 Okay, so I'm Willow. This is Tamate. We're going to talk to you today about things being on fire. We all get to play with a lot of awesome things all the time, but because technology has become ubiquitous, we get to deal with it in disaster, in revolution, and in crisis now. And it provides some really interesting problems. So this talk is your disaster slash crisis slash revolution just got pwned. And these are your introductions. For people who are following on the Ustream, or not Ustream, what are we even, I don't know, following the stream or what have you, you can follow the presentation at Bitly Telecomics Guab, and you can also go there afterward and kind of go through. There's more information embedded in this than we're actually going to cover right now, and we'll keep updating it as more things come in. So a traditional response. Will you hit the button for me? I will hit the button for you. Yes. Okay, so traditional response in humanitarian stuff is super top down. It's modular, but it's closed source because there's a lot, it takes a lot of money to get a satellite up into the air in order to make imagery. It takes a lot of money to deploy people. It takes a lot of people to train people. And so it ends up being closed source and very hierarchical. It's not very distributed. But it just works. Just that thing. Okay, next one. But because it just works, it seems sometimes like you're parachuting in. It's white dude in cape, right? You show up and you're like, I'm here to save everything. Because you're saying what people need, how they're going to receive it, et cetera. But it also means that they've figured out some of the problems of how they work together and what not. Yeah, as we all know, there are hacktivists outside parachuting in at the moment in different crises and revolutions and anything. And an advantage of them is that they have opening lines of communication. They're open to the people who want to help. I don't know who I've ever tried to help with the Red Cross, for example. It's very hard to get in. It is a closed system. And it's much more easy to work in activist groups, well, at least not telecomics, but others. And this is one of the big advantages. Everybody can fallow and they have different tools and different risks with these tools. So when telecomics is offering a tool to people in Syria, for example, we tell them about the risks, what might happen. It might happen that you get tracked down, full stop. We tell the people we transparent with the risks. It is very important to be transparent on risks. And the closed system, the old groups are mostly not. They just there and popped and then they go. We try to leave at least a contact where they can contact us that people get informed what is happening afterwards. After they use our tools, for example. Is it still working? Is it still secure, for example? Yeah. So it's, oh, that did not work the way I wanted it to. Maybe? There we go. Okay. So because you are offering up new tools for people to use, there are things that we don't understand about them yet. So there are people who have done some of this wrong, so I have to look at it to remember where I'm at in the presentation. So crisis mapping is where someone who's on the ground can text in or they can tweet or they can post to Facebook or they can do whatever they like. And that information is pulled into a database and then it is parsed by volunteers to be translated, categorized, geolocated and verified. And then that populates a map that first responders can use to figure out, well, what roads are closed? Who's trapped where? Where is their food? Is there a generator somewhere? Things like this. And that's awesome except that you need to understand who is using the map. Do people who shouldn't have access to that have access to it? If you're talking about children being lost in a basement or you found some kids in a basement, you don't just want to tell everyone. That's a very bad idea. And most people who do crisis response think everyone is altruistic as they are and unfortunately it's not the case. And also if no one is using the map, then you've just provided a false sense of response to the person who's texted in. And then maybe no one comes, maybe you've just made a map and then who cares? There's also the idea of crowdsourced volunteers. There's this huge deluge of information that happens because everyone's super excited to have a voice in disaster crisis revolution, what have you. But who's using that? Who has access to your data set? It's very important if you have volunteers in your group that you build a web of trust. So there are people just jumping in, for example, and I see them say, hey, I'd like to help. And I say, well, great, but who are you? Why? So what are your motives to help? Why do you choose our group to help? And who the fuck are you? This is a very important question, the question to ask, who are you? Yes, groups need to be open, transparent, but in case of a crisis, there's a revolution. There are groups working. It is most times not possible to directly jump in while the group is working. This needs to be known that this just doesn't work. Groups need to find something else and to form. And it is very important that you don't give access to everyone just jumping in. We had a great example of bad software. It's archetype. There was a software, we got a mail of telecomics from the Fluid Nexus crew. They said, hey, we have a great software for activists. You should promote it for us. Because you were inspiring us and I was like, wait, the mail was reading