[MUSIC]
Hello.
Nice to see you all again in this sun coming from the rear,
grilling everybody.
Please still remember, drink more water and keep the walkways free.
As we talked so much already due to the power failure,
sadly, neither on the stream nor on the recording.
I without further ado give it to Gabriella Coleman and
to Jeremy Hammond to talk about activism.
>> Great, thanks so much.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> All right, so I'll be contextualizing
the hack and leak, no surprise.
So I have a very specific definition for the hack and leak.
So it's a tactic executed by hacker outsiders who hack deliberately into
some org server place to snatch documents and material.
They publicize the intrusion, that's really important, and
stolen material to drum up interest in the leaks.
It was initially used mainly for whistle blowing, but
is now also used by different actors, like nation states, for different purposes.
I'll be concentrating more on this sort of hacktivist tactic.
Today, it's really a firm part of the hacktivist landscape.
Guacamaya, if you have not heard of them, are rocking the hack and
leak in Latin America.
They hacked the Mexican military, for example.
And really since 2011 and 12, you really just have a tremendous amount of
sort of hacktivist activity with this very deliberate tactic.
As I sort of mentioned after our technical snafu, this was so
not obvious to put together the chocolate hack and
the peanut butter leak and put them together.
And in fact, one of the fascinating things was that I interviewed for
a very different project.
A lot of hackers who were like pwning and owning systems in the 90s and 2000s.
And many were not ideologically inclined to do hacktivism, but
some certainly were, and there were a lot of hacktivists doing also website
defacements.
And one hacker actually from Europe during an interview said,
I wish we had done something about it, but we didn't.
I think we could have exposed a lot of corruption, a lot of wrongdoing of a lot
of high profile political people because they had access to their servers.
Now just to kind of give you a sense of how much more hacking and
leaking we have, here's a list from 2010 to the present and it's partial.
I could add another dozen examples.
And before 2010, you've really got four in that sort of English speaking world,
at least, and only two of them really kind of fit with my definition.
So as I mentioned, it was not obvious.
2009 is really the first instance where you have this tactic fully formed.
But what's interesting about the two, which I'll get to later,
was that people didn't copycat them.
And it wasn't until anonymous hacktivists actually independently and
accidentally stumbled upon this tactic that then it really started to
cement into a template for emulation.
So here's a very truncated genealogy.
So even though I sort of identify 2009 as the kind of time where this
came into being, I often like to give analog examples.
And there is a really amazing example of a group of activists,
the Citizens Commission to expose the FBI, who has heard of them.
So a few, they actually broke into an FBI field office in media Pennsylvania,
took like three, four suitcases of files, photocopied the documents,
sent them to journalists, and eventually, co-intel pro,
one of the most horrific sort of programs against activists was exposed.
And this is a kind of hack and leak.
Obviously, it's very hard to break into a building and take documents, so
that wasn't really replicated very often.
Now, it wasn't until 2003 where you have something similar,
where you have some big email dumps that were not from hacks.
And one has to do with a deep old voting machine.
Someone found documents and source code and
email on unencrypted FTP server, took them.
And then some obscure government official kind of dumped the Enron emails,
they were involved in fraud.
And these were super interesting because basically journalists could not be
bothered to mind them, right?
And it took amazing amount of effort to even sort of cover the documents that
were found.
In the case of D-Bold, for example, there were some stories about
the vulnerabilities, but in this piece, actually,
Paul Krugman is reflecting why the fuck didn't anyone go into the documents and
emails and report on them.
Now, going through email is a bitch.
No one likes to do it.
It's difficult.
You didn't really have boutique tech reporting as much as you did today.
So there's reasons for that, but
I think it also shows that it really wasn't on people's mental map.
So in 2009, you have two bona fide hacks and leaks.
You have one against a university in England, and it was Climate Gate.
And we don't know who took those emails.
They dumped them to kind of seed mistrust around climate science.
And this got a lot of news.
It was all over the news.
I'm not gonna talk about it.
It didn't seem to inspire copycats.
The second one was given to WikiLeaks and was signed anti-fascist hackers.
And it was against Holocaust denier David Irving.
And it did make a little bit of the press.
And eventually, we learned that it was Jeremy Hammond.
He did it.
And this is, again, one of the first bona fide hacks and leaks.
>> Fucking hack-nappy website.
>> [APPLAUSE]
Now what's so interesting is that eventually, I could sort of interview him about this stuff.
And I sort of asked about, where did you get this idea?
What was your sort of inspiration, right?
It wasn't that one day he's like, here's the peanut butter, here's the chocolate,
I'll put it together.
