 Right, my name is Ivan. I am an activist from Belarus who is organized in solidarity networks and kind of an activist street activism And I'm going to talk today about tractors cameras and guns and it is a little bit specific topic about Belarus, so There will be not so much introduction about what is happening in Belarus in general in the last 150 years as it was part of Russian Empire and blah blah blah. This is another talk that happened sometimes So I'm going to jump directly to more technological part However, there still will be history of the technology in Belarus This is the plan of the talk history of the Belarusian tech in USSR Lukashenko and technologies Lukashenko is our great president So it is really important his connection with the technologies in the modern days Belarus in 2020. This was like the biggest uprising in the modern history of the country Resistance to the state how the people were actually organizing themselves So I'm going to talk about how the state was organizing repressions in the technological Sector, but also talking about how people were resisting those technological Challenges on the streets and in the internet and so on and so forth Yeah, and then just short conclusions of what was happening in Belarus as I promised here are the tractors Oh, you can't see shit, right? That is not good I'm really sorry. Let's do this once again One second one second one second and seriously All right, we move here then as I promised tractors, right? in Belarus police is using tractors as one of their technological innovations and mostly it is used for like Taking away the cars. So here you have like this big whatever trucks Belarus police is using tractors Apart from that, it's not really popular, but tractor is a really important part of the Belarusian technological development It is produced like since ever So in Soviet Union Belarus was one of the key industrial zones and As I was checking like economical values, although country was really small on the scale of the Soviet Union It was producing around four percent of GDP of the whole Soviet Union and the main industries were on like a heavy industry tractors, but also like a really heavy huge machines for excavation and shit like that and more like a light industry and Also a lot of radio electronics, which is like I don't know chips for rockets and all the evil things that the Soviets were doing Part of it was produced in Belarus After the Soviet Union collapse Belarus was actually in quite a good shape in comparison to many other countries because all these factories were still there and Although the economical crisis hit pretty hard like the whole Soviet Union area Belarus kept producing all the things that were there available. However, it was really dependent on Resources that were coming from the other countries. So Soviet Union is a huge country, right and centralization part was like Moscow distributes everything to different parts of the country and when this collapsed there were some troubles to figure out where to get all the things outside of this centralized type of economic economy Yeah, as I mentioned it we had and we still have really developed radio electronic factories there are still producing things for the war industry mostly for Russian war industry and It is kind of like a really crucial part of the whole Let's say, yeah the war economy of the eastern Europe It is so crucial that For example, some rockets a couple of years ago that were trained in Russia They flew the wrong direction and I know at least one person from the factory that is producing the The boards for the rockets was really proud that they made those rockets that you know Like they can't fly properly and they just don't hit the targets that they were supposed to hit Yeah, so that's Belarusian kind of industry things And it still depends heavily on importing resources from other countries Belarus doesn't have oil doesn't have Metals and so on and so forth. So it's kind of like all the time buying things then produce something and then Get profits As for our great leader Lukashenko, he is coming from a traditional How would you say farmers Soviet enterprise and That means that his biggest connections with technologies or tractors right, so To give you a bit of impression what is like how it works for him the technologies He had some really interesting statements, which are mostly funny. I find it funny most people don't But Belarusians do and so one of it is we do not need an imported system for falsifying elections We will create our own one run by the state and this is in connection with like Him being blamed for falsifying elections all the time Then he of course mentioned that as a child he was growing among animals and plants And for us it was like wow great. We have really connected to nature person and Recently he said that he doesn't have a mobile phone Looking at other presidents and see how they're preoccupied with their iPhones I think he was talking about midget back then who was like a you know a hype Instagram guy president of Russia between putins I'm not doing that. I know what security is and even more I have enough people who can do that for me What is important here is that he is basically saying what is happening. He's an old guy He doesn't have any fucking clue about this iPhones You phones and all this stuff, but rather like he has people who figure everything for him Like they show him where to point they show him what to say what not to say How to write a website into this small thing in Firefox or whatever So he is not really the person who is connected to the technologies and for a lot of people This was like okay if the president doesn't know technologies then most probably the country is fucked I didn't put it here. I think I forgot about it The best quote for him was in 2010 when he said actually that the brain of Internet Should be moved to Belarus because we need to profit from that It was never moved I think it stays somewhere outside of Belarus, but he really wanted to have it And I don't know if you figure out that there is no brain of the Internet Right as for Internet as a technology in Belarus. I remember myself around like 2005-2006 we still had this Internet cards that you have to buy in in a monopolist shop Which belongs to the state and you would get like 60 minutes of the Internet 120 minutes of Internet and this was developing up to I think 2012-2013 you could still buy this cards So the Internet was really like lagging behind the rest of the world For us it was like I think 2008 you would could buy 200 megabytes in the Internet and enjoy your surfing or something like that However, this all started changing really fast rapidly like 2008-2009 as Belarus started like becoming a technologically IT country Yeah, I didn't find the pictures of the cards because they were awesome They were like pieces of art, you know, somebody was like just sitting and painting them Just for you to scratch it and throw it away Right Internet in Belarus was and stays a monopoly of the state If you want to get Internet you rather