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Greetings Troublemakers... welcome to Trouble.

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My name is not important.

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At 10:30pm on October 29th, 1969,

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Charlie Kline, a student programer at UCLA,

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successfully sent the first digital message

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from one computer terminal to another via the DARPANET,

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a top-secret research project run by the US Department of Defense.

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The transmission of this single word, 'login'

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was a pivotal moment in human history,

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as it represents the official birth of the Internet.

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And it was from here that the first message was sent.

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A revolution began!

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In the nearly fifty years that have followed,

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this invention has thoroughly transformed our world

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and come to dominate virtually all aspects of our lives.

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It has restructured and rejuvenated capitalism,

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by revolutionizing finance and transforming the globe

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into a single interconnected marketplace.

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It has provided new methods of interacting with one another

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and helped shape the ways that we receive and process information.

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And it has provided a place for people to upload terabytes of videos of their cats.

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This is pinky... he's a male. He's available for adoption.

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He's pet of the week.

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The Internet has also become the central pillar of a new form of social control

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based around mass data collection and the construction of algorithms

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aimed at better predicting and manipulating human behavior.

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But while states and digital capitalists have used the Internet

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as a platform for mass surveillance and pacification,

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it has also been a site of subversion

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and created new possibilities for decentralized attacks on the dominant order.

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We've got a problem.

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What?

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Someone synched a RAT to one of my servers.

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A remote access tool – we're being hacked!

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On the front-lines of this war are hackers

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... those who use curiosity, programming skills and problem solving

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to unlock closed systems and bend powerful forces to their will.

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Over the next thirty minutes,

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we'll share the voices of a number of these individuals

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as they share their experiences of defacing web sites,

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leaking emails, developing tools to thwart digital surveillance

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... and making a whole lot of trouble.

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Hacking is one of those terms that I think has become a little bit nebulous.

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I would define it as using technology in a way that wasn't intended,

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by finding bugs and oversights in designs

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to make it produce results that were never supposed to happen.

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Creative subversion of technical systems.

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You take software and you modify it to get another result.

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For example, accessing information on a system that you shouldn't be able to access.

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Or making the system do something that it shouldn't be able to do

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– or that you shouldn't be able to make it do.

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There's a lot of different definitions of hacking, depending on who you ask.

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US criminal law defines computer hacking as unauthorized access

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to obtain information, transmitting destructive code, etc.

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I mean, they've basically expanded the definition

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in their ongoing efforts to criminalize everyday Internet activity.

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If you ask someone like Richard Stallman,

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he'll tell you that it's really just a creative solution to a problem.

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But hackers also do like to break into systems.

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There are all kinds of systems,

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and there's all kinds of access

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... and all kinds of ways to gain access.

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Some hackers choose to fix and protect these systems.

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They work for the government, Microsoft etc.

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They call themselves White Hats.

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They're not even really hackers.

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They're seen in the hacking scene as sellouts.

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They do it for the paycheck... or maybe because of the flag.

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But there are those, of course, who don't don't it for employment.

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They don't do it for a paycheck,

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they do it for the love of solving complex puzzles.

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For the thrill of breaking into whatever artificial borders

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that these people decide to erect.

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Everything that's built can be broken.

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I don't think hacking has changed all that much in the last few years.

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What really has changed is the scope of things that can be affected by hacking.

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Before, in the 90's, most of it was just practical jokes

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because none of it had a lot of impact on real life.

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And in popular culture,

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you start to have hackers appear in movies, in television series,

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where there's this whole figure of these hackers that have these super powers.

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That can invade computer systems in any way, shape or form.

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There's a new virus in the database.

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What's happening?

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It's replicating... eating up memory.... uhh, what do I do?

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Type 'cookie' you idiot!

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Then it gets a lot more popularized.

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Since the dot-com boom at the end of the 90's,

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things now have a huge impact.

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And everything tends to be connected to the Internet,

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or some sort of network.

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As digital information networks have evolved,

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a lot of personal information is being stored.

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Y'know, big data corporations and industries are relying on computers

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... so hackers have access to this kind of information

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that these big companies have as well.

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Hacking can be very simple and very complex.

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But most times hacking is very simple.

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By supplying input in a certain way,

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you're able to make the back-end system believe that what you're supplying

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is actually part of its own code.

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Which, in a lot of cases, can give you full access to that system.

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That's not just limited to computers or telecommunication systems.

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We can really kind of apply this idea to all kinds of technical systems.

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So, for example, something like social engineering

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is a human form of hacking.

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Y'know, you can pretend to be somebody that you're not

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and ask another person questions about themselves

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in order to get them to reveal private information.

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It's possible that there is software

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in theory that doesn't have vulnerabilities.

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But in practice, that's impossible to have.

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If an application or a system performs queries to a database based on your input,

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you could possibly alter your input to be able to then alter the database query,

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and possibly gain access to information that you shouldn't be able to.

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Mostly what an exploit does,

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it's a small tool that you run to get access to a special sector

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of the software you want to get.

