 Okay. As we said the years before, the force merged to main. Andy is commonly known in our scene. His current talk, CAA versus WikiLeaks, intimidation, surveillance and other tactics observed and experienced. In his talk, Andy aims to report and shows a collection of his observations, physical, visual and other evidences of the last year incidents that strongly indicated context of US Central Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and potentially other entities of the US government acting against WikiLeaks and surrounding persons and organizations. Please welcome with a very warm digital applause, Andy. Okay. I have no idea how a digital applause works here, but thanks for it anyhow. At the beginning I want to make and I have to make a few disclaimers so that you know which perspective you're getting here. I'm working as a data journalist for quite a while around the topics of surveillance, signal intelligence, data security and running this funny bug planet. Even started that bugplanet.info before Snowden came with all his documents, but I did work a while with his documents. However, this talk is a bit different as I'm not talking about things that I learned, studied or whatever, but I experienced myself. I'm describing events here where I was targeted and so I might not be the most neutral person in this scenario, but I'm trying to be technically as accurate as possible anyhow. So forgive me if I'm a bit grumpy about these people. That's just because of the perspective. Secondly, well, I've also on the CCC of course has been addressing human rights issues in the digital age for a long time. We and I personally co-founded EGA, the European Digital Rights Initiative, to ensure the enforcement of human rights in the digital environment. However, what happened here is a slightly beyond digital rights. It goes into real life and while I'm a German citizen I now know roughly what kind of laws have been violated here in respect to the German environment. I absolutely would welcome people who helped me analyze and understand it from the perspective of the universal human rights because there is similar cases with people living in other jurisdictions and so on. Second slide of disclaimer, sorry, that is so much. So I'm addressing with this talk activities against people surrounding and have been entwined surrounding Julian and our WikiLeaks and or other members of WikiLeaks. Whatever I describe here is I have personally observed and experienced it. So it is for sure very incomplete. It's at best a fragment of what's gone on but you will in case you haven't heard about it yet that Pompeo made some very clear statements when he was head of CIA. It's pretty clear where to attribute these things and lastly there is of course other prisoners mentioned but I'm keeping them out here for all kinds of reasons but there will be the time when we will hear more reports and other perspective of this particular situation. So here's my little overview. I want to get you an idea how to get into such a mess. Just in case you know you want it. The context of the timeline, a bit of psychology as it's important because at some point you not only get paranoid you have this drive to oh no this can't be true right you have this cognitive dissonance drive inside of you that you would like to stay sane. The new normal of IT incidents we're all used to that covered versus over what's what I mean with the term intimidations of violence physical events and their impact about the elephant in the room the problem of the missing socks. And at the end a little bit of questions in my infectious how to get out of this mess maybe also. So how to get into such a beautiful mess. Wait it's not beautiful. Well there's some ideas we share in the hacker community usually and even it's not far from where to get into the journalist community information should be free. Free flow of information is a bit of a requirement for world peace and we had this and I personally also had this type of self-conception self-understanding consciousness 20 years already when Wikileaks started around 2006. So this is not that I was jumping or anybody in the scene was jumping onto something that didn't exist until then. But Wikileaks turned out to be an extremely good concept as a democracy test if governments cannot deal with full transparency. Well that tells you a lot about them and but of course that is similar to jumping into the last one similar to working in journalism when you expose things in journalism be it corruption be it hypocrisy of politicians be it blunt lies or whatever it's not always about making friends it's yes partly making friends and partly pissing people off that happens. However in this particular environments that Julian inspired to create there's some yeah cultural even misunderstandings for example the word conspiracy for us in Europe I think many of us in the German Hacker scene are inspired by Robert Wilson's way of saying oh a conspiracy is like the world is full of them and we should join the best of them. But in the American context the word conspiracy is a legal term unfortunately and when you are with American citizens in a room and talk about conspiracies they often get very nervous and it's kind of a complete different attitude because it's like the US term to define people who belong to a group like a organized criminals or organized you know this T word this other type of entities and of course that's absolutely not what we want to get into involved to but sometimes we mistakenly or misunderstanding the joke about conspiracies and people listening to this get it completely wrong and I fear that this also what happened and how yeah me and others got into such a mess. So at the end of course I'm journalism and that's