get like it from the state provider or there are private providers That are basically like renting the line from the state provider And sell it then to you. So everything that goes into the country and outside of the country is basically controlled by the state Since 2008-2009, no, I think this was 2010 There was a new law passed where the understanding of the Internet was becoming kind of like clear for the technological part of the Belarusian regime and they said everything that is hot that is like Representing Belarusian media that is hosted on dot by domain, which is like also controlled by the Belarusian state Everything should be hosted inside of the country. So all the medias all the kind of like Resources that have certain power in the Internet had to be moved to the by zone and have to move their servers to Belarus And this was like a long Game because nobody was like expecting okay We move our servers and they will be seized and that's the end of the story rather display the role ten years later in 2020 when most of the media resources were actually hosted in Belarus and for the police forces It was not a complicated issue just to go to the offices of those Companies and seize the servers and and for like some time and of the media resource in the Internet Then in attempt to control who is connected to the Internet the Belarusian government passed the law that would basically like force everybody to Show their passports when they're connected connecting to the public Wi-Fi spots Public Wi-Fi five spots means that you go to the restaurant and there is a Wi-Fi and they are giving you Password only if you give them Your passport and they write down this person at this moment and so on This was a little bit stupid and it didn't work out really well. However later on I Actually first time it encountered that in China and this moved actually to Belarus They started using phone numbers. There's the SIM card is connected to your Passport so it's enough just to get some kind of a code on the SIM card to make sure that you are controlling the person Who's connecting to the Wi-Fi and that's what happens in Belarus right now So if you want to connect to the public spots around the country You have to like get a Belarusian number get us a code and then you can connect to the network Right the first attempts to send our Internet were around 2006 So when I was like a kid and I was still like doing the password from the from the fucking card There were already people who were working with the Internet quite Rapidly and in 2006 the first in the media project was started I don't know if you know what in the media is it was like before the big internet point to whatever web point to One of the first platforms where people could post their news without registration anonymously It still exists in Germany, but in most of the countries that actually like degraded because of the social networks In Belarus it started in 2005 and during elections in 2006 There were some protests happening and Belarusian in the media played an important role in kind of like giving voice to the people on the streets And it was blocked and then it was like a fight going on it was kind of easy to go around the censorship for the people back then but It was the first time actually the Belarusian state started blocking the websites in the country although Yeah, as I said like it was not really technologically developed and the internet was not really a big mirror mean of communication for the population in 2016 like a jump further Belarusian state passes the law that is blocking tour network blocking it's kind of like With a lot of different things, you know that they would pass the law. They have no idea They have no idea. I'm talking too much and moving on to less. They had no idea on How to do that? But our great leader said after moving, you know brain of the internet to Belarus that we have to block this onion thing So they were blocking it somehow, right, but you can see that in the protest 2020 right now and Today as well the tour network was working through the different bridges But still available for the people and you can see that in 2020 it was kind of growing growing Recently, I think they started getting new equipment, but also a lot of people left the country So it's kind of like you can see that the activists are leaving the country So those who were main users of the tour network are using it outside of Belarus now Yeah Then in 2016 and new regulation was passed that would make really easy for the Belarusian state to actually ban the websites before it was just some kind of a gray zone that maybe sometimes They would do something but not on the long run Since 2016 there is there is a law and the first people who were facing that kind of censorship Were anarchists like the anarchist resources were blocked and some Islamist resources, which is like Normally on the same line of repressions in Belarus And then later on oppositional media resources slowly starting to get blocked and in this like 2020 elections and 2020 protests The blockade was like happening on the massive scale they were just expanding the list of the things that were supposed to be blocked and if you would go to the website it would get like redirected directly to this 82 209 230 23 and there they would be like just a small Text saying that this website that you were trying to open is blocked on the territory of Belarus by the law of the great leader and Not the case just by the law about the mass media right So as for it sector Belarus is One of the biggest IT countries in the Eastern Europe with a lot of Let's say Western companies working inside of the country Not directly not like establishing their I don't know offices rather than using outsourcing agencies and doing their business. So for example Friend of mine was working in Belarus for Reuters for Microsoft also for like What was else like this Thomas Cook the one that got bankrupt and shit like that All of those corporations are working aware working and are still working in Belarus and they're getting like quite a good Let's say experts because of Belarusian history of the radio electronic and development back in the even in the beginning of the 90s. We already had quite a big sector of Developers engineers and stuff like that, right? the average salary of IT worker in Belarus is by September 2021 around 823 euro, which is a explosion in the head of everybody I am just comparing to medicine sector where you get 330 euro, which is like an average, right? My mother gets around hundred fifty year for example working per month. So you get hundred fifty almost ten more than ten times People earning more than ten times Than the other people than the other workers and this is creating Kind of an interesting dynamic But it also happens because the IT sector is working not for the Belarusian economy rather working mostly for the Western clients, let's say like that also IT sector had like To develop the IT sector in Belarus Belarusian government went to this kind of tax exemption So the companies that came to Belarus