*silent 30C3 preroll titles*
*applause* Herald: Alright!
Good evening, everybody.
The ‘Saal’ is pretty full? So I guess this is gonna be
an interesting talk. We are on a tight schedule.
Our speaker, Jake Appelbaum is gonna be joined by Julian Assange via video stream.
I really hope that’s gonna work.
So without further ado – please welcome our speaker and… have fun!
*applause, some cheers*
Jacob Appelbaum: So we have a surprise guest. Some of you might know her.
She saved Edward Snowden’s life. Her name is Sarah Harrison.
*applause and loud cheers*
*Jacob applauding as Sarah prepares*
*continued applause*
Sarah Harrison: Thank you. *she and Jacob laugh*
*laughter* *one shout from audience*
Good evening. My name is Sarah Harrison as you all appear to know.
I’m a journalist working for Wikileaks. This year I was part – as Jacob just said –
of the Wikileaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison.
This act, and my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return
to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there,
in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden documents.
The U.K. Government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents
with an intent to influence Government behaviour as terrorism. I’m therefore
currently remaining in Germany. But it’s not just myself, personally, that has
legal issues of Wikileaks. For a fourth Christmas, our editor Julian Assange
continues to be detained without charge in the U.K. He’s been granted formal
political asylum by Ecuador due to the threat from the United States.
But in breach of international law the U.K. continues to refuse to allow him
his legal right to take up this asylum. In November of this year,
a U.S. Government official confirmed that the enormous Grand Jury investigation
which commenced in 2010 into Wikileaks, its stuff and specifically Julian Assange
continues. This was then confirmed by the spokesperson of the prosecutor’s office
in Virginia. The Icelandic Parliament held an inquiry earlier this year where it
found that the FBI had secretly and unlawfully sent nine agents to Iceland
to conduct an investigation into Wikileaks there. Further secret interrogations
took place in Denmark and Washington. The informant they were speaking with
has been charged with fraud and convicted on other charges in Iceland.
In the Icelandic Supreme Court we won a substantial victory over the extra-legal
U.S. financial blockade that was erected against us in 2010 by Visa, Mastercard,
Paypal and other U.S. financial giants. Subsequently, Mastercard pulled out
of the blockade. We’ve since filed a $77 million legal case against Visa
for damages. We filed a suit against Visa in Denmark as well. And in response
to questions about how Paypal’s owner can start a free press outlet whilst blocking
another media organization, he has announced that the PayPal blockade
of Wikileaks has ended.
*applause*
That wasn’t meant to be a pause for your clap, I just needed some water. Sorry!
We filed criminal cases in Sweden and Germany in relation to the unlawful
Intelligence activity against us there, including at the CCC in 2009.
Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights we filed a suit against the
U.S. military, against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning’s
trial. Yet through these attacks we’ve continued our publishing work. In April
of this year, we launched the Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy, the largest and
most comprehensive searchable database of U.S. diplomatic cables in the world.
This coincided with our release of 1.7 million U.S. cables from the Kissinger period.
We launched our third Spy Files, 249 documents from 92 global Intelligence
contractors exposing their technology, methods, and contracts. We completed
releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails from U.S. Intelligence
firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included documenting their spying
on activists around the globe. We published the primary negotiating
positions for 14 countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
a new international legal regime that would control 40% of the world’s GDP.
As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr. Snowden’s defence fund, part of
a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund, which aims
to protect and fund sources in trouble. This will be an important fund for
future sources, especially when we look at the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowers
like Snowden and alleged Wikileaks source Chelsea Manning who was sentenced
this year to 35 years in prison, and another alleged Wikileaks source
Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to ten years in prison this November. These men
– Snowden, Manning and Hammond – are prime examples of a politicized youth
who have grown up with a free internet and want to keep it that way.
It is this class of people that we are here to discuss this evening,
the powers they and we all have, and can have, and the good that we can do with it.
I’m joined here tonight for this discussion by two men I admire hugely:
– hopefully one of them will appear soon – *laughs*
Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, both who have had
a long history in defending our right to knowledge, despite political
and legal pressure. There he is! *laughs*
*applause and cheers*
So, Julian, saying as I haven’t seen you for quite a while,
what’s been happening in this field this year? What’s your strategic view
about it, this fight for freedom of knowledge?
