 So, first of all, I just want to thank the organizers for doing this great job. I've done it once and it's really hard work. And it's been a little bit since I've been at DePCOMP and it's really so, so nice to be back here. For those that don't know who I am, Gabriela, people call me Biela, and I've spent about the last 10 years looking at different hacker communities. And my first project was on free and open source software with a big focus on Debian. And it kind of culminated in a book called Coding Freedom, the Ethics and Aesthetics of hacking, which is available under Creative Commons license if you haven't checked it out. I was a pretty kind of regular at DePCOMP, but for the last number of years I got lost in a wormhole. And it was a bit of a fun wormhole, it was a bit of a scary wormhole, and I feel like I've actually only gotten out of the wormhole literally about 10 days ago. And that's because I finished this book completely in about August 10th. And the wormhole was looking at anonymous and studying anonymous. And it really took a huge amount of my time and effort and emotions and compared to something like Debian was a much, much tougher puzzle to crack. And the talk I'm giving today is primarily about anonymous, and you may be wondering what does anonymous have to do with Debian or free software. And at one level it kind of has nothing to do with these, but at another level it actually does have a lot to do with free software and hacker politics and also the questions of access and openness. And I wasn't really planning on giving a talk in part because I was exhausted while I was traveling through this wormhole for three years, but some folks suggested that since I went to this other galaxy and I've emerged back that I should give a talk about it. And what I'm going to do today is focus quite a bit on anonymous, but I'm going to try to make some connections between them and open source and also contextualize anonymous within the sort of flourishing of hacker politics that we've seen in the last couple of years. My talk has a warning. We're entering a politically incorrect zone. All personnel entering the premises will encounter a thing called freedom of speech. And in fact, anonymous is quite known for their offensive speech. And I will admit that anonymous will be violating the code of conduct. Because of their offensive speech, I think that they would be very happy to hear that they are violating the code of conduct. If you are concerned with adult language or expletives, and this is a problem, you might want to leave. I don't actually think it's going to be too much of a problem, but I think it's important to mention it at the start of the talk. So the talk is divided into three parts. How is it that anonymous turned to activism? It's a very interesting story. A second part, which is about their sociology, their politics, their political significance. And then finally, I'm going to get to weapons of the geek and talk about the broader milieu. But to start, we're going to start with a question of an accident and the accident. Because I really do think that anonymous is a tale about a crazy aberration, perhaps one of the weirdest political accidents ever to have occurred. Now this is not unusual to anonymous only. Even free software at some level has these accidental elements. And so for example, when Richard Stallman dreamed up the idea of free software and eventually architected a legal element to free software, he didn't envision free software to be a kind of global collaborative project, and it was Linus Torvalds who accidentally initiated that, right? So these are pretty common things in the history of politics. But as we'll see in a moment, I think the accident was really on overdrive with anonymous. A good place to start is in 2007. Fox News featured anonymous one evening in a general news segment, and they called anonymous hackers on steroids, a bit hyperbolic. And then they also called them the internet hate machine as well, which was a term that anonymous kind of embraced, somewhat ironically, but not entirely ironically either. The question is, was Fox News being just colorful? Were they exaggerating as Fox News often does, right? Well, yes and no. Fox News was reporting on anonymous because at the time in 2007, anonymous was purely a kind of trolling outfit. They were really well known for causing discordia, for choosing targets to humiliate them, and a lot of the activity came out of 4chan.org, and if you haven't been there, please enter at your own risk. And this trolling activity was done for the lulls, for the laughter, to take pleasure in the suffering of others, and anonymous was only known for this activity. Now as an academic, I strive for some precision in my definitions and actually think that one definition provided by anonymous as to what trolling is really captures the spirit of trolling, and that's ultra-coordinated motherfuckery. So that's what they were doing from about 2004, pretty much until 2008. So one example of one of their trolling raids was done against Habbo Hotel. Habbo Hotel is a social networking site that is popular in Finland among the youth, apparently, and anonymous once engaged in a trolling raid where they created a bunch of avatars where everyone was African American with afros and suits, and they blocked access to the pool because the pool had aids and fail. And this is classically extremely offensive in what anonymous did. This was in 2006. Now what's interesting actually about the Habbo Hotel raids was there was actually a slight political sensibility. There were rumors that the moderators in Habbo Hotel were blocking avatars if they were dark, so they were using very offensive means to protest Habbo Hotel, but it was primarily about trolling. So now let's fast forward to