and would be working there would get a lower taxes And people who are working in IT sector would actually have to pay lower taxes from their highest salaries Than the normal workers This changed in 2021 Because the government was really angry with IT sector that didn't support Lukashenko during the protests rather a lot of IT workers Were actually protesting against Lukashenko on the streets. So this was like a payback Okay, all your tax exempt are over you're going to pay as much as you Have to as the rest of the world Yeah There is also this thing that is called high technologies park, which is basically also a huge push of the dictatorship Indirection of like developing the IT sector in the country engineering sector and it works really nice it works really good as There are there were more and more companies that were developing their own products So if like 10 years ago you look most of the companies are working for the West Slowly through this development projects Belarus would get their like vibre shit You know like the the communication app comes from Belarus from this kind of like technology sector and so on So Belarus was slowly like catching up and for Lukashenko This is like the Belarusian Silicon Valley where everybody's like super smart and know where the brain is and all the shit However technologies in Belarus are like Well a complicated topic there you have this IT sector you have this engineers, but sometimes things like that happens where people have to be People have to be creative to for example like the guy is from the regime and he's trying to take a positional flag with a fishing rod, right? This is like a natural Set up for Belarusian society and for Soviet society where everything is supposed to be hacked You like you have a problem you you just try to solve it with the things that you have in your hands And this was like one of the craziest stories that we had The other is an example of the police trying to hit the drone with a police baton like if you're a cop you don't know To use any tools but the police button. So he was trying to to do that Yeah, so technologies is like Complicated topic in the society as you have educated people, but then you have policemen and then you have Belarusian president who don't know what it is They catch up they catch up like they catch up in the last year really a lot But at that point they were still like hitting the drones with the batons I think what is important here also talking about technologies and dictatorship to mention European Union, I love like you know shitting on the European Union policies and European Union was doing a lot of shit in Belarus since 2015 when Lukashenko became their kind of like Partner let's say like that and even before that one of the things that was happening was in the Line of the border protection corporation whatever shit that means and that means that they would give money To the regime to the dictatorship in the Eastern Europe In exchange of protection their borders So they would give Lukashenko money that the migrants from Eastern Europe or Asia or Whatever they're coming wouldn't pass through Belarus To Europe which he is using right now as some of you might have heard There is like a huge fucking crisis so-called crisis on the Lithuanian and Polish border because there are like 500 refugees passing Belarus and crossing Poland Lukashenko stopped basically like this cooperation stopped preventing refugees passing Belarus to Europe and now European Union is like What the fuck we have to do something what is going on? So between 2015 2020 European Union was using Lukashenko to To prevent that from happening. What was this cooperation looking like they would invest in? Cameras if you cross the border for example to Belarus there are the scanners right right? So you like you're a smuggler and you have a lot of cigarettes that somehow you're Going in the wrong direction with the cigarettes right from Poland to Belarus But somehow they have the scanners so they would put your car and everything that you have in the scanners And those scanners are like having this plate, you know paid by the European Union So I had like one of these Experiences where I'm standing in front of the scanner the car I came with is inside of the scanner and there is like a European Union flag and you're feeling like oh The repressions are not happening only you know with the Belarusian flag, but there is also European Union helping it out so they were doing that for quite some time and Somehow now it's on ice because of the problems Let's say of kidnapping the plane and all this shit that you might have heard The other thing that European Union was doing is the infrastructure projects They were investing a lot into the road infrastructure a lot of like renewed roads around the country are actually paid by the European Money and now the Belarusian government with the sanctions introduced is having some really serious issue trying to figure out How are we going to build the roads now without the European money? The other thing is police support if you were Presentation couple of years ago. You might have heard what you read the news on on the internet Actually, the German cops were training Belarusian cops around 2010 2011 and we're passing their Cameras that they're you know like trying to film everybody Belarusian cops were not doing that till 2011 But then the German cops taught them to do that like film everything and since then the Belarusian cops are filming everybody apart from that there was a scandal in October 2020 that the European Union and Lithuanian police passed 15 drones to the Belarusian police as part of the Interborder cooperation between for the law enforcement's trying to prevent some bullshit that they invented and this was happening like One month and a half after the protest started after all the torture after all the murder that was happening in Belarus European Union was still giving drones to the Belarusian state and was saying like okay We will see if they're using it wrong Then most probably we will have to take it back But we don't know how we take it back from the dictatorship But somehow it will work out and this is like the Belarusian cops, you know figuring out that there is a drone and like the picture of the cooperation and everybody's happy and so on and Apart from this kind of like three simple things there There is really a lot of money flowing from the European Union that is filling the Belarusian technological machine starting from for example the Photo traps in the in the forests that are like supposed to monitor the wild nature But are really helping the Belarusian state to monitor the fucking forests all around the country and a lot of different other Projects that were somehow stopped But stopped not by some moral, you know understanding of the European politicians about oh We have to stop like financing the dictatorship rather a huge outcry where the liberals would sit on their asses and like oh Yeah, we can't explain that in a really nice way that everybody will be happy Yeah Jumping to what the