 All right, so I think it's time to start. OK, good afternoon, ladies and gents. My name is David Robert Lewis. I'm a activist, technologist, and journalist. And I'm here to introduce you to the electronic struggle. Before we start, I've got to give you a disclaimer. This is not a chat about distributed denial of service attacks. It's not about tools such as the ping of death, email bombs, clobbering servers with HTTP calls and so on. And this is definitely not a talk about penetration testing. However, some of the material in the events related here may refer to previous epoch time when that kind of thing was considered legal, ordinary, even derogere. So if any of you feel uncomfortable about the content of my discussion, you're most welcome to leave the room. I'm hoping that you're going to stay with me, and you're going to take a journey back to ancient times. Back in the day, in the late 80s, early 90s, institutions such as the University of Cape Town was connected by UUCP, UNIX, NNTP, PopMail, Lynx, Gopher. Most of those facilities were under lock and key. If you enrolled in a PhD program in the right faculty, you had access to what was then also referred to as the internet. At the same time that you had your campus organizations using systems that were point-to-point protocol, you'd have your mail done loaded, transferred, maybe twice a day if you were lucky. So other servers and other institutions and other servers, it was a free bulletin board scene. You know anything about the bulletin board scene? It was also a point-to-point protocol. And mainly on personal computers, on the good old IBM ATXT computers that you had to boot up with a floppy disk. I've got my first copy of IBM DOS from the computer lab on campus. I actually sneaked it out. I met a computer science student in the afternoon. He gave me what you would probably consider an illicit copy of an operating system that is now antiquated. So along with the free BBS system, I've got to just frame it for you. This is a period of campus unrest. In 1987, the Hollywood University of Cape Town was closed down as a result of unrest, student revolt, and the South African police, the apartheid regime, was wedging a war of attrition against communism. And they came onto campus to give the communists on campus a lesson. And they shambucked students in the library, tear gas the campus. There's some interesting pictures of the UCT enveloped in tear gas, helicopters flying overhead, riot police. So I got caught up in the throngs of this whole unrest. I was a naive student, but I'd been politically active. I joined various organizations. And during that same year, the organizations such as the end-construction campaign, various other new SAS affiliates were banned by the Ministry of Security. And so that's just some of the context of this. So while the anti-apartheid movement was organizing against the apartheid state, you had the emergence of a variety of networks that helped us to connect the anti-apartheid movement with the outside world. So what is significant about this time is that there arose a bulletin board system known as WorkNet, which was really in opposition to the government-sponsored video text system known as BELTEL, which was based on a French system. If you were a law-abiding citizen, you could order a BELTEL system. There's a picture over there of something very similar. And so the big corporates in the banks and the apartheid regime delivered information via the very first information system. People who were now opposed to that system, I must admit I never actually got to use a BELTEL system. It would have been quite interesting to hack into it on Julian Assange. And he's got a novel detailing some of his exploits. And one of them is using a very similar Australian system to hack into NASA and the Pentagon and so on. So I came out of the bulletin board system, the WorkNet, and I used WorkNet, so I dial up into WorkNet and connect to GreenNet, PeaceNet, EConnect. I'd read my news on the NNTP system, which is the Network News Transfer Protocol. And there are a number of organizations which are worth mentioning, the computer education, so it's the community education, so Cape Educational Computer Society, all right. And the other organization is the Computer Resources Project, known as CRIG. These are two organizations on the Cape Flats. And if you know anything about apartheid, it was a system that segregated people according to race. I started out as a white person, and soon found myself being disenrolled from the white race as a result of my activism and as a result of my fraternization with people of color. I found myself on the wrong side of the law. And if you had a time machine, you could go back to the 1980s. And if you went to CRIG or Kex at an atlone, you might find a person such as Douglas Riehler and Imodem also dialing into WorkNet and organizing on labor issues, on social justice issues. So it was quite a frenetic period. The townships were burning. There was unrest. And the media outlets really carried the big story of our political leaders, FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela and the negotiations surrounding the end game settlement. What people don't realize is that while Nelson Mandela was being released, people were still being arrested and still being tried and