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Thank you for the introduction.
This is embarrassing. I need to fix my
screen.
OK.
OK, that fixed, yes, OK.
Computer scientists are excellent
technology.
OK, so
this is a panel with so I am the least
renowned person on the stage.
So I'm going to introduce our lovely
panelists and then I'll explain what
we're doing here.
So to my right
is Julia Angwin, who is
an awesome investigative
journalist at ProPublica, which is a
nonprofit investigative journalism
organization. She has written a
book about surveillance called Dragnet
Nation.
She used to be at the Wall Street Journal
where she led a privacy investigative
team. So she is awesome
and super great to.
Next, we have Jack Gillum, who is an
investigative reporter at the AP, the
Associated Press, and he focuses
on technology and surveillance and
government accountability.
He spent the last year uncovering a U.S.
government plan to overthrow Cuba using
fake social media.
So you may have heard about this story
and to.
And I think our last panelist needs no
introduction here, but I'll do so anyway.
Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker,
a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Polk Award
winner, an Oscar nominee for citizen
for the film that we'll be showing right
after this.
And my role here, as it was explained,
I live in the ivory tower and I
pontificate about cryptography, so that
would be my role here is to be the ivory
tower cryptographer.
So the genesis of this panel was
I for some reason was at a bar a few
months ago with Julia and
we sort of introduced ourselves and she's
like, I hate cryptographers.
And I was like, why we're so harmless?
And I mean, her explanation is basically
that every time she talks to a
cryptographer, they sound like this
some long winded story about Alice and
Bob that has no relationship to reality.
And so
and she started telling stories and I
thought these stories were amazing.
And also they sort of changed my idea of
how sort of cryptography related to
how journalists actually practice.
So we decided
to organize something where we could have
a conversation with the community about
how cryptography and journalism interact.
And this is sort of if you can think of
this as Kiwa testing for
you guys, that you have a bunch of
sort of Kiwa testers who have
done some things and they have some
feedback for you.
And maybe we can have a conversation.
You can suggest some ideas for
what they could be doing to secure
themselves better, and they can give you
some ideas of problems that they have
that are not being solved.
So that said,
OK, let's
let's do this.
All right. So if you are thinking about
journalists from the perspective of
a, say, cryptography practitioner
or like a security professional,
you think, OK, what what is the task that
a journalist is trying to accomplish?
They need to communicate confidentially
with their sources confidentially,
meaning like some eavesdropper
can't view the conversation
that they're having. All right.
Step number one.
And Bob, install some crypto software.
And I think the thing that we're trying
to get at here is that, you know, Laura
and Glenn had really an amazing
source and Edward Snowden, I mean, just
hang in the moon goldmine
of a source, really great documents
really uncovered a lot of government,
you know, malfeasance.
But maybe this is boring sounding and
covering the federal bureaucracy that is
Washington.
But most of the time, it's a guy named
Bob who's like five years away
from retirement and just can't fucking
take it anymore.
And he wants to find a way to get you
a document like, you know, a two
page PDF that he barely knows how to
print on the local printer, that
he needs help from an assistant
photocopying.
And it's that sort of, you
know, OPSEC involved there, because
if he keeps putting out these documents,
he's the same Bob who logs in from his
work computer and goes, you hear that?
You've got mail because he still uses
AOL 15 years later.
Like, those are the people that we
deal with on a regular basis.
And and it's the little breadcrumbs that
they they want to impart to
you. And so when you I guess
we're going to start getting at is it
when you then sit down and go, OK, so
you're going to need to install GPG tools
of using Windows Cleopatra, you're going
to need to do or revocation like
the minute they heard install revocation
key, they're like, no,
we're done. I mean, and that's and that's
happened before. And then they take the
easy way out. And that can lead to
trouble, I think.
Unfortunately, unfortunately, the easy
way out is that they are unsafe,
right, and so they so one
of the challenges for journalists is
that we are
trying to keep our sources from making
mistakes that will then hurt them and
also hurt us, but more them often.
And so, you know,
all the time people send me things
from their Gmail account at work
on their work computer, thinking somehow
that was some secret transmission
and that their bosses will never find
out. And and it's just
unfortunate. So the thing is, what we're
what we want to talk about is sort of how
the bar is so much lower than
you guys can maybe understand
in terms of like what we're dealing with.
And Edward Snowden obviously was like
this perfect source who came fully
encrypted and have yet to meet a source
like that.
I'm waiting.
So one of the things I remember hearing
about is that often sources don't even
realize that their sources.
Right.
So this is this is one of the things
this first date problem that
Nadia and I were talking about at the bar
was that, you know, you
meet somebody in the course of your
reporting and you're like, hey, let's get
a drink. And maybe you even met them
through writing something very innocuous.
And then you're at a bar
and you're like, so like, what do
you think about setting up
an encrypted channel?
And they're like, what?
And it's a little bit like
asking for sex on the first date.
You know, it's a little too much
too soon.
So I was telling Nadia this and that I
think was probably the genesis for this
panel was that line.
So and I've done this right.
And I've tried to convince people and
they're like, this is I don't even
actually know what you're talking about.
Sometimes it's successful.
You never know.
But but a lot of times
it's it's really a psychological
problem. This person is thinking like
they might help you because they want to
make sure the story is correct or they
just sort of want to provide you one
fact, but they don't want to be thought
of in their own mind as a source.
I mean, I'd like to just say a couple of
things, sort of from the journalist
perspective or sort of our kind of
progression of actually how we
learn these tools.
And so I went through
a period where so I made
a film in Iraq and then I was put
on a watch list.