similar to yeah dealing with data from a hacker's perspective is about yeah supporting media with data and information and so on. So here's a bit of a timeline to give you a time frame I'm now after I was a bit long for about two decades in CCC spokesperson and board member blah blah blah I moved to the board of the Vahalan Foundation. Vahalan Foundation collects actually money for WikiLeaks under the aspect of vows a dear of supporting freedom of information since 2010 or so I joined a little later. However when WikiLeaks started to publish the Afghanistan the Iraq warlocks the diplomatic cables that already triggered legal investigations and of course the arrest of Dan Stoll Bradley now Josiah Menning later. So there was always it was always clear more or less right from the beginning that there's legal trouble on the way that there's a secret grand jury and that the Americans didn't really appreciate their war crimes to be exposed and that diplomatic cables to be in the internet to be understood and readable for all of us and the media worldwide and so on. Of course when people come together and gather in any project you have human beings you have they have characters they have mistakes they do things that are not always great so I'm not trying to say here that everything was always great and it was only the CIA messing it up. No humans make mistakes and these mistakes in such environment of course get exploited get amplified and so on. In 2007 WikiLeaks started publishing some CIA documents and a whole series of it the so-called fold seven documents and those documents describe their technology exploit programs from the CIA you probably most of you will know them if not you can all look them up. These included tools that allowed the CIA to pretend to be someone else including coming from another country speaking another language be it from Russia in Russian be it from Iran and Farsi and so on and Pompeo who was at that moment still head of the CIA got very upset. There's two references from this one was from April 217 and another is from February 218 in his first public speech as a CIA director in uh 13 of April 217 um he made a speech at a conference in Washington and he said things like WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like an intelligent service and called WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service so for those of you who know a little bit about information science there's this idea of data it's actually something you can technically measure information as data in a context and intelligence is information processed to a level where you can make decisions based on it so being a public intelligence service I would say from that perspective is like a honorable term however there the way Pompeo emphasized it I think was slightly not that honorable he was more comparing it to you know other state actors and evil forces and so on because the US understanding of intelligence services far away from entities sorry I need a water um is far away from entities just collecting information but as you know they also mess up with other people's life and so on um however a year later in February 218 he even upgraded this type of statements at the site German newspaper reported about what he said at the Munich security conference intelligence round table and he said really nasty sentence like that he's most of his time he's dealing with the non-state actors and that's like al-qaeda islamic state uh wikileaks or ispallah like what a list so I have no idea um what he has um yeah what turned him into um comparing this kind of things I mean his father I could say we in Berlin um we know that they provide actually jami halloumi and and um some things but yes they are money launders and are suspected terrorists in some areas or whatever I have been declared terrorist but their hummus is really good I can say um however the um point I'm trying to come to so Pompeo got very upset he made all this comparison and he seems to have um yeah allocated resources to deal with wikileaks and everybody jumping around and it's no surprise that as von holland foundation finances selected activities of specific publications there um that we also got in the focus with us collecting donations and you know talking with the guys and financing some projects so um before I'm coming to very concrete events I want to get one second into psychology so of course when things happen to you from the intelligence perspective they always come with what's called plausible deniability when there's a guy standing in front of the door watching you know if you come in and out it's not just someone watching your door as someone reading the newspaper or repairing some electrical pipes or some water pipe or whatever I mean there's always a good reason for him to be there that has nothing to do with what he's doing and um that that's basic principle plausible deniability how intelligence agencies act in the so-called field so meaning in your home or on the street they're following you or whatever so um over time um of course if you have too much of this you're seeing this patterns and that's probably mainly called paranoia so you get like you know suspicious of everything that happens that might be very legitimate but you get like the feeling that something is wrong and so on um and that can be um we could also instead of paranoia call it situational awareness at some points because if it really happens it has nothing to do with your mind getting crazy it's just an accurate observation of patterns that happen surround of you but you might know that and your two friends who experience the same might know that your girlfriend your partner um the normal people you deal with they might all not understand this and think that