 Before we get started, we just want to thank all of you guys coming today for coming and wanting to learn more about Anonymous. It's a collective that all of us have had quite a bit of experience with, so we look forward to sharing that experience with you. Our panel today is entitled Anonymous and the Online Fight for Justice. For those of you that aren't too familiar with Anonymous, we found this amazing four-minute quick video to kind of fill you in on a non-101 that I want to play for you, but I also want to remind you too that this panel is slated for two hours. So just so you know, we're going to start off having the speakers give a little presentation to tell about their experience with the collective, and then we're going to go into some Q&A and we're going to have a lot of audience involvement and really allow you guys to participate and ask these amazing dynamic panelists a lot of questions. So before we get to that, here is a video we want to share with you to give you a little Anonymous 101 to get everyone in the audience up to speed. The Bunch of Basement Dwelling Social Outcast Hackers by the Media. It started out as a sort of joke on 4Chimp, then became a trolling group with an occasional activist attitude. Some of the trollish behavior of Anonymous included sending unpaid pizzas to houses, DDoSing websites, posting humiliating information, and prank calls. In 2008, a private video of Tom Cruise praising Scientology made it online and was subsequently taken down by The Church. This attempt of The Church of Scientology to hide the video irritated Anon and they began a massive trolling operation against the organization. Those that had been fighting against The Church of Scientology years before came to Anon and asked them to move away from their illegal and childish trolling and move towards legitimate protesting outside the Scientology headquarters. This idea appealed to the majority of Anon and they moved toward a legal form of protesting. Like all of the anonymous activities, they eventually got tired of this and went back to their trolling with the occasional legitimate cause. Anon got its big break around the time the governments were starting to come against WikiLeaks, which was also around the time of the Iranian uprisings. The increase in potential political causes started to move Anonymous toward more activist actions. Anyone can be a member of Anonymous. There aren't any rules or guidelines. While there are actual hackers that are members, they make up a very small portion of Anonymous. Most members are your normal everyday people with a computer. Your grandmother, lawyer, or teacher could be a member of Anon. The Guy Fawkes Mask that Anon is associated with comes from the comic book and subsequent movie adaptation, V for Vendetta, which is about an anarchist vigilante in futuristic Britain. Guy Fawkes is an actual historical figure. He attempted to blow up parliament in 1604 in order to destabilize the British government and instate Catholic domination, which was significantly more restrictive than the government at the time. Anyway, he failed, but people still like to wear his mask. Oddly enough, the mask design is owned by Time Warner, so a percentage of the sale of each mask goes to them. Anonymous organizes its raids and communicates through Fort Chan and other image boards, wikis, forums, and IRC networks. While Anonymous claims to not have any leaders, it does have a form of organization and logistics that shapes it as a group. Most non-operations are formed in the following fashion. One or two people think some fact where Vendetta is unjust and something should be done about it. They will talk to other non-members and suggest ideas. Whether an operation will actually be launched or not mostly depends on how many non-support the idea. No one can approve or reject an idea in a non. If enough people like the idea, they will support it. If not, it will be ignored and dropped. There isn't a specific number of people required for an operation. Operation HB Gary was tackled by about half a dozen people, whereas something like Operation Tunisia involves several hundred people. Anonymous has various methods of annoying its victims. Distributed denial of service attacks, prank calls, spam emails, ordering numerous pizza deliveries to households, straight up hacking, and more. A distributed denial of service attack is when a site is visited so many times in a certain period that it can't handle all the traffic and shuts down. Anonymous members run a program that syncs hundreds or thousands of computers to sort a single website at once. In the case of Anonymous taking down the MasterCard servers, they used over 2,000 computers to DDoS the site. A DDoS attack is devastating to a company. When PayPal was brought down, millions of transactions couldn't go through, resulting in massive fees that would have to be sorted out in court. Anon has gone against the Egyptian and Iranian government, Amazon, the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, and more. Recently, they announced a plan to bring down Facebook and proclaimed that they were coming down on those distributing child pornography. Although Anon values its privacy, they have exposed quite a bit of private data owned by companies and organizations. They leaked private data owned by HB Gary after their owners threatened to expose the non-members, and they gave out private information of officers involved in the Occupy Wall Street arrests. Members hide their identity by faking or masking their IP address, or using a zombie computer. A zombie computer is one that has been compromised