funny to say that in Europe because it's such a different context. Part of the problem here is the state. When the state has the power to make you have those kinds of thoughts appear in your head, when it allows you to create that and to make those choices, we become less free.
So maybe recognizing those coping mechanisms, and then trying to progress to the next one, trying to progress to the next thought, could be helpful.
It think it is helpful. And for me what I have tried to do, tried to recognize, is that I tried to cope with a situation that was impossible to cope with at the time.
I mean there is nothing quite going to ruin your night, than feeling like there is an entire state stepping on your throat. It's not even great to talk about it in parties, I mean there is really not a lot that's good about it.
But there is some good that can come of it, and that is to show the people that it is not total.
That it does not merely end in tears, I mean it might, but it doesn't every single day.
You get to choose how it goes. I had the opportunity recently to meet the Dalaï Lama in India, about two weeks ago, and to meet the Tibetan people who had escaped from tibet under the oppressive Chinese rule People who had been shocked, their skulls cracked open, their stomachs ripped out, their teeth knocked out, their family jailed, you name it, they've experienced it.
And I realized I have no problems, by comparison especially, but I recognized something, which is these are the friendliest, nicest people you can imagine, I mean it's really quite a touching thing.
I mean despite the fact that a hundred years ago they were brutal theocracists, they certainly have learned since then. And it is the case that we can decide how we cope with these things. We can become increasingly cold, anatemized, we can become destroyed, we can undermine our communities, we can work against our interests in the long run, or we can choose to try to find joy in the life that we have, and we can try to have a better world, than the one that we have just come from, that we have experienced.
When I look at Bill Binney, and Thomas Drake, and Jesselyn Radack, and John Kiriakou, who are some amazing whistleblowers in the United States, and three of them are in fact in the audience here, and have a talk later today that you should attend.
It is the best thing at the Congress -I'am including this talk- (laugh) These guys and Jesselyn are amazing, and I recommend that you hear their story, because they will be able to tell you what it is like to stand up for the right things, and to even try to do it in the most straightforward way as possible, exactly by the book. Binney basically took a decade working through the system itself, only to find out that the system itself isn't working to take care of the problems as it should take care of.
So this is a guy, who, in my opinion, went through every possible hoop that I wouldn't even have bothered to jump through. But he proved to me that I wouldn't have bothered for good reasons.
I mean it doesn't work out well, and there is something to be said about this.
But their story, I can't do justice talking about it, just the same way that I can't do justice to the story of Bradley Manning I can't do justice to the story of Julian, and what he is facing right now.
But what I can say about these things is that if you compare and contrast with Robert Bails, the allegedly Kandahar massacre-er I guess you could say, is when you're in the service of the state, even if it is killing (allegedly), twenty Afghanis, they will whisk you away, give you time for your family to move, and instead in the case of Bill Binney having a gun pointed to its head when he is taking a shower, they just make sure to take him to the general population of Leavenworth. Compare that to, let's say Manning, who spent months being tortured in Quantico, before being moved to the general population of Leavenworth.
There is something to be said about these kinds of examples that have come before, and I think, what can be said, is that some people have a very hard path, and when they choose that harder path. It is worth it choosing that harder path, Bill, Thomas, and Jesselyn have worked very hard on trying to show the world, that it is in fact, it's not completely worth giving up on, but it's not an easy task to go through, and when talking about Thomas, what his impact has been on his family, it is clear to me that the State intended for that hardship, it is one of their tactic.
But the return is that it used to be that people used to think that me, or some people talking about the surveillance state talking about the Utah data centre, that we are completely fucking crazy.
But now that's not the point. No one thinks that anymore. Now we understand that NSA's wireless tapping program is real. We understand that the data centre is there to spy on all of us. We are no longer reeling from that fact. We are no longer denying that. That is the reality. It is because of the things that they have done, that this is the case. It is because of the bravery that they have in their heart, and the suffering that they have endured.
And the point is not to make a pity party for them, and the point is not to say that anonymity is not important, it is simply to say that anonymity in itself is not enough. It takes more than that.
Anonymity will buy you time, but it will not buy everyone else justice.