He was part of the hacker underground.
And there was a cultural movement called Antisec.
Who here heard of Antisec?
Not the recent one, but the one from early 2000s.
Yeah, Antisec won.
Very few people.
So in the early 2000s, a bunch of hackers who were part of the underground were
professionalizing, they were getting jobs.
And there was a small crew of people who were like, screw that,
we wanna preserve our cultural kingdom.
We want our exploits and vulnerabilities.
So they went on a rampage against white hat hackers.
And what they did was they hacked them, took their emails, dumped them, but
not for whistle blowing, it was just for shaming them, right?
And Jeremy was like, that's badass, but maybe we can reformulate that and
reformat that for political purposes.
And initially, he would take emails and then share them with a small network of
people, not publicly.
And it wasn't till the WikiLeaks era where again,
the chocolate and peanut butter came together.
So he did this in 2009, he's on probation, very independently.
Anonymous comes into being, and very accidentally,
I don't have the time to go into the details.
They start to stumble on emails, into emails, sometimes not through hacks,
sometimes through hacks, and it's all over the news.
Jeremy's on the sidelines, he's super excited.
At a certain point, he's like, I can't help myself, I'm gonna kind of join.
And he does when LulzSec is disbanding, and very deliberately creates Antisec,
a kind of new version, where you're really deliberately hacking and
leaking and some side of sabotage as well.
Doing things like fuck FBI Fridays,
where you try to time a hack and leak every Friday.
So that's a very brief genealogy.
There's lots of interesting things else to say.
But in 2012, a lot of people get arrested, and
it's not really clear whether this would continue, right?
It's all over the news, but are people gonna basically copycat it, right?
And I wasn't sure myself.
I myself at this point also thought this tactic existed since the 1980s.
I took it for granted.
In 2014, the answer came with LulzSec Peru, with Phineas Fisher.
Then you also have Guardians of Peace, which is a nation state group, right?
So the tactic begins to morph, but
it really starts to grow some serious roots into the ground.
And what is also interesting, and
I'm wrapping up so that we could turn over to Jeremy, is that you have
groups like Phineas Fisher, who are not quite as visible.
They're not there doing 50 days of hacking in a row.
They're striking maybe one year or a few times, then in 2016 for
a few more times, but they're writing manifestos with extremely detailed
instructions for how not to get caught, right?
And indeed, whether it's Phineas Fisher or Guacamea,
now we have this tactic where these groups, individuals,
who knows who are doing this, but evading capture.
So that's all I'm gonna say.
If you're interested in the 40 page version, feel free to email me.
But otherwise, I'm now gonna turn it over to Jeremy for his bit.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Okay.
>> Beale, you're the best.
>> I've been learning this for a long time.
I was just learning it myself, learning it by doing basically.
I'm a back encoder and I'm pretty skilled at remote intrusion, but
I'm not actually particularly the best, right?
None of us are, but what I found is that how many 15 million security
contractors are there that could be a potential Snowden but ain't?
Because in the United States, a lot of tech workers and
developers are basically complicit with the system.
How do I full screen this shit?
This is very embarrassing.
>> [LAUGH] >> I don't use PowerPoint, right?
My God.
Command F.
So anyways, white hats.
My God.
Thunderbird?
All right, so what to do?
This is also single slides, but I can just do it on mine.
Sorry about this.
There we go.
All right, let's burn some shit.
So it's time to draw a line of the sand.
And it's time for hackers to develop some class consciousness.
Occupy Wall Street, we're the 99%.
But there's obviously intersectionalities and so forth.
And I think honestly we've been a little bit too patient with those who are
complicit with the corporate security.
These professionals are harmless now.
Now granted, I am so inspired by what y'all have built here.
I wish we could do the same thing in the United States where it's desperately
needed.
But what we have right now, how things have changed,
I just got a smartphone like two years for the first time when I got out of prison.
I was on all these ridiculous monitoring shits.
And I was just coming to terms with the rise of big tech and
what Corey Doctorow calls in shitification and
all these new complex ideologies that test creals like the Musks and
the Peter Thiels and this crypto stuff.
This futures and where those are left behind.
And all this Panopticon surveillance stuff would only be made possible by
those developers who had chose the paycheck over principle.
And so, and hackers, the vision of information was just free.
We'd all just result in this utopian, but
unfortunately was not able to contend with the forces of neoliberal capitalism,
which is a masterful recuperation of hackers.
That's why you see hack labs turn to hacker spaces and now maker spaces and
stuff like that and DefCon and so forth, right?
So it's time to make hacking a threat again.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> I love those little fishes, man.