put on trial for activities. So along with the bulletin board system, we also had the single monopoly operator called Telcom, which provided a one size fits all phone service. It was really just one shade of beige device that you could order from Telcom and you'd get a bill. And significant about that period in the 80s was the emergence of your PBX systems, your pay lines, gaming lines, and sex lines. So if you happened to read the classified section, you'd find a bunch of adverts advertising various gaming lines, telephone informational services that took money off your bill. And you dialed into those pay services via your phone. Let's go on to the next slide. OK, we've got a bit of animation. All right, so the problem of apartheid was that it wasn't just something that happened in isolation. It has a history. And one of the ways of looking at that history is through technology. One of the companies associated with the regime was a company known as International Business Machines. And it itself was what you could call a repeat offender. IBM are notorious for aiding and abetting the Nazi regime, particularly the census data that was used to gather information on your German citizens during the 1930s. What's important about it, let's just look at this guy, Hermann Hollerith, in the 1880s. He was a United States citizen. He came up with a tabulating machine using punch cards. This was the early information processing systems of that time. And IBM, being an emerging global company, ended up with a subsidiary in Germany known as Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen-Kuschelschaft der Mark, 1910. So before Hitler had arisen to power, there was the power provided by the technology to achieve ignoble ends. So you had a simple card system, a tabulating system, that was then used by a regime that had based its race theories on earlier scientific racism. You might know of a pseudoscience known as eugenics. So Hitler proceeded to implement information-gathering experiments on the German population and gathered data such as your ethnicity, your height, and so on, and used that information, particularly notorious in the German debt camps, which were also known as concentration camps. And so as a Jew, I'm quite fascinated by the way that technology has been used by fascist regimes to control populations. The apartheid state, which began in 1948 and ended officially in 1994, similarly gathered information on its population. It used similar data processing equipment, also designed and produced and leased by international business machines. And I'm going to get into the case. There's a longstanding case. But before we get there, I've got to relate a story. It's a personal story of related to my activism. Because in 1989, I wrote a letter to what was then sort of a cyberpunk magazine produced by Queen Mu and Ari Sirius to West Coast personalities. It was transitioning from, it was previously known as a high space or something, a head space. Anyway, it became Mondo 2000 in 1989. And I ended up with a letter published in issue two of Mondo 2000 under a pseudonym. And it detailed in sort of general terms the problem related to the personal computer, the good old XT and AT. And the use of this new technology, emerging technology at the time, to apprehend and surveil activists. It was a particular instance where a couple had gone to an ATM and their cart issued by the bank had been swallowed by the machine and had gone into the bank to retrieve their cart. And the manager, the branch, told them to wait. And of course, the system was rigged to inform and the special branch apprehended them. So there was a bit of consternation as to what the new technologies were being used for by the apartheid state. Bear in mind that this was a state that had, as a transpire, had death squads. And there was a particular incident at Fluck Palace, which is detailed, but in the truth commission, final report. So my general activism around the use of technology by the state turned into something quite interesting because there arose a case in the aftermath of the truth commission and the inquiry into apartheid. It arose this case that is still ongoing. It's one of the longest-running cases in legal history. It's in the same status as the survivors of the Holocaust. And it's, as we know, apartheid was a crime against humanity. So what is there to be said about the IBM case? Well, as we stand, there are two significant cases. There are two groups of individuals. The one is not such a large group. And recently, this year, the case, which is in Saberza v. IBM and also the Ford Motor Car Company, that case has essentially expired. It's come to it as far as it can go through the United States legal system. It went to a number of petitions because all the litigation is based upon the Alien Torts Act, which allows, in its form, as it stood, allowed foreign individuals to sue United States corporations if you could prove that the US corporation had intent and had somehow engaged in gross violations of human rights. The problem with this litigation is that there's been a trend towards limiting the ability of the aegis of the Alien Torts Act and a court, one of the lower courts, found in favor of IBM and Ford's company. And so it's turned really into a very complex piece of litigation. If you read the documents