you're driving nuts and this driving nuts is of course an element um that you always have to be self-critical because on the one hand side you might indeed see too much things happening that do not really happen on the other hand side there's also this human drive that we don't want this CIA guys to be in our life we want everything is to be fine and to some extent maybe that's even healthy to not see the monsters all the time but if they are really there and you start denying them while they sit in front of you that's also not so helpful so i found myself in this kind of um yeah weird environment where all these kind of thoughts come up all the time and i'm starting with the most harmless stuff so internet attacks i will or internet incidents i would it incidents i call it here um due to the pure volume of it i will put this into separate um presentation one day or report and in the next days or weeks or months and and you can all have fun with it but she has just some basic patterns so devices um you use as communication terminals or communication devices they always have issues when you start to do encrypted stuff and it's always when you do it with specific people so that's then mobile phones with data service at some point all of them have started to have issues very high volume of use data um apps disappear if you use them at all i stopped using them at all um now high battery use it when you did nothing with your film over hours and you were wondering what's going on okay yes we have faraday bags we put them somewhere else but still it's a little weird when your battery is empty half day um on lte um when i configured my phone to be on lte only it worked mainly fine next to that i couldn't make normal phone calls but when i had it in the normal mode it got downgraded 3g and there my encrypted connection started to have problems on my fixed lines my vpns when i try to build up a vpn shows me certificate errors and problems and then of course you deal with journalists which i'm doing with my colleagues all the time and they are not technical experts they all have their max and so on so they have funny issues with their pgp keys not working anymore with their pgp setups not working anymore yes it's also because it's open source software but um there's also something going on but this is kind of the world we all know and we get used to it you know this is like okay it doesn't work secure um connections break well happens all the time um from about mid to 17 when i um still regularly like once twice a month was flying over to see julian in the embassy i realized that there was something changing it with my treatment at the border that's of course that's the a that's purely uk border police uncles and daylight asked started to ask funny questions like do you live in the uk what's your occupation how long do you stay what do you do in the uk before then there was maybe one question but not three four of them and the most important was that i realized that he did not even listen to my answers sometimes he started the first question after i answered the third and it was feeling like in a limbo like with a machine who would randomly ask me things but i then realized he was just waiting for the green light on his green suit to let me go and that green light probably meant um that the team outside was ready to pick me up and that's what happened so um i get into the uk and have people follow me like the whole fucking day not only on the way to the embassy from the embassy back and so on um i once spotted one of those persons like sitting on the street level on the other side watching the whole time i was in an office ground level and because i had a bit of experience with that in continental europe like in germany if you realize these guys go after you and you put your camera on your table or start even to make photos of them they're very quickly gone because they don't want to be you know relocated they don't like to be exposed and so on but the british behaved in this time this scenario completely different so he was like getting like you know very aggressively body language while i spotting looking back and so on so um that was little weird that same day and three o'clock in the night when my friends drove me to the place where i was sleeping in the one-way street there was still a car following us um even in the one-way street so actually um he had to turn back and so on that was no more coverage of violence that was already the the edge to intimidation and then over the next months i started to have new favorites but not only in england also in other countries that i would see homeless looking like people on the street level sitting there begging or leaning to some um buildings and at some point i had to realize that the cheap plastic bags that we're wearing were just a cover for cameras that were actually with zoom and digital um getting into my direction so that felt a little hmm um and so the idea of this measurement if you look at their manuals which you'll find somehow in the internet is that the difference between discovered surveillance which is to find out where you are and the open surveillance which i call imitation intimidation surveillance the idea is you you create in the prison in this case and yeah for me a state of distress so you're like constantly having this like you know looking around and you obviously have the idea something is going on and they let you know they want to let you know and that's a little weird so in april 2018 uh excuse me in march 2018 um i brought one of my uh cryptophones in this case a desk phone based on a zip phone called snom 870 um back to our workshop here to repair the display had been exposed to heat and got a little melted it's a not so super high quality