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So but the next talk I can't
introduce, I'm not fit of that photo
for that, I call Jacob Appelbaum
on stage.
Hey, I want to
introduce this group by telling a little
story,
this group of people
was introduced to me.
This is Cage, and they were introduced to
me by a gentleman who came to a talk
that I gave in Switzerland.
And it was a really intense experience
because when I met this gentleman,
he was very clearly the only
Muslim in the room.
He had a beard.
He was dressed in such a way that it
signified he was not with the rest
of the Swiss people in this room in the
same way visually.
And I remember speaking with him and he
said, you know, thank you for the things
that you say about drone attacks.
Thank you for talking about surveillance,
about marginalized communities.
Thank you for doing that, because a
Jewish American person saying that
brings that into a different audience.
It allows other people to hear it.
And we want to get the message out to
everyone.
And I remember saying, well, sure, I'd
be very, very happy to keep doing that,
actually. And I think we have to do
that. We have essentially a moral duty to
talk about the things that are taking
place.
And he said, well, I want to show you an
email from someone.
It was a spiritual adviser
of mine and he was killed by
a drone.
And he showed me an email of a person who
is known to have been assassinated by
the American government.
Actually, Obama himself is known to have
signed off on killing this person,
and he was assassinated without a trial
and he was a U.S. citizen, though that
doesn't actually matter.
It's important to note that you can
figure out who this person is.
There's only a few of them.
And I remember what happened.
I actually took a step back
physically.
And then I thought, my God, with
WikiLeaks, with things that have happened
with Julian and myself and with other
people, everyone else takes a step back.
So I took a step forward and
I shook his hand and I apologized.
And we've actually been friends since
then. And so I wanted very
much for these guys multiple times to be
able to come to the Congress and talk
about what they have experienced, because
this is a community who is under threat.
These are people that are doing good
work. And I
think it is important for a pluralistic
society like the one that C.C.C.
represents, in fact, to stand
in solidarity with these guys, not to
give in to fear, to recognize
that we actually are all humans and we
have this in common and that we can work
together. And it's not just about
cryptography, it's also about politics.
So some of the people that are talking
today are people who have literally been
in Guantanamo Bay without a trial,
without evidence of basically
anything you can imagine in a free
society, having these guys have suffered
things that you would expect to not
happen in such a free society.
And so with that said, I want to
introduce Moazzam Begg, who
was a Guantanamo prisoner, and
he cannot be here today because the
British government, after he was released
from Guantanamo Bay, actually seized his
passport and he cannot travel here from
the United Kingdom.
So we have to use video
in order to actually have him speak
today.
So this is a person who is a victim in
the war on terror and he's also been
jailed. And in fact, this quote on the
shirt, sometimes knowing too
much can be a curse
was a tweet that he made before he was
arrested in the U.K.
again on trumped up charges.
And again, the case collapsed.
So this if we get the video up
here almost.
Well, it'll come in a second.
This person is in
some ways the canonical example of
someone who is completely innocent, and
it isn't to say that if you were guilty
in some way, that it would justify any
of the things that have happened.
But having him speak here is the quantum
hand of the NSA doing this to us.
We.
Probably not, but having him be able
to speak here, he should be able to come
in person.
There are lots of political prisoners
around the world of different stripes,
and the fact that he cannot travel here
is a fundamental violation of his
human rights.
But nonetheless, the Internet allows us
to give voice to other people.
So in this case, I'm hoping
it's OK.
Just trying to.
There we go. Now, we should be able to
buy time to talk about it.
And least you say
that I think you're right, size
fell in line.
So I have the great pleasure of knowing
my son back very well, and hopefully I'll
talk about him for a couple of seconds
while we get the connection that working
because we got a room full of techies and
of course, we can't get face time
working. So typical, really.
Moiseyev is a very, very close friend of
mine. Very I consider myself very lucky
to have got to know him
since he was released from Guantanamo
Bay.
Here we go.
Are we ready?
We are we are ready.
Well, first of all, it's my absolute
great pleasure to be addressing you
remotely from Birmingham.
Where I live was where I was born
to you and Honberg, it's
quite bizarre. But actually, the first
time I was ever in any kind of a
video call or video conference
was from the Bagram detention facility,
where I was held by the Americans in
2002.
And I had an interrogation
conducted by a
video link.
It might seem implausible
now in the sense that
the technology was perhaps
not as advanced as this now that people
can have it in their homes.
But back then, I was shocked
that here in the middle of the Afghan
mountains, the Americans had bought
these fancy computers and
were trying to get me interrogated and
getting me interrogated by members of the
CIA and the FBI right across
the United States to the United States of
America, where they had
deemed me and hundreds of other people
caught up in the war on terror as
enemy aliens, enemy combatants,
unlawful belligerents, any type
of name you want to designate
somebody with other than the ones
that they deserve, i.e.
human beings.
And essentially, this is what has
happened in the war on terror, that
people have been defined according to
codes that we thought
that we'd done away with, that things
like Nuremberg, things
like the United
Nations Convention Against Torture
and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
would never happen again.
Yet the reality is in 2015,
Guantanamo is still open.
I was just recently with a friend of mine
called Shaker Aamer, who unbelievably
has been returned to the United Kingdom
after 14 years of
detention without charge or trial,
held on the basis of secret evidence that
he could never challenge
kept away from his children, which
included a child he'd never seen,
and the others so young that they don't
even remember their father.