through viruses, Trojans, or other malware. The virus, Trojan, or malware will then make the computer send out information to target websites. The entire time the owner of the zombie computer has no clue as to the activities his machine is partaking in. Afterwards, all the logs would be deleted, removing any traces of their actions. A single infected computer will then be used to infect another, and so on. While Anon still reflects its trollish, 4chan origins, it has managed to move towards fighting for moral causes. Anonymous's actions are highly illegal, but the organization is often viewed favorably by advocates of free speech and internet neutrality. One thing is for sure, law enforcement will have to adapt if it ever wants to keep up with leaderless online groups like these. Right, we want to thank Jeremiah Warren for that awesome, four minute, real quick description on a complicated topic. And you guys have to forgive me, I'm working on a Mac here, and it's just been, very hard to deal with. All right, so first of all, my name's Amber Lyon, and I'm an investigative journalist. I've reported quite extensively on Anonymous. And today we have these wonderful panelists. First of all, we have Biela Coleman. She is a professor of anthropology. We also have Grania O'Neill sitting next to her. Mercedes Hafer, J. Letterman, and Marcia Hoffman. And if you notice, we have three lawyers on this panel and quite a few females. So, we're really representing here. All right, so we're gonna go through, we just found out we only have an hour in this room, then we move to another room for a little more audience, Q&A, and that room only fits 35 people, so we'll keep our speeches as short as possible so that we can allow more of a dynamic conversation with you guys. But just to give you a little bit of my background, I am an investigative reporter. As of now, I'm an independent investigative reporter. I spent two years working for CNN in their investigative and documentary unit up until last April when that unit was disbanded. I hope that that didn't have to do with me. I don't quite know, or my anonymous reporting. So, when I first started reporting on Anonymous, you know, the mainstream media really had the story wrong. They were calling a non-script kiddies. Some people were calling them moral fags. You'd hear an four-chan, also hackers on steroids. That was quite a popular term there. But the more I got to investigating this collective, the more I realized that this perception within the mainstream media was not totally representative of everything Anonymous stands for. And the more Anons I would talk to, the more I would see deeper into this collective and see its power to actually create tangible change. And I was overseas covering the Arab Spring and I'd have activists after activists tell me that they thanked Anonymous for actually helping galvanize and save their revolutions because Anonymous was able to take these videos and photos of human rights abuses and spread them across the internet and actually get the mainstream media to care about what was happening on the streets of Tunisia. Also covered Anonymous in their participation with Occupy Wall Street. Anonymous definitely served as a kind of the watchers for the protesters outing police officers for suspected police brutality incidents. In addition to that, I love this photo. I took this one at Occupy Wall Street in New York. And they also really had a presence on the street. You would see a lot of a non-masks walking in unison with the protesters. Now, one thing I noticed though, when you would look at mainstream media stories, you'd notice that a lot of the reporters didn't even talk to Anonymous for the story. They would just take critics' sayings and use those verbatim and wouldn't spend time actually getting to know the Anonymous. So as a journalist, one of my theories upon this is that these reporters are fearful of reporting on Anonymous. That's because it's a difficult story to cover. Obviously, this is a collective that says they have no leader. So you really have nowhere to go to to find sources as well as to go to to confirm your facts. Another thing too, you all know, the media gets played a lot as journalists. We have a megaphone to the world, so we become quite suspect. We become magnets, I guess, for trolls, for feds potentially wanting to use us to get stories out. Also, you know, we are constantly at the risk in dealing with Anonymous, of publishing an incredible story, or on the other hand, becoming the brunt of incredible lulls. And another thing I noticed with the reporting of Anonymous is that fear is not the only factor keeping the press from getting the story right. There's other forces at work that are just as, if not more, disturbing. So this is something that I hope everyone, it's not talked about enough in journalism. And that's the fact that right now, the Obama administration is waging a war, as many critics will call it, against journalists and whistleblowers. And I experienced this firsthand in different policies that were set in my reporting, especially in dealing with Anonymous. The administration, what they've been doing is they've been prosecuting whistleblowers and journalists under the Espionage Act of 1917. Now to put things into perspective, before the Obama administration, the act had been used only three times total since 1917. And now the administration has already used it six times, six times to go after journalists and whistleblowers. One of those journalists being a well-known New York Times reporter. Now, as an ethical journalist, I'm not gonna give up my sources. I