lcd display so i wanted just to display the to replace the display so i opened the thing and i found actually a bark and that bark um turned out to be very sophisticated thing so there was a battery pack there was a shielded thing um there was behind that shielded thing was a module that had been soldered into it was based on an fpga some hardware crypto elements 16 gigabyte of flesh rom it was completely passive so i wouldn't have found it in any sweep because it just recorded whatever i talked on that encrypted phone um and would be triggered by high frequency to send out the recorded stuff encrypted in a birth signal um you see here in the url to find more pictures online to give you an idea this is the thing i found um this is how it looked like at the beginning it is the phone itself has two pcbs one for the keyboard and one for the you know connectors the processing and so on this was the modified version of the keyboard pcb with this battery pack in blue the shielded module and here you get an idea of what was in there um that's pretty high tech we did of course look into what exactly do we have here when where this um chips produced what does it do and so on um but um it's pretty obviously that this is like for those who have read the snow and documents intensely um it's what's called special collection service inside there there's a group called uh targeted access a target access operations tau and they work together with a thing called ph e the physical access group that because someone and that was the thing um it was not only built into this phone that phone had be of course it had been of course in a locked room and i had to ask myself okay what happened here here you see how they grabbed the audio with a glued mini pcb from the other main controller um into their little technology and here you see a comparison picture to the right you see the original pcb keyboard which has almost nothing on it and to the left you see the modified version um friend of mine made a bit of a diagram um and um yeah i'll just leave it for you you can review it later i'll upload these pdf slides of course um so here's some aspects of what was going through my head over the time of course the first question was how long was this year um no idea could be years um the components we identified were produced around or no no earlier than april 213 so if you remember snowden came with this revelation mid of 213 roughly and i've been working for the spiegel uh with others on the snowden documents next to that phone and coordinating a lot of it in the year 213 um so in theory it could be even related to that who knows um the dimensions suggest clearly a non metric origin the antenna would you know work in the range of 800 megahertz so um you find here um mentioning of a pdf that tells you something about these groups um but i did talk to some people who do professional sweeping meaning looking for audio box and so on in devices and rooms and they told me from the experience of the cold war until today the operation to bring something into a room into a device that's quite an effort because you need to secure you need to ensure you don't get caught and so on and so what you normally do is because technology can fail is you do not install one box you install at least two in the cold war people told me from the elder generation that the relationship was one to eight so that because technology failed a lot back then um however that made me of course think okay what else could there be you know what can i do to find the rest and so on does it even make sense can i secure all the rooms that i use to work here and there uh in such a way that i could be sure and of course i can't be so this was the first hard confrontation with my own cognitive dissonance because all that you know the violence the other way i thought okay Julian has some trouble and i think i have something to do with it and when i travel to england okay they follow me you know you get used to that kind of things but like something you can have in your hand and that's outside of it incidents um that means that all your encrypted communications have been listened to well that feels shitty um so that's what i call a hard confrontation with my own cognitive dissonance um the next thing i want to talk about is very recent it's about one and a half months out old now when here in Berlin um i went out actually very early in the morning to get some stuff from the grocery in a time of pandemic when no one is in the shop at seven something in the morning i come back half an hour later and the key to my apartment door does not fit into the cylinder anymore um that felt a bit shitty um it was not normal cylinder it was a so-called stealth cylinder um you might want to look at the internet what it is it's a swiss company who's doing nice keys that you cannot photograph and copy because it has inner elements with a sophisticated mechanical way of opening i did however when i bumped into my door and had to now first i called my locksmith's dude uh or my friend from the lockpicking industry i could say um who had advised me to buy that cylinder um we i talked with my lawyer and we agreed it's a good idea to call the police to put it on the other list of things that i had collected until then um i then realized that i had been followed that morning but i didn't take any attention to it because i was just walking you know and half automatic mode to the grocery and there was a couple talking such a bullshit um they will probably listen to this talk and will remember that dialogue it was just not making any sense but i was too polite to point it out and they were very closely so it was not about where i was going it was about that i was not at home so they ensured that in the time