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A lot of exploits and vulnerabilities are discussed publicly

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and being used in the wild.

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If you pay attention to lists like Full Disclosure or Security Focus,

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they'll tell you some of the latest tricks that are being used.

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Of course, those are the ones that are already publicly known,

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and that the vendors have already released patches for

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... but a lot of companies don't always patch.

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They're not as on-top of it as they'd like to think that they are.

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For example, the Equifax hacks a couple of weeks ago

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was running outdated versions of Apache software.

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Most people don't really do updates regularly.

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So most people will actually get hacked by something very simple.

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Denial of service attacks

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... basically coming up with ways to create an enormous amount

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of traffic to your server,

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to the point where it can't continue to provide those services.

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There's such a thing as Distributed Denial of Service attacks,

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where that traffic is coming from many places at the same time.

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The most serious techniques are what they call 'undisclosed vulnerabilities',

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what they call a 'zero day.'

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When someone discovers a vulnerability, and instead of reporting it

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– which is the White Hat way –

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they continue using it privately.

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And they don't report it publicly,

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so that way for anyone to really adequately protect themselves against it.

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I think a useful way to think about this is

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that the Internet is a really hostile place.

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It was never designed with privacy or security in mind.

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State actors and corporations control the entire thing.

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And so when you talk about their ability to exploit it

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... I mean, to me, so many of the basic services that we use

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on the Internet are exploitative

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without thinking about a hacker getting into it, or malware or something like that.

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State actors like the US government

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have the ability to observe all Internet traffic in real time,

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collect it and store it,

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and then use it later at their discretion.

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And they work very closely with the digital capitalists

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– facebook, google and all these other entities

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– who are already storing that information anyway.

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The Internet has long been a tool used by social movements

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of various political stripes,

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both as a means of disseminating information

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and a fertile ground for recruitment.

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Back in the 1990's, the anti-globalization movement

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arose alongside the open-media publishing platform, Indymedia,

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which allowed for the virtual coordination of many localized fronts

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in the global fight against neoliberal capitalism.

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I need 50,000 people.

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50,000? You're gonna have to give me some time.

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And drums.

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You want drums? OK, I can do that.

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And what about the Italians?

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The Italians? Man, they're stuck on the border.

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They're gonna be with you tomorrow.

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And the black bloc?

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The black bloc are already there.

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You're gonna see black and red like there ain't no tomorrow, kid.

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You just sit tight.

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These days, social media platforms like facebook

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have given rise to a new form of online activity known as 'clicktivism',

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in which likes, shares and the signing of online petitions

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have become a popular way for liberals and so-called 'progressives'

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to project an image of ostensible participation

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in campaigns centered around a variety of social justice-related issues,

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and often masking their lack of participation in real world struggles.

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Real change requires real action.

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That’s why I always share political articles on facebook, whenever I see them.

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But not everyone has been lulled into this comforting delusion

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of how social change works.

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On both sides of the political spectrum,

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groups and individuals have continued to use the Internet pragmatically,

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both to spread their ideologies and coordinate their IRL activities.

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Anonymous is a decentralized network of hackers and activists

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that exist in places like IRC and Twitter,

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and anyone is free to become Anonymous

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and start their own operations within the network.

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It's kinda similar to the black bloc tactic used as cover and collective identity.

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I'm doing ten years in the fence for computer hacking charges

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related to my involvement in Anonymous.

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I was hacking police departments, military contractors

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... defacing their websites, releasing their emails and databases to the public.

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One of the bigger targets was a company known as Strategic Forecasting

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– Stratfor – which is a private intelligence firm

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made up of mostly former State Department and CIA agents.

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We took down their website.

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We went on donation sprees with all their clients' credit cards,

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and gave their email archives to Wikileaks.

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And Wikileaks pubished them,

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showed that they had been spying on activist groups

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on behalf of corporations like Dow Chemical.

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Groups like Anonymous got really really famous defacing websites.

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Other groups attacked police websites,

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getting all the data they have about current police members.

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There's also groups that were blocking huge institutions,

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like credit card companies or banks.

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If they block their transactions, they lose money.

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So there's a bunch of stuff you can do with hacking.

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Anonymous, they were really famous for

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really getting that kind of popular participation in a hacking movement

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that really didn't mean you had to be an expert to use it.

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You could download a piece of software,

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and you could just run it on your computer

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and you would enter in the target URL

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and you could begin to participate in what was effectively like a virtual sit-in.

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Now as far as Anonymous, or hacktivists in general

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playing a role in revolutionary movements...

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Anonymous was very active during Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.

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In general, an overall revolutionary strategy

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benefits from a diversity of tactics.

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Multiple attacks converging from all angles,

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including street protests, to smashed windows, to hacked websites.

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So Anonymous, y'know, revealing scandalous personal information

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on individuals associated with a company that is the current target of protests

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– timed well, it could be very effective.

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It's a really interesting concept to me.

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And a lot of people who are members of Anonymous

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use tools that I work on every day.