don't care, I'll go to jail. I will not reveal my sources. And that essentially has, thank you. Okay, so you guys all are clapping, but do you know to this administration that makes me a criminal? And I know we have... And I know we have a lot of feds in this audience, so I'm gonna tell you right now, I am a criminal in the eyes of this administration. But you know what, I'm damn proud of it, because I feel like we have such an important job as journalists right now, and we should start standing up and raising more awareness about what's going on. So this is how this has affected anonymous reporting, is that the administration has shown major media corporations that they're not scared to go after what was once the sacred press. And this really extends beyond having sources that are just leaking information. It's created a chilling effect to even dealing with sensitive sources and our ability to talk to individuals like Anans and get their side of the story. I was told by my superiors that I had to ask for permission to even communicate with anonymous. At that point, my bosses would conduct what they considered to be a risk assessment of that particular source. So whether I was allowed to interview that source became more of a business decision than an evaluation of societal good or journalistic responsibility. In other words, when you're dealing with sensitive sources who could potentially be wanted by the government, that makes the story a lot more expensive when you're evaluating the potential costs because I said I would not give up my sources. That told my bosses that we would potentially have to go to court to fight it, which you guys know how much lawyers cost. So that really was a consideration, as these lawyers would know. Jay, what would you say about that one? Mine is pro bono. We're often free. Well, these lawyers are a lawyer. So this being said, several of my investigations that would have given Anans an opportunity to tell their side of the story were killed before they even started. And that's just my experience. You can imagine how widespread this is among corporate media outlets. You know, for example, in February of this year, I wanted to interview this Anan. I don't know if you guys, if anyone knows who this is. Jay knows him quite well. He's a client of Jay's. And he goes by the name Commander X. His real name's Christopher Doyan. My bosses deemed it too risky and they told me I could not go and talk to him to get his side of the story, mostly because it was too risky because he's facing federal charges. New York Times reporter James Ryzen, who's currently facing an Obama administration subpoena, said it best. And I want you guys to hear this quote. He said, can you have a democracy without aggressive investigative journalism? I don't believe you can. And that's why I'm fighting. Well, I also fought back. And when my bosses told me I couldn't go talk to them, I said, okay, well then I'm taking vacation. I'm gonna go talk to him anyway. So I did. And I'm in the process of producing an independent documentary on his life and really giving him a chance to tell his side of the story, which is what I hope all journalists and all citizens encourage journalists to do so that we all know how dangerous it is when we allow the government to tell us who our enemies are rather than the people actually finding out the truth and allowing journalists to expose that. So I think more than anything is that if we're able to retake back our status as journalists and is watchdogs, then we'll be able to tell the story of anonymous better and we won't get criticized so much for getting it wrong. I want you to go ahead and give these panelists a chance to talk because each one of them has a very unique experience within the collective and an amazing perspective to share with you. So we're gonna start first with Professor Biela Coleman. One, I've been studying anonymous for better or for worse for about three years now and I'm gonna start with one of my favorite old school anonymous videos. Dear Fox News, it has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of anonymous has been ravaged as if it were a whore in a back alley and then placed on display for the public eye to behold. Allow me to say quite simply, you completely missed the point of who and what we are. Unfortunately for you, this is not some secret club where we gather in the clubhouse, shopping, gold, porn magazines, and daddies, etc. This is not some internet gang of panel nerds who will spend everything attempting to break into your computer. This is not some group of desperate and depraved individuals who are looking to ruin everyone else's lives because they're home and are pathetic. Where would you be down inside want to do to be your wife when she doesn't make you dinner when you come home? Where would you be down inside want to be when you find your 14-year-old daughter sleeping with her 27-year-old boyfriend? Where would you be down inside which it could be when your wife cheats on you, when you're signed on to you, when your daughter leaves you, when the waiter goes around you, when your boss ridicules you? We are what you could never be. We are everyone and we are no one. We are anonymous. We are a region. We do not forgive. We do not forget it. We are the face of chaos and the heartbreakers of judgment. I just liked that video because that was a response to Fox News' story when they described them as hackers on steroids and they're like, we're the harbingers of judgment, the face of chaos. So you can really imagine the surprise when six months after this video is released, anonymous doesn't