Hack_Curio
Coleman, Gabriella (Biella)
Bialski, Paula
Kelty, Chris
Hacking and hackers can be hard to visualize. In the popular imagination, the figure alternates between a menacing, hooded figure or some sort of drugged-out and depressed juvenile hero (or perhaps a state-sponsored hacker). To counter such images, a group of us have spearheaded a new digitally-based video project, Hack_Curio that features hacker-related videos, culled from a range of sources, documentary film, newscasts, hacker conference talks, advertising, and popular film. In this talk, the Hack-Curio creators and builders will briefly discuss the purpose and parameters of Hack_Curio and spend most of the talk featuring our funniest, most compelling videos around hacking from around the world. We will use these to reflect on some of the more obscure or less commented on cultural and political features of hacking-features that will address regional and international dimensions of the craft and its impacts around the world. Hacking and hackers can be hard to visualize. In the popular imagination, the figure alternates between a menacing, hooded figure or some sort of drugged-out and depressed juvenile hero (or perhaps a state-sponsored hacker). To counter such images, a group of us (Chris Kelty, Gabriella Coleman, and Paula Bialski) have spearheaded a new digitally-based video project, Hack_Curio that features hacker-related videos, culled from a range of sources, documentary film, newscasts, hacker conference talks, advertising, and popular film. In this talk, the Hack-Curio creators and builders, will briefly discuss the purpose and parameters of Hack_Curio and spend most of the talk featuring our funniest, most compelling videos around hacking from around the world. We will use these to reflect on some of the more obscure or less commented on cultural and political features of hacking-features that will address regional and international dimensions of the craft and its impacts around the world. We will begin our talk by telling the audience what drove to build this website and what we learned in the process of collaborating with now over fifty people to bring it into being. After our introduction, we will showcase about 7-10 videos drawn from quite different sources (ads, parodies, movie clips, documentary film, and talks) and from different parts of the world (Mexico, Germany, South Africa, France) in order to discuss the cultural significance of hacking in relation to regional and international commonalities and differences. Finally, we will finish with a short reflection on why such a project, based on visual artifacts, is a necessary corollary to text-based discussions, like books and magazines, covering the history and contemporary faces of hacking.
 Music The speakers that I have on stage today are both anthropologists and they are both experts on hacking culture culture. Today, also they launched their website, hackcure.io, which is also the name of the talk, Hack Curio, decoding the cultures of hacking one video at a time. I welcome Grab Briella, Aka, Biela Coleman, and Pola Bielski. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Do you hear us? Good evening, CCC. It's so lovely to be here. We are super excited to stand before you here today and present a project we've been working on for the past year or so. That would not have been finished if it were not for this talk. Exactly. So thank you. Exactly. Thanks for forcing us to stand before you. And get away from our desks. Let's drink some wine, have some 11.30pm discussion with you. And there's no better place to launch the project that we're going to show you than at the CCC. So we're super excited to be here. Let's start with the very basics. What is hack curio? What is it that you guys are going to see in the next hour or so? Hack Curio is a website featuring short video clips all related to computer hackers. Now, a bit of a background. My name is Pola Bielski and I am a sociologist. I'm an ethnographer of hacker cultures. I study corporate hacker developers. And for those of you who don't know Biela Coleman, I'm an anthropologist. I also study computer hackers. And we, along with Chris Kelty, have helped to put this website together. Exactly. And in the past year, we've decided to come together and bring all sorts of clips from public talks, from documentaries, from Hollywood films, from memes, advertising, all sorts of sources. We've brought together these videos that also come together with short descriptions by authors, by scholars, by journalists, by people who know something about hacker cultures. And we brought that together all in one place. So call it a museum, call it a compendium, call it a website. And it's a place to really pay homage to you guys. Because hackers come in all shapes and sizes. What it means to hack might mean something to you, but might mean something very different to you. And we decided as anthropologists, we think it's very important to represent a certain culture in a certain way. We're not just hackers and hoodies. It's a really diverse culture. So we're going to talk about that today. Alright, so like how did this project come into being? Like why are we here? Why did we spend the last year doing this? Well, you know, first of all, it wasn't created, I didn't create it because I had this idea in mind. It was created because I started to collect videos for a reason. I'm a professor and I twice a week stand in front of students who are on the internet, on Facebook, maybe buying shoes. And it's like really hard to get their attention. And you know what? I found using videos in class was an amazing way to get them off Facebook and paying attention to moi, to me. Right? So over the years, I just collected a lot of videos, right? Video after video after video after video. And at a certain point, I was like, you know, I have this private collection, semi private collection that I use in class. Why don't I transform it into a public resource? And more so as someone who studied hackers for many years, why don't I kind of make it into a collaborative project? Why don't I tap into the kind of expertise that exists among hackers and journalists and researchers and academics and draw them in? And so I decided to do that, right? And so about a year and a half ago, I brought together a couple of other people like Paula, Chris Kelty, who's another curator, and I said, like, let's get this going. So when we were kind of fashioning the project, we were also thinking like, what are we trying to do with this project, right? You're not my students. I don't see you twice a week. And so we came up with some goals and we don't know if we're going to achieve these goals. The site literally is going live like right now. But this is what we're trying to do with the project. We're trying to chip away at some plastic conceptions and stereotypes of hackers. We know these exist. Can we chip away at them, right? We want to offer new perspectives on what hackers have actually done and what they do. A really important thing which Paula has already kind of mentioned is showcase the diversity of hacking, right? People who do blockchain and free software and security. I mean, there's similarities, but there's also differences. Like, let's try to show this. And while this is not an archive, this is not the Internet Archive, we are trying to kind of preserve bits and bytes of hacker history. So these are the four goals and we do feel that video, right, is a nice medium, a mechanism to achieve these four goals. It's persuasive. It's compelling. It's memorable. It's fun. Like we like to waste time at work on video, right? So we're like, hey, let's add a little persuasive punch to text. And this is why we decided to do it this way. Exactly. So what happens when you click on the site today and how is it organized? We want to show you a little bit of the actual architecture of the site itself. So you can go, when you click on the website, you see certain categories. We've grouped the videos into different categories. Because as you say, there's a huge diversity. So you can see here, Biela is lovely here pointing out the beautiful categories. We've got anti security hackers, blockchain hackers. We've got free and open the software. We've got freaking. We've got hacker depictions. You can look at all sorts of different categories. You go onto a category website and then you have a blurb about what this subculture of hacking is all about or what this category is. Exactly. What the theme is. And then you have all sorts of little videos that last maybe 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes. And under these videos, you would look at the video and then you would have a little bit of a blurb. It's not an essay. It's not a book. It's not some boring academic text. It's supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be for your grandmothers to read. It's supposed to be actually accessible and understandable. So you have the video and the actual text itself. This is how it looks like. And this is maybe some sample of our content itself. What do we have? We've got 42 entries at the moment, which we've collected from, as I said, various different academics with different authors. And by the end of 220, we would love to have around 100 entries. And we'd try to publish around 50 or 20 entries a year. After that. Because it's really brutally hard to edit academics. Exactly. Exactly. And so we've got what you'll find. These are just some examples. We'll get into some really of the videos in just a moment. But for example, you would look at hackers and engineers humming at the Internet Engineering Task Force. Or you'd look at an entry that's about the programming legend of course, Grace Hopper being interviewed by a clue is David Letterman. Maybe you guys have seen this video. A blockchain ad that people see it or you'd say it. You'd ask, is this real? It's kind of a wacky ad. Or is it parody? And when you watch it, you have to know that it is actually quite real. The actor Robert Redford showing off his mad social engineering skills with the help of cakes and balloons. Or how to make sense of why Algerian hacker Hamza Ben Delage, addressed by US government, smiles and how many people from Algeria understand his grin. So this kind of various diversity of really what hacking is really all about. But we're here to get the video party started. Exactly. Finally. So let's get it started. Yeah. A little background. Exactly. Okay. So we'd, yes. Yeah, you start. You start. All right. So we thought it would be a good idea to start with phone freaking because phone freaking really developed at the same time. If not kind of before computer hacking. And we're going to show Joey Bubbles, Joey Gressia, who is, you know, often considered to be the grandfather of phone freaking. So let's go to a video. Make their calls. In the days when calls went through the operators, phone freaking wasn't possible. But as human switchboards were replaced by mechanical systems, different noises were used to trigger the switches. If you had perfect pitch like blind phone freak Joe and Gressia, you could whistle calls through the network. Let's see if I make it this time. This is really hard to do. It sounded like all the tones were present. So it should be ringing about now. Okay. It hit the phone. It just takes a little while. He even showed off his skills for the local media. Now, from his one phone to a town in Illinois and back to his other phone, a thousand mile phone call by Whistley. Joe and Gressia. All right. Very cool. Right. So Joe and Gressia is featured and Joan Donovan, who is like a mad researcher at Harvard University, wrote a really awesome entry about that. And, you know, of course, she emphasizes things like, you know, while hacking is often tied to computers, it's often tied to any system that you could understand, improve, fix, undermine. And the freakers really showed that, right. And of course, the history of phone freaking is about blind kids. Not everyone who was a freak was blind, but many of them were. They met each other in camp and kind of exchanged information. And that was one of the ways in which phone freaking grew. Phone freaking really grew as well when a big article in 1971 was published by Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire magazine. Who here has read that article? Has anyone? It's incredible. We mentioned, I think, in the piece. Check it out. Freaking freaking exploded after that article. The spelling of freaking changed from capital F, freak, to pH because of that article. Freaking also grew when blue boxes were created, right. This is also something that Joan writes about in her entry. One of the cool things that Joan writes about, and then I'm going to turn it over to Paul again, is that some freaks trained birds. Okay. It's a freaking freak. Let's just leave it at that because that's freaking cool. All right. Okay. Are you guys ready now to cringe? We need a little bit of a cringing moment as well. So without further ado, this is Steve Ballmer that would like to do some dancing. From Microsoft. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Ballmer. Come on. Okay. Yeah, that's right. Can I just say one little thing? There's a remix of this with goats screaming. Like, look it up. It's awesome. I'll have it, exactly. But why do we show Steve Ballmer the sort of like Godfather? Exactly. Kind of an anti-hacker of sorts. I myself, an ethnographer who worked around corporate culture of software developers, aren't hackers per se. But if you think of a figure like Steve Ballmer, a lot of you guys who perhaps identify with yourself as hackers, you have day jobs. You go to work and you have to make some money in order to live and to work on your own projects. And you often have to face sort of mini Steve Ballmer's at work. And this is a quote that I have my own entry that I did right next to this video of Steve Ballmer. Even Ballmer's unbridled display of exuberance is exceptional. Many software developers still have to deal with mini Steve Ballmer's every day in their work. We're sorry that you do, but if you do, you do. Exactly. So this exuberance is all about these sort of slogans of win big, save the world while building technology, be awesome, be true, whatever it is your corporate slogan is. And there is, I think, in a way in which a software developer and sort of the hackers that work in their day jobs challenge this sort of really intense exuberance of wearing your corporate t-shirt and smiling every day in a way in which you hack your daily projects, you work on your own private projects on the side. You actually do have many acts of resistance in a way to this kind of loud, massive exuberance. And I talk about these sort of sideline mini hacks that happen on an everyday corporate culture. Check out her entry. It's really funny. All right. So now we're going to a hacktivist. So who here has heard of Phineas Fisher? All right. Awesome. Just in case for those who are watching the video now or later, I'm going to give a little bit of background. But I love this video about Phineas Fisher because he's explained what he or the group has done, but he also does kind of a very clever media hack. So for those that don't know who Phineas Fisher is, he or the group is a hacktivist that claims to be inspired by anonymous Jeremy Hammond. He's hacked into various corporations from Phineas Fisher to hacking team. And what he did was take documents, take email, and then publish them. And these were important in ways that I'll talk about in a moment. He's donated, I think, stolen Bitcoin to the Rojova government. And this fall, he published a manifesto kind of calling for public interest hacking and claims he would give $100,000 to anyone who does this. So now I'm going to show the first, and I believe the only interview that he has done. And he did this with Vice News a couple of years ago. Let's do this. These are the exact words from our live text exchange, voiced by one of my colleagues. So why did you hack, hacking team? Well, I just read the Citizen Lab reports on Phineas Fisher and hacking team and thought, that's fucked up. And I hacked him. What was the goal in hacking the hacking team data? Were you trying to stop them? For the lulls? I don't really expect leaking data to stop a company, but hopefully it can at least set them back a bit and give some breathing room to the people being targeted with their software. Okay, so this does not yet exist on HackKiria. I have to write the entry, but because I was so busy getting the whole other site in preparation, I haven't done it, but it will happen in the next few weeks. But what I love about this video is, first of all, he's like hacking media representations, right? I mean, even when awesome journalists like Motherboard publish on hackers or other kind of entities, they still kind of use a masked hacker. Even once they published about Phineas Fisher and they put like a mask on him. And I was like, hackers have heat. Like they don't need a mask, right? And there is this sense where there's always a kind of demonic mask figure. And he was like, okay, I'll do this interview, but you have to represent me as like a lovable, Muppet-like figure, right? So he's there hacking the media. But what's also really interesting, and do watch the full video, it's kind of amazing, is that, you know, he kind of claims, oh, I didn't have much of infect. I don't think he could do anything. But in fact, first of all, the information that was released really reaffirmed what people suspected. For example, in the case of hacking team who was selling problematic exploits by way to dictatorial regimes, we really got a confirmation that this was happening. And in fact, eventually, hacking team even lost their license, right? So this was like a direct effect from what Phineas Fisher did. So really, it's a kind of amazing video that showcases what he was doing, his reasoning, and then with a performance, literally, a puppet that hacked the media. Okay, so now we're going to rewind a little bit and go back in time. So a lot of hackers care about cryptography, right? And ever since the cypherpunks, and since that period, there have been projects from Tor to Signal that have enabled cryptography that has been really important for human rights activists and others. But one of the great, great kind of encryption projects came from this fellow, Tim Jenkins. Who here in the room has heard of Tim Jenkins? Okay, this is amazing. This is why we're doing kind of hack-kirry-o. So Tim Jenkins is from South Africa. And beginning in 1988, secret messages were sent and received regularly across South Africa borders using an encrypted telematics system assembled during the final years of the South African liberation struggle. And Tim Jenkins, along with Ronnie Press, who has since passed away, created the system. And Tim Jenkins was kind of like a phone freak, and that was one of the reasons he was good at working with phones. And what was amazing about this system, which was part of Operation Vula, was that it allowed people in South Africa to communicate with leaders in exile in London, right? And Tim Jenkins created this system. And we're going to show a video about it in a moment, and Sophie Tupin has written a terrific entry. The reason why we have him with a key there was that, like, you know, the South African apartheid government did not really like Tim Jenkins, so they threw him in jail. Well, a lot of hackers lockpick. He actually created 10 wooden keys secretly in the wooden shop and broke out of jail. And we can talk about, like, taking lockpicking to, like, another sort of level. All right, so let's listen and see the video about this incredible program. After we sent in the first computer, we expected things to start immediately, but it actually took a couple of weeks. And then suddenly one day I was sitting at my desk and the telephone answering machine suddenly started worrying. I thought, no, this must be just absolutely