frame that i was there the other guys could operate and so on um yeah that is an ongoing investigation but i can tell you this is the next accident where like incident where like cognitive dissonance and the illusion you want to give this of you know i'm not important in this game yeah these guys follow me here and there and they this feels kind of different this is no more nice um here's a little bit of a get the idea of the cylinder you cannot really see the object that was inserted but at the end we didn't get it out for forensic reasons we had to drill police went through the apartment and so on um yeah another interesting day you can have um so here's some aspects um that i asked myself um so was it even my cylinder that i couldn't open maybe they could not um lock pick the original stealth cylinder i had they had to open it in a violent way they were in the apartment to whatever put another bug in there um but as they couldn't replace it with the original cylinder as they had destroyed it like they put another one in and that's why my key wasn't fitting is an option next option was it maybe a trap to make me replace the broken cylinder with a cheaper one with a more simple one that they could open then afterwards when i was gone next option um or maybe was it not about the door at all was it maybe just to freak me out um of course it feels not so great if you can't open your own apartment door and so on um and the fourth question was of course oh gosh how much time did i spend that day with you know with the police was drilling open the door with all that kind of things it more or less cost me a day and what maybe happened to my to my machines meaning my computers my other things maybe where was my attention not in that time frame because it could be it was a pure distraction thing that would freak him out a little bit and while he's freaking out we do other things in his office or whatever i can't rule it out um and then of course i mean the police sent me some funny questions i'm still working on that like yeah should i name Pompeo as a suspect not sure but um maybe i should um discussing it with my lawyer and so on and also is it maybe related to the date this was the third of november just in case have it said the third of november is the election day or was the election day in the united states and there was some accusation which one had something to do with the election um some years ago um so however the next event um incident number three has to do with something that happened in between because on monday the day before they messed up with my door i had shipped some documents to spain i realized then um that was legal documents that required me and a friend going to the spanish embassy we gave a tower power fraternity and so on because we are also accusing this company uc global which i talked about last year which was the company um running the surveillance or the protection surveillance at the beginning on behalf of the aquadorians in that embassy and later turned out to be working for shadel ailson's company or at least um having a site arrangement there um which is still subject to an ongoing lawsuit and we participate in that lawsuit because not only julian was bite on everybody was bite on who was visiting him and so on so i had shipped documents on that monday uh almost six o'clock um on the local post office here by dh l express i put that documents in a sealed bag that's like a bag was a serial number and so on that went together with a describing list was inside the bag into white envelope that again i sealed with you know seal tape um then i gave that to the post office but they insisted it gets in a dh l express bag that's what you get for the 70 euro um to be arriving within two days um so um yeah the stuff arrived on wednesday but um all opened and um the spanish lawyers freaked completely out they were very sure that this was a meddling um you would see that it was sliced open and so on yes you see this funny um duct tape here called sol but um why would the german customs open a document shipment within europe that just not makes a little sense it's still uh on the way to be checked in theory they could do that but also this incident has some aspects it's a breach of attorney client privilege that's why the spanish lawyers insisted us we bring this to a criminal complaint they did on their end right when they received it and they made this photos um so was german customs even involved i was just a duct tape used by some funny people um why when i emailed all this to my lawyer with the pictures and so on why did he not receive the email until he realized on monday that it somehow ended in his trash um he also freaked out and um then i talked with stg l of course i made a big fuss there and they were like no we cannot tell you on which legal grounds the shipment was open we cannot tell you who did it but if you have an inquiry why don't you send it to the customs so without giving me even which customs entity it would be or whatever and again of course this is kind of interesting story but i have normally other priorities in my life so i'm asking myself oh gosh how many days should i waste here was finding out who opened the fucking shipment um but you know this is again the state of distress this is again the the effort and it's again a reminder we are after you we check your things we don't like you're um suing the cia suspected company and so on and so on um so coming to a bit of a conclusion of this talk as we also want to have time for for questions and so on um i want to talk about three aspects the one is the elephant in the room and the problem of the missing sock so at some point um i don't want to say that i have been completely not in a state of distress you know so