simply become a trolling machine but becomes irreverent activism as well. And this is when I decided to jump in. And as the video we saw originally that opened this panel talked about, Scientology was the first kind of political campaign. And although they moved away from trolling, they still sort of retained some of the lulzy, irreverent transgressive tactics of trolling into their activism. Now what was kind of interesting was that between 2008 and 2010, you basically still have trolling rolling at a forechan. Some people really upset that there's any kind of activist orientation. And then you have Project Chenology. There were some sort of small operations that started such as Operation Tit Storm to kind of protest the Australian government, censorship and so on, so forth. And it was actually in 2010, that slide's missing, in 2010 with Operation Payback where a new node, a new network was born that was eventually known as a non-ops. And this is significant because in some ways, what is distinctive about Anonymous, and the first video was actually kind of wrong about this, is that Anonymous doesn't go from X, Y and Z. It is that there's X, Y and Z at the very same time. And this is something really important to emphasize. Project Chenology in fact continues today, right? It just happens to be that usually one network or one set of operations such as the hacking operations becomes the face of Anonymous because of the media attention given. So that's one point I really want to hammer down. It is a kind of multiplicity, it's not amorphousness. Okay, in the most general terms, I guess you can say that the lesson to heed from Anonymous is that the internet will judge the actions of individuals, corporations and governments. It will often do it at the drop of a hat, unpredictably. And so this is a sort of general way to understand the political operations, but now I just want to sort of emphasize some particular points about the political networks. Again, I want to say it is not amorphous blob, it's a multiplicity that is highly dynamic and that's one of the reasons why it's so difficult to study. There's regional networks, there's international networks, a network will come and go, and this is one of the reasons why it's difficult to pin down. It is not quite as amorphous as the media often portrays it to be. They take on many different causes from environmental causes to occupy, but the largest kind of operations often have to do with internet censorship. Those are when you get like the real, real numbers. Another sort of point that I want to emphasize is that the iconography and the ethics are often the same across these different nodes and networks, so the Guy Fawkes mass, the headless suit are quite similar, there's innovation, of course. Another really shared principle has to do with an anti-celebrity ethic within Anonymous and I'll go back to this, but this is kind of core across the different activist networks. What is different are the political tactics. So, chenology doesn't use hacking, it doesn't use d-dossing. Anonops, obviously that was their kind of preferred weapon of choice for many years. Voxenon, which is a recent network, actually came up with a constitution to delimit the technical power of elite. So the political tactics and the political cultures of these different networks are distinct. But perhaps something else which unites them has to do with the fact that they put on a really good show. Their art is spectacle, whether it's through propaganda, PR, hacking, lot of great videos and iconography. This is something, again, that's often shared by the different political networks. And this is important because what this means is that Anonymous, like that initial video showed, is not simply just hackers, that's a small fraction, it actually allows a whole lot of people with different sorts of skills to kind of jump on board and participate. All it takes to become Anonymous is to sort of self-identify. And obviously certain skills, whether they're technical skills or kind of digital skills with design and art are quite handy. But obviously, obviously, obviously, Lullsec and Antisec, two hacker groups who are really the same but rebranded in different ways were quite important in the history of Anonymous. And I just want to finish with one point about them. So Lullsec in some ways is quite interesting because individuals involved were quite involved in Anonymous, but they were a kind of secret wing. They knew that it was good to kind of do their work under the radar. They didn't want to get the attention of the media. And also they knew that it was best not to call attention to themselves as individuals. Emboldened by the HB Gary hack, Lullsec broke away and went on its 50-day kind of crazy hack for the Lulls. They retired and rebranded themselves as Antisec which became a bit more militant in its tone and language. And one of the most interesting things within the trenches of Anonymous, at least from my perspective as I was doing work with them, was that on the one hand, they were politically valued. And why were they politically valued? Well, they were valued because they were exposing the sorry state of security on the internet. So people were kind of happy about that. There was a lot of hope, especially with Antisec, that they would continue doing the leaking that WikiLeaks had been doing in the past, but they sort of went defunct. So there was the hope that they would reveal politically worthwhile or damning information. So people admired them or at minimum tolerated them. But what was the problem with Antisec and Lullsec? Well, they were leader