Now, one would think
that perhaps this is the sort of thing
that goes on inside deepest,
darkest Africa or Asia or some
country where the rule of law simply
doesn't apply.
But this was between two parties
known to the world as the bastions of
democracy and freedom and human rights.
The British government, who are complicit
in keeping him and me and many others
there and the United States of America
that has invaded numerous
countries in the name of protecting
human rights.
If it wasn't so serious, it would be
laughable.
But the reality and the truth of the
matter is that these are some of just
some of the measures that are
available to the governments
against those people,
not just terrorists.
We all understand that there's a need to
defend, defend against any
terrorism. But this goes way beyond
that, because nowadays, as you will be
aware, well aware, everybody is called
a terrorist.
If you can see, for example, in the
British parliament, the British prime
minister, David Cameron, actually said
to the opposition leader, that is the
leader of the Labor Party, Jeremy
Corbyn, that you and your party
are a threat to national security.
And he even called him a an
apologist, a sympathizer
for terrorism.
So if that can be said to the leader
of the opposition party in the United
Kingdom who is perspectively the
former the future prime minister
of this country, possibly, then
what do the rest of us where
do we fit in all of this and the
laws and the measures that have been
meted out against us include a
series on a raft of legislations,
which I just want to explain to.
You have affected
all of us who have been
calling for accountability.
And essentially this is the price of
dissent. The price of dissent isn't
simply that you get vilified in the
press, as we do quite regularly.
The price of dissent means essentially
that you can and will be detained
without charge or trial.
You will be subjected to cruel, inhuman
and degrading treatment.
You will be tortured.
You will be have.
Meaningless communication with your
family. I.e., that letters
that are sent to you by your family
members might get you six months or a
year after they were sent.
It means that you will be detained.
Once you are released, you will be
detained at airports
and entry ports of the country
under the scheduled seven Terrorism Act,
which essentially means you can be held
for up to nine hours at a port of entry
or exit in the country, like what
happened with David Miranda, the partner
of Glenn Greenwald, when he was bringing
over important information which
was seized by the British authorities
under the name of national security,
which, of course, Glenn Greenwald
and David Miranda had nothing to
do with. And essentially what
happens is that these laws and measures,
they may say they are
targeting a minority
within a minority, i.e.
Muslims who happen to be
committed to terrorism.
But in fact, it goes on, as you have
seen, to target the Muslim community
and then to target everybody who
dissents. As I said, that you can see
in the case of Jeremy Corbyn and the
Labor Party and anybody else
who dissents that they are
deemed to be terrorists.
One of the latest legislations that the
the home secretary of this country has
said that this
that is culminated after a multitude
of laws that have been passed in this
country, now
says that in the snooper's charter,
under the new investigatory powers
bill announced by the
home secretary that the Internet
browsing history of everyone
in the UK, everyone
will be stored for up to a year
by the security services and they
will be given access to
the lists of visited websites
without any warrant.
This essentially means if you were to
translate this into
non technical
terms, that they could enter your
home and take away all of
your belongings and every document
you've ever had without any warrant,
without any charge sheet, without any
arrest, without any evidence at all,
and simply keep it in their custody for
up to a year or more.
And you can do anything about it
simply because this exists
in cyberspace.
This is what the government will be
arguing. And this is where we've got to,
because sadly, people
have been silent.
They've remained
at best, silent at worst, giving
approval when they saw these
lists of
law after law being passed that
exclusively applied
to people from the Muslim community.
And just to give you an example, when I
came back from Guantanamo after three
years of detention without trial,
within days my passport
was seized. I was subjected to
something called the royal prerogative.
And that is for those of you who don't
understand something in our
democracy in Britain,
where the queen decides
with the power invested into
the home secretary that your
passport can be taken away from you from
an unlimited period of time.
And it's based upon secret
evidence, evidence that you could never
challenge in court.
So mine was taken away and passport
of others for several years.
I challenged it.
Eventually, I got my passport back,
but not that I traveled to any
country and returned to the UK,
except that I was stopped under
schedule seven of the Terrorism Act,
which meant essentially I could be
detained without charge again at
the ports of entry and exit in
Britain and.
Even when I was going on visits
to give evidence at trials
and tribunals like, for example, the
Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, where
both Bush and Blair
were charged with crimes against
humanity, whether it was going
to the European Parliament
to give evidence about rendition
programs with the British and the
Americans and other countries had been
complicit in the torture and the
false imprisonment of others, or whether
it was going to countries like Pakistan,
Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and
even Syria, where I uncovered
that there was intelligence cooperation
between the British government, the
American government and all of the
regimes of those countries
where eventually the Arab Spring
erupted.
In all of those cases, being
stopped at ports of entry and exit to the
country was a matter of routine for
people like me.
And of course, eventually they just
decided that this is too much.
And after a return trip from South
Africa, they decided to take my passport
again away for the second time
in two years without any legal process,
without any explanation, without
any ability to
see the evidence that they're using to
take this away from you.
But it goes beyond that.
I was then again arrested
because of an accusation
of being involved in supplying
finance to the
to people in Syria.
And essentially this was that I provided
a an electricity generator
to the Syrian rebels.
And as a result of this,
I was raided.
I was by 150 police officers,
my children scattered throughout several
homes because my home was in
uninhabitable with all the
police around it.
I was taken to a maximum security prison
held there as a category, a prisoner
for seven months, only at the end of
it, to be declared innocent by the very
people who took me in.
But even after that, it didn't end.
