[00:00.000 --> 00:05.500]  The door and push back from the gate as soon as everyone is in their seat with their seat belts fastened.
[00:05.760 --> 00:06.620]  So please.
[00:07.560 --> 00:10.300]  If you... I'm going to make a couple of announcements.
[00:10.580 --> 00:15.400]  First of all, welcome to the X-HOPE conference.
[00:16.160 --> 00:17.780]  This is X as in 10.
[00:17.920 --> 00:20.520]  We've done this 10 times over 20 years.
[00:21.400 --> 00:22.580]  So welcome.
[00:22.800 --> 00:25.000]  Somehow we've... they still let us back in the hotel.
[00:26.400 --> 00:28.820]  A few announcements.
[00:28.860 --> 00:35.960]  If you were not an early riser, you may not have heard yet, but actually there were a couple of sessions already at this conference.
[00:35.960 --> 00:41.200]  For those of you who were up before the crack of noon, you've heard this before, please forgive me.
[00:41.360 --> 00:48.920]  First of all, please, please, please put your cell phone on stun or turn it off.
[00:49.100 --> 00:54.740]  If your phone rings in the middle of the session, everyone in the room will point at you and laugh.
[00:55.000 --> 00:56.280]  You don't want that to happen.
[00:56.460 --> 00:59.160]  So please do that now if you've not done that already.
[01:00.000 --> 01:08.760]  Secondly, we... there will be lightning talks in the U Room at 4 o'clock today and tomorrow.
[01:09.120 --> 01:13.700]  There are still slots available if you'd like to give a five-minute lightning talk.
[01:14.240 --> 01:17.180]  Go down... there is a sign-up at the U Room.
[01:17.500 --> 01:20.760]  You being down at the end of the hall that way.
[01:21.520 --> 01:22.420]  It's a lot of fun.
[01:22.520 --> 01:26.980]  It's always my favorite part of the conference.
[01:27.460 --> 01:34.440]  So, you know, if you've got something to say in five minutes, now is your opportunity to sign up for that.
[01:35.040 --> 01:37.340]  And it's always a lot of fun to go to.
[01:37.480 --> 01:41.620]  So 4 o'clock today and there's another lightning session 4 o'clock tomorrow.
[01:41.940 --> 01:47.000]  Okay, it is my great pleasure to introduce our session.
[01:47.080 --> 01:48.240]  Oh wow, that's us up there.
[01:48.360 --> 01:49.700]  This is so recursive.
[01:50.700 --> 02:01.640]  Well, my great pleasure to introduce our session on Barrett Brown and his prosecution and Anonymous with some amazing people.
[02:01.960 --> 02:13.160]  Kevin Gallagher, Ahmed Ghappour, and Gabriella Coleman will be talking a lot about this case and I'm going to allow them to introduce themselves even though they need no introduction.
[02:13.880 --> 02:14.800]  So... Thank you.
[02:15.120 --> 02:17.640]  Well, thanks for coming out today.
[02:17.940 --> 02:21.440]  I'm personally incredibly excited to be here at HOPE.
[02:21.740 --> 02:26.340]  And what we're going to do is introduce ourselves.
[02:26.520 --> 02:27.900]  I'll introduce myself in a second.
[02:28.300 --> 02:31.280]  Each one of us is going to talk for about 10 minutes.
[02:31.440 --> 02:39.440]  We're going to also do a little bit of a kind of interactive Q&A for another 10 minutes and then we're going to open it up to the audience.
[02:40.280 --> 02:41.680]  So I'm going to begin.
[02:41.920 --> 02:43.020]  My name is Gabriella Coleman.
[02:43.260 --> 02:48.600]  I'm a professor at McGill University who has just finished a book on Anonymous that will be out this fall.
[02:48.960 --> 02:53.660]  And I'm tasked with giving a little bit of background about Anonymous.
[02:54.360 --> 02:57.220]  Is it possible to show the slides?
[02:59.200 --> 03:00.100]  Okay, great.
[03:00.380 --> 03:09.920]  So this is probably not an audience that needs much of an introduction to Anonymous, but I do want to cover a few bases.
[03:10.980 --> 03:22.640]  You know, they have emerged in the last number of years as the kind of global face of dissent in many, many different areas of the world.
[03:22.900 --> 03:39.320]  And what I find so particularly amazing about Anonymous and their evolution over time is how their roots were fully, fully, fully in the world of Internet trolling.
[03:40.340 --> 03:52.640]  And there was this one very famous moment in the history of Anonymous in 2007 when Fox News had a broadcast and they heralded Anonymous as the Internet hate machine.
[03:52.980 --> 03:57.320]  And if you guys haven't seen that segment, I really recommend it.
[03:57.820 --> 04:02.980]  But right after that segment, Anonymous released a video.
[04:03.280 --> 04:12.240]  And I'd like to play a short clip and hopefully it's audible because I think it really gets at how immersed Anonymous was in the world of trolling.
[04:13.300 --> 04:15.280]  So let me pull that up.
[04:17.980 --> 04:19.020]  Fox News.
[04:20.260 --> 04:26.640]  It has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of Anonymous has been ravaged.
[04:26.860 --> 04:27.100]  Do you hear that?
[04:27.140 --> 04:32.240]  As if it were a whore in a back alley and then placed on display for the public eye to behold.
[04:33.080 --> 04:39.360]  Allow me to say quite simply you completely missed the point of who and what we are.
[04:40.300 --> 04:48.360]  Unfortunately for you, this is not some secret club where we gather in the clubhouse, swapping old porn magazines and daddy's Everclear.
[04:48.860 --> 04:55.140]  This is not some Internet gang of panel nerds who will spend everything attempting to break into your computer.
[04:55.720 --> 05:03.980]  This is not some group of desperate and depraved individuals who are looking to ruin everyone else's lives because their own are pathetic.
[05:04.940 --> 05:12.360]  We are what you, deep down inside, want to do to your wife when she doesn't make you dinner when you come home.
[05:13.100 --> 05:22.080]  We are what you, deep down inside, want to be when you find your 14 year old daughter sleeping with her 27 year old boyfriend.
[05:22.900 --> 05:37.260]  We are what you, deep down inside, wish you could be when your wife cheats on you, when your son hates you, when your daughter leaves you, when the waiter spills wine on you, when your boss ridicules you.
[05:37.760 --> 05:40.100]  We are what you could never be.
[05:40.780 --> 05:43.180]  We are everyone and we are no one.
[05:43.180 --> 05:44.720]  We are anonymous.
[05:45.160 --> 05:46.220]  We are a legion.
[05:46.520 --> 05:47.560]  We do not forgive.
[05:47.880 --> 05:48.740]  We do not forget.
[05:49.400 --> 05:54.740]  We are the face of chaos and the heart-bringers of judgment.
[05:55.660 --> 05:57.640]  We lie from the face of tragedy.
[05:57.940 --> 05:59.780]  We mock those who are in pain.
[06:00.160 --> 06:03.280]  We ruin the lives of other people simply because we can.
[06:03.800 --> 06:05.220]  That's probably a good place to finish.
[06:05.400 --> 06:09.020]  We ruin the lives of others simply because we can, right?
[06:09.020 --> 06:20.200]  And so the great thing about this video is that it really kind of conveys just how deep anonymous was in the world of trolling.
[06:20.440 --> 06:24.580]  And these were some of the quotes from the video just in case you couldn't hear the audio.