fags. They called way, way, way too much attention to the group or individuals within these groups such as Topiary and Sabu became celebrities on Twitter. And then of course the media was giving them a whole lot of attention. So they became the status seekers that Anonymous otherwise fucking like hated. And so there was this big tension between, again, we want you to do something politically worthwhile, but ethically you're violating our core, core ethic. So we know in March 6th, 2012 Sabu was revealed as an FBI informant. It was the big Sabu Taj. And since that time, hacking still occurs within Anonymous. There have been some new hacker groups, but generally individuals within them have kind of stepped away from the limelight to not draw attention to themselves. I don't know what will happen next, but I just do think it's important to emphasize that Anonymous is a multiplicity. We're hacking is one weapon among many. And again, it's not quite an amorphous blob, but it is quite difficult to track of because it's kind of like a Hydra with many, many different tentacles. So with that, I will pass it over to Grania. Thank you. We are running very low on time, so I'm gonna be really, really quick. But my name is Grania O'Neill and I'm a defense attorney and I'm a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which is a membership organization of radical and progressive lawyers throughout the country and we have international affiliates. And when in December, I was listening to the very exciting Operation Payback in a snowy apartment, I thought, wow, this is so awesome. And then midway through, I thought, shit, these kids are really gonna need lawyers. And so the National Lawyers Guild, we got together and we decided to create a non-LG and what we hope to do and what we continue to hope to do is to provide people with legal assistance at the moment when they're either followed or searched or approached or arrested. And so that you can call our hotline or approach us via Twitter or on our email and say, hey, we need a lawyer, I'm in Alaska and we can kind of go through our NLG Rolodex and find radical lawyers in Alaska. So that's our goal and kind of to bring in like how I'm thinking about anonymous, I'm not an anonymous expert like Viola, but how I think of it is as part of kind of a continuing thread of liberation movements and people will say, no, but how can that be? They're unique and on the internet and lulz-y and if you look back through any movement at the time, it was never as clearly defined as we define it today. So at the time, all movements start out rough and then with hindsight, when they've achieved some of their goals, we can look back and say, oh, that movement was the civil rights movement or that movement was the free speech movement. And so anonymous is evolving and will continue to evolve, but it's important to not be overly critical, I think, of it and to distance it from other liberation movements. So I wanted to say that like Viola said, anonymous is dichotomous, like it's good and bad all mixed together and we often think about how can they be so good and how can they be so bad at once? And the thing is, that's the truth for all people. All people are good and bad at the same time and that's dialectical, that's Freudian. We learned this 100 years ago. It's not unique to anonymous, but the law totally disagrees with my analysis here. Their mandate is keeping the status quo and so what they do is they repress groups to try to change the status quo and that's what we're seeing with what the National Ayers Guild calls the nerd scare. So I guess one of the things I hope to talk about tonight a little bit, I know we have like 10 more minutes, but is kind of comparing anonymous and its movement to different other groups and how they were repressed and how some of the things that we saw with Sabu we could have seen if we were looking to other movements and saw their infiltrators and informants. Okay, thanks. Next up is Mercedes. Now, so my section is sort of over. We've been told not to talk too long because Biela had a really important section and it really needed the time. So my sort of area is over the difference in prosecution between like civil disobedience and online civil disobedience. So everything is online now and when you protest that, that's a felony, but if you protest something offline it's like $200 ticket and a night in jail. So that's an issue because you're sort of arresting all these really awesome young politically involved people that deserve to be parts of society, deserve more to be parts of society than anyone else and you're sort of throwing them in jail for 15 years until they're 35. So that's my section. And I have another site. What was the other side? Is it? If you know what that is, congratulations. Welcome. Oh, yeah. Did I introduce myself? I've had a lot of shots. Oh, I am currently charged with conspiracy to denial of service, which I find really amusing because I want you to turn to the person next to you and punch them in the face and very few of you are actually gonna do that but now I'm gonna be charged with telling you to do it. All right, I'm done. How do you follow that? You don't. Don't show tits. No. This is a majority women panel. I'm at the most awesome, mostly female panel ever in the history of DEF CON. And on it or they wouldn't let us have it. So complain to DEF CON at the lack of tits. All right. So I'm happy to be the lack of tits here. My name is Jay Leaderman and I am a trial attorney. I practically live in court and I do all manner of cases. And when I saw what was kind of going on politically, when