today, literally today, last week, when anonymous is now a name used primarily to instigate revolution, protest around the world. And in order for me, I'd like to actually show you an example related to one of their most recent operations, which relates to Operation Ferguson in Ferguson, Missouri. And this operation concerns a young African American man, Mike Brown, who was shot six times by a police officer. And anonymous swooped in, and they do what they do now, which is engage in distributed denial, service attacks, and hacking. But they're also very well known for helping to organize protests and create videos to kind of raise political awareness and consciousness. So let me now play about one minute of a video that they created for Operation Ferguson. You know, within 24 hours of Robin Williams' death, we knew more about what happened than we've learned in four days since the very public shooting of Mike Brown. There it goes there, now firing on to the crowd. He just said to me on air, media do not pass us, you're getting mace next time you pass us. They're threatening to mace you. Yes. Media do not pass us, you're getting mace next time you pass us. But your guess is pretty, is pretty thick. Greetings, citizens of the United States. We are anonymous in recent light of the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, where the People's Right to Protest has been usurped by an illegal curfew and the deployment of the National Guard. We're committed to stand hand in hand with the people in Ferguson, where peaceful protesters have been arrested, journalists threatened and the Right to Protest criminalized. Using jammers to disrupt communication of live streamers, letting clumb rule the streets like dictators in the Middle East to hurt people, no fly zone, in a word a military force, will not ensure peace and justice in Ferguson. Jane Nixon, this is not democracy. This may be your right, but not your right to fight us, and that's what my the dosage of online and offline protest will continue. So that's pretty remarkable, I think, to go from these, you know, extremely offensive trolls that are all about pranking to this, which is about protest and political awareness. And this is just one example of over 200 operations that Anonymous has been involved in in the last number of years. So for example, they were involved in the Arab Spring, they were one of the first kind of outside groups to report on Tunisia in January 2011, shuttling and gophering videos out of the country to the Western media. They were an informal protest, or I mean public relations wing for the Occupy movement. And Anonymous is quite well known to be triggered into action when it comes to any sort of intranet issue or censorship issue. So for example, they were quite involved in stopping SOPA, which is about piracy and engage quite extensively. So the question is, how do these trolls pivot towards activism, right? And one of the fascinating things is that it really has a lot to do with Tom Cruise. We have Tom Cruise to thank for Anonymous. And what happened, and really because he believes in Zeno, that is really part of it, because really what happened was that there was this video. Who's has brought to this world, there still remains one more word on the man. Call it Tom Cruise on, Tom Cruise Scientologist. I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist. It's something that you have to earn. And because Scientologist does, or she has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions, being Scientologist you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. Okay, so that video was leaked by Little A. Anonymous. It was members of the Church of Scientology who were critical of the church, who got the video out. This church was meant only for internal consumption for Scientology members. It spread like wildfire. And news establishments like Gawker published the video. And Scientology is known for its very litigious nature. And so they got out there, they got out their lawyers and their lawyers threatened websites like Gawker with lawsuits. And once they did that, Anonymous, the trolling outfits like, hey, what a perfect target. Let's troll the heck out of the Church of Scientology. And to this day, it's probably their mothership trolling raid. I mean, basically they DDoS'd every website related to Scientology. They sent hundreds of pizzas to Scientology churches across the country. They pranked the Dianetics hotline. They scanned their, you know, butts and then sent faxes of their butts to churches. These sorts of things. They had a great time doing it. And as part of this trolling raid, they created a video. And the video was done for the sake of the lulls. And it was a very important video. And now I want to show you leaders of Scientology. We are anonymous over the years. We have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature. All of these things have caught right with the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation. The extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed for the good of your followers or the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment. We shall proceed to expel you from the internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. I recognize you as serious opponents. Okay, so this video also took off. It was like wildfire. And the interesting thing is that within Anonymous, it helps spur a debate. And the debate was, shall we stay faithful to our madcap roots and continue to be these gnarly internet trolls or should we actually earnestly protest the Church of Scientology? I mean this is truly a debate that started to happen after this video and after some critics of the Church also said, hey, you guys are kind of powerful. Why don't you jump aboard the ship of kind of protest and