Belarusian state is using nowadays. So in 2020 And when the protest started what was the things apart from the baton that was flying against the The quadcopter and the fishing rods there were things Happening on the streets that were quite new for a lot of Belarusian people who didn't have an experience with protesting But also quite a lot of new things for the whole region And of course water cannons were not new But the type of the water cannons that appeared on the Belarusian streets was coming from Canada and It was like one of the things that was a public outcry that Belarusian state managed to buy Canadian water cannons Although we had like our own older versions of it But it was really important for Belarusian state to show like technological advancement in the story As I mentioned before the cops Started using cameras for documentation all the time. This was happening from 2010 but in 2020 This went to a different level So instead of just like running around the crowd and trying to film which they were not capable to do because people were rioting and people were beating up cops they would Set up cameras on the on the roofs of the Blockhouses as you can see sometimes happening actually in Dresden as well You would have cops on the top of the roof and they are filming something with a high resolution in Belarus They were doing that as well and this later on this kind of like a high resolution videos and pictures Were used to identify the people who were the demonstrations Prosecute them and the pictures from those high resolution cameras were part of your like criminal case and they would like show Oh, yeah, you were in this crowd at that point Then there is like this weird thing that appeared on the streets that doesn't appear in Europe I haven't seen anywhere apart from Belarus and Russia this kind of like mobile car shields That would be coming to a certain part of the street and they would like build up a small It's not like a transformer, but rather like a mechanical thing. They would build up a wall That the protesters cannot go so Belarusian state had that also for a couple of years They didn't use that and it was one of this like one of the first technological walls used in the Eastern Europe during the protests Like the Russians had also some modified versions, but they never used it at the pro for the protest against the protesters And of course the crowd control equipment from other countries. So for example here is a picture of Stun grenade coming from Czech Then they were also using electroshock shields from Russia as I said water cannons from Canada some self-made Explosions that they were throwing into the crowd and a lot of shit that we will never figure out where it came But Belarusian state does not produce those things like rubber bullets and shit like that Yeah, and Belarusian cops also were using body camps here There was a discussion and in Europe. I think in general body camps was for some time a discussion in Belarus There was never a discussion in in society they just passed a law that would put on every copper body cam and This would be used as well for the people for the prosecution and documenting of the Resistance Here is a video that shows like a full-scale usage of what they had like the rubber bullets. This is like this the shield Cars which they would have like in in bigger amounts next days Also like this happened at the first night of the protests where the police started using all this equipment within like Half an hour of the beginning of the protests They completely lost the control and just went Went crazy with with the whole thing that they had This is another thing that was happening later on the cops actually running after the people at the demonstrations and tagging them with paint guns and This was used for later on arresting people somewhere on the streets So what was happening is that the crowds were so massive and some people were hiding actually in the houses So the police started using some tagging techniques apart from that They were also using paint in the water cannons to specify the people who are living the streets and arrest arrest them later on Yeah, but then there were also like this, you know this contrast of the technological and this kind of like an old Soviet shit that is happening to us all the time so So the sound that you can hear is coming from this kind of emergency Notification system that you can hear also in Dresden from time to time when they are testing it in Belarus We also have this stuff against the air raids and you know the NATO coming in so they use those to kind of like Play the old Soviet patriotic songs during the demonstrations To demoralize the people and show them that they are still in control of on the streets Which was like a bizarre as I said like the stupid shit and I can imagine Lukashenko You know himself saying play my favorite song on the thing. Let them know that I know what they're doing And then at some point the situation escalated to the extent that they just started bringing military shit so if you see like Things on the military parades in Moscow or in Belarus there was a military parade in 2020 They were just starting bringing this toys into the city as a part of like things that they would use to suppress the population Right, but running Jumping back to the internet and to the network I think what is really important to understand that Belarusian state was working for quite some time with the Russian state on Controlling the network and in Russia they developed I Think back in the 90s the form system that would allow the police forces to be inside of the infrastructure of the Internet providers, but also like phone providers and so on and the latest version of the storm as a standard would like Describe which servers where should be and so on inside of the network And it's basically like a backdoor in the network you as a network provider have to buy a Box that you would install inside of your system and then the police would have a direct access to it Really handy if they want to like figure out your SMS or they want to call some friends or whatever They have like they basically control the network of the network provider and this was happening for the last 20 years or so A funny fact again, it is not produced by the Belarusian IT sector or engineering sector one of the main providers of the storm system is Nokia There was like a big scandal actually recently because there was a leak of their like description of their boxes that they are selling to Russia and Swarm played an important role during the protest as well as the government can for example Intercept the SMS that you would get as a two-factor a certification They can block you out completely out of the network So ever all the traffic that goes to your phone would go to some asshole who is sitting in the Political police office and he's getting everything and you're not getting anything and you have no fucking clue that Somebody's trying to authenticate on your telegram for example Right so what is also what played also an important role in