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All right!

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Good evening everybody!

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This hall is pretty full.

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So I guess this is gonna be an interesting talk.

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We are on a tight schedule. Our speaker Jake Applebaum

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is gonna be joined by Julian Assange via, by a videostream

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I really hope that's gonna work.

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So without further do, please welcome our speaker and have fun!

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So! We have a surprise guest. Some of you might know her.

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She saved Edward Snowdens life. Her name is Sarah Harrison.

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Thank You!

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Good evening my name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know.

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I'm a journalist working for WikiLealks.

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This Year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks-team that saved Snowden from a life in prison.

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This act and my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the UK,

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due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to movements of Eward Snowden documents.

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The UK Government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents

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with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism.

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I’m therefore currently remaining in Germany.

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But it’s not just myself personally that has legal issues at WikiLeaks.

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For a fourth Christmas arrested, Julian Assange continues to be detained without charge in the UK.

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He’s been granted formal political asylum by Ecuador

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due to the threat from the United States.

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But in breach of international law,

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the UK continues to refuse to allow him his legal right to take up this asylum.

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In November of this year,

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a US Government official confirmed that the enormous grand jury investigation,

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which commenced in 2010, into WikiLeaks,

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its staff, and specifically Julian Assange, continues.

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This was then confirmed by the spokesperson of the prosecutor’s office in Virginia.

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The Icelandic Parliament held an inquiry earlier this year,

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where it found that the FBI had secretly and unlawfully sent nine agents to Iceland

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to conduct an investigation into WikiLeaks there.

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Further secret interrogations took place in Denmark and Washington.

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The informant they were speaking with has been charged with fraud

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and convicted on other charges in Iceland.

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In the Icelandic Supreme Court, we won a substantial victory over the extralegal US financial blockade

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that was erected against us in 2010 by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and other US financial giants.

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Subsequently, MasterCard pulled out of the blockade.

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We’ve since filed a $77 million legal case against VISA for the damages.

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We filed a suit against VISA in Denmark as well.

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And in response to questions about how PayPal’s owner can

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start a free press outlet whilst blocking another media organisation,

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he’s announced that the PayPal blockade of WikiLeaks has ended.

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Sorry! That wasn't meant to be pause for a clap. I just needed some water, sorry.

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We filed criminal cases in Sweden

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and Germany in relation to the unlawful intelligence activity against us there,

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including at the CCC in 2009.

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Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights we filed a suit against the US military

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against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning’s trial.

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Yet through these attacks we’ve continued our publishing work.

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In April of this year, we launched the Public Library of US Diplomacy,

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the largest and most comprehensible searchable database of US diplomatic cables in the world.

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This coincided with our release of 1.7 million US cables

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from the Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files,

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239 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors

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exposing their technology, methods, and contracts.

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We completed releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails

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from US intelligence firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included

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documenting their spying on activists around the globe.

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We published the primary negotiating positions for fourteen countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,

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a new international legal regime that would control

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40% of the world’s GDP.

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As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr Snowden’s defence fund,

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part of a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund,

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which aims to protect and fund sources in trouble.

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This will be an important fund for future sources, especially when we look at the US crackdown on whistleblowers

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like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning,

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who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and another

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alleged WikiLeaks source Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to ten years in prison

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this November.
These men, Snowden, Manning, and Hammond,

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are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up

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with a free internet and want to keep it that way. It is this

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class of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they

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and we all have, and can have, and the good that we can do with it.

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I am joined here tonight for this discussion by two men I admire hugely.

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Hopefully one of them will appear soon.

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WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, both who

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have had a long history in defending our right to knowledge, despite political

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and legal pressure. There He is...

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So Julian, seeing as I haven’t seen you for quite awhile,

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what’s been happening in this field this year, what’s

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what’s your strategic view about it, this fight for freedom of knowledge, are we winning

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or are we losing?

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I have an 18-page speech

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on the strategic vision, but I think I’ve got about five minutes, right?

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At the most.

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No, less?

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Okay. Well. First off, it’s very

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interesting to see the CCC has grown by 30%

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over the last year.