activism? Well, they made a decision. And the decision came in the form of a global day of protest on February 10th, 2008, where over 7,000 geeks and nerds showed up across 127 cities in front of Scientology churches and protested. And it was really interesting. I went to the protest in New York City and it was pretty clear that, first of all, a lot of these internet nerds came from 4chan and 4chan truly is kind of anonymous and they just wanted to meet other kind of people from 4chan. But on the other hand, what also happened was that the media validation that they got, as well as just the feeling of empowerment when you kind of hit the street, was enough to constitute a new activist project, a long-term activist project. And it went by the name of Operation Chenology. And this was the kind of name of the anonymous operation that started to earnestly target the Church of Scientology and people from anonymous every month started to protest the Church. Now it's time for a slight detour. How is it that I kind of got involved, right? These things were happening. But why was it that it caught my attention? Well, I'm going to confess, I myself have had a relationship with Zinu. And it happened in 2007 when I ended up at the University of Alberta for a postdoc. And I found out that the largest Scientology archives in the world are housed in this university. And I was like, oh, oh, this is wonderful. Because during my research with free and open source software hackers, a number of people had told me that they were involved in protesting the Church in the 1990s and that they had released secret Church documents. And that, in fact, the very issues I was interested in, copyright and trademark, were actually explored because of the battles that occurred in what is humorously referred to as Internet versus Scientology. And there was a very popular Usenet group in the 1990s that circulated secret Church documents and Scientology went after its critics in a very kind of hardcore fashion. And here I was at the University of Alberta and I was studying these early battles. But I was actually quite secretive about the project because, you know, Scientology is and was a little bit creepy and they went after academics and journalists. And at the time what I found so interesting when I was doing the project wasn't simply the fact that Scientology went after its critics, but as an anthropologist I was interested in the fact that Scientology seemed to be the perfect nemesis for the geek and hacker world. It was like Scientology was the evil doppelganger of the hacker world. Now I'm going to now offer you one tiny morsel from Scientology that I think will prove very immediately what I mean by this. Hackers have a very particular relationship to science and technology and Scientology is a religion about science and technology and a relationship to technology could not be more different than the way that hackers treat technology. So I'm going to show you a document called Keeping Scientology Working which one might say condenses again the view that Scientology takes on technology. So Keeping Scientology Working consists of getting the correct technology applied, consists of having the correct technology, knowing the technology, knowing it is correct, teaching correctly the correct technology, applying the technology, seeing that the technology is correctly applied, hammering out the existence of incorrect technology, knocking out incorrect applications, closing the door on any possibility of incorrect technology, and closing the door on incorrect application. And this is done with no irony whatsoever, right? This is the truth. And so what was really fascinating to me was the way that geeks and hackers in the 90s had found their perfect nemesis and so when Anonymous came into being, I was like, oh, this is like proves my thesis that once Scientology goes after this population, there is this true enjoyment in protesting your nemesis. So I decided to start following Anonymous. I was also really just intrigued by that transformation from these trolls that were living in the kind of underbelly, the underworld of the internet, and that they decided to sail on the ship of activism. So let's now fast forward to 2010. This is April 2010 where the kind of very famous hacker institution that was involved in politics was not Anonymous. It was WikiLeaks at this time. And WikiLeaks released Collateral Murder. It was provided by Chelsea Manning. And for those that don't know what Collateral Murder is, it was a U.S. military video that, in fact, the Reuters news organization was trying to get access to. They had requested it through a Freedom of Information Act and they could not get it. And the reason why they wanted it was this video shows U.S. soldiers gunning down a couple of journalists and children. And it shows the cold-blooded pathological reality of war that tends not to be shown anymore in our news organization. And it really caused quite a bit of controversy and it was something that really put hackers on the political map. At this time, Anonymous was geopolitically insignificant. Now let's now go to the fall of 2010, September. There was something by the name of Anon Ops, which eventually became an IRC server. And what happened was, Chenology was still protesting the church of Scientology. There was still some trolling under the name of Anonymous. But a new wing, a new node, came into being. And what was interesting about this new node was, first of all, it wanted to defend file sharing and piracy. That became its issue of choice. But the more significant innovation was that they started to use digital direct action in the form of hacking and distributed denial service attacks to make their political points. These were tactics that were dropped by Chenology. Chenology really