Internet censorship is Sandvine is like a private company that is providing the boxes the hardware for and software for Internet censorship like they can put their boxes in the middle and everything will be sent of everything will be Filtered and They were doing that with Belarus so Belarus and state use and vine boxes to block the internet in August 2020 It seems like their hardware is shit because people were capable of actually accessing Internet and using like telegram and stuff But they played an important role in building up this kind of like a censorship Perimeter around the Belarusian protesters also the 2020 was the time when Belarusian Police actually asked for assistance from the Russians So they were Russian like experts in censoring coming in August and Showing okay You have to flip that button and you have to press here to make it more successful and so on so Belarusian state was actually like Running this censorship machine not alone, but rather us with support of the big brother from Putin It is also important for me at least to mention Microsoft here and their great child Or not their child, but the child that they bought on the market and skype because this was used intensively in 2020 and 2021 as a mean to prosecute people so there were at some point over 30,000 people in total prosecuted as a protest as part of the protest Belarus is a country of 9.5 million. So this is like massive And there was no capacity for the Belarusian state to actually like deliver all the People to the court wait till the court is free and all do all this bureaucratical shit so that what they would do they would have like two three minutes processes where you would have a Skype call from the prison and You would be prosecuted get your 15 20 days of arrest and that's it and without the Skype infrastructure This was not this wouldn't be possible for Belarusian state Microsoft never like in any way commented on that, but for me This was like this is a fuck up like if your network is used to prosecute like political dissidents You are a piece of shit and also Skype was crucial to build up anonymity for the police I will talk about it a little bit in the resistance part that people started Deanonymizing the cops so if there would be a face somebody would know this face and there would be a name and where the person is Leaving so what what started happening around I think October 2020 the cops would be coming To the courts via Skype in the masks like completely black block style the glasses You cannot recognize and most probably there was just one cop who was going to every court case And it was not even like important who is he because they were even changing their names Yeah, so Skype was also important to maintain that part of the Belarusian repression machine What was also interesting is That Belarus started using face recognition system to repress the protesters For us it was a new thing and actually there was like an explosion in the media again Belarus. We all think tractors Maximum like throwing sticks against the helicopter against the drones And for a lot of people this Understanding that the state can use the same technologies that are used in the other parts of the kind of the world was not possible So what happened in Belarus there is this private company that is called Sinises and they are from 2014 I think developing the machine learning systems like a face recognition voice recognition systems And they are doing that mostly for Belarusian state But also for the Russian state and for you know, like the best of the best of the democratic systems They have like on their website even the list of like Russia Belarus Kazakhstan Azerbaijan and then United Kingdoms And then there is even Ireland. So I think UK ended up on a really good list Yeah, so CEO of the company is a son of KGB agent from Russia So he has also a lot of connections inside of the whole security structure And that means that he can jump with his software solutions to everybody Starting from the military and ending up with KGB FSB and all the assholes and the software is since 2019 Providing the active face recognition. There was like a test run during the European games in Belarus European games I think you have never heard what is that but it's kind of like Olympic games But in Europe and only for the European countries this happened in Belarus in 2019 And they use the face recognition systems to provide security for all the tourists that are coming to Belarus Because there are some crazy anarchists that you know can kill tourists and shit like that So they use that to run their like test run and it worked pretty well However, because of the budget and problems they actually shrink the whole system They had like 3000 cameras that were running the face recognition up to 200 or 300 at the beginning of 2020 and in August 2020 they started using the face recognition to Detain the the targets that they would specify, right? It wouldn't be like we would use it against everybody and that's it rather They would have lists of the people that they're searching and the face recognition in the life would give them who is where So at least like for example of one anarchist was detained at the train station in Minsk and then later on Tortured in the like political police station So their system was crucial to actually like Pick up the top targets pick up the people who were mostly most active in the whole resistance movement in the whole uprising And they worked pretty well so this was like a really horrifying part and a lot of people didn't understand what the fuck is face recognition How to fight it back and although like we had a wave of coronavirus still in Belarus some of you might have heard that there was no coronavirus, but there was and With this wave of coronavirus people were still like not wearing masks and stuff And this was making it really easy to actually do the face recognition on the people and put those cases in their administrative or criminal cases that they were the demonstrations and Basically, they are actually running the data analytics on on the whole data that they collected in the years Till now so they are still detaining people from the protests that were happening like in October 2020 just by running their Algorithms on the pictures and videos that they made back then Yeah, so keep what ended up right now in the sanctioned list. They are not allowed actually to work in Europe As far as I'm aware But again, they are not the people who are Existing in isolation and they are like this great engineers from Belarus that created this awesome software and everything is great Rather than they are dependent on Intel that provides them the hardware for machine learning that is kind of like a just for enterprises They are also dependent on developers from Russia from Ukraine They are also dependent on their customers or distribution networks in us and in UK and in Ireland and in you luckily the company is like falling apart and Actually one of the reasons why it's falling apart is like an achievement of the anarchist movement in Belarus