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And we can see the CCC

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as a type a very important type

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of institution which does have analogues.

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The CCC is a paradox in that it has the vibrancy

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of a young movement, but also now has been going nearly

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30 years since its founding in 1981 by Wau Holland

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Great point, great point.

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Blame the NSA?

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Blame the NSA?

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It’s the new ‘blame Canada’.

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Is it here or the embassy they’re spying on the most?

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Such a good talk, isn’t it guys?

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I wish Bruce Willis (Assange’s Skype name) would pick up the phone.

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Should we move over while we’re waiting to you, Jake.

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As I saying, I think it’s quite interesting, it does seem to be a trend that there are these young

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technical people. We look at Manning, Snowden, Hammond…

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often sysadmins. Why are they playing such an important role

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in this fight for freedom of information?

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Well, So, I think there are

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a couple important points. The first important point is to understand that

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ll of us have agency, but some of us actually have literally

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have more agency than others in the sense that you have access to systems

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that give you access to information that helps to found knowledge

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that you have in your own head.
So someone like Manning

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or someone like Snowden who has access to these documents in the course of their work,

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they will simply have a better understanding of what is actually happening. They have access

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to the primary source documents as part of their job.

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This, I think, fundamentally is a really critical,

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I would say a formative thing.
When you start to read these

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original source documents you start to understand the way that organisations

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actually think internally. And, this is one of the things that Julian Assange has said quite

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quite a lot, it’s that when you read the internal documents of an organisation,

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that’s how they really think about a thing. This is different than a press release.

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And people who have grown up on the internet, and they’re essentially natives on the internet, and that’s all of us,

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I think, for the most part. It’s definitely me. That

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essentially forms a way of thinking about organisations where the official

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thing that they say is not interesting. You know that there’s an agenda behind that

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and you don’t necessarily know what that true agenda is.
And so people

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who grow up in this and see these documents, they realise the agency

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that they have. They understand it, they see that power, and they want to do something about it.

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In some cases, some people do it in small starts and fits.

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o there are lots of sources for lots of newspapers that are inside

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of defense organisations or really, really large companies, and they share

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this information. But in the case of Chelsea Manning,

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in the case of Snowden, they went big.

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And I presume that this is because of the scale of the wrongdoing that they saw,

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in addition to the amount of agency that was provided by their access

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and by their understanding of the actual information that they were able to have in their possession.

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And do you think that it’s something to do

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with being technical; they have a potential ability to

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find a way to do this safer than other people, perhaps? Or?

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I mean, it’s clearly the case that this helps.

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There’s no question that understanding how to use those computer systems and

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being able to navigate them, that that is going to be a helpful skill.

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ut I think what it really is is that these are people who grew up in an era,

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and I myself am one of these people, where we grew up in an era where

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we are overloaded by information but we still are able to absorb a great deal of it

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And we really are constantly going through this.

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And if we look to the past, we see that it’s not just technical people, it’s actually people who have an analytical mind.

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So, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, who’s famous for the ‘Ellsberg Paradox’.

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So, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, who’s famous for the ‘Ellsberg Paradox’.

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He was of course a very seriously embedded person in the US military,

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he was in the RAND corporation, he worked with McNamara,

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and during the Vietnam War he had access to huge amounts of information.

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And it was the ability to analyse this information and to understand

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in this case how the US Government during the Vietnam War was lying to the entire world.

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And it was the magnitude of those lies combined

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with the ability to prove that they were lies that I believe,

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ombined with his analytical skill… It was clear what the action might be,

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but it wasn’t clear what the outcome would be.

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And with Ellsberg, the outcome was a very positive one. In fact it’s the most positive

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outcome for any whistleblower so far that I know of in the history of the United States

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and maybe even in the world.

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What we see right now with Snowden

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and what we’ve now seen with Chelsea Manning is unfortunately a very different outcome,

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at least for Manning.

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So this is also a hugely important point

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which is that Ellsberg did this in the context of resistance against the Vietnam War.

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And when Ellsberg did this, there were huge support networks,

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there were gigantic things that split across all political spectrums of society.

