activism

Jake Applebaum at Schauspiel Köln & Update

Posted by Christian

Unmissable events at Schauspiel Köln: A play about Wikileaks and the NSA, a panel discussion with, among other figures central to current affairs, Jake Applebaum, and on Sunday, the beginning of a discussion series called Surviving under Surveillance.

Saturday 23 Nov 2013: Assassinate Assange – Reloaded
von Angela Richter
Regie: Angela Richter
ANSCHLIESSEND PANEL (IN ENGL. SPRACHE) MIT JACOB APPELBAUM (JOURNALIST), RENATA AVILA (MENSCHENRECHTSANWÄLTIN), JOSEPH FARRELL (WIKILEAKS), ANGELA RICHTER, JENNIFER ROBINSON (RECHTSBERATUNG WIKILEAKS). DAS GESPRÄCH FÜHRT JOHN GOETZ (JOURNALIST).

Sunday 24 Nov: Assassinate Assange – Reloaded
von Angela Richter
Regie: Angela Richter
Anschliessend Diskussionsreihe
Überleben unter Überwachung
Jacob Appelbaum lädt ein
MODERATION ANGELA RICHTER

http://www.schauspielkoeln.de/spielplan/

We’ll make the Sunday events an excursion, keep your ticket and receipt, and we’ll reimburse you.

Some selected material on Applebaum: His keynote talk at last year’s Chaos Communication Congress:

And an interview in N+1 mag. Note, both of these are from before the NSA revelations, and in retrospect look quite lucent. Quote:

But the thing is, taking precautions with your communications is like safe sex in that you have a responsibility to other people to be safe—your transgressions can fuck other people over. The reality is that when you find out it will be too late. It’s not about doing a perfect job, it’s about recognizing you have a responsibility to do that job at all, and doing the best job you can manage, without it breaking down your ability to communicate, without it ruining your day, and understanding that sometimes it’s not safe to undertake an action, even if other times you would.

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Postscript:

I have some comments and notes that I would like to share with you, but please post yours here below first (anonymously if you like).

Also:
A good and a bad review: http://www.ksta.de/kultur/mrs-heart,15189520,25127138.html

The bad one is more interesting: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buehne-und-konzert/mister-heart-12679064.html

If I may translate the last paragraph, about the power of art:

“All the theater would need to do, in order to do justice to the issues at heart, is ‘just’ to develop the self-confidence and go back to its roots and trust its artistic powers and possibilities. Then it would be, by pulling the audience into a process of understanding that is, by being subjective, ambiguous, playful and exceeding the simple transmission of information, the last public space that the NSA can not spy on. A medium that would be as suspicious as it would be indispensable.”

Im Original:

“Dabei müsste das Theater, um dem Thema gerecht zu werden, „nur“ das Selbstbewusstsein entwickeln, sich auf die eigenen Wurzeln zu besinnen und seinen künstlerischen Möglichkeiten zu vertrauen. Dann wäre es, wie es den Zuschauer in einen subjektiven, vieldeutigen, spielerischen, über die bloße Mitteilungsebene weit hinausgehenden Verstehensprozess zieht, der letzte öffentliche Ort, in den die NSA nicht hineinspionieren kann. Und als Medium so verdächtig wie unverzichtbar.”

what paranoid networking physically looks like (and sounds like)

Posted by Christian

From a discussion about protecting yourself against most ‘black bag’ and ‘evil maid’ attacks.

put distinctive scratches into all your peripherals, take a photo, and regularly check that the scratches are identical to the photo. This is how weapons inspectors ensure the seals protecting weapons caches have not been tampered with. The seals are scratched in a distinctive way that can’t be forged, then check periodically. Use tamper evident tape on your devices to slow down a burglar that wants to plant a keylogger in your keyboard.

The computer in question is an ‘air gapped’ machine, which means it is not connected to any network. You’d use it for extreme operational security (i.e. working with leaked NSA documents).

If you have a desktop [computer], put super glue in all the USB interfaces so they aren’t functional. Do the same to any interface on the mother boards that could attach removable media. Try to make the case impossible to open (bonus points for encasing it in cement except for the fan, CD tray, cables for keyboard/mouse, power cable and power button).

Turns out that really isolating a computer that you work on is a very hard thing to do. The latest threat seems to be some kind of super-malware that can bridge air gaps by communicating via a computer’s built-in speaker and mic. Allegedly it ‘talks’ at around 18kHz which is a frequency most people cannot hear.

a restaurant’s walk-in freezer is the poor man’s faraday cage

Some responses to the Snowden revelations

Posted by Christian

Opinion: NSA’s surveillance programs are the “most serious attacks on free speech we’ve ever seen.”

[He] stressed that privacy invasions of this magnitude are “attempts to try to change who we are as Americans.” In fact, they are attempts to define who we are as human beings.

Our human rights to speak and to communicate, to report and to assemble, are all at stake. “What I do know is it’s not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7,” writes Groklaw’s Jones.

We must return to a place where we feel that we can speak freely without consequence.

We must roll back the NSA’s surveillance apparatus.

Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj
 The owner of the campaigning website Groklaw explains why she sees no other option than shutting down. A funeral speech to privacy. (local mirror)

Lavabit, email service Snowden reportedly used, abruptly shuts down
Another secure email provider, Silent Circle, followed suit and physically destroyed their servers, without warning to their users, to preempt being commandeered by the NSA.

Surviving in a Feudal Security World
Bruce Schneier talk (video).

NSA secrets kill our trust

More revelations, another funky logo

Posted by Christian

PRISM looked interesting. Now here’s another Big Data surveillance program, this time not run by the NSA but by the DEA, the US drug enforcement agency. The title is HEMISPHERE, and it’s got a great logo. The leaked PDF says we shouldn’t mention it, though, it’s top secret!

Turns out they have a complete record of all calls going through AT&T’s switches, going back to 1987. That’s 26 years.

hemisphere

I wonder what those two vertical lines on the sides of the globe signify. Everything under control? What do you think? Leave a comment.

International Day of Privacy – #StopWatchingUs

Posted by

Morgen um 13h erheben wir am Bahnhofsvorplatz (vor dem Dom) unsere Stimme gegen eine multimediale Überwachung seitens verschiedener Geheimdienste. Genau so verurteilen wir das verantwortungslose Verhalten unserer Regierung in diesem Zusammenhang.

Irgendwie war es in den letzten Wochen so gruselig still um den Größen Bespitzelungsskandal aller Zeiten. Drum wollen wir jetzt um so lauter sein. Bringt Trommeln, Vuvuzelas, Trillerpfeifen usw. mit.

[jwplayer mediaid=”1344″]

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Bruce Sterling on what has changed

Posted by Christian

and what we’ll see more of. https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5

bruce-sterling

He is probably (hopefully) right that we’re going to see more and more of these kinds of dissidents, and possibly wrong about the fact that activists got it all wrong. 
What about the claim that they (which extends to, I guess, ‘we’ as artists) would be

utterly thrilled to have the NSA’s vast technical power at their own command.

Are we, too,

electronic first, and civil as a very distant second

?

Next term @ Surveillant Architectures: The Future

Laser

Posted by Christian

“behold the future of drone countermeasures”

AFP Agence France-Presse 30 Jun #PHOTO: Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo pic.twitter.com/FtNVpCgOAg
AFP Agence France-Presse 30 Jun
#PHOTO: Egyptian protestors direct laser lights on a military helicopter flying over the presidential palace in Cairo pic.twitter.com/FtNVpCgOAg

lasers against helicopter 2 EGYPT-POLITICS-UNREST lasers against helicopter 4 lasers against helicopter 5 lasers against helicopter 6