*rC3 preroll music*
Herald: As we said the years before, the force merged to main. Andy is commonly
known in our scene. His current talk "CIA vs. WikiLeaks: intimidation, surveillance,
and other tactics observed and experienced". In this talk Andy aims to
report and show us a collection of his observations, physical, visual and other
evidences of the last year incidents that strongly indicate the context of US
Central Intelligence Agency and potentially other entities of the US
government acting against WikiLeaks and surrounding persons and organizations.
Please welcome, with a very warm digital applause, Andy.
Andy: OK, I have no idea how a digital applause works here, but thanks for it
anyhow. At the beginning, I want to make and I have to make a few disclaimers, so
that you know which perspective you're getting here. I'm working as a data
journalist for quite a while around the topics of surveillance, signal
intelligence, data security. I'm running this funny buggedplanet, even started that
buggedplanet.info before Snowden came with all his documents. But I did work a while
with his documents. However, this talk is a bit different as I'm not talking about
things that I learned, studied or whatever, but I experienced myself. I'm
describing events here where I was targeted. So, I might not be the most
neutral person in this scenario, but I'm trying to be technically as accurate as
possible anyhow. So forgive me if I'm a bit grumpy about these people. That's just
because of their perspective. Secondly, while I've also and the CCC, of course,
has been addressing human rights issues in the digital age for a long time, we, and I
personally, co-founded EDRI, the European Digital Rights Initiative, to ensure the
enforcement of human rights in the digital environment. However, what happened here
is slightly beyond digital rights. It goes into real life. And while I'm a German
citizen, and I know roughly what kind of laws have been violated here, in respect
to the German environment, I absolutely would welcome people who help me analyze
and understand it from the perspective of the universal human rights, because there
is similar cases with people living in other jurisdictions and so on. Second
slide of disclaimers, sorry that it's so much, so I'm addressing with this talk
activities against people surrounding and have been and/or surrounding Julian and/or
WikiLeaks and/or other members of WikiLeaks. Whatever I describe here, I
have personally observed and experienced it. So it is for sure very incomplete.
It's at best a fragment of what's gone on. But you will, in case you haven't heard
about it yet, that Pompeo made some very clear statements when he was head of CIA.
It's pretty clear where to attribute these things. And lastly, there is, of course,
other persons mentioned. But I'm keeping them out here for all kinds of reasons.
But there will be the time when we will hear more reports and other perspective of
this particular situation. So, here's my little overview. I want to get you an idea
how to get into such a mess. Just in case, you know, you want it. The context and the
timeline, a bit of psychology as it's important because at some point you not
only get paranoid, you have this drive to... no this can't be true. Right? You
have this cognitive dissonance drive inside of you that you would like to stay
sane. The new normal of "IT-incidents". We're all used to that, covert vs. overt.
What I mean with the term intimidation surveillance, physical events and their
impact about the elephant in the room, the problem of the missing socks. And at the
end, a little bit of questions. Am I infectious, how to get out of this mess?
Maybe also. So, how to get into such a beautiful mess? Wait, it's not beautiful.
Well, there are some ideas we share in the hacker community usually, and even it's
not far from there to get into the journalist community. Information should
be free. Free flow of information is a bit of a requirement for world peace. And we
had this and I personally also had this type of self conception, self
understanding consciousness. Twenty years already when WikiLeaks started around
2006. So this is not that I was jumping or anybody in the scene was jumping onto
something that didn't exist until then. But WikiLeaks turned out to be an
extremely good concept as a democracy test. If governments cannot deal with full
transparency, well, that tells you a lot about them. But, of course, that is
similar to jumping to the last point, similar to working in journalism. When you
expose things in journalism be it corruption, be it hypocrisy of
politicians, be it blunt lies or whatever. It's not always about making friends. It's
yes, partly making friends, and partly pissing people off. That happens. However,
in this particular environment that Julian inspired to create. There's some
cultural, even misunderstandings. For example, the word conspiracy. For us in
Europe, I think many of us indeed German hacker scene are inspired by Robert and
Wilton's way of saying, oh, a conspiracy is like the world is full of them and we
should join the best of them. But in the American context, the word conspiracy is a
legal term, unfortunately. And when you are with American citizens in a room and
talk about conspiracies, they often get very nervous. And it's kind of a complete
different attitude. Because it's like the U.S. term to define people who belong to a
group like, organized criminals or organized, you know, this T word, this
other type of entities. And of course, that's absolutely not what we want to get
into involved here. But sometimes, we mistakenly are misunderstandingly joke
about conspiracies and people listening to this get it completely wrong. And I fear
that is also what happened and how me and others got into such a mess. So at the
end, of course, in journalism and that's similar to dealing with data from a
hackers perspective is about supporting media with data and information and so on.