[06:25.720 --> 06:27.940]  But I'll go over them pretty quickly.
[06:28.340 --> 06:38.880]  So it was quite surprising when anonymous in 2008 kind of shifted gears and started to engage in activism.
[06:39.020 --> 06:50.440]  And basically since 2008 they've gotten involved in all sorts of campaigns from Tunisia to Occupy.
[06:50.560 --> 06:55.760]  They became particularly famous when they protested the Church of Scientology.
[06:55.760 --> 07:02.020]  When they supported WikiLeaks back in 2010 with DDoSing.
[07:02.020 --> 07:10.980]  Now, one of the interesting things was that the militant wing in anonymous grew in the fall of 2010.
[07:11.380 --> 07:20.560]  And by the militant wing I mean those who started to engage in distributed denial of service attacks and hacking for political purposes.
[07:20.920 --> 07:25.640]  And what I have up here is a chat from the end of January 2011.
[07:25.640 --> 07:36.860]  And this came right after 40 warrants were issued in the United States for people involved in DDoSing PayPal.
[07:37.220 --> 07:40.120]  And then there was also a number of arrests in the UK.
[07:40.740 --> 07:50.280]  And anonymous 9 is talking about, you know, how it's pretty unbelievable that the state is going to crack down really hard against anonymous.
[07:50.280 --> 07:59.920]  And I particularly like the next slide, which says... I can't see it on my screen here so I have to turn around.
[08:00.240 --> 08:04.440]  It's amazing the way they're pursuing us all so thoroughly.
[08:04.980 --> 08:13.960]  Whilst the actual criminals named the leaked WikiLeaks cables are being defended by the respective governments, there's something sick about that.
[08:13.960 --> 08:19.440]  I mean, whatever they say about us, we've never actually been party to torture or murder.
[08:19.720 --> 08:23.460]  And he continues to reflect on the situation.
[08:23.820 --> 08:26.140]  Now this was just the beginning.
[08:26.380 --> 08:35.540]  That was just the start of the massive state crackdowns against anonymous that have subsequently been global.
[08:35.540 --> 08:46.680]  There have been over a hundred arrests across the world, although really the epicenter of these arrests have been both in the United States as well as in the UK.
[08:47.300 --> 08:56.940]  And I'm not going to go over all of them, but probably the most famous of them is Jeremy Hammond's case.
[08:56.940 --> 09:05.820]  And he was sentenced here in New York City in November, November 15th, just this last year, to ten years in jail.
[09:06.580 --> 09:16.220]  But he is just one example of what Grania O'Neill, who was a lawyer at the National Lawyers Guild, who was involved in a number of these cases, has called the nerd scare.
[09:16.600 --> 09:26.520]  And while hackers have obviously been arrested many times before, there have never been so many who have been swept in at one period of time across the globe.
[09:26.520 --> 09:29.020]  As has been the case in the last two years.
[09:30.040 --> 09:40.460]  Now Jeremy Hammond's case is interesting because he, you know, he hacked with impunity against corporations, police departments.
[09:40.580 --> 09:44.780]  He deleted all the files of Stratford.
[09:45.700 --> 09:48.440]  So it's not too surprising that he got in a little bit of trouble.
[09:48.920 --> 09:55.200]  The case that we're going to be talking about now, and I'm going to transition to Kevin, who's going to fill out the details.
[09:55.200 --> 10:05.140]  What is quite exceptional about Barrett Brown's case, in light of all the other ones, is that he never engaged in any DDoSing.
[10:05.340 --> 10:07.320]  He never engaged in any hacking.
[10:07.700 --> 10:11.140]  His crime was mostly that of just being a journalist.
[10:11.760 --> 10:16.720]  But he got swept into this larger... as part of this larger nerd scare.
[10:16.720 --> 10:23.400]  So now I'm going to turn it over to Kevin, who's going to talk a bit more about the particulars of Barrett's case.
[10:24.300 --> 10:24.620]  Hi, everyone.
[10:24.840 --> 10:26.360]  I am Kevin Gallagher.
[10:26.560 --> 10:31.420]  I set up the Barrett Brown Legal Defense Fund and the Free Barrett Brown campaign.
[10:32.300 --> 10:35.960]  It's kind of an interesting story about how I got involved in all this.
[10:35.960 --> 10:41.760]  is that I actually ran into Barrett here at the last HOPE conference two years ago.
[10:42.560 --> 10:59.460]  And that led to me... you know, although I had been familiar with his work, and I was following him during something called Op Metal Gear, which was an effort he set up to crowdsource the investigation of emails that were hacked out of Stratfor, and looking at the activities of private intelligence contractors.
[10:59.460 --> 11:01.540]  And I was familiar with his writing and his work.
[11:01.820 --> 11:07.240]  It really took meeting him in person, because it would be only weeks later that he was arrested.
[11:07.520 --> 11:11.720]  So I knew he was under FBI investigation, and he had already been raided.
[11:13.520 --> 11:20.260]  And so, you know, just a month or two after I met him, he uploads this video in which he's demanding his stuff back from the FBI.
[11:20.420 --> 11:23.360]  He's upset about the fact that they're going after his mom.
[11:23.660 --> 11:28.920]  And he made some inadvisable comments, and they used that opportunity to arrest him.
[11:29.500 --> 11:35.560]  For those that don't know who we're talking about, Barrett Brown is a 31-year-old Dallas-based journalist.
[11:35.980 --> 11:41.620]  He's someone who's written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and he's quite a character.
[11:41.780 --> 11:48.740]  He's outlandish, witty, hyperbolic, irreverent, but he's also a very brilliant writer, in my opinion.
[11:50.040 --> 12:02.140]  And on the occasion of the Arab Spring in Op Tunisia in early 2011, he delved into Anonymous with zeal, and he became something of a go-to person for the media on the group.
[12:02.400 --> 12:07.160]  And he was turned by some people an unofficial spokesperson for Anonymous and so on.
[12:08.600 --> 12:17.800]  But given the allegations after he was arrested, I knew it would be a challenge to defend him, but my expectations of the case evolved as it went on.
[12:17.800 --> 12:24.000]  So, for example, you know, I figured he would be indicted, but I figured he would get bail.
[12:24.700 --> 12:32.320]  Little did I know that a judge would arbitrarily declare him a danger to the community and a risk of flight, so he was denied bail.
[12:32.880 --> 12:49.580]  And a few months later, they indict him, again, for a link, something that had the whole Internet up in arms, because they were trying to criminalize this hyperlink he sent to data that was taken by hackers from Stratfor.
[12:50.020 --> 13:03.400]  And then they indicted him a third time for obstruction of justice, for hiding his computers during the first raid in March 2012, when the FBI visited his apartment and his mom's house.
[13:05.540 --> 13:13.000]  And then they were charging his mom with obstruction while he was in jail, and she ended up with a six-month probation term.
[13:13.460 --> 13:18.680]  In April 2013, the government actually moved to seize our defense fund.
[13:18.900 --> 13:25.740]  At that time, it was about a month after Glenn Greenwald had written an article about the case and raised quite a lot of funds.
[13:27.500 --> 13:35.160]  And it was about $20,000 they were trying to seize, and fortunately that got shut down after we brought in a new legal team.
[13:38.140 --> 13:53.940]  And, you know, a few months later, they were so concerned about the media coverage and what was being written about the case, which was obviously critical of the government, which was overreaching and mostly supportive of Barrett, that they applied for a gag order and they got it,
[13:54.640 --> 13:59.840]  restricting the First Amendment rights of Barrett and his lawyers to speak about the case.