But hey, so these are some tips and stuff like that that I thought what were our
strengths that made work.
Anonymity, encryption, ops, compartmentalization, need to know.
I will say that the reasons why I've been busted at any of these times is not
because of any of the failures of the technology itself.
First off, shout out to the Tor project.
I relied on that shit for nine months and that's not how they caught me.
I made my own mistakes by running my mouth mostly and trusting people and so
forth, but encryption works.
Al Snowden said it himself.
But if you just need to be precise though, of course, right?
What also works is memetic action.
Replicable action, creating openings, be like water like they said in Hong Kong,
I believe.
Basically, I've worked in a lot of protests and organizations and so forth, right?
And I'm an anarchist, but so we have a criticism of centralized and
hierarchical organizational structures and I think the future is more memetic
action. I think that's one of anonymous' strengths is to learn how to the virality.
And also because you don't have to wait to do it yourself.
You could just be inspired.
If you see something, it recognizes it.
Like I have some examples down here.
Stuff like graffiti, raves, flash mobs, hopping and turnstile, team takeovers and
so forth.
Or like in Chicago, we have like these team takeovers, these slides where people
just have these spontaneous public gatherings and so forth.
That just, it's guerrilla stuff, hit and run.
Diversity of tactics.
You know, there's no one way to do it.
There's many ways.
There's many worlds.
You know, sometimes you have to know what card to play at the right moment.
Sometimes it's just got to boil over though and you got to take action.
But I came up handing flyers and going to anti-war protests and stuff like that and
thinking possibly naively that you could change things by that the people in power
will be willing to listen to you or they'll be able to, you could achieve reforms
through this system.
It took my head being whacked by batons.
It took a lot of time in jail and a lot of bogus charges in jail.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it didn't do it though.
And I had to learn that the whole thing just has to go completely.
Right?
And so direct action, hey, it gets the goods, baby.
There's a lot of activism though.
You know, you don't all have to, we don't all got to be the hero to break stuff.
You know, we choose our own level of involvement.
We're all not uniquely positioned in our lives.
Again, there's all forms of defensive hacktivism.
These hacker spaces creating these incubations and developing software and
audits are all part of this diversity of tactics.
Decentralized deterrence, discourage recruitment of cops, law enforcement,
white hats.
If they thought, first off, a cop shouldn't be able to get a bar in any fucking place,
you know, anywhere, they shouldn't, you know, if white hats were like that too,
maybe we'd have less white hats developing the hacking team spy shit,
the surveillance, all that.
So Antisec, big fan, we chose targeting the white hats as the weak link because
also, first off, their emails, they got the credentials, they got the live
vulnerabilities, they got the keys to the kingdom.
So we're after that shit.
Get the mail, get it all.
All right.
Mistakes were made.
But they didn't stop us from learning our lessons and moving on.
You know, my first time I hacked a protest wire is like a right wing counter
counter protester thing.
They were kind of like doxing us.
And like Biela had said, a lot of the work I was doing was a lot of anti-fascist
work, knowing and mapping the right wing networks.
And again, like hacking that, all of it has to be spectacular front page news
defacement.
Sometimes it's like quietly and listen, right?
And knowing where to distribute that data to those that matter.
You know, we need to know who these Nazis are in our neighborhoods.
We need to know their connections, whether they are also police officers or
work in security themselves or generally.
And also it works.
You know what I mean?
So the David Irving one, I went after that because he was on a speaking tour.
And we did the secret location and all this type of stuff.
And so we were able to hack his emails, get all the meeting locations he had to
cancel it.
Also the attendees, those who attended, these neo-Nazis and so forth.
So now I chose to release it to WikiLeaks because that was a stable platform that
was at the time that distributed no questions asked, right?
And so it's like, you know, it's one of the difficult things for those who are
breaking in, whether it's physically, like the example you had mentioned, or
digitally, like.
But fortunately, y'all are fucking the greatest because there's now many
distributed distribution systems, D.secours, of course, right?
Anyways, back to this.
Imprecise and undisciplined technical execution, like you've got to be on point,
right?
You know, hacking and stuff is like you grind it.
They're doing it for the paycheck, nine to five, but we're all night online,
baby.
You know what I mean?
We just need to find that one mistake, right?
But the reverse is true because you also have to be 100% accurate 100% of the time.
And you might get away with it or so you thought, but years later, man, that log
file or whatever the fuck they did, come get your ass.
So just be precise.
Persistent identities and crossing streams.
Crossing streams, OK, so I hacked this site.
I was, you know, using aliases tied to my name.