So here is a bit of a timeline to give you a time frame. I'm now after I was a bit
long for about two decades a CCC spokesperson and board member blah blah
blah, I moved to the board of the Wau Holland Foundation. Wau Holland Foundation
collects actually money for WikiLeaks under the aspect of Wau's idea of
supporting Freedom of Information since 2010 or so. I joint a little later.
However, when WikiLeaks started to publish the Afghanistan, the Iraq war logs and
diplomatic cables that already triggered legal investigations, and of course, the
arrest of then still Bradley, now Chelsea Manning, later. So there was always, it
was always clear, more or less right from the beginning, that there's legal trouble
on the way, that there's a secret grand jury and that the Americans didn't really
appreciate their war crimes to be exposed and the diplomatic cables to be in the
Internet, to be understood and readable for all of us and the media worldwide and
so on. Of course, when people come together and gather in any project, you
have human beings, you have, they have characters, they have mistakes. They do
things that are not always great. So I'm not trying to say here that everything was
always great and it was only the CIA messing it up. No, humans make mistakes
and these mistakes in such an environment, of course, get exploited, get amplified
and so on. In 2007, WikiLeaks started publishing some CIA documents and a whole
series of it, the so-called 'Vault 7' documents. And those documents describe
technology, exploit programs from the CIA. You probably, most of you will know them.
If not, you can now look them up. And these included tools that allowed the CIA
to pretend to be someone else, including coming from another country, speaking
another language, be from Russia, in Russia be from Iran and Farsi and so on.
And Pompeo, who was at that moment still head of the CIA, got very upset. And there's
two references from this, one from April 2017, and another is from February 2018.
In his first public speech as a CIA director in 13 of April 2017, he made a
speech at a conference working in Washington and he said things like
WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like an
intelligence service. And called WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service.
So for those of you who know a little bit about information science, there's this
idea of data is actually something you can technically measure. Information is data
in a context and intelligence is information processed to a level where you
can make decisions based on it. So being a public intelligence service, I would say
from that perspective is like an honorable term. However, the way Pompeo emphasized
it, I think was slightly not that honorable. He was more comparing it to,
you know, other state actors and evil forces and so on, because the US
understanding of intelligence service far away from entities... sorry, I need a
water... Is far away from entities just collecting information, but as you know,
they also mess up with other people's life and so on. However, a year later, in
February 2018, he even upgraded this type of statement. The Zeit, German newspaper,
reported about what he said at the Munich Security Conference Intelligence
Roundtable, and he said, a really nasty sentence like that. Most of his time he's
dealing with the non-state actors. And that's like al-Qaida, Islamic State,
WikiLeaks or Hezbollah. Like what a list. So I have no idea what he has. What turned
him into comparing these kind of things? I mean, Hezbollah, I could say we in Berlin,
we know they provide actually yummy halloumi and some things. But yes, they
are money launderers and are a suspected terrorist in some areas or whatever, or
have been declared terrorist. But their hummus is really good, I can say. However,
the point I'm trying to come to. So Pompeo got very upset. He made all this
comparison and he seems to have allocated resources to deal with WikiLeaks and
everybody jumping around. And it's no surprise that as Wau Holland Foundation
finances selected activities of specific publications there, that we also got in
the focus with us collecting donations and, you know, talking with the guys and
financing some projects. So before I'm coming to very concrete events, I want to
get one second into psychology. So, of course, when things happen to you, from
the intelligence perspective, they always come with what's called plausible
deniability. When there's a guy standing in front of the door watching, you know,
if you come in and out, it's not just someone watching your door. It's someone
reading the newspaper or repairing some electrical pipes or some water pipe or
whatever. I mean, that's always a good reason for him to be there that has
nothing to do with what he's doing and that's a basic principle. Plausible
deniability, how intelligence agencies act in the so-called field. So meaning in your
home or on the street, following you or whatever. So over time, of course, if you
have too much of this, you're seeing these patterns, and that's probably mainly
called paranoia. So you get like, you know, suspicious of everything that
happens that might be very legitimate, but you get like the feeling that something is
wrong and so on. And that can be, we could also instead of paranoia, call it
situational awareness at some points, because if it really happens, it has
nothing to do with your mind getting crazy. It's just an accurate observation
of patterns that happen around of you. But you might know that and your two friends
who experience the same might know that your girlfriend, your partner, the normal
people you deal with, they might all not understand this and think that you're
driving nuts. And this driving nuts is, of course, an element that you always have to
be self-critical, because on the one hand side, you might indeed see too much things
happening that do not really happen. And on the other hand side, there's also the
human drive that we don't want these CIA guys to be in our life. We want everything