[14:01.140 --> 14:03.940]  which was in place until April of this year.
[14:06.660 --> 14:23.360]  So, eventually, you know, and extremely fortunately, in March of this year, they dropped the most egregious and meritless charges of the sharing the link, which he was facing the most time for, up to 45 years on that alone.
[14:24.480 --> 14:27.760]  And just a month later, they worked out...
[14:27.760 --> 14:35.420]  Well, I should point out that, you know, the government dropped the linking charges only a couple days after Ahmed here wrote a phenomenal motion to dismiss.
[14:38.080 --> 14:44.640]  And it was days before the EFF was set to enter the case and file their amicus brief as well.
[14:44.640 --> 14:48.780]  So, I think maybe they knew that the charges were flawed.
[14:49.060 --> 14:57.800]  There's no way they couldn't have known that, but the motions and the threat of the EFF entering the case was definitely a factor in those charges being dismissed.
[14:58.480 --> 15:05.740]  And then a month after that, they put together a plea agreement on some reduced charges that has him now facing 8.5 years max.
[15:06.980 --> 15:09.020]  But he's still in jail to this day.
[15:09.220 --> 15:10.620]  In fact, he's in the hole right now.
[15:11.280 --> 15:14.180]  He was set to be sentenced on October 6th.
[15:14.400 --> 15:16.620]  And we're hoping that he gets time served.
[15:17.580 --> 15:22.200]  He's one of the only journalists that I'm aware of...
[15:22.200 --> 15:29.840]  I know there have been a couple others that have been imprisoned in the United States for charges that are related to his journalism.
[15:29.840 --> 15:46.000]  I mean, the first time that they raided him, explicitly on the search warrant, was a reference to Project PM, which is this wiki site he had set up to do journalistic research into the emails from Stratfor and HBGary.
[15:47.860 --> 15:50.760]  And the FBI, again, was interested in that.
[15:50.980 --> 15:58.440]  Even a year later, they issued a subpoena to Cloudflare to figure out who was behind that site and who was hosting it.
[15:59.600 --> 16:04.360]  So, I was truly surprised by some of the excessive tactics that were used in the case.
[16:04.520 --> 16:08.740]  The gag order, the going after his mom, the subpoena that I just mentioned.
[16:09.860 --> 16:16.800]  But in terms of the Free Barrett Brown campaign and how that got going, it all happened very gradually.
[16:17.080 --> 16:18.240]  It just starts with...
[16:18.240 --> 16:21.900]  You know, someone gets arrested and starts with the hashtag, FreeBB.
[16:21.900 --> 16:26.460]  And then we kind of realized, hey, we need a website.
[16:27.040 --> 16:31.120]  So, we get in touch with his family and friends and we set up a website.
[16:31.520 --> 16:33.100]  And then you need a donation site.
[16:33.200 --> 16:35.840]  So, you get a WePay or PayPal or something like that.
[16:36.200 --> 16:41.980]  And you get into social media, Twitter, Facebook, and you start to formulate a campaign.
[16:42.200 --> 16:43.600]  You have a mailing list.
[16:43.680 --> 16:45.080]  You start putting out press releases.
[16:45.080 --> 16:47.760]  You reach out and get prominent supporters.
[16:48.620 --> 16:50.660]  Barrett has many prominent supporters.
[16:51.080 --> 16:55.620]  Just recently, Pussy Riot came out in support of Barrett.
[16:55.880 --> 17:03.440]  We also have Noam Chomsky, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, are all on our website with support statements for Barrett.
[17:04.920 --> 17:09.500]  But I want to point out that this is not going to be the last time that something like this happens.
[17:09.500 --> 17:13.480]  Or this is not going to be the last journalist or hacktivist who is over prosecuted.
[17:13.980 --> 17:24.920]  So, I think anybody can really do this in terms of setting up support campaigns and doing advocacy and jail support and legal defense.
[17:25.860 --> 17:29.540]  I know my inspirations were things that came before, like the...
[17:29.540 --> 17:34.600]  It was then called the Bradley Manning Support Network, but now Chelsea Manning.
[17:38.140 --> 17:56.940]  And so, I would hope that people can kind of learn that it's very important to set up campaigns for people who are arrested and to get them access to defense that is competent, basically.
[17:57.280 --> 17:58.360]  Private legal defense.
[17:58.640 --> 18:02.280]  And with that, I want to turn it over to Ahmed, the lawyer.
[18:04.860 --> 18:05.660]  Hi, all.
[18:06.740 --> 18:07.300]  Hi.
[18:07.480 --> 18:07.860]  Oh, wow.
[18:07.960 --> 18:09.500]  I thought there wasn't anyone here.
[18:10.900 --> 18:11.460]  Hello.
[18:11.680 --> 18:13.080]  My name is Ahmed Ghappour.
[18:13.240 --> 18:17.780]  I'm a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
[18:18.300 --> 18:25.160]  There, I run a clinic that focuses on sort of these security and technology issues.
[18:25.160 --> 18:42.020]  And the whole point of that clinic is to basically intervene in cases like this, joining the usually appointed attorney and trying to provide sort of either technical expertise or some sort of cultural competency in a lot of these cases.
[18:43.120 --> 18:43.440]  Closer.
[18:43.440 --> 18:43.760]  Closer.
[18:43.960 --> 18:44.480]  Okay.
[18:44.900 --> 18:45.600]  All right.
[18:45.720 --> 18:46.300]  That's a lot better.
[18:46.440 --> 18:46.580]  Okay.
[18:46.720 --> 18:58.880]  So, I just wanted to briefly talk about a couple things that, in my opinion, make a prosecution a persecution, because I think that's the title of today's panel.
[18:58.880 --> 19:03.500]  And then, hopefully, that will set us off for some great Q&A.
[19:04.100 --> 19:19.580]  So, the first thing that comes to mind as to what makes a regular prosecution a persecution is that the suspicion or the investigation or some component of pre-indictment was based on otherwise protected speech.
[19:19.580 --> 19:27.740]  So, you see this coming to light more and more with the Snowden revelations.
[19:28.120 --> 19:33.100]  So, for instance, folks could be targeted for using privacy tools like Tor.
[19:33.680 --> 19:40.660]  In fact, who knows if folks will be indicted for developing certain IT and privacy tools.
[19:41.720 --> 19:56.080]  Most recently, we've got the Silk Road... the alleged Silk Road administrator indicted, amongst other things, actually writing some code that enabled folks to use his website.
[19:56.400 --> 19:58.840]  Or to use his hidden website.
[20:00.960 --> 20:04.100]  That is, to me, 100% pure speech.
[20:05.160 --> 20:11.660]  Another sort of indicia of what makes a prosecution a persecution might be something like the unknown.
[20:11.940 --> 20:17.240]  Where I might not know what you're up to and, therefore, I just criminalize it.
[20:17.520 --> 20:21.380]  So, you see this a lot, actually, with terrorism cases and religion.
[20:21.700 --> 20:28.200]  So, somebody might say... and by the way, it's an irony that I should talk a bit about my history.
[20:28.200 --> 20:35.680]  I started off... I used to be a computer engineer working on distributed systems and supercomputers and stuff like that.
[20:36.380 --> 20:41.040]  And then went to law school, became a patent litigator, and then started doing all this Guantanamo work.
[20:41.240 --> 20:47.960]  And so, what's strange is that the national security work I've done both in Guantanamo and later in the U.S.