stayed within the legal domain. Now, how they came into being was also very much like that accident I just told you about. And I don't have time to go into the details, but I do go into it in my book. But very soon after the Constitution of Anon Ops, they come to intersect with WikiLeaks. And it has to do with Cablegate. So Cablegate is when WikiLeaks releases diplomatic cables, again, provided by Chelsea Manning, it really causes this huge firestorm. The U.S. government pressures financial organizations like MasterCard and PayPal to block WikiLeaks. It was known as the banking blockade. Amazon also pulled the plug on services. An anonymous Anon Ops, this new wing, comes in support of WikiLeaks and basically initiates the largest distributed denial service protest in the history of the web. So freedom of expression is priceless for everything else, there's MasterCard, right? And what is really amazing about this moment, there's a couple of things. First of all, it was also a bit of an accident. I'll tell you what it was very briefly. Anon Ops was only going to mirror WikiLeaks like many other geeks and organizations were doing. But someone went ahead and didost PayPal. They probably had access to a botnet, they did it. And then someone in the secret cabal, because there's many, but many cabals in Anonymous, decides to claim that DDoS as Anon Ops. And so he went to a blogger and said, that was us, let the world know that that was us. And then this guy goes back to the little cabal who actually makes decisions through consensus and everyone is livid, they're going to shred him to pieces. They're like, that wasn't us, we did not make this decision, we're just mirroring WikiLeaks. And then this savvy, clever person said, hey, that ship was sailing, I wanted to jump on that ship, come on, the media's all over this, let's just say it was us. And then finally they're like, yeah, let's say it was us. And then they decide to claim it their own and also do a lot more DDoSing, right? Again, imagine if that had never happened. And this was quite significant because this detached Anonymous from questions of file sharing. Also what was quite interesting was that the DDoS was really only made possible by very cheap botnets that these hackers were renting or had control of. But thousands of people were angered at this blockade. And so thousands of people also joined this IRC channel, there was 7,000 people on one channel, that's a lot of people. There was over 100,000 people who downloaded low-orban ion cannon, which was a tool that you can use to contribute to the DDoS. It wasn't necessary and a lot of people got in a lot of trouble for using it, but it showed or made palpable the kind of widespread discontent that people had with what the government and corporations had done. It was after this that things got really interesting with Anonymous. First of all, this was the architecture that Anonymous took. It began to look like a Hydra. They were competing political nodes with different political cultures. There were regional nodes in Italy, in India popping up. It really became a complex geography. And then the other interesting element was that Anonymous became Anonymous everywhere. This was the time where along with WikiLeaks they got involved in Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Venezuela. It was unbelievable the fountain of activity that was coming out of Anonymous. And following them basically became my life 24, well not 24 hours a day, but when I was awake and thankfully I was on sabbatical that year, otherwise my teaching would have suffered quite a bit. So then just very briefly, you know, Anonymous mutates a lot. It changes. And two of the big changes were in May of 2011 a number of the hackers who did a lot of the political technical work decided to break away and form a group called LULSEC. And the reason why they broke away was Anonymous had become so associated with activism that if they did hacking that didn't have a political purpose people in Anonymous would get upset. So they decided to break away with their own little group where they would hack for the LULSEC, for the fun of it. And they went on a 50-day hacking spree and hacked AT&T, Sony Pictures, a bunch of video game companies. And it was interesting because even though many of the hacks had no overt political purpose, they were enacting a politics of transgression. They were also demonstrating to the world the crappy state of internet security. And they were a little bit like a performance troop as well. They disbanded at the end of June. And then soon after through some leftover members created the group Antisec, which unlike LULSEC became a political, a militant hacker group. Militant in the sense that on Fridays they would try to target the governments, for example. And the hashtag for their dump was fuck FBI Fridays. On Mondays it was, you know, Monday military meltdowns, right? Like they were really just trying to target governments and security firms. And they really went on an unbelievable hacking spree. Now I can't go into detail about all the operations under the banner of anonymous or LULSEC or Antisec, but to give you a flavor of what anonymous does and how it does it, I would like to just go in depth for a second in one operation that I think is representative of the different tactics that anonymous uses in its operation BART from August 2011. Now this happened after BART officials decided to basically shut off cell phone access in their stations because local activists were protesting BART and the police after Charles Hill, a homeless man had been killed by a police officer. And so they were protesting Bay Area Rapid Transit, sorry. And they were protesting the killing of Charles Hill, the local activists, and the Bay Area Transit was going to shut off