wrong number or something. But then sure enough, I heard the distinctive tones of the messages and I could hear this thing coming through. The tape word and word and word, and then it stopped and I loaded the message onto my computer. In fact, it was a report from Mac. And sure enough, there was our first message, absolutely perfect. The fax machine. Okay, so this is from the entry by Sophie Tupin, who is writing a dissertation on this topic. The international hacker community has since taken notice of Tim Jenkins and the Vula and cryptic communication system that embodies so many qualities often associated with an exceptional hack. Elegant, clever, usable and pragmatic, right? Jenkins has been invited to speak at the Berlin-Logan symposium in 2016 and to the lockpicking communities in the Netherlands and the United States. In 2018, the RSA security conference gave Jenkins the first award for excellence in humanitarian service. So just like one last thing, this is a good reminder that histories of computer hacking are often skewed. They often actually start with the United States, when for example in Europe with a CCC, that story has been told in bits and pieces, but deserves a much longer or much larger showcase. And actually, this example also shows that for example, the history of encryption when it comes to communication didn't even necessarily start in the United States, right? And so it's really, really important to kind of showcase these histories that haven't been told elsewhere. Exactly. So maybe by now you're kind of getting at the fact that we see hacking as a diverse practice, hackers as a diverse group of people who do different things. And at the moment, I want to come back to ways in which hackers challenge power through challenging really the very stereotype of what gender means, then challenging really gender politics. And it will turn to this topic by looking at an entry that a woman named Christina Dunbar-Hester has done on a woman named Naomi Cedar. And some of you probably know Naomi Cedar. This is part of her entry and she wrote, Naomi Cedar is a programmer and core participant in the Python programming language community. As a trans identified person, Cedar grappled with whether she would have to give up everything in order to transition and whether the community would accept her for doing so. So let's watch a clip of the video and let's see how Naomi Cedar challenged that. And one thing she gave this talk at PyCon, the Python open-source developer conference. And it's a really incredible talk. I really encourage you to watch the whole talk, but this is the moment where she's like, do I have to leave the community? Or can I transition in the community? Exactly. So let's watch a tiny clip of that. I decided that to do that would probably mean giving up everything. Remember back at 13, I had absorbed this into my brain that the only way you were going to get out of this was to basically leave everything. And this was a very painful thing to think about, but like a lot of trans people, I had come to the point where even if I lost everything, that was fine. So I started to think about other alternatives here. I had toyed with the idea of doing the education summit as a farewell thing to the community. I would do it and then disappear, go into the trans witness protection program. The only problem was I actually started accelerating the pace of my transition because, well, it was just such a freaking relief to start moving in that direction. That that wouldn't work. So I actually thought about what was for me, harking back to Leveron Cox, a very revolutionary idea. What if I just did it and was open about it? First thing I looked at, codes of conduct. I looked for specifics. What happens to me if there is a problem, if I am harassed? This was important to me. Other thing I did was I started telling a few people, Jesse Noller, Ava Yadloska, some people I would work with on PyCon, and they were all pretty cool with the idea. And the more I talked about it, the more I decided that I would go ahead and take that chance. So I did. I started by teaching at some Python workshops for women. I spoke at some conferences. We went to PyCon. It was good. The education summit was fine. Okay, some of the people I worked with in organizing it were a little bit confused when the names on the emails changed. I apologize. But in general, it went pretty well. In fact, the more open I was, the easier it was for me because I didn't have to worry about being outed. And it was easier for other people because they certainly knew what to expect. The other interesting side light is that when I told people, they sometimes felt an obligation to share some deep dark secret about themselves. I kind of trumped them and they had to answer back. So my takeaway here is that we talk a lot about diversity and that's real. So we should be ending on this point except that I'm a contrarian in my old age. So it is not quite all rainbows and unicorns. Or as you might put it, this is kind of common in social justice circles right now. We don't get a cookie. Exactly. All right. And yeah. It's a very powerful play. Exactly. And I guess we could also say that the next step I want to show that after the entry by Christina Dunbar-Hester, Naomi Cedar actually gave a response to this entry, which we've also published, which we also want to do. We want to have a discussion between some of the responses to the actual entries themselves. It's very powerful. So we actually wanted to quote it in full. Yeah, exactly. So perhaps let's read this section from the response of Naomi Cedar. PyCon itself has continued to evolve into an ever more diverse place with an ever stronger representation of queer folks, people of color, people who speak different languages, et cetera. Codes of conduct are nearly universal these days. And more often than not, communities insist that they be well-crafted and meaningful and backed up by real enforcement. Even in these retrograde times of official attacks on the rights of so many groups, we have come a long way. But just as I said five years ago, it's still not all rainbows and unicorns. Too many groups throughout the open source world globally are making only token efforts to foster inclusion. And in my opinion, too many members of privileged groups tend to focus on superficial or cosmetic changes rather than addressing the underlying fundamental issues marginalized groups face. It doesn't take a bit away from how far we've come to also acknowledge how much we still have to do in Naomi Cedar. So this really part, we wanted to discuss this in the way in which hacking is also a practice of challenging power, challenging stereotypes, and challenging really gender norms in many ways. All right, let's move on. All right, so the final frontier. We have three more videos to show before we get to the Q&A. In all videos relate to geopolitics and hacking. You know, hacking has always been political in some fashion. If for no other reason than sometimes laws are challenged or you're doing something that someone doesn't want you to do, right? But there's only been certain moments where nation states have been interested in hacking, or there have been sort of ways in which nation states have used hacking, for example, recently in order to kind of engage in international politics. So we're going to kind of focus on these last, the last three videos will focus on these issues. We're at the CCC, so of course I wanted to show a video related to CCC. Unfortunately, I don't have one related to the German CCC, please do send good videos related to the CCC to me. But I am going to show one related to the FCCC, established in Lyon by Jean Bernard Condat. So do people know what the F stands for? All right. Okay, what's going on here? What does it stand for? French. French. Okay. Once you see the video. Hold on. You will also see that it stands for fake and fuck as well. Because basically the French chapter of the CCC was established in part to try to entrap hackers in order to kind of work for the French government. It's a fascinating story that's been told in bits and pieces. And I'm going to say a little bit more about it, but now I'm going to show a clip from a French documentary that kind of charts a little bit of that history. It's in French with subtitles. And quickly, the different teaching services have all tried to integrate the skills of these network users. We arrived at 6am to arrive at a pavilion located in the province, around, and to knock on the door to say, here is the police, the purchasing, to have parents who will open our eyes. And we say, my son, my son, but he never left his room, he's always in his room, etc. In fact, it was a very pious pirate and he was younger. So that means that we are to make a new population. We are a little bit immune to this problem. And we couldn't recruit people like that for the house. On the other hand, why wouldn't we do the national service of people who are interested in the national service? Of people who are well-known, who could work not in the shadow, but for the nation. So we started to recruit people. At the time, we didn't say to the heart, we said to the pirate, who helped us understand. In France, it was the time when the undergrounds of the DST, the Baleno, recruited by General Guillaume, alias the Baleno. I was only there for the first year, I was only there for the second year, and then it was my turn until the 15th. I received all of them personally before, so I had to open the shopping centers, the profits I was looking for. I received the guys and I selected them according to the way of the mood. The more I laughed, the more serious it was for me. Because you have to be crazy to do that, you have to have fun. Every year we had a new Baleno, and every year, he could bring us something new. But they were the most vulnerable people. Others were proud of themselves, because they were trialed on the flight. The KGB did the same thing as we did, since they didn't have many doctors, they were just like Jesus, and they detected people who were actors, and they told them, listen, instead of having fun, I'll pay you a little more if you go and see such or such systems. The Americans didn't like it. In 1991, I'm on a TV show and I see an actor, a presenter called Jean Bernard Condat. I'm representing a group, and I recently was born, it's called the CAU, the computer club in France. And I see myself on the stage, who is in fact in a mess with the policemen who are also present. I want to know, can I enter the Ministry of Iraqi Defense? I want to know how many munitions they have currently in their stock. Here, page 629 of this show. Iraq, the Idaas network, I-D-A-S, managed by the association called BTC, the access code, zero to exit, 41.81 access codes. Then you search in the paragraph in front, I won't come to the number of the central computer of the BTC society, to whom you will ask the whole of the government, media... Okay, so pretty incredible, right? And this story has been told in bits and pieces by French journalists. I'm working with another French journalist to try to kind of uncover the fuller history, as well as tell the story of kind of American and European hackers who did not get recruited by intelligence, but who nevertheless came from the underground, because they were breaking into systems, not maliciously, but they learned a lot, and they had really valuable knowledge that no one else had. I mean, it's kind of really incredible, right? And, you know, this history, whether it's just the transformation of the underground into security hackers, or in the case of France, where some portion of people were tapped to work for intelligence, informally, formally, with pressure, right, has yet to be written. And there's many remarkable elements about this, but basically I do think it's remarkable that it's a bunch of kind of amateurs who just were obsessed with networks, who were the ones holding the special knowledge that was needed by corporations and intelligence in order to start securing systems, right? The other kind of really interesting thing is that some of the best underground, non-malicious hacker crews were European. TISO, which had a lot of Austrian and German members, ADM, which is from France, was considered to be the best at exploit writing, right? So the entry, which I'm going to write with a French journalist, is going to reflect on this, and this is actually a big project that I'm working on as well, so I'll have more to say about it later. All right, so going from the past to the present. I mean, I guess we couldn't talk geopolitics and hacking without talking about Trump, talking about Putin. A slew of politicians that we know in recent years have used the hacker for their own political discourse, for their somehow political gain, and this next video will show us just that. This is under our hacker depictions section. It was posted by a scholar named Marietta Bozovic. So without further ado, let's listen to the way in which Putin sees the hacker. Russia is not doing well. Maybe theoretically, but the most important thing is that I'm deeply convinced that no hackers can adversely influence the hunt for a election campaign in another country. But it's all right. It doesn't affect the consciousness of the voters, the consciousness of the people, it doesn't affect any information, and it doesn't affect the final result. So that's my answer. We don't take the state level. We don't do it, we don't plan to do it. On the contrary, we try to do it. In some ways, yes, it's true that hackers are artistic and creative, etc. They just don't wake up early in the morning. Exactly. Maybe they don't wake up early in the morning. But what's important, I think, in here, and this is also what Bozovic points out in her entry, is that he uses this, of course, for his political gain to show that he is not influencing any hackers or any technologists who maybe identify as hackers or not. Influencing them, and because they are so free and artistic and sort of living in their creative world, that they're beyond his control. So partially it's true, but partially he's employing this to make a political statement about his non-involvement with any sort of... And what's interesting is all evidence points to the fact that the technologists who did the hacking just work at intelligence organizations. So we just have one more video, and we want to end on a positive note. A lot of stuff around hackers is sometimes depressing, especially when it comes to the law. They get arrested, they get thrown in jail, they commit suicide. And so we want to showcase a video that covers British and Finnish hacker Laurie Love, who's presented here at the CCC. Some of you may know that he faced extradition to the United States due to his alleged involvement with anonymous operation called OP last resort, which was kind of in support of Aaron Schwartz, who had committed suicide when he was facing many criminal charges. And we'll watch a clip where parliamentarians and others debate his case. A young man with a Sperger's syndrome awaits extradition to the United States facing charges of computer hacking, and is then likely to kill himself. It sounds familiar. He's not, of course, Gary McKinnon, who was saved by the Prime Minister, but Laurie Love, who faces in effect a death sentence. So when the Prime Minister introduced the foreign bar to in her words provide greater safeguards for individuals, surely she expected it to protect the vulnerable, like Gary McKinnon, like Laurie Love. The Honourable Gentleman, my Honourable Friend, obviously campaigned long and hard for Gary McKinnon, and obviously I took that decision, because at that time it was a decision for the Home Secretary to decide whether there was a human rights case for an individual not to be extradited. We subsequently changed the legal position on that, so this is now a matter for the courts. There are certain parameters that the courts look at in terms of the extradition decision, and that is then passed to the Home Secretary, but it is for the courts to determine the human rights aspects of any case that comes forward. It was right, I think, to introduce the foreign bar to make sure that there was that challenge for cases here in the United Kingdom, as to whether they should be held here in the United Kingdom, but the legal process is very clear, and the Home Secretary is part of that legal process. Lenin Keika. Okay, so the author of the entry, Naomi Colvin, is right there in the front, and she has a great sentence which says, In Lori Love, the US had definitively chosen the wrong target, principled, passionate, and articulate, certainly more articulate than Teresa May herself in the clip, which accompanies this article, Love vs. USA would be one for the underdog, and it was Love 1, he's not being extradited, and in part it was also because Naomi Colvin was part of the team that stopped it, so let's thank Naomi as well. And it's just really important to document some of the wins every once in a while, so do check that out. So we are now going to wrap up so that there's going to be 10 minutes for Q&A, but a few final reflections about this project. Exactly, so I think these videos show actual hackers and hackings, and at a more meta level demonstrate how hackers have become central to our popular imagination, how hackers and hacking are one medium to think through digital cultures, to think through politics. I mean, we care about culture, we care about representing, digging deep, looking at various angles of a certain culture, and I think that's the purpose, or I see this as the purpose of Biela, mine, Chris's, and our friends' projects, is that we really want to take the work that we've been doing and really pay tribute to this really huge, diverse community that you are. On a more practical level, being a little less meta, we do hope that people assign HackKirio entries in their courses, you could use them in high school, you could use them in college classes, maybe you could even use them in middle school, elementary, I don't know if that will work, but get it out there, and also for some of you, I think it will be fun to look at different tidbits of hacker history, and when you're at home for the holidays before you come to the CCC and you're like, oh man, my parents, they don't really understand what I do, you can fire up a video that kind of represents what you do and fire up another video that represents what you don't do. Exactly, and have a discussion instead of talking about politics, yeah. And so this is our last slide, what next? The site is live, share it. Our Twitter address is up there, we consider this a soft launch. We have 42 entries, but we'll get some feedback and tweak things, send video suggestions, spread the word. And to end, before Q&A, we just really want to thank the CCC, we want to thank Lisa for having us here, this is really an amazing place to launch, and we also want to thank everyone who made this possible from funding to the authors to the entire HackKirio team, so thank you so much, and we're here for a little bit of Q&A. Yeah, thank you. Thanks a lot for this beautiful talk. We are now open for the question mics. If there's any questions from the audience, please just stand up to one of the mics. Don't be shy. Nobody's more interested in hacking culture? Are you overwhelmed? There's someone on mic one, please. Thank you for this talk and for the energy that was in your talk, it was just amazing. I have one question to ask, what were the surprising moments for you in this research journey? Okay, that's a good question. In terms of the project, collaborating with others and building a website is very different than what academics often do, where we do often have to rely on ourselves and we get feedback. I think it does give a sense of the really beautiful relations at form, where you go back and forth with an author, with a web developer. It really does give you a sense of the deep social ties. We do