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And so it is the analytical framework

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that we find ourselves with still, but additionally with the internet.

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And so every single person here that works as a sysadmin,

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could you raise your hand?

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Right.

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You represent, and I’m sorry to steal Julian’s thunder, but he was using Skype and well…

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We all know Skype has interception and man-in-the-middle problems,

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so I’m going to take advantage of that fact. You see, it’s not just the NSA.

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Everyone that raised their hand, you should raise your hand again.

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If you work at a company

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where you think that they might be involved in something that is a little bit scary,

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keep your hand up.

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Right.

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So here’s the deal:

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everybody else in the room lacks the information that you probably have access to.

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And if you were to make a moral judgment,

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if you were to make an ethical consideration about these things,

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t would be the case that as a political class you would be able to inform all of the political classes in this room,

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all of the other people in this room, in a way that only you have the agency to do.

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And those that benefit from you never doing that are the other people that have that.

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Those people are also members of other classes as well.

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And so the question is, if you were to unite as a political class,

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and we are to unite with you in that political class, we can see that there’s a contextual way

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to view this through a historical lens, essentially.

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Which is to say when the industrialized workers of the world decided

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that race and gender were not lines that we should split on,

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but instead we should look at workers and owners,

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then we started to see real change in the way that workers were treated and in the way the world itself was organizing labor.

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And this was a hugely important change

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during the industrial revolution.

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And we are going through a very similar time now

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with regard to information politics and with regard to the value of information in the information age.

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Fantastic, Bruce Willis.

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Jesus Christ, Julian, use Jitsi already.

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And so, we’ve identified the potential

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people that you’re talking about and you’ve spoken about how it’s good

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for them to unite.

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What are the next steps?

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How do they come forth? How do they share this information?

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Well, let’s consider a couple of things.

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First is that

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Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning; Daniel Ellsberg, still Daniel Ellsberg;

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Edward Snowden, living in exile in Russia unfortunately.

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Still Edward Snowden.

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Still Edward Snowden, hopefully.

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These are people who have taken great actions where they did not even set out to sacrifice themselves.

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But once when I met Daniel Ellsberg he said,

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‘Wouldn’t you go to prison for the rest of your life to end this war?’

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This is something he asked to me, and he asked it quite seriously.

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And it’s very incredible to be able to ask a hypothetical question

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of someone that wasn’t a hypothetical question.

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What he was trying to say is that right now you can make a choice

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in which you actually have a huge impact,

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should you choose to take on that risk.

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But the point is not to set out to martyr yourself.

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The point is to set out...

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Are you going to stick around this time, Julian?

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I don’t know, I’m waiting for the quantum hand of fate.

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The quantum hand that wants to strangle you?

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Yeah.

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Yeah. So we were just discussing right now the previous context,

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hat is Daniel Ellsberg, the Edward Snowdens, the Chelsea Mannings,

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how they have done an honorable, a good thing

235
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where they’ve shown a duty to a greater humanity,

236
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a thing that is more important than loyalty,

237
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for example, to a bureaucratic oath, but rather loyalty to universal principles.

238
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So the next question is, how does that relate to the people that are here in the audience?

239
00:17:16,217 --> 00:17:19,881
How is it the case that people who have access to systems

240
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where they have said themselves they think the companies they work for are sort of questionable

241
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or doing dangerous things in the world?

242
00:17:27,404 --> 00:17:30,936
Where do we go from people who have done these things previously to these people in the audience?

243
00:17:30,936 --> 00:17:36,207
Well, I don’t know how much ground you’ve covered,

244
00:17:36,207 --> 00:17:40,796
but I think it’s important that we recognize what we are

245
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and what we have become.

246
00:17:44,606 --> 00:17:48,128
And that high tech workers are... ...a class.

247
00:17:48,128 --> 00:17:52,129
In fact, very often... ... a position

248
00:17:52,129 --> 00:17:58,108
to in fact prompt the leaders of society...

249
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...cease operating...

250
00:18:04,927 --> 00:18:15,633
Should we just leave him like that and continue?

251
00:18:15,633 --> 00:18:32,298
Am I back?