During the period of time that I was in
prison, my assets
were frozen under a terrorism asset
freeze cage.
The organization that you will be hearing
much more from had
their accounts closed.
My own accounts were closed, my wife's
account was closed. My children,
including my 11 year old son's accounts,
were closed again without any
recourse to justice.
And essentially, I've tried to figure
out in my head why,
what did I have to do to these people, to
these governments ever in my
life? I've never been to America,
but America has been to me.
It came and took me from my home in
Pakistan in 2002 and
took me to the world's most notorious
prison.
And since that point, they have never
shown in any way how I've
harmed them, except for one way.
Seeking justice and accountability
and seeking justice and accountability
they think will harm them.
Then I'm going to continue to do that
because nobody is above the law and
nobody is beyond accountability.
And essentially, when you have found
time and again that your own government
has been complicit in the abuse,
the physical and mental and psychological
abuse of citizens of its own country
and beyond, if you are able
to do so, you are duty bound
to ensure that you uncover
every truth, though they despise
it. And that is the price of dissent that
we have been paying for the past 10
years. Things have got, as you've seen,
from bad to worse.
But in this process,
though, we have made enemies as far as
some governments are concerned,
as we know.
People are not supposed to be afraid
and frightened of their governments,
governments are supposed to be afraid and
frightened of the people.
And in this regard, we have gained so
many allies and supporters
that it's hard to count them anymore.
Cage has gone on from being just an
organization that's solely used to
campaign for the rights of Guantanamo
prisoners to an organization now
that stands up for the rights of
everyone. And when I say everyone,
everyone that has been designated
in the so-called war on terror as
some sort of an extremist without any
legal process at all.
So essentially now,
just before I finish,
what's really important is that.
We are in a new era and in an era
where most of us don't even understand
where we're going to fit in all of this,
we don't know what will happen tomorrow.
We don't know with the technology
that is moving on
as we speak.
We don't know what it's going to take us.
But something I just want to give you an
idea just to recognize for all of
you. And I think it's very relevant to
you. During one of my interrogations
in the Bagram detention facility, which
is in Afghanistan, it was
a place set up by the Americans shortly
after they invaded Afghanistan in 2002.
I was asked by the CIA
for a password for a
an encryption program that
I was using, and at that time it
was called PGP pretty good
private privacy.
I was new in it.
I hadn't understood its detailed
operational system.
It is something that I thought I was
introduced to and I used it
a few times.
The police in Britain, while I was in
the Bagram detention facility, raided
my home and they took my computer.
They passed on that information to the
Americans in Bagram.
In Bagram, I was approached
by the CIA and the FBI
and told that if you don't give us this
passport password, then.
Some terrible things may happen to you
and let me just explain to you what sort
of things were happening in background.
So you've got you've got a flavor
of the type of place it was
in Bagram. I came across the
case of a man called Ibn al-Sheikh al
Libi. And it's so important because
that's the reason you'll find in a moment
why we are where we are today.
The CIA said to me, if you don't
cooperate with us, we will send you to
Egypt, just like we did to Abdul Sheik
al Libi, who they claimed was a senior
member of al-Qaida.
They had, in fact, sent him to Egypt.
In Egypt, he was tortured under
the intelligence chief of
Hosni Mubarak, the president, into
giving a false confession.
That false confession was that he was a
member of al-Qaida.
The first falsity, the second falsity
is that they were working with Saddam
Hussein on obtaining weapons of mass
destruction.
This information was taken by
Colin Powell, who was the U.S.
secretary of state at the time, presented
to the United Nations Security Council as
credible evidence to invade Iraq.
And that's exactly what they did.
The rest, as we say, is history.
So it was during this period that
they'd asked me and told me that if you
don't cooperate with us, we will send
you either to Egypt or to Syria,
as we had done with it.
Now, Sheikh al Libi and it all began
with looking at the documentation
on the laptop of mine that they had
seized. They included innocent pictures
of my family, which they waved in front
of me and said that if you do not
cooperate with us, what
do you think will happen to your
children? Do you think you will ever see
them again?
And while they were doing that, they were
the sounds of a woman screaming and
in the cage next door that I was
led to believe was my wife being
tortured.
And so, you see, this is
why it's so important that
the encryption programs, the various
ones that cage ourselves, we are trying
now to learn to use and
to implement in our daily lives isn't
because we have anything to hide.
It's because we are and
we have experience of
those people who are
now mastering in the arts of torture and
abuse, that whatever information
they use and they get hold of,
they will use it against you even if it
was the most innocent thing.
I remember there was a picture of the
pope that had been
cached in my memory
that had been from a BBC website.
And when they seized my laptop, they
said, what have you got a picture of the
pope here?
Is this because you're planning some
nefarious activity against him?
And so that
in the end turned out to be
one of the ludicrous reasons
why I remained in Guantanamo for
all of those periods.
But finally, I'd like to thank you,
all of you, for listening, for taking the
time to listen to the work of Cage and
for supporting us and giving me the
opportunity to explain what
price we've had to pay for this.
Thank you very much.
Excellent. So that was my Izembek
very good friend of mine who actually
introduced me to my wife, so I've got a
lot to thank him for.
My name's Kerry Bullivant and I'm from
Cage as well.
I got involved with Cage after being held
in the UK in Britain under
secret evidence and secret trial for two
and a half years, six months of that in
Belmarsh high security
prison.
The case against me was secret.
I was never given any reason.