have academics, but I think it's much deeper with hackers, so that's one thing. I am frustrated as an academic, where a lot of people do have very, very, very narrow conceptions of hackers. It's not a perfect world and there's a lot which we can change. It was very clear also that as academics, we weren't necessarily changing perception so much. This project was an effort to finally do that. It's like, see them, stop listening or reading just my words, because obviously that's not really changing Jack. So come see some of the videos. Yeah, and I guess for me, if you work in your own little bubble and you work in your own little corner, just in any type of science, you don't see as much as what's going on up there. For me, the whole definition of what it is to hack, what a hacker actually is, you start really opening your eyes out when you see, wow, there's 50, 100 other scholars out there that actually think a hacker is this or a hacker is that. And I think for me, that opened my eyes out really to think, hey, wow, this is what you think it means. That's so interesting. Thank you. Now a question from Mike too, please. Hi, thank you for the talk. It was very enlightening. I have two questions. The first one would be, could you tell us maybe a bit more about the server and the infrastructure you're using or are you just linking YouTube videos? The second one would be, how would you envision future engagement with students? Because I'm teaching a course for computer science test undergrads and we did something similar around movies and descriptions that they have to make around hacker movies. And they don't really learn how to reflect on social issues a lot in their studies. So I wonder how this could be integrated into the platform and how you could engage students further. So great questions. I mean, first of all, for the website, it runs on WordPress. It just seemed like an easy way to hack it up for this sort of thing and we hired actually a master's student from my department at McGill University. Thanks Joel, you're awesome. And then we're hosting the videos on Vimeo and they come from all sorts of different places. That's actually not the best or the most ideal solution in so far as like, you know, who knows if Vimeo is going to exist in 15 years, right? Internet archive, we looked into them and they were kind of like psyched about it, but it was going to be slower to deliver the video, right? So maybe if the project grows, we can at a certain point host our own videos, right? But like we'll have to sort of graduate there at the next level. The entries are all going to be creative commons and we're using clips that then we cite the entire clip and where it came from. We consider this fair use for those that may be wondering. And so we'll see how that goes. And for the second, I guess I could take the second question. Whenever I mean my students are not their digital media students, they're not competing science. But if you ever even try to touch along something around culture or something maybe around social sciences, always I think ask how is power related, how do these people relate to power? How do they relate to critique? How do they use these tools to critique something? And I think all of these videos and maybe even the videos that your students chose, if they just ask that question, whether they're studying computing science, whether they're studying geography or whatever it is, if they look at it from a form of power and how it's contested, I think that that's a way in which they really can engage into a certain topic really deeply. There's a nice little text by Foucault that's called What is Critique? I use it for my students that are non-maybe cultural studies students or whatever. That's a nice little text that could be with that. Thank you. One more question from Mike too please. So thank you again. And I wanted to ask you because I looked at the videos on the side and I see a lot of stories of single people. And I'm quite surprised to find very little stories of communities and showcases of hacker spaces. A lot of researchers I've spoke about are actually focusing on how communities work. So was there any conscious decision that you want to tell singular people's, singular person's stories instead of communities? First of all, that's a great piece of feedback because one of the things as an anthropologist that I've always loved about the hacker world is on the one hand, people often talk about rights that are tied to notions of individualism, but hacking is so collectivist. I mean look at the CCC. I mean you can't have a better example of a kind of ritual collective, effervescent experience, hacker spaces, right? So I do think it's really important to try to showcase that. And we do have videos around hacker spaces and they're being written up like the authors are writing about them now. But if that's not coming through the sites, we actually need to, right? But it does show, I mean one of the problems with video, and we will reflect on this, is that on the one hand while you could put a face to hacking, which is great, it's like it's not the hooded person, video has its own limits, right? Often it's an individual. It's often what journalists are interested in. And we also have to make sure that this isn't the whole of hacking. And also at times use the video to tell a different story than what the video is showing. So I think that's a great comment and we're going to keep that in mind because to me the collectivist community part of hacking is one of the most amazing parts that never makes it into kind of mainstream representation. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Then we have a question from the internet first. Internet. Tell us. Hi. Talk to us. The question from the internet is when covering international scenes, are scenes like FRAC magazine use a source material? Is FRAC magazine a source? Yeah. I mean, FRAC magazine, remember the video that I showed around the fake French CCC? That is a larger project around how parts of the underground went pro and started doing security work. And FRAC is amazing. I mean, FRAC tells so much of that story. And what is also so interesting because I've done like almost 26 interviews, in-depth interviews around this. And like you'd expect in many hacker circles, there's a lot of diversity of opinions. And the one thing that people agree on was that like FRAC was awesome technically. And it brought very different types of people together. You know, FRAC hasn't come up in the video because it's one of these things that hasn't been documented, right? So much in documentaries or film. And again, it points to that problem, which is on the one hand, we're trying to show the faces of hacking. But we also have to make very, very clear that there's certain parts of hacker history that don't exist in video and don't take this as the definitive sort of word or record. No. Now the question from microphone two, please. Hi. I was wondering whether you plan to expand your categories if I didn't miss anything to something. For example, in my PhD, examples of hacking connected with biology, genetics, and digital fabrication, neurohacking, and so on. And also here at the CCC, there's a track dedicated to science that I think it's somehow related. Thanks. Great. Yeah, so if I can count correctly, I think we have 11 categories and we absolutely are expanding. And like biohacking is one that we want to include because actually, you know, hackers are like creating insulin in the context of the United States where insulin is ridiculously expensive. And some of the most important hacking, I think, is happening. So we're absolutely going to expand by a handful. We also don't want to go much more beyond 15 or 18. And one of the ways that we're also then handling that is that each entry comes with tags. And then there's going to be other groupings around tags. And certainly, I mean, what you've seen is live. It's live. It's live. But it's also very much beta. Yes, exactly. And if you've written also on this topic and you have an interesting video, please email us. Send it over. We'd be really interested to hear about your research. Yeah. And then we have another question on mic one, please. Thank you. My question is for Bella and it's about, would you say that your work with an on anonymous affected the way you engage with working with video after, after going deep into seeing how anonymous uses video as a medium to engage with the public as compared to other activist groups who are very less successful in that. That's great. I mean, that is definitely, you know, I on the one hand always use video in my class. And it's not just like hackers, you know, if I'm talking about Martin Luther King and something he said, I will show a video of what he said, because having me repeat it versus having MLK on the screen. And it's a lot more persuasive and we are in a moment where truth is not winning the game and we have to think about our game of persuasion. Right. That's just this is a kind of side project. But you're absolutely right. It was also anonymous who use so many videos, right, in a period where sure others had used videos, but it was groups like for example, in the media who turned 20 this year, who took videos of the world around us. Whereas anonymous created videos as a means for persuasion and it was very powerful at the time. And I am I am inspired to think about how can we think about persuasive mediums in all contexts in order to get our message out because again, we're not always winning in this regard. Truth can never speak on its own. Right. And we always need adjuncts and adjuvants in order to get truth message out there. And certainly it was anonymous in part that that helped me see the importance of video in a new way. So I'm really glad you mentioned that. Thank you. And then we have another question from the Internet. Yeah. And the next question from the Internet is how will you select the right curators for the entries and how do they decide how they are presented and contextualized? All right. So I mean, I've been working on hacker cultures for since 1998. Yeah. Mine is a journey has been a little bit shorter, but also for about 10 years. Yeah. And so I do. I know a lot of people working on different topics. And for the first round, we invited people. And it wasn't just academics. I've gotten journalists and have hackers are writing some entries as well. But they're just like a little bit harder to kind of get them to turn in their entries. And hopefully they will because again, it's not just who's been credentialed to talk about a topic. It's who knows about a topic, who has something to say and who's willing to go through the editing process. Because while journalists generally don't have to go through multiple edits because you all just really know how to write for the public, everyone else actually does struggle a little bit. And we do really try to get the entries written in such a way where we're presuming you know nothing about hackers or the video. It's not always easy then to write an entry that kind of starts from that low level. And then in terms of the contextualization, that's where we have three editors and curators. And I would actually even say four because our final editor, Matt Gorson, he was an MA student under me. He's doing a big project on security hacking with me at Dayton Society. He knows a ton. And it's precisely having many eyeballs on one entry that allows us to hopefully contextualize it properly. But you know, again, if something seems off, people should email us. And again, we're also open to responses from the community as well, which we have one response from Naomi, but you know, perhaps that will kind of grow into something larger. So when you ask why or why is it us that are curating or who's curating really, it's just a three of us that are doing this. And what kind of speech position are we coming from? I mean, we're anthropologists of hacker cultures. What does that mean? Maybe for you guys, it doesn't mean much or it means a lot or it's really, we've studied you guys for a long time. Yeah. But it's also cool because it's like, well, except for Paula, I mean, Chris and I, like, we have tenure and that may mean nothing to you all, but you know, hackers care about freedom and free speech. And tenure allows you to be free. I have tenure now. Oh, you do? Sweet. We all are free to kind of do what we want in interesting ways. And again, we're trying to experiment with mediums that go a little bit beyond the academic journal, which I'm totally behind. I think that there's really good things about the academic journal. I think there's really good things about the book, but we have the freedom to experiment with new mediums. And so hopefully this new medium will kind of reach different types of publics in a way that kind of academic journal articles will never reach. Are there any more questions? Party, party. Yeah, it's time. It looks like it. So I would like to invite you for another round of applause for Bella and Paula. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. You
 Music  The speakers that I have on stage today are both anthropologists and they are both experts on hacking culture  culture. Today, also they launched their website, hackcure.io, which is also the name of the  talk, Hack Curio, decoding the cultures of hacking one video at a time. I welcome Grab  Briella, Aka, Biela Coleman, and Pola Bielski. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Do you hear us? Good evening, CCC. It's so lovely to be here. We are super excited to stand before you here today and present a project we've been working on for the past year or so. That would not have been finished if it were not for this talk. Exactly. So thank you. Exactly. Thanks for forcing us to stand before you.  And get away from our desks. Let's drink some wine, have some 11.30pm discussion with you. And there's no better place to launch the project that we're going to show you than at the CCC. So we're super excited to be here. Let's start with the very basics. What is hack curio? What is it that you guys are going to see in the next hour or so? Hack Curio is a website featuring short video clips all related to computer hackers.  Now, a bit of a background. My name is Pola Bielski and I am a sociologist. I'm an ethnographer of hacker cultures. I study corporate hacker developers. And for those of you who don't know Biela Coleman, I'm an anthropologist. I also study computer hackers. And we, along with Chris Kelty, have helped to put this website together. Exactly. And in the past year, we've decided to come together and bring all sorts of clips from public talks, from documentaries, from Hollywood films, from  memes, advertising, all sorts of sources. We've brought together these videos that also come together with short descriptions by authors, by scholars, by journalists, by people who know something about hacker cultures. And we brought that together all in one place. So call it a museum, call it a compendium, call it a website. And it's a place to really pay homage to you guys.  Because hackers come in all shapes and sizes. What it means to hack might mean something to you, but might mean something very different to you. And we decided as anthropologists, we think it's very important to represent a certain culture in a certain way. We're not just hackers and hoodies. It's a really diverse culture.  So we're going to talk about that today.  Alright, so like how did this project come into being? Like why are we here? Why did we spend the last year doing this? Well, you know, first of all, it wasn't created, I didn't create it because I had this idea in mind. It was created because I started to collect videos for a reason. I'm a professor and I twice a week stand in front of students who are on the internet, on Facebook, maybe buying shoes.  And it's like really hard to get their attention. And you know what? I found using videos in class was an amazing way to get them off Facebook and paying attention to moi, to me. Right? So over the years, I just collected a lot of videos, right? Video after video after video after video.  And at a certain point, I was like, you know, I have this private collection, semi private collection that I use in class. Why don't I transform it into a public resource? And more so as someone who studied hackers for many years, why don't I kind of make it into a collaborative project?  Why don't I tap into the kind of expertise that exists among hackers and journalists and researchers and academics and draw them in? And so I decided to do that, right? And so about a year and a half ago, I brought together a couple of other people like Paula, Chris Kelty, who's another curator, and I said, like, let's get this going.  So when we were kind of fashioning the project, we were also thinking like, what are we trying to do with this project, right? You're not my students. I don't see you twice a week.  And so we came up with some goals and we don't know if we're going to achieve these goals. The site literally is going live like right now. But this is what we're trying to do with the project.  We're trying to chip away at some plastic conceptions and stereotypes of hackers. We know these exist. Can we chip away at them, right?  We want to offer new perspectives on what hackers have actually done and what they do.  A really important thing which Paula has already kind of mentioned is showcase the diversity of hacking, right? People who do blockchain and free software and security.  I mean, there's similarities, but there's also differences. Like, let's try to show this. And while this is not an archive, this is not the Internet Archive, we are trying to kind of preserve bits and bytes of hacker history.  So these are the four goals and we do feel that video, right, is a nice medium, a mechanism to achieve these four goals. It's persuasive. It's compelling. It's memorable. It's fun.  Like we like to waste time at work on video, right? So we're like, hey, let's add a little persuasive punch to text. And this is why we decided to do it this way.  Exactly. So what happens when you click on the site today and how is it organized? We want to show you a little bit of the actual architecture of the site itself.  So you can go, when you click on the website, you see certain categories. We've grouped the videos into different categories.  Because as you say, there's a huge diversity. So you can see here, Biela is lovely here pointing out the beautiful categories. We've got anti security hackers, blockchain hackers.  We've got free and open the software. We've got freaking. We've got hacker depictions. You can look at all sorts of different categories.  You go onto a category website and then you have a blurb about what this subculture of hacking is all about or what this category is.  Exactly. What the theme is. And then you have all sorts of little videos that last maybe 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes.  And under these videos, you would look at the video and then you would have a little bit of a blurb. It's not an essay. It's not a book.  It's not some boring academic text. It's supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be for your grandmothers to read.  It's supposed to be actually accessible and understandable. So you have the video and the actual text itself.  This is how it looks like. And this is maybe some sample of our content itself. What do we have?  We've got 42 entries at the moment, which we've collected from, as I said, various different academics with different authors.  And by the end of 220, we would love to have around 100 entries. And we'd try to publish around 50 or 20 entries a year.  After that. Because it's really brutally hard to edit academics.  Exactly. Exactly. And so we've got what you'll find. These are just some examples. We'll get into some really of the videos in just a moment.  But for example, you would look at hackers and engineers humming at the Internet Engineering Task Force.  