like a cat and log. And we did not do anything without. Then there was a little hacker crew who thought, okay, let's have a look at this tool. And they needed about 12 hours to destroy it completely. It was destroyed. And then they wrote a paper about it and sent it to them. Hey, guys, please have a look at these bugs. Well, the whole tool was a bug. And then they went, instead of saying thanks for pointing out these bugs, they were arguing. They said, no, it's secure. Everything is fine. And the crew said, no, it's not. As proved here in this paper, at the end, someone had to left the Fluid Nexus crew. And it's still not back online. The software, well, there's a beta, but it says, do not use in the field on the web page now. Before it said, hey, use us in the field. It would be a great software. So when you're doing software for crisis response, please do it open source. Give it to hackers. Let them break the shit and then repair it. Let them break again and repair again until it's really done. It is. So as we hear on Hacker Congress, I know many hackers are here. Please be nice to those people whose software you have broken. It's way better to be broken by your friends than it is to be broken by people who don't care. Yeah. So also, especially if you're a douche to Meredith. And also, go out of your way and play with some tools that people have made in the good intent and check them on their shit as it were. And when you do software and someone breaks it, do not complain about that it's broken. Make sure that it's unbroken sometimes. Thanks. So your goals are that it's secure, then that it's open, and then that it's easy to use. If it's not easy, people aren't going to use it. Especially when things are on fire, the last thing you want to do is check the language. And if you dropped a semi colon, you don't want to do that. And so make friends with designers. They have silly hats, but they'll help it work. A lot of us working in a. At least no one on the ground likes to open up a terminal. No one likes this. They want just to click. And then it should work. So if there's if you have configuration for your tool, don't make an expert mode. People consider themselves as experts. Every time. And most expert modes, we can mess everything up. Don't do expert modes. Please ask the designer how the your eyes should be, how to be a workflow. What could you do that people feel comfortable with the tool? So don't throw an error with just null. Please explain the error to the people using it. It is very important because if I don't understand a tool, I will not use it anymore. It could be as great as possible. If I don't understand it, I don't trust it. I don't use it. And that would be bad. So make friends and accept the challenge. Okay. If you deploy in crisis, it's too late. People need to be using the things that you make already in their everyday life. The reason Twitter did so well and had so much impact during the Arab Spring is because people used it every day already. It was a part of their lives. And so what people already have, what they get is what they use. However, if you have your shit together, when shit is hitting the fan, it is the best time for policy change. It's the best time to request new data sets. It's the best time to push new initiatives through governments. The other team does this, so I feel pretty okay about being manipulative like this. Best example at the moment in the Arab Spring, people use Skype. Because it works. They install it. It gets through the firewall. They don't need to configure anything. It just works. Skype finds a way out of the computer. And unfortunately, back in too. We all know that. So it's not one way. We always say to them, don't use it, but we don't have anything else. So if we don't want the people to use Skype anymore, we need to build it. And we need to make it easy as Skype. So things are still on fire. So these are real people and it's real problems. These problems are universal. They're complicated and they're fascinating. So they're the best puzzles ever. But because they're real people, don't fuck up. People will die. But no pressure, still try. And do all the tests. And wear pony shirts. So yeah, we do serious business outside. But we all should take breaks and dance a little bit. Dancey, dancey, dance. Yeah, it's important to have fun. This sort of work wears on you. I like to think of the things that I build as the zombie apocalypse tools and the things that I interact with. Because if you talk to people about lost children and things being on fire and we can't find your parents and your church collapsed or whatever, people get really depressed really quickly. Who knew? So having a sense of humor about this not only helps you keep your sanity, but it also helps you communicate to the people that you need to interact with. Yeah, take care of your Hacker friends. It's very important. Take care of them. If they are only working all the time, force them to go out. Just break into the apartment, kick the door, raise all the shoulder and wear them out. They need to get this. If they don't eat anymore, bring them food, cook for them, cook together with them. There's so much we can do for ourselves. We can take care for each other. I mean, we are not machines. Well, you are, but we are no machines. We are human beings with our, we need to get all the shit in our head done. And so please take care of your Hacker friends that they not die anymore. Okay, so I'm gonna go on a tiny rant right now. Well, maybe two sentences of we're recreating ourselves through our technology. We