It certainly won't even buy them justice, and it wouldn't help them anyway, because in the long run it is easy for the surveillance state to try to deanonymise people, in fact I think it will be quite easy to deanonymise almost anyone in the total surveillance state, because our behavioural patterns will give us up, because our writing will give us up.
So, in theory the things that I have said are things that aren't probably new to anyone here, and you often hear that as a tactic of dismissal, “ well, it's nothing new, it's nothing special there. ”
Well, I hear that. And I'd like to raise you a “ please stop adulty talking ”, because it is true that some of these things are not new, but the reality is that we need to actually do something about it regardless of how long we have known that things are wrong. So there are things that we can in fact do. And it is worth mentioning, that this is not just happening to people who are whistleblowers, or associated with the people who are the most dangerous people on the internet, or anonymity, or some things like that. This happens to regular people.
And I'll tell you briefly about two minutes for about two minutes of an example, well, it is a very personal example, and I've been debating about whether or not I was going to mention, and I think I'll mention it, just because I think that it is important. In the United States, probably not surprising most of the people here, I have a mother. And my mother, I know. But my mother and I are not particularly close, and unfortunately for her, my mother is quite mentally ill, and her life is quite tragic, more tragic than any person that I have mentioned so far.
But what is most tragic about her, is that in the last two years, about the time when my harassment from the United States started, but probably not related, she was arrested and jailed.
And the state broke basically every law that you can imagine in arresting her, including breaking into her house without a warrant, for arrest or search. Despite the fact that she was arrested under totally bogus circumstances, and despite the fact that her life has been utterly destroyed, where her house and her property have been taken from her and she has literally nothing left. She was forcibly committed to a mental institution.
And as a result of that, they decided that they can hold her for three years without a trial. Now being mentally ill is not in itself a crime. But because she was arrested for something then that is allegedly a crime, this means they can keep her until she is competent, thus effectively criminalizing insanity, which is too bad, she is legitimately mentally ill, and she could use help, but the way they decided to help her was by destroying her life, such that when she gets off from of the charges she's facing, she will have nothing to return too. So these are the effects of a totalitarian society, that goes after Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and myself.
And she told me, though she's quite insane so it's difficult to know if it's true, that she was interrogated twice about me and Wikileaks. Once before she was being treated, and once after she had been forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medicines.
Now, that's a pretty upsetting thing to say the least. But the most upsetting part is that I don't know if it's her crazy ramblings because she is quite crazy, or if it's true.
But the important part is, that if we just take it as it seems, which is that it is a person who is falling on hard times. What we can take from this is that it is everybody's problem. I mean it's also actually technically my problem, but the important part here is to recognize that she is what is happening to everyday regular people in American society.
And that's a really upsetting reallity to have that happened. So, what can we do about these things? Right? I mean, if you're still not convinced that that's what happening to regular people, then you will just skip by, fine. I don't know what I could say really to convince you, but I suppose I could say to look at the children who have been killed by drones, and are so innocent, and see what kind of justice that they have.
But it seems to me rather that we have to fight against things, but we have to do more than just fight against them, because merely fighting against things becomes corrosive. the same for Bradley Manning, In my mother's situation, fighting against her unjust imprisomnent, the same for Assange, the same for all the people who have been unjustly harassed, or worse.
That burns you out, and it destroys your life, and it destroys your ability to feel hope, to have fun, and to be able to relax. I can't even remember when was the last time that I did not go to sleep wondering if I would wake up with a gun in my mouth, when living in the United States. Because that's the kind of world that we live in now.
And maybe you are lucky because you don't live in that world, but the reality is that lots of people do live in that world. And whether or not they deserve it, there is something to be said about the people who are not arrested, who have to worry of that kind of stuff.
Maybe that's a world where you don't want to live in.
So what if instead, we try just not to fight against things, but to build alternatives, and specifically to try to build sustainable alternatives, and to come to terms with the fact that we are losing our democracy around the world, and that we are losing our agency.
We are increasingly depressed about the kind of democratic oversight that we have, and feeling like we don't have representation in our respective parliaments and congresses.
That I think is a really good step to take, because it means that we can start to take other steps. Because once we admit that we have this problem, we can try to do something about this problem.