Are we winning or are we losing?
Julian Assange: *via A/V connection, on screen* Well, I have an 18-page speech
on the strategic vision. But I think I’ve got about five> minutes, right?
*coughs* Sarah: At the most!
No, less? Okay. Well, first off,
it’s very interesting to see the CCC has grown by 30%
over the last year. And we can see the CCC
as a very important type of institution
which does have analogues(?). The CCC is a paradox
in that it has the vibrancy of a young movement, but also now has been going
nearly 30 years since its founding in 1981 by Wau Holland and others.
*video transmission stops/freezes*
Sarah: *laughs* Great point, great point. *laughter*
Jacob: Blame the NSA! Sarah: He, heh?
Jacob: Blame the NSA! *Sarah laughs*
So, the new “blame Canada”! *Sounds of Skype, reconnecting*
Sarah: Is it here or the embassy that they’re spying on the most?
*laughter* *ongoing sounds of Skype reconnecting*
Hey, such a good talk, isn’t it, guys? *she laughs*
Jacob: I wish Bruce Willis [Assange's Skype name] would pick up the phone!
*laughter*
Sarah: Should we move over while we’re waiting to you, Jake? As I said, I got…
I think that it’s quite interesting, it does seem to be a trend that there are
these young, technical people. We look at Manning, Snowden, Hammond…
often sysadmins. Why are they playing such an important role in this fight
for freedom of information?
Jacob: Well, so, I think there are a couple of important points.
The first important point is to understand that all of us have agency, but some of us
actually literately have more agency than others in the sense that you have access
to systems that give you access to information that help to found knowledge
that you have in your own head. So someone like Manning or someone like Snowden
who has access to these documents in the course of their work, they will simply
have a better understanding of what is actually happening. They have access
to the primary source documents. That’s part of their job. This, I think,
fundamentally is a really critical, I would say a formative thing.
When you start to read these original source documents you start to understand
the way that organizations actually think internally. I mean, this is one of the things
that Julian Assange has said quite a lot, it’s that when you read the internal
documents of an organization, that’s how they really think about a thing. This is
different than a press release. And people who have grown up on the internet,
and they’re essentially natives on the internet, and that’s all of us, I think,
for the most part. It’s definitely me. That essentially forms a way
of thinking about organizations where the official thing that they say
is not interesting. You know that there is an agenda behind that
and you don’t necessarily know what that true agenda is. And so people
who grow up in this and see these documents, they realise the agency
that they have. They understand it, they see that power, and they want to do
something about it, in some cases. Some people do it in small starts and fits.
So there are lots of sources for lots of newspapers that are inside of
defense organizations or really, really large companies, and they share
this information. But in the case of Chelsea Manning, in the case of Snowden
they went big. And I presume that this is because of the scale of the wrongdoing
that they saw, in addition to the amount of agency that was provided
by their access and by their understanding of the actual information
they were able to have in their possession.
Sarah: And do you think that it has something to do with being technical
they have a potential ability to find a way to do this
safer than other people, perhaps? Or…
Jacob: I mean, it’s clearly the case that this helps. There’s no question that
understanding how to use those computer systems and being able to navigate them,
that that is going to be a helpful skill. But I think what it really is is that
these are people who grew up in an era, and I myself am one of these people,
where we grew up in an era where we’re overloaded by information but we still
are able to absorb a great deal of it. And we really are constantly going
through this. And if we look to the past, we see that it’s not just technical people,
it’s actually people who have an analytical mind. So e.g. Daniel Ellsberg,
who is famous for the ‘Ellsberg Paradox’. He was of course a very seriously
embedded person in the U.S. military. He was in the RAND corporation,
he worked with McNamara. And during the Vietnam War
he had access to huge amounts of information. And it was the ability
to analyze this information and to understand, in this case
how the U.S. Government during the Vietnam War was lying to the entire world.
And it was the magnitude of those lies combined with the ability to prove that
they were lies that, I believe, combined with his analytical skill it was clear
what the action might be. But it wasn’t clear what the outcome would be.
And with Ellsberg, the outcome was a very positive one. In fact it’s
the most positive outcome for any whistleblower so far that I know of
in the history of the United States and maybe even in the world.