to be fine. And to some extent, maybe that's even healthy to not see the
monsters all the time. But if they are really there and you start denying them
while they sit in front of you, that's also not so helpful. So I found myself in
this kind of weird environment where all these kind of thoughts come up all the
time. And I'm starting with the most harmless stuff. So Internet attacks or
well Internet incidents. I would... IT- incidents, I called it here. Due to the
pure volume of it, I will put this into a separate presentation one day or report
and in the next days or weeks or months. And you can all have fun with it. But here
is just some basic pattern. So devices you use as communication terminals or
communication devices, they always have issues when you start to do encrypted
stuff, and it's always when you do it with specific people. So that's hm... Then,
mobile phones with data service. At some point, all of them have start to have
issues. Very high volume of used data, apps disappear if you use them at all. I
stopped using them at all. High battery usage. When you did nothing with your
phone over hours and you were wondering what's going on. OK, yes, we have buried
their bags. We put them somewhere else. But still, it's a little weird when your
battery is empty half day. On LTE when I configured my phone to be on LTE only it
worked mainly fine. Next to that, I couldn't make normal phone calls, but when
I had to do the normal mode, it got downgraded to 3G and there my encrypted
connections started to have problems. On my fixed lines, my VPNs when I tried to
build up a VPN shows me certificate errors and problems. And then of course you deal
with journalists, which I'm doing with my colleagues all the time. And they are not
technical experts. They all have their Macs and so on. So they have funny issues
with their PGP keys not working anymore, with their PGP setup not working anymore.
Yes, it's also because it's open source software, but there's also something going
on. But this is kind of the world we all know and we got used to it. You know, this
is like, OK, IT doesn't work. Secure connections break, well, happens all the
time. From about mid 2017 when I still regularly, like once or twice a month was
flying over to see Julian in the embassy, I realized that there was something
changing with my treatment at the border. That's of course, that's yeah, that's
purely UK border police uncles. And they like started to ask funny questions like
"Do you live in the UK?", "What's your occupation?", "How long do you stay?",
"What do you do in the UK?". Before then there was maybe one question, but not
three or four of them. And the most important was that I realized that he did
not even listen to my answers. Sometimes he started the first question after I
answered the third, and it was feeling like in a limbo, like with a machine who
would randomly ask me things. But I then realized he was just waiting for the green
light on the screens to let me go. And that green light probably meant that the
team outside was ready to pick me up and that's what happened. So I get into the UK
and have people follow me like the whole fucking day, not only on the way to the
embassy, from the embassy back and so on. I once spotted one of those persons like
sitting at the street level on the other side watching the whole time I was in an
office, ground level. And because I had a bit of experience with that in continental
Europe, like in Germany, if you realized these guys just go after you and you put
your camera on your table or start even to make photos of them, they're very quickly
gone because they don't want to be relocated, they don't like to be exposed
and so on. But the British behaved in this time, this scenario completely different.
So he was like getting like, you know, very aggressively body language, try
spotting, looking back and so on. So that was a little weird. That same day at three
o'clock in the night when my friends drove me to the place where I was sleeping in a
one way street, there was still a car following us, even in the one way street.
So actually he had to turn back and so on. That was no more covert surveillance. That
was already at the edge to intimidation. And then over the next months, I started
to have new favorites, but not only in England, also in other countries that I
would see homeless looking like people on the street level sitting there begging or
leaning to some buildings. And at some point I had to realize that the cheap
plastic bags that they were wearing were just a cover for cameras that were
actually with Zoom and digital getting into my direction. And so that felt a
little, um. And so the idea of this measures meant, if you look at their
manuals, which you'll find somehow in the Internet, is that the difference between
discovered surveillance, which is to find out where you are and to open
surveillance, which I call intimidation surveillance. The idea is you create in
the person in this case and yeah, for me, a state of distress. So you like
constantly having this, like, you know, looking around and you obviously have the
idea that something is going on and they let you know. They want to let you know
and that's a little weird. So in April 2018, exiting in March 2018, I brought one
of my Cryptophones, in this case a desk phone based on a SIP phone called Snom 870
back to our workshop here to repair. The display had been exposed to heat and got a
little melted. It's not so super high quality LCD display, so I wanted just to
replace the display. So I opened the thing and I found actually a bug and that bug
turned out to be a very sophisticated thing. So there was a battery pack, there
was a shielded thing. Behind that shielded thing there was a module that had been
soldered into. It was based on an FPGA, some hardware crypto element. 16 GB of
flash ROM. It was completely passive. So I wouldn't have found it in any sweep
because it just recorded whatever I talked on that encrypted phone and would be
triggered by high frequency to send out the recorded stuff, encrypted in a signal.