At the tor project, one of the things that we've been trying to do, is to build the thing called the Ooniprobe, and Arturo Filasto and Isis Lovecruft, who are two of the most awesome Python hackers on the planet, they have been working on a probe, to try to detect Internet censorship, so that we can do something about this.
They are building a positive alternative where we will have data to be able to talk about human rights violations in the context of scientific observations, which will allow us to be able to actually have conversation about whether or not this does the right thing for our societies, whether or not there's a trade issue.
This kind of constructive approach is awesome. And we should applaud it. I don't know if you want to stand up Arturo, but you should!
[applaud]
I recently used this code. I wrote the very first version of Ooniprobe, and Arturo was set to discuss it, and he rewrote it from scratch. I admit, I think it was probably the right choice. But I used it in Burma, and using this is we accidentally discovered a new way to detect censorship surveillance, that we had not previously considered, which was, even if you don't know a censored site, if you use twisted, it's so efficient that it will crash the blue coat device for a nonsense on site. Thank you Blue Code.
These kinds of positive constructive approaches are worth talking about, and there are lots of them. Everybody who's worked on GNU project, everybody who's worked on opensource software and free software, everyone in this room who's working on hardware, who's working on documentation, these are things that we should try to focus on.
And we should do it towards some goals. We should try to consider that when we build free and opensource software, when we build free and opensource hardware, we are enabling people to be free in ways that they previously were not.
[40:56]
Literally, people that write free software are granting liberties.
About ten days ago, I had the —I guess pleasure is the word— to go to Burma, and I met some free software hackers who live in situations, which are almost unthinkable. One person I met had been sentenced to 15 years in jail for receiving an email with a political cartoon in it. And it was considered receiving illegal information, or something along these lines, and he served four years in a hard-laboured prison camp, before being released earlier this year. So the conditions for hacking, the conditions in which communications are not free, where sim cards cost $250, where there is a massive class stratification in what regards the access to the Internet and censorship, these people are working on building free software there, literally free software for freedom.
So when you work on free software for freedom, your are also enabling them to also work on freedom. this is the kind of mutual aid and solidarity, of which you don't even need to know that you are doing it in specific. But you are. So everyone who is working on free and open source hardware and softare, is actively concretely building a better world. And yet there are exceptions.
There are sometimes people who make new licenses because they don't feel that they don't get enough credit. I think it was Theo de Raadt who said that. I mean, it happens. But ultimately, overall, it is a positive thing, and writing free software is great. And ultimately, part of the goal here, something we can agree on I think, is to try and leave enjoyable lives, free from cause of force. This is something that is, regardless of how we live our lives, that is probably something we wish to work on towards everybody being enable to have, as their life, to be free, and in a very specific sense, where they get to choose what it is their freedom represents, where they get to choose how their life goes. Working towards that, you might be able to call it, as Peter Singer would say, a preference-based utilatarianism. The reality of that is, that I may not be willing to believe in your God, but I'm may respect the fact that you want to believe that your God exists. We have to come to the terms, that we live in a pluralistic world, whether or not some people might like it, right? The German nazis that the secret police were helping?
Those guys did not want to believe it. But those guys are dying out. Even though there are lots of them, there are seven billion people on the planet, and no single person is going to be able to usher in their dreams of getting rid of the rest of the people who don't believe in them. And that's great, by the way. You see that, of someone from a Jewish descent standing here in Hamburg right now, which is fantastic.
[applaud]
So even though Rop, who is in the audience here, is feeling pretty burnt out, is feeling that things are hard, because they are hard, it doesn't mean that it's a lost cause. He wants to go, and build a farm, and I'm not sure where he is in the audience, but he wants to go and build a farm, and to have a good time, and I think that's great.
I think that it is enough of a resistance that is worth exploring.
But I also think for people who are not yet burnt out, that there is a changing of the guard that is taking place. And so it is a new generation's time, to do what Rop has done for the last thirty years, is that about right? Gosh!
We should thank him for that I might add. [applaud]
So I think we should stop trying to fool ourselves when we say that we don't care about things, or that we want to help but we don't help the things that are obvious and directly in front of our face. We should try to work together, to try to build independent structures, to replace the parts of the state that have been dismantled.