I was young and I know what the hell I was doing.
But while at the same time also breaking into shit and then people are just
obviously able to see two and two together because I did not
compartmentalize my life and it was very easy for them to get.
So you can't really do above ground and underground stuff at the same time.
I mean, you can, but we all have a little bit of multiple personality stuff.
But persistent identities.
During anonymous, I attempted to have multiple a dozen nicknames or something
like that change at a different time and place, you know, and, you know,
if you do a hack, it's not really a good idea to use the same identity over and
over and over again because you keep them guessing, right?
It's best to keep them guessing that they don't know.
Unfortunately, I was talking to an informant who knew all the nicknames
anyways, or didn't even really matter in my case.
But that has to do with more of a choice about whether I chose to involve myself
with a larger phenomenon and get involved publicly.
We'll talk more about the to crew or not to crew later.
Leaders, hierarchies and pyramids, right?
You know, we already know all that.
Ambiguous politics.
I would say it's nice to know who you're getting involved with and know where you
stand and let others know how you would react to a situation politically.
Occupy Wall Street was the 99 percent, but then you'd also have like a lot of
right wing tea partiers and even folks who believe that the cops are part of
the 99 percent too.
And so again, they had to wait until they got kicked out of a dozen cities by
force by the police until they, oh, wait a minute, they're not on it, right?
No connection to local struggles.
Hacktivist actions are really, you can't just like parachute in and think that you
know what a local struggle or those who are being oppressed by some type of
corporation or government is going to do.
We're just going to come in and save the day.
You know, I mean, you really do have to understand the context and get involved
to see what folks actually want.
This the synergy of activism hacking is at those little intersections of Venn
diagrams is when you really are effective, though.
And it's there's in the United States is actually not that much overlap between
hacking and from my personal perspective.
You know, I've been to those 26 hundreds and they they just ain't into it.
They're saying into it.
You talk talk about anti-fascism to be like, oh, that's good.
It's extremely real.
I don't do that.
Other problems, exclusivity, elitism, not sharing the knowledge and fun.
And like I'm a black head.
I understand.
Don't publish exploit code.
Don't keep it private.
I respect it.
But also like we can't keep this specialized and insular direct action.
We need to show.
And so like like Biela had said, Phineas and the Decepticons, I believe not only
do they hack some shit and leak some shit, they've also published DIY guides
to showing first off how easy it is and that you could do it yourself, that
you don't need to wait.
Working within the system, you already know.
We ain't doing all that.
All right.
I just do this and mistakes are made.
I didn't really intend to talk in detail about how I was caught.
But I just do these couple slides here.
Just talk the tour correlation attack is with an informant.
But we'll talk about that later.
If you want to see me on a Saturday, come on.
We'll go on to how upset could go horribly wrong.
Here's some more fashion tips for the brave.
This black so they reduce identifying.
This is more of a physical.
But it also I thought it might have some analog stuff too, because you know,
writing in these RSC chat rooms and publishing press releases.
I'm always curious to see how these intelligence agencies like use language
analysis and so forth to identify and tie together stuff.
Or if you smash the window lately, well, like don't be wearing these the same
sneaks that you'd be wearing all the time to catch your ass.
And they do.
They do one mistake.
So this is right because these motherfuckers have mastered the counterinsurgency.
They know how to manage resistance and recuperate.
So and they did so.
With anonymous and a lot of it has to do with maybe a little weakness of the
open nature of decentralized communities, right?
They have just these chat rooms with thousands of people, you know,
who's in their logging, of course, informants, of course, entrapment that
we could talk a little bit about that as well later.
But they also try to discredit those who are working hard on the right shit.
They'll just go share co-option.
They'll try to I have a list down here.
The Dutch and formula, the divide and conquer other side of the coin are a few
good papers that talk about some of the different things that they're doing.
A few good papers that talk about some of the different divide and conquer
strategies, mostly between isolating good and bad protesters,
whatever the hell that means, or even try to reduce it to a narrative of law
in order of criminality, like oh, we could have got to be legal or we have to be
pacifist is the only way the one way or like that.
And so one of the strategies, they isolate the radicals.
They call us criminals.
They call us. But listen, what I found is that I was handing out flyers and
news will get my head beaten.
They still call me a terrorist.
I didn't even do that terrorist shit till many years later because they made me.
They made me a government corporate fascist co-opting the tactics and
aesthetics of hackers and revolutionaries.
We're seeing this with QAnon like they're trying to say that is the
type of lineage. There's obviously no lineage, but they like the aesthetics of
rebellion and resistance.