252
00:18:32,298 --> 00:18:36,132
Yeah. You’ve got three minutes to say something.

253
00:18:36,132 --> 00:18:38,491
Make it good.

254
00:18:38,491 --> 00:18:41,929
Those high tech workers, we are a particular class

255
00:18:41,929 --> 00:18:44,709
and it’s time that we recognized that we are a class

256
00:18:44,709 --> 00:18:46,650
and look back in history and understood

257
00:18:46,650 --> 00:18:49,213
that the great gains in human rights and education

258
00:18:49,213 --> 00:18:53,163
and so on that were gained through powerful industrial workers

259
00:18:53,163 --> 00:18:56,323
which formed the backbone of the economy of the 20th century,

260
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and that we have that same ability

261
00:18:59,852 --> 00:19:04,380
but even more so because of the greater interconnection

262
00:19:04,380 --> 00:19:07,494
that exists now economically and politically.

263
00:19:07,494 --> 00:19:10,323
Which is all underpinned by system administrators.

264
00:19:10,323 --> 00:19:18,216
And we should understand that system administrators are not just those people who administer one UNIX system or another.

265
00:19:18,216 --> 00:19:21,379
They are the people who administer systems.

266
00:19:21,379 --> 00:19:24,769
And the system that exists globally now

267
00:19:24,769 --> 00:19:28,690
is created by the interconnection of many individual systems.

268
00:19:28,690 --> 00:19:36,793
And we are all, or many of us, are part of administering that system

269
00:19:36,793 --> 00:19:38,700
and have extraordinary power

270
00:19:38,700 --> 00:19:43,813
in a way that is really an order of magnitude

271
00:19:43,813 --> 00:19:48,814
different to the power industrial workers had in the 20th century.

272
00:19:48,814 --> 00:19:52,167
And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks

273
00:19:52,167 --> 00:19:56,285
that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations,

274
00:19:56,285 --> 00:20:02,034
it is possible now for even single systems administrators to have a very significant change,

275
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or rather apply very significant constructive constraint

276
00:20:07,368 --> 00:20:10,533
to the behavior of these organizations.

277
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Not merely wrecking or disabling them,

278
00:20:12,615 --> 00:20:15,866
not merely going out on strikes to change policy,

279
00:20:15,866 --> 00:20:21,790
but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system

280
00:20:21,790 --> 00:20:25,326
which we’re developing from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information

281
00:20:25,326 --> 00:20:30,948
into the knowledge commons, where it can be used not only as a disciplining force,

282
00:20:30,948 --> 00:20:33,095
but it can be used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.

283
00:20:33,095 --> 00:20:36,487
Now, Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA,

284
00:20:36,487 --> 00:20:48,287
is terrified of this. In “Cypherpunks” we called for this directly last year.

285
00:20:48,287 --> 00:20:57,615
But to give you an interesting quote from Hayden,

286
00:20:57,615 --> 00:21:02,408
possibly following up on those words of mine and others,

287
00:21:02,408 --> 00:21:07,122
“We need to recruit from Snowden’s generation”

288
00:21:07,122 --> 00:21:08,292
says Hayden.

289
00:21:08,292 --> 00:21:11,117
“We need to recruit from this group because they have the skills that we require.

290
00:21:11,117 --> 00:21:15,621
So the challenge is how to recruit this talent while also protecting ourselves

291
00:21:15,621 --> 00:21:20,487
from the small fraction of the population that has this romantic attachment

292
00:21:20,487 --> 00:21:24,207
to absolute transparency at all costs.”

293
00:21:24,207 --> 00:21:27,815
And that’s us, right?

294
00:21:27,815 --> 00:21:32,524
So, what we need to do is spread that message and go into all those organisations.

295
00:21:32,524 --> 00:21:34,201
In fact, deal with them.

296
00:21:34,201 --> 00:21:37,498
I’m not saying, ‘Don’t join the CIA’.

297
00:21:37,498 --> 00:21:38,723
No, go and join the CIA. Go in there.