I started following the news accounts, started getting on Twitter, I said exactly the same thing that Grania said. I said, holy shit, someone's gonna need a lawyer here and someone's not gonna be able to pay for it. So I took out my Twitter account and I tweeted at my 17 followers and I told them, hey look, any hacktivist busted in my hood, the righteous hacktivist busted in my hood, I will represent. So thankfully one of my 17 followers was able to say, look, that's not how you do it. Rewrote the tweets from me, send it back and I sent them out and actually they seem to make the rounds. And I had a whole lot of replies and a whole lot of emails, including one the next morning from that gentleman, Commander X. He was subsequently indicted for, of all things, a very small DDoS on the County of Santa Cruz in retaliation supposedly for protests over homelessness there, homeless, bad homeless laws. But that was sort of my entree into a larger world of kind of talking to Anans. I don't go into the IRC, but I am reasonably active on Twitter. I have slightly more than 17 followers now. And you know, I sort of got adopted by a number of Anans as their attorney. Now I'm not quite sure in my mind that I'm their attorney, but I'm sure they're sure in their mind that I'm their attorney. I don't recall anyone having ever paid me, but that's all right. We do this because it's interesting to us because political and because we think it's important. A number of people have come up sort of on their own and everyone thinks they're terribly clever when they do it, have called me the Tom Hagan of Anonymous. I am not, please don't call me that. It's just not, it's just not accurate, but I do tend to have a good deal of attorney-client-like relationships with Anans. And I'm not trying to excuse their behavior. I'm not trying to put a happy face on any type of criminal behavior, but I am making certain arguments, including one that I've made very loudly in the press, which is that under certain circumstances, this may horrify a lot of the security people, under certain circumstances, DDoS is protected political speech and should be afforded First Amendment protections. In Germany under certain conditions. So as you heard from, or maybe you didn't hear from Amber, Commander X was nice enough to flee the jurisdiction during the middle of our prosecution. So I never did get a chance to flesh out that argument if one of you guys wants to do a political DDoS attack. Let me know, we'll advance it. We can always use a good test case. Well, you don't mind, it's only, look, again, in real life protests, trespassing in California where I'm from $250 fine, probably maybe a couple of hours community service, online, 10 years, $250,000. You can handle that, can't you? Why $100,000 if it's conspiracy? Well, yeah, if they throw on the conspiracy, that's an extra five years and 500,000. But I really do want this crowd to conceive of the notion that DDoS may be more than just an annoying little thing that ultimately serves nothing. It may be a valid form of protest. It may be, as we say, no different than the civil rights movement in the 60s than African Americans taking up space at the Woolworth's lunch counter and saying, if you will serve me lunch, I will eat it, I will pay for it and I will leave, but if you will not serve me lunch, I will stay here until you change your policies. And that's what we see in some regards, DDoS being. Thanks. Hello there, I'm Marcia Hoffman. I'm a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So my organization, as many, if not all of you know, supports digital civil liberties and we are an activist organization and we're also a public interest law firm. So we've been watching the anonymous movement with great interest because it touches upon a couple of areas that we're incredibly interested in, the first being, of course, online activism and the second being the hacking laws, the computer intrusion laws. And I wanna pick up on some of the threads that Mercedes and Jay put out there, which is first and foremost, a lot of people participate in this movement because they see it as being a way to participate in political activism and a form of civil disobedience and one of the things that is scary about that from our perspective is that there is a big difference between civil disobedience in the offline world and in the online world and the reason that that is because the computer intrusion laws carry these incredible penalties. We're not talking about spending a night in jail. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the federal hacking law and the provision of it that I think would most likely apply to a DDoS situation basically says that it's illegal to knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information, code or command and as a result of doing that, intentionally causing damage without authorization. Now damage has a very particular definition which is incredibly broad. It means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system or information and if you do that, the penalties for a first time offense can be up to 10 years in jail, sorry, in prison. And for more severe attacks like that, it could be even up to life. And so it's an incredibly harsh penalty and it's very concerning to think about young people who are starting to flex their political muscle and really wanna take part in a movement facing up to 10 years in prison for a first time offense. And something that makes it even more concerning is the fact that there are efforts underway to try to actually increase those penalties as if they're not crazy enough. There