And you see here a URL to find more pictures online. To give you an idea this
is the thing I found. This is how it looked like at the beginning. The phone
itself has to PCB's one for the keyboards and one for the connectors, processing and
so on. This was the modified version of the keyboard PCB with this battery pack
in blue, the shielded module. And here you get an idea of what was in there.
That's pretty high tech. We did, of course, look into what exactly do we have
here, when were this chips produced, what does it do and so on. But it's pretty
obvious that this is like for those who have read the Snowden documents intensely,
it's what's called special collection service. Inside there, there's a group
called a target access operations TAO, and they work together with a thing called
PAG, the Physical Access Group because someone and that was the thing, it was not
only built into this phone, that phone had been, of course, in a locked room. And I
had to ask myself, OK, what happened here? Here you see how they grabbed the audio
with a glued mini PCB from the other main controller into their little technology.
And here you see a comparison picture, to the right you see the original PCB
keyboard, which has almost nothing on it. And to the left, you see the modified
version. A friend of mine made a bit of a diagram and yeah, I'll just leave it for
you. You can review it later. I'll upload these PDF slides, of course. So here's
some aspects of what was going through my head over the time. Of course, the first
question was: How long was this there? No idea. Could be years. Um, the components
we identified were produced around, oh no, not earlier than April 2013. So if you
remember, Snowden came with his revelation mid of 2013 roughly. And I've been working
for the Spiegel with others on the Snowden documents next to that phone and
coordinating a lot of it in the year 2013. So in theory, it could be even related to
that. Who knows. The dimensions such as Kadian nonmetric origin, the antenna
would, you know, work in the range of 800 MHz. So you find a mentioning of a PDF
that tells you something about these groups. But I did talk to some people who
do professional sweeping, meaning, looking for audio bugs and so on in devices and
rooms. And they told me from the experience of the Cold War until today,
the operation to bring something into a room, into a device, that's quite an
effort because you need to secure, you need to ensure you don't get caught and so
on. And so what you normally do is, because technology can fail, is you do not
install one bug, you install at least two. And the Cold War people told me, from the
elder generation, that the relationship was one to eight, so that because
technology failed a lot back then. However, that made me, of course, think,
OK, what else could there be? You know, what can I do to find the rest and so on.
Does it even make sense? Can I secure all the rooms that I use to work here and
there in such a way that I could be sure. And of course, I can't be. So this was the
first hard confrontation with my own cognitive dissonance, because all that
surveillance theater where I said, OK, Julian has some trouble, I don't think I
had something to do with it. And when I traveled to England, OK, they follow me,
you know, you get used to that kind of things, but like something you can have in
your hand and that's outside of IT incidents. That means that all your
encrypted communications have been listened to. Well, that feels shitty. So
that's what I call a hot confrontation with my own cognitive dissonance. The next
thing I want to talk about is very recent. It's about one and a half months old now.
When here in Berlin, um, I went out actually very early in the morning to get
some stuff from a grocery in a time of pandemic when no one is in the shop at
seven or something in the morning. I come back half an hour later and the key to my
apartment door does not fit in the cylinder anymore. That felt a bit shitty.
Um, it was not a normal cylinder. It was a so-called stealth cylinder. You might want
to look in the Internet what it is. It's a Swiss company, it's doing nice keys that
you cannot photograph and copy because it has inner elements with a sophisticated
mechanical, a way of opening. I did, however, when I bumped into my door and
had to first I called my locksmith dude or my friend from the lock picking industry,
I could say, who had advised me to buy that cylinder. I talked with my lawyer and
we agreed it's a good idea to call the police, to put it on the other list of
things they had collected until then. I then realized that I had been followed
that morning, but I didn't take any attention to it because I was just
walking, you know in half-automatic mode to the grocery and there was a couple talking
such a bullshit. They will probably listen to this talk and will remember the dialog.
It was just not making any sense, but I was too polite to point it out. And they
were very closely. So it was not about where I was going. It was about that I was
not at home. So they ensured that in the time frame that I was there, the other
guys could operate and so on. Yeah, that is an ongoing investigation. But I can
tell you, this is the next incident where like cognitive dissonance and the illusion
you want to give this of, you know, I'm not important in this game. Yeah. This
guy is following me here and there. And this feels kind of different. This is no more
nice. Um, here's a little bit to get the idea of the cylinder. You cannot really
see the object that was inserted. But at the end, we didn't get it out. For
forensic reasons. We had to drill. Police went through the apartment and so on.