So I knew that I had to sort of be
careful, but I didn't really know what
that meant.
And so the film that I made after that, I
made in Yemen and it was in Yemen
and in Guantanamo, and I
knew that, like, digital communication
was not safe.
So I was like sort of danger zone.
And but I didn't know quite actually how
to to to respond to that or how
to sort of work around that.
And and I was trying to get
access at that point.
I was trying to get access to a film
crew, to Guantanamo and to film.
And I had gone through the official
channels. I won't try the front door and
I just never got anywhere.
I just sort of like delay, delay, delay.
And then my name was on all the requests
and that wasn't going anywhere.
And then I was like, all right, I need to
try the side door, you know, like, how
can I get to Guantanamo through the
side door, which was, you know,
created like this sort of,
you know, efforts to kind of like sever
metadata, like have the person like I
hired somebody to sort of be the
person who sent in the letters and they
called from their cell phone and not
never from my office and did these kind
of things to kind of, you know,
not have a direct connection
between me and these requests that were
going in.
And for for that whole film, I really
kind of almost resorted to like an analog
way of working. Like, I I was
sending grant applications, but I would
never send any over email.
I was like, everyone got a hard copy and
these kinds of things. And it wasn't
actually until, um, working
on the film that
I'm going to show later that I actually
learned some tools and it wasn't that
easy to actually find out what were the
correct tools, because like, you know,
you do a search and like a lot of things
come back in terms of what
is recommended. So it actually took quite
a long time where I was working kind of
in the dark, not knowing what tools
I could trust to have anonymity
and and security and
to do the work that that I was doing.
And then, you know, luckily I
had some very good teachers.
So what does work or
does it say to you,
is there anything that does work?
Anything that doesn't work does does.
It does work.
I how do you mean?
Like I mean,
Jake, Jake Appelbaum and I are doing
a talk tomorrow and we'll talk about some
things in terms of Bitburg, so.
So there's one last problem that I
remember discussing about the
difficulties of installing crypto
software, which is that if you were at a
bar, imagine you're at a bar and you pull
out your phones, you're installing a
software.
All right, so one time I did manage
to get someone convinced to do this on
the first day at a bar, and
I thought that an encrypted
messaging app would probably be the
easiest thing.
A cell phone app.
This is it was silent
text at the time.
And so I sat down with
my source and I was like, this is going
to be so much fun, which is this just
like fun, you know, be like a fun way to
communicate.
And so
so, you know, it's
one of those things where sort of it
takes a long time to download and then
do a lot of verification, actually,
that you have to do.
So there was
a verification key that
like we had to exchange with each other
and for some unknown reason, we just took
an hour to do this.
And by the end of it, we were both sort
of like covered in sweat and exhaustion
and like it was a little like sex on
the first date.
And we were
and, you know, the thing is that
silent circle we
were using it, it was really the early
days and had just come out because it
wasn't that much krypto that I felt like
I couldn't ask this person to try to use
GPG.
So so
we had these calls
that it was like the 70s, you know, were
like I would talk and then they'd be like
a five second delay.
And then she would reply
and I realized
that it was too painful.
And we both kind of gave
up using it after
several months. And so but
we gave it a really good try.
And but it's just sitting at a bar
trying to do this when you've had two
glasses of wine and we
probably weren't at our best
for these tools.
OK, so once Alice and Bob
have successfully installed some crypto
software, the next thing they do is
exchange keys.
This is one of the great things in
the greatest developments in cryptography
ever. Public key cryptography exchange
keys. It solves the key management
problem.
And unfortunately, the reality of the key
management problem today even
still looks like this.
So so my family, including
a relatively named Nameless,
likes to use, you know, the different
search engines out there that are
installed on a browser like Bing
Jack, if you have you Bing this day.
And I have no idea what she's saying.
And these are the people who we are
dealing with in Washington who have
this rudimentary understanding and have
their kids fix her iPhone or, you know,
even younger people don't really
understand this.
So when you say
the words open up terminal or open up the
command line in windows, again,
like we were saying earlier, I mean,
that's when they sort of freeze.
And part of this is and maybe
maybe something that isn't correct me if
I'm wrong, but in windows,
you know, which I have to use for my
work, Cleopatra, you can't,
out of the gooey create a revocation key.
So at least that I haven't been able to
find. And so and that's obviously
a very critical part.
If your laptop gets stolen or compromised
or whatever, you need that revocation key
and just even explain it.
It's a very smart, you know, almost
tech savvy coworkers are like, well,
wait, what it needs to hyphens with the
app.
And it's just that that that complicated
message, you know, for us, you know, it's
maybe not that hard to describe the
terminal and type of command and bash and
be done with it. But it's that critical
step that people tend to bypass.
I think we're going to talk about the
shortcuts that people take to when these
things get hard beyond what they're what
they're used to and not to our industry.
You know, a lot of journalists are are
Dundar busses or something.
But, you know, we're set in our ways.
I mean, where we spend
10, 20, 30 years, we know how to report
a story, how to turn the screws on
people, how to get the documents, how to
file the public records request.
And we're sort of been doing that, you
know, chugging along for a long time.
And all of a sudden, you know, you know,
and particularly after the Snowden
disclosures made us realize more than
anything and after, you know, my
colleagues at the AP to boot where their
phone records were subpoenaed by the
Justice Department, I mean, sometimes
they really are out to get you.
And, you know, this is this is this is
critically serious.
So it's, I think, trying to
teach an old and young dog new tricks.
And it's very difficult.
I think also, I just want to
confess, I don't
have a vacation
sorry, or a separate
of key I've been meaning to.
But honestly, I find it kind of
challenging.