are legislative proposals out there right now that, for example, would treat conspiracy as having the same maximum penalty as a completed offense. It would make the penalties for first time offenses the same as the maximum penalties for repeat offenses so that for a DDoS type offense, first time offense would be up to 20 years in prison. It would increase maximum penalties and for the first time ever, it would add a mandatory minimum of three years in prison for hacking-related intrusions involving critical infrastructure computers. And we've been working for a long time to try to push back against the CFAA. We think it's a very problematic law on many levels. We think certain provisions of it are probably unconstitutional and we are very, very concerned about, thank you. And we think that trying to actually enhance the penalties in this way is an incredibly counterproductive thing and we'll be fighting back against that, too. Thank you. All right, so I'm sure a lot of you guys out there have some questions for these panelists. So rather than me asking them, I want to invite anyone from the audience to come up to one of these microphones and we'll go ahead and try to... Anyone? All right, here we go. Come at me, bro. OK. In a moment. I'm from Mexico and at the beginning of the year, we were having big war on drugs at this point. At the beginning of the year, there was a big movement of anonymous. They offered to throw away or show our public, well, publicly put outside in the internet, all the information of the corrupt officials or people that were working with drug dealers. At that point, it was a big motion. A lot of people in the government were hoping for that. Also, people on the drug side were waiting for that. The idea was if they throw that away and they show that to the public, a lot of people would die the next night. Anonymous came back on it. Then again, went for it. And in the end, they did not public anything. So I would like to hear your thoughts, especially on the ethics side about all this. So wait, just to clarify, you were talking about Op-Cartel, right? I think it is there. Yeah. Without getting into too many specifics and a kind of long history about it, it's a good example because one of the things about anonymous for better or for worse is that it's highly experimental, which is like people sort of get an idea on the fly and they're like, hey, let's go for it. And they rear forward without having a really good plan as to what they're doing and how they're doing it, right? And then it's sort of after a couple of iterations of something, they kind of work it out slightly better. And I do think, again, there's some sort of benefits and downsides of having this highly reactive and experimental method where they're just reacting to world events. The kind of plus side is that they just are really, they've got their finger on the pulse of world events, they're willing to jump in in a way that kind of other groups are not willing to do so, it's highly dynamic. But then in other instances, it also shows the kind of downsides because oftentimes they're not quite prepared to really tackle the nature of the problem. And so Op-Cartel in some ways is a perfect example of that kind of experimental tactic that's at the heart of some political operations behind anonymous. Jay? Yeah, I think, first of all, I agree with her. I agree with Be'el about what she's saying about Op-Cartel, but moreover, it gave you a good bird's eye into the dichotomies within anonymous because that was one of the most divisive ops that I can remember. There were people that were staunchly behind it and there were many more, in fact, probably the majority were very against it. And there was a recognition that people could get really hurt, really seriously hurt and people could potentially even die through this. And there was a conversation, there was a dialogue about it that was, well, is that a reasonable price to pay for transparent government and for an end to this type of corruption? And then there was a further dialogue with who are you to think this would end any type of corruption or that it would even achieve those ends? So I'm trying not to take a position. I didn't really get to into studying what was going on, but those were the essential, that was the essential framework of what was there. And ultimately I think they made the right call in not releasing what they claimed to have. Hello. Hi, I would have to say from an observer's point of view that there's a lot of times where people will start and op with the intention of trying to do something and then someone will jump the gun and make a flyer and say, we're gonna fucking do it. And then later on everyone sort of realized that sometimes it's not always possible with the people that you have around or with the time that people have with real lives and girlfriends and jobs and things. I don't have any of those, so I don't know. And so I would say that sometimes that because there's no leader, because there's no formal observation or guidelines, ethics, morals, regulation that sometimes things don't always work out the way that the media thinks they're going to or that even the people making like flyers or PR think they're going to. So people are shouting, we're gonna try and do it. And someone says, they're gonna fucking do it. And then it doesn't happen because it's not actually possible or feasible at that time. So a lot of things happen like that. So we're gonna take down this and it doesn't happen. So. All right, thank you for the great question. We'll. I love your shirt. Thank you. Kind of actually following up on