can only create tools that are within our experience to create. We only address the problems that we see. And so any issues that we run into with what we build are really human problems. The issue is not necessarily the security of the code. It's that people will manipulate or use the security holes in the code. And so if you make a tool that gets out of the way of the people using it, you let them trust the people that they would choose to trust. Does this make sense? I don't know if I'm explaining it well. A little bit. Okay. Just a sec. Let me let me do a thinking dance. I have to move in order to think. Okay. Interpretive dance. That's my name. Interpretive dance pony. I'll get it. Interpretive dance cutie mark. What could possibly go wrong? Sorry, okay. So people will have a good gut instinct about who they should trust anyway. And so if you're creating secure networks where people have the choice of trusting the folk that they would anyway, then you've made a good tool. If that is intercepted in some way, then you haven't. But the issue is not necessarily the technology itself. It's how people use it. I think we all know. But it's good to say every once in a while. Tell me if I didn't make that clear. So, eh. Okay, let's move on. All right. Cool. Okay. I'm going to move on. I'm going to move on. Okay. The whole concept of open data and transparency on processes and how we work is in fact, political. So parachuting in like the Red Cross is a political act. And there are other hackers who say shut up and hack. So they see themselves not as political. And this is okay. Most people of ours are political in a way. And some really just say technology is neutral. And I don't care who's using it. But you can really, really work together. It's not exclusively that if someone's only hacker and doesn't want to use it in a particular way, that it can be used in a political way and the other way around, of course. We want to have this discussed later on. But we'll do that later. Yeah. You can get involved comma bitches. We mean that. We are in the last months, we have seen, oh, there are people working. And it's great. But no, I sit at home and don't do it. Anybody can do it. Form your own groups. Help people get things done. Help people on the streets. Help people locally. Help to solve their technical problems. And get involved. I mean, it's very easy. Do one thing well, then evolve to more things. And people will get your name. They will listen up if you say something. And they will ask you for help. So you did one thing well, then do well again. And again, and again, and again. You cannot expect that people on the ground will just trust you because you're there. Telecom is now gets contacted by people on the ground. When we started earlier this year, we need to contact them. So this all can change in the group. And if you have done well again, you can eat cake. But not before. So document and communicate. If you don't, if you don't document, no one cares. They're not going to be able to care. And if you don't communicate, no one will know. Again, obvious, but still needs to be stated. Also test and play. There's something coming up called, well, let's go in order. No, okay. Can't Roberts is happening, which is United States based, basically non non government organizations, nonprofits, military, private sector, etc. I'll get together and they run through a scenario. They actually have people out in the field running around trying to complete missions. It's like, find this thing. And it's an adult scavenger hunt. And it's awesome. And they see how all their tools are interacting and what people can learn from each other and what the next steps are of integration and etc. But this time, they've learned that there's a term called red teaming. There's progress. And so if you want to participate remotely and either attack or defend, those are the dates get in touch with me. And it will be super happy fun times. Yeah, on the other hand, they're, for example, random hacks of kindness. I'm sure you heard about that. This is great. People on the ground say what they need. And this will be done. It's twice a year, where people gather and I think 27 cities all over the world. For example, here in Berlin and hack together the shit which is needed. And then it's documented. It's released and people on the ground know that they can trust these tools because they requested these tools. It is really nice to help. And random hacks of kindness is a very good point to start to see what is needed on the ground. How can I contribute to that? And yeah, so get informed about that. It's very, very great and important to help there. And then there's the break fast. And random hacks is only two days long. So it's a minimal commitment. If you want to kind of go get your toes wet. Break fast. So in the spirit of breaking something before eating breakfast, but drinking a lot of latte in the meantime. Next weekend. So that's day the seventh, I think we're going to be at sea base and in the spirit of breaking things. So come and do an exploit and then we will feed you. Yeah, I guess that's it. So again, with the with the Internet's in the follow up and we'll do that thing. Yeah, so when you do something, when you contribute, or whatever, stay open. It is common. Meanwhile, the hackers seen that we do not talk about what we have done on great things. But it is important. Because if you tell that you're doing great things and help people, others may see, hey, I can do that too. And other people who need help will see, hey, these guys can do this