I've taken me two years,
three years of really working at using
GPG, and I feel like I kind
of have my little system duct taped
together.
And so and
lest you think less of me, which I'm
sure you do, I am probably the most tech
savvy journalist in every newsroom
I've been in.
I grew up in Silicon Valley.
I started programing and basic in fifth
grade. I do actually have some
credentials, but I find this stuff
incredibly challenging.
Just one question, how many people in
this room understand everything that's on
the screen right now?
Yes,
we need more sources, like you
said.
How many of you guys understand
everything that's on the screen right
now?
I'm the guy I went to the
Linux users, groups, parties growing up
and had no friends.
So I understand this a little bit,
but I loved it and I wouldn't change it
for the world. But I,
I think I understand it.
That doesn't mean I succeed.
OK, so once Alice and Bob
have exchanged public keys, they need to
verify the authenticity of these keys so
they, Alice and Bob need to verify
fingerprints.
Laura, you should tell it like the best
case scenario, right?
Yeah, I don't know how many
people Michael Lee, who works
with me at The Intercept, wrote
a lengthy piece about how
he helped my
initial contact with with Snowden.
And what had happened
was Snowden
had tried for a while to get Glenn
on encryption that didn't work.
And then actually the way that Snowden
found me is he emailed the Freedom of
the Press Foundation, which is an
organization that I'm on the board of and
trying to get in touch with me and get my
key. And I think also wanting to somewhat
verify that the key that he got was
was correct.
And so then Michael sent me an email, an
encrypted email and said, hey, some guy
or some person who didn't know gender
wants to get in touch with you.
Can I give you a key?
And I said, sure.
And then he
then emailed and we did a first exchange,
his first email to me.
It was to my true name account.
It was at Gmail maybe.
I don't think I said that before, but it
was.
And
then actually. But that email has already
been published, his email that he sent it
to.
So then so then he said
something that was like certainly
got my attention, which I
think was that
he was in the government and
that he wanted to share information and
that no matter what happened to him, the
information should make its way to the
American public.
And so that certainly got my attention.
So then he asked me to
create a new account,
an anonymous account, and to contact
him.
He sent me a fresh
as he sent he contacted me at a new email
address with a fresh key, asked for
one, and then he asked me to
to figure out a way to
to verify it. And he gave me some
options. And one of them was to have
someone tweet it.
And so he he actually recommended
that Mica tweet the fingerprint.
So then I emailed the fingerprint to Mike
and I said, Ted, hey, you know,
I didn't say too much about the
you know, the first email. I just said,
you know, would you mind just putting
this in your Twitter account?
And and he did.
And so that was how Snowden was able
to verify my fingerprint.
And that was, you know, a couple
probably a week or two weeks after we
started corresponding.
And then we were sort of on an anonymous
you know, both my communications
were were severed from
my true name, but I'm still using the
same computer.
And then the next email that I got after
that one was the sort of holy shit email,
which is when I realized that I really
need to create sort of a real blockade
between anything that was tied to my true
identity and these communications.
And that's when
that I that I moved over to tale's
to the tail's operating system.
So thank you. If there are any tale's
developers in that room.
Thank you.
And
I can continue on a little bit on the
story and then we can come back so so
then so he actually snowed in and said,
you know, for most security
you should use tale's and I, I,
I've known of it, but I wasn't using it
at that time.
And so but I did have a bit of a dilemma
with it because I didn't really have
confidence of how to verify
this.
The download the certificate.
And and I actually was back in
Berlin and I was a friend
of a friend when one of the friends is in
the in the room gave me the name
of another person whose last name I
actually never knew, who set up
a tale's disk for me
on a computer, which was a computer that
I purchased with cash
in New York.
So it was was nothing tied to
my name in the correspondence
from then on.
So that's like above and beyond levels of
verification and trust verification.
And then you can I guess I'm going to
play the part of the complete
with one here. But I did the I thought
one of my sources, I thought
he verification in terms of numbers would
be too hard. So we tried to do the shared
secret on.
I managed to get this person on our end
and I
thought that it would be really easy if
we we didn't set up a shared secret in
advance. I just thought we would be able
to come up with one.
So I said, when do we first
meet and then or
where where did we first meet?
What location?
And the person answered wrong.
And then the person answered asked me a
question of where we first met, and I
answered it wrong that we had no idea
where we had first met.
So that didn't work.
How many people in this room have had
that problem?
I feel better.
All right.
So now we've successfully verify the
authenticity of our keys and our
software.
Step number four in a confidential
communication is Alice and Bob actually
initiate confidential communication with
each other.
You all understand why this entire talk
is illustrated with CDs, slides,
and even even at the AP, depending
on which version of software you install,
it either does inline PGP.
It attaches it as an attachment
or and you can't read them.
And there's UTF to ASCII character
conversions. And that's just among four
people I work with.
And that's, you know, it's
yet another headache. I think we're not
bagging on this entirely.
I mean I mean, this the story,
the Cuba story that that Nadia was
mentioning, we used extensively
when we did work in countries of, shall
we say, aren't really very
favorable toward the press.
We used other tools, which I'm sure
and talk about in the future,
community voice communication tools
like whisper systems, the signal.
We use that quite a bit
and it worked very well and
other sort of tools. So so don't take
away the impression that this is all
garbage and we're throwing up our hands.
It's just that your mileage may
vary.
But I mean, I guess I could just bring
in, like, yet another sad story, so
one time I was really proud because I was
really getting like a good
communication going with
somebody.
And then
all of a sudden we started dropping
plaintext.
And basically it turned out that
one of us had it set only
to accept, OK, I'm going to
get the technology wrong as MYM and
PGP and one of us was not
accepting this MYM.