which have been filed by the bigger group, which is the Cullimani case, which there represents some 100,000 survivors of apartheid, many of them were victims of torture and various rights violations. Some of them are widows and orphans of activists who were killed at Flukplas. If you look at the manner in which the documents have been filed, in my honest opinion, speaking as a layperson and as a journalist, it appears that the case has been filed with regard to what is known as grand apartheid. The problem of the denationalization of South African citizens who were classified as black by the government, if you know anything about apartheid, one of the policies was to remove black citizens from citizenship so that you had a white country and then you had these homeland states that were supposedly independent homelands, none of which were recognized by the international community. So the problem of proving intent, it's a lot easier to prove the census information and the gathering of census data, such as race criteria, bloodline and blood criteria and the issues of blood quantum. And I'm someone who's fallen foul of this pseudoscience, where I myself have been disenrolled from the so-called white race as a result of issues of blood quantum. And as you know, it's very difficult to prove, if you look at your DNA, it's very difficult to prove that there is such a thing as race because the science tells us that innate adaptations such as hair and skin color are not indicative of a separation between the species. We are all, biologically speaking, the same species. All right, I'm a person who went from the Apple Revolution, the Apple II revolution, the small BBS movement, and worked in it. And shortly after, Chris Haney, who was the leader of the Communist Party in South Africa, was assassinated, I ended up in self-imposed exile on the West Coast, the United States of America. So the end stages of apartheid, I was out of the country. In 1990, we went one step ahead, I think. There we go. Sorry. We're back again. Pre-animation, you know. Yeah. You have to hold it there for a special brand. Go back. Being censored. Yeah, this, yeah. There's these silly animations. I thought I was being clever. All right, we're going back again. I think I'm just going to click on the actual slide, and then ask it to show me. Start from current slide. All right, it's an animation that's doing this. Right. OK, so we don't have a picture. The picture by the way is just a picture of two kids at Club Megatrepolis on the West Coast with a PowerBook 180, very similar to the one that I was carrying around at the time. So what happened in 1994? Surprise, surprise, we went from the BBS systems, where you had point-to-point protocol, to a totally new way of communicating. The TCP-IP protocol, essentially, as far as I'm concerned, was an introduction of the internet as it is commonly referred to. Because instead of going point-to-point, you issued your IP, you could produce your own IP, you'd instead of going through a bulletin board, you go directly to a server where you were given an IP address. And at the same time, we had Tim Berners-Lee and the Worldwide WUSH, which was also the Worldwide Wait. I had an account that's on a bulletin board running Unix. It was Berkeley Unix. And it's quite a popular bulletin board known as the whole Earth electronic link. So a lot of this was superseded by the Worldwide Web. Myself, I experienced the unbundling of Mozilla and Netscape Navigator, which arrived on my PowerBook 180 as zipped files that I downloaded from them. They were actually given to me by Wes Thomas, who was then the editor of Mondo 2000. And unzipped the file. Next thing, I'm surfing using a graphical user interface. And there wasn't much that you could do. There were a couple of other online, like American Online and a couple of places. But most part, it was a totally new frontier. You could log into the academic community. So I logged into Stella Mosch University from the West Coast. I could surf the card catalog at the institution. And this new world of the internet presented all sorts of opportunities. As an activist, I thought this was an amazing opportunity to engage in what became known as hacktivism. The word hadn't been coined at the time. But in 1994, people might know of this, if you're old enough. The prime minister of Great Britain, Manbandham John Major, he implemented his government. He was a conservative Tory government. He implemented a series of laws, which outlawed music with a repetitive beat, criminalized outdoor music festivals. And it was really aimed at the underground rave culture scene of the time, which was, if you might know about it, was based on electronic music and became also later known as the trance music scene. So what happened? I was part of a bunch of infanauts, activists, and ravers who grouped together. And at that point, being a bunch of kids, we were known as the zippies. Zippies stands for Zen-inspired, pro-noyed, profound, peace-professional. Pro-noy is the sneaking suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf. So our tactics, we gate-crashed a book launched by a late Tim Leary. He was launching a book on chaos and subculture. He jumped on the bandwagon, and technology was the new drug. So dropping the internet or hooking into the internet was