I always think it's hilarious for right put rage against the machine as example
because all these like anti-vax or right wingers and stuff might just hear it for
the first time because you know, they only know what the hell to do it and they
think that is then they wait.
These are commies. These are fucking lefties.
What the fuck is like, what the fuck Marjorie Taylor Greene was selling defund the FBI
shirts right, but there's or right wing thinking that like they're now trying to
claim the mantle of free speech and stuff like that because they got fucking
kicked off at Twitter.
How about you fucking try a month in the box because you posted some shit on
Twitter or how about you write a letter to your fucking judges sentencing and
stuff like that.
They take your email privileges away for fucking months, right?
You know, try just doing handing leaflets and get your ass whooped and not these
motherfuckers complaining about Twitter and stuff.
And then of course like Bielat had mentioned the hacked state and governments
also are now adopting the hacking leaks themselves, right?
Full circle I suppose.
You know, there's a Vault 7 revelation showed how also the US CIA specifically
has tools that could misattribute a hack and make it appear like it comes from
somewhere else.
And then they try to muddy the waters too also with this Hunter Biden laptop and
the DNC and stuff like that.
So they're learning that some things are effective and in a way that it's a little
bit more honest in a sense that they're not even they're dropping the pretense of
law and order because democracy is a sham in the first place and now they're doing
the same shit we are like at least in the United States they're just it's best past
the breaking point.
Alright, just some critiques of leaking is not enough.
Like Bielat said, a lot of the work is honestly the journalism digging through
the databases.
You know what I mean?
Like, okay, you could hack some shit and get like 80 gigs of emails and SQLs
and stuff like that.
Like, you know, who has time?
You know, when I was at my height, I had like hundreds and hundreds of targets,
man.
It's one of the reasons why I chose to go with WikiLeaks to release the Stratford
emails because they had teams of professionals and journalists to be able to go through
and look and find the stories to find the scandals because destroying is great.
I mean, believe it and I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
But leaking is kind of has a long-term scandals that could make or break a presidency
or aspiring right-wing politicians career.
So deep-ancing the empire.
Can I give one example?
Yes.
In Lulsec, Peru hacked the government and they released emails that showed massive
corruption and then they were voting to disintegrate the government and they didn't
but they needed one more vote to do so.
So making a difference.
You could shape public perception and consciousness of the problem by exposing it.
And as outsiders, we're a little bit different from whistleblowers.
You know, I mean, I've never we're not military.
We're not law enforcement.
You know, I mean, we're they're holding all the keys like in their little fortress and
stuff like that.
But again, if a smart person knows where to look to find the cracks in the windows and
the doors, right and find that shit and release it.
Okay, leaking is not enough.
Lack of stable distribution platforms in the early days.
But fortunately now, I think a little bit is better now with Torrance and you know,
a lot of the technology all developed.
A problem is over-saturation and desensitization.
So like in the early days, like it was a revelation that, you know, you have like a police
chief email sending races stuff like that and you could get a fire.
But now there's just they're muddying the water.
But by dumping so much fake news and disinfo that is hard to distinguish reality.
And so now it's just a everyone's perception is, you know, we all know it.
Diffusion by disinfo limits whistleblowing.
So yeah, a lot of whistleblowers, you know, who work within like these governments and
stuff like that.
First off, we do need to create incentives because we do want to welcome those.
A lot of them do have like these once they see the dirt.
Maybe the few of them do join these things with the good intentions.
Maybe not police, bullies and so forth.
But nevertheless, maybe they have a crisis of conscience and we need to create welcoming
environments to where they could we could embrace them.
But nevertheless, oftentimes I found that they have lingering allegiances and a belief
that you could still appeal to the authorities by, you know, there's like whistleblower programs
with the government like, oh, they'll protect you.
But you know what?
You know, look what they did to the ones who tried, you know, they prosecute and threaten
and discredit and all the rest.
And so I found that that resulted in a lot of half measures.
And also, I don't remember if I talked, okay, I'll talk about it later.
And then liberal media is complicit as well because either they're not going to be covering
it unless they have to.
Like for example, the Pentagon Papers, you know, or even Chelsea Manning went to several
reporting agencies and tried to release them, but they weren't trying to hear none of that,
right?
So they're kind of part of the problems.
That's why we need like independent DIY journalism and stuff like that.
This is where you all come in.
Unfortunately, leaking, I would say, has not stopped the death march because now that we
are aware of it, we all know government is spying on us.
They're going to war and stuff like that.
So just the knowledge of this fact, we've all known that, right?
So we need to make hacking a threat again.
Towards a more effective hacktivism, right?