And so so the whole thing
fell apart. And
once again, I just felt like every time I
think I've climbed some way up
the mountain, it turns out I'm really
just at base camp.
I will confess that
I have dropped plaintext with people on
the stage
and see.
So, OK.
I guess let's see, we can we can
talk about once, once, once we've moved
on from confidentiality,
we've talked about this a little bit
already of another property
that journalists need with sources
is anonymous communication.
Laura was talking about anonymous,
unthinkable communication.
So what this looks
like is, say the
simplest case, even
not using so much cryptography,
is if you want an unthinkable thing.
This is what Laura just did.
She purchased a device with cash
and then install software on it.
So, Alice, our journalists
might purchase a burner phone with cash,
maybe install some encrypted
communication applications on it, install
all the contacts that they've been
verified by her, and then say mail
bob his special burner phone and then
Bob can use his burner phone to securely
communicate with Alice.
This is this is straightforward.
This is taking all of the responsibility
for installation and verification
away from Bob, our hapless source.
So how does this work in practice?
Yeah, so
colleagues of mine actually think that
this is a true burner phone,
I it's not
particularly when they do it on their
phone, they tie it to their Apple ID
and then make what they think are
anonymous phone calls.
This was sort of by accident that he put
the slide in because that one used the
burner actually is in the side burner.
Had, as it's obvious,
is an app where you can select an area
code and for a certain amount of credits,
create a phone number that, you know,
masks or masquerades from that
that area code.
Well, that masquerades and they can call
you back on it.
And I remember once dealing with a former
Washington official, we got a document
how he's got some big payout from
an organization and he wouldn't
obviously pick up my Toyota.
That's a Washington, D.C.
area code. Phone number one, pick
up a block number. Wouldn't do it.
So I figured out where he lived in a
rural in his rural state where he retired
to. And I got that that area
code and called him up and he called me
and he answered in a tizzy because he
thought, I swear to God, he thought I was
the plumber who was running late to come
fix it because he probably, like, picked
up the phone, OK?
And he's like, I just got done with a
workout or are you still coming over at
10:00 AM like Mr.
So-and-so, it's great to get you on the
phone. We're preparing a story in an hour
that says you did it.
See, and like that's I think the only
time that I mean, this is not a do
not use this for anonymous
communications. I mean, it's to basically
I mean, in my my experience, it's
to, you know, hit him with
Erica that they think is friendly fire
or is friendly.
No. When it's not.
So one time I bought a burner and did
the sort of Alice and Bob thing you just
laid out, and I sent it in the mail
to my source, an executive at a company
who is trying to share all sorts of
damning information about his company.
And we met in a cafe and I said,
I'm going to be sending you a phone.
And he agreed this was not a first date
problem. We'd been talking for years.
So he was willing to set up this
encrypted channel.
And and then
I would call I would text
nothing.
No response. No response.
I finally had to call me, like, what are
you doing with the burner phone is, oh,
I never bring it anywhere with me and
just leave it at home.
So they never, you know,
just like it didn't have enough room in
his pockets. You one phone.
And so, you know,
once again I was like I would end up
calling to tell
him to go pick up the burner phone.
And so that was a pointless exercise.
And a burner thing is difficult, too.
I mean, you know, particularly,
you know, at least in the States.
I mean, the stereotyping that's it's like
you must be a drug dealer if you're
getting a burner phone with cash and
you really look like the I mean, I'm a
journalist by training out of care, you
know, I look like an odd duck for a
living. And that's fine. I'm fine being
the weird guy.
But like, when you're there, the you
know, the AT&T store, whatever your
topping up your SIM card and you're like
the guy pulling out wads of cash
and you don't really want to give your
driver's license because you don't really
have to. And you're given a name that the
guy knows is not your real name.
And you're doing this weird dance.
And just like it's just like
it's like a terrible Christmas dinner,
just like I just want to go home, just
give me the thing and go.
And you got to do that to fill it up.
And it's, you know.
So basically, we need to normalize
the burner phone or something
we don't have used for.
Yeah, oh, yeah, all the time,
I guess we heard Laura success story with
tales.
I mean, I don't think any of us could do
our work without her.
I mean. I mean, really.
Yeah.
I mean, I think we use it every day and
and even for for people who don't
understand, you know, DNS,
all I do is I don't know why I use this
website.
I put them down.
I go, you know, particularly since the AP
has their own net block and, you know,
you reverse look up that address, it says
The Associated Press, you know, whatever.
Thirty Third Street, New York, New York.
And you go to IP chicken,
dot com or whatever, like, look, you
know, somebody who's monitoring a
government email or a government web
server, you know, you're immediately
tipping them off that you're hitting
them.
I mean, there's many uses for tor besides
that, but just the little things that
always seems to like they're grasping
like, oh, they really know it's me.
I'm like, yeah, they they know
it's you.
I mean, so actually
Tale's is like the my favorite
sort of success
story.
So with fellow journalists actually
who don't who find
all this other encryption difficult,
I find that actually showing tales is
easier because it's sort of this
controlled environment.
So I've had some success getting some
colleagues to use tales
because it's sort of simple.
The idea is a little bit simpler.
The idea you just have this separate
machine that you just do this and it sort
of all the box is built
as a default to make you kind of make the
right choices.
And so
it's probably my favorite tool.
I think that sideways into sort of the
last journalists task, which is
keeping notes and data and
of course from the perspective of
the hapless cryptographer, this is easy.
Alice wants to keep some notes.
She encrypts the data to her private key.
Nobody but her can decrypt it.