Or you'd look at an entry that's about the programming legend of course, Grace Hopper being interviewed by a clue is David Letterman.  Maybe you guys have seen this video. A blockchain ad that people see it or you'd say it. You'd ask, is this real?  It's kind of a wacky ad. Or is it parody? And when you watch it, you have to know that it is actually quite real.  The actor Robert Redford showing off his mad social engineering skills with the help of cakes and balloons.  Or how to make sense of why Algerian hacker Hamza Ben Delage, addressed by US government, smiles and how many people from Algeria understand his grin.  So this kind of various diversity of really what hacking is really all about.  But we're here to get the video party started.  Exactly.  Finally.  So let's get it started. Yeah.  A little background.  Exactly.  Okay. So we'd, yes.  Yeah, you start.  You start.  All right. So we thought it would be a good idea to start with phone freaking because phone freaking really developed at the same time.  If not kind of before computer hacking.  And we're going to show Joey Bubbles, Joey Gressia, who is, you know, often considered to be the grandfather of phone freaking.  So let's go to a video.  Make their calls.  In the days when calls went through the operators, phone freaking wasn't possible.  But as human switchboards were replaced by mechanical systems, different noises were used to trigger the switches.  If you had perfect pitch like blind phone freak Joe and Gressia, you could whistle calls through the network.  Let's see if I make it this time.  This is really hard to do.  It sounded like all the tones were present.  So it should be ringing about now.  Okay. It hit the phone.  It just takes a little while.  He even showed off his skills for the local media.  Now, from his one phone to a town in Illinois and back to his other phone, a thousand mile phone call by Whistley.  Joe and Gressia.  All right. Very cool. Right.  So Joe and Gressia is featured and Joan Donovan, who is like a mad researcher at Harvard University, wrote a really awesome entry about that.  And, you know, of course, she emphasizes things like, you know, while hacking is often tied to computers, it's often tied to any system that you could understand, improve, fix, undermine.  And the freakers really showed that, right.  And of course, the history of phone freaking is about blind kids.  Not everyone who was a freak was blind, but many of them were.  They met each other in camp and kind of exchanged information.  And that was one of the ways in which phone freaking grew.  Phone freaking really grew as well when a big article in 1971 was published by Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire magazine.  Who here has read that article?  Has anyone?  It's incredible.  We mentioned, I think, in the piece.  Check it out.  Freaking freaking exploded after that article.  The spelling of freaking changed from capital F, freak, to pH because of that article.  Freaking also grew when blue boxes were created, right.  This is also something that Joan writes about in her entry.  One of the cool things that Joan writes about, and then I'm going to turn it over to Paul again, is that some freaks trained birds.  Okay.  It's a freaking freak.  Let's just leave it at that because that's freaking cool.  All right.  Okay.  Are you guys ready now to cringe?  We need a little bit of a cringing moment as well.  So without further ado, this is Steve Ballmer that would like to do some dancing.  From Microsoft.  Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Ballmer.  Come on.  Okay.  Yeah, that's right.  Can I just say one little thing?  There's a remix of this with goats screaming.  Like, look it up.  It's awesome.  I'll have it, exactly.  But why do we show Steve Ballmer the sort of like Godfather?  Exactly.  Kind of an anti-hacker of sorts.  I myself, an ethnographer who worked around corporate culture of software developers, aren't hackers per se.  But if you think of a figure like Steve Ballmer, a lot of you guys who perhaps identify with yourself as hackers, you have day jobs.  You go to work and you have to make some money in order to live and to work on your own projects.  And you often have to face sort of mini Steve Ballmer's at work.  And this is a quote that I have my own entry that I did right next to this video of Steve Ballmer.  Even Ballmer's unbridled display of exuberance is exceptional.  Many software developers still have to deal with mini Steve Ballmer's every day in their work.  We're sorry that you do, but if you do, you do.  Exactly.  So this exuberance is all about these sort of slogans of win big, save the world while building technology, be awesome, be true, whatever it is your corporate slogan is.  And there is, I think, in a way in which a software developer and sort of the hackers that work in their day jobs challenge this sort of really intense exuberance of wearing your corporate t-shirt and smiling every day  in a way in which you hack your daily projects, you work on your own private projects on the side.  You actually do have many acts of resistance in a way to this kind of loud, massive exuberance.  And I talk about these sort of sideline mini hacks that happen on an everyday corporate culture.  Check out her entry. It's really funny.  All right. So now we're going to a hacktivist.  So who here has heard of Phineas Fisher?  All right. Awesome. Just in case for those who are watching the video now or later, I'm going to give a little bit of background.  But I love this video about Phineas Fisher because he's explained what he or the group has done, but he also does kind of a very clever media hack.  So for those that don't know who Phineas Fisher is, he or the group is a hacktivist that claims to be inspired by anonymous Jeremy Hammond.  He's hacked into various corporations from Phineas Fisher to hacking team.  And what he did was take documents, take email, and then publish them.  And these were important in ways that I'll talk about in a moment.  He's donated, I think, stolen Bitcoin to the Rojova government.  And this fall, he published a manifesto kind of calling for public interest hacking and claims he would give $100,000 to anyone who does this.  So now I'm going to show the first, and I believe the only interview that he has done.  And he did this with Vice News a couple of years ago.  Let's do this.  These are the exact words from our live text exchange, voiced by one of my colleagues.  So why did you hack, hacking team?  Well, I just read the Citizen Lab reports on Phineas Fisher and hacking team and thought, that's fucked up.  And I hacked him.  What was the goal in hacking the hacking team data? Were you trying to stop them?  For the lulls? I don't really expect leaking data to stop a company, but hopefully it can at least set them back a bit and give some breathing room to the people being targeted with their software.  Okay, so this does not yet exist on HackKiria.  I have to write the entry, but because I was so busy getting the whole other site in preparation, I haven't done it, but it will happen in the next few weeks.  But what I love about this video is, first of all, he's like hacking media representations, right?  I mean, even when awesome journalists like Motherboard publish on hackers or other kind of entities, they still kind of use a masked hacker.  Even once they published about Phineas Fisher and they put like a mask on him.  And I was like, hackers have heat.  Like they don't need a mask, right?  And there is this sense where there's always a kind of demonic mask figure.  And he was like, okay, I'll do this interview, but you have to represent me as like a lovable, Muppet-like figure, right?  So he's there hacking the media.  But what's also really interesting, and do watch the full video, it's kind of amazing, is that, you know, he kind of claims, oh, I didn't have much of infect.  I don't think he could do anything.  But in fact, first of all, the information that was released really reaffirmed what people suspected.  For example, in the case of hacking team who was selling problematic exploits by way to dictatorial regimes, we really got a confirmation that this was happening.  And in fact, eventually, hacking team even lost their license, right?  So this was like a direct effect from what Phineas Fisher did.  So really, it's a kind of amazing video that showcases what he was doing, his reasoning, and then with a performance, literally, a puppet that hacked the media.  Okay, so now we're going to rewind a little bit and go back in time.  So a lot of hackers care about cryptography, right?  And ever since the cypherpunks, and since that period, there have been projects from Tor to Signal that have enabled cryptography that has been really important for human rights activists and others.  But one of the great, great kind of encryption projects came from this fellow, Tim Jenkins.  Who here in the room has heard of Tim Jenkins?  Okay, this is amazing.  This is why we're doing kind of hack-kirry-o.  So Tim Jenkins is from South Africa.  And beginning in 1988, secret messages were sent and received regularly across South Africa borders using an encrypted telematics system assembled during the final years of the South African liberation struggle.  And Tim Jenkins, along with Ronnie Press, who has since passed away, created the system.  And Tim Jenkins was kind of like a phone freak, and that was one of the reasons he was good at working with phones.  And what was amazing about this system, which was part of Operation Vula, was that it allowed people in South Africa to communicate with leaders in exile in London, right?  And Tim Jenkins created this system.  And we're going to show a video about it in a moment, and Sophie Tupin has written a terrific entry.  The reason why we have him with a key there was that, like, you know, the South African apartheid government did not really like Tim Jenkins, so they threw him in jail.  Well, a lot of hackers lockpick.  He actually created 10 wooden keys secretly in the wooden shop and broke out of jail.  And we can talk about, like, taking lockpicking to, like, another sort of level.  All right, so let's listen and see the video about this incredible program.  After we sent in the first computer, we expected things to start immediately, but it actually took a couple of weeks.  And then suddenly one day I was sitting at my desk and the telephone answering machine suddenly started worrying.  I thought, no, this must be just absolutely wrong number or something.  But then sure enough, I heard the distinctive tones of the messages and I could hear this thing coming through.  The tape word and word and word, and then it stopped and I loaded the message onto my computer.  In fact, it was a report from Mac.  And sure enough, there was our first message, absolutely perfect.  The fax machine.  Okay, so this is from the entry by Sophie Tupin, who is writing a dissertation on this topic.  The international hacker community has since taken notice of Tim Jenkins and the Vula and cryptic communication system that embodies so many qualities often associated with an exceptional hack.  Elegant, clever, usable and pragmatic, right?  Jenkins has been invited to speak at the Berlin-Logan symposium in 2016 and to the lockpicking communities in the Netherlands and the United States.  In 2018, the RSA security conference gave Jenkins the first award for excellence in humanitarian service.  So just like one last thing, this is a good reminder that histories of computer hacking are often skewed.  They often actually start with the United States, when for example in Europe with a CCC, that story has been told in bits and pieces,  but deserves a much longer or much larger showcase.  And actually, this example also shows that for example, the history of encryption when it comes to communication didn't even necessarily start in the United States, right?  And so it's really, really important to kind of showcase these histories that haven't been told elsewhere.  Exactly.  So maybe by now you're kind of getting at the fact that we see hacking as a diverse practice, hackers as a diverse group of people who do different things.  And at the moment, I want to come back to ways in which hackers challenge power through challenging really the very stereotype of what gender means,  then challenging really gender politics.  And it will turn to this topic by looking at an entry that a woman named Christina Dunbar-Hester has done on a woman named Naomi Cedar.  And some of you probably know Naomi Cedar.  This is part of her entry and she wrote, Naomi Cedar is a programmer and core participant in the Python programming language community.  As a trans identified person, Cedar grappled with whether she would have to give up everything in order to transition and whether the community would accept her for doing so.  So let's watch a clip of the video and let's see how Naomi Cedar challenged that.  And one thing she gave this talk at PyCon, the Python open-source developer conference.  And it's a really incredible talk.  I really encourage you to watch the whole talk, but this is the moment where she's like, do I have to leave the community?  Or can I transition in the community?  Exactly. So let's watch a tiny clip of that.  I decided that to do that would probably mean giving up everything.  Remember back at 13, I had absorbed this into my brain that the only way you were going to get out of this was to basically leave everything.  And this was a very painful thing to think about, but like a lot of trans people, I had come to the point where even if I lost everything, that was fine.  So I started to think about other alternatives here.  I had toyed with the idea of doing the education summit as a farewell thing to the community.  I would do it and then disappear, go into the trans witness protection program.  The only problem was I actually started accelerating the pace of my transition because, well, it was just such a freaking relief to start moving in that direction.  That that wouldn't work.  So I actually thought about what was for me, harking back to Leveron Cox, a very revolutionary idea.  What if I just did it and was open about it?  First thing I looked at, codes of conduct.  I looked for specifics.  What happens to me if there is a problem, if I am harassed?  This was important to me.  Other thing I did was I started telling a few people, Jesse Noller, Ava Yadloska, some people I would work with on PyCon, and they were all pretty cool with the idea.  And the more I talked about it, the more I decided that I would go ahead and take that chance.  So I did.  I started by teaching at some Python workshops for women.  I spoke at some conferences.  We went to PyCon.  It was good.  The education summit was fine.  Okay, some of the people I worked with in organizing it were a little bit confused when the names on the emails changed.  I apologize.  But in general, it went pretty well.  In fact, the more open I was, the easier it was for me because I didn't have to worry about being outed.  And it was easier for other people because they certainly knew what to expect.  The other interesting side light is that when I told people, they sometimes felt an obligation to share some deep dark secret about themselves.  I kind of trumped them and they had to answer back.  So my takeaway here is that we talk a lot about diversity and that's real.  So we should be ending on this point except that I'm a contrarian in my old age.  So it is not quite all rainbows and unicorns.  Or as you might put it, this is kind of common in social justice circles right now.  We don't get a cookie.  Exactly.  All right.  And yeah.  It's a very powerful play.  Exactly.  And I guess we could also say that the next step I want to show that after the entry by Christina Dunbar-Hester,  Naomi Cedar actually gave a response to this entry, which we've also published, which we also want to do.  We want to have a discussion between some of the responses to the actual entries themselves.  It's very powerful.  So we actually wanted to quote it in full.  Yeah, exactly.  So perhaps let's read this section from the response of Naomi Cedar.  PyCon itself has continued to evolve into an ever more diverse place with an ever stronger representation of queer folks,  people of color, people who speak different languages, et cetera.  Codes of conduct are nearly universal these days.  And more often than not, communities insist that they be well-crafted and meaningful and backed up by real enforcement.  Even in these retrograde times of official attacks on the rights of so many groups, we have come a long way.  But just as I said five years ago, it's still not all rainbows and unicorns.  Too many groups throughout the open source world globally are making only token efforts to foster inclusion.  And in my opinion, too many members of privileged groups tend to focus on superficial or cosmetic changes rather than addressing the underlying fundamental issues marginalized groups face.  It doesn't take a bit away from how far we've come to also acknowledge how much we still have to do in Naomi Cedar.  So this really part, we wanted to discuss this in the way in which hacking is also a practice of challenging power, challenging stereotypes,  and challenging really gender norms in many ways.  All right, let's move on.  All right, so the final frontier.  We have three more videos to show before we get to the Q&A.  In all videos relate to geopolitics and hacking.  You know, hacking has always been political in some fashion.  If for no other reason than sometimes laws are challenged or you're doing something that someone doesn't want you to do, right?  But there's only been certain moments where nation states have been interested in hacking,  or there have been sort of ways in which nation states have used hacking, for example, recently in order to kind of engage in international politics.  So we're going to kind of focus on these last, the last three videos will focus on these issues.  We're at the CCC, so of course I wanted to show a video related to CCC.  Unfortunately, I don't have one related to the German CCC, please do send good videos related to the CCC to me.  But I am going to show one related to the FCCC, established in Lyon by Jean Bernard Condat.  So do people know what the F stands for?  All right.  Okay, what's going on here?  What does it stand for?  French.  French.  Okay.  Once you see the video.  Hold on.  You will also see that it stands for fake and fuck as well.  Because basically the French chapter of the CCC was established in part to try to entrap hackers in order to kind of work for the French government.  It's a fascinating story that's been told in bits and pieces.  And I'm going to say a little bit more about it, but now I'm going to show a clip from a French documentary that kind of charts a little bit of that history.  It's in French with subtitles.  And quickly, the different teaching services have all tried to integrate the skills of these network users.  We arrived at 6am to arrive at a pavilion located in the province, around, and to knock on the door to say, here is the police, the purchasing, to have parents who will open our eyes.  And we say, my son, my son, but he never left his room, he's always in his room, etc.  In fact, it was a very pious pirate and he was younger.  So that means that we are to make a new population.  We are a little bit immune to this problem.  And we couldn't recruit people like that for the house.  On the other hand, why wouldn't we do the national service of people who are interested in the national service?  Of people who are well-known, who could work not in the shadow, but for the nation.  So we started to recruit people.  At the time, we didn't say to the heart, we said to the pirate, who helped us understand.  In France, it was the time when the undergrounds of the DST, the Baleno, recruited by General Guillaume, alias the Baleno.  