And even though now I've been found
innocent to this day, I still
don't know what it was I was even accused
of in the first place.
That meant I had spent two years
under house arrest and six months
in a high security prison.
I'm sorry, I can't wait for the flights
because my son went on for a little bit
longer and we're very pushed for time.
Jake will tell me off if we run over.
So
after basically a year and a half
of living under a control order, which is
a form of house arrest where you're not
allowed to leave the house except for a
couple of hours a day, you have to phone
the police before you leave.
You have to phone the police. When you
return, you have to
have a tag on your ankle.
Basically the sorts of stuff that you
hear about in countries like Burma,
after a year and a half of that, I'd had
enough. I couldn't take it anymore.
And I just decided that the best thing
for me was to abscond
to to make a run for it and
leave the country.
And are you going to get it fixed
to to leave
and to go on the run and to go into
hiding?
You can see up there a lovely wanted
picture. Have you seen this man?
That's me when I had hair.
And Innovest, I don't
know why that's there.
There are some people in this world that
weren't built for vests and I'm one of
them.
So having
spent about six
weeks on the run, it was major
breaking news at the time you
had the the
independent review of anti-terrorism
legislation. Lord Carlile saying these
are dangerous people.
We have solid intelligence about them,
but we can't tell you what it is because
it's a secret.
And you can check that up.
It's in the sun. He says we have solid
intelligence. He'll come up later.
We move along.
I was as I said, I was found innocent.
And it was because of that experience,
because of going through it, because of
feeling it on a first hand basis.
Myself, though, I came
to be working with Cage.
But why Cage? Why not any other
organizations?
There are there are plenty of human
rights groups out there.
And my mother, who had always been my
biggest supporter throughout this whole
period where I was held
on the secret evidence and secret trial,
she had always believed in me.
And when I was in prison, she'd gone to
these large human rights organizations,
some of which are represented here.
And unfortunately, none of them had
been willing to take on my case, even
though there was secret evidence and
clear breaches of due process
and the norms of justice that we all
understand.
None of these major human rights
organizations were willing to touch it
because it was terrorism.
And, you know, these cases often look
quite bad.
So it was after I came out that I found
out that the only people that were taking
on these cases, the only people that were
speaking out on these cases of
due process were cage.
They took on cases based on principle,
not on whether they were trending.
You'd be the cause celeb
for defending them, not because
they'd get praise in the media and
loaded about.
In fact, Cage actively took cases
that were unpopular because
those are the ones that we need the most.
It's fundamental if we
do not protect the rights of everybody,
then really we don't have the rights for
anybody.
Cage began as a website back in
those days, it was Cageprisoners dot com
and there's a beautiful quote there from
one of our directors talking about the
importance of the Internet cage
existed to bypass the mainstream
media that weren't talking about what was
happening in Guantanamo Bay, to get
information out there about the people
who were held captive and to
give the power back to the
the masses and to change the narrative
on these cases.
We've seen that from Guantanamo Bay,
especially that the vast,
vast majority, I think, is home
to something like 97 percent of the
people that have been held in Guantanamo
Bay have been released without charge,
without trial.
Moazzam Begg among them, shocking Ahmed,
14 years, who I'll be
talking about a bit later on as well.
And so what we see
is that Muslims in the suspect community
are the canaries in the mine.
What happens to them and how
things are tested out on them?
Because society at the moment, because of
fear of terrorism, are more
likely to be accepting of these things
when it's posed as a terrorism
issue. And the issue is not going to be
affecting everybody.
It's just these these funny brown folk
with big beards.
So when we see what happens
to them, inevitably
it happens to the rest of society
starting off with activists and
dissidents.
The clear examples of that, David
Miranda, the Moazzam Begg mentioned
the lawyers for both
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, all
have been affected and held under
counter-terrorism legislation in
the UK.
And it's very important that I bring
up those examples.
I cite those examples because journalists
and lawyers are meant to be two very
protected roles in our society
to roles that are meant to hold people
to account.
And when you start trying to put fear
into them, then this is a very, very
dangerous step down a slippery road.
The BBC, a BBC journalist, just recently
had his laptop taken off him
again under anti-terror legislation.
We've seen The Guardian affected by this
as well.
So what we see is that
after 14 years of the war on terror,
are we any safer if we look around
the world now and compare it to 2001?
Is there less terrorism?
Are we suddenly sleeping better in
our beds?
I don't think so.
I think that that's a fairly obvious
fact. I think if you look at
the empirical evidence,
the biggest things that have caused
people to go towards groups like al Qaeda
and ISIS are what Guantanamo
Bay, drone strikes, illegal detention,
all of these things that scream
of hypocrisy.
We try to claim the moral high ground and
say we're the West and we defend
liberties and our
actions speak otherwise.
And that's why Cage is necessary to hold
the powerful to account and to speak
truth to power.
The MacNicol, this is a
800 year old document that is
meant to be the basis and foundation of
law in Britain and
in America is actually part of the
constitution in America and it is
enshrined there.
Not so in the UK, though,
and we just turned 800
years old. And this is the main obstacle
of it that is still relevant today
in Britain especially.
I'll try not to focus too
much on Britain. I know we have a very
international audience, but the focus
right now is on British Muslims
accepting British values.
The British values are
this ideal set that
we have to live by.
And at the same time that we're being
told as Muslims in Britain that we're not
British enough, that we're not
we're not following the
sick.