[20:48.020 --> 20:56.540]  doing all these terrorism cases is strangely what I find to be uniquely my value add to these cases.
[20:56.540 --> 21:01.660]  So, I joined these cases and I sort of think about how the government goes after potential terrorist suspects.
[21:01.920 --> 21:10.640]  And, lo and behold, it's very analogous to what they're doing right now with information activists and generally what you might call hackers.
[21:12.260 --> 21:14.900]  So, and it all revolves around the unknown.
[21:15.120 --> 21:21.680]  So, somebody could say, you know, something in a foreign language.
[21:21.680 --> 21:25.220]  And you might have two different interpretations of what that means.
[21:25.420 --> 21:27.820]  And so, you go with the one that's culpable.
[21:28.120 --> 21:29.700]  And that's how you get your search warrant.
[21:29.960 --> 21:31.880]  Or that's how you get your indictment.
[21:32.000 --> 21:33.780]  Or that's how you get your conviction.
[21:34.280 --> 21:38.800]  And in this case, it happens a lot with technology.
[21:39.180 --> 21:41.820]  Whereas, I don't know why somebody might be using Tor.
[21:42.000 --> 21:47.760]  I don't know why somebody might develop code that allows something like Silk Road to occur.
[21:47.760 --> 21:56.600]  But rather than sort of tell a judge or my colleagues in law enforcement that I don't know what this is about.
[21:56.820 --> 21:57.980]  Let's investigate further.
[21:58.380 --> 22:01.240]  I just kind of push ahead full steam.
[22:02.500 --> 22:05.200]  And at the end of the day, it comes out in these cases.
[22:05.200 --> 22:09.940]  So, I think Biella was talking about the threat of Anonymous.
[22:10.260 --> 22:13.680]  How it was trumpeted in media a few years back.
[22:14.080 --> 22:17.360]  And most of us think that that doesn't really exist anymore.
[22:17.700 --> 22:25.260]  But in Barrett's case, the government actually alleged that he and Anonymous were trying to take over the world.
[22:27.800 --> 22:29.180]  So, it's true.
[22:29.340 --> 22:29.400]  Yeah.
[22:29.400 --> 22:31.540]  And so, the first time I read that, I laughed too.
[22:31.700 --> 22:33.300]  But then I started to cry a little, right?
[22:33.420 --> 22:41.440]  Because that's basically calling them just almost short of calling them something like the Taliban at the end of the day.
[22:44.380 --> 22:48.960]  So, the difference between the unknown and acknowledging the unknown is a search warrant.
[22:49.340 --> 22:53.420]  Sometimes it's an indictment, as I said, for something like sharing a hyperlink.
[22:53.420 --> 23:01.480]  And the sharing of a hyperlink, for those that aren't familiar with the exact sort of conduct that Barrett was charged with, amongst other things.
[23:01.680 --> 23:09.000]  But it was hyperlinking, or sorry, cutting and pasting a hyperlink that led to a public website.
[23:10.160 --> 23:19.420]  That, on that website, it contains a dump of what is now known to be the Hammond hack of Stratford.
[23:21.160 --> 23:25.460]  So, basically, to me, that's just republishing something already in the public domain.
[23:25.720 --> 23:29.380]  And it's not even a violation of copyright, even if it was copyrightable.
[23:29.560 --> 23:45.540]  But the fact that this got across several FBI agents in an investigation, and a grand jury, and a judge, and put Barrett in prison for God knows how long until we finally got it dropped, a couple of years almost.
[23:46.380 --> 23:49.080]  It means that the unknown is very dangerous.
[23:49.840 --> 23:53.240]  And the unknown, of course, becomes more dangerous the more scared we are.
[23:53.480 --> 24:01.480]  Which is the other sort of very important component of persecution, which is fear.
[24:01.480 --> 24:13.880]  So, as long as everyone is afraid of hackers, as long as we're portraying them hacking into drones on 24, and then, you know, killing everybody.
[24:14.220 --> 24:21.380]  Or talking about the 2010 cyber time bomb that the Russians planted in NASDAQ.
[24:21.540 --> 24:22.780]  Whatever that means, right?
[24:23.280 --> 24:25.420]  The more we'll all be afraid, right?
[24:25.600 --> 24:34.080]  And the more afraid we are, the more we are tolerant of very zealous prosecution.
[24:34.900 --> 24:36.740]  Or persecution, for that matter.
[24:37.880 --> 24:42.000]  And, of course, we've seen this happen time and time again in the U.S.
[24:42.160 --> 24:43.500]  since the beginning of time, really.
[24:43.500 --> 24:47.980]  Most recently with the national security prosecutions.
[24:48.220 --> 24:53.020]  And then, of course, the sort of evolution of that into cyber security.
[24:53.620 --> 25:11.360]  So, I hope that everyone here knows that the current number one security priority, analogous to the biggest security threat that we're facing right now in the United States, at least according to the United States, is cyber security and the threat of cyber attack.
[25:13.420 --> 25:14.960]  More than terrorism.
[25:15.900 --> 25:19.640]  And, of course, the one that comes right after that is the internal threat.
[25:19.980 --> 25:29.080]  And that's essentially the Manning Snowden threat of having an employee with access who, you know, feels like something is unjust and might go and leak it.
[25:29.940 --> 25:33.880]  The third priority is terrorism, counter-terrorism.
[25:35.600 --> 25:38.240]  Which is a strange sort of paradigm, I think.
[25:41.140 --> 25:45.280]  And this is becoming more worrisome to me.
[25:45.320 --> 25:51.140]  And I don't think it will change the sort of trend that's happening right now with these prosecutions.
[25:52.280 --> 26:00.700]  Because we currently regard a cyber attack as something that could sort of rise to the level of violence.
[26:00.700 --> 26:06.260]  that rises to the level that warrants or rises to the level of the use of force.
[26:06.500 --> 26:10.840]  This is now our government's position as well as most governments in the West.
[26:11.040 --> 26:24.440]  So if you think about it, the way that international law works, customary or actual treaty based, is basically, if you strike me, I can strike you back, to simplify.
[26:25.100 --> 26:32.540]  And so if your cyber attack is considered to rise to the level of force, that means I can respond in kind.
[26:33.100 --> 26:40.360]  Which means I can respond forcefully, using weapons, actual kinetic tools to hurt people.
[26:41.380 --> 26:47.260]  And now that we've sort of entered this paradigm, it's only been, I think, at most five or six years.
[26:48.600 --> 26:49.480]  I think...
[26:52.500 --> 26:55.140]  I'm afraid to actually tell you what I think.
[26:55.260 --> 26:57.120]  Because it's just going to get a lot worse.
[26:59.300 --> 27:01.260]  And hopefully that would...
[27:01.260 --> 27:04.400]  Hopefully that will just give us some food for thought for the Q&A.
[27:05.180 --> 27:07.200]  I'm not going to depress anyone anymore.
[27:08.600 --> 27:09.300]  That's what I've got.
[27:09.660 --> 27:09.780]  Thanks.
[27:10.760 --> 27:10.980]  Great.
[27:11.360 --> 27:16.220]  Well, why don't we transition to a couple of the questions that we thought we would toss out to each other.
[27:16.360 --> 27:19.060]  And then we'll open it up for discussion for a long Q&A.
[27:19.560 --> 27:20.960]  So I'm going to have you start.
[27:21.400 --> 27:21.860]  Sure.