298
00:21:38,723 --> 00:21:41,871
Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out,

299
00:21:41,871 --> 00:21:44,846
with the understanding, with the paranoia,

300
00:21:44,846 --> 00:21:50,285
that all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation,

301
00:21:50,285 --> 00:21:53,537
by an ideology that is spread across the internet.

302
00:21:53,537 --> 00:21:56,617
And every young person is educated on the internet.

303
00:21:56,617 --> 00:22:00,086
There will be no person that has not been exposed to this ideology

304
00:22:00,086 --> 00:22:07,462
of transparency and understanding and wanting to keep the internet which we were born into free.

305
00:22:07,462 --> 00:22:11,532
This is the last free generation.

306
00:22:11,532 --> 00:22:16,007
The coming together of the systems of governments,

307
00:22:16,007 --> 00:22:17,652
the new information apartheid, across the world,

308
00:22:17,652 --> 00:22:20,691
linking together in such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a decade.

309
00:22:20,691 --> 00:22:30,933
Our identities will be coupled to the information sharing

310
00:22:30,933 --> 00:22:33,203
such that none of us will be able to escape it.

311
00:22:33,203 --> 00:22:36,488
We are all becoming part of the state,

312
00:22:36,488 --> 00:22:38,206
whether we like it or not.

313
00:22:38,206 --> 00:22:46,653
So our only hope is to determine what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of.

314
00:22:46,653 --> 00:22:48,703
nd we can do that by looking and being inspired

315
00:22:48,703 --> 00:22:52,483
by some of the actions that produced human rights and free education and so on

316
00:22:52,483 --> 00:22:55,578
by people recognizing that they were part of the state, recognizing their own power

317
00:22:55,578 --> 00:23:02,687
and taking concrete and robust action to make sure

318
00:23:02,687 --> 00:23:06,974
they lived in the sort of society they wanted to and not in a hell-hole dystopia.

319
00:23:06,974 --> 00:23:08,367
Thank you.

320
00:23:08,367 --> 00:23:26,090
So basically all those poor people Jake just made identify themselves,

321
00:23:26,090 --> 00:23:29,595
you have the power to change more systems than the one you’re working on right now.

322
00:23:29,595 --> 00:23:34,848
And I think it’s time to take some questions because we don’t have long left.

323
00:23:34,848 --> 00:23:40,374
if there are any? What's the...

324
00:23:40,374 --> 00:23:44,281
If you do have Questions, please line up in the middle of the room. we have microphones there.

325
00:23:44,281 --> 00:23:50,537
If you cannot reach one please put your hand up, we try to get one to you.

326
00:23:50,537 --> 00:23:53,651
While we wait for the first question.

327
00:23:53,651 --> 00:23:56,815
I’d like to say, it looks like there’s quite a lot of people there..

328
00:23:56,815 --> 00:23:59,812
Start going to the mic even while he's talking if you do have a question.

329
00:23:59,812 --> 00:24:03,788
Cause otherwise we won't know that you have one and we just keep on going.

330
00:24:03,788 --> 00:24:09,498
Alternatively just raise your hand... ...quite a lot of people there.

331
00:24:09,498 --> 00:24:14,122
but you should all know that due to the various sorts of proximity measures

332
00:24:14,122 --> 00:24:17,805
that are now employed by NSA, GCHQ, and Five Eyes Alliance,

333
00:24:17,805 --> 00:24:21,621
if you’ve come there with a telephone,

334
00:24:21,621 --> 00:24:24,794
or if you’ve been even in Hamburg with a telephone,

335
00:24:24,794 --> 00:24:27,891
you are all now coupled to us.

336
00:24:27,891 --> 00:24:29,337
You are coupled to this event.

337
00:24:29,337 --> 00:24:31,576
You are coupled to this speech in an irrevocable way.

338
00:24:31,576 --> 00:24:33,890
And that is now true for many people.

339
00:24:33,890 --> 00:24:41,094
So either we have to take command of the position that we have,

340
00:24:41,094 --> 00:24:44,538
, understand the position we have, understand that we are the last free people,

341
00:24:44,538 --> 00:24:46,246
and the last people essentially with an ability to act in this situation.