cell phone access for the second protest in the hopes of quelling protests. Anonymous is like, oh, censorship, we're going to get involved. A small team called the cabin crew initiates it. AnonOps gets quite involved. Like they often do, what they do is engage in an organized street protest. This actually is not from the first protest. This is the year anniversary, but I just like the picture. And it's also paying homage to another man who had been killed before Charles Hill. But they also, some people took the initiative, oh, this was also during the protests and I guess the point I was going to make with this is that though many of their tactics are legal, they like to retain their abrasive screw you edge. And I think that this is a perfect example of that. So along with protests, some individuals decide to hack into the Bay Area Rapid Transit websites and they release customer data, customers that had nothing to do with the police brutality. And this of course causes enormous controversy inside and outside of Anonymous because generally let's just say information is procured through hacking that reveals corruption. Most people Anonymous are like down for that. If hacking has collateral damage, there's a few people who decide to move forward with it for the purposes of media attention. This lands them literally on CNN, but this act initiated a press release from Anonymous that Anonymous is not unanimous. And finally, if someone can do something in the classical style of trolling, they often will if they can. And in the case of Operation Bart, they were able to. The gentleman who announced that Bart was going to shut down cell phone access, his name was Linton Johnson and he was the public spokesperson for Bart and someone happened to find a photograph of him that was a bit racy and published it on a website called Bart Lowles and said if you're going to be a dick to the public then I'm sure you don't mind showing your dick to the public, Bart Lowles. So I think that this is a really good kind of example of the way in which Anonymous integrates legal tactics, illegal tactics, morally gray tactics in one operation. This is not being necessarily coordinated by the same people, although they may be on the same IRC server. Okay, now I just want to move away from their history and talk a little bit about their kind of sociology and their political significance. I don't have time to go into this, I'm going to skip that. So initially it was quite fun to study Anonymous. It was quite pleasurable. It really is an unusual subversive subcultural world. But eventually this was definitely not a mother-cracking game. With over a hundred arrests around the world there were about two dozen people in the United States who were arrested with numerous, numerous convictions and it's so significant the number of arrests, again in North America and Europe and much of the world, that a number of the lawyers who are representing people from Anonymous have called this moment the nerd scare. That is something like the red scare where the U.S. government went after and demonized communists during the McCarthy era. And I would like to mention it's not simply just Anonymous that is targeted as part of this nerd scare. I think a great example of this is Peter Sunde who is part of the Pirate Bay, who is currently in jail in Sweden serving a year sentence simply for running the Pirate Bay. You know, with Anonymous, if you're going to have arrests it also means that there's a lot of snitches that are obviously going to be within Anonymous. And one of the most famous was this fellow here, Ekter Montseguir, who is better known as Sabu, who is part of Lulsec, who had been arrested in June in the day of his arrest. He flipped and became an informant. And he was really pivotal in catching a lot of the hackers who were arrested in the United States and the UK. Probably the most significant of all of them was Jeremy Hammond, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence for hacking many kind of American corporations. So that's obviously something that's part of the sociological landscape. But what has been interesting is that even though there's been major arrests, even though there's snitches everywhere, Anonymous has not been entirely stopped. They're quite strong and going strong. And I decided to kind of make a list of ingredients that kind of can help explain the secret sauce of Anonymous's success, and here it is. So I think part of the reason they're successful is because they have bold and recognizable Hollywood aesthetics. There is a really kind of strong participatory open thrust in Anonymous, which I'll get to. They function like an anti-brand brand. There's a lot of mystique and misinformation that helps create a drama, so people want to follow them. They land a tremendous amount of media attention. But I think the most important has to do with their unpredictability. And in fact, if there was one word, if I had to pick one word to describe Anonymous, it would definitely be Mercurio. They're changeable, volatile, fickle, flighty, erratic, animated, lively, sprightly, quick-witted. These kind of characteristics really capture what Anonymous is about. And what's interesting is that I don't think that they're random. There's many logics to Anonymous, but they're very malleable and fickle and flighty. And this kind of set of characteristics is not unique to Anonymous either. In fact, if you know about trickster lore, the trickster being figures like Coyote or Anansi the spider or Loki if you've seen Thor the Hollywood film, tricksters kind of embody these characteristics. And in my book I do a lot of kind of conceptual work of relating the trickster to Anonymous. But these characteristics are really animated by their amazing artwork, which on the one hand is functions