So you know, again, like we can all be the warriors.
I would say that is extremely important that you know exactly what you're looking at before
you even get involved in it and also let those who are around you know what your limitations
are before you get involved.
And then also, it's super important to practice prisoner solidarity for those comrades got locked
up in the line of duty.
Now first, I want to shout out chaos camp because I got a lot of postcards from this camp years
ago and it meant everything to me.
It meant everything to me.
I'm so, I can't tell you how happy I am to be here with you all.
I think they are still also doing a jailed to the mail thing.
I mean, if I was talking about, so there's still lots of folks locked up behind bars.
And I will say enacting prisoner solidarity is not as important also because it emboldens
the next line of those who were willing to thinking about whether they take the adventure
because you are not alone.
You will have a movement that got your back.
And we'll see you through.
We'll see you through the other end, right?
So study court documents.
You know, the discovery, the indictments, read that shit, study the forensic reports,
the advisers, see how they're caught.
I threw in here reject law and order, the framing of ethical hacking.
Yeah, we all know this shit, right?
This is the big one though, know if and when to pull the trigger.
Like I alluded to it earlier, but you know, not always it's a good idea to release immediately
or attack immediately.
For one, I would say this is one of the, when I first started getting anonymous and started
looking at them, it was so amazing and inspiring because they're getting some big targets off
the rip, but there's an IRC, OSHA, SQA, StateGov, Wendeface, Wendeface.
I was like, nah, you got to go through the emails.
You got to test all those hashes.
You know, you got to probe and get all the mails at least.
If you ain't got the mails, you know, before you pull the trigger.
But then again, you can't wait too long either because of course the window might close.
Less spectacle and more damage.
All right, now smashing a window, it shatters the myth of law and order and creates openings
in which another world is possible.
But spectacle is great.
Defacements are great.
But man, why don't you just RMR off that shit?
You know what I mean?
Destroy that shit.
Stratford, it took them like six weeks because I deleted like four servers completely, DD
and shit like.
So a defacement that might take down, but damage is forever, baby.
Less redactions and more doxing.
So I put this in because I was kind of a little bit frustrated that for example, the Snowden
dox that released all these slides of like the NSA slides and all the prisms and all this
stuff, right?
They didn't even release the names of the NSA agents or whoever fucking wrote them.
Why the hell not?
Release that shit, man.
Like first off, in a lot of places around the world, police officers and stuff like that,
you should be known and we shouldn't have police in the first place.
All cops are bastards.
But it would be a thing to know who they are.
So what are you so, but nevermind.
Docs their addresses and all that shit.
I will say though that you do have to go with the data because it's a lot of responsibility
to be sitting on.
I was hacking a lot of police stuff like that and I'd have emails and stuff like that.
And for example, they would have jail rosters of people who are incarcerated in these jails
and people who are not even convicted of a crime for example, or also possibly victim
witness statements and so forth of domestic violence that we don't necessarily want to,
obviously we don't want to expose that stuff because, so you do have a tremendous responsibility
to parse through that data, which is again, a lot of the work when you hack some 80 gigs
of emails and shit.
Oh man, I need a team for this.
But there's no crew, only you.
Don't wait either.
But that's why there's like these networks.
We have these journalism networks and WikiLeaks and alternatives to WikiLeaks, how we do this.
And don't be afraid to be the first.
Don't be afraid to go all the way.
I will say this, when I started getting arrested and something like, my first time I had 5,000
credit cards, didn't use a single one.
I talked about using a little bit, oh we're going to donate to all these causes that they
hate.
It would be great to charities and comic groups and stuff like that, but I didn't use them.
But they still charged me as if I did it anyways.
And they gave me the sentencing gullet, 5,000 credit cards, $500, two and a half million dollars
in damages six years over the statutory maximum.
Anyways, come on man, they're going to sentence you as if you did it anyways, so you may as
well go all the way.
Hell, half the time I've been arrested, half the time, yeah, you already know man.
And that's really all I have to say to be honest.
That's it.
We're down for questions.
Please hit it.
I'm an open book.
I'm here all week, so hit it.
So there's plenty of time for questions.
I will help moderate them.
Jeremy?
Is there a microphone?
Yeah.
Stand over here because we need to be in the camera shot.
Oh hi, I will never thank you enough for all you've done in your entire life.
I love you so much, both of you.
I have a short comment.
I'll make it short and I have a question for you.
We heard 2009, we heard Wikileaks name three times, we heard Vault 7, but you mentioned
Wikileaks as a platform, a bunch of journalists.