What we see right now with Snowden and what we’ve now seen with Chelsea Manning
is unfortunately a very different outcome, at least for Manning.
So this is also a hugely important point which is that Ellsberg did this
in the context of resistance against the Vietnam War. And when Ellsberg did this,
there were huge support networks, there were gigantic things that split across
all political spectrums of society. And so it is the analytical framework
that we find ourselves with, still; but additionally with the internet.
And so every single person here that works as a sysadmin, could you
raise your hand? Right. You represent – and I’m sorry to steal Julian’s thunder,
but he was using Skype, and… well… *laughter and applause*
But we all know Skype has interception and man-in-the-middle problems, so…
I’m gonna take advantage of that fact. You see, it’s not just the NSA. Everyone that
raised their hand, you should raise your hand again! If you work at a company
where you think that they might be involved in something that is
a little bit scary, keep your hand up! *laughter*
Right. So here’s the deal: everybody else in the room lacks the information that
you probably have access to. And if you were to make a moral judgment, if you
were to make an ethical consideration about these things, it would be the case
that as a political class you would be able to inform all of the other
political classes in this room, all of the other people in this room, in a way that
only you have the agency to do. And those who benefit from you never doing that,
or the other people that have that. Those people also are members of other classes
as well. And so the question is: If you were to unite as a political class,
and we are to unite with you in that political class, we can see that there’s
a contextual way to view this through a historical lens, essentially.
Which is to say that when the industrialized workers of the world
decided that race and gender were not lines that we should split on, but instead
we should look at workers and owners, then we started to see real change in the way
that workers were treated and in the way that the world itself was organizing labor.
And this was a hugely important change during the Industrial Revolution.
And we are going through a very similar time now with regard to information
politics and with regard to the value of information in our information age.
*Skype connection being re-established* *applause*
*Skype connection just terminates again* *laughter*
Jacob: Fantastic, Bruce Willis!
*laughter*
Hahahaha! Jesus Christ, Julian, use Jitsy already!
*laughter, applause and cheers*
Sarah: And so, we’ve identified the potential of the people that you were
talking about. So you’ve spoken about how it’s good for them to unite.
What are the next steps? How do they come forth? How do they share this information?
Jacob: Well, let’s consider a couple of things. First is that Bradley Manning
– now Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg – still Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden
– living in exile in Russia, unfortunately…
Sarah: …still Edward Snowden! Jacob: Still Edward Snowden! Hopefully.
*Sarah laughs* These are people who have taken
great actions where they did not even set out to sacrifice themselves. But once
when I met Daniel Ellsberg he said: “Wouldn’t you go to prison for the rest
of your life to end this war?” This is something he asked me, and he asked it
to me quite seriously. And it’s very incredible to be able to ask
a hypothetical question… *Skype ringing out*
…of someone. That wasn’t a hypothetical question! What he was trying to say is
that right now you can make a choice in which you can actually have a huge impact,
should you chose to take on that risk. But the point is not to set out
to martyr yourself. The point is to set out…
Are you gonna stick around this time, Julian?
Julian: *via Skype* I don’t know, I’m waiting for the quantum hand, Jake.
Jacob: The quantum hand that wants to strangle you?
Julian: Yeah! I have protection! Jacob: We were just discussing right now
the previous context, that is Daniel Ellsberg, the Edward Snowdens,
the Chelsea Mannings, how they have done an honorable, or good thing where they’ve
shown a duty to a greater humanity. I think that is more important than
loyalty, e.g. to a bureaucratic oath, but rather loyalty to universal principles.
So the next question is: how does that relate to the people that are here
in the audience? How is it the case that people who have access to systems
where they have said themselves they think the companies they work for are
sort of questionable, or doing dangerous things in the world?
Where do we go from people who have done these things previously
to these people in the audience?
Julian: Well, I don’t know how much ground you covered, but I think it’s important
that we recognize what we are, and what we have become. And that high tech workers are
a particular class. In fact, very often it’s ‘class hacking’…(?).
…class … a position to in fact prompt the leaders of society…
[audio crippled, incomprehensible]
*mumble in the audience*
*laughter*
Sarah: Should we just leave him like that and continue?
*laughter*
*laughter and applause*
Julian: Am I back? Audience and speakers: Yeah!!
Sarah: You’ve got three minutes! To say something!