i don't know how this affects my sanity and those people surrounding me so your cognitive systems get kind of otherwise triggered and you start to see these things everywhere and when then um you wash some socks and turns out there's a sock missing uh the other person my life was like okay cia however i did suspect the bad sheets and we found one of the socks in a bad sheet so when you know the problem is socks get in the drum sometimes hanging you wash something different than like a bad sheet and a bad sheet is an excellent place to hide things that have been in the drama then get into the bad sheet and you just dry it with it and you don't even realize it and so on so while i'm a complete um i for entertainment reasons also for you know you need to relax your brain in such a situation once a while i'm totally okay to say this year is responsible for everything including the missing socks but suspect the bad sheet first and realize that yes this is a joke and this is escapism and it helps you maybe to stay sane for the little moment but on the long term i don't know so and that's the the i don't know part is the other two slides that are coming now so what should i do and i should i invite some friends and declare my office here um like a laboratory for surveillance yeah it has been before i looked at surveillance technology but in this case it's surveillance technology look at me and my friend so it's slightly different um it's maybe also important to not get into some kind of auto response mode when things happen because i was thinking also what the fuck why are they doing all these things it cost them money it cost them effort um is it to freak me out is it that they think that like like um like i'm seriously in such an evil mode organization that you know they will escalate things and i will start to throw bombs at the u.s embassy or i don't know um i have no idea what their idea is there but i would just try to stay like slow motion and think about it um the next aspect is however um do i infect other people and now i'm not talking about my paranoia um or my situational awareness as i would call it um which of course at some point is ongoing and it's no more sometimes um but when i talk with normal people with other journalists with people i deal with for normal things and they visit me and we do whatever kind of social uh things like normal things like having food and afterwards they'll read they call me a day later and say oh finally my phone started rebooting twice yesterday and and these kind of things so that you think okay it's not my paranoia that um is in fact just it's actually they obviously want to not only know what kind of people i'm dealing with and look into that technology they also want to freak them out so this is um not cool and it also means that the type of ignorance you could normally apply and say well ignorance is a blast um come on let's have have a nice day um and forget about all this that's kind of limited that's no more an option um and also while i've been dealing um with that type of stress and that type of thing for a while now and i can say yeah well that's how it is and um it doesn't mean that everybody dealing with you um can do that there's people who are seriously freaked out by such a situation and they it creates fear it creates anger stress and so on so that's not cool so um my last slide and it ends up with a question to you guys is how to get out of this mess um so you know option one i managed to get proper authorities to make the CIA stop acting illegal okay i heard the laughing i know this is ridiculous um but you know it would be so beautiful justice prevails um the german authorities the european ones pick it up i finally managed to escalate it to the general bonus i'm by shaft i do not have to talk with the german intelligence services is i'm not sure they would be helpful in this game um and they make the stop the CIA stop acting illegal and against me and the other person surrounding beautiful dream but okay not very realistic maybe option two Pompeo realizes jesus lost wiki leaks and whatever show become true will become true he reads it on the bible Pompeo seems to be if you look at his twitter account reasonable believe in jesus christ and all that thing so he realizes it's all wrong doing against julian and wiki leaks and all the people targeted in that context and stops it i know okay shit happens will come good um if that's realistic i don't know you tell me um and the third option uh i don't know maybe you have some ideas and that's my question to you the audience um and that's the end of my um prepared part of the talk and with these words uh thank you andy for the brilliant talk um in the meantime i'm i received some message a third option would be to have a great win yard wine yard sorry um i'm personally it's completely right i considered actually maybe i should do something with go it's become a farmer or you know yeah there's there's these options but i thought before i you know give it up and and find my way on the countryside um i outsource the problem to the community and see what they think in the meantime i think there is uh plenty of time for a great white wine but uh to our questions uh we have indeed plenty of questions um the first question would be um how would you compare the surveillance of the cia or other to the surveillance of the ddr so for the uh the german republican republic um well i'm i'm born in hamburg in west germany i lived in east germany when the government was already falling into pieces it was technically still there so i'm not the best person to compare it um but i did talk with a person i know who worked for the foreign intelligence services because there was you know i simplified here of course the incidents