or these guys can do this. So stay open. Stay open for other hackers. Stay open for for people who are in need and stay open for the problems. This is important. Stay open for the problems. Don't make the solution for a problem which isn't, which doesn't exist. We very often do this. So there's a great tool, but no one has this fucking problem. Yeah, so to get involved, you can do epic shit. Telecomics is doing this via IRC. They coordinate themselves. There are many links out the side in the wild where you can find how we're working. You can try to get into telecomics, which is unfortunately not that easy. Well, we try hard. But it's not that easy. On the other hand, you may take the design pattern and make your own group, which is like telecomics with even a cooler name, maybe. What do you guys do? If anyone here doesn't know what you do, what does telecomics do? Yeah, what do we do? We started as a political body and evolved to an activist group. Now we do merchandise with activists together. You can buy shirts. In the Arab Spring, it started for us with Egypt and we provided modern landlines to the options when the net was shut down by Mubarak. Now, in Syria, we released lockfights of the blue coat routers to show the world what is happening there. We help people to circumvent surveillance and censorship. So and these are things you guys can do. Everyone who is a little bit a hacker can do this. Just talk to the people. Be there for them. Listen to their shit. Give the shit to the media. Get out photos, videos, whatever and release it to the wild. This is what we're doing the whole day. We talk to people on the ground and that we are there for them and they can share their thoughts, their ideas, their fears. And this is why we, on the other hand, the people we can talk to, to take care of ourselves. So you can, as a group, specialize to certain things, but then remember to stay open, communicate about it. Like we do, we have our artifacts. We talk to the media, for example, not everyone, but some of us. Some do presentations and lectures and this is all a group can do to get formed as a body, to show that they are existing and to do great stuff, which is good for the people. On the other hand, I'm with geeks without bounds, which is a little bit more structured. We do sort of project management for continued efforts on these tools. So promising projects that come out of a random hacks. We have a team of volunteers that will continue working on it so that it actually becomes deployed and trouble-shooting, etc. Yes. Yeah. Now it's, well, time for the thank you. Seriously, thank you. Thank you, all people here. You're great. It was a great conference for me. Thanks to the comics guys, to the school factory, to the Maxxian who wrote our abstract. I just, I rambled that at Ella and she's like, is this what you mean? Yes, it is. How do you do that? Thanks, Clip Mata. Thanks so much. Thanks to the break pass crew for destroying Fluid Nexus. Thanks to all the ponies making us a funny life. And at least now we want you and we want your ideas on how people can get involved, how hackers can get involved and which problems they fear that we maybe answer your questions if you would like to help outside. Thank you. Can you talk a bit about sustainability? So how do you get kicks to show up on the fifth meetup and a year later and, you know, how do you get over the hype and actually start doing stuff in the long run? Sorry, I had really problems understanding you regarding your accent. Sorry for that, but can please someone? The question was, how do you make sure that people who get involved will stay involved for a longer time? Oh, thanks. Well, this is not that easy. At Telecomics, it's a kind of identification with the system Telecomics. You cannot plan a long term. So you need to reform every time we do an action. At the moment, when we started with Syria, we had other people then now involved in this case because people jump in, help a little bit and then jump out. This happens and this is okay because we're open. We can process this. Some of us now since the beginning with Telecomics were just quite a long time now. So this is in a way a kind of core team and they try to get people involved and to talk to them. So at least we are not never sure if there is something coming up, if there are enough manpower to do this. This is a flaw in our design pattern of our activist group. We're working on that flaw, but every good bug because it needs time. I found that doing regular, like once a month meetups work out well. If you do more often, at least in Pacific Northwest, people don't go because they figure they'll go next time. It really helps to get people in the field actually to experience what it is that they're addressing because then it becomes a part of their life. But the main thing for continued engagement is making sure people don't burn out. It's a really hard thing to tell people to go and sleep. When things are really bad. So like right after Christ Church, we still don't know what all is going on. There are still all these people missing and we still had shifts set up and it was mandated you get off of the chat and you go and sleep because if you're exhausted you're no help to anyone and then you burn out and then the next time a disaster or what have you hits you remember how awful it was for you and you don't want to do it. And so making sure that you are taking care of yourself is absolutely necessary. Hello. I just have a basic question. Whatever I hear sounds like a split up that any group requesting communication