the next best thing to taking acid. And what did I do? I hacked into his account on the well. I managed to get hold of his password, which I believe, if my memory serves me right, his password was SmileSquared. And we forced Mr. Leary to email Bob, his arch-enemy, John Major, with a protest message demanding an end to the criminal justice bill. Problem with being the first person or the first bunch of people to do this was there was no way of knowing what the reaction would be. This is a year before the Italian NET strike, which was also an online protest. And it came after, if you read Julia Sange's book, it was an internet worm, which broadcast messages, anti-nuclear messages. So what was the next thing that happened after we were trashing John Major and Her Majesty's government, HMS John Major, and the criminal justice bill, and also likewise CCing and becoming a total nuisance and disrupting MPs communication and pinging servers and removing their ability to communicate with their electorate was, of course, there was a counter-strike. So I ended up with a conversation with a man named Mark Healy. If you are from San Francisco, you might know Mark Healy as an expat UK person who relocated to the West Coast and became involved in the dance culture, the nightlife scene, the magazine. So I ended up with a telephone call crapping on me because the morph servers that we had used as one of our bases on the internet, the morph servers had now fallen over as a result of the data coming back after we had sent a lot of data, a lot of page calls, a lot of pings, and a lot of really large files as part of, through the pop servers, all of that ended up in the morph servers going down. And of course, morph was a community that had come out of the bulletin board scene. It was a community with a lot of people, whether it was LGBT community or the rave community or various other communities. So everyone was irate that we were being bad cyber-citizens, that our activism had essentially created a disruption of the communication. Needless to say, the feds decided to once again crack down on the fiend of the day, which if you read the press and if you watched Hollywood movies, the hackers were the enemy. And there was a witch hunt against the use of computers, people, adolescents, teenagers using computers and causing disruption on the internet. And one of the individuals who was unlucky enough to come up against the federal government, and I believe it's because he had done some penetration and he had copied also files. He'd essentially stolen information as far as I know. But Kevin Mitnick was a member of the ELTOT2600 hacker community and the feds really came down hard on Kevin. And he ended up with a trial bar Hollywood. Crazy thing about it was that Kevin was arrested on my birthday, which was so the intervention of the UK was in September of 1994. 1995 and the 15th of February, which was my birthday, Kevin Mitnick was arrested. There was a trial bar Hollywood and he ended up serving hard time hard labor in a state penitentiary and ended up with a longstanding campaign to release Kevin. The Intervasion, which was a public event at the Tim Leary Book Launch, was covered by a Berkeley free radio who based in Oakland and later also it was a couple of articles appeared in Hack Block. But for the most part, that entire experience has been deleted. We don't exist. If you read Wikipedia, even the Italian net strike doesn't exist. Activism somehow starts in 2005 if you read your Wikipedia. Another point I want to make about this period that I spent in the West Coast was this guy by the name of Phil Zimmerman in 1991 released a piece of software known as PGP, a pretty good privacy. And under the Clinton administration in Al Gore, you had a couple of attempts to stop the encryption of information. And there was a case against Phil Zimmerman for PGP. Oh, you're free to leave. She was waiting for you. Right. PGP was created in the shadow of the Clipper Chip fiasco. It was a genuine meter's way of explaining the problem of surveillance. And the fear was that your chips that you had in your phones or your computers would be used to record your conversations and to surveil. So PGP was now supposedly the solution to surveillance. The United States government cracked down on PGP. The reaction from the community, the crypto free community and the cyberpunk community, was to upload copies of PGP on every server that they could possibly imagine. And the result was that the United States government was forced to drop its case in 1996. The case involved restrictions on exporting crypto, restrictions on the type of crypto that you could have. There was a NSA standard that they thought that ordinary citizens shouldn't be in possession of. And they tried to essentially make it a crime to be in possession of pretty good privacy. All right. So when I returned back from exile in 1995, I was all fired up by the crypto wars and early hacktivism. Now, again, a private campaign ready to create awareness around the internet and around issues to do with access to information, privacy, and information freedom. I attended an event hosted at the iCafe, which no longer exists. It was the first internet cafe. Cafe was a big scene at the time in Longstreet. And there's a picture of me right there in front of a monitor