Yeah. Another interesting day you can have. Um, so here's some aspects that I
asked myself. Um, so was it even my cylinder that I couldn't open? Maybe they
could not lockpick the original stealth cylinder I had. They had to open it in a violent way.
They were in the apartment to whatever put another bug in there. Um, but as they
couldn't replace it with the original cylinder as they had destroyed it, like
they put another one in. And that's why my key wasn't fitting. It's an option. Next
option: Was it maybe a trap to make me replace the broken cylinder with a cheaper
one with a more simple one that they could open then afterwards, when I was gone. The
next option, or maybe was it not about the door at all? Was it maybe just to freak me
out? Um, of course it feels not so great if you can't open your own apartment door
and so on. And the first question was, of course: How much time did I spend that day
with, you know, with the police, drilling open the door with all that kind of
things? It more or less cost me a day. And what maybe happened to my machines,
meaning my computers, my other things, maybe? Where was my attention not in that
time frame? Because it could be, was a pure distraction thing. It would freak him
out a little bit. And while he's freaking out, we do other things in his office or
whatever, I can't rule it out. And then of course, I mean, the police sent me some
funny questions. I'm still working on that, like, yeah, should I name Pompeo as
a suspect? Not sure, but maybe I should. Discussing it with my lawyer and so on.
And also is it maybe related to the date? This was the 3rd of November, just in case
to have it said the 3rd of November is the election day, or was the election day in
the United States. And there were some accusation that had something to do with
the election some years ago. Um, so however, the next event, incident number
three, has to do with something that happened in between, because on Monday,
the day before they messed up with my door, I had shipped some documents to
Spain, I realized then. That was legal documents that required me and a friend
going to the Spanish embassy. We gave power of attorney and so on because we are
also accusing this company, UC Global, which I talked about last year, which was
the company running the surveillance or the protections/surveliance at the
beginning on behalf of the Ecuadorians in that embassy and later turned out to be
working, for (inaudible)'s company or at least having a site arrangement there,
which is still subject to an ongoing lawsuit. And we participate in that
lawsuit because not only Julian was spied on, everybody was spied on, who was
visiting him and so on. So I had shipped documents on that Monday, almost six
o'clock on the local post office here by DHL Express. I put that documents in a
sealed bag, that's like a bag was a serial number and so on. That went together with
the describing list what's inside the bag into a white envelope that again, I sealed
with, you know, seal tape. Then I gave that to the post office. But they insisted
that it gets in a DHL Express back. That's what you get for the 70 Euro to be
arriving within two days. So, yeah, the stuff arrived on Wednesday, but all opened
and the Spanish lawyers freaked completely out. They were very sure that this was a
meddling. You would see that it was sliced open and so on. Yes. You see this funny
duct tape here called Zoll. But why would the German customs open a document
shipment within Europe? That just not makes a lot of sense. It's still on the
way to be checked. In theory, they could do that. But also this incident has some
aspects. It's a breach of attorney client privilege. That's why the Spanish lawyers
insisted as we bring this to a criminal complaint. They did on their end right
when they received it and they made those photos. So was German customs even
involved or was just their duct tape used by some funny people. Why when I emailed
all this to my lawyer with the picture sent to one, why did he not receive the
email until he realized on Monday that it somehow ended in his trash? He also
freaked out. And then I talked with DHL of course, I made a big fuss there and they
were like, no, we cannot tell you on which legal grounds the shipment was opened. We
cannot tell you who did it. But if you have an inquiry, why don't you send it to
the customs? So without giving me even which customs entity it would be or
whatever. And again, of course, this is kind of an interesting story, but I have
normally other priorities in my life. So I'm asking myself, oh gosh, how many days
shall I waste here with finding out who opened the fucking shipment. But, you
know, this is, again, the state of distress. This is, again, the effort. And
it's, again, a reminder. We are after you. We check your things. We don't like
your're suing the CIA, a suspected company and so on and so on. So coming to a bit of
a conclusion of this talk, as we also want to have time for questions and so on. I
want to talk about three aspects. The one is the elephant in the room and the
problem of the missing socks. So at some point, I don't want to say that I have
been completely not in a state of distress. And so I don't know how this
affects my sanity and those people surrounding me. So your cognitive systems
get kind of otherwise triggered and you start to see these things everywhere. And
when then you wash some socks and it turns out there's a sock missing. The other
person in my life was like, OK, CIA. However, I did suspect the bed sheets and we
found one of the socks in a bed sheet. So when you know, the problem is socks get in
the drum sometimes, Hanging, then you wash something different then like a bed sheet
and a bed sheet is an excellent place to hide things that have been in the drum.