342
00:24:46,246 --> 00:24:53,205
Or we are the group that will be crushed

343
00:24:53,205 --> 00:25:08,170
because of this association.

344
00:25:08,170 --> 00:25:11,577
So you were talking about the sysadmins here.

345
00:25:11,577 --> 00:25:15,400
What about those people who are not sysadmins?

346
00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:21,561
Not only joining CIA and those companies, what else can we do?

347
00:25:21,561 --> 00:25:25,033
Jake, do you want to have a go at that one?

348
00:25:25,033 --> 00:25:27,116
Sure. This is a question of agency.

349
00:25:27,116 --> 00:25:27,955
Good timing.

350
00:25:27,955 --> 00:25:29,890
It’s a question in which one has to ask very simply,

351
00:25:29,890 --> 00:25:31,934
what is it that you feel like you can do?

352
00:25:31,934 --> 00:25:35,014
And many of the people in this audience I’ve had this discussion with them.

353
00:25:35,014 --> 00:25:38,497
For example, Edward Snowden did not save himself.

354
00:25:38,497 --> 00:25:41,534
I mean, he obviously had some ideas, but Sarah, for example,

355
00:25:41,534 --> 00:25:45,620
not as a system administrator, but as someone who was willing to risk her person.

356
00:25:45,620 --> 00:25:49,247
She helped, specifically for source protection, she took actions to protect him.

357
00:25:49,247 --> 00:25:53,121
So there are plenty of things that can be done.

358
00:25:53,121 --> 00:25:57,408
To give you some ideas, Edward Snowden, still sitting in Russia now,

359
00:25:57,408 --> 00:25:59,922
there are things that can be done to help him even now.

360
00:25:59,922 --> 00:26:06,117
And there are things to show, that if we can succeed

361
00:26:06,117 --> 00:26:07,648
in saving Edward Snowden’s life and to keep him free,

362
00:26:07,648 --> 00:26:09,538
that the next Edward Snowden will have that to look forward to.

363
00:26:09,538 --> 00:26:12,248
And if we look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning,

364
00:26:12,248 --> 00:26:17,688
we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned,

365
00:26:17,688 --> 00:26:20,488
just as Thomas Drake and Bill Binney set an example

366
00:26:20,488 --> 00:26:24,561
for every single person about what to do and what not to do.

367
00:26:24,561 --> 00:26:26,486
It’s not just about systems administrators,

368
00:26:26,486 --> 00:26:31,767
it’s about all of us actually recognizing that positive contribution that each of us can make.

369
00:26:31,767 --> 00:26:35,403
OK our next question will be microphone 4 ..2 please

370
00:26:35,403 --> 00:26:41,605
Hi Julian, I’m wondering,

371
00:26:41,605 --> 00:26:42,087
do you believe that transparency alone is enough to inject some form of conscience into evil organizations,

372
00:26:42,087 --> 00:26:52,335
quote and quote “evil” organizations?

373
00:26:52,335 --> 00:26:58,285
And if not, what do you believe the next step after transparency is?

374
00:26:58,285 --> 00:27:02,038
It’s not about injecting conscience,

375
00:27:02,038 --> 00:27:04,656
it’s about providing two things:

376
00:27:04,656 --> 00:27:08,451
one, an effective deterrent to particular forms of behavior

377
00:27:08,451 --> 00:27:17,168
and two, finding that information which allows us to construct an order in the world around us,

378
00:27:17,168 --> 00:27:20,682
to educate ourselves in how the world works

379
00:27:20,682 --> 00:27:25,765
and therefore be able to manage the world that we are a part of.

380
00:27:25,765 --> 00:27:28,700
The restriction of information,

381
00:27:28,700 --> 00:27:33,407
the restriction of those bits of information, colors it.

382
00:27:33,407 --> 00:27:37,563
It gives off an economic signal that information is important when it’s released,

383
00:27:37,563 --> 00:27:41,405
because otherwise why would you spend so much work in restricting it?

384
00:27:41,405 --> 00:27:44,090
So the people that know it best restrict it.

