4) A few words with Mochipet, who performed at Raw Thought On January 11th at the DNA Lounge – A Tale Of Modular Synthesizers – Another Open Source Success Story – Mochipet is a modular synthesizer aficionado and he explains how the German company Doepfer’s decision to make their specs open has led to a flourishing of musical culture that would otherwise have been impossible.
To be clear: It’s two events in one – if you get there early enough (between 7-8:30pm) to learn about Police Surveillance and filing public records requests, great! If not, no biggie, just grab a drink and join the party.
Come to Raw Thought on March 8th (from 9pm-2am) & see Grumpy Green‘s super special Psychedelic Chill Room (an immersive space for both dancing & chilling).
Page 4 – Explains the VPN and “user traffic mixing”
Page 4 – Explains Static IP Address Management
Page 5 – Explains “Virtual Private Servers”
Page 6 – Explains “Point of Presence Locations” to allow personas to appear to originate from different locations
Page 7 – Explains the “Secure Operating Environment”
Page 8 – Says $2,760,000 again
Detailed version of the story:
As I was preparing Barrett Brown and Trevor Timm’s segment from the Aaron Swartz Day Evening Event for publication, and transcribing some of it, I realized that he and Aaron had actually kinda known each other.
This was amazing to me, as I had asked Barrett to start participating in our last two years of Aaron Swartz Day’s because his projects had felt so on-target with Aaron’s concerns and values, not because I knew that they had ever exchanged emails, much less collaborated at any point.
Barrett himself had basically forgotten about it until recently at the end of his talk with Trevor Timm during last year’s Evening Event. As I was transcribing the talk last week, my ears perked up as Barrett explained their interactions:
“He (Aaron) once offered to do an FOIA request on persona management. One of my interests back then. One of these disinformation propaganda methodologies that have come out of the intelligence contract industries, and had been encouraged by various states. Something that I think is very dangerous. So he offered to do his thing on that. To explore the possibilities and see if we could get some information on it. And the interesting thing about that is that I’d sort of forgotten about it until very recently. I’m not sure where that was left. I’m not sure if he got some results back.”
Aha! The hunt was on – I wanted to find this request and find out what information ever came back for it. I still didn’t know what “persona management” was exactly, but I could guess the outcome – sock puppets. I had always known that sock puppets were very dangerous, from the first day I learned of their existence en mass.
I had been working with Muckrock intensely all week myself, filing dozens of public records requests to numerous police and sheriff departments for the Aaron Swartz Police Surveillance Project. (Which just revamped it’s Muckrock templates, by the way.)
I wrote Barrett an email immediately asking what ever came of it. He said, to his knowledge, it was filed, but he didn’t know if anything was ever sent back on it. He sent me this Project PM link on “Persona Management”:
Persona management entails the use of software by which to facilitate the use of multiple fake online personas, or “sockpuppets,” generally for the use of propaganda, disinformation, or as a surveillance method by which to discover details of a human target via social interactions. Various incarnations of this capability have been discovered in the form of patents, U.S. military contracts, and e-mail discussions among intelligence contractors.
My first idea was to go back to the original story by Jason Leopold in Truthout that was published immediately after Aaron’s death. There was a link in it to all of Aaron’s FOIA requests, but it was broken. So I wrote Michael Morisy, founder of Muckrock, and asked him about it. He not only gave me a good link of every FOIA request Aaron Swartz ever filedand what he received back, on Muckrock. But he sent me the exact FOIA request in question, asking about persona management software. As well as the document that came back.
“Hey, I believe this is the same RFP that became public in 2011, though I’m not entirely sure. But yes, that’s exactly what it’s used for; social media accounts are the main vector, and as seen by the recent NYT story on the Israeli firm that Trump campaign approached regarding this, it’s definitely been marketed to entities as a means of influencing elections (in this case, influencing GOP delegates).” (I have reposted the NYT story on our blog .)
