... wanted to be able to use
Thunderbird and GnuPG together with Tor,
and so we thought:
oh, it would be really easy, I bet,
to configure Thunderbird to work with Tor
- hah - so a new Free software project was born.
It's a really simple thing, but basically
it's just a package that hooks it all together.
So a lot of people were using Thunderbird
and TorBirdy, and GnuPG, and Tor,
and Debian, together for email,
combined with Riseup as an email service.
So it's a literally a real peer to peer, Free software driven set of things,
actually, that made it possible.
[question]: So one thing I never understood about this
process was exactly how the documents were handled, and maybe that's because nobody
wants to say, but, you know, did you leave them on a server somewhere and download
them, hand them over to people, and who took what where, and how do you...
in case I need to do something really dangerous with a load of documents,
what's the best way of doing it?
[laughter]
[Jacob]: Hmm!
[audience member]: It's a good thing this isn't being streamed.
I'm sorry, what?
There was a voice from god, what did she say?
[audience]: I said good we aren't streaming tonight.
Oh yeah, so hello to all of our friends
in domestic and international surveillance services.
Well, so I won't answer your question,
but since you asked the question, it's my turn to talk.
So what I would say is that...
if you want to do clandestine activities
that you fear for your life for,
you need to really think about the situation that you're in
very carefully.
And so a big part of this is operational security
and a big part of that is compartmentalization.
So certain people had access to certain things,
but maybe they couldn't decrypt them,
and certain things were moved around,
and that's on a need to know basis,
and those people who knew,
which is not me - I don't know anything, I don't know what you're talking about.
Those people knew, and then you know,
it'll go with them to their grave.
So if you're interested in being the next Edward Snowden,
you need to do your homework
in finding people that will be able to do the other part of it, let's say.
But just in general, I mean
compartmentalization is key, right.
So it's not just for AppArmor profiles.
So you need to think about what you want to do.
And I mean a big part of this is to consider that the network itself
is the enemy, even though it is useful for communicating.
So all the metadata that exists on the network
could have tipped people off, could have caused
this whole thing to fall apart.
It really is amazing, I feel like you know
two and half, three years ago,
when you talk about Free software,
and you talk about the idea of Free software,
and you talk about issues relating to autonomy and privacy, and security
you have a really different reception now than you did then,
and that's really what it took
to turn the world half a degree, or something,
or a quarter of a degree or something.
So I'm not going to tell you about detailed plans for conspiracy,
but I highly encourage you to read about South African history,
in particular the history of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
They are the clandestine communications group for MK,
or rather the operation who lay inside of MK,
which is Umkhonto we Sizwe,
and they are sort of with the African National Congress,
and those people have published so many books about the revolutionary activities
to overthrow the apartheid state.
If you read these books, especially the book "Operation Vula"
and "Armed and Dangerous" by Ronnie Kasrils
they give you some idea about what you need to do
which is to compartmentalize,
how to find people to do various tasks, specific tasks,
how to work on building trust with each other, what that looks like,
how to identify political targets,
how you might use things like communications technology
to change the political topic on,
and the discussion in general.
And I think the best way to learn about these things is to study previous people
who have tried to do that kind of stuff.
And the NSA is not the apartheid regime of South Africa,
but there are still lessons to be learned there,
so if you really want to know the answer to that, also Che Guevara's manual
on guerilla warfare is very interesting,
and there's a lot of other books like that.
I'd be happy to talk about it with you later.
And I have nothing to do with anything that we may or may not have done.
[laughter]
[question]: Do you think there is a chance that things may get better
for example I know that publicly, some programs were not extended
but I don't know what is happening in the background
so maybe it's the same thing but they are pretending that it's not
How do you see this?
[Jacob]: Well I think a couple of things.
In general I think what happened, not just with this movie but with all of these things
is that in inspired hope,
and the hope is very important,
but hope is not a strategy for survival, or for building alternatives,
so what it has also done, is that it has allowed us to raise the profile
of the things which actually do make it better.
For example ridding ourselves of the chains of proprietary software
is something that's a serious discussion with people that wouldn't have previously
talked about Free software because they don't care about liberty,
they care about security.
And even though I think those are really simliar things,
previously they just thought we were just Free software hippies,
in tie-dye shirts
and while that may be true on the weekends and evenings
or with Bdale every day [laughter]
I think that actually does make it better
And it also changes the dialogue, in the sense that it's no longer reasonable
to pretend that mass surveillance and surveillance issues don't matter,
because if you really go down the rabbit-hole
of thinking about what the security services are trying to do
it becomes obvious that we want to encrypt everything all the time
to beat selector-based surveillance and dragnet-based surveillance.