[27:22.920 --> 27:23.380]  So...
[27:25.180 --> 27:31.240]  So as he was kind of hinting at, the threat of hacktivists is, you know...
[27:31.240 --> 27:35.280]  And cybersecurity is the number one, you know, U.S. threat.
[27:35.580 --> 27:42.460]  And you see the word hacktivist mentioned explicitly at, like, the most recent Senate Intelligence Committee hearings.
[27:43.100 --> 27:48.440]  James Clapper, in his report, hacktivist is right there.
[27:48.880 --> 27:51.700]  It's included in the threat assessment to the U.S.
[27:52.260 --> 27:55.240]  So what is the biggest attempt to legitimize...
[27:55.880 --> 28:00.220]  De-legitimize anonymous that you've seen in the last few years?
[28:00.220 --> 28:02.080]  So that's a great question.
[28:02.280 --> 28:09.620]  Because you have to imagine the state is going to dip into propaganda to try to de-legitimate the movement anonymous.
[28:10.120 --> 28:15.500]  And there was one very particular moment in time where I felt like this happened.
[28:15.800 --> 28:29.460]  So in late January, February, there was a slew of protests against SOPA and, in Europe, against ACTA, both copyright agreements.
[28:29.460 --> 28:39.440]  And there was a certain moment where left-leaning Polish parliamentarians took the Guy Fawkes mask to protest ACTA.
[28:39.540 --> 28:41.240]  Who here has seen that photo?
[28:42.120 --> 28:43.460]  Okay, it's really incredible.
[28:43.640 --> 28:51.780]  It was the first time that government officials actually took on the symbol of anonymous, of Guy Fawkes, to engage in a political protest.
[28:51.780 --> 28:57.360]  A few weeks later, there was an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal.
[28:57.980 --> 29:15.900]  And it was based on a kind of secret meeting with Keith Alexander who claimed that anonymous had the capability of taking down the electrical grid in two years.
[29:16.520 --> 29:18.620]  It was very vaguely stated.
[29:19.020 --> 29:20.400]  There was very little information.
[29:20.920 --> 29:26.240]  I mean, it really seemed like a classic case of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
[29:26.820 --> 29:32.700]  It was pretty remarkable that it even got published, I felt, because really there was no credible evidence behind it.
[29:32.940 --> 29:37.320]  But I remember thinking right at that moment, okay, is this going to stick?
[29:37.320 --> 29:45.740]  Is this the moment where that kind of cyber terrorism framing is going to be placed on anonymous?
[29:46.080 --> 29:49.280]  And I actually think it didn't stick at that point.
[29:49.680 --> 29:55.020]  There was a slew of articles that came out afterwards saying, you know, this is not believable.
[29:55.320 --> 29:57.640]  A lot of security professionals wrote it off.
[29:58.080 --> 30:00.760]  And things just moved forward at some level.
[30:00.760 --> 30:08.220]  But nevertheless, I think it was a pretty vigorous attempt by the state to do that sort of delegitimization.
[30:08.580 --> 30:11.000]  And it could have succeeded.
[30:11.020 --> 30:13.100]  And I think in the future it can.
[30:13.420 --> 30:17.540]  But that has been the sort of most notable attempt I've seen so far.
[30:18.840 --> 30:20.280]  Can I ask you one more?
[30:20.560 --> 30:34.460]  So we've seen incredible surges of activity from anonymous at particular times, like during the Chanology protests against Scientology, or in early 2011 during the Arab Spring and during LulzSec.
[30:35.980 --> 30:40.160]  Anonymous organized very well around, you know, protesting SOPA.
[30:40.440 --> 30:45.840]  But to me it seems like the hive, the collective, has seemed weaker in recent years.
[30:45.840 --> 30:48.180]  Or maybe it's just not breaking as many headlines.
[30:48.680 --> 30:53.780]  Do you think anonymous can or will return to its former glory, so to speak?
[30:54.000 --> 30:57.940]  And is this a reasonable question or is it based on a flawed assumption?
[30:57.940 --> 31:10.060]  No, I mean I think a lot of people are always interested in that because their activity was just so, like you said, they seemed to be in the news every week.
[31:10.160 --> 31:10.740]  They were everywhere.
[31:10.740 --> 31:19.820]  They were making all sorts of interventions that had to do with both just hacktivism and information activism to just very different types of social movements.
[31:20.820 --> 31:24.780]  And it's definitely the case that on the one hand, some of their activity has waned.
[31:24.860 --> 31:44.260]  On the other hand, at the end of 2012 and 2013, there was also a real sort of global turn where there was a lot of interventions in Cambodia and Indonesia, in the Philippines, and the West doesn't really cover those types of operations and really some fascinating ones.
[31:44.960 --> 31:49.500]  But again, you don't really see that in the news and it's just a bit of a trickle.
[31:49.500 --> 31:56.920]  That said, Anonymous's strength has never been consistency nor kind of social reproduction.
[31:57.700 --> 32:01.140]  You know, the groups that come together form for a period of time.
[32:01.140 --> 32:02.320]  They're very prolific.
[32:03.300 --> 32:05.240]  But then they wax and they wane.
[32:05.240 --> 32:12.660]  And in many ways, Anonymous's strength is in reinvention and unpredictability.
[32:12.940 --> 32:19.960]  And I think they're in a great position to kind of rise up in new form in a very different way in the future.
[32:19.960 --> 32:30.180]  But because they've morphed so often, in a lot of ways, it's impossible to really say whether they will or not emerge in the same way and with the same strength.
[32:30.560 --> 32:33.660]  Can I just comment just on the first question?
[32:33.660 --> 32:38.740]  And we agree about this because we talked about this earlier.
[32:38.960 --> 32:44.120]  But I just want to underscore that it's not just about Anonymous.
[32:44.600 --> 32:54.260]  It's about criminalizing information activism or hacking or programming.
[32:54.620 --> 32:55.720]  I mean, period.
[32:56.200 --> 33:06.840]  I mean, so for instance, the line between someone who facilitates, in other words, like creates a tool that can be used for something, and the person that uses it is becoming really gray.
[33:08.860 --> 33:15.780]  Or the idea of these sort of hackers for hire in...
[33:16.320 --> 33:18.640]  I mean, and this is literally government talk.
[33:18.780 --> 33:21.740]  Hackers for hire in Eastern Europe and China, right?
[33:21.980 --> 33:27.400]  And they're not necessarily part of the state, but they're retained by the state to hack the United States and so on, right?
[33:27.400 --> 33:31.500]  That's not Anonymous, but it's terrorism.
[33:31.760 --> 33:34.880]  I mean, it's what one might think of as terrorism.
[33:35.540 --> 33:46.400]  And so that creep, when you're thinking about that creep, the mission creep, and when you think about the sort of global politics around it, we can't just limit it to Anonymous.
[33:46.400 --> 33:47.600]  Great.
[33:48.280 --> 33:49.680]  So I have two questions.
[33:50.040 --> 33:55.280]  One is directed at Kevin, and then the other one is for both Kevin and Ahmed.
[33:55.880 --> 34:08.820]  If we compare Free Barrett Brown and even Jeremy Hammond's case to Aaron Schwartz's, we have much more visible cases, campaign advocacy in this case than in Aaron's case.
[34:08.980 --> 34:14.240]  And, you know, why Aaron didn't make a very kind of public campaign is an interesting question.