My comment is that to me Wikileaks also taught the world how to do journalism and data journalism,
taught the world how to do anti-censorship publishing and not just a platform.
Also Wikileaks taught us about source protection.
Now I haven't heard the name of Assange in your talk and when the camp ended four years
ago he was mentioned because four years ago he was fucking arrested and he's still in
the worst prison in the UK for nothing today.
So I wanted to ask you, does this case of this violent character assassination campaign
with this fake doctored accusations, the Niels Melser, the UN reporter, demonstrated that
the Swedish rape case was fabricated?
This and the rest, is that the same tactics to discredit, to divide and the such that you
mentioned earlier?
And is there a US bias in the perception of the character of Assange that prevents the
unified and justified campaign of support that he and Wikileaks and everybody else in
Wikileaks deserves?
I could talk about the liberal media.
Well for one, for you Julian Assange and all political prisoners, all prisoners just saying.
Thanks for the question, it's a very heavy one, right?
I will say this, it's true like we mentioned earlier that the United States especially
uses the campaigns to discredit those who stand up, the nail that stands up gets hammered
down.
But it is also true that there is a history of patriarchy and sexual abuse that anyone
is capable of doing it and it is disappointing and people need to be held accountable for
their...
I can't comment on the specifics of the Assange, but I will say also that one thing I like
about the new generation of whistle blowing platforms is that it is not necessarily centered
around personalities or individuals, which that's why I mentioned earlier the martyrdom
thing is that because it's a failure, we all fail, right?
And Wikileaks lists a lot of examples, I'm not even specifically referring to Assange
here.
So I'm just saying that it has a way of lessening the problem of these abusers in our organizations
if we don't centralize power in that way.
And I could speak to the kind of bias against Assange in his case in the United States and
the liberal media.
I think you're absolutely right and I think it runs enormously deep for a couple of reasons.
I mean one of which is absolutely, you're right, that the American media in different
moments of its history has been extremely spineless, completely spineless.
And in fact, the Citizens Commission to expose the FBI, the Washington Post published the
story but they did not want to.
They did not want to, the New York Times didn't want to, a bunch of editors convinced Katherine
Graham to release the information.
At the time that Wikileaks came into being, you had Chelsea Manning who wanted to show
collateral murder, Reuters knew about that fucking video, they had seen it and they would
not publish, right?
And it was so important to have that platform.
And I think because in some ways, like if I was some Freudian, Lacanian psychoanalyst,
which I'm not, I think there's something really interesting about how Assange basically showed
how spineless the American media was.
Then things went sour, you know, and then it's insane to me because I've definitely
have done events around Assange and you know there have been a lot of people who have come
out and supported it but it's not receiving the attention it needs because that is a threat
to journalism, he does not deserve that.
So I really appreciate your question and Wikileaks is a key part of the story that we're telling.
But yeah, absolutely in many deep ways.
I will say also that they tried to, you know, when they held me in contempt and wanted me
to testify saying Assange was like, he asked you, he was paying you, whatever, he was like,
just because I don't necessarily agree with some of the Trump stuff earlier that I didn't
agree with, but that doesn't mean I still said fuck you, I ain't saying shit motherfucker,
free the man, free the man.
We have five minutes, so questions, comments?
We have a crisis of journalism that is we're almost past facts so nobody believes in anything
anymore.
So how can journalism still expose stuff if no one believes anything anyway?
I think there is an objective truth.
You know what I mean?
Despite their attempts to muddy the water with disinfo in this post-truth society, you're
right, you're right, that's why I said leaking may not be enough.
That's why, you know, if you get the docs, post it, yes, and maybe we can and we should
push hard to hold these people accountable once we find their information, right?
But you're right because then they could also create a counter narrative that just makes
shit up.
So that's why I say just delete their shit or just stalk them outside of the house or
do what you need to do, but they should not be around working military no more if you
know what you know about them.
I also, I'm an anthropologist and we sort of, our bread and butter is conspiracy at some
level and it's interesting because, you know, historically we tended to be like, oh, look
at the chupacabra which is this like goat sucking alien in Puerto Rico which is where
I'm from and I'm like, I love the chupacabra and it's really about colonialism and post
colonialism and extraction and I will say that as much as I hate the far right and the
right, I do actually think that part of the problem, again, I go back to like the liberal
media and these sorts of things is that, you know, they haven't been historically aggressive
enough going after the powerful, right?
And so sometimes you get these conspiracy theories that kind of have like a kernel of
truth, right?
And so as you sort of rebuild journalism, you also have to like, you know, I got my
vaccines and Pfizer helped create it, but Pfizer has done a lot of really fucked up
things as well, right?