So then, of course,
situation No. One, collaboration with
fellow journalists.
I mean, there are times I'm just thinking
of in recent memory, and we've had I
mean, the AP is a global news
organization where people all over the
world and and, you know,
you know, sometimes we need to
communicate securely.
And like I was talking about earlier and
again, this is you know, this is no
it's not malicious that people do this,
but they you know, they're just so used
to picking up the phone, using plain
old telephone service and just dialing,
you know, 011 the number, what have
you.
And I just remember, you
know, coming close, wants to be
on a call where people were calling in
from, shall I say, hostile
countries toward journalists and their
sources. And we were all calling
in using these unsecured lines.
And then we all sort of realized that
what we were doing and it was, you know,
it's like, you know, we all sort of
realize, you know, oops, we left the
backdoor up and I think the cat just got
out and it's too late, but
not quite because we didn't really we
were about to, you know, we weren't going
to say so. Confidential Source X lives on
whatever street in Venezuela.
You know, we didn't get to that point.
But, you know, even even when we're
sort of used to it, you know, after
Snowden has sort of showed us
that and the AP subpoenas
it, you know, people really
want your data.
They will get access to it.
And this is no laughing matter.
I mean, and
even, you know, people who do it all the
time sometimes forget about it just by
force of habit. And I think that's,
you know, a problem.
Obviously, we need to correct ourselves
internally.
But it's one of these things, actually.
It's sort of like the mindset in
journalists newsrooms is sort of is is
outdated. So the
sort of rule of thumb in a newsroom,
most newsrooms would be if you're filing
a story based on a confidential
source, your editor and oftentimes
the editors up the chain need
to know the identity of that source.
And that's a general practice.
And the problem is your editor may be in
another country. And so,
you know, in at The Wall Street Journal,
where I worked for 14 years, you know,
sometimes like it just wasn't
possible for the journalist to convey
to the management in New York who the
source was in a secure way.
And sometimes before a story would run,
that journalist would actually fly
to New York to talk to the editors and
say, this is the real story.
You should publish it.
And of course, that delays publication
and is very expensive.
And so it's it's
just a challenge within the structure of
newsrooms.
Yeah. I mean, I certainly experienced
this these kinds of problems working
on on this story before
right before going to Hong Kong.
The Washington Post got very nervous
and there were a bunch of lawyers that
were making phone calls.
They were all in the clear and they were
sending emails about what was going on.
And I mean, I really freaked out because
it seemed to me this was the most risky
time to to be having these kind of
communications over anything electronic.
Let me I want to say something about the
sort of collecting of notes, because
as a filmmaker, I mean, what I do
is I actually usually, you
know, filming. And so, I mean, one of the
things that I would love if somebody
could someday develop is
if you can record
video to an encrypted
media. And so you don't have unencrypted
media on you because that's pretty risky,
depending on what situation, if you
happen to be, for instance, filming a
protest and you're not able to, you know,
pull out an SD card in time.
When I was in Hong Kong, I was
I was concerned that we would be raided.
And so every day I was backing up the
media and putting it onto encrypted
drives. But then I was had to physically,
like, destroy the SD cards because I
didn't want, you know, the
raw footage to ever fall in anyone else's
hands. And and it happens
a lot when you have people who are
working in, you know, whatever
in protests in Egypt, for instance,
if if they get your camera, they can get
potentially get a lot of information if
you can't get your media out in time
and do something with it.
So I think
we're almost done here, so
with the slides, so start preparing your
questions and your answers to all of us,
I think.
Well, what Laura story just
segued into the legal coercion problem
that one of the big threats that
journalists face is coercion
from governments, either forceful
or legal or any other way.
Does our AP representative want to talk
about the problems that the A.P.
has faced?
Yeah, I mean, just
generally speaking, I mean, I think
I mean, it's not I mean, it is
a little bit of a hostile time and maybe
that's understating it.
I mean, for journalists, I mean and
I apologize. I come from very American
centric point of view because a
Washington journalists.
But I mean, this is it's sort of
conversely the most transparent
administration in global history.
But, you know, we were talking about M.C.
catchers, the other, you know, an earlier
panel. And, you know, this is the same
meanwhile, government that turns around
and tells my colleague and I found out
that there's local law enforcement.
They can't even release details about
what the local police do.
And, you know, it's very secretive about,
you know, getting like when they got our
phone records.
You know, they're it's, you know,
people even coming down to sources and
sort of like the bottom line here, where,
you know, why this matters so much is
it's not the Segway into it's not just,
you know, about the intelligence
community here. It's not about, you know,
a you know, an NSA contractor in
Hawaii who dumps all the
top secret classified documents is
important as it is.
I mean, these are people who work in
state houses and companies.
I mean, as as Julie was saying, you know,
like a company that's crooked and
and, you know, people lose their jobs
for this. I mean, they lose their
mortgages. They can't pay their bills.
They can't feed their families.
I mean, these are very real effects
of talking to the press, just talking
to us.
And and I think we owe it to
sources to do a better job at
this. I mean, we have the tools at our
disposal and with the help of
the crypto community, I think we can you
know, we really do it right and
make this better so we can have better
journalism and hold people accountable.
It's so cliche to say, but that's the
reason why we do what we do.
And, you know, we can't just go
back to a plain text world when
encryption is clearly the next
forefront. So.
I just want to add one thing, which is
that I
I think that newsrooms
I know that journalism is also
under financial pressure, but I believe
we have a moral obligation to invest more
in these types of tools.
Right. It's heartbreaking to me
whenever I learn how few people
support the tools that I
use every day and how underfunded
they are.