This software allows you to have sock puppets on steriods, provide VPNs for masking your geographical location, with the ability to actually pull in feeds from the geographical location you are claiming to be in, so you make the right comments and comment on local posts/issues and such.
Sock puppets and fake personas were not a new invention, of course. But you usually had to be a technical wizard of sorts to be able to pull it off. You would have to actually write things in a certain voice and monitor the input and output feeds of a given location on your own. Perhaps a gifted individual could have 5 or 10 of these going at once, but that would be impressive.
In contrast, using the software described in the RFP that was retrieved from Aaron’s FOIA request on Barrett’s behalf, someone could have dozens or even hundreds of these things going at once; without having to remember everything. In addition, the software could refresh one’s memory about a certain profile before having to interact with a human. And human interactions come so rarely anyway. Most all social media interactions are passive – like email, as opposed to conversations in real time.
From the NY Times story:
“A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.
The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump…
The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time.” – NY Times Article by By Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David D. Kirkpatrick and Maggie Haberman.
Aaron Swartz Filed a FOIA request, in collaboration with Barrett Brown, asking about Persona Management software. (Read the full story here, but here’s the document obtained via Muckrock.)
After scouring social media accounts and all other available information to compile a dossier on the psychology of any persuadable delegate, more than 40 Psy-Group employees would use “authentic looking” fake online identities to bombard up to 2,500 targets with specially tailored messages meant to win them over to Mr. Trump.
The messages would describe Mr. Cruz’s “ulterior motives or hidden plans,” or they would appear to come from former Cruz supporters or from influential individuals with the same background or ideology as a target…
Each approach would “look authentic and not part of the paid campaign,” the proposal promised. The price tag for the work was more than $3 million…
A third document emphasized “tailored third-party messaging” aimed at minority, suburban female and undecided voters in battleground states. It promised to create and maintain fake online personas that would deliver messages highlighting Mr. Trump’s merits and Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses or revealing “rifts and rivalries within the opposition.”
Trevor Timm: Could you tell us a little bit about what the theme is of your memoir…What are you trying to get across to readers?
Barrett Brown: There are a couple sort of overlapping issues. One is that, these institutions that we’ve inherited. We should not be surprised when they fail. They weren’t invented by philosopher kings with unlimited resources and the ability to implement their vision. They grew up haphazardly by very imperfect people and are frequented and designed and maintained by certain subsets of people that sometimes are outright psychotic. And other times, when they are noble, have their hands tied.
So, we have these institutions crumbling and proving themselves to be less solid than we once assumed them to be. That’s important.
The other important aspect of our age is that we can no longer look back on the 80s and 90s or 60s or anytime prior to determine what’s possible. To determine what’s viable or probable. The framework, the environment in which human collaboration occurs has changed so fundamentally and drastically in a historically short period of time that we cannot base our course of action, or the experiments we undertake, or the things we do on what others were able to pull off. We just can’t. What we can do, is always keep in mind that all human collaboration; Human collaboration is where all this comes from. All of our states. All of our laws. All of our problems. And so when the means change, and the possibilities suddenly increase in ways that we can’t understand yet, we have to explore all of these options. And I think it’s viable to really be able to do that in an effective way in the next decade or so, with Pursuance and all of these other things that are coming out.
Trevor Timm: Absolutely. (pause) With this being Aaron Swartz Day, I’d love to hear from you; Did you actually know Aaron personally? If you did or if you didn’t: How do you think about his legacy?
Barrett Brown: I didn’t really know him. I think I encountered him once or twice online.
He (Aaron) once offered to do an FOIA request on persona management. One of my interests back then. One of these disinformation propaganda methodologies that have come out of the intelligence contract industries, and had been encouraged by various states. Something that I think is very dangerous. So he offered to do his thing on that. To explore the possibilities and see if we could get some information on it. And the interesting thing about that is that I’d sort of forgotten about it until very recently. I’m not sure where that was left. I’m not sure if he got some results back. Someone asked me about it.