a little bit there was one scene when later i went into my kitchen that day when my door lock got tempered with and i found a blue plastic glove and i don't have blue plastic gloves and i asked my locksmith's guy he was like no it's not from me and the police had black ones so and i thought hmm what the fuck maybe the guys have been inside the apartment which i didn't thought earlier because of a second lock and the police checked and so on um and then i talked to discuss it with this person i know he was a kind friendly man was working in the foreign intelligence of that country and so and he was like you look you have to look at it from a cost effectiveness point of view like that piece of plastic cost you 10 cent nothing and it freaks you out three months so see how much how cost effective it is and i mean that's a good aspect um that's a good point and so i think that the east german the guys the eastern intelligence guys they also they knew very well the difference and they had both instruments in their you know in their program to either do covets of violence really like not let you know and the department thought we let him know and see how he reacts or we let him know because he's ongoing doing things and we want him to you know stop it and and get intimidated and so on and get scared maybe or his wife gets scared or these kind of things so i think it is comparable cool uh on well not cool um speaking of uh covered versus uh over civilians so again sorry um as you now know does it still bother you emotionally um well what bothers me sometimes is you know it's also it has a sometimes it's nice to be alone and it's sometimes nice to not think about the c a guys um being in the apartment next door or in my case an apartment under me uh or in in surrounding environments um but thinking about normal things like playing a puzzle or seeing some funny spy movies oh wait that's almost relaxing now seriously um at some point it sucks a little bit i i can kind of deal with it um but i mean this 2020 year has of course complicated um or has made it almost impossible to travel so normally i escape my intensity of my work situation with travels maybe um i can do that this year so i i'd feel a little more intense and it it annoys a little bit and i would like to get these guys out of my life and do something useful with their life or whatever yeah um the next question um he or she or the person or creature um probably missed it uh do you disassemble all your devices on a regular base no i usually do just irregular and seal them um in this case um the seal had had an issue with with the heat as well so i and i was lousy on checking it i have to say um okay so yes that's something i mean if you have one office you can do that i tend to work on different continents even and that um turned out to be a bit of an issue so yes you need to have sleeves everywhere and seals and but even then you know um Pompeo seems to have justified um or have given orders to do these things no matter the costs and my expectation to have like a private or a secure encrypted channel so is very limited for a while watching that effort the encryption of the cryptophone obviously was good otherwise they wouldn't have had the effort to you know build something in but um at the end of the day um for me um it has the same impact it's like well yeah it's a phone it's a piece of devices in a room the room has windows we've seen what they've done with the embassy windows and so on so it's like yeah security what a nice idea but doesn't really exist yeah um do you try giving a few coins to the homeless looking people to do either some uh reverse intimidation or good deed if they are not CIA yeah that's i mean i had this one particular situation where i was waiting for someone on a kind of a shopping street and i just i just thought something is wrong with a guy but when i saw the camera and son he also rushed away so no i didn't give them the money the second scenario um no but it's a good idea um the thing is that what i started to do is to always have a camera with me that turns out for me to be important to be able to document things and also most of them except the british don't like it when they are being photographed and you either they it's very interesting because normal people do realize when they are being photographed but these guys are either pretending no i don't see that you photograph me you know they look but a little bit there's too much energy away at that moment um or they are seriously disturbed and go away so the best uh solution would be to have the boldest biggest largest camera uh always by hand yeah let me say it like this i mean i've not been afraid of surveillance technology and for sure not of cctv for a long part of my life but i start to like the idea of cctv at some places in my own environment i'm sorry to say that um but there's compromises you can make like survival feed you know other parts you don't always need the faces and if you need the faces yeah there's options and still analog photography is a great thing um but that's my personal opinion um you maybe you want to you can talk maybe you cannot talk about um they use other counter measurements um you want to talk about or you can't talk about no obviously don't want to talk about it but i mean i've been um i was wondering um myself how um why i had this rather intense things going on in me i was wondering is it a time frame is it me as a person it might have to do with actually being in this uh funny scene of course i've i've learned i mean i know lockpicking persons i've always um had an eye on having good locks based on their advice and understanding how easy it would be otherwise and using encryption was also not always about like um hiding something