campaigning Minister Palo Jordan in an event which was the first time that an MP had used IRC to communicate with the electorate. So a bunch of us at the iCafe, including Stephen Garrett, chatted online the very first time using a new technology of the internet with our minister. Fax Jay Naidu, who was also Minister of Communications. And what is significant about this period, 1995, is that after 1994, which was the first democratic election where a majority government was elected, there was a period in which we engaged as a country in writing a piece of legislation which would become known as the Bill of Rights. It's just a note here that I also handed Mr. Jordan, who attended after the chat session. He arrived with his entourage. Palo Jordan was really the ANC ambassador at the United Nations. And it was quite a significant persona in terms of the history of this country. So he arrived, and I handed him a copy of the virtual community by Howard Ryan Gold. And there was an effort to really educate our politicians about information rights. And we ended up with a document which is very much a document of its time. It's a document which was written in the light of the rise of the internet and the dot-com bubble. So we ended up with two very interesting pieces of legislation in the Bill of Rights. There's Article 14, which is the right to privacy, i.e. the right not to be surveilled, not to be exposed to intrusions by our government or by commercial entities. And then Article 32, which is the access to information clause is a sub-clause of the freedom of expression. I feel it would have been better if that actually had a completely separate clause with number one being access to information. But be that as it may, we have an article in our Bill of Rights access to information, which is defined as the freedom to receive and to impart information. It was really much based on the model of a modem dial-up handshaking itself with the server that any interruption of that relationship which was considered sacrosanct would be a violation of our Bill of Rights. I sent a letter to Wired Magazine. Needless to say, my letter was extracted and turned into a snippet authored by some other individual about the new rights that we had in our country where previously I don't think there was any nation on the planet that had gone so far to protect information, access, and privacy rights through legislation. The bill was signed by Nelson Mandela on the 31st of December, 1996. And this year marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of our Bill of Rights. The result was a 15-year reprieve from obnoxious intrusions on privacy and violations of freedom of access. For the most part, our country has respected issues such as net neutrality. There have been a number of important precedents protecting users' rights to information access. It's been very difficult to clamp down, for instance, on so-called copyright offenders, difficult to regulate traffic, and ISPs on by-large are protected from liability. The internet's generally considered a human right. And I'm not going to go into my Lewis versus Big Data, my piece of what I'm going to get to the next very important slide. So for 15 years, we had a reprieve from oppressive laws. After 9-1-1, things went from relatively OK to quite bad. We saw the rise of RECA, which is the Regulation of Interception Communication Act, which allows our government to spy and to gather information over the mobile networks. In 2010, a proposal by a man by the name of Malusi Gagaba was, if it wasn't defeated, it was essentially shelved because of activism by persons such as myself. Gagaba's draconian piece of legislation would have essentially created a national firewall very much like Communist China. After the Polyquani conference, which elected Jacob Zuma to the presidency, just to note, Jacob Zuma has a background as a man involved in intelligence. There's an organization called Mbacodo. After Polyquani, we've had several pieces of laws that all violate the premise and principles in our Constitution, and each one of them pretty serious. And they've all been proposed in 2015. There's the Film and Publications Regulations Bill, which has been labelled by the EFF, which is not the local political group, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as Africa's worst new internet censorship bill. It creates paid censors and places all media under prior restraint, under the guise of curbing child pornography and sexual deviance. It also envisages gathering of fees for online content distribution as a new source of unlimited revenue. It's essentially physically impossible to enforce the law because it would create a massive bottleneck, and as we know, the terabytes of information and data that coalesce around the internet on a daily basis would just pile up outside the Film and Publications Board, that would never have enough human hours to vet all the information that would come under the aegis of the legislation. There's another bill, which is particularly noxious, which is the Cyber Crimes and Cyber Security Bill, also introduced last year, in which the mere use of a computer or opening a terminal creates grounds for suspicion by the authorities. The bill essentially treats UNIX and Linux as a virus. Any other net tools that you find commonly used on