Get into the bed sheet and you just try it with it and you don't even realize it and
so on.. So while I'm a complete, I for entertainment reasons and also for, you
know, you need to relax your brain in such a situation once in a while, I'm totally
OK to say the CIA is responsible for everything, including the missing socks,
but I suspect the bed sheet first and realize that yes, this is a joke and this
is escapism and it helps you maybe to stay sane for a little moment. But in the long
term, I don't know. So and that's the I don't know part is the other two slides
that are coming now. So what should I do? And I should invite some friends and
declare my office here like a laboratory for surveillance. Yeah, it has been
before. I looked at one technology, but this case is surveillance technology,
looking at me and my friends. So it's slightly different. And it's maybe also
important to not get into some kind of auto response mode when things happen.
Because I was thinking also, what the fuck? Why are they doing all these things?
It cost them money. It costs them effort. Is it to freak me out? Is it that they
think that like like like I'm seriously in such an evil mode organization that, you
know, they will escalate things and I will start to throw bombs at the U.S. Embassy
or I don't know. I have no idea what their idea is, but I just try to stay like slow
motion and think about it. The next aspect is how ever do I infect other people? And
now I'm not talking about my paranoia or my situational awareness, as I would call
it, which, of course, at some point it's ongoing and it's no more sometimes. But
when I talk with normal people, with other journalist, with people I deal with for
normal things, and they visit me and we do whatever kind of social things, like
normal things, like having food. And afterwards, the way they call me a day
later and say, oh, finally my phone started rebooting twice yesterday and
these kind of things so that you think, OK, it's not my paranoia that is
infectious. It's actually they obviously want to not only know what kind of people
I'm dealing with and look into their technology, they also want to freak them
out. So this is not cool. And it also means that the type of ignorance you could
normally apply and say, well, ignorance is a bliss. Come on, let's have have a nice
day and forget about all this. That's kind of limited. That's no more an option. Um,
and also while I've been dealing with that type of stress and that type of thing for
a while now, and I can say, yeah, well, that's how it is. And, um, it doesn't mean
that everybody dealing with you can do that. There's people that are seriously
freaked out by such a situation and it creates fear, it creates anger, stress and
so on. So that's not cool. So, um, my last slide that ends up with a question to you
guys is how to get out of this mess. So, you know, option one, I managed to get
proper authorities to make the CIA stop acting illegal. OK, I heard the laughing.
I know this is ridiculous, but, you know, it would be so beautiful. Justice
prevails. The German authorities, the European ones pick it up. I finally
managed to escalate it to the Generalbundesanwaltschaft. And I do not
have to talk with the German intelligence services as I'm not sure they would be
helpful in this game. And they make the stop, the CIA stop acting illegal and
against me and the other person surrounding beautiful dream. But OK, not
very realistic. Maybe option two, Pompeo realizes Jesus loves WikiLeaks and
whatever shall become true will become true. He reads it on the Bible. Pompeo
seems to me if you look at his Twitter account, reasonable believe in Jesus
Christ and all that thing. So he realizes it's all wrongdoing against Julian,
WikiLeaks and all the people targeted in that context and stops it. I know. OK,
shit happens. What? But if that's realistic, I don't know. You tell me. And
the third option. I don't know. Maybe you have some ideas. And that's my question to
you at the audience and that's the end of my prepared part of the talk.
Herald: And with these words. Thank you, Andy, for the brilliant talk. In the
meantime, I received some messages. A third option would be to have a great
vinyard, vinyard. Sorry, I personally Andy: Yes, yes it's completely right. I
considered actually maybe I should do something with goats, become a farmer or,
you know, yeah, there's these options. But I thought before I give it up and find my
way on the countryside, I outsource the problem to the community and see what they
think. Herald: In the meantime, I think there is
plenty of time for a great white wine, but to our questions, we have indeed plenty of
questions. The first question would be: How would you compare the surveillance of the
CIA or other to surveillance of the DDR? So for the Deutsche Demokratische
Republik. Andy: Well, I'm born in Hamburg in West
Germany. I lived in East Germany when the government was already falling into
pieces. It was technically still there. So I'm not the best person to compare it. But
I did talk with a person I know who worked for the foreign intelligence services
because there was, you know I simplified here, of course, the incidents a little
bit. There was one scene when later I went into my kitchen that day when my door lock
got tampered with and I found a blue plastic glove and I don't have blue
plastic gloves. And I asked my locksmith guy, he was like, no, it's not for me. And
the police had black ones. So I thought, what the fuck? Maybe the guys have been
inside the apartment, which I didn't thought earlier because of a second look
and the police checked and so on. Um, and then I talked to discuss it with this
person I know. He's a quite friendly man, was working in the foreign intelligence of
that country. And so and he was like, you know, you have to look at it from a cost
effectiveness point of view, like that piece of plastic costs you ten cents,
nothing, and it freaks you out three months. So see how much how cost effective
it is. And I mean, that's a good aspect. That's a good point. And so I think that
the East German Stasi, the guys, the East intelligence guys, they also they knew
very well the difference. And they had both instruments in there, you know, in
their program to either do covert surveillance really like not let you know.