because They published a List of all the people who are working in the company basically like some of you would say oh, this is immoral and shit like that There was the discussions maybe and people said no, this is like every person of that fucking company is actually implied in Torturing people in Belarus so they should be made public nobody killed them Nobody kidnapped them or tortured or whatever their names were just made public that everybody knows their heroes and This also created incredible pressure on the on the whole system where people just started dropping out of the of the you know Surveillance networks or surveillance industry just because somebody figure out that they are working there And so if you know, you know your friends are working in some fucked up companies Just go and tell other friends that this person is working there and building up the social pressure is actually quite often enough To get those people out of this shitty jobs and actually to prevent shit happening Um Yeah, this is like their picture that they're showing to the police to explain that this is our good pictures Like you can identify faces and this is like you can't identify faces right and really simplified version but yeah as For social networks, I think many of you might have heard that Belarus was like a one of this, you know revolutions that were really important Or the revolutions that were really dependent on telegram networks and That was partly true And so social networks were actually used by the police for a really long time already in Belarus to prosecute people in Belarus For quite some time. I think 2000 till 2017 the major social network was called contact This is like a Facebook clone for the Eastern Europe for Belarus Russia you in Ukraine is banned but for Belarus and Russia and And this is like completely under control of FSB. So everything that goes inside is not anonymous So people know who you are even if you write your not not proper name or your anonymous, whatever It is not and a lot of people were prosecuted in Russia for what they were saying online And a lot of people were prosecuted in Belarus for what they were saying online Also social networks were used to Deanonymize people in Belarus What would happen is that you would get arrested, right? And cops would take your picture and they would put it later on on the social networks saying oh, this is like an anarchist Oh, this is anti-fascist. He's living there. He is working there. He's doing that which is In most of the cases in Belarus not a problem because there are not so many Nazis or people who could use that information However, it was used like by the police to show. Okay, we control everybody We know who you are we know where you live we post it on our contactee page and everything will be like controlled Later on after like the contact of contact became less popular among the population They moved to telegram so you would can you can find now Telegram channels where the cops would post personal information about the people trying to put pressure On them and saying okay. Yeah, we know those activists and shit like that and Belarusian government is working with contactia Which allows them to block the pages not block the whole contact it rather that they would write to administration of contact And would say this this this is extremist content block them And they would filter this content according to the AP so Belarusian IP wouldn't get access to the content in Belarus For example it within the social network and luckily other like the Western social networks I'm not doing right now that thing but this can happen at any point when Belarus becomes again the partner of the European Union and US Mobile phones is another thing that was a huge entrance point for the police for the repressions First of all celebrate you all know The company they were selling their hardware to Belarusian state as well So Belarusian state was using this to dump the data from the smartphones pretty eagerly They were saying like all we can you know hack some iPhones we can hack some Android systems Belarusian state or Belarus in repressive machine found another way so they can like basically break any encryption through torture And that's what had started happening from August 2020 So Belarusian state was applying torture to the certain activists to break the encryption on the phones but also on the PCs and and laptops and it doesn't matter like how good the encryption is basically like if you're live on stake most people were giving it away and this this kind of like experience but also this Practice Was spread all around the population so everybody knew that you can get tortured So people would unlock their phones without any problems and that was happening unmasked in Belarus in 2020 Yeah What the cops would do apart from just collecting data from your phones like getting all the pictures getting all your contacts They would quite often impersonate activists impersonation would be like the goal of impersonation would be to Find the people who are right now in the underground or people abroad and figure out more information about them or impersonate to sabotage Information channels so in telegram you would have like this group that is posted news about something And then the cops would take over the phone of the administrator of that group and start posting this information trying to well like this organized people Which was working pretty well and also they would use this impersonation to take over certain groups channels in telegram or in other social networks and say okay The police is now controlling we know everybody who was part of this group. We are all coming after you Then the cops were doing sim cloning So if you're like an activist who is You know not really easy to catch the police would just be cloning your sim cards Or basically like getting into the network with that we assume and getting everything that they need so all the Things that are dependent on the same on the phone number Registration were extremely vulnerable to the police activity on that part Even like if there is you know like a checkbox in telegram or in signal that would allow you to stop the police from Hacking your account this checkbox needs to be you know clicked and For most of the people from like my mother like she would never go in any settings or do shit So a lot of phone numbers were easily hackable Through the police because of the problems within the security Concepts that were there for telegram or even signal And another interesting part that the cops were like reporting by themselves Which showed also that the cops are not only the stupid fuckers driving tractors and You know having what they had the water cannons rather that they have technological departments and One of the political police depart technological departments was doing analysis of the traffic Going and Incoming on telegram to figure out who is uploading For example videos to the certain telegram channels and they were at least sounded like From the person who actually deserted from the squad They were