like memes and so far as they're stock images that are just tweaked and redone so a lot of people can contribute. On the other hand, there is a kind of a lot of artistry that goes into it and their videos in particular, as we've seen, whether it's that first Scientology video or the videos that they create for their operations, are incredibly important. Just like with any kind of domain of political organizing, you have to have teamwork and that is no different in Anonymous and it comes at many different levels. So for example, Anonymous is often described as being hackers, hackers, hackers and hackers, hackers, hackers. And in fact, compared to something like Debian, actually what makes Anonymous distinctive is that many people are not hackers. Many people who show up are students and janitors, video makers, designers, like people with really different backgrounds. And one of the reasons why they've had such a forceful presence is because they're quite good on mediums like Twitter and one of the biggest activist accounts in the English-speaking leftist world is your anonymous news. It's got over one million followers and this is based and predicated on teamwork. They've had up to 25 people behind the team. There's a style guide. There's rules and consensus. They have to follow. There's big dramas. They explode. They get reconstituted, right? So that's really important. And then of course, LullSec, AntiSec, you know, there's a lot of teamwork that goes into Anonymous. Another kind of factor behind their success is their openness. They really combine and open source logic in the context of organizational obscurity or downright secrecy. And I know that this may not seem like a pair that can go together, like how can something be really open and also really secret at the same time, right? And it's because it's two different elements that are in play. So really Anonymous is this idea that cannot be controlled. It's free for anyone to take. And I think it was really embodied well when Jake Davis, who was known also as topiary, a member of LullSec, before he was arrested, he tweeted, you cannot arrest an idea. And this is the only tweet that now stands on that old account. And what this has meant is that you have Anonymous in Indonesia, in Singapore, in Canada, right? It really is this commons for anyone to take. And there are limits to who can take it. I once heard a good story from some intelligence officers who told me that jihadists actually admired Anonymous for all the media attention they got, but really they probably couldn't embrace the idea of Anonymous or Lulls, right? The cultural differences between kind of jihadist terrorists and Anonymous are too big. So it doesn't mean Anonymous can travel anywhere and everywhere, but nevertheless it has real wide appeal and can circulate. And I think the most crystallized example of this was when Polish parliamentarians who were protesting the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, which was being considered in Europe, well they protested it and one of the ways that they protested it was by taking the Anonymous mask. Now they weren't claiming to be Anonymous, but by this time the mask had become equated with popular dissents and again was a symbol that could travel in many different parts of the world and it was because no one claims ownership over it. However, the architecture of the actual networks like Anonymous is like a maze. It's unbelievably complex. There's cabals within cabals. It makes the cabals in Debian look like child's play in comparison. I mean to give you one example, there was once a channel that I believe was called Kitten Core, which at first I thought was about cat porn, but it wasn't and there was another one called Upper Deck and they had the same exact people minus one person because at the time they were splitting bitcoins and this was a new person and they didn't trust them and so for a while you have like these two channels that are exactly the same minus one person, right? And really the only reason why I've come to know about many of the cabals is because people were arrested and they were able to talk freely in a way that they weren't able to do so before and even though I've written a really big book I feel like I've only captured like a fraction of this maze and that's what it really felt like. So now I just want to move to the ethics and politics of anonymity. You know, whenever Anonymous intervenes in a certain area of the world or operation there's an effect to their operation but at a more meta level I think Anonymous is really interesting because they came into being just at the moment where anonymity and privacy are truly going extinct and dying and possibly are going away and sometimes I really do think Anonymous is simply the kind of party at the funeral of privacy. You might as well go out having a good time if you're going to do it. But what is really fascinating is not simply that they incarnate visually this importance of privacy and anonymity but that there is an extremely robust anti-celebrity ethic that's at the heart of Anonymous and I think that there is real strong virtue in embracing opacity, illegibility, anti-celebrity in the age of celebrity and surveillance and there were many, many kind of examples in which people who were seen to kind of be acting for fame, recognition or who were self-promoting were literally kicked out, banished, chastised, thrown to the corner as a result of doing so. This was really a living ethic and I have many instances in my book and I'll just give you right now a short conversation happening between one person accusing another person who demassed of trying to seek fame and recognition and again there's going to be some strong language. So this person says, hey, E, can I say you really love attention