Julian: Alright! Sarah: Make it good!
Julian: Those high tech workers – we are a particular class and it’s time that
we recognized that we are a class. And looked back in history and understood
that the great gains in human rights and education etc. that were gained through
powerful industrial workers which formed the backbone of the economy
of the 20th century, and that we have that same ability but even more so
because of the greater interconnection that exists now economically and
politically. Which is all underpinned by system administrators. And we should
understand that system administrators are not just those people who administer
one UNIX system or another. They are the people who administer systems. And
the system that exists globally now is created by the interconnection of many
individual systems. And we are all… or many of us are part of administering
that system and have extraordinary power in a way that is really
an order of magnitude different to the power industrial workers had
back in the 20th century. And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks
that Wikileaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations,
it is possible now for even a single system administrator to have a very significant
change to the… or rather apply a very significant constructive constraint
to the behavior of these organizations. Not merely wrecking or disabling them,
not merely going out on strikes to change a policy, but rather shifting
an information apartheid system which we’re developing
from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information
into the knowledge commons, where it can be used not only as a disciplining force,
but it can be used to construct and understand the new world
that we’re entering into. Now, Hayden, the former Director of the CIA and NSA,
is terrified of this. In "Cypherpunks: [Freedom and the Future of the Internet]"
we called for this directly last year. But to give you an interesting quote
from Hayden, possibly following up on those words of mine and others:
“We need to recruit from Snowden’s generation” says Hayden, “we need
to recruit from this group because they have the skills that we require.
So the challenge is how to recruit this talent while also protecting ourselves
from the small fraction of the population that has this romantic attachment
to absolute transparency at all costs.” And that’s us, right?
So, what we need to do is spread that message and
go into all those organizations. In fact, deal with them. I’m not saying
“Don’t join the CIA”. No, go and join the CIA! Go in there!
Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out, with the understanding,
with the paranoia, that all those organizations will be infiltrated
by this generation, by an ideology that is spread across the internet.
And every young person is educated on the internet. There will be no person
that has not been exposed to this ideology of transparency
and understanding and wanting to keep the internet which we were born into free.
This is the last free generation. The coming together of these
systems of governments, the new information apartheid across the world,
and linking it together such that none of us will be able to escape it.
In just a decade. Our identities will be coupled to it, the information sharing
in such that none of us will be able to escape it. We are all becoming
part of the state, whether we like it or not. So our only hope is to determine
what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of. And we can do that
by looking and being inspired by some of the actions that produced human rights
and free education etc. by people recognizing that they were
part of the state, recognizing their own power and taking concrete and robust
action to make sure they lived in the sort of society that they wanted to
and not in a hell-hole dystopia.
Sarah: Thank you!
*applause*
So basically all those poor people Jake just made identify themselves, you have
the power to change more systems than the one you’re working on right now.
And I think it’s time to take some questions because we don’t have long left.
If there are any… I did… what’s the…
Herald: If you do have questions please line up in the middle of the room.
We have microphones there.
If you cannot reach one, please put your hand up and we’ll try to get one to you.
Julian: While we wait for the first question I’d just like to say I’m not sure
how many people are in there. It looks like that it’s quite a lot.
Sarah: Start going to the mike, even while he’s talking, if you do have a question.
Cause otherwise we won’t know that you have one, and we’ll just keep on going!
Julian: It looks like there’s quite a … apologize …
Herald: Alternatively just raise your hand, and we’ll try to go to you.
Julian: It looks like there’s quite a lot of people there,
but you should all know that due to the various sorts of proximity
measures that are now employed by NSA, GCHQ and Five Eyes Alliance,
if you’ve come there with a telephone, or if you have been even in Hamburg
with a telephone, you are all now coupled to us. You are coupled to this event.
You are coupled to this speech in an irrevocable way. And that is now true
for many people. So either we have to take command
of the position that we have, understand the position we have, understand
that we are the last free people, and the last people essentially with an ability
to act in this situation. Or we are the group
that will be crushed because of this association.
*applause*
Herald: I’d say I think we have a question at the mike 4.
Question: So you were talking about the sysadmins here. What about those people
who are not sysadmins? Not only joining CIA and those companies,
what else can we do?
Sarah: Jake, do you want to have a go at that one?