Debian are somehow scary stuff that needs to be dealt with by the lawmakers. The bill in its current form allows for extradition of so-called cyber criminals, i.e. suspects. And the problem with the manner in which the bill has been framed, it creates a situation where the federal government and Hollywood, you are the main protagonists here, where Hollywood would be able to extradite copyright infringers, serial copyright infringers of persons that are deemed to be suspicious for trial in America. There are precedents in the United Kingdom where users have been flown over the Atlantic to face trial for various abuses online. Another piece of legislation which people need to look at is the Copyright Amendment Bill, which restricts permissive licensing, in particular the GNU, GPL, and Creative Commons, which are permissive licenses. The problem is that it draws all information and everything to do with data and computers and technology under the copyright laws and creates a default where everything that is produced is deemed to have been produced in terms of the bill. So there's no way out. And if you read the bill, you're not allowed to sign a contract that would be an escape out of that system. You can't sign a private contract. There's pretty much a piece of legislation drawn up by socialist bureaucrats who wish to control the private individuals. I'm going to hand out some copies of, I think I might have brought it with me, possibly even left it. Just a quick one. I wrote a document called the Electronic Freedom Charter. It's a rewrite of South Africa's Freedom Charter, which was a basis for the Bill of Rights, just in a kind of egalitarian, idealistic, adolescent, if you will, manner that the internet shall govern or computer platforms shall have equal rights. Users shall share in the collective wealth. New media shall be shared among those who work it. All users shall be equal before the law. All shall enjoy equal digital rights. There shall be leisure and gaming. The doors of learning and culture shall be opened. There shall be chat rooms, computers and comforts. There shall be peace and friendship. And these freedoms we will fight for side by side through our routers and modems until we have won our liberty. Each one of those points is, there are a couple of sub points in the document which is available online. And I'm going to end it there. So thank you very much for listening to me. Right, any questions? On that copyright assignment, Bill, if somebody in South Africa takes his work and licenses it under Creative Commons, so kind of he retains copyright but allows a free use in any of the Creative Commons cases. Is that covered? Is that OK? The default is that even if you release something under a permissive license, it still would be in terms of the copyright law, which, as I've said, does not recognize permissive licensing. It's a crazy piece of legislation that's written in a vacuum by people who clearly do not understand what the Creative Commons or the GPL is all about. Can you clarify what you mean by default? Is there a way to opt out so that you can give a permissive license? There is no out. You would need a court order or a constitutional challenge. The fear of the ruling ANC government would essentially it would run completely contrary to the principles enshrined in our constitution. Essentially, these bills create work for attorneys. They create an environment in which, unless you have a large amount of money, able to procure attorneys, it's a way of soliciting business for the legal profession. Does that answer your question? That's one of them. So is there a sort of layman's summary of this copyright bill? I think a lot of people would be pretty interested. That's a very good point. I don't think there is a layperson summary of the bill. I have written about it. That's a very good way to raise consciousness and awareness. If anyone feels up to it. Well, if I could respond to that before I say what I was going to say. The right to no campaign, r2k.org.za, has summarized these bills from an activist point of view. All right. OK. And then just to rewind, during the talk, there were two points that David touched on, which I would like to sort of slightly elaborate for people who are not South African. Firstly, at the time of World War II, the people who were to come to power in 1948, including a future prime minister, were so closely associated with Nazism that they were interned in internment camps for the duration of the war. And some of their supporters who had been to Germany at the time of the Olympic Games just before the war actually re-infiltrated the country by submarine and things like that. And the Nazi regime had actually planned what it was going to do with the entire world if it won the war, which it thought it would do. And their plan for South Africa was to hand over to those Afrikaner nationalists who actually won the 48 election. So that's what we were dealing with. That's an interesting point, Michael. There's evidence. And the evidence is quite interesting. There are cards issued by the national party, the same party that came up with the apartheid system. That same party was an affiliate of the international white gentile movement. And the cards issued during the 1930s and 40s carry the swastika. Thank you all. We are off now. Awesome.