But it showed Aaron Swartz knew what was important. He agreed with me on this one aspect of these propaganda methodologies being important, and he also anticipated all of us in envisioning a different kind of internet that we didn’t accept from last year, that we’d actually build from the ground up according to our values…
(Yes, the sound mysteriously goes out for 15 seconds at the end, but probably it was just operator error as there were many errors throughout the broadcast – many apologies and I PROMISE we’ll have a professional webcaster next year :,-(
These Early Bird Passes are only available until midnight on August 15th.
Hello everyone in Aaron Swartz Day-land. We are expecting a full house this year for our San Francisco Hackathon and subsequent Reception & Evening Event. This will be our largest event to date, and many of our speakers are flying in from out of town.
For these reasons, in order to supplement our finances for this year’s grand extravaganza, we have decided to sell some “Early Bird All Access” Passes.
So, until midnight on August 15th, you can buy an “Early Bird All AccessPass” for only $20! (For up to 100 passes, while they last.)
Each “Early Bird All Access Pass” Includes:
1) Admission to both days of the Hackathon ($25 value) (Don’t panic. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. See the note at the bottom of this announcement :)
2) Admission to Reception and Evening Event ($50 Value)
3) Admission to After Party – 10:30 pm-2am ($20 Value) – Location TBD
8pm – Evening Event – Special Guests Speaking or Performing (or both):
As always, please write aaronswartzday@gmail.com if you need a free ticket. There are student discounts too, but you need to write us first to get the code.
Barrett Brown and Steve Phillips are speaking both Saturday and Sunday at the Aaron Swartz Day San Francisco Hackathon AND at the Evening Event. TICKETS HERE
Barrett Brown is an award winning writer and anarchist activist.Steve Phillips, is a privacy developer who has now brought an incredible project to life, The Pursuance Project, with none other than Barrett Brown.
The Pursuance Project is more than software. The project proposes a much needed new way of organizing and sharing information. A new way of drilling down to get to the truth as a team of people. It can be a team of people in the same building, or scattered all around the world. All that matters is that a group of people who really care about a topic are joining together to do something about it.
Perhaps Pursuance could be one of the missing pieces we need to organize ourselves towards a better democracy.
——
It’s not just about the software, it’s about thinking about new ways to organize and create positive change. Of course, this is not a concept that Aaron invented, but it is one that he lived.
So, let’s learn as much as we can about Pursuance, as quickly as possible, ahead of time, so that we can all get as much as possible out of our in-person time with Barrett and Steve on November 4th, when they demo Pursuance for the first time, at the Aaron Swartz Day Hackathon, on November 4th, at 3pm, and again on November 5th, when they go over more of the technical details.
I spoke to Barrett and Steve to find out how they met and how they pulled all this off in less than a year.
LR: What does Pursuance actually do?
BB: The pursuance system is a framework for process democracy. That is, it allows individuals with no prior relationship to self-organize into robust, agile entities governed via a “proceduralism of agreement.” These entities, called pursuances, in turn engage and collaborate among themselves to whatever extent they choose.
SP: Fundamentally, the Pursuance System software enables you to create a pursuance (which is a sort of organization), invite people to that pursuance (with the level of permissions and privileges that you choose), assign those people tasks (manually, or automatically based on their skill set!), brainstorm and discuss what should be done, rapidly record exciting ideas or strategies in an actionable format (namely as tasks), share files and documents, be notified when relevant events occur (e.g., when you are assigned a task or mentioned), and effectively get help from others.
LR: But is it simply end to end encrypted project management software? It seems like there is something larger going on here?
BB: A variety of existing tools for crowd-sourced research and secure communication will be implemented into the system. The ecosystem will be seeded with about 200 individuals and groups with a track record of advancing individual rights, state accountability, and robust journalism and information dissemination; each of these initial users will have the right to bring others into the system, and so on. This is not a content neutral medium; although any political ideology or combination of views is permitted in theory, everyone who joins does so under the condition that they oppose the drug war, police state, and national security state (although participants are free to interpret these issues broadly, and need not agree entirely on definitions or solutions).