Jacob: Sure. *Skype end-connection sound*
So this is a question of agency, right? Sarah: Good timing!
It’s a question in which one has to ask very simply, what is it that you feel like
you CAN do? And many people that are in this audience I’ve had this discussion
with them. E.g. Edward Snowden did not save himself. I mean he obviously
had some ideas, but Sarah e.g., not as a system administrator, but as someone
who is willing to risk her person. She helped specifically
for source protection, she took actions to protect him. So there are plenty
of things that can be done. To give you some idea, as Edward Snowden’s
still sitting in Russia now, there are things that can be done to help him
even now. And there are things to show that, if we can succeed in saving Edward
Snowden’s life and to keep him free, that the next Edward Snowden will have that
to look forward to. And if we look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning,
we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned. Just as Thomas Drake
and Bill Binney set an example for every single person about what to do or
what not to do. It’s not just about system administrators, it’s about all of us
actually recognizing that positive contribution that each of us can make.
Herald: Okay. Our next question will be microphone 2, please.
*applause*
Question: Hi Julian, I’m wondering, do you believe that transparency alone is enough
to inject some form of conscience into ‘evil’ organizations,
and if not, what do you believe the next step
after transparency is?
Julian: It’s not about injecting conscience. It’s about providing
two things: One, an effective deterrent to particular forms of behavior
and two, finding that information which allows us to construct an order
in the world around us, to educate ourselves in how the world works
and therefore be able to manage the world that we are a part of.
The restriction of information, the restriction of those bits of information
colors it. It gives off an economic signal that that information is important
when it’s released. Because otherwise why would you spend so much work
in restricting it? So the people who know it best restrict it. We should take
their measurement of that information as a guide and use that to pull it out
where it can achieve some kind of reform. That in itself is not enough.
It creates an intellectual commons which is part of our mutual education.
But we need to understand – say, if we look at the Occupy event,
a very interesting political event – where revelations and perhaps destabilization
led to a mass, a very large group of people wanting to do something.
However, there was no organizational scaffold for these people
to attach themselves to, no nucleus for these people to crystallize onto.
And it is that problem, which is an endemic problem of the anarchist left, actually.
The CCC. Why are we having this right now? Because the CCC is an organized structure.
It’s a structure which has been able to grow, to accommodate the 30%
of extra people that have occurred this year. To shift and change and act like
one of the better workers’ universities that are around.
So we have to form unions and networks
and create programs and organizational structures. And those organizational
structures can also be written in code. Bitcoin e.g. is an organizational structure
that creates an intermediary between people and sets up rules between people.
It may end up as a quite totalitarian system one day, who knows? But
at the moment it provides some kind of balancing. So code and human structures
do things. Wikileaks was able to rescue Edward Snowden because we are
an organized institution with collective experience.
Sarah: Okay, I think there’s one question left for me
that’s coming from the internet.
Signal Angel: Yes, on IRC there was the question: What was the most difficult
part on getting Snowden out of the U.S.?
Jacob: Hah! * Julian laughs*
Jacob: That’s quite a loaded question!
Julian: Yeah, that’s interesting to think whether we can actually answer
that question at all. I’ll give a variant of the answer because of the legal situation
it is a little bit difficult. As some of you may know the U.K. Government has
admitted to spending £6 million a year approximately surveilling this embassy,
in the police forces alone. So you can imagine the difficulty in communicating
with various people in different countries in relation to his diplomatic asylum and
into logistics in Hong Kong in a situation like that. And the only reason we were
able to succeed is because of extremely dilligent u…
*video transmission freezes* *audience uneasy*
Jacob: Perfectly timed! Sarah: And we didn’t use Skype!
*laughs* *laughter*
Jacob: Do we have time for one more question?
Herald: I think we ran out of our time, I’m very sorry.
Jacob: That was such a fantastic, perfect way to make sure that you didn’t learn
the answer to that question! Sarah: Hehe, yeah!
*laughter*
*applause*
Herald: Unfortunately that is all the time we have for this talk…
*Skype sounds audible* *laughter*
From audience: …he wants to say goodbye!
Herald: …but I want you all, to still (?) thank you: Jake Appelbaum! Thank you.
*applause* I’m very sorry…
*silent postroll titles*
*subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2017. Join, and help us!*