I was only there for the first year, I was only there for the second year, and then it was my turn until the 15th.  I received all of them personally before, so I had to open the shopping centers, the profits I was looking for.  I received the guys and I selected them according to the way of the mood.  The more I laughed, the more serious it was for me.  Because you have to be crazy to do that, you have to have fun.  Every year we had a new Baleno, and every year, he could bring us something new.  But they were the most vulnerable people.  Others were proud of themselves, because they were trialed on the flight.  The KGB did the same thing as we did, since they didn't have many doctors,  they were just like Jesus, and they detected people who were actors, and they told them,  listen, instead of having fun, I'll pay you a little more if you go and see such or such systems.  The Americans didn't like it.  In 1991, I'm on a TV show and I see an actor, a presenter called Jean Bernard Condat.  I'm representing a group, and I recently was born, it's called the CAU, the computer club in France.  And I see myself on the stage, who is in fact in a mess with the policemen who are also present.  I want to know, can I enter the Ministry of Iraqi Defense?  I want to know how many munitions they have currently in their stock.  Here, page 629 of this show.  Iraq, the Idaas network, I-D-A-S, managed by the association called BTC,  the access code, zero to exit, 41.81 access codes.  Then you search in the paragraph in front, I won't come to the number of the central computer of the BTC society,  to whom you will ask the whole of the government, media...  Okay, so pretty incredible, right?  And this story has been told in bits and pieces by French journalists.  I'm working with another French journalist to try to kind of uncover the fuller history,  as well as tell the story of kind of American and European hackers who did not get recruited by intelligence,  but who nevertheless came from the underground, because they were breaking into systems,  not maliciously, but they learned a lot, and they had really valuable knowledge that no one else had.  I mean, it's kind of really incredible, right?  And, you know, this history, whether it's just the transformation of the underground into security hackers,  or in the case of France, where some portion of people were tapped to work for intelligence,  informally, formally, with pressure, right, has yet to be written.  And there's many remarkable elements about this, but basically I do think it's remarkable that it's a bunch of kind of amateurs  who just were obsessed with networks, who were the ones holding the special knowledge  that was needed by corporations and intelligence in order to start securing systems, right?  The other kind of really interesting thing is that some of the best underground, non-malicious hacker crews were European.  TISO, which had a lot of Austrian and German members, ADM, which is from France, was considered to be the best at exploit writing, right?  So the entry, which I'm going to write with a French journalist, is going to reflect on this,  and this is actually a big project that I'm working on as well, so I'll have more to say about it later.  All right, so going from the past to the present.  I mean, I guess we couldn't talk geopolitics and hacking without talking about Trump, talking about Putin.  A slew of politicians that we know in recent years have used the hacker for their own political discourse, for their somehow political gain,  and this next video will show us just that.  This is under our hacker depictions section.  It was posted by a scholar named Marietta Bozovic.  So without further ado, let's listen to the way in which Putin sees the hacker.  Russia is not doing well.  Maybe theoretically, but the most important thing is that I'm deeply convinced that no hackers can adversely influence the hunt for a election campaign in another country.  But it's all right.  It doesn't affect the consciousness of the voters, the consciousness of the people, it doesn't affect any information, and it doesn't affect the final result.  So that's my answer.  We don't take the state level. We don't do it, we don't plan to do it.  On the contrary, we try to do it.  In some ways, yes, it's true that hackers are artistic and creative, etc.  They just don't wake up early in the morning.  Exactly. Maybe they don't wake up early in the morning.  But what's important, I think, in here, and this is also what Bozovic points out in her entry, is that he uses this, of course, for his political gain to show that he is not influencing any hackers or any technologists who maybe identify as hackers or not.  Influencing them, and because they are so free and artistic and sort of living in their creative world, that they're beyond his control.  So partially it's true, but partially he's employing this to make a political statement about his non-involvement with any sort of...  And what's interesting is all evidence points to the fact that the technologists who did the hacking just work at intelligence organizations.  So we just have one more video, and we want to end on a positive note.  A lot of stuff around hackers is sometimes depressing, especially when it comes to the law.  They get arrested, they get thrown in jail, they commit suicide.  And so we want to showcase a video that covers British and Finnish hacker Laurie Love, who's presented here at the CCC.  Some of you may know that he faced extradition to the United States due to his alleged involvement with anonymous operation called OP last resort,  which was kind of in support of Aaron Schwartz, who had committed suicide when he was facing many criminal charges.  And we'll watch a clip where parliamentarians and others debate his case.  A young man with a Sperger's syndrome awaits extradition to the United States facing charges of computer hacking,  and is then likely to kill himself. It sounds familiar.  He's not, of course, Gary McKinnon, who was saved by the Prime Minister, but Laurie Love, who faces in effect a death sentence.  So when the Prime Minister introduced the foreign bar to in her words provide greater safeguards for individuals,  surely she expected it to protect the vulnerable, like Gary McKinnon, like Laurie Love.  The Honourable Gentleman, my Honourable Friend, obviously campaigned long and hard for Gary McKinnon, and obviously I took that decision,  because at that time it was a decision for the Home Secretary to decide whether there was a human rights case for an individual not to be extradited.  We subsequently changed the legal position on that, so this is now a matter for the courts.  There are certain parameters that the courts look at in terms of the extradition decision, and that is then passed to the Home Secretary,  but it is for the courts to determine the human rights aspects of any case that comes forward.  It was right, I think, to introduce the foreign bar to make sure that there was that challenge for cases here in the United Kingdom,  as to whether they should be held here in the United Kingdom, but the legal process is very clear, and the Home Secretary is part of that legal process.  Lenin Keika.  Okay, so the author of the entry, Naomi Colvin, is right there in the front, and she has a great sentence which says,  In Lori Love, the US had definitively chosen the wrong target, principled, passionate, and articulate, certainly more articulate than Teresa May herself in the clip, which accompanies this article, Love vs. USA would be one for the underdog, and it was Love 1, he's not being extradited,  and in part it was also because Naomi Colvin was part of the team that stopped it, so let's thank Naomi as well.  And it's just really important to document some of the wins every once in a while, so do check that out.  So we are now going to wrap up so that there's going to be 10 minutes for Q&A, but a few final reflections about this project.  Exactly, so I think these videos show actual hackers and hackings, and at a more meta level demonstrate how hackers have become central to our popular imagination,  how hackers and hacking are one medium to think through digital cultures, to think through politics. I mean, we care about culture, we care about representing, digging deep,  looking at various angles of a certain culture, and I think that's the purpose, or I see this as the purpose of Biela, mine, Chris's, and our friends' projects, is that we really want to take the work that we've been doing  and really pay tribute to this really huge, diverse community that you are.  On a more practical level, being a little less meta, we do hope that people assign HackKirio entries in their courses, you could use them in high school, you could use them in college classes,  maybe you could even use them in middle school, elementary, I don't know if that will work, but get it out there, and also for some of you, I think it will be fun to look at different tidbits of hacker history,  and when you're at home for the holidays before you come to the CCC and you're like, oh man, my parents, they don't really understand what I do,  you can fire up a video that kind of represents what you do and fire up another video that represents what you don't do.  Exactly, and have a discussion instead of talking about politics, yeah.  And so this is our last slide, what next? The site is live, share it. Our Twitter address is up there, we consider this a soft launch.  We have 42 entries, but we'll get some feedback and tweak things, send video suggestions, spread the word.  And to end, before Q&A, we just really want to thank the CCC, we want to thank Lisa for having us here, this is really an amazing place to launch,  and we also want to thank everyone who made this possible from funding to the authors to the entire HackKirio team, so thank you so much, and we're here for a little bit of Q&A.  Yeah, thank you.  Thanks a lot for this beautiful talk. We are now open for the question mics. If there's any questions from the audience, please just stand up to one of the mics.  Don't be shy.  Nobody's more interested in hacking culture? Are you overwhelmed?  There's someone on mic one, please.  Thank you for this talk and for the energy that was in your talk, it was just amazing.  I have one question to ask, what were the surprising moments for you in this research journey?  Okay, that's a good question.  In terms of the project, collaborating with others and building a website is very different than what academics often do, where we do often have to rely on ourselves and we get feedback.  I think it does give a sense of the really beautiful relations at form, where you go back and forth with an author, with a web developer.  It really does give you a sense of the deep social ties. We do have academics, but I think it's much deeper with hackers, so that's one thing.  I am frustrated as an academic, where a lot of people do have very, very, very narrow conceptions of hackers.  It's not a perfect world and there's a lot which we can change.  It was very clear also that as academics, we weren't necessarily changing perception so much.  This project was an effort to finally do that. It's like, see them, stop listening or reading just my words, because obviously that's not really changing Jack.  So come see some of the videos.  Yeah, and I guess for me, if you work in your own little bubble and you work in your own little corner, just in any type of science, you don't see as much as what's going on up there.  For me, the whole definition of what it is to hack, what a hacker actually is, you start really opening your eyes out when you see, wow, there's 50, 100 other scholars out there that actually think a hacker is this or a hacker is that.  And I think for me, that opened my eyes out really to think, hey, wow, this is what you think it means. That's so interesting.  Thank you. Now a question from Mike too, please.  Hi, thank you for the talk. It was very enlightening. I have two questions. The first one would be, could you tell us maybe a bit more about the server and the infrastructure you're using or are you just linking YouTube videos?  The second one would be, how would you envision future engagement with students? Because I'm teaching a course for computer science test undergrads and we did something similar around movies and descriptions that they have to make around hacker movies.  And they don't really learn how to reflect on social issues a lot in their studies. So I wonder how this could be integrated into the platform and how you could engage students further.  So great questions. I mean, first of all, for the website, it runs on WordPress. It just seemed like an easy way to hack it up for this sort of thing and we hired actually a master's student from my department at McGill University.  Thanks Joel, you're awesome.  And then we're hosting the videos on Vimeo and they come from all sorts of different places. That's actually not the best or the most ideal solution in so far as like, you know, who knows if Vimeo is going to exist in 15 years, right?  Internet archive, we looked into them and they were kind of like psyched about it, but it was going to be slower to deliver the video, right? So maybe if the project grows, we can at a certain point host our own videos, right?  But like we'll have to sort of graduate there at the next level. The entries are all going to be creative commons and we're using clips that then we cite the entire clip and where it came from.  We consider this fair use for those that may be wondering. And so we'll see how that goes.  And for the second, I guess I could take the second question. Whenever I mean my students are not their digital media students, they're not competing science. But if you ever even try to touch along something around culture or something maybe around social sciences,  always I think ask how is power related, how do these people relate to power? How do they relate to critique? How do they use these tools to critique something? And I think all of these videos and maybe even the videos that your students chose, if they just ask that question, whether they're studying  computing science, whether they're studying geography or whatever it is, if they look at it from a form of power and how it's contested, I think that that's a way in which they really can engage into a certain topic really deeply.  There's a nice little text by Foucault that's called What is Critique? I use it for my students that are non-maybe cultural studies students or whatever. That's a nice little text that could be with that.  Thank you. One more question from Mike too please.  So thank you again. And I wanted to ask you because I looked at the videos on the side and I see a lot of stories of single people. And I'm quite surprised to find very little stories of communities and showcases of hacker spaces.  A lot of researchers I've spoke about are actually focusing on how communities work. So was there any conscious decision that you want to tell singular people's, singular person's stories instead of communities?  First of all, that's a great piece of feedback because one of the things as an anthropologist that I've always loved about the hacker world is on the one hand, people often talk about rights that are tied to notions of individualism, but hacking is so collectivist.  I mean look at the CCC. I mean you can't have a better example of a kind of ritual collective, effervescent experience, hacker spaces, right? So I do think it's really important to try to showcase that.  And we do have videos around hacker spaces and they're being written up like the authors are writing about them now. But if that's not coming through the sites, we actually need to, right?  But it does show, I mean one of the problems with video, and we will reflect on this, is that on the one hand while you could put a face to hacking, which is great, it's like it's not the hooded person, video has its own limits, right?  Often it's an individual. It's often what journalists are interested in. And we also have to make sure that this isn't the whole of hacking.  And also at times use the video to tell a different story than what the video is showing. So I think that's a great comment and we're going to keep that in mind because to me the collectivist community part of hacking is one of the most amazing parts that never makes it into kind of mainstream representation.  That's great. Thank you.  Thank you.  Then we have a question from the internet first.  Internet.  Tell us.  Hi.  Talk to us.  The question from the internet is when covering international scenes, are scenes like FRAC magazine use a source material?  Is FRAC magazine a source?  Yeah.  I mean, FRAC magazine, remember the video that I showed around the fake French CCC? That is a larger project around how parts of the underground went pro and started doing security work.  And FRAC is amazing. I mean, FRAC tells so much of that story. And what is also so interesting because I've done like almost 26 interviews, in-depth interviews around this.  And like you'd expect in many hacker circles, there's a lot of diversity of opinions.  And the one thing that people agree on was that like FRAC was awesome technically.  And it brought very different types of people together.  You know, FRAC hasn't come up in the video because it's one of these things that hasn't been documented, right?  So much in documentaries or film. And again, it points to that problem, which is on the one hand, we're trying to show the faces of hacking.  But we also have to make very, very clear that there's certain parts of hacker history that don't exist in video and don't take this as the definitive sort of word or record.  No.  Now the question from microphone two, please.  Hi.  I was wondering whether you plan to expand your categories if I didn't miss anything to something.  For example, in my PhD, examples of hacking connected with biology, genetics, and digital fabrication, neurohacking, and so on.  And also here at the CCC, there's a track dedicated to science that I think it's somehow related. Thanks.  Great. Yeah, so if I can count correctly, I think we have 11 categories and we absolutely are expanding.  And like biohacking is one that we want to include because actually, you know, hackers are like creating insulin in the context of the United States where insulin is ridiculously expensive.  And some of the most important hacking, I think, is happening.  So we're absolutely going to expand by a handful.  We also don't want to go much more beyond 15 or 18.  And one of the ways that we're also then handling that is that each entry comes with tags.  And then there's going to be other groupings around tags.  And certainly, I mean, what you've seen is live. It's live. It's live. But it's also very much beta.  Yes, exactly. And if you've written also on this topic and you have an interesting video, please email us.  Send it over.  We'd be really interested to hear about your research.  Yeah.  And then we have another question on mic one, please.  Thank you.  My question is for Bella and it's about, would you say that your work with an on anonymous affected the way you engage with working with video after, after going deep into seeing how anonymous uses video as a medium to engage with the public as compared to other activist groups who are very less successful in that.  That's great. I mean, that is definitely, you know, I on the one hand always use video in my class.  And it's not just like hackers, you know, if I'm talking about Martin Luther King and something he said, I will show a video of what he said, because having me repeat it versus having MLK on the screen.  And it's a lot more persuasive and we are in a moment where truth is not winning the game and we have to think about our game of persuasion. Right. That's just this is a kind of side project.  But you're absolutely right. It was also anonymous who use so many videos, right, in a period where sure others had used videos, but it was groups like for example, in the media who turned 20 this year, who took videos of the world around us.  