And so we have to hold these corporations really accountable because I think that helps
breed conspiracy as well and as kind of Jeremy said, like if you're not doing that, then
that creates the conditions, but it's going to be a long time.
Obviously these have come in waves before, so I hope that we overcome the wave before
we destroy the planet with climate change.
That's my big worry now.
Okay, we have two more minutes.
We have one more question and we need to get that in those two minutes.
Can we take the two questions side by side and I'll just let...
So I'll be quick.
Thanks to both of you for all the great work you've done.
Thanks for coming and talking to us.
You said that the postcards from here helped you while you were in prison and I was wondering
because it was a long time, right?
And what helped you carry through?
What else is helpful to do?
And the second half of the question, now that you're out, are you completely free or are
you still under some conditions and what is your life like?
What is your situation?
Right, thanks.
You're right.
So prison and jail is an extremely dehumanizing and isolating place.
They're trying to break you.
They're trying to break your spirits.
But one thing I've learned is that they can take your body, but they can't take your mind.
It's that last inch.
You're free.
And so being an isolating place, it's a whole world of fences and walls trying to separate.
It is a whole micro nation where they're basically second classes and stuff.
So I do a lot of political prisoner work and books to prisoners and support now is one
of my main things.
And what we're trying to do is we're trying to pierce that wall.
We're trying to climb that wall and reach out and make connections with folks to let
them know that they're not alone.
It's a very despairing place.
And so just knowing that you're heard, for one, and just knowing that you got people out
there that got your back means everything.
And so what I do, like you said, what conditions and stuff.
When I got out, I had three years paper and I was on this internet monitoring program
where it's like a private company that I had to actually pay for all my devices that monitored
my messages and stuff like that.
And actually to upload my messages every day and my PO would be like, "Who is this you're
talking to?"
It was terrible.
So that's why I've been out two years though.
And fortunately I had some lawyers who all the way supported me.
Shout out to Legal Aid, shout out to National Lawyers Guild, by the way.
And I'm sure you all have the equivalence because they've always had my back and often for free.
So in my case they actually fought the conditions on free speech and associate.
They said I couldn't even associate with hackers, couldn't even associate with civil disobedience.
What the hell that means, right?
And it was like that the first time too as a matter of fact.
I still did what I did though.
But fortunately my lawyers did beat that with motions after we got the judges transferred
over to Chicago and stuff like that.
One thing I'll say though is that I did two federal sentences for hacking and got arrested
dozens of times.
I don't regret any of it.
My only regret is that I didn't give a chance to finish any of the targets I was working
on.
So, can you do the reading quick?
Because then I would take this as the last quick answer, quick question.
So if we're talking about hacking and leaking now, I'm wondering what you guys, obviously
not ideologically, but what you think about ransomware groups and if you think that journalists
or academics will touch the data that ransomware groups are leaking because they're pushing
out gigabytes and gigabytes of data from big companies, what do you think about that as
a phenomenon?
Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like I haven't monitored them as closely, but they
certainly have changed their tactics where they're pulling back a little bit against
like hospitals and then going against targets where they might hit a law firm that worked
for Trump, take the emails and then DDoS secrets host them.
And I actually really respect what DDoS secrets is doing, which takes a kind of equal opportunity
hosting the stuff.
They make some stuff public, some stuff they just give to researchers because that stuff
is really, really important.
And there still isn't quite enough people going through this material.
And I also do suspect that ransomware groups are probably strategizing a little bit in
terms of choosing targets that will help them monetarily, but maybe drawing a little bit
of public sympathy as well.
But there is material out there, right?
And I think having the public journalists, others really go through that stuff can yield
some really, really important insights.
And that is something that many of us are well positioned to do today.
I just want real quick, I just want to say that I don't think we should necessarily knock
criminal hacking or hacking for survival.
Those who as a means must learn how to scam copycars or credit card fraud just because
if people are going to do what they have to do to survive.
When I was in jail and stuff, I didn't think myself no better or no less than anybody else
that was in there.
And frankly, the second time when I got out, I made a decision to go hard as possible I
could and go after governments and all this stuff.
It was like all gas, right?
But I still got 10.
In the United States, that's actually relatively medium to low.
So there were 10s and 20s and 30s in life for people just wrong place, wrong time, they
have to just survive and stuff like that.
So I'm a little bit humbled and not so like judgment about criminal hacking, which I think
is still within our rubric.
So do what you got to do.
Okay, then thank the two of you for coming over here and actually giving the talk.
And ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy Annette, Biala Coleman.
Thank you.