actually figuring out some of the administrators within Belarus who were posting like anti-governmental Content on telegram through analyzing the traffic that was going in and out of telegram right as For resistance. We're almost there. So the presentation is almost over resistance apart from this kind of like a really easy technological resistance using stones and Classical stuff that was used for the last I don't know 2000 years people were actually Using a lot of technological Solutions for the challenges that came with the repressions But of course before we go that it's important to understand that the protests that were happening In Belarus were intense. They were super fucking intense. They were like For us a revolution happening Nowadays and we are almost breaking down the dictatorship So I'm going to show you a small video that shows how intense if it was Short video Yeah, and the the clashes were happening all around the country and people were not using You know tanks or whatever rather than fighting with their fists and stuff like that But apart from that there was a massive organization that is that was required to actually this to happen So people were using to go around the censorship of course proxies tour VPNs as I mentioned Although the Belarusian government was trying to block the internet and block tour network It was all done in this kind of like a tractor style so some things are working some things are not working and For a lot of for a lot of activists online, but also offline This was like really important part that the internet is still working for us For a lot of people who are somehow involved in political activism Quite often mesh networks are coming into question like if they switch off the internet We will get our mesh network and we are going to break their censorship So in Belarus this didn't work out and it didn't work out because as long as soon as the Let's say the protests grows to the extent that you would get non-technological people This all starts falling apart. You can't get your grandmother using the mesh network You can't get even your most probably colleagues from work to use mesh networks Even if they are like engineers in developing software So this didn't work out at all the Belarusian mesh networks didn't exist Although there was some software that was like yeah now we will be able like for example briar that was used by Five people I know right and the protest was like almost million people People were also Destroying the surveillance property at some point so when it came to understanding that those cameras that are hanging They're not only like just hanging and filming me and then there is a guy who's sitting But there and what is the video but rather there are algorithms running on those cameras People started just destroying the cameras on mass One of the biggest waves was in autumn 2020 and then recently there was like a new wave of destruction of Property which is in most cases actually the state property of the cameras even if they are hanging on the private homes So that's is what happening actually still right now people understood that we are going to smash those fucking cameras and Destroy the you know the eye of the big brother Also a lot of hacking was happening Although the Belarusian like hacking scene was not really big before the protests Certain people found themselves in the situation where they have to start moving and Trying to not only break the websites but trying to get into the network of the police Trying to get into the network of the whatever repressive apparatus is there and recently There were like really huge leaks from those networks from the people who were able to get inside and actually get information Like phone calls between the cops or the actually the full database of the Belarusian passports of everybody basically including the police officers Then there was Doxing of police and regime functioners as I mentioned before So you would have a telegram channel for example I think it was established like two three days after the beginning of the protests where the pictures of the cops would be posted with their Names and the addresses and their phones and this would be used as a kind of like okay This is your target like apart from just going on the protest on the streets use this information for your own good sometimes it was used so for example a Summer house that was still building for the chief of the riot police of Belarus was burned down or like some Cars were damaged but like it never went to the extent that somebody was trying to kill some cops and It turned into like a really actually big map. I have like a small actually Well, come on internet Example of it Okay, as usual technological problems. Anyway, so there is like an interactive map where you can just see, you know Where the cops are living so you're living on the streets Here somewhere you're living in Centralberg you can go to the map and you can see in the neighborhood You have like this and this and this and this cops and you when you don't have anything to do you do like in the evening What should I do? I'm going to you go and Write on the wall that this cop is an asshole and that's what people were doing Sometimes prosecuted sometimes never caught but this was like also an important part to show that we as a society Are in control of this repressive apparatus at least in some small way, right? Yeah, and then there was a lot of online education happening a Lot of videos that were published how to do Molotov cocktails how to do I don't know how to build a proper barricade how to burn a proper barricade and all this you know like collective knowledge that is not existing there and The interesting part is that actually telegram was blocking that and Facebook So that would be enough actually for your channel to be blocked Even if you are like I'm the resistance against dictatorship for telegram. They don't give a fuck You know like you're making a lot of cocktail on our social network. Fuck you Even if you're a good person So this is an example of like an education video that the person made Yeah, this is like I Don't know if you know what is that so it's kind of like it's called a hedgehog in Russian And it's used to break the tires of the cars and in this video The guy is showing how to make them and then he goes to the police station and just throws it around So when the cop cars are leaving actually police station, they're going to get like flat tires and This kind of videos were distributed all around the internet with Yeah, we're also with a lot of Let's say anarchist context saying that we are fighting not for a new for a new President rather that we are fighting actually for the society without the presidents Yeah, and then there was also like a funny propaganda happening That you can see here it says this is like a funny chap from the Soviet cartoons Called Cheburashka some of you might know him and and he says that if you can't Break the dictatorship you can still burn it down Yeah, so that's one of the things that we learned actually from from our