it was just good practice of having privacy and operational security so for me that was very normal for many years to do that and maybe you know compared to other persons that made me more interesting i don't know um i'll find out one day um but i think it's a good idea for everybody involved to think about these three aspects physical security encryption and also uh what kind of ways do you have to realize if something is being tampered with yeah and that's not necessarily monitoring i mean monitoring can help but on the other hand side yeah with monitoring systems they can also deal with like physical checks sums kind of um our next question uh do you ask the police at the border if everything is prepared now uh you mean at the british border uh probably that's the reference to i don't travel to the uk anymore i decided you know after they dealt with julian there i don't like that place anymore i never felt so well there and actually maybe i forgot to mention that um after this kind of treatment at the border started i also started avoiding sleeping in the uk so i made day trips sometimes in order to get the last plane out of the country i was flying to zürich first because it was a late flight to zürich in the next morning to bulund i felt in zürich better at a bar of fish hilly hotel then in london central city with um yeah the special relationship as it's called between the intelligence of the uk and those of the us i see um speaking of sleeping or in this case concerning your apartment um that question would be uh would some home surveying system bring some relief for example well that's like that's like a change in devil with the other dude right i mean um no i'm not really friend of that but yes of course i had to at the end of the day at least check with my door and so on what i can do to detect and record things and so on but it's not a pleasure it's not like uh i don't know i mean yes you end up doing that kind of shit but that's not how life on planet earth should be yeah yeah it's a it's a kind of a trade-off um for what return and i mean the thing is i mean look i'm a german citizen what i'm doing is constitutionally protected i live in the governmental district of bulund it's fairly safe here but you know i have friends in other places other situation in life is completely different there and um that is more what worries me that i'm in a relatively cool position secure position that's why i can talk about these things but i have friends who have a more severe situation and they are not sure they should talk about it to not escalate things and that's a very tricky choice to make maybe yes indeed um that brings us to another question and i think this is a perfect point to mention that uh can we do what can we do to support you in getting out of this mess and what can we do in general for this well i really appreciate the question i don't have a good answer but i think um yes i would like to discuss more with people about what can be done um i mean i'm for the moment i'm dealing with police with lawyers the speaker guys i'm working with they also um find some ways maybe to address it um but it seems like at least if it comes to jewian situation things are yeah badly escalated and it's all a bit interrelated so i don't have a good answer at this moment but i think it's a good idea to discuss it more and um uh so maybe identifying other people who are in some kind of a risk situation because these things happens and as i maybe hopefully was able to show it's not that difficult to get into such a mess it's it happens yeah and uh speaking of discussing you mentioned earlier there is a big blue button to discuss any further you will find it in the 2d area in a 2d world in the whistleblower wiki is it right uh yes in the tent actually i was told and the tent is the url to the big blue button or somehow it's interlinked there so again um please go out explore the 2d world and of course the whistleblower tent um we still have some minutes left um how do you do mentally um did you use any methods to keep your head clean or clear and uh freak out uh yeah that's a good question um i drink too much vodka but i try to keep it with good quality um let me say like this the real trouble is maybe that while in this scene here people have a rough understanding of this type of things already um i also liked to have to be around with people who have nothing to do with you know it with security with all these kind of things so-called normal people sometimes it's refreshing to be with them but um their ability to understand this mess is a little bit limited so um it's i think others judge better how i'm doing mentally i'm trying to keep my head up and i'm finding a good way out but if anyone has a good idea i'm really um all for listening and um see what's possible in this case i can come back to the win yard uh it's pretty relaxing uh to have work in the late autumn all right even during a pandemic okay you just have to find the way there yeah it's uh outside and it's uh a lot of distance between the people i think this will work um so the last question um red or white wine red red wine red yeah definitely and i mean thank thanks for all this um just to point out please we also have to work and to get in julian out there and others who are in this mess who can't even talk about it um i really appreciate um the option here to talk to you guys but it's also about the others and um yeah let us get julian out here please out that shit there with this great words um andy thanks for your time uh thanks for being here at the remote chaos as mentioned we still have the opportunity to ask you some questions in the whistleblower tent and uh with this have a nice evening uh try to relax and see you latest next time goodbye