Citizenfour QA Session

... 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 really 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 would classify as
non-technical people,

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
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.

[question]: A quick organisational question.

Right now we're live-streaming the Q&A.
Are you comfortable with that?

[Jacob]: I don't think in the last three
years I've ever had a moment

that wasn't being recorded.

[laughter, applause]

[question]: If you're fine with it, moving on...

[Jacob]: That's fine, just don't do it
when I'm trying to sleep.

[question]: I was wondering why Laura
and you ended up in Germany

because what you said about people in
Germany might be true

but I'm really ashamed about my Government
and how they dealt with ????

and they are doing nothing for this.

[Jacob]: The reason that we ended up in
Germany

is that I'd been attending
Chaos Computer Club events

for many years

and there are bunch of people that are
part of the Chaos Computer Club

who are really supportive,
and good people,

who have a stable base,
and an infrastructure.

The German hacker scene has this
phenomenon which is that

it's a part of society.

So there are people in the CCC who will
talk with the constitutional court

for example,

and that creates a much more stable
society

and those people were willing to help us.

They were willing to hold footage,
to hold encrypted data.

They were willing to help modify hardware.

There was a huge base of support where
people, even if they had fear,

they did stuff anyway.

And that support went back a long time.

And so we knew that it would be safe
to store footage for the film here.

In Berlin, not in Heidelberg, but here
in Germany.

And we knew that, of course,
there were people that would be helpful.

In the US there's a much bigger culture
of fear.

People are afraid of having their houses
raided by the police,

where there's lots of detainments at the
borders,

where there's lots of speculative arrests,

journalists that are jailed,

so the situation was not to say that
Germany was perfect.

I revealed in Der Speigel with three other
journalists that Merkel was spied on

by the NSA.

And it's clear that the Germany government
was complicit

with some of this surveillance.

But in a sort of pyramid of surveillance
there's a sort of colonialism

that takes place.

And that the NSA and GCHQ are at the top.

And the Germans are little bit below that.

The thing is that there's not a lot you
do about that.

And so even though we revealed this
about Merkel,

it's not clear what she should do.

It's not clear what anyone should do.

But one thing that was clear was that
if they wanted to break into our houses

they would do it in a way that would
cost them a lot politically.

It would be very public.

The last time someone raided someone
working with Der Speigel

was in 1962 during the Speigel affair,

and some ministers were kicked out.

You may have seen recently the
Landersverrat thing

with Netzpolitik.

The charges against them now
have been dropped.

That would never happen in the
United States.

We would not be safe.

And I still, for my investigative
journalism,

and my work with Wikileaks,

and my work with the Tor project,

I wouldn't even go back to the US,

because there's no chance that if they
wanted to do something to me

that I would have any constitutional
liberties, I think,

and the same is true of Snowden.

You just won't get that fair trial.

And we thought at least here we would
have ground to stand and fight on.

And it's exactly what happened,
and we won.

[question]: This is also about the fear
stuff that you talk about

which is in the very old days we used to
put red words in the end of every message

to make sure that it would be hard to find
the actual subversive message

among all the noise.

And you can think about the same thing
here.

Should we build our systems so that
everything gets encrypted all the time?

[Jacob]: So I have a lot of radical
suggestions for what to do,

but I'm going to talk about them tomorrow
in the keynote mostly.

But to give you an example,
if you install Debian,

you can give someone the ability to log
into the machine

over a Tor hidden service for free.

You get a free .onion when you add two
lines to a Tor configuration file.

We should make encryption not only easy
to use but out of the box

we should have it possible to have
end-to-end reachability and connectivity,

and we should reduce the total amount
of metadata, to make it harder for people

who want to break the law, that want to
break into computers.

We should solve the problem of adversarial
versus non-adversarial forensics

so we can verify our systems with open
hardware and Free software together.

And there's a lot to be done,
but the main thing to do is to recognise

that if you have the ability to upload
to Debian,

there are literally intelligence agencies
that would like those keys.

And we have a great responsiblity to
humanity as Debian developers

to do the right thing: to build open
systems,

to build them in a way where users don't
need to understand this stuff.

There are a lot of people in the world
that will never see this film.

And we can solve the problems that this
film describes largely with Free software.

And we can do that without them knowing,

and they will be safe for us having
done that.

And if we can do that, the world will be
a better place, I think.

And I think the world is a better place
because of the efforts that were

already done in that area, that made this
possible.

The Tails project made it so that a bunch
of people

who were good at investigative journalism,

but absolutely terrible with computers,
were able to pull this off.