This is a server-based ecosystem of collaboration and self-governance in which all participants will have equal opportunity to create and join pursuances: structured entities best thought of as evolvable organizational charts, with a wide range of customization available, as well as the ability for individual pursuances to link up in various ways; indeed, the ultimate goal of this process, which will provide a superior means by which to organize collaborative activism, is to eventually give rise to a sort of technocratic super-organism capable of confronting criminalized institutions and ultimately rolling them back.
SP: Aside from the specific software features, we are quite excited about having an ecosystem of like-minded individuals with shared goals and interests. The world needs an energetic network of activists effectively collaborating to achieve such things as prison reform, an end to the drug war, an end to mass, suspicionless surveillance, and various other issues. We need many researchers to assist journalists in finding the facts and getting stories right. And we need a great number of people to assist non-profits and political action groups in achieving their political ends. Pursuance amplifies these efforts.
LR: Other articles referenced its potential as a tool for democracy, could you elaborate? :-)
BB: As opposed to institutional democracy, whereby some artificial structure is generally implemented from above, Pursuance allows everyone the equal opportunity to define the exact terms of their associations with others, either by creating a Pursuance or by joining one that provides what they consider to be sufficient agency. Pursuances themselves may or may not involve voting; they can certainly be structured so that some, most, or all decisions, major or minor, requires majority votes by all participants, but others are driven more by free association, depending upon the ability of individuals to quickly and easily form new Pursuances with particular requirements so as to create a polity that’s sufficiently in agreement that participants are comfortable giving most responsibilities to a few people.
Importantly, the ease of creating, applying to join, and leaving pursuances will encourage experimentation and evolution, such that differing models of participation can be used and improved upon. One pursuance may be doing the exact same sort of work as another, but simply with a more regimented system whereby everyone is taking orders from above, with one person initially delegating power to others along a structure whereby no voting is done at all; another may involve each participant having the exact same degree of control, with decisions subject to majority votes or even requiring unanimous ones. By allowing every participant to employ free association, and by providing a structure that makes it easy to try different approaches to governance, we’re providing a highly customizable framework for collaboration that’s universal enough to be used for everything from running a bike drive to governing a political party.
LR: How did you two connect? Did Steve write to you when you were in prison?
BB: Steve saw the Wired article on my release, which went into the broad aspects of the project, and tracked me down to D Magazine, where he called me. We spoke and then he flew down to Dallas for a meeting. Over that three or four hours, we came up with many of the major additions to the basic idea that will ultimately be used; he happened to be perfect for this, both as programmer and project manager as well as a broad thinker with a great deal of knowledge relevant to this undertaking.
SP: Backstory: in 2015 I gave a DEF CON talk regarding my project CrypTag, which makes encrypted data partially searchable and stores it in any folder or file-syncing service. I started a non-profit around CrypTag with the slogan, “Secure mobile and desktop apps for activists, journalists, and you,” and with the 10-year goal of providing “data privacy for every Internet user”. I launched a graphical, user-friendly encrypted wiki/note-taking app — CrypTag Notes — solicited and got some great user feedback, and had some people using it.
But there were a couple problems.
First, I hadn’t found a significant number of people who thought they needed their privacy protected. Secondly, I didn’t have a means through which I could reach such people, and I wasn’t networked with that many activists other than a few I’d met at Occupy. Thirdly, since I have extremely broad interests and, thanks to the Internet, am aware of many problems in the world that I would like to see solved (if not help solve), I was concerned that even in the best-case scenario, if I could help fundamentally solve the problem of human privacy, that this wouldn’t be nearly enough in light of all that we face — global warming and environmental destruction, superhuman AI, Neoliberalism, racial unjustice, political bribery, technological employment and the apparent need for a basic income, and more.