And I personally try to donate, but
I don't have I I'm a journalist,
right? I'm not I'm not going to be able
to pull this by myself.
And but I think our newsrooms would
be well served to see these tools as as
central to our work and to invest in
them.
All right, last slide, the four
questions, the last issue that a
lot of you run into is crossing
international borders.
OK, well,
yeah, I mean, it's no man's
land.
I mean, in terms of legal, I mean, you
have no protection. And they and they
they use it. I mean, the US government,
when I say they and,
you know, in my case, you know, it's over
six years detained every time I return to
the country. And, you know, they'd
photocopied my books and threatened
to take electronics.
Many times they would stack them in a
pile. And, you know, I would say that
I was a journalist and would have long
fights and they would say things like,
well, you know, this will go much faster
for you if you just give us your
passwords. And that's, you know, that's
not happening. And then they'd say, well,
if you don't answer our questions, we'll
find our answers on your electronics.
You know, that was one of my favorite
quotes.
I mean, ultimately, I moved to Berlin
because of this problem, because
because of the project I was working on.
I couldn't I didn't feel that I could
protect the source material I had and
cross the U.S. border.
And so I started I was shooting and
filming.
And then I would leave footage
outside of the country, back it up and
then return home and did that for
a while. And then once I needed to start
editing, then I came to Berlin
and started working there.
So it really was, you know, created a
huge problem for
for me to be able to do the work in the
U.S..
I think there's a question that we don't
know how to answer. Is it safer to bring
data across a border with your person
or to send it electronically?
Maybe the answer is just no.
I mean, I think I think to a
trusted, you know, second party
would be probably the safest.
If there are no more stories that our
other panelists want to tell.
Well, I mean, I haven't
obviously left the country.
I still live in New York, but I have for
the past several years after
one source called me and said, look, I
know you're about to go on your annual
trip to India. I go every year to visit
my husband's family in India at Christmas
time.
And this person said, I just can't have
your my name in your
contact list if you're going to bring
your phone across the border.
And at that moment, I realized,
oh, my God, I can't I can't bring
anybody's name across in my contact
list.
So I realized I had to leave
my phone behind and I have
continued to leave my phone behind
on every international trip and
and also my computer.
I have a what I call a zero data policy
crossing borders, which, by the way,
means I don't have anything right.
So it's really inconvenient to
come with no data.
It means that I get less work done, I'm
less productive. I bring a tale's
machine and then I have some
documents I might want to work on on a
stick. But it's not a
great and convenient way to do reporting.
And my editors, despite, you
know, supporting me, are really annoyed
when I don't reply to their e-mails.
All right, so I guess with that will open
up for questions and answers from
you.
So before we start the questions, first
of all, if anybody is leaving right
now, please do so very quietly, take your
trash with you.
And also, it would be nice if you would
not let any martyr bottles fall over.
Thank you for the demonstration.
And also, if
you have free seats now, then please
already try to defragment a
bit like move inwards in your
respective rows and
make room on the sides.
We will not let anybody inside
this room yet before
the next section, but basically
the film is going to start.
So doing the Q&A, please try
to be a bit quieter than right
now.
A bit quiet,
please.
OK.
So then, hey,
let's start with microphone one.
So if you're so
much in the focus of, uh,
agencies and so on, like Laura,
what do you do about endpoint security?
Let's say you do everything correct with
encryption, but now you have this AACAP
device lying in your home and
like, do you always carry it with you or
do you sleep with it under your pillow?
Or how do you make sure that it doesn't
get bugged?
I would never answer that question.
OK, so would you have any advice
for people who want to
who have that problem?
Like, I mean, what oh,
how would they find out what
they should do?
I mean, obviously it's a question of
threat model. Right.
You know, and.
I mean, you know, there I mean, I don't
know if Sarah Harrison is here, I know
she's giving a talk, but she's off.
She carries a lot of computers with her.
I mean, that's sometimes what we do there
times when you carry a lot of computers
with you. And I think that
there are times, you know, where it
depends where that might be more
necessary than others, depending
on what you're working on and or the
political context in which you're
working.
So, I mean, obviously,
I mean, what people will say is that if
you never lose possession
of it, it would
be, you know, the sort of, you
know, absolute secure recommendation.
Thank you. Microphone to please.
Hello.
I was left with the impression that
burner phones are viable option for
informants. I would dispute that view
as the problem.
But the problem I see with burner phones
is that in the data
mining is very easy to identify a burner
phone because like, let's say if we have
a burner phone, there are two cases who
travel with a burner phone, then you
quickly identify a burner phone as a
burner phone because of movement.
Pattern is very similar or identical.
You see like the same base stations.
So you can identify not only that,
you can identify which person has the
burner phone. And because you know the
identity of that person, you can identify
that it's that person's burner phone.
And even for the stationary case, for
example, leave the burner phone at home,
the burner phone has a very distinct
communication pattern because you
essentially just communicate to one
person, which is extremely unusual.
So together with the location in, you
know, for example, OK, the person's
living, let's say, in the radius of a
kilometer or something, but you have
these special phones that only talk to
one person.
So I don't think there is a good scenario
for burner phone should be avoided.
I would just say that on burner
phones that it depends on your threat
model. Right. For a state actor
who can see the whole cell network,
you're completely right.
I wouldn't recommend burner phones, but
I was using a burner phone in this
particular instance for a corporate
source. Right. And I don't think his
company was going to be able to get
the cell companies to give up
that information.
I wanted him just to not use his
corporate paid cell phone, which is what
he previously was using to talk to me.
Right. So it depends on your threat
model. For some people, a burner
could be fine.
OK, thanks.