[44:44]
This is something which I think is highfalutin and difficult for people to grok, but part of the reason that we lose so much in our society, is because we don't have democratic control over the things that matter to us. So what we need to do is to try to replace those structures, those structures especially that are missing. And I'm including things that are not sexy, like child care and education, as well as, you know, open and free base band for cell phones, it's all related, so I think we have to move from a world where we act, not just react.
And there is a story about Emma Goldman, who is one of the greatest feminist and anarchist to ever walk on this earth, in terms of the work that she has done. And she talked about how she wanted to see the world be a better place, to bring about this anarchist utopia, and an old man confronted her and said: “ Well I would like one extra hour of leisure time, and I recognize that compromising makes it difficult, but you know, I'm old, and I will die, and I will never know your anarchist utopia, so an extra hour of leisure time a week is very useful to me, and it's all that I will ever see. ”
And I think that this story is a good reminder, and that story I tell it briefly and badly, in order to say that the means, in fact are the ends, in most the activities that we take.
So the people who'd better break into computers and spy on people for the State, those people put people in prison, often as unjustly, and even in some case justly —even though I'm not a fan of it, I understand there is some good that can come out of it— the reality is that means that the control structure has become one that breaks into things and spies on people.
That is the end for the people who meet that as their untimely end. And I recognize that these kinds of means ends discussion is quite controversial. But the reality is that if we don't act with compassion for the people who are suffering on a daily basis, everyday. When we look the other way because of petty fights, as an example, the way that many people, because they do not like certain aspects of Julian Assange, or Bradley Manning, that they look the other way for the unjustice that they face.
Even despite the fact that there is a difference of opinion about many things, people do not deserve to be tortured, and people do not deserve to be unjustly imprisonned. To me, I think that…
[applaud]
You can clap if you want.
Well, I feel bad for mentionning his name now. Moxie Marlinspike who is a great guy, well, I love the guy, he's fantastic. Well, he says part of the problem is, you know I'm paraphrasing, but he says part of the problem is we feel we don't have any agency, we can't do anything about all the bad shit that happens in this world. But the reality is we actually do. So if you believe, let's take a survey. Raise you hand if youn think anonymity is something, and you think is a fundamental right we should all have.
Now raise your hand if you wanna do something about it.
Now keep your hand up if you're gonna run a Tor relay.
[laughs]
Everybody that put your hand down, why don't you run a Tor relay?
You can do something about it right now. There are costs.
But that is the point. We do have the agency. And sometimes we make the choice not to use it. And I respect that. We have that choice, and I'm glad that it's a choice. But we should recognize, that when we don't make that choice, or when we are afraid, that that is what is is. Bravery is not an absence of fear. It is continuing to do things, even when you are afraid, because you know that it is the right thing to do. So it is important to be brave, and to acknowledge that there is fear.
And it is important to refuse to be anatemized in our society.
And it is important I think to have solidarity with broad causes, rather than simply pointing out the differences, or things that we do not agree with.
Having mutual aide with humanity as a whole is something highfallutin, and out here in outer space in a sense, but that is the hacker community who wants to put people on the moon. So I believe that we can accomplish a little good will towards each other as well.
[applaud]
[49:12]
So I mentionned that this was going to be about resistance, but it's beyond resistance, because part of resistance is really to make sure that people are doing something differently. But what if instead of making sure they do something differently, we make sure that there are alternatives available for people to freely choose? Well, that is part of what's happening here.
People aren't going to choose to starve. People are going to choose to do the things that keeps their family fed. So we have to replace the structures that allow for that starvation. And likewise we have to ensure as we build those strctures, we have to ensure that we build them in ways that are just and sustainable We have to make sure, that while whistle blowing and leaking are fundamentally a useful set of tactics towards a long term strategy of transparency, that there are lots of other things.
Gene Sharp's writings on the topic are extremely awesome, and I recommend that you read them. Because singing and dancing in the streets, even though it does not seem like it's helpful, it is documented to have brought down dictatorships.
There are lots of other things that we can do to continue, and to really carry forward the bit of democracy that we have left in this world.