Whereas anonymous created videos as a means for persuasion and it was very powerful at the time. And I am I am inspired to think about how can we think about persuasive mediums in all contexts in order to get our message out because again, we're not always winning in this regard.  Truth can never speak on its own. Right. And we always need adjuncts and adjuvants in order to get truth message out there. And certainly it was anonymous in part that that helped me see the importance of video in a new way.  So I'm really glad you mentioned that.  Thank you. And then we have another question from the Internet.  Yeah. And the next question from the Internet is how will you select the right curators for the entries and how do they decide how they are presented and contextualized?  All right. So I mean, I've been working on hacker cultures for since 1998.  Yeah. Mine is a journey has been a little bit shorter, but also for about 10 years.  Yeah. And so I do. I know a lot of people working on different topics. And for the first round, we invited people.  And it wasn't just academics. I've gotten journalists and have hackers are writing some entries as well. But they're just like a little bit harder to kind of get them to turn in their entries.  And hopefully they will because again, it's not just who's been credentialed to talk about a topic. It's who knows about a topic, who has something to say and who's willing to go through the editing process.  Because while journalists generally don't have to go through multiple edits because you all just really know how to write for the public, everyone else actually does struggle a little bit.  And we do really try to get the entries written in such a way where we're presuming you know nothing about hackers or the video.  It's not always easy then to write an entry that kind of starts from that low level. And then in terms of the contextualization, that's where we have three editors and curators.  And I would actually even say four because our final editor, Matt Gorson, he was an MA student under me. He's doing a big project on security hacking with me at Dayton Society.  He knows a ton. And it's precisely having many eyeballs on one entry that allows us to hopefully contextualize it properly.  But you know, again, if something seems off, people should email us. And again, we're also open to responses from the community as well, which we have one response from Naomi, but you know, perhaps that will kind of grow into something larger.  So when you ask why or why is it us that are curating or who's curating really, it's just a three of us that are doing this.  And what kind of speech position are we coming from? I mean, we're anthropologists of hacker cultures. What does that mean? Maybe for you guys, it doesn't mean much or it means a lot or it's really, we've studied you guys for a long time.  Yeah. But it's also cool because it's like, well, except for Paula, I mean, Chris and I, like, we have tenure and that may mean nothing to you all, but you know, hackers care about freedom and free speech.  And tenure allows you to be free. I have tenure now. Oh, you do? Sweet. We all are free to kind of do what we want in interesting ways.  And again, we're trying to experiment with mediums that go a little bit beyond the academic journal, which I'm totally behind. I think that there's really good things about the academic journal.  I think there's really good things about the book, but we have the freedom to experiment with new mediums. And so hopefully this new medium will kind of reach different types of publics in a way that kind of academic journal articles will never reach.  Are there any more questions? Party, party.  Yeah, it's time. It looks like it. So I would like to invite you for another round of applause for Bella and Paula. Thank you guys. Thank you so much.  You
36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_0_1031.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_1032_1715.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_1716_2087.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_2088_4367.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_4368_4571.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_4572_4619.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_4620_4883.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_4884_5399.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_5400_5543.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_5544_5927.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_5928_8471.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_8472_8795.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_8796_12767.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_12768_13283.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_13284_16319.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_16320_16427.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_16428_17375.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_17376_20303.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_20304_20447.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_20448_20891.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_20892_23639.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_23640_24383.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_24384_25055.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_25056_32423.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_32424_32975.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_32976_42167.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_42168_42287.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_42288_42731.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_42732_42779.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_42780_42851.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_42852_43091.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_43092_47555.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_47556_48563.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_48564_48623.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_48624_48803.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_48804_48851.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_48852_49283.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_49284_50387.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_50388_50663.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_50664_52667.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_52668_52775.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_52776_54059.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_54060_54143.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_54144_54251.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_54252_54935.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_54936_55619.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_55620_57851.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_57852_58091.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_58092_58679.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_58680_58979.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_58980_59219.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_59220_59759.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_59760_62519.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_62520_66383.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_66384_70619.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_70620_70931.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_70932_72503.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_72504_78995.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_78996_87563.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_87564_87719.png 36c3-10875-eng-deu-Hack_Curio_hd_87720_88300.png
Music The speakers that I have on stage today are both anthropologists and they are both experts on hacking culture culture. Today, also they launched their website, hackcure.io, which is also the name of the talk, Hack Curio, decoding the cultures of hacking one video at a time. I welcome Grab Briella, Aka, Biela Coleman, and Pola Bielski. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Do you hear us? Good evening, CCC. It's so lovely to be here. We are super excited to stand before you here today and present a project we've been working on for the past year or so. That would not have been finished if it were not for this talk. Exactly. So thank you. Exactly. Thanks for forcing us to stand before you. And get away from our desks. Let's drink some wine, have some 11.30pm discussion with you. And there's no better place to launch the project that we're going to show you than at the CCC. So we're super excited to be here. Let's start with the very basics. What is hack curio? What is it that you guys are going to see in the next hour or so? Hack Curio is a website featuring short video clips all related to computer hackers. Now, a bit of a background. My name is Pola Bielski and I am a sociologist. I'm an ethnographer of hacker cultures. I study corporate hacker developers. And for those of you who don't know Biela Coleman, I'm an anthropologist. I also study computer hackers. And we, along with Chris Kelty, have helped to put this website together. Exactly. And in the past year, we've decided to come together and bring all sorts of clips from public talks, from documentaries, from Hollywood films, from memes, advertising, all sorts of sources. We've brought together these videos that also come together with short descriptions by authors, by scholars, by journalists, by people who know something about hacker cultures. And we brought that together all in one place. So call it a museum, call it a compendium, call it a website. And it's a place to really pay homage to you guys. Because hackers come in all shapes and sizes. What it means to hack might mean something to you, but might mean something very different to you. And we decided as anthropologists, we think it's very important to represent a certain culture in a certain way. We're not just hackers and hoodies. It's a really diverse culture. So we're going to talk about that today. Alright, so like how did this project come into being? Like why are we here? Why did we spend the last year doing this? Well, you know, first of all, it wasn't created, I didn't create it because I had this idea in mind. It was created because I started to collect videos for a reason. I'm a professor and I twice a week stand in front of students who are on the internet, on Facebook, maybe buying shoes. And it's like really hard to get their attention. And you know what? I found using videos in class was an amazing way to get them off Facebook and paying attention to moi, to me. Right? So over the years, I just collected a lot of videos, right? Video after video after video after video. And at a certain point, I was like, you know, I have this private collection, semi private collection that I use in class. Why don't I transform it into a public resource? And more so as someone who studied hackers for many years, why don't I kind of make it into a collaborative project? Why don't I tap into the kind of expertise that exists among hackers and journalists and researchers and academics and draw them in? And so I decided to do that, right? And so about a year and a half ago, I brought together a couple of other people like Paula, Chris Kelty, who's another curator, and I said, like, let's get this going. So when we were kind of fashioning the project, we were also thinking like, what are we trying to do with this project, right? You're not my students. I don't see you twice a week. And so we came up with some goals and we don't know if we're going to achieve these goals. The site literally is going live like right now. But this is what we're trying to do with the project. We're trying to chip away at some plastic conceptions and stereotypes of hackers. We know these exist. Can we chip away at them, right? We want to offer new perspectives on what hackers have actually done and what they do. A really important thing which Paula has already kind of mentioned is showcase the diversity of hacking, right? People who do blockchain and free software and security. I mean, there's similarities, but there's also differences. Like, let's try to show this. And while this is not an archive, this is not the Internet Archive, we are trying to kind of preserve bits and bytes of hacker history. So these are the four goals and we do feel that video, right, is a nice medium, a mechanism to achieve these four goals. It's persuasive. It's compelling. It's memorable. It's fun. Like we like to waste time at work on video, right? So we're like, hey, let's add a little persuasive punch to text. And this is why we decided to do it this way. Exactly. So what happens when you click on the site today and how is it organized? We want to show you a little bit of the actual architecture of the site itself. So you can go, when you click on the website, you see certain categories. We've grouped the videos into different categories. Because as you say, there's a huge diversity. So you can see here, Biela is lovely here pointing out the beautiful categories. We've got anti security hackers, blockchain hackers. We've got free and open the software. We've got freaking. We've got hacker depictions. You can look at all sorts of different categories. You go onto a category website and then you have a blurb about what this subculture of hacking is all about or what this category is. Exactly. What the theme is. And then you have all sorts of little videos that last maybe 30 seconds, maybe a few minutes. And under these videos, you would look at the video and then you would have a little bit of a blurb. It's not an essay. It's not a book. It's not some boring academic text. It's supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be for your grandmothers to read. It's supposed to be actually accessible and understandable. So you have the video and the actual text itself. This is how it looks like. And this is maybe some sample of our content itself. What do we have? We've got 42 entries at the moment, which we've collected from, as I said, various different academics with different authors. And by the end of 220, we would love to have around 100 entries. And we'd try to publish around 50 or 20 entries a year. After that. Because it's really brutally hard to edit academics. Exactly. Exactly. And so we've got what you'll find. These are just some examples. We'll get into some really of the videos in just a moment. But for example, you would look at hackers and engineers humming at the Internet Engineering Task Force. Or you'd look at an entry that's about the programming legend of course, Grace Hopper being interviewed by a clue is David Letterman. Maybe you guys have seen this video. A blockchain ad that people see it or you'd say it. You'd ask, is this real? It's kind of a wacky ad. Or is it parody? And when you watch it, you have to know that it is actually quite real. The actor Robert Redford showing off his mad social engineering skills with the help of cakes and balloons. Or how to make sense of why Algerian hacker Hamza Ben Delage, addressed by US government, smiles and how many people from Algeria understand his grin. So this kind of various diversity of really what hacking is really all about. But we're here to get the video party started. Exactly. Finally. So let's get it started. Yeah. A little background. Exactly. Okay. So we'd, yes. Yeah, you start. You start. All right. So we thought it would be a good idea to start with phone freaking because phone freaking really developed at the same time. If not kind of before computer hacking. And we're going to show Joey Bubbles, Joey Gressia, who is, you know, often considered to be the grandfather of phone freaking. So let's go to a video. Make their calls. In the days when calls went through the operators, phone freaking wasn't possible. But as human switchboards were replaced by mechanical systems, different noises were used to trigger the switches. If you had perfect pitch like blind phone freak Joe and Gressia, you could whistle calls through the network. Let's see if I make it this time. This is really hard to do. It sounded like all the tones were present. So it should be ringing about now. Okay. It hit the phone. It just takes a little while. He even showed off his skills for the local media. Now, from his one phone to a town in Illinois and back to his other phone, a thousand mile phone call by Whistley. Joe and Gressia. All right. Very cool. Right. So Joe and Gressia is featured and Joan Donovan, who is like a mad researcher at Harvard University, wrote a really awesome entry about that. And, you know, of course, she emphasizes things like, you know, while hacking is often tied to computers, it's often tied to any system that you could understand, improve, fix, undermine. And the freakers really showed that, right. And of course, the history of phone freaking is about blind kids. Not everyone who was a freak was blind, but many of them were. They met each other in camp and kind of exchanged information. And that was one of the ways in which phone freaking grew. Phone freaking really grew as well when a big article in 1971 was published by Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire magazine. Who here has read that article? Has anyone? It's incredible. We mentioned, I think, in the piece. Check it out. Freaking freaking exploded after that article. The spelling of freaking changed from capital F, freak, to pH because of that article. Freaking also grew when blue boxes were created, right. This is also something that Joan writes about in her entry. One of the cool things that Joan writes about, and then I'm going to turn it over to Paul again, is that some freaks trained birds. Okay. It's a freaking freak. Let's just leave it at that because that's freaking cool. All right. Okay. Are you guys ready now to cringe? We need a little bit of a cringing moment as well. So without further ado, this is Steve Ballmer that would like to do some dancing. From Microsoft. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Ballmer. Come on. Okay. Yeah, that's right. Can I just say one little thing? There's a remix of this with goats screaming. Like, look it up. It's awesome. I'll have it, exactly. But why do we show Steve Ballmer the sort of like Godfather? Exactly. Kind of an anti-hacker of sorts. I myself, an ethnographer who worked around corporate culture of software developers, aren't hackers per se. But if you think of a figure like Steve Ballmer, a lot of you guys who perhaps identify with yourself as hackers, you have day jobs. You go to work and you have to make some money in order to live and to work on your own projects. And you often have to face sort of mini Steve Ballmer's at work. And this is a quote that I have my own entry that I did right next to this video of Steve Ballmer. Even Ballmer's unbridled display of exuberance is exceptional. Many software developers still have to deal with mini Steve Ballmer's every day in their work. We're sorry that you do, but if you do, you do. Exactly. So this exuberance is all about these sort of slogans of win big, save the world while building technology, be awesome, be true, whatever it is your corporate slogan is. And there is, I think, in a way in which a software developer and sort of the hackers that work in their day jobs challenge this sort of really intense exuberance of wearing your corporate t-shirt and smiling every day in a way in which you hack your daily projects, you work on your own private projects on the side. You actually do have many acts of resistance in a way to this kind of loud, massive exuberance. And I talk about these sort of sideline mini hacks that happen on an everyday corporate culture. Check out her entry. It's really funny. All right. So now we're going to a hacktivist. So who here has heard of Phineas Fisher? All right. Awesome. Just in case for those who are watching the video now or later, I'm going to give a little bit of background. But I love this video about Phineas Fisher because he's explained what he or the group has done, but he also does kind of a very clever media hack. So for those that don't know who Phineas Fisher is, he or the group is a hacktivist that claims to be inspired by anonymous Jeremy Hammond. He's hacked into various corporations from Phineas Fisher to hacking team. And what he did was take documents, take email, and then publish them. And these were important in ways that I'll talk about in a moment. He's donated, I think, stolen Bitcoin to the Rojova government. And this fall, he published a manifesto kind of calling for public interest hacking and claims he would give $100,000 to anyone who does this. So now I'm going to show the first, and I believe the only interview that he has done. And he did this with Vice News a couple of years ago. Let's do this. These are the exact words from our live text exchange, voiced by one of my colleagues. So why did you hack, hacking team? Well, I just read the Citizen Lab reports on Phineas Fisher and hacking team and thought, that's fucked up. And I hacked him. What was the goal in hacking the hacking team data? Were you trying to stop them? For the lulls? I don't really expect leaking data to stop a company, but hopefully it can at least set them back a bit and give some breathing room to the people being targeted with their software. Okay, so this does not yet exist on HackKiria. I have to write the entry, but because I was so busy getting the whole other site in preparation, I haven't done it, but it will happen in the next few weeks. But what I love about this video is, first of all, he's like hacking media representations, right? I mean, even when awesome journalists like Motherboard publish on hackers or other kind of entities, they still kind of use a masked hacker. Even once they published about Phineas Fisher and they put like a mask on him. And I was like, hackers have heat. Like they don't need a mask, right? And there is this sense where there's always a kind of demonic mask figure. And he was like, okay, I'll do this interview, but you have to represent me as like a lovable, Muppet-like figure, right? So he's there hacking the media. But what's also really interesting, and do watch the full video, it's kind of amazing, is that, you know, he kind of claims, oh, I didn't have much of infect. I don't think he could do anything. But in fact, first of all, the information that was released really reaffirmed what people suspected. For example, in the case of hacking team who was selling problematic exploits by way to dictatorial regimes, we really got a confirmation that this was happening. And in fact, eventually, hacking team even lost their license, right? So this was like a direct effect from what Phineas Fisher did. So really, it's a kind of amazing video that showcases what he was doing, his reasoning, and then with a performance, literally, a puppet that hacked the media. Okay, so now we're going to rewind a little bit and go back in time. So a lot of hackers care about cryptography, right? And ever since the cypherpunks, and since that period, there have been projects from Tor to Signal that have enabled cryptography that has been really important for human rights activists and others. But one of the great, great kind of encryption projects came from this fellow, Tim Jenkins. Who here in the room has heard of Tim Jenkins? Okay, this is amazing. This is why we're doing kind of hack-kirry-o. So Tim Jenkins is from South Africa. And beginning in 1988, secret messages were sent and received regularly across South Africa borders using an encrypted telematics system assembled during the final years of the South African liberation struggle. And Tim Jenkins, along with Ronnie Press, who has since passed away, created the system. And Tim Jenkins was kind of like a phone freak, and that was one of the reasons he was good at working with phones. And what was amazing about this system, which was part of Operation Vula, was that it allowed people in South Africa to communicate with leaders in exile in London, right? And Tim Jenkins created this system. And we're going to show a video about it in a moment, and Sophie Tupin has written a terrific entry. The reason why we have him with a key there was that, like, you know, the South African apartheid government did not really like Tim Jenkins, so they threw him in jail. Well, a lot of hackers lockpick. He actually created 10 wooden keys secretly in the wooden shop and broke out of jail. And we can talk about, like, taking lockpicking to, like, another sort of level. All right, so let's listen and see the video about this incredible program. After we sent in the first computer, we expected things to start immediately, but it actually took a couple of weeks. And then suddenly one day I was sitting at my desk and the telephone answering machine suddenly started worrying. I thought, no, this must be just absolutely wrong number or something. But then sure enough, I heard the distinctive tones of the messages and I could hear this thing coming through. The tape word and word and word, and then it stopped and I loaded the message onto my computer. In fact, it was a report from Mac. And sure enough, there was our first message, absolutely perfect. The fax machine. Okay, so this is from the entry by Sophie Tupin, who is writing a dissertation on this topic. The international hacker community has since taken notice of Tim Jenkins and the Vula and cryptic communication system that embodies so many qualities often associated with an exceptional hack. Elegant, clever, usable and pragmatic, right? Jenkins has been invited to speak at the Berlin-Logan symposium in 2016 and to the lockpicking communities in the Netherlands and the United States. In 2018, the RSA security conference gave Jenkins the first award for excellence in humanitarian service. So just like one last thing, this is a good reminder that histories of computer hacking are often skewed. They often actually start with the United States, when for example in Europe with a CCC, that story has been told in bits and pieces, but deserves a much longer or much larger showcase. And actually, this example also shows that for example, the history of encryption when it comes to communication didn't even necessarily start in the United States, right? And so it's really, really important to kind of showcase these histories that haven't been told elsewhere. Exactly. So maybe by now you're kind of getting at the fact that we see hacking as a diverse practice, hackers as a diverse group of people who do different things. And at the moment, I want to come back to ways in which hackers challenge power through challenging really the very stereotype of what gender means, then challenging really gender politics. And it will turn to this topic by looking at an entry that a woman named Christina Dunbar-Hester has done on a woman named Naomi Cedar. And some of you probably know Naomi Cedar. This is part of her entry and she wrote, Naomi Cedar is a programmer and core participant in the Python programming language community. As a trans identified person, Cedar grappled with whether she would have to give up everything in order to transition and whether the community would accept her for doing so. So let's watch a clip of the video and let's see how Naomi Cedar challenged that. And one thing she gave this talk at PyCon, the Python open-source developer conference. And it's a really incredible talk. I really encourage you to watch the whole talk, but this is the moment where she's like, do I have to leave the community? Or can I transition in the community? Exactly. So let's watch a tiny clip of that. I decided that to do that would probably mean giving up everything. Remember back at 13, I had absorbed this into my brain that the only way you were going to get out of this was to basically leave everything. And this was a very painful thing to think about, but like a lot of trans people, I had come to the point where even if I lost everything, that was fine. So I started to think about other alternatives here. I had toyed with the idea of doing the education summit as a farewell thing to the community. I would do it and then disappear, go into the trans witness protection program. The only problem was I actually started accelerating the pace of my transition because, well, it was just such a freaking relief to start moving in that direction. That that wouldn't work. So I actually thought about what was for me, harking back to Leveron Cox, a very revolutionary idea. What if I just did it and was open about it? First thing I looked at, codes of conduct. I looked for specifics. What happens to me if there is a problem, if I am harassed? This was important to me. Other thing I did was I started telling a few people, Jesse Noller, Ava Yadloska, some people I would work with on PyCon, and they were all pretty cool with the idea. And the more I talked about it, the more I decided that I would go ahead and take that chance. So I did. I started by teaching at some Python workshops for women. I spoke at some conferences. We went to PyCon. It was good. The education summit was fine. Okay, some of the people I worked with in organizing it were a little bit confused when the names on the emails changed. I apologize. But in general, it went pretty well. In fact, the more open I was, the easier it was for me because I didn't have to worry about being outed. And it was easier for other people because they certainly knew what to expect. The other interesting side light is that when I told people, they sometimes felt an obligation to share some deep dark secret about themselves. I kind of trumped them and they had to answer back. So my takeaway here is that we talk a lot about diversity and that's real. So we should be ending on this point except that I'm a contrarian in my old age. So it is not quite all rainbows and unicorns. Or as you might put it, this is kind of common in social justice circles right now. We don't get a cookie. Exactly. All right. And yeah. It's a very powerful play. Exactly. And I guess we could also say that the next step I want to show that after the entry by Christina Dunbar-Hester, Naomi Cedar actually gave a response to this entry, which we've also published, which we also want to do. We want to have a discussion between some of the responses to the actual entries themselves. It's very powerful. So we actually wanted to quote it in full. Yeah, exactly. So perhaps let's read this section from the response of Naomi Cedar. PyCon itself has continued to evolve into an ever more diverse place with an ever stronger representation of queer folks, people of color, people who speak different languages, et cetera. Codes of conduct are nearly universal these days. And more often than not, communities insist that they be well-crafted and meaningful and backed up by real enforcement. Even in these retrograde times of official attacks on the rights of so many groups, we have come a long way. But just as I said five years ago, it's still not all rainbows and unicorns. Too many groups throughout the open source world globally are making only token efforts to foster inclusion. And in my opinion, too many members of privileged groups tend to focus on superficial or cosmetic changes rather than addressing the underlying fundamental issues marginalized groups face. It doesn't take a bit away from how far we've come to also acknowledge how much we still have to do in Naomi Cedar. So this really part, we wanted to discuss this in the way in which hacking is also a practice of challenging power, challenging stereotypes, and challenging really gender norms in many ways. All right, let's move on. All right, so the final frontier. We have three more videos to show before we get to the Q&A. In all videos relate to geopolitics and hacking. You know, hacking has always been political in some fashion. If for no other reason than sometimes laws are challenged or you're doing something that someone doesn't want you to do, right? But there's only been certain moments where nation states have been interested in hacking, or there have been sort of ways in which nation states have used hacking, for example, recently in order to kind of engage in international politics. So we're going to kind of focus on these last, the last three videos will focus on these issues. We're at the CCC, so of course I wanted to show a video related to CCC. Unfortunately, I don't have one related to the German CCC, please do send good videos related to the CCC to me. But I am going to show one related to the FCCC, established in Lyon by Jean Bernard Condat. So do people know what the F stands for? All right. Okay, what's going on here? What does it stand for? French. French. Okay. Once you see the video. Hold on. You will also see that it stands for fake and fuck as well. Because basically the French chapter of the CCC was established in part to try to entrap hackers in order to kind of work for the French government. It's a fascinating story that's been told in bits and pieces. And I'm going to say a little bit more about it, but now I'm going to show a clip from a French documentary that kind of charts a little bit of that history. It's in French with subtitles. And quickly, the different teaching services have all tried to integrate the skills of these network users. We arrived at 6am to arrive at a pavilion located in the province, around, and to knock on the door to say, here is the police, the purchasing, to have parents who will open our eyes. And we say, my son, my son, but he never left his room, he's always in his room, etc. In fact, it was a very pious pirate and he was younger. So that means that we are to make a new population. We are a little bit immune to this problem. And we couldn't recruit people like that for the house. On the other hand, why wouldn't we do the national service of people who are interested in the national service? Of people who are well-known, who could work not in the shadow, but for the nation. So we started to recruit people. At the time, we didn't say to the heart, we said to the pirate, who helped us understand. In France, it was the time when the undergrounds of the DST, the Baleno, recruited by General Guillaume, alias the Baleno. I was only there for the first year, I was only there for the second year, and then it was my turn until the 15th. I received all of them personally before, so I had to open the shopping centers, the profits I was looking for. I received the guys and I selected them according to the way of the mood. The more I laughed, the more serious it was for me. Because you have to be crazy to do that, you have to have fun. Every year we had a new Baleno, and every year, he could bring us something new. But they were the most vulnerable people. Others were proud of themselves, because they were trialed on the flight. The KGB did the same thing as we did, since they didn't have many doctors, they were just like Jesus, and they detected people who were actors, and they told them, listen, instead of having fun, I'll pay you a little more if you go and see such or such systems. The Americans didn't like it. In 1991, I'm on a TV show and I see an actor, a presenter called Jean Bernard Condat. I'm representing a group, and I recently was born, it's called the CAU, the computer club in France. And I see myself on the stage, who is in fact in a mess with the policemen who are also present. I want to know, can I enter the Ministry of Iraqi Defense? I want to know how many munitions they have currently in their stock. Here, page 629 of this show. Iraq, the Idaas network, I-D-A-S, managed by the association called BTC, the access code, zero to exit, 41.81 access codes. Then you search in the paragraph in front, I won't come to the number of the central computer of the BTC society, to whom you will ask the whole of the government, media... Okay, so pretty incredible, right? And this story has been told in bits and pieces by French journalists. I'm working with another French journalist to try to kind of uncover the fuller history, as well as tell the story of kind of American and European hackers who did not get recruited by intelligence, but who nevertheless came from the underground, because they were breaking into systems, not maliciously, but they learned a lot, and they had really valuable knowledge that no one else had. I mean, it's kind of really incredible, right? And, you know, this history, whether it's just the transformation of the underground into security hackers, or in the case of France, where some portion of people were tapped to work for intelligence, informally, formally, with pressure, right, has yet to be written. And there's many remarkable elements about this, but basically I do think it's remarkable that it's a bunch of kind of amateurs who just were obsessed with networks, who were the ones holding the special knowledge that was needed by corporations and intelligence in order to start securing systems, right? The other kind of really interesting thing is that some of the best underground, non-malicious hacker crews were European. TISO, which had a lot of Austrian and German members, ADM, which is from France, was considered to be the best at exploit writing, right? So the entry, which I'm going to write with a French journalist, is going to reflect on this, and this is actually a big project that I'm working on as well, so I'll have more to say about it later. All right, so going from the past to the present. I mean, I guess we couldn't talk geopolitics and hacking without talking about Trump, talking about Putin. A slew of politicians that we know in recent years have used the hacker for their own political discourse, for their somehow political gain, and this next video will show us just that. This is under our hacker depictions section. It was posted by a scholar named Marietta Bozovic. So without further ado, let's listen to the way in which Putin sees the hacker. Russia is not doing well. Maybe theoretically, but the most important thing is that I'm deeply convinced that no hackers can adversely influence the hunt for a election campaign in another country. But it's all right. It doesn't affect the consciousness of the voters, the consciousness of the people, it doesn't affect any information, and it doesn't affect the final result. So that's my answer. We don't take the state level. We don't do it, we don't plan to do it. On the contrary, we try to do it. In some ways, yes, it's true that hackers are artistic and creative, etc. They just don't wake up early in the morning. Exactly. Maybe they don't wake up early in the morning. But what's important, I think, in here, and this is also what Bozovic points out in her entry, is that he uses this, of course, for his political gain to show that he is not influencing any hackers or any technologists who maybe identify as hackers or not. Influencing them, and because they are so free and artistic and sort of living in their creative world, that they're beyond his control. So partially it's true, but partially he's employing this to make a political statement about his non-involvement with any sort of... And what's interesting is all evidence points to the fact that the technologists who did the hacking just work at intelligence organizations. So we just have one more video, and we want to end on a positive note. A lot of stuff around hackers is sometimes depressing, especially when it comes to the law. They get arrested, they get thrown in jail, they commit suicide. And so we want to showcase a video that covers British and Finnish hacker Laurie Love, who's presented here at the CCC. Some of you may know that he faced extradition to the United States due to his alleged involvement with anonymous operation called OP last resort, which was kind of in support of Aaron Schwartz, who had