Thank you. So let's get a question
from the Internet.
Can you give the can you activate
the microphone now it's activated.
Hello?
Well, there are a thousand questions
on the IOC channel, and
I hope it can at least relay a few of
them.
Well, a lot of them are going
about training for journalists, like
are there any
journalism schools or universities
that are teaching crypto as an
obligatory.
Yeah. Basic skill?
Or what can a technical
journalism journalist do
to learn more of
their fellow students
into some crypto parties?
And also.
Yeah.
How many days or weeks or
years do it?
Does a journalist in your experience,
need to really also get the
point of encryption or a secure
communication to be also comfortable
with it? So this is all about
this huge field.
I mean, I know journalism schools
up to five years ago, like their prime
technological feat, besides doing,
as we would call beat reporting, was
teaching people how to use Adobe Flash
and like that, tick the box with
like the technology that needed to be
learned. And and again,
maybe it's an old dog, new tricks thing.
Or people have been in the business and
they're like this crypto thing.
I mean, those include journalism
professors who never had to use this,
never had to face this reality.
I know Columbia University has a
computational journalism track.
I know there's been I'm not the expert on
this. Maybe somebody else says, I know
that this has been at least a discussion
in, like the American journalism
education community about, you know, it's
not just the crypto to it's, you know,
digital public records requests and
analyzing, you know, big data,
you know, how to pass through it.
All these sorts of things that, you know,
that that go beyond the, you know,
notebook assisted reporting of
days of yore.
You know, and and I I'm
sure that's a discussion somewhere.
So I'm working with the Columbia
Journalism School right now.
Actually, I'm writing a chapter for their
book that's coming out on what types
of techniques journalists can use.
And they are beefing up their
crypto programs, but it's
not mandatory.
And the truth is
that there's a lot of confusion
out there about what are the best crypto
tools.
And there's one
thing that's upsetting to me is that
there are you know, every day I get an
email from a new crypto program and
some of them are not really as encrypted
as they seem.
And so I think there's a lot of confusion
in the regular public about what they
should use, which is why and
you guys probably already know know all
this, but essentially I did a ranking
with F of crypto tools
on seven criteria just to provide
some sort of benchmark of what people
might think we might consider actually
safe.
Thank you, so microphone three,
please.
Hello. Thank you very much for your talk.
I want to raise a question about
a power structure that was not part of
the discussion so far.
I once gave a party at a big
Dutch News Corporation for the Dutch
people in the office, and
the journalists were super enthusiastic.
They want to get started right away.
And I said, OK, let's get started with
installing Thor.
And we are not allowed to do that on our
machines.
But luckily, there were some tech people
and I was in the room and and we looked
at them like, can you help them out?
Can you give them permission?
Is that we could, but we're not
allowed because it's not part of our
budget to install this and everything's
actually closed down. And if we change
anything, it will all fall together and
looked kind of panicked.
And then it turned out the management had
to come in, but they were nowhere to be
found. And that seemed and maybe
you can relate to that in a lot of News
Corp, there's this management
layer that in the end needs to be
like part of this whole transition into,
like, secure communication.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a that's a really, really, really
great question, because
having worked for American news companies
where they are cut to the bone,
that is a very real concern.
I mean, you have almost two parts I would
say are two sort of
issues. One is the money issue,
because, you know, from an I mean, you
know, from a newsroom point of view,
we're like, well, it's a great source.
Let's do it, you know, pay any cost,
bear any burden. We're going to do it.
But then they're like, no, we only have X
amount for fiscal year, whatever.
And by the way, our exchange mail servers
are basically smoking.
You can see one smoking.
That's where the money has to go right
now. The other one is to.
Yeah, exactly. And that's the
counterargument to that is it doesn't
and it's not what they're used to.
They're not used to doing this.
And so at least that the success that
we've had or I've had in some news
organizations, others have either as
well, is sort of the
and now general investor Matt
Waite used to be a reporter and Florida
has this thing called demos, not memos
like do this organic from the bottom up
and sort of show how it works.
Do you a test case, you know, use free
software, use TOR, you know,
use the Tor browser, the IP checking
thing that I was taught, whatever you
want to use. And then people sort of have
these little epiphanies like, oh, OK,
that makes sense.
And then that, you know, and
I've seen it happen even very recently,
it starts bubbling up to the top.
You know, combined with the other news
just in general about how, you know,
the government is basically looking over
our shoulder and, you know, ideally
that starts to collide.
And, you know, the selling point for them
is like Tor, it's our tails,
it's free. You know, the cost of a DVD.
I'll I'll give you a ten on the house.
Just download it, you know, and I think
it's just just a different mindset
that they're not used to, just like
reporters are used to.
Yeah.
But also I mean, there's a problem with
it departments in newsrooms being total
control freaks and not letting anyone
touch any machines.
And that's just not about cost or or,
you know, not understanding how it works.
They're just, you know, not don't
want anyone touching any machine.
And they want to keep access to every
machine that goes out of a newsroom.
And that just needs to stop.
I mean, I think I was at Democracy
Now and and and
Jake was trying to install Otara
and someone's you know, he said, oh, you
should have Otara so we can talk.
And he started to install it and
that kind of freaked out it person
came into the room is like, what are you
doing to this computer?
So they were they were actually they were
able to know that that was happening.
That's sort of fucked up.
And it'd be then why would you ever stop
that?
And it's funny because then people do the
work arounds, right? Like I was in a news
organization once where I, I
couldn't it was locked down
administratively. I could install
anything. So I just brought in my home,
my my whatever power about whatever
it was at the time.
