-
... 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 some of 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, especially
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
civil 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
can 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,
when 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 tell 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, for
ten years -
-
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 Tails 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
-
them having 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 a 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's
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, and even though you could 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 people 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
seek and 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 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 for
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 say 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 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 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 actual 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 modules 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 very reasonably so,
-
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 should get loaded
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.
-
Any other questions? Wow. Where's the rum?
-
[question]: How do you deliver the
encrypted message without exposing
-
the connection to a third party?
-
[Jacob]: Which encrypted message do you
mean?
-
Do you mean, like jabber?
-
[question]: Email, or jabber, yes.
-
[Jacob]: For the most part we use systems
where Tor hidden services are available
-
to connect to them, so we never even left
the Tor anonymity network,
-
so they're end-to-end encrypted and
anonymized, you connect to a
-
.onion address,
-
and then using crypto on top of that, so
TLS to a Jabber server,
-
and then OTR on top of that,
-
so you have, you could call it a
composition of cryptographic systems,
-
and the core of that is Tor, along with
using throwaway machines,
-
going to locations where you never go
twice,
-
using open wifi plus Tor plus TLS plus
OTR,
-
and for email, Riseup offers Tor hidden
services, which allows you to do the same
-
thing, essentially, and then using PGP as
well.
-
[question]: I mean, how about metadata,
like the delivery address of the target?
-
[Jacob]: In some cases we use a system
called Pond,
-
and Pond is a system that is completely
Tor hidden service based,
-
pond.imperialviolet.org.
-
Adam Langley probably wouldn't want me to
say, but I'll say it anyway,
-
it would be very useful to package this
for Debian,
-
because it's a system where once you do
key exchange with someone,
-
you have an end-to-end encrypted messaging
system that's like email,
-
you can send files that are encrypted,
you can send messages that are encrypted,
-
It's delay based. You don't have
usernames,
-
you just have a public key,
and then you have group signatures,
-
so that people can send things to your
mailbox by proving they are a member
-
of the group but not which member of
the group they are.
-
And there's a lot of stuff like that.
-
So we use Jabber, we use email, and we use
Pond.
-
And those three systems together also
allowed us to build a clandestine
-
sneakernet.
-
So we have the ability to carry USB disks,
-
and a few of us carried them inside of
our bodies,
-
and if you've never had that experience,
lucky you.
-
You want to make sure you use post-quantum
computer crypto for that, by the way.
-
It's more comfortable.
-
[orga]: Shall we relieve this man from his
duties?
-
[Jacob]: Any more questions?
-
[orga]: One more question.
-
[question]: Okay, so when the Snowden
leaks were first published it created
-
a lot of awareness, and people were
talking about it,
-
and there was a huge media echo,
-
Now if some documents leaked, people
are saying yeah, all this surveillance,
-
and we aren't dead yet, and we can still
live our lives.
-
They basically care less. They still care
a bit, but they care much less than
-
when the first documents were published,
-
so how can we maintain awareness for
this issue in the world population,
-
in your opinion?
-
[Jacob]: There's a really scary thing
that's happening right now.
-
There was this idea in the 90s, we had
the crypto wars.
-
Did any of you remember this idea of the
crypto wars?
-
Okay, a few of you do, maybe not all of
you do.
-
But we had the so-called crypto wars in
the 90s, I encourage you to look this up
-
on DuckDuckGo, or whatever your
favourite search engine is.
-
In theory we're in the second crypto
wars now.
-
In reality what happened is the first
crypto wars never ended.
-
We didn't actually win, like we thought
we did.
-
But there are a bunch of things that are
taking place.
-
For example, making a stand against
backdoors.
-
Using end-to-end encrypted
communications.
-
Actually pushing for that, being quite
open about actually hosting
-
those kinds of services, and doing it
from a principled perspective,
-
from a legal perspective.
-
I think you will find that the tension
will continue to rise for a while,
-
and I think that it will continue to be
a conversation about public debate,
-
and an important aspect of this is that
now regular journalists that don't
-
understand technology at least understand
the importance of these things.