It doesn't matter if something is authenticated
You could still trigger some action to take place
with these kinds of surveillance machines
that could for example drone strike someone,
and so it raises that.
And that gives me a lot of hope too,
because people understand the root of the problem,
or the root of many problems
and the root of some violence in the world, actually.
And so it helps us to reduce that violence
by getting people to acknowledge that it's real
and also that they care about it
and that we care about each other.
So that really gives me a lot of hope, and part of that is Snowden
and part of that is the documents
but the other part of it is that..
I don't want to blow it up and make it sound like we did something
like a big deal,
but in a sense, Laura, Glen, myself and a number of other people
were really not sure we would ever be able to travel home to our country
that we wouldn't be arrested.
I actually haven't been home in over two and half years,
well, two years and three months or something
I went out on a small business trip that was supposed to last two weeks
and then this happened
and I've been hear ever since.
It's a really long, crazy trip.
But the point is that that's what was necessary to make some of these changes
and eventually it will turn around
and I will be able to go home,
and Laura and Glen will be able to travel to the US again.
Obviously, Julian is still stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy
Sarah lives in exile in Berlin,
I live in exile in Berlin,
And Ed is in Moscow
So we're not finished with some of these things
and it's also possible that we are, the set of people I mentioned,
the state we're in, will stay that way forever.
But what matters is that the rest of the world
can actually move on and fix some of these problems,
and I have a lot of hope about that.
And I see a lot of change, that's the really big part.
Like I see the reproducible build stuff that Holger and Lunar are working on.
People really understand the root reason for needing to do that
and actually seems quite reasonable to people
who would previously have expended energy against it,
in support of it, so I think that's really good.
And there's a lot of other hopeful things.
So I would try and be as uplifting as possible.
It's not just the rum!
[question]: Near the end of the film we saw something about another source.
I may have been missing some news or something
but I don't remember anything about that being public.
Do you know what happened to them?
[Jacob]: As far as I know any other source that was mentioned in the film
is still anonymous, and they're still free.
I'm not exactly sure because I was not involved in that part
but I also saw the end of the film
and I've seen a bunch of other reporting which wasn't attributed to anyone in particular
So the good news... there's an old slogan from the Dutch hacker community, right?
"Someone you trust is one of us,
and the leak is higher up in the chain of command than you"
And I feel like that might be true again, hopefully.
I think that guy has a question as well.
[question]: Part of the problem initially was that encryption software
was not so easy to use, right?
And I think part of the challenge for everyone
was to improve on that situation to make it better
so I'm asking you if you've observed any change and to the rest of the room
have we done anything to improve on that?
[Jacob]: I definitely think that there is a lot of free software
that makes encryption easier to use,
though not always on free platforms, which is heart-breaking.
For example Moxie Marlinspike has done a really good job
with Signal, Textsecure and Redphone
and making end-to-end, encrypted calling, texting, sexting,
and whatever apps,
sext-secure is what I think it's nicknamed
and I'm very impressed by that, and it works really well
and it's something which in the last two years
if you have a cell-phone, which I don't recommend
but if you have a cell-phone, and you put in everyone's phone number,
a lot of people that I was classify as non-technical,
that don't care about Free software as a hobby or as a passion
or as a profession.
You see their names in those systems
often more than some of the Free software people,
and that's really impressive to me
and I think there's been a huge shift just generally about those sorts of things
also about social responsibility
or people understand they have a responsibility to other people
to encrypt communications, and not to put people in harm's way
by sending unsafe stuff over unsafe communication lines
So I think in my personal view it's better.
But the original problem wasn't actually that the encryption was hard to use.
I think the main problem is people didn't understand the reason
that it needed to be done
and they believed the lie that is targetted versus mass surveillance
And there's a big lie, and the lie is that there is such a thing
as targeted surveillance.
In the modern era, most so-called targetted surveillance actually happens
through mass surveillance.
They gather everything up, and then they look through the thing
they've already seized.
And of course there are targetted, focussed attacks.
But the main thing is that the abuse of surveillance often happens
on an individual basis
It also has a societal cost.
I think a lot of people really understand that.
It's probably because I also live in Germany now for the last two years
but I feel that German society in particular is extremely aware
of these abuses in the modern world
and they have a historical context that allows them to talk about it
with the rest of the world, where the rest of the world doesn't downplay it.
So this is how other people relate to Germany
not just about Germans relate to each other.
And that has also been really good for just meeting regular people
who really care about it,
and who really want to do things.
So people's parents email me, and are like
"I want to protect my children,
what's the best way to use crypto with them"
You know, things like that.
And I didn't every receive emails like that in the past
and that's to me is uplifting and very positive.