[34:14.840 --> 34:23.520]  But I'm interested to hear what actual difference having a visible campaign makes, either for the prisoner or for the trial itself.
[34:24.060 --> 34:24.920]  So that's one question.
[34:25.200 --> 34:27.560]  The second one has to do with Project PM.
[34:28.180 --> 34:42.020]  What is really fascinating about Project PM was that it was a wiki that was really trying to collate and catalog what is disparate information about the private security industrial complex.
[34:42.020 --> 34:47.740]  And no one was really putting it all together in a public way, except for Barrett Brown, right?
[34:47.940 --> 34:50.600]  With the efforts of others involved and anonymous.
[34:51.180 --> 35:03.880]  And I want to know, or I'm interested in hearing, how much do you think his role in Project PM had to do, kind of compel the state to go after him in a pretty, you know, swift and hard way?
[35:04.060 --> 35:05.260]  Those are great questions.
[35:06.040 --> 35:26.300]  Well, first, I think it's worthwhile to mention, you know, how Aaron was dissuaded from doing a campaign by his prosecutor, Stephen Hyman, because, like, the night after he asked for donations for his legal defense, the prosecutor, like, was so mad and basically said,
[35:26.300 --> 35:31.280]  oh, you just destroyed all your chances at, you know, getting a good deal or whatever.
[35:31.660 --> 35:44.200]  But I think the campaigns make a huge difference because when you have public visibility and you can get media covering the case, when these prosecutors know that they're being watched, their behavior changes.
[35:44.660 --> 35:47.280]  And I actually observed that over time.
[35:49.020 --> 35:55.120]  The types of things that they would say to justify, you know, what they were doing actually changed.
[35:57.180 --> 36:02.180]  Like, for example, when they say, we're gagging Barrett, but, oh, it's actually for his own good.
[36:02.620 --> 36:07.720]  You know, and that was at the point that Rolling Stone and New York Times were writing about the case.
[36:08.260 --> 36:13.660]  However, you know, a year earlier, when there was no coverage, they could essentially get away with anything.
[36:14.640 --> 36:20.520]  So, you know, the campaign, the advocacy, and getting media around it is all very important.
[36:20.640 --> 36:21.440]  It makes a big difference.
[36:21.720 --> 36:35.360]  And I'd say, without a doubt, Project PM had a role in him being targeted by the FBI and the feds because it's right there on his search warrant that they were seeking info for the domain name for that wiki.
[36:36.940 --> 36:40.720]  So, for some reason, the FBI is still interested in Project PM.
[36:40.720 --> 36:48.420]  We are doing a panel on that tomorrow, by the way, at 4 PM, if anyone's interested in learning more about Project PM.
[36:51.080 --> 36:54.820]  And I guess I have a couple questions for Ahmed.
[36:56.560 --> 37:03.920]  Why do you think the government casts such a wide net when dealing with defendants like Barrett?
[37:04.700 --> 37:12.280]  Some of the strange things I saw was including social media posts in their filings and referring to statements that were made by supporters.
[37:12.940 --> 37:16.140]  Do you think it reflects fear or hysteria?
[37:16.300 --> 37:20.620]  Do you think it's an attempt to intimidate us to keep us away from supporting the defendant?
[37:20.620 --> 37:26.100]  Does the prosecutor actually perceive a threat to their case from what's in the media?
[37:27.560 --> 37:28.400]  Or what?
[37:31.860 --> 37:32.420]  Exactly.
[37:34.800 --> 37:38.520]  I think they do so because they can.
[37:38.720 --> 37:41.740]  And it goes back to the unknown and the lack of competence.
[37:42.420 --> 37:44.160]  Some people are privacy activists.
[37:44.420 --> 37:45.840]  Some people are security activists.
[37:45.840 --> 37:49.440]  I'm a competency enthusiast.
[37:49.620 --> 37:51.020]  I want everyone to be competent.
[37:51.300 --> 37:53.100]  I always tell the feds... Thank you.
[37:53.240 --> 37:54.320]  Let's... Competence.
[37:54.380 --> 37:54.720]  That's right.
[37:54.800 --> 37:55.160]  There we go.
[37:55.340 --> 37:55.500]  Yeah.
[37:59.140 --> 38:06.380]  So, I always tell the feds actually like almost literally, I don't care if you put a camcorder in my shower.
[38:06.620 --> 38:10.880]  Just don't interpret it to mean that I'm going to set off a bomb somewhere because that's crazy.
[38:10.880 --> 38:12.640]  And that's what I always see in these cases.
[38:13.920 --> 38:16.620]  Not in those exact sort of descriptions.
[38:19.420 --> 38:27.440]  But, the idea of bringing in social media of a... I think what you're referring to is essentially a retweet of...
[38:27.440 --> 38:29.500]  Basically, I think that... Oh, they did it to you too.
[38:29.780 --> 38:30.680]  Yeah, they did it to me.
[38:30.800 --> 38:39.720]  So, I think Trevor Tim had tweeted a Glenn Greenwald article about Barrett to which I just retweeted.
[38:39.720 --> 38:42.760]  And somehow that got brought into court for me to be gagged.
[38:43.200 --> 38:51.200]  So, somehow I adopted not only... I think I just bypassed Trevor and went straight to Glenn's article.
[38:51.460 --> 38:54.500]  And those became my words according to the government.
[38:54.780 --> 39:02.120]  And anyone who knows anything about linking or social media or how this stuff works or the culture of the internet knows that that's complete bullshit, right?
[39:02.120 --> 39:08.920]  So, but try explaining that to a judge in like 30 seconds, right?
[39:09.120 --> 39:11.380]  So, they do it because they can.
[39:11.560 --> 39:28.260]  And it highlights a much bigger problem, which is the complete lack of competence in the judiciary, but also the bar, the criminal defense bar, and the DOJ on technical issues.
[39:28.260 --> 39:35.520]  I mean, that's just... that's sort of a threshold that we have to cross over before we start really complaining about justice.
[39:36.660 --> 39:40.400]  So, what are some of the types of things that the judges could do?
[39:40.660 --> 39:53.000]  I mean, I know like hiring technical experts is one, but to improve this, the fact that they're being presented with things in computer crimes cases that they have absolutely no understanding of.
[39:53.000 --> 40:01.420]  I think they should... one thing that some magistrates have done, specifically Magistrate Smith in Texas, is just ask questions.
[40:02.280 --> 40:04.920]  And this happens even before the indictment stage.
[40:05.040 --> 40:08.520]  It happens during the investigation stage when someone's seeking a warrant.
[40:08.800 --> 40:13.000]  And they might seek a warrant for something called a network investigative technique, for instance.
[40:13.380 --> 40:16.180]  And really what that means is I'm going to hack this computer.
[40:17.840 --> 40:22.620]  And sometimes, or actually almost none of the time, do you read that and understand what it means.
[40:22.820 --> 40:36.260]  So, maybe if you ask the follow-up question, and then once you understand it's hacking, you might ask, well, how are you going to deploy the malware that you seek to have invade this target?
[40:36.260 --> 40:39.540]  And the answer might be, well, through a phishing attack.
[40:39.820 --> 40:47.680]  And then the follow-up question might be, oh, that's odd because if you do a phishing attack, how can you particularize the target?
[40:47.820 --> 40:49.040]  It might be anybody's computer.
[40:49.200 --> 40:53.460]  So, if I'm the target in my email account, I could be checking my email on someone else's computer.
[40:55.720 --> 41:01.540]  And then the malware would get deployed on someone else's computer and it wouldn't be constitutional and so on.