A government
line enough they are throwing
these things out of the window
from even just from what you heard from
them, from what I've been telling you
about secret courts and secret trials,
you can see that this has gone completely
out of the window, which leads us to the
core processes that Cage
seeks to uphold such occasions
by upholding due process.
As I said before, everybody has
the right to a fair trial.
Everybody has the right to know what the
accusations are against them.
We need to work towards ending this cycle
of violence and breaking it down.
We didn't get to peace in Northern
Ireland by more bombs and more killing.
We got to peace in Northern Ireland by
negotiation and trying to provide
justice for all sides.
And the final thing is empowerment,
empowerment by giving a voice to the
voiceless, giving a voice to people who
for so long have not
been given the opportunity to speak out.
So what has been the price of dissent for
Cage?
What have we paid as a price for
it? This is a shot.
Some of the guys that were coming with us
to this conference.
This is from three days ago.
This was on their backs when they when
they got to to
Hamburg, they were stopped by the German
authorities for over three hours,
questioned about this conference, why
they were coming here, what they were
planning to do here.
And the German authorities said, we're
just doing this because the Brits told us
to. We we we we
checked out what they saw, what they say
do not load stamp
means. It basically means that the Brits
weren't sure whether they were going to
even let us come to this conference
and they put this on the backs to say put
it on at the last moment when we've
decided if we're going to let them go.
I think that even the fact that
they tried to block a simple
communication like this says a lot
about the price of descent dissent
on.
So, Kate, you've had their
bank accounts closed since early 2014.
That was when my son had his accounts
closed. I had my accounts closed.
His whole family had their accounts
closed.
To this day, I still don't have a bank
account. I have to rely on bank accounts
of my friends and family.
And that's fine.
That's good. We're in great company with
WikiLeaks there who have also had their
bank accounts closed to all who have had
days affected.
And we're happy for that.
I want to make something very, very clear
here, we're not moaning about the price
that we pay for to send all of these
things away, we're going to be mentioning
here are not something that we didn't
know about going into this.
You can't step up and speak out on
account people in power without having
some some some come back on it.
So this is about telling you about it,
but also saying that that's fine, that's
not a problem. And we're up for it.
They want to bring it.
Come on.
Just some of the major funders of Cage
were main charities,
the Rodeck Foundation, the
thank you very much, the Rodek Foundation
and the Round Shoe Trust for parcels
used to support Cage and the Charity
Commission came in and said,
you guys can't fund them anymore.
And it's meant to be an independent
organization. So we took them to court
over this and we said, look, you're
independent.
These are charities.
And their objective is to fund people who
support freedom of speech
and you're trying to block them.
And that's not within your remit.
As we got into the Coupal, we got
access to a lot of the emails and
all of their emails regarding Cage.
And we found out that the
the head of the of the charity
commission, William Shawcross, Sir
William Shawcross, who will again come up
later, was told
by the American intelligence services
and in his own words, in his own emails
that they had to put pressure on and try
and stop our funding.
And this was reported in The Guardian as
well.
There's been a barrage of attacks from
the right wing. And I'll be honest, when
you're speaking out against the military
industrial complex, you expect the
Murdoch media to come after you
with their knives sharpened.
But it's gone beyond the Murdoch media.
We have the prime minister
of Britain mentioning it's
directly in speeches, telling
the largest student union body
that they shouldn't have anything to do
with this and they should be ashamed of
themselves for getting involved with
Cage. This is the level to which it's
gone to right at the very top.
They're still coming for us.
We've got a little rogues gallery here
of middle aged white men that don't like
Katch.
So starting there with the leader,
we've got David Cameron.
The PM does not stand for pick
molester.
It's prime minister.
William William Shawcross,
who, as I said, was the head of the
charity commission.
He's also the queen's official
biographer.
So we see here that at the heart of the
establishment, a strong neocon
thread of people who have taken it upon
themselves to attack
Cage and in some cases, myself
personally. Lord Carlile, he was the
independent reviewer of terrorism
who said that their secret evidence
was solid against me personally.
However, when a judge finally got to see
that evidence after two and a half years,
he said they were never even reasonable
grounds for suspicion.
I want to clarify that there were never
any reasonable grounds for suspicion that
I'd done anything wrong, let alone been
involved in terrorism.
Now, reasonable grounds for suspicion,
which is the burden of proof that they
have to prove with the secret court and
secret evidence where they can't he hear
your side of the case.
Reasonable grounds for suspicion is
the burden of proof. You need to do a
stop and search on the street two and
a half years of my own life taken away on
the basis of a burden of proof that
is stopping search
next flight
so we can play a little game here.
We're going to we're going to get some
hands in the air, a
little bit skewed audience participation.
So just take your hands in the air like
you just don't care how many people have
had their bank accounts closed for
no reason and with no accountability.
As a couple, but largely
all the hands down where this has been
happening across the Muslim community,
it's happened to people
within two workers
within the organization, one board member
myself, Muslim bag.
And it's going on among
a whole range of other groups and
organizations, including the Cordoba
Foundation, A.L, secretely and
others.
How many people have had their passport
taken away and given
no due process to try and get it back
at all?
We're now in the U.K.
and the word progressive and other
legislation, this is happening more
and more and more among the Muslim
community.
We I've had my passport taken away in the
royal progressive before.
Moazzam Begg has taken away twice.
My next door neighbor, when I used to
live in Birmingham, had his possible
taken away.
And I personally, personally know
of probably about 40, 50
people that have had this happening to
them.
How many people here have been banned
from entering countries
for four, again, for no other reason
or given the reason?