But in the last week of March I was reading a Wired article, “Anonymous’
[Barrett] intends to build a piece of software called Pursuan[ce], designed to serve as a platform for coordinating activists, journalists, and troublemakers of all stripes. Pursuan[ce], as Brown describes it, would be an open-source, end-to-end-encrypted collaboration platform anyone could host on their own server. Users will be able to create a “pursuance,” an installation of the software focused on a group’s particular cause or target for investigation. The software would offer those groups the same real-time collaboration features as Slack or Hipchat, but also include a kind of org-chart function to define different users’ roles, the ability to host and search large collections of documents, and a Wiki feature that would allow collaborators to share and edit their findings from those documents.
Brown has yet to recruit a team of coders or volunteers to launch Pursuan[ce]. … But Brown has never had trouble finding followers …
I quickly realized that not only did Barrett have the public platform that I lacked, he also attracts and excites thousands of activists who *know* they need privacy protections because they are opposing the corrupt and powerful elements of the status quo.
It was also immediately clear that I had exactly what Barrett needed — experience building secure, user-friendly software; open source development; managing small teams of developers; and recruiting other technical people, as I was hosting weekly privacy hackathons at Noisebridge (which continue to this day), and I had recently moved to San Francisco.
I figured this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with someone like a Barrett Brown, or a John Kiriakou, or an Edward Snowden, or a Glenn Greenwald, or a Laura Poitras, and that I must take massive action to turn into reality this amazing possibility to work with with Barrett Brown to amplify the efforts of activists and journalists in order to help them solve as many of the world’s problems as possible.
I could not believe how much overlap there was between what Barrett and I wanted to accomplish, and how much we could complement each other.
So I brainstormed with a friend about the best course of action, which led to my aggressively reaching out to people I knew may be connected to Barrett, attempting to contact him in several different ways all in parallel, and successfully getting through just two days later. He said he was interested to have me involved, so I then flew to Texas, met twice with Barrett, began designing the software, then flew back to California. Two days later, Barrett emailed the others involved and said, “this is Steve Phillips based in San Francisco, and he is in charge of building the Pursuance System” — the very software I had been merely reading about less than two weeks prior.
That was just six months ago, and it’s been a hell of a ride since. (And of course, John Kiriakou and others are on our board of directors.)
My extremely excitement toward what can be accomplished with Pursuance continues to this day.
LR: Steve mentioned that you both were inspired one of Aaron’s posts, entitled When Is Transparency Useful? – could you elaborate on that please? :)
SP: I was talking to a friend about Pursuance, and he pointed me to one of Aaron Swartz’s essays. Part of what blew me away was this line and the argument leading up to it:
Imagine it: an investigative strike team, taking on an issue, uncovering the truth, and pushing for reform. They’d use technology, of course, but also politics and the law.
I found that this complemented Barrett’s thinking very well regarding what can be accomplished with a diverse mix of complementary skill sets, rather than having silos of just journalists working by themselves, and my experience with seeing tech geeks building more tech for geeks rather than solving bigger problems.
I knew that Aaron had co-invented RSS at the age of 14, that he had the foresight to create software that has become SecureDrop, and that he convinced Larry Lessig that getting money out of politics is a fundamental, but this is yet another example of Aaron being ahead of his time.
BB: Transparency is something we generally want to apply to institutions, particularly governments that are funded by its population and have a legal monopoly on violence, and specifically on government entities that have a history of misusing secrecy. On the other hand, the question of transparency becomes vastly more complicated when we’re talking about private entities. Within Pursuance, a given pursuance can be entirely opaque to outsiders, which in some cases will be a necessary defense against states and powerful firms that have a history of retaliating against activists and even journalists. But most of them, I think, will be highly transparent, both as basic policy and as a means of better allowing other pursuances to find areas where they might want to collaborate.
A good part of the concept behind Pursuance is to encourage not just individuals to arrange themselves into efficient entities, but also to encourage pursuances to eventually develop similar connections, sharing information, resources, and talent. This also goes for those existing non-profits and NGOs and the like that we’ll be actively recruiting; with this system, they’ll be able to easily create a pursuance presence by which to organize their supporters as well as finding areas of efficient potential partnerships with both pursuances and other institutions who’ve come on to the system. Those areas are most easily discoverable when everyone concerned can quickly see what other groups are doing and how they’re doing it.