And the department for "we let him know and see how he reacts" or "we let him know
because he's ongoing doing things that we want him to, you know, stop it and get
intimidated". And so on, and get scared maybe or his wife gets scared or this kind
of thing. So I think it is comparable. Herald: Cool. Well, not cool. Speaking of
covert versus overt civilians. As you now know, does it still
bother you emotionally? Andy: Um, well, what bothers me sometimes
is, you know, it's also it has a sometimes it's nice to be alone and it's sometimes
nice to not think about the CIA guys being in the apartment next door or in my case,
an apartment under me or in the surrounding environments. Um, but thinking
about normal things like playing a puzzle or seeing some funny spy movies. Oh,
that's almost relaxing. No, seriously, at some point it sucks a little bit. I get my
kind of deal with it. But I mean, this 20/20 era has of course, complicated or
has made it almost impossible to travel. So normally I escape my intensity of my
work situation with travels. Maybe I can do that this year. So it feels a little
more intense and annoys a little bit. And I would like to get these guys out of
my life and do something useful with their life or whatever.
Herald: Now, the next question, he or she or the person or creature probably missed
it: Do you dissemble all your devices on a regular basis?
Andy: No, I usually do just regular and seal them. In this case, the seal had
an issue with with the heat as well. So, and I was lousy on checking it. I have to
say so. Yes, that's something. I mean, if you have one office, you can do that. I
tend to work on different continents even, and that turned out to be a bit of an
issue. So, yes, you need to have safes everywhere and seals and duh, duh, duh,
duh. But even then, you know, Pompeo seems to have justified or have given
orders to do these things no matter the costs. And my expectation to have like a
"private" or "secure" encrypted channel so is very limited for a while, watching that
effort. The encryption of the cryptophone obviously was good. Otherwise they
wouldn't have had the effort to, you know, build something in. But at the end of the
day, for me, it has the same impact. It's like, well, you know, it's a phone, it's a
piece of device, it's in a room. The room has windows. We've seen what they've done
with the embassy windows and so on. So it's like, yeah, security. What a nice
idea, but it doesn't really exist. Herald: Yeah. Do you try giving a few
coins to the homeless looking people to do either some reverse intimidation or good
deed if they are not CIA? Andy: Yeah, that's, I mean, I had this one
particular situation where I was waiting for someone on kind of a shopping street,
and I just said something is wrong with the guy. But when I saw the camera and saw
and he also rushed away. So, no, I didn't give them the money. The second
scenario... No, but it's a good idea. Um, the thing is, what I started to do is to
always have a camera with me. That turns out for me to be important, to be able to
document things. And also most of them, except the British, don't like it when
they are being photographed. And you either, they, it's very interesting
because normal people do realize when they are being photographed. But these guys are
either pretending, no, I don't see that you photograph me. You know, they look a
little bit with too much energy away from it or they are seriously disturbed and go
away. Herald: So the best solution would be to
have the boldest, biggest, largest camera always in hand.
Andy: Yeah, let me say it like this. I mean, I've not been a fan of surveillance
technology and for sure not of CCTV for a long part of my life. But I start to like
the idea of CCTV at some places in my own environment. I'm sorry to say that, but
there's compromises you can make like surveil feet, you know, other parts you
don't always need the faces. If you need the faces , yeah there's options.
Herald: And still, analog photography is a great thing. But that's my personal
opinion. Um. You maybe you want to, you can talk, maybe you cannot talk about: Do
you use other counter measurements you want to talk about or can talk about?
Andy: You know, I obviously don't want to talk about it. But I mean, I've been, um.