Again, we got one or two hands here.
Again, Cage members have been barred
from a pretty impressive list myself
from Turkey.
I was going on an aid convoy and they
decided the sleeping bags I
was going to be giving to refugees in
Turkey were far too dangerous.
And I had to basically hitchhike
back to the UK from from the Turkish
border, which was a fun trip.
Next one.
How many people have been detained in
there upon entering the country
for up to six hours?
This could schedule seven miles.
We spoke about quite a lot.
It's actually a very important piece of
legislation because it's very, very
dangerous in what it can do.
And it's one of the things that it's the
legislation they used on David Miranda.
If you look to the list list of the
different rights that you don't
have when you're traveling
in and out of the country.
Now, my lovely and long suffering wife
is Dutch.
She comes from Amsterdam.
And so I have to go to Amsterdam very,
very regularly because otherwise
my mother in law won't see her, her
grandchildren, and that will involve me
getting stopped very quickly.
So every single time I come
back, this is the first time that I have
to go through and not just me.
Six between 60000 and 90000
people a year
are affected by these by this
legislation.
And there is no requirement for
reasonable suspicion at all.
Happens to so much in the office that
we've got a leaderboards tracking
who's been stopped the most.
OK, now this is this is the future, and
this is very scary and this is what we're
just starting to see happen, how many
people have had their children taken away
because of their religious or political
beliefs?
That's a horrific statement, just
the fact that we can say that
is horrific.
We wound
that with the new legislation would
prevent became mandatory and statutory,
and every civil servant has to
implement this policy of
basically spying upon communities,
that the outcome of that would be
children being taken away from their
families. We were told that we were
scaremongering and that would never
happen. It has happened.
It's already been happening.
You're dealing with eight cases at the
moment and these cases
are again being heard in secret courts
and secret involving secret evidence.
You've got 360000
public sector workers who have been
trained to spy on Muslims who have been
trained to spot the signs of
radicalization.
Those signs of radicalization
and the effect of that has been a 500
percent increase in the number of
referrals.
The the training they receive is an
hour and a half.
That's one hour video,
which includes scenes from this is
England and a half an hour
question and answer session where they're
meant to learn the ins and outs of Islam.
A religion is 1400 years old
and be able to spot what a radicalized
I actually come from an Irish family and
being a radical as it was meant to be a
good thing.
So this is a terrifying
development in the war on terror.
We're going to talk more about prevention
later on as long as I could get a shout
out.
So I'm going to skip over
this because you heard about those.
It's not scaremongering.
These are all documented cases.
And we are not going to
be silent on these issues.
We will keep on talking out.
We will not lay down.
We will not shut up because it is an
obligation upon us to speak truth to
the people in power.
And we will continue to speak truth to
the people in power, as we did when
we compiled the first comprehensive
list of people that have been held in
Guantanamo Bay.
We will continue to speak truth to power,
as we did when we exposed the
British complicity in the rendition
and CIA torture programs.
We will continue to speak truth to power
in the way that we did when Moazzam
was able for his work and for his
campaigning to change the views on
Guantanamo.
We will continue to speak truth to power
when we expose black sites, CIA
prisons, and we will continue to speak
truth to power to
countries like Abu Dhabi that
have secret prisons.
And the reason why the Qatari embassy is
on there is because there was a custody
man being held at the secret prison
within walking distance of his own
embassy in his own embassy had no idea of
it.
Kati's opposition to prevent has been
groundbreaking, and we are leading the
way in this area.
We organized a petition of over 300
leading academics in the UK
and across the across the world who
signed a joint
letter saying how damaging and dangerous
for them was.
Some of you might know who this guy is.
I hear he's quite well known
and he emphasizes
the same point here, that what happens
to the Muslim community will happen
to the rest of us as well.
So Cage has been involved in the release
of Guantanamo prisoners and
working for this, especially
with the South African government now.
We have been very proud of our
work to get people released
from a variety of different
situations where they've been held
unjustly.
We were working on the case of Alan
Henning and obviously, very, very
sadly, that one didn't work out.
But one of the things I always say about
Alan Henning was that he was rendered
from his from his aid convoy.
He was detained indefinitely without
charge or trial, and then he was
murdered by extrajudicial killing
by ISIS.
And we stand out against that.
And we campaigned for his release
and we were working behind the scenes for
his release. And we have done for
four other people like Norman Kember.
And for us,
it doesn't matter if you're ISIS
and you're kidnaping people or you're the
CIA and you're kidnaping people.
It's all wrong.
It's all illegal.
And you should be held to account.
And earlier earlier and
earlier on this year, we won a landmark
case against the the
charity commission
in regards to them trying
to stop our funding, which
would never happen before.
So obviously, because
of the crowd that we are here, I want to
talk about infosec for for a minute with
you guys and
the threat that we face as
an organization, as we are holding
governments to account, as we are holding
security services to account as well
as we are holding all
these different organizations to
account. We know that the people that
are trying to spy on us and
snoop into our emails, some of the most
dangerous people out there
in regards to these sorts of issues.
And so this letter from
Jason Leopold from the CIA,
where he did a Freedom of Information
request as to whether they're spying on
us. Unfortunately, they weren't that
forthcoming with the particulars.
So infosec is very, very important
for us in our work. It protects our
sources. It protects the work.
The people that we're working with
TOR is our standard browser
in the office.
It would be very, very bad if anyone was
caught using anything else.