or just some wannabe? You know, would be surprised if you're not some faggot fed just like Sabu, who is this person working as the informant. The other person tries to defend himself, say whatever you want, but you'd be wrong and then this person says you're like this other person on Twitter who seeks attention. And so really this was something that was really incredibly important. Now, another logic of anonymity that is alive and anonymous actually has a very long heritage and it has to do with the fact that speaking anonymously is important for the vibrancy of democratic societies and this has been enshrined in the Supreme Court. Probably my favorite example is captured in an aphorism by Oscar Wilde who says, man is least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth. But I think that there is a pretty strong sentiment as well that acting anonymously is cowardly. This is something I hear quite a bit sometimes when people are critical but I actually disagree. I think that there's good political reasons to try to protect yourself and I think at its best anonymity puts the attention on the message rather than the messenger. And in many cases when it comes to political movements whether it's in the past or it's in the present so here we have Hoffman who was one of the founders of the Yipis which is a kind of counter-cultural 1960s pranking sort of movement who was made into a celebrity leader Abby Hoffman and then there's Julian Assange who was very much kind of embraced by the media and Julian put himself in the spotlight and in both instances when the leader is tarnished his or her reputation the whole movement can be tarnished so there's real kind of powerful reasons why one might want to embrace anonymity in political acts but a final kind of element about anonymous interactions when you're doing it politically in small groups is that there's a great psychological burden when you're interacting with others very closely but you can't share much about your life with each other and in fact some of the hackers who were caught simply shared too much about their lives because they couldn't sort of hold back when you are under such intense conditions you want to talk about your past and your desires and what you've done and this is exactly what people did because it's truly hard to remain truly anonymous and the next quote I'm showing you is from a hacker who did manage to remain anonymous and he's never been caught but he was telling me one day how hard it was to bear that burden and he said the hardest is the silence when we have trouble and stress unlike family or work tensions there's no one to talk to no friends who understand the advantage is that anonymous can resurrect you can go away, come back with a new name if you don't share anything for you, he was talking to me I'll keep following Biela there's no nick changes for you and so it is definitely not necessarily easy to work under the veil so just to finish now I'm just going to talk very briefly about weapons of the geek contextualized, anonymous within this larger field very briefly this title is inspired by an anthropology book called weapons of the weak everyday forms of peasant resistance in which an anthropologist by the name of James Scott looked at interventions like minor acts of sabotage or foot dragging that on the surface do not look political, it's someone being difficult at work for example but his argument is that in the aggregate they do have political effects and that in many different peasant societies there's many different types of weapons of the weak but they all share some similar characteristics and in part inspired by the fact that in the last stage and especially the last five years there's been this unbelievable kind of flowering of hacker political activity I am really interested in what are the points of similarity and differences between let's just say the world of free and open source software radical tech collectives, the pirate party, the whistleblowers what unites hacker and geek politics and in what ways are the different modalities quite different and I was really struck by Zach's earlier talk because on the one hand I think that there are these two opposing trends on the one hand there are these very very strong forces of depoliticization in the hacker world I think also bolstered by startup culture as well but on the other hand there's also been this unbelievable flowering of kind of very direct action politics in the hacker world and so first of all just very briefly in terms of some of the similarities or not so much similarities but one way to account for the fact that we have a kind of explosion of hacker politics today has to do with the fact that courage is contagious you have these very dramatic acts such as what Chelsea Manning did giving all this information to WikiLeaks and what Julian Assange did and that literally inspired Jeremy Hammond in anonymous to return to political hacking we know probably that Edward Snowden was at least partly inspired by what came before him right so these very visible acts and this is very different from weapons of the week which are very invisible hacker politics weapons of the geek are very visible on the other hand and this visibility has allowed for this kind of courageousness to be infectious now I think there's about a half a dozen characteristics that help explain some of the different connections between something like the pirate party, the pirate bay Debian and anonymous and don't worry I'm not going to go into all six of them but I'm going to mention one of them and one element that I do see marking hacker and geek politics is different from other domains is that hackers often work on projects together and their different motivations don't get in the way of achieving a goal so people go to