385
00:27:44,090 --> 00:27:46,805
We should take their measurements of that information

386
00:27:46,805 --> 00:27:52,285
as a guide and use that to pull it out where it can achieve some kind of reform.

387
00:27:52,285 --> 00:27:55,033
That, in itself, is not enough.

388
00:27:55,033 --> 00:27:59,485
It creates an intellectual commons which is part of our mutual education.

389
00:27:59,485 --> 00:28:05,455
But we need to understand, say, if we look at the Occupy event,

390
00:28:05,455 --> 00:28:08,487
a very interesting political event,

391
00:28:08,487 --> 00:28:17,246
where revelations and perhaps destabilization led to a very large group wanting to do something

392
00:28:17,246 --> 00:28:23,894
However, there was no organizational scaffold for these people to attach themselves to,

393
00:28:23,894 --> 00:28:29,615
no nucleus for these people to crystallize onto.

394
00:28:29,615 --> 00:28:31,978
And it is that problem,

395
00:28:31,978 --> 00:28:36,287
which is an endemic problem of the anarchist left, actually.

396
00:28:36,287 --> 00:28:39,573
The CCC. Why are we having this right now?

397
00:28:39,573 --> 00:28:43,039
Because the CCC is an organized structure.

398
00:28:43,039 --> 00:28:50,957
It’s a structure which has been able to grow to accommodate the 30% of extra people that have occurred this year.

399
00:28:50,957 --> 00:28:55,244
To shift and change and act like one of the better workers’ universities that are around.

400
00:28:55,244 --> 00:29:01,564
So we have to form unions and networks

401
00:29:01,564 --> 00:29:05,735
and create programs and organizational structures.

402
00:29:05,735 --> 00:29:10,039
And those organizational structures can also be written in code.

403
00:29:10,039 --> 00:29:13,486
Bitcoin, for example, is an organizational structure

404
00:29:13,486 --> 00:29:19,290
that creates an intermediary between people, it sets up rules between people.

405
00:29:19,290 --> 00:29:23,698
It may end up as a quite totalitarian system one day,

406
00:29:23,698 --> 00:29:26,938
who knows, but at the moment it provides some kind of balancing.

407
00:29:26,938 --> 00:29:29,813
So code and human structures do things.

408
00:29:29,813 --> 00:29:37,561
WikiLeaks was able to rescue Edward Snowden because we are an organized institution with collective experience.

409
00:29:37,561 --> 00:29:42,701
Okay, I think there’s one question left that’s coming from the internet.

410
00:29:42,701 --> 00:29:50,785
On IRC there was the question, what was the most difficult part on getting Snowden out of the US?

411
00:29:50,785 --> 00:29:56,654
That’s quite a loaded question.

412
00:29:56,654 --> 00:30:01,042
Yeah, that’s interesting to think whether we can actually answer that question at all.

413
00:30:01,042 --> 00:30:06,792
I’ll give a variant of the answer because of the legal situation it is a little bit difficult.

414
00:30:06,792 --> 00:30:12,958
As some of you may know, the UK Government has admitted to

415
00:30:12,958 --> 00:30:19,851
spending £6 million a year approximately surveilling this embassy in the police forces alone.

416
00:30:19,851 --> 00:30:21,869
So you can imagine the difficulty in communicating with various people in different countries

417
00:30:21,869 --> 00:30:34,884
in relation to his diplomatic asylum and into logistics in Hong Kong in a situation like that.

418
00:30:34,884 --> 00:30:37,176
And the only reason we were able to succeed is because of extemely dilligent…

419
00:30:37,176 --> 00:30:48,541
Perfectly timed.

420
00:30:48,541 --> 00:30:49,795
And we didn’t use Skype.

421
00:30:49,795 --> 00:30:54,486
Do we have time for one more question?

422
00:30:54,486 --> 00:30:57,880
I think we run out of the time.

423
00:30:57,880 --> 00:30:59,333
That was such a fantastic, perfect way to make sure that you didn’t learn the answer to that question.

424
00:30:59,333 --> 99:59:59,999
Unfortunately that is all the time we have for this talk