[41:01.800 --> 41:02.820]  Nobody really does that.
[41:02.960 --> 41:04.460]  So, the first thing might be to ask questions.
[41:04.460 --> 41:09.200]  The second thing might be, as you say, some technical expertise.
[41:09.440 --> 41:20.620]  A lot of the courts, ironically, that have a very heavy patent docket, employ clerks that were formerly engineers or PhDs and such.
[41:20.800 --> 41:25.460]  So, that's another thing that might be considered.
[41:26.080 --> 41:32.640]  So, I'm going to ask one more question to Ahmed, but start spinning your questions in your head because we're going to open it up.
[41:32.640 --> 41:40.120]  Now, Ahmed works at a clinic where he can actually... he's given the freedom and the resources to take on these types of cases.
[41:40.600 --> 41:44.900]  And I was just wondering if you can demystify your work for us a little bit.
[41:45.060 --> 41:50.580]  What limits might there be working for an academic clinic in taking on these cases?
[41:50.600 --> 41:52.680]  Or is it pretty open, pretty free?
[41:52.680 --> 42:03.500]  I think probably many of us don't really know what it means to be working at a law clinic and what sorts of resources and freedoms you have to take on these sorts of cases.
[42:06.620 --> 42:13.020]  Wow, I should probably save that for the five-minute lightning round or something where I just start yelling and crying and stuff.
[42:13.180 --> 42:15.460]  But it's... there aren't... basically...
[42:17.000 --> 42:23.940]  Basically, what I'm trying to do is modeled after what folks used to do in capital cases.
[42:23.940 --> 42:43.960]  So, back in the day, they didn't... currently, if you get charged with a death... if you have a death-eligible case, in other words, capital punishment is on the line or on the table, then you would get appointed a special counsel that they call learned counsel that understands stuff like mitigation so that you can then take death off the shelf.
[42:44.280 --> 42:51.740]  And so, what I'm trying to do is provide some level of expertise to lawyers that are doing these cases.
[42:51.740 --> 42:56.900]  And so, Barrett's case initially, I didn't want to get on the case as lead attorney.
[42:57.120 --> 43:01.140]  I wanted to help the federal public defender kick ass.
[43:01.560 --> 43:03.900]  But for whatever reason, that did not work out.
[43:04.080 --> 43:08.780]  Oftentimes, the federal defenders have policies that don't allow outside counsel to come in and so on.
[43:08.960 --> 43:13.660]  And so, we had to take over the case and build a legal team and a campaign.
[43:13.660 --> 43:15.120]  And really, it was all Kevin.
[43:17.220 --> 43:19.580]  So, that's essentially what we're trying to do over time.
[43:19.580 --> 43:25.760]  It would be great to hire an investigator that could help out or someone that could actually travel a little bit more.
[43:27.180 --> 43:28.900]  But, I hope that answers your question.
[43:29.060 --> 43:30.820]  And just one more thing, just about the experts.
[43:31.000 --> 43:32.700]  The last question, I just remembered.
[43:32.920 --> 43:42.420]  The most important expert, I think, for these hacking type cases where the targets are hackers or alleged hackers, is somebody like Biella.
[43:42.760 --> 43:45.940]  Because you actually are... you're an academic.
[43:46.800 --> 43:48.600]  And you get this.
[43:48.780 --> 43:49.680]  And you're not crazy.
[43:51.060 --> 43:57.580]  So, you can actually come in and talk to judges and tell them, yeah, this isn't actually taking over the world.
[43:57.860 --> 43:59.960]  This isn't what they're trying... maybe, I don't even know.
[44:00.160 --> 44:01.140]  But it's up to you.
[44:01.140 --> 44:04.580]  I think you should say a word about your book.
[44:04.920 --> 44:05.840]  That'd be great.
[44:06.220 --> 44:15.360]  Well, I wrote a book on Anonymous, which was extremely challenging, because Anonymous truly is a challenge to both understand, study, and write about.
[44:16.040 --> 44:25.200]  But I did feel like it was particularly important, given this moment that we're in, to make Anonymous slightly more legible.
[44:25.700 --> 44:31.140]  And quite a bit of the book also addresses questions of hacking, leaking, whistleblowing.
[44:32.500 --> 44:38.660]  And, yeah, it's just part of this kind of greater education process that's so important today.
[44:38.880 --> 44:41.180]  And it's called... and it will be available...
[44:41.180 --> 44:44.120]  It's called Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy.
[44:44.540 --> 44:47.300]  The Many Faces of Anonymous, available in November.
[44:47.840 --> 44:48.280]  Awesome.
[44:48.820 --> 44:52.880]  So, if there's any questions from the audience, there's a microphone right in the middle here.
[44:55.100 --> 44:56.000]  I'll go first.
[44:57.020 --> 45:00.500]  So, I have one question here for Dr. Coleman.
[45:02.340 --> 45:08.680]  How do you think Snowden has helped move the sort of the views that Anonymous has traditionally held into the public?
[45:08.860 --> 45:10.720]  In other words, sort of bringing them out of the shadows?
[45:11.400 --> 45:12.560]  Can you repeat that again?
[45:13.120 --> 45:13.600]  Sure.
[45:14.260 --> 45:21.000]  How do you think Snowden has helped shift the views that Anonymous tends to hold into the public light?
[45:21.240 --> 45:27.480]  In other words, has what Snowden done helped the politics of Anonymous spread?
[45:27.480 --> 45:39.140]  So, I think, yes, Snowden really shifted the debate in such a way that Anonymous...
[45:39.140 --> 45:50.960]  Well, Anonymous's intervention into questions of privacy, anonymity, and surveillance are important and interesting because it allows anyone and everyone to participate.
[45:50.960 --> 45:52.460]  It's a grassroots movement.
[45:52.620 --> 45:54.140]  And that, I think, is incredibly important.
[45:54.140 --> 46:02.620]  To have something that's not a non-profit, for example, that's not a small organization, and that doesn't sort of require just the action of a single individual.
[46:02.620 --> 46:09.420]  But there's also limits to the messages that Anonymous could convey.
[46:09.700 --> 46:11.560]  A lot of people don't like them.
[46:11.720 --> 46:12.880]  They're confused by them.
[46:13.100 --> 46:15.560]  So there are real limits to that sort of politics.
[46:15.780 --> 46:32.460]  So what Snowden did, in some ways, was intervene in such a way that every woman and man could understand the issues and also provide such a strong, thick stack of facts and documents that it became indisputable.
[46:33.220 --> 46:39.440]  But, again, it's important to have a kind of grassroots facet where anyone can contribute to this type of politics.
[46:43.920 --> 46:44.620]  Go ahead.
[46:44.920 --> 46:53.820]  Ahmed and Kevin were talking about legal defense, protecting hacktivists, journalists, and so on, and Anonymous.
[46:53.820 --> 46:56.820]  And so I was wondering a question for Biella.
[46:57.580 --> 47:09.060]  On Anonymous's end, if it wants to be a more radical force, if it's chilled by these prosecutions and persecutions, you know, there's the legal end, like Kevin and Ahmed's.
[47:09.440 --> 47:17.200]  But on Anonymous's end, what could it do if it wants to return sort of to the early videos you were showing, the really anarchic and chaotic ones?
[47:17.880 --> 47:18.740]  Oh my gosh.
[47:18.980 --> 47:23.340]  I'm starting to see the real limits of having an ear that's half deaf right now.