that with the way that anonymous and other groups using hacktivism and the admin of the internet and the ability to spread information that way. You actually see that it behaves similarly to how the democratic process is meant to behave. My question is actually, do you believe that one, that's actually a good way to do it and that we're moving in a positive direction with this, especially following up with what she said, where there are times when you say, hey, we're gonna do this and then it falls through. And obviously that brings down everyone's support and belief in the system. But with the ability for commoners to have more of a voice and be able to spread it across without as much censorship or the indirectness of the voting system where you don't necessarily get to present your point. You just give the yes, no, I agree or I don't agree. Do you think that we're actually moving in a positive direction and this is the right way to start looking at, A, is there a good way to make some more structure around this where it's a little bit more controlled than just a bunch of people, banging on their computers and hoping it works? Cloudy the future is, difficult to say. That comment is actually really funny because I hung up a sign once at an Air Force base in front of a warehouse that said, these are not the drones you were looking for. Nice. But it wasn't vanishing because it was removable. Anyway, in response to your question, I think that there's a lot of things that go amiss in the democracy that we show in a lot of our governments and that I think it's really nice and really beautiful to just have been able to observe this, not even an organization, but just a subculture that views everyone as equal or even skill-based, if you can do a flyer, you're the flyer guy and you're that guy and you're valued for that position or if you're the person that's really good at getting the media involved, you're the media guy and you're valued as that person. You're valued and everyone has a skill set and everyone is good at something. Every single one of you are good at something if only socialing drones like goons to let you into the conference. So you have a skill set and to see a subculture arise that values everyone for what they're good at when you see in real life where you're only as good as your money or you're only as good as the job that you can do and get paid for, it's amazing to see something coming forward and even if anonymous dies, even if this goes away and no one ever reads about it, that idea still resonates and you can see it joining the mainstream, you can see people starting to start things like this and it's been amazing to watch it just ripple. I thought about it. I guess kind of in response to your question, it's pretty clear that our democratic system or our representative democratic system is pretty broken right now. There's about three million people in prison. Most of them are people of color. Most of them are in prison for possession of drugs or something like that, things that aren't really crimes. There's not even a victim. And when we're talking about Mexico, that's a drug war that's created by the US government and the Mexican government and that so many people have been killed in that drug war and I think I'm not the expert on this but I saw this PBS kind of chart about who was voting for SOPA and who was voting against SOPA and which campaign contributions, who they were getting their campaign contributions from and it was really shocking. It was like people who got money from the media industry were voting for SOPA. People who got money from the tech industry were voting against it. It's broken and that's not to say that anonymous's procedures for decision making are perfect or are the best but I think that the point is, is they're working on an alternative model that maybe will be really good and a lot of good things have come out of this and we've seen them. So yes, some really bad things have happened or will happen and things that we don't agree with but I think that's part of life and I really don't think it could get much worse for many of the people in prison for marijuana possession. So. You know, I wanna jump in for a second because someone, you know, there's parts of anonymous I really do admire but I do think it's important not to either put them on a pedestal and be like they are a democratic future and in fact, you know, there's many cabals in anonymous. There's a lots of problems. There's lots of poolings of power. There's a lots of secrecy. It's a kind of really, really difficult entity to understand. This doesn't mean either that we need to demonize them and then there's also some really, really good lessons that lie in anonymous and it's everything from the fact that they've tapped into this deep disenchantment with the status quo. It is a place that allows the many to participate which is what Mercedes has pointed to. They perform the importance of anonymity at the moment when anonymity seems dead, right? So I think it's important to specify why they're politically valuable in such a way that then doesn't portray them as the thing that's gonna solve all democratic problems or political problems. I hate to do this but we have to, I've been given the notice that we're done for now. We're in this room although the panelists are going to be open for more questions in one of the smaller rooms to the side but let's go ahead and give everyone a nice round of applause. Thank you guys so much. Here's Twitter handles and in true anonymous fashion as you will have a show tits. We wanna play a little sax roll for you on the way out.