And we're looking to within the Muslim
community around Europe
to do a tor tool, which just sounds
brilliant, where we're hoping
to help people learn
about Tor and get communities using
it more frequently because it's such an
important piece of kit.
GPG encryption
is used on all of our internal
communications and I've got to give a
special shout out to signal, which
just does so much incredible work.
And Cage couldn't exist without
all of these pieces of technology
that we use every day.
So allow us to communicate with our
clients and to leak
out critical information that we're
doing.
So I want to end on a very big thank you.
Firstly, I thank you to the survivors and
to the people who have been through these
things and are working
with Cage and and a big,
massive thank you to to you guys,
basically the people in the communities
to create things like tor the communities
that create things like signal with who,
without whose help. We couldn't do this
work. This work would just fall flat
without without the tools that you guys
create.
The tools that you create are saving
lives and exposing lies.
Thank you very much.
So so now we're going to
if you want to exit, if
you want to exit, now would be a good
time.
But we're going to do a Q&A.
But before you leave, there's one thing I
want to say, which maybe is not the
kindest thing to say, but it's an
important thing to say.
Now, none of you can say that you didn't
know. So it's up to us to do something
to change these things.
So if you have a question, please come to
the microphones. This is, I think, a
really unique chance to talk to people
who really need to interact
with the infosec community, who need to
think about the things that this
conference and that the CCC has been
thinking about for 30 years and getting
these groups together is really huge.
So I hope that you're welcome, Cage and
integrate them into the community, sit
with them in the tea house, really talk
with them and come to the microphone now
to ask questions.
You probably won't be drowned, but
it'd be worth it.
Do you have a question?
OK, I guess.
Thank you for having this topic because
we always knew people were spying.
But seeing this happening in
more or less our neighbor country is
quite shocking, to be honest.
And I guess my question is, since
you're using Tor and GBG and
Siegenthaler, all of that, have you
experienced any flaws?
So the government, knowing the things you
only communicated through
supposedly secure channels?
So far we haven't had any
cases where we've found obvious
flaws and seen
identifiable issues yet.
But it's my inclination
that if there was, they'd probably be
quite careful not to expose
it to us. But like
so far, so good.
And we can only do what
we can, but we haven't
had any complaints yet.
Thank you very much.
Took a question from
the Internet, please.
Yes, what can we do to strike
a balance between government overreach
to prevent terrorist attacks and privacy
protection?
OK, so I couldn't see who asked that,
but thank you for the for the question.
Oh, yeah.
No, I think what we need to do is
remember always our fundamental
values and our fundamental principles
about the rule of law and implementing
justice equally regardless
of the situation.
Generally speaking, every time you go
into the realms of overreach, you're
making the problem worse for yourself,
not better.
And that, in and of itself,
is a self-defeating way
of approaching these situations.
We didn't need all this legislation
rafts and Ralf's of it, that we've had
since 9/11 to deal with the
the Irish situation.
And to be honest, the Irish were much
better at being terrorists than the
Muslims have proven to be.
Yeah, so and
even now, we we see the
according to FBI reports and
Interpol, varying
numbers, but 97 percent.
And in America, 98 percent of
all terrorism has nothing to do with
Islam. So we we need to
take a realistic approach, take a
measured approach and maintain
our values.
Microphone six, please.
Hello. Yes, sir.
I'd like to ask
so you've had all your bank accounts
closed and on blocked,
so and this is one of the
supposed use cases for Bitcoin.
I'm just wondering, have
you been using it or what reasons
have you had for not using it?
Wider sense.
OK, so speaking personally,
I'm not a great techie.
Bitcoin is something I've looked at a few
times for for getting involved in and
using.
And it's something that could have been
been looking at.
I think one of the main reasons that sort
of held us back so far has been market
fluctuations.
I think as far as I understand
and as I said, it's not my area of
expertize all but with the with the
fluctuating value of it.
It can be quite
there's been some organization worries
and concerns on that regard.
But it is something that we're definitely
looking at and coming to places like that
and meeting people like you guys who are
experts in these sorts of things is very,
very invaluable for us because we need
that that layer of expertize
and advice.
Microphone one, please.
Thank you so much for coming and sharing
your story with us. This was a really
incredible talk. Um, I think
kind of piggybacking on what you just
said. It's super important for
communities like this one to hear about
experience like yours, not simply because
we can probably help you with digital
security. And it's really awesome to see
that you're already using a lot of these
tools. Could you maybe talk about other
organizations like Cege that are not in
the UK since this is such an
international audience and how we might
be able to reach out to them to sort of
offer them the same resources or at least
just be in touch in solidarity?
There are a lot of really, really good
organizations that are doing similar
sorts of work. So in France, where
at the moment the legislation in France
has gone into hyperdrive, absolutely
insane. I was telling you about control
orders that I was under in the
wake of the Paris attacks.
In the space of two days, they put 400
people under these sorts of similar
measures without charge and without
trial. They're actually the
the the French government
putting in a request to the Supreme
Court to look into the legality
of opening up a domestic Guantanamo
Bay where they could lock people up
without trial and without charge in
France.
So we're looking at internment camps on
mainland Europe, basically.
And so in France, there's a brilliant
organization called CCF.
My French is absolutely terrible, but I
think it basically means like
standing against Islamophobia.
But they are doing some brilliant,
brilliant work.
There's quite a few organizations
in Holland doing some good stuff on this.
Helen Duffy, who's based
in Denmark, is
actually superb on this sort of stuff.