committed suicide when he was facing many criminal charges. And we'll watch a clip where parliamentarians and others debate his case. A young man with a Sperger's syndrome awaits extradition to the United States facing charges of computer hacking, and is then likely to kill himself. It sounds familiar. He's not, of course, Gary McKinnon, who was saved by the Prime Minister, but Laurie Love, who faces in effect a death sentence. So when the Prime Minister introduced the foreign bar to in her words provide greater safeguards for individuals, surely she expected it to protect the vulnerable, like Gary McKinnon, like Laurie Love. The Honourable Gentleman, my Honourable Friend, obviously campaigned long and hard for Gary McKinnon, and obviously I took that decision, because at that time it was a decision for the Home Secretary to decide whether there was a human rights case for an individual not to be extradited. We subsequently changed the legal position on that, so this is now a matter for the courts. There are certain parameters that the courts look at in terms of the extradition decision, and that is then passed to the Home Secretary, but it is for the courts to determine the human rights aspects of any case that comes forward. It was right, I think, to introduce the foreign bar to make sure that there was that challenge for cases here in the United Kingdom, as to whether they should be held here in the United Kingdom, but the legal process is very clear, and the Home Secretary is part of that legal process. Lenin Keika. Okay, so the author of the entry, Naomi Colvin, is right there in the front, and she has a great sentence which says, In Lori Love, the US had definitively chosen the wrong target, principled, passionate, and articulate, certainly more articulate than Teresa May herself in the clip, which accompanies this article, Love vs. USA would be one for the underdog, and it was Love 1, he's not being extradited, and in part it was also because Naomi Colvin was part of the team that stopped it, so let's thank Naomi as well. And it's just really important to document some of the wins every once in a while, so do check that out. So we are now going to wrap up so that there's going to be 10 minutes for Q&A, but a few final reflections about this project. Exactly, so I think these videos show actual hackers and hackings, and at a more meta level demonstrate how hackers have become central to our popular imagination, how hackers and hacking are one medium to think through digital cultures, to think through politics. I mean, we care about culture, we care about representing, digging deep, looking at various angles of a certain culture, and I think that's the purpose, or I see this as the purpose of Biela, mine, Chris's, and our friends' projects, is that we really want to take the work that we've been doing and really pay tribute to this really huge, diverse community that you are. On a more practical level, being a little less meta, we do hope that people assign HackKirio entries in their courses, you could use them in high school, you could use them in college classes, maybe you could even use them in middle school, elementary, I don't know if that will work, but get it out there, and also for some of you, I think it will be fun to look at different tidbits of hacker history, and when you're at home for the holidays before you come to the CCC and you're like, oh man, my parents, they don't really understand what I do, you can fire up a video that kind of represents what you do and fire up another video that represents what you don't do. Exactly, and have a discussion instead of talking about politics, yeah. And so this is our last slide, what next? The site is live, share it. Our Twitter address is up there, we consider this a soft launch. We have 42 entries, but we'll get some feedback and tweak things, send video suggestions, spread the word. And to end, before Q&A, we just really want to thank the CCC, we want to thank Lisa for having us here, this is really an amazing place to launch, and we also want to thank everyone who made this possible from funding to the authors to the entire HackKirio team, so thank you so much, and we're here for a little bit of Q&A. Yeah, thank you. Thanks a lot for this beautiful talk. We are now open for the question mics. If there's any questions from the audience, please just stand up to one of the mics. Don't be shy. Nobody's more interested in hacking culture? Are you overwhelmed? There's someone on mic one, please. Thank you for this talk and for the energy that was in your talk, it was just amazing. I have one question to ask, what were the surprising moments for you in this research journey? Okay, that's a good question. In terms of the project, collaborating with others and building a website is very different than what academics often do, where we do often have to rely on ourselves and we get feedback. I think it does give a sense of the really beautiful relations at form, where you go back and forth with an author, with a web developer. It really does give you a sense of the deep social ties. We do have academics, but I think it's much deeper with hackers, so that's one thing. I am frustrated as an academic, where a lot of people do have very, very, very narrow conceptions of hackers. It's not a perfect world and there's a lot which we can change. It was very clear also that as academics, we weren't necessarily changing perception so much. This project was an effort to finally do that. It's like, see them, stop listening or reading just my words, because obviously that's not really changing Jack. So come see some of the videos. Yeah, and I guess for me, if you work in your own little bubble and you work in your own little corner, just in any type of science, you don't see as much as what's going on up there. For me, the whole definition of what it is to hack, what a hacker actually is, you start really opening your eyes out when you see, wow, there's 50, 100 other scholars out there that actually think a hacker is this or a hacker is that. And I think for me, that opened my eyes out really to think, hey, wow, this is what you think it means. That's so interesting. Thank you. Now a question from Mike too, please. Hi, thank you for the talk. It was very enlightening. I have two questions. The first one would be, could you tell us maybe a bit more about the server and the infrastructure you're using or are you just linking YouTube videos? The second one would be, how would you envision future engagement with students? Because I'm teaching a course for computer science test undergrads and we did something similar around movies and descriptions that they have to make around hacker movies. And they don't really learn how to reflect on social issues a lot in their studies. So I wonder how this could be integrated into the platform and how you could engage students further. So great questions. I mean, first of all, for the website, it runs on WordPress. It just seemed like an easy way to hack it up for this sort of thing and we hired actually a master's student from my department at McGill University. Thanks Joel, you're awesome. And then we're hosting the videos on Vimeo and they come from all sorts of different places. That's actually not the best or the most ideal solution in so far as like, you know, who knows if Vimeo is going to exist in 15 years, right? Internet archive, we looked into them and they were kind of like psyched about it, but it was going to be slower to deliver the video, right? So maybe if the project grows, we can at a certain point host our own videos, right? But like we'll have to sort of graduate there at the next level. The entries are all going to be creative commons and we're using clips that then we cite the entire clip and where it came from. We consider this fair use for those that may be wondering. And so we'll see how that goes. And for the second, I guess I could take the second question. Whenever I mean my students are not their digital media students, they're not competing science. But if you ever even try to touch along something around culture or something maybe around social sciences, always I think ask how is power related, how do these people relate to power? How do they relate to critique? How do they use these tools to critique something? And I think all of these videos and maybe even the videos that your students chose, if they just ask that question, whether they're studying computing science, whether they're studying geography or whatever it is, if they look at it from a form of power and how it's contested, I think that that's a way in which they really can engage into a certain topic really deeply. There's a nice little text by Foucault that's called What is Critique? I use it for my students that are non-maybe cultural studies students or whatever. That's a nice little text that could be with that. Thank you. One more question from Mike too please. So thank you again. And I wanted to ask you because I looked at the videos on the side and I see a lot of stories of single people. And I'm quite surprised to find very little stories of communities and showcases of hacker spaces. A lot of researchers I've spoke about are actually focusing on how communities work. So was there any conscious decision that you want to tell singular people's, singular person's stories instead of communities? First of all, that's a great piece of feedback because one of the things as an anthropologist that I've always loved about the hacker world is on the one hand, people often talk about rights that are tied to notions of individualism, but hacking is so collectivist. I mean look at the CCC. I mean you can't have a better example of a kind of ritual collective, effervescent experience, hacker spaces, right? So I do think it's really important to try to showcase that. And we do have videos around hacker spaces and they're being written up like the authors are writing about them now. But if that's not coming through the sites, we actually need to, right? But it does show, I mean one of the problems with video, and we will reflect on this, is that on the one hand while you could put a face to hacking, which is great, it's like it's not the hooded person, video has its own limits, right? Often it's an individual. It's often what journalists are interested in. And we also have to make sure that this isn't the whole of hacking. And also at times use the video to tell a different story than what the video is showing. So I think that's a great comment and we're going to keep that in mind because to me the collectivist community part of hacking is one of the most amazing parts that never makes it into kind of mainstream representation. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Then we have a question from the internet first. Internet. Tell us. Hi. Talk to us. The question from the internet is when covering international scenes, are scenes like FRAC magazine use a source material? Is FRAC magazine a source? Yeah. I mean, FRAC magazine, remember the video that I showed around the fake French CCC? That is a larger project around how parts of the underground went pro and started doing security work. And FRAC is amazing. I mean, FRAC tells so much of that story. And what is also so interesting because I've done like almost 26 interviews, in-depth interviews around this. And like you'd expect in many hacker circles, there's a lot of diversity of opinions. And the one thing that people agree on was that like FRAC was awesome technically. And it brought very different types of people together. You know, FRAC hasn't come up in the video because it's one of these things that hasn't been documented, right? So much in documentaries or film. And again, it points to that problem, which is on the one hand, we're trying to show the faces of hacking. But we also have to make very, very clear that there's certain parts of hacker history that don't exist in video and don't take this as the definitive sort of word or record. No. Now the question from microphone two, please. Hi. I was wondering whether you plan to expand your categories if I didn't miss anything to something. For example, in my PhD, examples of hacking connected with biology, genetics, and digital fabrication, neurohacking, and so on. And also here at the CCC, there's a track dedicated to science that I think it's somehow related. Thanks. Great. Yeah, so if I can count correctly, I think we have 11 categories and we absolutely are expanding. And like biohacking is one that we want to include because actually, you know, hackers are like creating insulin in the context of the United States where insulin is ridiculously expensive. And some of the most important hacking, I think, is happening. So we're absolutely going to expand by a handful. We also don't want to go much more beyond 15 or 18. And one of the ways that we're also then handling that is that each entry comes with tags. And then there's going to be other groupings around tags. And certainly, I mean, what you've seen is live. It's live. It's live. But it's also very much beta. Yes, exactly. And if you've written also on this topic and you have an interesting video, please email us. Send it over. We'd be really interested to hear about your research. Yeah. And then we have another question on mic one, please. Thank you. My question is for Bella and it's about, would you say that your work with an on anonymous affected the way you engage with working with video after, after going deep into seeing how anonymous uses video as a medium to engage with the public as compared to other activist groups who are very less successful in that. That's great. I mean, that is definitely, you know, I on the one hand always use video in my class. And it's not just like hackers, you know, if I'm talking about Martin Luther King and something he said, I will show a video of what he said, because having me repeat it versus having MLK on the screen. And it's a lot more persuasive and we are in a moment where truth is not winning the game and we have to think about our game of persuasion. Right. That's just this is a kind of side project. But you're absolutely right. It was also anonymous who use so many videos, right, in a period where sure others had used videos, but it was groups like for example, in the media who turned 20 this year, who took videos of the world around us. Whereas anonymous created videos as a means for persuasion and it was very powerful at the time. And I am I am inspired to think about how can we think about persuasive mediums in all contexts in order to get our message out because again, we're not always winning in this regard. Truth can never speak on its own. Right. And we always need adjuncts and adjuvants in order to get truth message out there. And certainly it was anonymous in part that that helped me see the importance of video in a new way. So I'm really glad you mentioned that. Thank you. And then we have another question from the Internet. Yeah. And the next question from the Internet is how will you select the right curators for the entries and how do they decide how they are presented and contextualized? All right. So I mean, I've been working on hacker cultures for since 1998. Yeah. Mine is a journey has been a little bit shorter, but also for about 10 years. Yeah. And so I do. I know a lot of people working on different topics. And for the first round, we invited people. And it wasn't just academics. I've gotten journalists and have hackers are writing some entries as well. But they're just like a little bit harder to kind of get them to turn in their entries. And hopefully they will because again, it's not just who's been credentialed to talk about a topic. It's who knows about a topic, who has something to say and who's willing to go through the editing process. Because while journalists generally don't have to go through multiple edits because you all just really know how to write for the public, everyone else actually does struggle a little bit. And we do really try to get the entries written in such a way where we're presuming you know nothing about hackers or the video. It's not always easy then to write an entry that kind of starts from that low level. And then in terms of the contextualization, that's where we have three editors and curators. And I would actually even say four because our final editor, Matt Gorson, he was an MA student under me. He's doing a big project on security hacking with me at Dayton Society. He knows a ton. And it's precisely having many eyeballs on one entry that allows us to hopefully contextualize it properly. But you know, again, if something seems off, people should email us. And again, we're also open to responses from the community as well, which we have one response from Naomi, but you know, perhaps that will kind of grow into something larger. So when you ask why or why is it us that are curating or who's curating really, it's just a three of us that are doing this. And what kind of speech position are we coming from? I mean, we're anthropologists of hacker cultures. What does that mean? Maybe for you guys, it doesn't mean much or it means a lot or it's really, we've studied you guys for a long time. Yeah. But it's also cool because it's like, well, except for Paula, I mean, Chris and I, like, we have tenure and that may mean nothing to you all, but you know, hackers care about freedom and free speech. And tenure allows you to be free. I have tenure now. Oh, you do? Sweet. We all are free to kind of do what we want in interesting ways. And again, we're trying to experiment with mediums that go a little bit beyond the academic journal, which I'm totally behind. I think that there's really good things about the academic journal. I think there's really good things about the book, but we have the freedom to experiment with new mediums. And so hopefully this new medium will kind of reach different types of publics in a way that kind of academic journal articles will never reach. Are there any more questions? Party, party. Yeah, it's time. It looks like it. So I would like to invite you for another round of applause for Bella and Paula. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. You
Hack Curio is a website featuring short video computer hackers. And we, along with Chris Kelty, come together and bring all sorts of clips from films, from memes, advertising, all sorts of sources. We've brought together these videos that like how did this project come into being? Like why are we here? Why did we spend the last year together a couple of other people like Paula, subculture of hacking is all about or what this Because it's really brutally hard to edit exuberance. And I talk about these sort of that it allowed people in South Africa to Exactly. So maybe by now you're kind of getting practice, hackers as a diverse group of people everything in order to transition and whether the developer conference. And it's a really can I transition in the community? Exactly. So transition because, well, it was just such a went pretty well. In fact, the more open I was, have a discussion between some of the responses Cedar. So this really part, we wanted to discuss younger. So that means that we are to make a new In France, it was the time when the undergrounds with a French journalist, is going to reflect on employing this to make a political statement become central to our popular imagination, how that's the purpose, or I see this as the purpose tidbits of hacker history, and when you're at questions from the audience, please just stand up collaborating with others and building a website they come from all sorts of different places. they use these tools to critique something? And I showcase that. And we do have videos around the problems with video, and we will reflect on the most amazing parts that never makes it into when covering international scenes, are scenes please email us. Send it over. We'd be really turned 20 this year, who took videos of the world perhaps that will kind of grow into something