-
And if they don't do that, they at least
perceive that they will be considered
-
unprofessional if they don't care, and
think about those things,
-
or they'll be somehow negligent.
-
And I think that will keep some of the
discussion going,
-
and it will allow us to build some
breathing room,
-
and that breathing room will actually
allow us to build some alternatives.
-
But there are some downsides, right?
-
Some of the things that take place when
you reveal security service spying
-
is that it tends to get normalized, to a
degree.
-
But then in some cases it does get pushed
back.
-
In the 70s in the United States, it became
illegal to do assassinations, for example.
-
Because what the CIA were doing was so
atrocious that eventually there was
-
political pushback.
-
It turns out it only lasted 30 years, and
then they started doing it again.
-
But there's a saying in my country which
is that effectively the price of liberty
-
is eternal vigilance.
-
And that's what we are engaged in now.
-
And the liberty starts with software
liberty, I think,
-
in the case of communications on networks.
-
And so we have to have Free software,
and it has to be responsibly encoding
-
packets and data,
-
and if we think about it in this sense
we'll find a lot of pressure,
-
and we'll have a lot of discussions
about it,
-
and you'll start to see it be a part of
policy debates,
-
like one of the presidential candidates
in the United States
-
just came out against encryption.
-
I hope that sinks his presidential
campaign.
-
I mean it's weird to be against
encryption.
-
It's like I'm against prime numbers.
-
No modular arithmetic.
-
[laughter, applause]
-
I just want to say it's important to
understand, you are right,
-
people will be normalized about it,
-
but each and every one of us that
understands these issues
-
can actually keep it alive.
-
And the way we do that is when we
communicate with people...
-
I'll give you an example which I
like to give.
-
I grew up in San Fransisco and in the Bay
Area or San Fransisco, and California,
-
and I did that in the 80s.
-
And so a lot of people that I knew had
HIV and they died of AIDS.
-
And there was a huge discussion about
this, and it was called GRID,
-
the Gay Related Immune Deficiency
syndrome.
-
Before it was called HIV and AIDS.
-
And lots of people were sick, and lot of
people died,
-
and there was a sort of normalization
process where people sort of
-
accepted this as their fate, especially
if they were in the gay community.
-
And still, over years and years and years,
people began to build a culture about
-
safe sex, and they started to talk about
respecting their partners,
-
and about talking about these issues,
and about getting tested,
-
and it took a lot of effort, to really go
much further.
-
A lot of people actually died in that
process.
-
It was a very sad, serious situation.
-
And I think we have similar discussions
that are taking place now,
-
and some people don't take it seriously,
-
and if they happen to be Muslims living
in Pakistan,
-
they might get a drone strike.
-
And there's a sort of survival mechanism
that takes place there.
-
And it's an unfortunate parallel, I think,
-
but I would really consider that we can
change this dialogue
-
by continuing to have it even though
it's exhausting,
-
and by recognizing our responsibility,
-
and how we can make it better by
continuing to do that,
-
and by building healthy alternatives,
and by building new systems,
-
and by refusing to backdoor any
system, ever,
-
completely committing to
Free software,
-
and transparency of that software,
and also of those processes.
-
And really really really sharing the
knowledge about it,
-
to make it impossible to surpress.
-
And we should not accept the
normalization of that.
-
We shouldn't make it fun to spy on people,
we shouldn't make jokes about it
-
in a way that normalizes it,
-
and we should respect those people
who are victims of surveillance,
-
and we should recognize that basically
everyone here is a victim of surveillance
-
to some degree,
-
and we should care about that,
and we should continue to be upset,
-
but not just upset; to channel that
anger into something useful
-
like making Debian better.
-
[applause]
-
[orga]: Thanks Jake for such a long Q&A
session,
-
I hope you enjoy the rum.
-
And I'm sure Jake's going to ask any more
questions if he can still talk.
-
[Jacob]: Thanks.