to secure communication tools of course gets a tailored solution which means you have an awful lot of solutions just nowadays in the field which are different just for about two, five, 10 percent but you have a lot of things and if a group tries to come together we simply start at the beginning to discuss if we should use Skype or Java or whatever and I see a tremendous split of efforts and a lot of if you want to call it products or solutions it doesn't matter but an awful lot of efforts spend into quite similar things. Yeah this is true. We have way too much tool outside. This is most times because a coder is coding something and then another one comes and says hey I would love to do this 10 percent of your tool in another way and though they fork and the next one forks too and suddenly you have five forks the same tool and in the worst case which is normal they do not work together so when you're doing tools and you find other people tools which are nearly doing the same and it's just 90 percent of what you would like to do or would you do please keep the 90 percent and keep it working and don't fork it because of 10 percent which are most times not that important. So makes the sense. That's one of the cases where it's also really nice to have someone with field experience helping to guide things and as good as we all are at coming up with very strange ways of getting around something and so we think that we know best sometimes they just want one thing and they want it to work they're like no really you want this no they don't and so it's good to collaborate and to offer other suggestions but maintaining focus that's provided by a person who knows what's needed. Just wanted to add a quick observation which is that social coding practices actually actually make this a lot easier. The there's a lot of sharing on GitHub among the folks in crypto.is so there's a lot of pull requests go back and forth people will fork something work on their own weird little thing and then it gets flowed back into the the main developers tree. That ends up working out a lot better I from what I've seen than kind of the old school forks as it were so that might be one bit of advice to pass on. Awesome thank you. We have the tools just use them. I assume I got a tool that might be useful to the people on the ground. How can I get in touch with them? How can I find out if it is really that useful as I think it is? Something like Camrobats for example where they test tools where they have different situations which might happen on the ground are replayed and where it can contribute even from here. On the other hand well the beginning is not that easy you need to make contact to people. We did it with this modem things where we faxed faxes with modem numbers and now people contact us so do well, evolve, do well again and then eat the cake. It is very much a still a who do you know because the trust based models are we've actually sat down and had a beer together and so I trust you so I trust your organization things like that. I'm happy to play organic chat client and if you tell me the things that you're working on or sort of I'll try to put you in touch with the best person I know that you should talk to but it's not a very like it's the best system and yet it's not at all. What software does you use for the slides? It's Prezi is the movement through it I like it because I grew up on comic books and so the fact that you can actually zoom out how do you You're in presentation mode but normally you could zoom in and out and everything and then I drew all of this other stuff so see how it's like one thing so I drew all the stick figures and stuff I broke my arm on on November 1st my motorcycle and I got in a fight with a car and not being able to type as fast as I can think really upset me so I took up drawing so now there's this thing If that's not clear raise your hand if you have a question you had a slide you wanted to have discussed right? Yeah Wow I wasn't Oh yeah I can't get this It was about this topic we asked you earlier that we wanted this topic so I hope you all have thought about that and I'm sure you all remember yeah so Hacking is a political act Hacking is way more politically than most people think or on the other hand nope it is not and it is important for us for our work to get to know how the hackers feel about these both tithes that we can deal with it that people who are working with people on the ground know in which way they need to ask and which kind of software they might expect so any comments, remarks on that I would be happy to hear them Not from the internet as you usually relay from the internet I think it's very diverse as in I see lots of different groups here either just caring about doing the technology bit and some just doing the technology because of the what have a political thing to do and some people see that the desire for how do you can use technology as a political act in itself and I think you have yeah not quite a diversity in that Super diplomatic response No it's good So any oh next remark I think if you make political decisions then those of course will influence how your tool needs to be designed and during the Kastor protests against the nuclear waste transport in northern Germany which is something that happens every year for 15 years now just for people who are not familiar with it there is a tool called Kastor Ticker which was basically like a Twitter feed on its own web page so it's a tool used to dispatch short messages with links and location data for where stuff was happening where people