And we have actually to help them further, and to help other people. And it's worth doing it. Well, I think hacktivism as a strategy is I think worthwhile. And it's worth mentioning that while breaking into something is sometimes quite difficult, it's fundamentally much easier than building something, something that everyone can use freely, something that is going to benefit people. But let's talk about these basic tactics for just a moment, because I'm almost out of time. But there are things that are scary. Like when I say that we should get rif of the secret police in the world, people expect ligthning to strike, or some sniper rifles to like release a magic pink dust from the back of my neck.
But the thing is that the secrecy is what gives power. And so I think that the thing that we should try to dot, is that if we have secret police that is interfering not democratically with our society, we should out them. That's important. To report them, and reveal the thing that is decidedly illegal. Reveal them and ask for accountability.
[applaud]
If it is decidedly illegal, that for example they are helping right wing murderers, then show, that that's not what society actually wishes these people to do. Because otherwise there is a kind of culpability. This notion that is not your department is nonsense. It is all our department. You get to make a choice between living a life where you are going to have quite a lot of shame in the end, or one where the whole earth is our department.
That's a choice we have to make, and we make it all the time.
I'm honestly humbled by the fact that some people, like Karsten Loesing in the front row here, could have chosen to work a cushy job at the University, But he chose to work on some metrics for the Tor project. He's a brillant guy who can probably choose to do anything that he'd want, and he's chosen to do great work helping people to speak freely. And it's the same with Linus Nordberg, and George, and other people in this audience. So you can make that choice, and the return is the freedoms that we actually have in our lives. So I want to close, you know, by saying that if the governments murdering people, that you don't just brush if off.
You think about it, you look to who's accountable, and you collect data. Rop actually encouraged me to think about this. We may not be able to bring justice for people today. But when we have the data on the people who have done this tomorrow, tomorrow might be the day when we bring those people justice. Not brushing it off, not becoming desensitized, keeping that around, that will allow us to make people accountable later, even though right now that we can't. License plate scanners across your city?
Get that data. One useful thing useful that you can do with that data is that you can reveal all the covert surveillance that's taking place in that city. Think about it for a few minutes, and you'll figure it out.
It's not very hard. So then reveal that information, because spying is wrong, because spying is an affront to the human dignity.
Data retention? Same deal. Get that data. Use that data for something useful. Try to make sure that it is clear that those are not the decisions and trade offs we want, where a total surveillance state won't actually allow even special people to retain their specialness. It's quite dangerous when we have a fully surveillance state. But we have not fully understood that yet.
But we work toward that all the time. So if I were to leave you with just one thing, I would probably leave you with one thing that the Dalaï Lama said in his teachings.
I'm fundamentally not a religious person, at all, so I'm just to going to leave out the last part of what he said, because it doesn't really drive what I'm trying to tell you. But I'll tell you what it is, and I'm not gonna say it at the same time.
He said that death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, and I think that's something hard to cope with. But it's something I also heard from Bill Binnie which is very inspiring, and I've also heard it from Daniel Ellsberg. They both said that they are old men, and that they've got nothing to lose, but that they are going to do the best that they can, because “ what are we gonna do? Jammy for the rest of their life? ” they said.
That's awesome that they said that, because they're both older guys, and they may only have a little bit of life left.
But I think the important part is to recognize that they're coping with that certainty, that they will have to sleep at night, that they get to choose what they're going to do with the remaining precious bits of life that they have, and they've choosen directly and clearly that it is their department, to do the things that are in their control, to not sit idly by, to not be complicit of serious things, that are going seriously wrong. So what the Dalaï Lame also said, was that at the time of death what only helps is the religious practice, and I think that might be true on a personal level, but on a societal level, another thing that helps is to recognize that we all are going at different paces, and so as people make these choices, they impact the world in what other people can do with their life. So Bill Binney's actions, he may not live to see all of these things come to fruition, but the important part is that because of what he has done, he has inspired others. And those are thepeople who will take action, and make the world a better place.
So with that said, I'd like to say that some of the goals that I layed out in this, I'd like to say that they are everyone's department.
Happy hacking. Thanks for having me.
[Applause]