[47:23.500 --> 47:25.140]  Because I didn't fully hear the question.
[47:25.820 --> 47:26.580]  But I...
[47:26.580 --> 47:27.920]  I heard it.
[47:28.520 --> 47:35.340]  He's wondering about how Anonymous can kind of assist in the legal defense campaigns.
[47:35.600 --> 47:41.200]  And I think Free Anons does a lot of that, but Free Anons is very limited in many ways.
[47:42.500 --> 47:43.340]  What do you think?
[47:43.340 --> 47:52.400]  Well, so Free Anons is an organization that has raised money and brought awareness to many of the cases.
[47:52.860 --> 47:57.680]  Part of the limits of Free Anon, Free Anonymous, is that some people are anonymous, right?
[47:59.240 --> 48:06.100]  And that's really wonderful in a lot of ways, but these campaigns really do need public invisible people.
[48:06.280 --> 48:09.460]  So that's one of the limits to it.
[48:09.460 --> 48:21.020]  But it is really important, I think, just to make sure that people continue to support the prisoners, just for the prisoners.
[48:21.140 --> 48:22.300]  I mean, this is quite obvious.
[48:22.860 --> 48:27.020]  But if people just vanish, that will kind of kill the movement, right?
[48:27.320 --> 48:29.360]  But people haven't vanished, actually.
[48:29.360 --> 48:34.280]  I think it's been really quite incredible how people have really risen up and supported the prisoners.
[48:34.280 --> 48:37.300]  So I think it's a great example of what to do successfully.
[48:38.860 --> 48:39.740]  Next question.
[48:40.360 --> 48:41.840]  My question is for Ahmed.
[48:42.440 --> 48:46.440]  Earlier you said that cyber attacks are on par with physical force.
[48:46.960 --> 48:58.920]  I was wondering where in the continuum of force for international law that sort of lands, and what that means for hacktivists and people that are trying to do, I think, legitimate work for this sort of thing.
[48:58.920 --> 49:01.560]  That's exactly what everyone is trying to figure out.
[49:02.780 --> 49:14.740]  So basically the question was, I think, that I said that cyber attacks can rise to the level that warrant a response, a physical response in force.
[49:15.360 --> 49:17.700]  And so the question was, how does that work?
[49:18.360 --> 49:21.080]  And everyone is trying to figure that out right now.
[49:21.380 --> 49:31.540]  I mean, that's the subject of many law review articles and, you know, policy papers and such.
[49:31.660 --> 49:35.490]  I mean, yes.
[49:36.150 --> 49:39.010]  I want to thank you very much for all of your efforts.
[49:39.270 --> 49:40.330]  It's very inspiring.
[49:40.950 --> 49:59.870]  The other thing I had a question about was I believe that hacktivists are a threat not for damage per se, but because if you look around this room, there's enough knowledge here that we could reach out and communicate with tens of millions of people in a heartbeat and create a mass movement.
[50:00.170 --> 50:07.490]  I think that all this prosecution seems to try to quiet us down.
[50:07.490 --> 50:15.150]  And as you might know, prosecutors cannot be prosecuted if they prosecute maliciously.
[50:15.450 --> 50:20.730]  So what can we do to maybe change the rules where prosecutors could be held accountable?
[50:22.450 --> 50:25.190]  I think that the most important thing...
[50:26.510 --> 50:30.830]  I think the most important thing is to keep an open mind when someone is prosecuted.
[50:31.370 --> 50:43.330]  And keep in mind that there are potentially many false accusations or accusations that are drawn from something that could be a joke or taken in jest or hyperbolic, etc.
[50:44.050 --> 50:48.190]  And I think the biggest problem once in starting a campaign...
[50:48.190 --> 50:53.530]  And Kevin, you could probably speak to this, but it's getting over a certain stigma that the prosecution has painted.
[50:53.530 --> 50:58.390]  They like to gag defense attorneys and defendants.
[50:58.550 --> 51:04.390]  But what we often don't realize is that the first press release is the DOJ's press release.
[51:04.530 --> 51:06.690]  And so they get a jump on the PR.
[51:07.390 --> 51:08.050]  And when you call...
[51:08.550 --> 51:09.310]  Yeah, and so... go ahead.
[51:09.770 --> 51:17.690]  Yeah, their strategy is to prejudice the public from supporting the defendants from the get-go with their first press release.
[51:17.690 --> 51:24.070]  By including, you know, really salacious allegations that would...
[51:24.070 --> 51:28.570]  You know, if any average person would read, they would not be inspired to support the defendant.
[51:28.810 --> 51:30.690]  So that's what we're pushing back against.
[51:31.550 --> 51:36.970]  And, you know, trying to give them the real facts, the real narrative about what's going on.
[51:37.370 --> 51:39.090]  I think we have time for one more question.
[51:41.350 --> 51:48.470]  The PayPal 14 case resulted in no jail time for the people who were prosecuted.
[51:48.690 --> 51:59.830]  And if I understand the result correctly, the government did not mount a successful prosecution
[52:02.870 --> 52:10.970]  to characterize DDOS activities as criminal.
[52:11.410 --> 52:17.210]  And instead, effectively, it could be argued that they were treated as...
[52:17.470 --> 52:21.030]  or they could be perceived to be First Amendment actions.
[52:21.030 --> 52:30.070]  My question is, does this portend well for other such protest activities of this nature?
[52:31.490 --> 52:48.950]  Well, I mean, the idea that DDOS is free speech protest, I mean, analogous to, you know, blocking access in a line at, like, a physical location, there's no precedent for that anywhere.
[52:49.270 --> 52:51.930]  And I'm not sure if that argument has even succeeded.
[52:52.190 --> 52:54.550]  But, do you have any comment?
[52:55.310 --> 52:57.850]  Just, my limited understanding is that it was a plea.
[52:58.350 --> 53:02.930]  And so, even though, my understanding is that it was a plea to a misdemeanor count.
[53:03.230 --> 53:08.650]  So, nonetheless, it's still a plea to something that was, you know, criminal, admitted to be criminal.
[53:09.950 --> 53:22.090]  And just sort of on a tangential note, when you don't go to trial, when you don't challenge, these issues, even in Barrett's case where the government just dropped the charges.
[53:22.590 --> 53:29.210]  Now, by dropping the charges, they spare themselves a judge actually saying that these are BS charges.
[53:29.670 --> 53:38.490]  And they spare themselves in the future any sort of pushback from going after someone for the same reason or applying the same sort of investigation.
[53:38.950 --> 53:44.950]  So, strategically from the government's end, taking a plea on a case that might go either way makes a lot of sense.
[53:44.950 --> 53:47.110]  Or, in our case, dropping the charges.
[53:47.250 --> 53:52.210]  I think, to me, that was probably the number one reason, if I was a prosecutor, that I'd drop the charges.
[53:52.490 --> 53:54.690]  So, that doesn't really answer your question.
[53:54.710 --> 53:55.090]  I'm sorry.
[53:55.550 --> 53:57.250]  I think we're out of time.
[53:57.250 --> 54:00.630]  So, I just want to thank everyone for coming and asking these great questions.
[54:00.830 --> 54:01.070]  Thank you.
[54:01.950 --> 54:02.510]  Thank you.
[54:02.510 --> 54:04.910]  You,
[54:10.330 --> 54:21.770]  I think we're perfect.
[54:21.770 --> 54:21.850]  You, I'm hoping to continue to get a good drama show.