Barrett Brown and Steve Phillips are speaking Saturday and Sunday at the Aaron Swartz Day San Francisco Hackathon.
Saturday November 4th 3pm -4:30 pm Barrett Brown and Steve Phillips – Building a Better Opposition: Process Democracy and the Second Wave of Online Resistance w/ Q and A (First live demo of the Pursuance Project!)
Sunday November 5th 2pm – 3 pm Pursuance Advanced Tech (w Q and A) – Steve Phillips and Barrett Brown
November 4, 2017, from 6:00-7:00 (Reception) 7:30pm – 9:30 pm (Speakers)
The purpose of the evening event, as always, is to inspire direct action toward improving the world. Everyone has been asked to speak about whatever they feel is most important.
The event will take place following this year’sSan Francisco Aaron Swartz International Hackathon, which is going on Saturday, November 4, from 10-6 and Sunday, November 5, from 11am-6pm at the Internet Archive.
Hackathon Reception: 6:00pm-7:00pm – (A paid ticket for the evening event also gets you in to the Hackathon Reception.)
Come talk to the speakers and the rest of the Aaron Swartz Day community, and join us in celebrating many incredible things that we’ve accomplished by this year! (Although there is still much work to be done.)
We will toast to the launch of the Pursuance Project (an open source, end-to-end encrypted Project Management suite, envisioned by Barrett Brown and brought to life by Steve Phillips).
Migrate your way upstairs: 7:00-7:30pm – The speakers are starting early, at 7:30pm this year – and we are also providing a stretch break at 8:15pm – and for those to come in that might have arrived late.
Speakers upstairs begin at 7:30 pm.
Speakers in reverse order:
Chelsea Manning (Network Security Expert, Former Intelligence Analyst)
Lisa Rein (Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Co-founder Creative Commons, Co-founder Aaron Swartz Day)
Daniel Rigmaiden(Transparency Advocate)
Barrett Brown(Journalist, Activist, Founder of the Pursuance Project) (via SKYPE)
Jason Leopold (Senior Investigative Reporter, Buzzfeed News)
Jennifer Helsby (Lead Developer, SecureDrop, Freedom of the Press Foundation)
About the Speakers (speaker bios are at the bottom of this invite):
Chelsea Manning – Network Security Expert, Transparency Advocate
Chelsea E. Manning is a network security expert, whistleblower, and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. While serving 7 years of an unprecedented 35 year sentence for a high-profile leak of government documents, she became a prominent and vocal advocate for government transparency and transgender rights, both on Twitter and through her op-ed columns for The Guardian and The New York Times. She currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area, where she writes about technology, artificial intelligence, and human rights.
Lisa Rein – Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Co-founder, Aaron Swartz Day & Creative Commons
Daniel Rigmaiden became a government transparency advocate after U.S. law enforcement used a secret cell phone surveillance device to locate him inside his home. The device, often called a “Stingray,” simulates a cell tower and tricks cell phones into connecting to a law enforcement controlled cellular network used to identify, locate, and sometimes collect the communications content of cell phone users. Before Rigmaiden brought Stingrays into the public spotlight in 2011, law enforcement concealed use of the device from judges, defense attorneys and defendants, and would typically not obtain a proper warrant before deploying the device.
Barrett Brown – Journalist, Activist, and Founder of the Pursuance Project
Barrett Brown is a writer and anarchist activist. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Guardian, The Intercept, Huffington Post, New York Press, Skeptic, The Daily Beast, al-Jazeera, and dozens of other outlets. In 2009 he founded Project PM, a distributed think-tank, which was later re-purposed to oversee a crowd-sourced investigation into the private espionage industry and the intelligence community at large via e-mails stolen from federal contractors and other sources. In 2011 and 2012 he worked with Anonymous on campaigns involving the Tunisian revolution, government misconduct, and other issues. In mid-2012 he was arrested and later sentenced to four years in federal prison on charges stemming from his investigations and work with Anonymous. While imprisoned, he won the National Magazine Award for his column, The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison. Upon his release, in late 2016, he began work on the Pursuance System, a platform for mass civic engagement and coordinated opposition. His third book, a memoir/manifesto, will be released in 2018 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.