And that is entirely the product, in my
opinion, of Free software.

And a little bit of Laura and Glen, but
I'd say a lot of Free software.

[question]: How many people do you think
NSA has

working within the Debian community?

[laughter, applause]

[Jacob]: Well, I looked in the Snowden
archive about that actually.

[laughter, applause]

Yeah. And as far as I can Debian is not a
high priority target for them.

I mean they write exploits for all sort
of stuff

but I never found any systematic attempt
to compromise or harm the Debian project.

But obviously there are people who are
paid by the NSA to infiltrate communities,

and that's why we have to open transparent
processes

so that if those people behave badly,
we have an audit trail.

We won't ever stop that kind of stuff,

but what matters
is that people do good things.

It doesn't matter who they do bad things
for as long as we can correct those things

and/or catch them and stop them before
it happens.

But as far as I know there are only a
couple of people that have ever

been associated with the NSA in the
Debian community.

But I think we shouldn't get paranoid
about it,

but we should just be prudent about our
processes,

because there are lots of intelligence
services around the world

that do not like the values of a
universal operating system,

so I don't think it's super-important to
look, but I did actually look,

very specifically for a whole bunch of
people in the Debian community

to see if any of them also were being
paid by the NSA

and I didn't find any serious thing that
raised concern,

and if I did, I would have...

I mean, there were lots of things I found
in the archive that I immediately

notified security teams about.

Where I worked along with many other
people to actually fix those things.

And one of those things, if we had found
them, like infiltrators in Debian,

I absolutely would have just told people
about.

The problem is that a lot of the
journalists don't want to do that

because there's a ten year felony
where you go to prison -

a federal American prison -

if you reveal the name of an agent.

So there's a tension there,

but I think that there's something
to be said,

if they're actually actively harming the
community

and they're committing a crime,

I think there's something to be said
about that.

So if I found that I think it would be
worthwhile,

but just so you know, there's this
high cost.

So if there were people in the agency
now,

because they say that we used Tails, and
Debian, and they wanted to subvert it,

there's a really really high bar for
punishment.

Which suggests that maybe people
won't tell you.

So we need to sort of bank on the fact
that we'll never know,

but we don't need to know, as long as we
have good processes

that would catch bad behaviour.

And that's one of the strengths of Debian.

There are very few operating systems,
I think,

and just in general Free software
communities,

that are as diverse, and committed to the
openness and the Free software nature

of this kind of a project,

and so it's very important to state that.

But I do think one of the things that will
happen in the future at some point

is that you'll start to find people in the
Debian community that are pressured

by other people to do bad things

so we need to set up processes that will
stop that,

to create an incentive for that
not happening.

But it's really tough,

so I think that openness, transparency
and accountability are the ways that

we can combat that, because otherwise
we won't really be able to solve it.

But don't be paranoid, is the other thing.

They really are out to get you,
so be prepared.

[laughter, applause]

[question]: I'm just wondering how trust
was established

because I'm just realizing that
this community,

for you to verify your public key and even
fingerprint is like,

you have you produce your passport,

so I'm wondering how Laura managed to
exchange her keys with Snowden

and make sure that they were really
talking to the right person.

[Julian]: Well, they had a whole sort of
dance for doing key exchange.

I think it was a little bit luck, and a
little bit transitive trust,

there's a little bit of the web of trust,

and it worked pretty well.

I mean, I don't think that the key-signing
stuff that Debian does is anything close

to what they were doing.

They just wanted to make sure that the
keys they had were the right keys,

and that they weren't compromised,

and that then they would change things.

There was a point in the movie where they
said:

"let's disassociate our meta-data
one more time"

And what that means is they changed all
of the identifiers that are visible

to the network, new keys, new email
addresses, new Tor circuit, etc

and this is like a key consistency thing,

where they had the right key to begin with
and the continued to rotate over new keys.

This is also sometimes called TOFU.

This is, I think, weaker than the
web of trust,

but a lot easier for people to do, and
very easy to explain,

and it worked out pretty well.

It doesn't scale really well, but it has a
separate good side

which is the web of trust explicitly names
a web of co-conspirators.

And so you don't want that feature.

It's useful for something like Debian;

it's not useful for clandestine
conspiracies to commit

investigative journalism.

[laughter]

Lots of questions, this is great.

[question]: Somebody working on Tail told
me that the NSA has a file on every DD.

Is that true, do you know?

[Julian]: Okay, so when you balance your
check-book,

just to answer your question in a really
strange way,

when you balance your check-book,
or you balance your bank account,

and you think this is how much my rent is,
this is how much food is,

this is how much I have to spend on some
new hardware,

you think about money in an
individual way.

But if you think about is as a state, the
way a state thinks about money.

They don't balance budgets the same
way that you do.

They think about long-term investments
very differently.

They have other people's money.

It's a whole different way of managing it.

And the NSA is not the Stasi. So it's not
that you have to worry about whether

they have a file on you, or every Debian
developer,

but rather there exist some laws in the
United States that say

for cyber-security purposes, you don't
have constitutional rights

and based on your accent, you weren't
an American anyway,

and you aren't in America,

so you don't have any rights at all,
anyway, according to them.

They're just allowed to do whatever they
want to you,

up to and including murdering you, with
the CIA.

That's what they do with drones; that was
at the very end of the movie.

So it's not that they have a file on you.

It's that they have giant databases full
of information on all of us,

and then when they're interested in you,
pull up all your data,

and associative data,

and then they use that, and sometimes
they use it to target you,

to break into your machines,
or to find people to exert pressure on,

or to do psychological manipulation on.

All that stuff, they do all of those
things.

And so it's not that they have one file
on you.

Though maybe, it depends, if you work on
a critical package like the Linux kernel

they might be more interested in you
than if you work on something else.

I don't want to denigrate anyone's work,
but they have very specific focuses,

and so they definitely are interested in
being able to compromise systems, right?

And so you may also have file, but it's
really the meta list that's the new way

of thinking about it.

And in some senses I think that's actually
scarier, because they just hoover up

everything, all across the whole Internet,

and things that are interesting, then
they have them.

And depending on what interesting
things are there, they maybe

put those in a database that lasts
for ever,

or maybe it's just around for 30 days,

or maybe its full content for 9 days,
or something like that.

And then of course if you are a person of
interest

they do do the same stuff that the Stasi
does,

they do that Zersetzung stuff, if you're
familiar with this German term,

disintegration, they do that kind of
stuff, along with JTRIG, from GHCQ,

so they harass people, blackmail them,
do all sorts of really nasty stuff.

And they do that also, so both of those
things.

So again, I don't think you should be
paranoid, you should encrypt your stuff,

and help people do the same,

and know that in a democratic society with
a secret political police,

the right place to be is in their
database, right?

You should be proud of being surveilled
by them,

it means you're doing the right thing.

[laughter, applause]

Nonetheless, we should stop them.

[question]: I'm curious about your views
about Snowden actually coming out

and saying he was the whistleblower,

because I know, when he came out,
I had some fierce discussion

with friends about it, so I wanted to know
what you thought about it.

[Jacob]: What do you mean came out?

[question]: He said I'm Edward Snowden,
I'm the whistle-blower, here I am,

instead of just being anonymous the
whole way, just sending files to people.

[Jacob]: Well, I think the main thing is
that it's about control of

your own narrative, right?

I mean if we could have done everything
here anonymous, and gotten away with it,

would that have made the same impact

in getting other people to come forward
even if they maintain their anonymity?

So I think that what Snowden did, what'
beautiful about it,

is that he basically did enough,

where he could then survive.

Our job now for the most part, a very
good friend told me,

he's a little bit of a fatalist, he said:

your job, Laura's job, Glen's job,
Snowden's job, your job now is

just to survive.

That's all that you need to do now.
You don't need to do anything else.

You should go do other things, like
drink a glass of wine, relax, be happy,

have a nice life, but just survive,

so other people can see that you do the
right thing, you couldn't have done more,

you did enough, and you lived through it.

And so Snowden coming out and telling us
all of these things, I mean,

there are really powerful people saying
he should be assassinated, right,

hung by the neck until dead, was what one
of the CIA people said.

So he probably could have continued to be
anonymous for a while,

but imagine if the NSA had got to reveal
his identity.

How would that have been framed, what
would the first impression have been?

I think they called him a narcissist, and
they called him all these terrible names.

And it didn't really stick, because he
basically said "come at me bro',

I'm ready, and you can do your worst,
but you can't get rid of the facts,

so let's talk about the facts."

And I think the timing of how he did that
is good, because he really cared

about the issues, but he also recognized
that it was a matter of time,

the NSA police went to his house, they
really bothered his family,

they've done that with my family as well,
other people's families have had trouble.

So I think think it's tough, because I
think he probably would have liked to have

been able to not have that happen, but
there comes a point at which

you're the person who has access to all
that information

and they're going to figure it out.

No amount of anonymity, I think, will
last forever, but it can buy you time.

He got exactly the amount of time
he needed.

The really sad part about him coming out
in public when he did, though, was that

he got stuck in Russia, because my
government cancelled his passport.

I think mostly for propaganda reasons.

Because in the United States, we denigrate
all things relating to Russia.

And there are lots of problems with
Russia,

and especially with Vladimir Putin,

but at the same time that seems to be the
only country that was willing to uphold

his fundamental liberties.

I went to the Council of Europe, and to
the European Parliament,

to the German Parliament, to the French,
sort of to the French Parliament,

they didn't really want to meet with me,
but also to the Austrian Parliament,

and to a number of other places,

and everyone said, oh, we would really
live to help anybody who needs help,

oh it's Edward Snowden, never mind.

[laughter]

And so though I have a lot of critiques
on Russia, the propaganda aspect of it

was very damaging for him to be stuck
in Russia,

but on the other hand, he's still alive,
and he's still mostly free.

And they recognized his right to
receive asylum.

So there's a lot of trade-offs to think
identifying one's self,

and if you were thinking about being
the next Snowden,

or helping the next Snowden, or helping
Snowden, or something like that,

you really have to think that, you really
have to think this out many steps ahead,

and it's easy to stay, oh he should have
just stayed anonymous and

nobody would have figured it out,

but that's very clearly not planning the
case that they do figure it out,

and then they're going to be in control
of the narrative,

and in that case, I think you are better
off to do what he did,

and he did so quite reluctantly.

He's not an egoist, or an narcissist,
he's actually a really shy guy

from what I can tell.

I don't know exactly what conversation
you and your friend had,

but I would suspect that the notion is
that people are more powerful

when anonymous.

And that is true sometimes,
but not always,

and it's important to remember that
the anonymity technology is there

so you have a choice, not a requirement.

And that choice is sometimes
counter-intuitive,

but I think he did the right thing in
this way, and I wish that my government

had done the right thing by him as well,
but they did not.

[question]: So there are lot of questions,
do you want to keep going on,

shall we get in a little Mate?

[Jacob]: I would love some of that rum.

I think I have to GRsec, right?
GRsec kernel.

And then rum appears. Rum as a service.

[applause]

I'm really happy to keep taking questions,
because to me, what I want is

for every person in this room to feel
a part of this, because you really are.

A lot of the people I've met in this
community really inspire me to action,

and it's important to understand that
really, it would not have been possible

without Debian.

For example debootstrap - really important
tool, right?

With weasel's packaging of Tor, it allowed
us to have bootstraps of things,

it allowed us to build things,

and using Free software really was
helpful,

so if you guys have any questions at all,

really each and every person that helps
with Debian should just know

that you are a part of that,

and I'm just happy to talk for as long as
you want, basically,

to answer all of your questions,

except the ones that put me in prison.
Thanks.

[laughter]

[question]: I just wanted to make a quick
note about the question

"do they have a file on me?"

From all I've read so far, it's just that
they're doing the thing

that is in the commercial world called
"big data".

[Jacob]: Yep. Absolutely.

Oh boy. GRsec again?

[orga]: it's not rum, but it's Bavarian
whisky.

[Jacob]: Oh boy. It's going to be a
heavy morning tomorrow.

I saw another couple of hands.

[question]: I was just wondering if
that you noticed throughout this

that you think we could improve in Debian
to make the next people's lives easier.

[Jacob]: Oh my god, I'm so glad you asked
that question, that's so fantastic.

I'm going to talk about that tomorrow
in my keynote,

but let me tell you about one that I have.

I revealed a specific document about a
wifi injection attack system.

It's a classified document, it's a
top secret document,

for a thing called nightstand, and what
nightstand is,

it's basically like car metasploit,
it's a wifi injector...

cheers!

Danke schön.

It's a wifi injector device...

Whew, jesus!

[laughter, applause]

[orga]: Tonight's whisky sponsored by
drunc-tank dot org.

[Jacob]: So this wifi injector device,
what it does is it basically is able to

exploit the kernel of a device by sending
malformed data over wifi.

Now I have a series of photographs, so
all of us.. not all of us, but most of us

used these speciallly modified X60s where
we removed the microphones, soldered??

down things on the PCI bus,

we removed, like, firewire, really
modified it, flashed coreboot onto it,

flipped the read pin so it was only
read-only,

so you couldn't easily make a BIOS
root kit and make it persistent,

we booted TAILS, did all this stuff,

often we could boot to RAM so that
once the machine was powered off

basically it would be done, so if someone
kicks down your door,

you just pull the power out,

and you don't have a battery, and
when the power fails you have an

instant kill switch.

So things that are in TAILS that are
really useful include this

wiping the kernel memory package
which I hear is being packaged for Debian

soon, which is very exciting.

Because everyone should have access
to that so we can tie it into something

like GNU panicd or these other things.

But one thing I kept having problems with
is this wifi injection device,

I'm pretty sure, was very close to my
house.

There was a white van outside, it was
vibrating a bit like there was a guy

walking around in it,

and then all of sudden, an X60 here,
an X60 here, and an X60 here,

just booted into TAILS, not doing
anything at all, but on the wifi network,

kernel panic, kernel panic, kernel panic.

All the same kernel panic, all the
same memory offsets,

in the Appletalk driver of the stock
kernel for TAILS.

I think I filed a bug upstream with TAILS
at the time,

but this is just incredible because
it's clear that all the crap

in the default Debian kernel that you
really want for your 1992 Apple network

makes operational security really hard,

and one thing that would be really great
would be a GRsec enabled kernel...

[applause]

Yes, have to drink.

But as an example, we built different
custom machines, and one of the things

that we did for some people and in some
circumstances was

to build GRsec enabled kernels.

And I'm not going to drink again.

So we built those kernels

[audience]: Which ones?

[Jacbob]: Yes, exactly, those ones.

And that was work which creates a problem
for a bunch of reasons.

When you build custom kernels, and
you only have a few people

that can build those kernels,

you actually build a chain of evidence of
who helped who.

And if that was stable, normal package,

that people could install in a Debian
pure blend,

then it would have been easier to do that.

We built a lot more sandbox profiles for
various different things,

we built some transparent TOR-ification
stuff,

and that required a lot of bespoke
knowledge,

and it required a lot of effort that a lot
of people did not have,

because they had a different set of
skills,

and it's good to have a division of
labour,

but having that kind of stuff built into
Debian by default, making a

Debian installer that could do that,

and also verification, would be great,
right?

So I wrote some custom scripts
where I could look at a TAILS disk,

or a Debian install,

and know if it had been tampered with.

And it would be nice if there was just
a disk you could boot that did

verification of an installed system

very very easily, so easily that
Glen Greenwald could use it.

I love Glen, I saw that very politely,

but what I means is it needs to be
easier than that,

because Glen at least knows that he
he a reason to need it.

And so that was something that we really
needed help with.

And we spent a lot of time on that.

And there are lots of other little things
like that,

and I'll talk about some of those things
tomorrow,

but one of the really big problems is
hardware,

which is that you cannot buy a modern
Intel CPU which doesn't come

with a backdoor any more.

And that is a huge problem, and I'm not
sure that the answer is to use ARM.

It seems like the answer is to use ARM.

But that's only if assume that ARM didn't
just add a backdoor that's obvious.

So we really need to think about how to,
in moving forward,

how to have easy to use, easy to buy
on the shelf, Debian hardware,

available everywhere, all the time,

so you can just go and buy this thing and
verify it in some way

with some other machine,

to know that you would have the right
thing.

And to that extent we didn't have X-rays
for a lot of the circuit boards,

so that made it very difficult to know
if when you buy something,

it's been tampered with.

I'll talk about some of that stuff
tomorrow,

but basically, Debian does a lot of stuff
right,

and that is also worth mentioning.

There's so many things that just work
out of the box, that just work perfectly.

So the main thing is to keep the
quality assurance at the level,

or to exceed where it is right now.

Because it actually works super super
well.

The exception being for very specific
targetted attacks,

the kernel attack surface is pretty big,
and pretty bad, I think.

And also, we rebuilt some binaries in
order to..

sorry, I'll get to you in a second.

We rebuilt some binaries to make sure
that we had address space randomisation

and linker hardening, and stack
canary stuff,

and for some stuff lately we've been using
address space sanitizer,

so it would be really great if all the
hardening stuff was turned in,

if there was PAX plus GRsec as a kernel.

[audience]: so the specific problem with
GR security is that they don't really

want to work with distros.

So we could have a Linux kernel package
with GR security applied,

but it wouldn't have any of the other
Debian patches.

[Jacob]: So I talked with Brad Spender
about this,

and I'm so glad that you said that,

because what he said was that, as far
as I can tell, he's totally interested in

helping Debian with this but thinks that
Debian is not interested.

He actually runs a kernel building
service where they actually do

individual kernel builds, and I think
you'd be interested,

and when I told him we'd love to have
this in TAILS, he said

what patches do I need to include in GRsec
to make sure that it'll work?

And he offered to do the integration
into the GRsec patch if there are not

too many things.

So I think what we should try and do
is build a line of communication,

and if it costs money we should find a way
to raise that money,

I'll put in some of my own personal money
for this,

and I know other people would too.

[distant audience]: I will.

[Jacob]: Great.

So securedrop, for example, part of what
they do for their leaking platform,

if you go to the intercepts website,
you wan to leak them a document,

they actually use free software
everywhere, but there are a few things

they build specially, and one of those
things is a GRsec kernel.

So the people at first look, that helped
make this movie,

and that work on securedrop,

they would probably also,

I'm not committing them, I don't
know that they would actually do this,

but I think they would really like it if
that was in there,

and I think it we could find the community
will to do that,

I know I would volunteer and other people
would,

I know that dkg in the back would love to
help with this, I would that ???

who is just totally behind funding this
work, right?

I thought that you were there to protect
my civil liberties, buddy.

But I really think that it's possible
that we could do this,

and I definitely think Brad, the author of
GRsec,

I think he would really love it if Debian
shipped GRsec.

And it doesn't need to come by default,

but if it was possible to just have
it all, that would be great.

Maybe we could have an affinity group
where everyone who is interested can

meet sometime tomorrow and we could
talk about doing this.

I would love to have that conversation.

Who are you?

[audience]: Ben Hutchings.

[Jacob]: Oh, nice to meet you!

[laughter, applause]

That's awkward.

[question]: Hi. Sorry to interrupt the
awkwardness,

and replace it with more awkwardness.

Nice to see you, Jake.

So, I remember reading the documents
in 2013

and seeing the NSA's internal training
guide for how to query their

Hadoop data store, aka xkeyscore,

and so I thought I would just ask you
if you think Free software net helps us

or helps them.

[Jacob]: I'm really glad you asked that
question.

I think that Free software helps everyone
on the planet, and I think that

purpose-based limitations.. I understand
why people want them.

I think we should try to build a world
where we are free,

and so putting in purpose-based
limitations is really problematic,

and I think what we should do is try to
mitigate the harm that they can do

with those systems,

as opposed to pretending that they care
about Free software licensing.

These guys kill people with flying robots,

it's illegal to murder people, and they
do it.

Limiting their use with licenses, first
of all, that just means they'll spend

your tax money to rewrite it if they care
about the license,

and you won't get their bug-fixes or their
improvements,

and then additionally they're still not
going to obey your license anyway,

because literally some of these people
work on assassinating people.

So it is better that we keep our integrity
and take the high road,

and write Free software, and we give it to
every single person on the planet

without exception,

It's just better. It's better for all of
us, right?

So the fact that they have Hadoop, the
fact that they, for example, use OpenSSL,

or maybe they use Tor, or whatever, right?

Or they use gdb to debug their exploits.

I kind of wish that on them.

[laughter, applause]

I think it's great, right?

So one of the things Che Guevara said
in his manual about guerilla warfare,

in chapter two, is that (oh, it was
chapter three)

He talks about when you have to arm
a guerrilla army,

this is not exactly related, but it's an
analog.

He says that the most important thing
is for the guerrilla army to

use the weapons of the people that
they're fighting - the oppressor.

And the reason is that it allows you to
resupply, essentially.

When you win a battle, you resupply.

When we all use the same Free software,
and we're working on these things,

the fact that they have to contribute
to the same projects and they often do

means there's a net win for us.

They do have some private things that they
don't share, obviously,

with the exception of nice people like
Edward Snowden,

and I think that it is a net positive
thing,

and if we think of it as a struggle,

we are better off to take the high road,

and so I really think we should not
pretend that we can stop them,

and instead we should work together
to build solutions.

And I think that Debian is doing that,
right?

I think Debian is much harder to
compromise than

a lot of other operating systems,

and it's much much harder to coerce
people,

and there's a strong ethos that comes
with it that it's not just the technical

project, there's a social aspect to it.

I think I was in the New Maintainer
queue for 11 years,

maybe that's a little too long,

but there's a huge hazing process,

so anyone who wants to help, really really
wants to help,

and if they want to do something wrong
there are processes to catch

people doing things wrong.

So we should really stay true to the
Free software ethos,

and it really is a net benefit.

[question]: Hi Jake. Thanks a lot for
saying so much "GRsec".

Just wanted to give a shout out.

You mentioned possible backdoors in
CPUs and so on,

that ARM might not be the next best thing
because it's not so open either.

You might want to have a look at Power 8.

It's basically PowerPC 64, so Debian has
support for it as far as I know,

and most of the stuff is actually open.

Not that actually designs that IBM is
using,

but you can have, actually, an FPGA
implementation of it,

and if you have the money make your own
ASICs for it, without even knowing

how to do it, which is pretty good,
I think.

[Jacob]: I think there are lots of things
we can hack right?

I mean I had one of those weird RMS
laptops, the Limote,

or whatever it's called, for a while.

And I was definitely able to get some
Free software running on it,

in theory it was a Free software laptop.

But getting other people to use this is
the problem,

you need to get everybody to use it,
right?

There's a sort of old anarchist cliché,

"None of us are free until all of us are
free"

And that really applies here.

We really need to have Free software
that's usable by everyone,

otherwise we're sort of bound by the
lowest common denominator

of Free, or proprietary tools, depending
on what people have to use.

So it'll be great when we have that,

and there's a thing called the Nokimist???

which is a video mixing board that has an
FPGA implementing a Free software CPU

that you can boot Debian on, or OpenWRT,

and it does work, and I have used it,

and in fact I used to use it as a shell,

and for a long time I used a Debian
trick,

actually I've never talked about that in
public,

let me think about that for a second.

So I used to use an IRC client that was
really buggy,

and I couldn't figure out where all the
bugs were,

but I knew that if I hung out in certain
networks that someone else

would help me find those bugs by trying
to exploit my client.

And I wanted to make it as hard as
possible.

So I ran my IRC client inside of a Debian
machine that was running an S390 emulator.

Who here uses Hercules? Thank you to
whoever packaged it.

And so I would use Hercules, it was a
very long install process.

Very slow.

And I would do this, and what I'd always
dreamed of doing at some point

was using the Nokimist??? and the
Hercules together

for maximum ridiculously difficult
to exploit,

plus GRsec kernel.

But that's not a usable thing.

So what we need to do is take these kinds
of prototypes

which actually do represent many steps
forward,

and we need to make sure that they're
produced on a scale where

you can go into a store and puchase them
anonymously, with cash,

in a way that you can then verify.

And we're actually really close to that
with software defined radios

and open hardware,

but we're not quite there yet.

[question]: What I meant is that Power 8
is basically getting big, currently,

on the server market,

and it might get big for other stuff also.

[Jacob]: Hopefully.

[question]: I want to come back to the
story about the panic

in the Appletalk driver.

The common approach against this is
to compile your own kernel with

all this stuff not compiled in,

but on two of my systems I have a
modprobe wrapper which has

a whitelist of module which may be
loaded,

and I install that wrapper as the thing
that the kernel uses for loading modules.

Do you know if such a thing exists
elsewhere, or if not,

I would be interested in developing it
into something which is actually useable

for people.

[Jacob]: That would be great.

In this case we were using Tails.

And so, Tails is very finicky about what
it will accept,

and so having that in Debian will make it
a lot easier to get it into something

like Tails, I think.

But the main thing is really that we have
to think about the attack surface

of the kernel very differently.

The problem is not Appletalk; the problem
is the Linux kernel is filled with

a lot of code,

and you can autoload, in certain cases,
certain things come in,

and certain things get autoloaded,

and I know Bdale loves his
ham radio stuff,

but I never use ham radio on my machine

I used for clandestine conspiracies,
you know?

That's a separate machine.

It's over here.

So we just need to find a way to think
about that.

And part of that could be kernel stuff,
but also part of it could be thinking

about solutions like that, where we
don't need to change the kernel.

So if you could package that and develop
that, it would be really fantastic.

[Ben]: Actually, some time ago, after
I think it was the econet exploits,

no-one uses econet, it was broken anyway,
but you could exploit it,

because it was autoloaded.

So I actually went through and turned off
autoloading on a few of the more obscure

network protocols.

We could probably go further with that,
even in the defaults.

[Jacob]: I think it would be great to
change some of the kernel stuff so that

at least, I mean, Tails is a special use
case, where, I think, it's very important,

and it doesn't work for everyone,

but we should just consider that there are
certainly things which are really great,

and I want to use Debian for it, because
Debian is a universal operating system.

But for a modern desktop system where
you're using GNOME,

and you haven't set anything up,
Appletalk for example,

maybe we would ask those people
to load that module themselves.

[Ben]: Yeah, for example you could
have, a lot of those things are going to

have supporting utilities,

so you could put something in the
supporting utilities that loads it

at boot time.

And if you don't have those installed,
you don't need it.

[Jacob]: Yep, totally. And I think there's
lots of ways to do it where

the network can't trigger it,
and that's important.

[Ben]: Yeah, that puzzled me,
I can't understand,

the protocol module when
userland tries to open a socket

of that type,

it shouldn't happen in response to
network traffic.

There are things like, I think if you
run ifconfig that can autoload

a bunch of things, for example.

[Jacob]: Yeah, I think on either side
it should be more explicit,

and in this case with Tails,

there was a time when you looked at
the kernel module list

and it was pretty amazing,

like I think there was an X25 thing,
an Appletalk, thing,

wait, this is all about going over Tor,
we don't support any of these

things at all.

So it's just the way that things are
interdependent, right?

It's not a dig at the kernel itself.

I think the Linux kernel as it works
in Debian today works really well

for a lot of people,

but there is definitely a high security
use case,

and I, for example, if I were a Debian
developer, and I had a development

machine where I didn't run a web
browser,

and I took a lot of effort.

It would be really nice if there were
a kernel that put in the same

threshold of security.

And I think that the GRsec kernel with
some stuff changed about it,

like getting rid of Appletalk and a few
other things,

would be closer to that,

and combined with that guy's tool that
he's talking about,

you could make autoloadable module,
that at least even if the system was

going to autoload it, you could stop it,
in a failing closed sort of way.

And I think there's a lot of stuff,
practically, to do on that front,

and there's another project called
Subgraph OS,

which is basically working on becoming
in some ways a Debian derivative,

and they're going to do stuff like GRsec
kernel,

and they have a whole sandboxing framework
which uses apparmor, seccomp

and xpra, and a few other things,

and I think that they'll make a lot of
interesting security decisions,

which might make sense to adopt in
Debian later.

[Ben]: I think Matthew Garrett has an
interesting criticism about that and

how it wouldn't really work, and Wayland
was a better way to go than xpra.

[Jacob]: Yeah, I've heard those
criticisms,

but Matthew Garrett is wrong.

Not usually, but in this particular case.

For example, the sandboxing stuff,
if you have a GNOME appstore,

essentially, that's for one set of users,
but for a Debian developer

writing your own policies,
it might be useful,

and if you need Wayland, you might
not have a full solution,

we might want to have both for a while.

And think it'd be great.

And the main thing is we just need to
find people who will think about those

issues and try to integrate them,

because most people who write exploits,
or who understand how to do offensive

security stuff, they don't want to help
Free software projects,

they just want to exploit them.

And so some of the Subgraph guys,
what I really like about them

is that they're trying to improve the
Free software products we all use.

Even though they may make different
design decisions,

they're making Free software all the same.

[question]: Maybe also, some other thing
to keep in mind is actually

that there is also a social aspect of this
pressure if NSA wants to put anything

inside Debian.

So if we actually also need to make sure
that if they put pressure on somebody

we have any way to help these people
not land in prison.

So is there also a social aspect of
supporting people which get pressure

from anyone.

[Jacob]: Yep. I mean, if anyone is ever
in that situation one thing I would say

is that it's your right to remain silent,

you have the right to remain silent
I think is the phrase the police would say

but there are definitely communities
of people who will help you.

There's a group called the Courage
foundation, for example,

which was started by Sarah Harrison,

and the job that the Courage foundation
has taken on

is essentially to help people who would be
sources or who are in harm's way like this

and if you found yourself in that kind of
a position there are people

who will try to help you.

I really don't think that is the next step
in this,

I think that could happen.

But I thin it's much more likely someone
is going to write an exploit for Firefox.

That's the way they're going to own
Debian people in the future,

for the most part, that's how they own
us today.

Firefox, number one enemy to security
on your Debian machine, probably.

And that's not a dig at Firefox, it's just
super-complicated software,

and these guys are really good at
writing exploits,

and that's an easy target.

So we, I think, have to do with the social
thing,

but we also should look at some of the
technical problems,

and then when and if people have that,
you can contact me.

I'm super happy to put you in touch with
people who will help.

And obviously, get a lawyer, get several
lawyers if you can.

Contact the EFF, or the ACLU, depending
on where you are.

At least in Germany, and in the United
States, it isn't so bad yet

that they can put that kind of pressure
on you openly,

in a Free software project.

If you write proprietary software you're
in a very different situations,

and there are definitely people who are in
that situation right now,

and I don't envy them. Their position is
actually much harder.

So actually writing Free software already
makes you not at the very beginning

of the target list, I think.