protest that It's a hard process. It's not so easy to do and as for technologies we figure out as a society that we are living in 2021 and every dictator every like bearded old man who have nothing No understanding of technologies still have a young dynamic friend who can explain him How the technologies are working or actually do the technological repressions for him? We also figure out that phone or phone number is a horrible concept of Identification like if you still have this idea that your next app will be using phone number as a login Never do that If we are talking about Germany I think here you are also like obliged to give your passport to get registered with the SIM card If you are like a revolutionary anarchist, right? Of course, you will find a way not to register your phone with the passport, right But most people are not most people are not revolutionary people. So when the this kind of things are coming when the moments of civil Movements are coming They are not dependent on like a small bunch of people who know how to move through the current rules Rather, they are dependent on the masses that are not capable of finding a unique ID that will be not connected with their identification, right? We also figure out that the password is a good thing. So passwords were working phone numbers. We're not working in security concept Surveillance is good for the state and bad for society Doesn't matter where Belarusian state was building up the surveillance system before the protest started with an understanding that it is built for controlling the society although it was sold like It's for your own sake. It's for your good and if people if politicians are saying to you. Oh, we're doing that to you know to fight the Children pornography or whatever don't believe them. This is a complete bullshit in every police station There's seeds an asshole who thinks I want it to be like in Russia I want it to be like in Belarus So I want to have more and more and more and more of things So when the surveillance state is expanding it's expanding not for your safety But it's rather expanding the power of the state and this is like an important part that we Have to learn and we have to actually fight Here and now It is also important to understand that dictatorships nowadays in this technological world do not exist in isolation It is not like a small, you know Fenced community where there are dogs and cops running around and stuff Rather that it is a system that is integrating a lot of different systems from the including Western countries That are used to repress the population to keep them within the cages And this is not you know the some really bizarre companies that are sitting in the deserts And you don't know this is like your neighbors This is your the companies that are sitting around the corner and you know where they are You know most probably who's working there and there are ways to resist that here to prevent the things from happening in Belarus You can also resist here also resist like Microsoft IKEA and all the other corporations that are doing business with Belarus We also learned that smart doesn't mean smart So if the person is actually like an engineer and he's like figuring out the things with IT And he knows how the things are working and can make Kubik Rubik really fast. It doesn't mean he's really smart In the sense of society in the social processes in understanding Morality like a basic morality a lot of things that were happening in Belarus were done by Engineers by smart people by the people who know their things around the network. They know their things around the computers and This is an important part also that you have to talk to the engineers You have to talk to those people who are building all the structures and make them smart and make them understand What are actually the results of their work in the long run? What will be happening not only to the people around them, but to the them because they are the next ones So the IT workers that we're building keep what actually are among them those who left the country Because well, they couldn't find a job or well living in a dictatorship that is actually destroying the society right now on the scale That is happening in Belarus is really complicated It is also Important to remember that we are running out of time a lot of surveillance Techniques a lot of surveillance technology is actually Stabilizing the state or making repressions and destruction of the social movements easier and more successful Belarus is the best example. It was like a highly technological repressions and they are still happening and The further we go historically the more of this shit will be there and less possibilities We will have to actually break it down Maybe at the point when the you know ecological crisis will break and there will be no electricity Then everything will be fine for us But until that point if we are not actually resisting that the scales that are like the distribution of the surveillance technologies We are going to be fucked in next 10 20 years It doesn't matter what politicians are speaking Everybody wants to have a full power and not the stupid fuckers that are trying to change the society from the bottom and I Think for some people there is this myth that as a digital activist We can change the world as it is. We are like really powerful people. We can hack some systems We can spread the news. We can do a lot of shit, but actually like digital resistance is part of the bigger Struggle that is happening here and now and without the people on the streets without people in like Horizontal organizations without the neighborhood assemblies We will have no power even if we know how to go around the net network even if we know how to break things online It won't change anything if there is no society out here out right now Yeah, the last part I want to help you want to help for sure. I hope I educated you donate money to Belarusian NGOs that are collecting To support the prisoners to support the current movement There are anarchist organizations that are doing that as well Do solidarity actions like even a small solidarity action actually plays a role for the people inside of the country to Although Belarus is not coming so often right now in the media It is still important for the people in Belarus who are still fighting to know that they are not alone They are not left on them on their own by the rest of the world Learn and spread information as I said our struggle an example of our struggle is actually something that can become reality in the other parts of the world and You have to know your enemy before the enemy strikes So learn the information spread the information tell about this to your friends to your family to your dog Because we all should know how the state is working how the repressions are working to be able to win and Join the fucking anarchists and make revolution Because well for the freedom we have to fight together Those are links to some anarchist websites that are publishing in English and Yeah, thank you very much for listening