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And I hope they will use them for good.

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I think the unifying idea is just using anonymity to achieve some end.

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And doing it with other people.

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And I think that that speaks to some of their internal contradictions too,

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because they're not unified by a political ideology.

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Members of Anonymous fight with each other about that.

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And I think when you have no political ideology motivating work like that

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– work that has the potential to impact the whole globe, and has before

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- it can be really dangerous.

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We of Anonymous declare total fucking war on antifa,

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and all who support their criminal and violent actions

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towards innocent civilians.

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I've seen Anonymous operations go after people

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in a kind of y'know, right-wing, Pizzagate-type style.

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You know... I mean it originated on 4Chan.

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Historically, the hacker community has been very inclusive.

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When everything started,

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nobody really knew who was on the other side of the line.

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Everyone was just green text on a black background.

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With that said, there is a lot of sexism in tech generally,

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and I'd say that the people who are recruited from places

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like Reddit and 4Chan are like, y'know,

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your typical tech bros.

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Every community on the Internet,

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and every sub-community within those sites,

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whether it's 4Chan or Reddit or whatever,

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has a dog in the fight in gamergate.

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Gamergate and 4Chan, and the origins of the alt-right,

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I think are one of the most obvious confirmations

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of something that many of us who are radicals already knew

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... which is that toxic masculinity, misogyny, whatever you wanna call it,

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is an incredibly dangerous and violent force.

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And it never ends there.

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Beyond the origins in 4Chan,

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I don't really know exactly where a lot of these young men came from.

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I imagine that it's probably not any more interesting

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than they are a result of late-capitalist alienation.

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But I think that they started out with, y'know,

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just like your garden variety misogyny.

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And then actual literal fascists went to their forums

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and whispered fascist poison into the ears of these impressionable men.

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And because they already were prone to violence and bigotry,

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then it was just the natural conclusion.

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Doxxing is the practice of exposing information about your opponent

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that they'd rather have kept secret.

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Typically, doxxing happens from information

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that is already somehow readily available

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... maybe just a little bit hidden.

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If someone is doing their activism under a pseudonym,

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attackers will search for any connection

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to their real physical persona and put that information online.

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And then whoever the target is,

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all the people who wanna go after that target

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will work collectively to terrorize them.

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The result of it can be, y'know, something like

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getting 50 pizzas delivered to your house

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... or it can be a SWAT team showing up in response to a fake bomb threat.

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Protection against this is best done by

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compartmentalization of your online activities.

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So keep your activist activities and your regular activities separate.

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Use different email accounts when you sign up for services.

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Doxxing's also been used by hacker collectives

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to expose lists of police officers, members of fascist organizations...

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A lot of people were doxxed after the Charlottesville rally

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out of just public open-source knowledge,

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and had to back-track on their beliefs

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and actually had to go out in public and offer apologies.

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In June of 2010, a malicious computer worm

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called the Stuxnet virus was first discovered

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by a small Belorussian software company, VBA32.

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It was soon shared with cyber-security experts

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at Kaspersky Labs, in Moscow,

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and Symantec in Silicon Valley,

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who quickly realized that it was unlike any virus ever seen before.

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Far from your run-of-the mill malware,

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Stuxnet was a sophisticated weapon,

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comprised of millions of lines of code

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and believed to have been jointly developed by the cyber-warfare divisions

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of the American and Israeli military.

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Its target was the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, in Iran.

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For Natanz, it was a CIA-led operation.

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So we had to have agency sign-off.

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Someone from the agency stood behind the operator and the analyst

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and gave the order to launch every attack.

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For months, the virus had lain hidden

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within the plant's Programmable Logic Controllers,

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machines that are commonly used to regulate and control

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a wide variety of industrial processes.

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Running commands that were completely untraceable to workers in the plant,

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Stuxnet targeted centrifuges for sabotage,

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causing them to explode, seemingly without cause.

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The virus was only discovered due to an error in an upgrade patch,

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which allowed it to jump out of the secured military facility

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and onto the world wide web

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…. otherwise we would have never even known it existed.

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The Israelis took our code for the delivery system and changed it.

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Then, on their own, without our agreement

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they just fucked up the code.

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Instead of hiding, the code started shutting down computers

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... so naturally people noticed.

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Because they were in a hurry, they opened Pandora's Box.

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They let it out and it spread all over the world.

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The Stuxnet virus set an important historical precedent,

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as it heralded the beginnings of a dangerous new chapter in modern warfare.

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Still in its relative infancy, state-led cyber military campaigns

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are now being conducted under conditions of total secrecy,

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shrouded from public scrutiny, or even knowledge.

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And given the widespread incorporation of digital systems

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into all aspects of industrial civilization,

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from electrical grids to emergency management systems

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and even missile launch sites,

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the potential consequences of these types of attacks

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could lead to truly catastrophic loss of life.

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And while states have been the first to reach this stage

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in the development of offensive cyber warfare,

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corporations and other sub-state actors are already charting their own courses

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in the militarization of digital systems.