were needed and they had this one really strange and really funny message where they said that they were working on the DNS problems that had arisen for an IP range used by the police so the way that I think people were meant to understand it was that they had shut out police DNS ranges from using the tool which must have made quite an impact because police were known to use this tool and to find it more reliable than their own internal than their own internal ways of communication you know radio messages because those are all top-down and known to be really slow and so on the one hand this is a hacking decision you know to shut out an IP range is a technical problem but on the other hand of course it was based on the political factor of we do not want police in this case to be able to access this information so these questions you know they kind of influence each other and if you program a tool you have to think about could I possibly want exclude people from using this tool like the military in some case or like government agencies so you might leave some space for political decisions even though you don't want to make them I'm hoping that some of the tools that are coming out that are inherently transparent and inherently node structure will be subtly disruptive to all of these top-down systems because people look at them and they don't know how to use them and just by learning how to use them they learn the values of transparency that makes me happy in certain ways that's okay how do you manage the tension that exists here between having tools that for example need to interact with military structures or police structures like the classic example is crisis mapping and tools that want to be kind of you know sort of oppositional to authority kind of oppositional to hierarchies like how can you build relationships with those communities while also trying to kind of work around the sort of bad aspects of them well at least tools like crisis mapping have well a merit on the floor the merit is that anybody can see where is something going on after a disaster like an earthquake, tsunami whatever this is great this is helping everyone that helps the parachuting in troops who do well yeah the Red Cross whatever the technicians to see okay we need to work here we should need to send medics there and so on in a revolution I would not suggest to use such a tool if it's if a tool is highly transparent like disaster mapping you should not give it into the wild then you need to run it on dark nets or whatever which are not accessible by the not meant persons this is something we need to teach people on the ground in an ongoing revolution this is why they need the activists group from outside who built this for them in most cases so the same tool can be used in different ways and it is very important that people who are on the ground and find a tool somewhere on the net that they understand that this is not meant to be used in a revolution for example but I think this should be a little disclaimer somewhere in big red letters on the screen do not use in case of revolution something like this you see Facebook is well a wallet garden we know that it is easy to use it is very easy to use it is in a way not secure for people it is way too complicated to use in in cases of privacy issues but it is the best that people have we haven't built till now something better or something saying easy for them so they use what they have and we can complain as long as we want we just do not build better tools for them so they will use what they have all right for the people who know it it wouldn't be a surprise but I didn't think that it could work to control who is using your data because well digital vital management is just bullshit but my question is do you want to talk about the use of the tools or do you want to talk about also the design processes and the design process of the tools and at least both okay yeah I just wondering how the thing about don't use for revolution and but like using the tools use other tools or tools differently when you have a revolution line up with working together with military organizations like that's camp robert's okay so when you're dealing with when it's oh sorry when it's thank you when it's in a disaster then you have you are going to interact with the military no matter what hopefully in a way that's collaborative in revolution you're also going to interact with the military no matter what but in a different way and so until we have the ability that as technology becomes ubiquitous and as we're more able to help ourselves instead of asking for outside help we're from one organization especially the military the military is really good at moving things which is vital in disaster they're really good at shipping things it just shows up and it works but yeah it's it's treacherous territory of well if we made friends with you over here for a flood but then there's also refugee camp in the flood area then who are and was the military a part of why there's a refugee camp there it's it gets really shady and so it's not just about the the technology tools that we're using it's not just about those complicating factors it's also about the complicating factors of the people involved so there are no easy answers but that's why it's awesome okay first is Johnny I think we should we should finish awesome so um yeah thanks a lot for being here for listening to us for giving us input I hope you enjoyed our talk a little bit with the slaps and everything have a good last day here at the congress and see you all next year