projects for very different reasons and additionally their offline political affiliation like are they social democrats or they're libertarian or they anarchists that tends not to matter so much for many different domains for politics whether that's Debian or anonymous and generally I think that's a really powerful thing and to give you a great example of this in action I'm going to show a very short clip from a movie on the pirate bay where each of the three kind of main people behind the pirate bay are explaining why they contribute to this project and each one of them has wildly different reasons in Swedish so there's subtitles at the bottom I actually have to escape it because it's too large okay for the media for communication I really don't care if ideology behind pirate copying is right or something or politics I do this because it's really fun to drive a big site what is the important pirate bay it democratizes a lot and creates a good way to express freedom what does it have to do with the material that the pirate bay can do for an individual to share the material even if it's based on the law it's a boring problem I think you have to discuss okay so they're under oath I just like that slide for weapons of the geek they're under oath I have no reason but to believe them the first person is interested because he wants to run a neutral political communication infrastructure and by the way Anacada is another person who's been caught up in the nerd scare he was in solitary confinement for quite a while I'm not even completely sure why he's in jail but he's someone else who's in jail the middle person is into it because it's fun and then Peter Sunday is like this is political for me and I see that in many different domains of hacker action you have that kind of extreme flexibility and malleability and I actually think that this is generally a really positive thing but there are some limits to it as well at times and this is what I'm going to I promise finish with I think it's really interesting with weapons of the weak I mean geek you have these very different domains like free software like anonymous real blowing and there's these amazing moments where they cross pollinate and I'm going to show to finish a video by Edward Snowden who basically videoed into hackers on planet earth and he basically pays massive homage to free software installment and he talks about the importance of creating technological tools for the fight against surveillance and basically he's issuing a call to arms and the question now is what free software developers what Debian is going to do in response and there seems to be a strong need to bake in security defaults that provide enhanced privacy to protect and enable things like crypto so that governments cannot so easily snoop on the population and I think that this is a really important call but one of the things is that this can't necessarily arise magically but needs to be a kind of concerted effort if not for a whole project at least a team in a project in order to make it happen where basically different motivations need to align in order to make it happen but again what I really like about this final video that I'm going to show is that different areas of hacker politics do cross pollinate do come together do speak to each other and again Snowden is a perfect example but the limits or the problem is that he's just an individual who did a tremendous amount by exposing this kind of blanket surveillance and the kind of close relationship between corporations and governments but he's very well aware that there are armies of geeks and hackers and it is they who could find who can finish the kind of job that is necessary to restore privacy if not we're definitely just going to be at the party at the funeral of anonymity and privacy so to finish I'm just going to play the video and then I realize I've gone over time so we can just wrap up but if people have any questions or comments I'll definitely be around afterwards topic and I think when we talk about whether or not the government begins going after journalists this is the real sticking point for me because in terms of my political philosophy as it relates to technology here is I would say almost Stalman-esque when we think about free software we need to think about software as a means of expressing our freedom but also defending our freedom governments rely on the same technologies we do they adopt the same standards they use the same products and this happens worldwide so the solution to that when you ask me is whether or not the United States government can manage to behave itself to restrain itself against violating the constitution against bringing suits against journalists limiting the freedom of press other governments will make different decisions and if we want to live in a better more enlightened world what we need to do is we need to remove those capabilities from the governments by enshrining our rights into our means of communications by denying them those capabilities at least at a targeted level because you can't pitch a zero day at every mobile phone or it's going to get caught it's going to get caught by a researcher it's going to end up on the Verge or Technica or any one of these other sites and there's going to be a post mortem there's going to be reused and re-purposed they're going to find it out they're going to trace it back to you but governments can still pursue their legitimate needs on a targeted basis by using those zero days only when they are the least intrusive and essential means of getting okay so he goes off a little bit but I just wanted to end there and just thank everyone for the work they do and again I'm going to be here all week so if you have any questions or comments I'm happy to engage and take them thank you very much