And I installed it and they were so
concerned about security, security,
security. But then I just took the
Ethernet cable and just bam right
into the wall and got right onto the
network. I'm like, OK, so
like on one end we're concerned about
security here, but I'm here.
I can. It's no problem.
OK,
thank you. Another question from the
Internet, please.
Yeah.
As I just touched the
journalists, I now go to developers
as the target group.
So what tools
would you need or would other
journalists need that open source
developers can develop
and make better?
And like what features are
really most important to you
to help you make your
job?
I think that actually
investment in GPG itself
would be great, because I love the
fact of the public key infrastructure,
the fact that you and your source don't
have to
don't have to know each other.
Right.
Because if you if somebody reaches out to
you the way that Snowden reached out to
Laura, he there was a way, even
though it's clunky, it seems to me
that that method of sort of
overcoming that first date problem
of finding somebody and verifying
them in a public way is still sort of our
best hope.
Those are the sources that we want to
attract to us, is
somebody who just thinks they might want
to share something.
And if we could make that easier,
I would be really in favor of that.
I still use GBG much
more than I use any other tool, despite
my constant frustrations
with it.
Yeah, I mean, I would just echo again
what Julia said earlier about tales and
what and what a great
device that is for us to do the work.
Because what I found when I started doing
the reporting then it wasn't just me who
needed it. But then you have a circle of
people who you're also reporting with
that you have to bring up to speed.
And you could actually, you know, I ended
up making a lot of tale's disks and
circulating them to people so that I
had people in my circle that I needed to
talk to and that was became, you know,
relatively large.
And to have a tool that actually is
sending things by default with encryption
that that you can just say, here's a
computer, this is how you find me,
was the most valuable tool for doing
this reporting.
Thank you, so microphone
four, please.
Good.
So I just wanted to make a couple of
comments, positive comments about the use
of burner phones.
Ideally, both
parties will have a burner phone that
was bought in cash from a brand
where you don't have to show I.D.
and you don't have to deal with a human.
In the US, these are track phones usually
where you just go into a
convenience store or something like that.
You buy something in cash, you buy some
minutes that you add onto there
and that's that.
OK, so ideally, as the first
comment actually pointed out, is that if
you're carrying these around all the
time, the social graph, it
becomes very easy because, you know,
Julia's social graph
calls she's making, where she's at, which
cell tower she's hitting will match up
identically with her burner phone.
And that's absolutely not what you want.
Ideally, you would want to have a set
time where you have your battery
into the phone and all other times it's
off on both ends.
So if you say, you know, Saturday from
seven to nine every week, please put
your battery in the phone.
If I don't call, OK, if I do call,
OK. And all of the times
just keep it unplugged.
And that's a really good way to ensure
that, you know, hopefully you're both
making calls outside of the house.
So maybe it's even slightly less
trackable. But also, if you're in a big
city like New York, it doesn't necessarily
matter. This is also what drug dealers
do. You might recognize this method from
there.
I'm super excited to meet the source
who's going to comply with those
directions.
Please put your battery on this phone
from seven to nine on Saturday.
I'm sure that person is out there.
All right, another question from the
Internet, please.
Following up on this, like,
what should it suicide do?
What is the most sensible way
to contact a journalist?
And what, in your experience, are the
typical and maybe most fatal
mistakes they make?
It's a great question.
You know, it depends
on how secure you want to be.
It's very difficult to make first contact
without using the journalists existing
email address. So you are going to have
some or
some known way to reach them.
I actually advise people to use the
postal mail.
No return address.
And I read my mail.
I get it.
I get a lot of mail.
Most of it is an interesting, but some of
it's really interesting.
And then you can put a disposable
email address in there or a phone number
and I will reach out.
I think it's an underestimated tool.
Yeah, yeah, and you get you get
I mean, I get letters all the time from
that, all the time, but from people who
do want to make that first contact, if I
haven't already met them at a previous
social occasion, I mean, again, this is
very specific to Washington because
everybody talks to everyone.
But I mean, then they will send me
a note and, you know, ask me in touch
with them, I guess.
We have time for two quick questions,
so first, microphone one, please.
Regarding the request for encrypted
video, the Magic Lantern Project,
which is a opensource firmware
for the Canon SLR cameras,
already supports RSA encryption of
the still images, but not yet the
video.
But if you reach out to us, we'd be happy
to talk about whether or not that's a
possibility.
That's fantastic. Thank you.
Thank.
OK, that was more of a comment and a
question, but thank you.
So microphone three, last question,
please.
As you mentioned, circulation
problem and
thank you.
So what would you think of
systems which basically allow
you to set up a passphrase
and encryption passwords, which
are basically a fake one, which would
make sure that are definitely unusable
if you ever use it?
Is it actually a good solution
for the question issue?
You mean that would destroy your data?
Like if you get hand over this password,
it would destroy everything? Is that what
you're saying? Yeah.
I mean, in the context of the UK,
that would probably be something that
because I think they can hold you if you
don't if you don't comply with that, it
depends on the context.
But I think that would, I think,
be very valuable.
I don't know
if it's been done.
Would you guys do such a thing?
I would love to have such a thing.
I think it's fun to have the idea of the
escape handle like stop
the train.
Right.
Because then also I would sort of feel
maybe better about bringing my
devices over the border if I could
feel very confident that I could destroy
it at a moment's notice.
Was it Hillary Clinton advocating
for like a kill switch, knowing what was
there? There was a kill switch idea, but
that was something else. Never mind.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure if you've already
had a legal demand, that would be a risk
of contempt of court to use such a
thing, right?
Yeah.
OK, then we're finished.
Thank you very much.
Give them again the warm applause.