And so there are quite a few
things. We're going to be upstairs in the
tea room. If you come come to us, we can
give you sort of a more full list
north
microphone to please
up.
First of all, I'd like to say that you
guys are insanely brave for what you're
doing, so.
Yeah, thank you.
The thing is.
Nobody likes abuses and nobody
in their right mind would ever
condone being wrongfully
accused or being taken to Guantanamo or
whatnot, but
there's this
crazy fear about
terrorism.
Yeah.
In light of the recent attacks.
So what do you think the security
community or you guys could
do in order to help
Big Brother or whoever
to prevent terrorism?
Because, OK, we are
fighting abuse and that's great.
But these things do happen, and I'm
personally terrified of that.
Yeah, look, we're
all terrified and scared of
the the dangers that that we're placed
under. And I think we
at the same time, we have to make sure
that we take a balanced approach.
And we look at these things
in a scale that's befitting
what they are.
The attacks in Paris were horrible and no
one would deny that.
Unfortunately, according
to Nobel Peace Prize
winning statisticians
and doctors, there have been four million
deaths since the war
on terror from indigenous Muslim
peoples in their own lands.
So we have to if we
want to get past this war on terror,
we have to move towards a situation of
justice for all peoples.
And to be honest, we have to
realize that and take our
own privilege into account.
Western lives are valuable.
All lives are but our eastern lives
as well. And as long as we are rampaging
around the world, dropping bombs
willy nilly, then there are
going to be those people that are going
to seek to attack us in
the same sort of way.
It's horrific and it's wrong and it
shouldn't happen.
But it happened with the Irish.
It happened in South in
South Africa with the ANC and Nelson
Mandela was involved in bombing
campaigns.
And so we have to look at
this in the context of history and
not take history away from what's going
on at the moment.
A question from the Internet, please.
So this question is, is kitsch
connected to other groups which fight
against or prevent in the
UK?
Yeah, in terms of working against
PREVENT, there's a very
good organization called Prevent Watch
which do incredible work
dealing with the people who are affected
by it.
We had a case just recently of
an eight year old boy who was
in class. They were discussing
environmentalism.
And this eight year old boy said, I think
it's really good what Greenpeace do.
They get out there and they stop the
Japanese from killing the whales.
They crash their boats into them.
They kind of like eco terrorists.
And two hours later, he was being taken
out of the classroom by police and
questioned about his views on Israel and
Palestine and ISIS.
This is an eight year old child in the
United Kingdom.
Prevent. Watch that case.
I worked with Cage.
We got it out into the public sphere.
We're working with the US, the largest
student body in the UK.
They have a
they are working with us widely
in the university setting.
We're working with a whole range of
organizations.
Too many to list, really mopac
the modifier.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
Microphone number four, please.
Thanks.
So my question is, if you want, I believe
if you want to change behavior, we
basically have to understand why this
behavior. So if you could you put
yourself in the shoes of the government.
What is what is their narrative?
Are they what you say?
Oh, we just want to find terrorist
activity domestic or to demand
votes or to direct money or
what are their intentions?
There's a couple of problems.
There's there's a couple of issues.
And that's a really great question.
By the way, there's a couple of
issues here from the government's
perspective. One, we have a
very strong neoconservative push going
on across multiple governments
at the moment, which are very hawkish
and seek to enrich
the military industrial complex
to they've got a fundamental
misunderstanding about the way that
terrorism happens.
So we're constantly told in the
media that it's all to do with
radicalization and understandings
of Islam and people
you know, one guy starts wearing a thobe,
thing grows a beard, and the next thing
you know, he's probably going to be
joining ISIS, the academic
experts in these fields,
mosques, Hageman, who is Axia
and actually came up with this theory
and other experts who say this is
complete nonsense.
The terrorism that we face now is like
every other terrorism.
It comes from political
dissatisfaction.
And that's why Cage, we
always try to try to use the term
political violence, because that's what
it is. It's a it's a political
situation. We need to find a political
solution to it.
So that sort of answers.
And the last question, microphone
two, please.
Hi. Hi.
Thank you for your question or sorry,
this is my question. Thank you for your
time.
I know exactly how you feel right now.
Yeah.
OK, but
it's see, that's on stage.
I guess my question to you is,
as a technologist, how can we better
support you and build better tools and
basically build tools that are effective
for your organization, for organizations
like you?
Thank you very much.
I think that what
we need, especially at the moment, is
advice and working with people who are
experts in these sorts of areas.
And there are a lot of things that, for
example,
there's software now that's going out and
being rolled out across the country in
schools where
if you type in any one of a number of
keywords, you get flagged up for the
prevention measures, which I was telling
you about, where kids get taken out of
schools and questioned by the police and
sometimes even taken away from their
families.
When we found out about the software,
we found out that
the some of the names
on the list for ordinary
activists who have
very, very clearly have no reason
to be on any such list.
And so we we're like, this is McCarthyist
system.
And anyone checking the typing things in
can innocently then cause
problems for themselves later on.
One of the things that we tried to do was
find out and work out what
the full list was.
We had a screenshot of a presentation
that they gave, but
we couldn't and we had no idea of
how to approach those sorts of problems.
So working with people like yourselves
to deal with these things
would be very, very good
and sort of getting into sort
of finding out and
researching these sorts of issues.
Thank you very much for this inspiring
talk. It's kind of disturbing,
but we all have to know that.
Thank you. Thank you very much for having
me.