But I was wondering myself how, um, why I had this rather intense things going on. I
mean, I was wondering, is it the time frame? Is it me as a person? It might have
to do with actually being in this funny scene? Of course, I've learned. I mean, I
know lock picking persons, I've always had an eye on having good locks based on their
advice, and understanding how easy it would be otherwise. And using encryption
was also not always about, like, hiding something. It was just good practice of
having privacy and operational security. So for me, that was very normal for many
years to do that. And maybe, you know, compared to other persons, that made me
more interesting. I don't know. I'll find out one day. But I think it's a good idea
for everybody involved to think about these three aspects: physical security,
encryption, and also what kind of ways do you have to realize if something is being
tampered with. Herald: Yeah -
Andy: And that's not necessarily monitoring. I mean, monitoring can help,
but on the other hand side, yeah, with monitoring systems, they can also deal
with. Herald: Like physical checksums(?), kind
of. Our next question: Do you ask the police at the border if everything is
prepared now? Andy: You know, the British border,
probably that's a reference to, I don't travel to the UK anymore. I decided, you
know, after they dealt with Julian there, I don't like that place anymore. I never
felt so well there. And actually, maybe I forgot to mention that, after this kind of
treatment at the border started I also started avoiding sleeping in the UK. So I
made day trips sometimes, in order to get the last plane out of the country. I was
flying to Zürich first, because it was a late flight to Zürich and then the next
morning to Berlin. I felt in Zürich better at the bar of a shitty hotel than in
London Central City with, yeah, this special relationship, as it's called,
between the intelligence of the UK and those of the US.
Herald: I see. Speaking of sleeping, or in this case concerning your apartment, the
question would be: Would some home surveillance system bring some relief, for
example? Andy: Well, that's like, that's like
exchanging the devil with the other dude, right? I mean, no, I'm not really a fan of
that. But yes, of course, I had to at the end of the day, at least check with my
door and so on, what I can do to detect and record things and so on. But it's not
a pleasure. It's not like, I don't know. I mean, yes, you end up doing that kind of
shit. But that's not how life on planet Earth should be.
Herald: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a kind of a trade off, for what return. And yeah -
Andy: I mean, the thing is, I mean, look, I'm a German citizen. What I'm doing is
constitutionally protected. I live in the governmental district of Berlin. It's
fairly safe here. But, you know, I have friends in other places, other situations,
their life is completely different there, and that is more what worries me. That I'm
in a relatively cool position, secure position. That's why I can talk about
these things. But I have friends who have a more severe situation and they are not
sure they should talk about it, to not escalate things. And that's a very tricky
choice to make, maybe. Herald: Yes, indeed. Um, that brings us to
another question. And I think this is a perfect point to mention that. Can we do -
What can we do to support you in getting out of this mess? And what can we do in
general for this? Andy: While I really appreciate the
question, I don't have a good answer. But I think, yes, I would like to discuss more
with people about what can be done. I mean, for the moment, I'm dealing with
police, with lawyers, the Spiegel guys I'm working with, they also find some ways
maybe to address it. Um, but it seems like at least if it comes to Julian's
situation, things are, yeah, badly escalated and it's all a bit interrelated.
So I don't have a good answer at this moment, but I think it's a good idea to
discuss it more and also maybe identifying other people who are in some kind of a
risk situation because these things happened. And so maybe, hopefully was able
to show it's not that difficult to get into such a mess. It's - it happens.
Herald: Yeah, and speaking of discussing, you mentioned earlier, there is a Big Blue
Button to discuss any further. You will find it in the 2D area, in the 2D world in
the Whistleblower Wiki. Is that right? Andy: Yes. In the tent, actually, I was
told. In the tent is the URL to the Big Blue Button or somehow it's interlinked
there. Herald: So again, please go out, explore
the 2D world. And of course, the whistleblower tent. We still have some
minutes left. How do you do mentally? Did you use any method to keep your head clean
or clear and, did you freak out? Andy: Yeah, that's a good question. Um. I
drink too much vodka, but I try to keep it with good quality. Um, let me say it
like this. The real trouble is maybe that while in this scene here, people have a
rough understanding of this type of things already. Um, I also liked to have, to be
around with people who have nothing to do with IT, with security, with all these
kind of things. So-called normal people. Sometimes it's refreshing to be with them,
but their ability to understand this mess is a little bit limited. So it's, I think
others judge better how I'm doing mentally. I'm trying to keep my head up
and finding a good way out. But if anyone has a good idea, I am really all for
listening and see what's possible. Herald: In this case. I can can come back
to the vineyard and it's pretty relaxing to have work in the late autumn.
Andy: All right. Even during a pandemic. OK, you just find a way there. Yeah.
Herald: It's outside and it's a lot of distance between the people. I think this
will work. So the last question: Red or white wine?
Andy: Red, red wine. Herald: Red.
Andy: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, thanks for all this. Just to point out, please,
we also have to work on to getting Julian out there and others who are in this mess
who can't even talk about it. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you
guys, but it's also about the others. And let us get Julian out here, please. Out
that shit there. Herald: With these great words, Andy,
thanks for your time. Thanks for being here at the remote chaos. As mentioned, we
still have the opportunity to ask you some questions in the whistleblower tent. And
with this, have a nice evening. Try to relax and see you latest - next time.
Andy: Goodbye.
*postroll music*
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