Jason Leopold, Senior Investigative Reporter, Buzzfeed News
Jason Leopold is an Emmy-nominated investigative reporter on the BuzzFeed News Investigative Team. Leopold’s reporting and aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act has been profiled by dozens of media outlets, including a 2015 front-page story in The New York Times. Politico referred to Leopold in 2015 as “perhaps the most prolific Freedom of Information requester.” That year, Leopold, dubbed a ‘FOIA terrorist’ by the US government testified before Congress about FOIA (PDF) (Video). In 2016, Leopold was awarded the FOI award from Investigative Reporters & Editors and was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame by the Newseum Institute and the First Amendment Center.
Jennifer Helsby, Lead Developer, SecureDrop (Freedom of the Press Foundation)
Jennifer is Lead Developer of SecureDrop. Prior to joining FPF, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where she worked on applying machine learning methods to problems in public policy. Jennifer is also the CTO and co-founder of Lucy Parsons Labs, a non-profit that focuses on police accountability and surveillance oversight. In a former life, she studied the large scale structure of the universe, and received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 2015.
Cindy Cohn – Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel.The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: “[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn.”
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship explores the politics and cultures of hacking, with a focus on the sociopolitical implications of the free software movement and the digital protest ensemble Anonymous. She has authored two books, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014).
Caroline Sinders – Researcher/Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Caroline Sinders is a machine learning designer/user researcher, artist. For the past few years, she has been focusing on the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment and politics in digital, conversational spaces. Caroline is a designer and researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation, and a Creative Dissent fellow with YBCA. She holds a masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University.
Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, which now preserves 20 petabytes of data – the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.
Steve Phillips, Project Manager, Pursuance Project
Steve Phillips is a programmer, philosopher, and cypherpunk, and is currently the Project Manager of Barrett Brown’s Pursuance Project. In 2010, after double-majoring in mathematics and philosophy at UC Santa Barbara, Steve co-founded Santa Barbara Hackerspace. In 2012, in response to his concerns over rumored mass surveillance, he created his first secure application, Cloakcast. And in 2015, he spoke at the DEF CON hacker conference, where he presented CrypTag. Steve has written over 1,000,000 words of philosophy culminating in a new philosophical methodology, Executable Philosophy.
Mek Karpeles, Citizen of the World, Internet Archive
Mek is a citizen of the world at the Internet Archive. His life mission is to organize a living map of the world’s knowledge. With it, he aspires to empower every person to overcome oppression, find and create opportunity, and reach their fullest potential to do good. Mek’s favorite media includes non-fiction books and academic journals — tools to educate the future — which he proudly helps make available through his work on Open Library.
Brenton Cheng, Senior Engineer, Open Library, Internet Archive
Brenton Cheng is a technology-wielding explorer, inventor, and systems thinker. He spearheads the technical and product development of Open Library and the user-facing Archive.org website. He is also an adjunct professor in the Performing Arts & Social Justice department at University of San Francisco.
3) “Property of the People” Lawsuit Proves Aaron Was Scooped Up In An FBI Investigation Back In 2007 – Aaron had been erroneously swept up in a 2007 terrorist investigation that, most likely, caused law enforcement agencies (FBI, DOJ) to treat him with rougher hands during its subsequent encounters with him afterwards.
4) A few words with Mochipet, who performed at Raw Thought On January 11th at the DNA Lounge – A Tale Of Modular Synthesizers – Another Open Source Success Story – Mochipet is a modular synthesizer aficionado and he explains how the German company Doepfer’s decision to make their specs open has led to a flourishing of musical culture that would otherwise have been impossible.
The Internet Archive is hosting the Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day International Hackathon and Evening Event: