Lorax

With the WikiLeaks organization in disarray due to the ongoing extradition hearing of Julian Assange, their website slowly falling apart due to lack of technical staff, their submission portal not functioning since the beginning of 2022, and in theme of the conference theme of "cheap alternatives," - this is a talk for those who care about the leaks continuing to flow and are interested in setting up and running their own secure leaking platform as an alternative to WikiLeaks that still works, on a fraction of their former (and current) budget, while learning from the various mistakes they made during their history.

Apr 6, 2022, 12:40 PM

How do you know Sylvia? We haven't dated for years.

Admittedly, things got weird with Mike-- but that was ages ago.

British student fights extradition to US for allegedly hacking the FBI and Nasa

I met her at one of Laurie's court dates. When I was covering that case for the Guardian.

*Lauri Oh-- I was thinking Sylvia Mann from Sylvie and the Fiver Dollar Hats, from the anti-folk scene

Apr 6, 2022, 1:12 PM

The Sylvia you're talking about has something to do with Barrett Brown I'm guessing? We had him in our film-- but frankly, I can't follow along with his bullshit.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:13 PM You wouldn't believe-- we were trying to get teh final print of the film out, but Barrett all the way along was dragging his feet and just couldnt pull himself together to sign the release

Apr 6, 2022, 1:15 PM

Something to do, yeah. Agreed on not being able to follow along with his bullshit. Sylvia is the person he alternately calls "girlfriend" or "fiancee" nowadays, depending on what mood strikes him.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:15 PM

Ah

Well-- more headaches than he's worth

Apr 6, 2022, 1:15 PM I am not surprised that Barrett is less than productive to work with. I came in to DDoSecrets at the tail end of a research project he was supposed to lead, but instead he nearly destroyed.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:16 PM

oh shit! I just figured it out!

That pitch was about him! lololol

Too fucking funny!!

OMG

Get the fuck out

I dont really know about DDOS We just kinda troll politicians for lols

But, Im not surprised

What a fucktard

Apr 6, 2022, 1:18 PM

We publish datasets. The dataset that Barrett wrote an announcement text for, was called #29 Leaks.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:18 PM

ok

Apr 6, 2022, 1:18 PM

It concerned a company formation agency in London that was facilitating money laundering.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:18 PM ok

Apr 6, 2022, 1:19 PM

There was an embargo period, involving investigative journalists, and Barrett fashioned himself as a participant in that embargo, but he didn't do any work.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:19 PM

gotcha

Apr 6, 2022, 1:19 PM

Now he thinks that, because we don't want to work with him anymore, we are probably a complex web of intelligence operatives and FBI informants, part of the massive conspiracy to get him extradited back to the US.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:20 PM

wow

crazy

Apr 6, 2022, 1:21 PM

We just think he's not worth our time and we'd rather focus on publishing more datasets with more journalists who research datasets.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:21 PM

So fucking stupid that she's with him

Fuckign creep

Well, I hope she is safe

Apr 6, 2022, 1:23 PM

Everybody has their own path. Yeah, I hope she gets out relatively unscathed.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:24 PM

I'm on his page, and there's all this shit about rape wtf

I'm so fucking confused

Wish I never had him in the movie

What the fuck is this shit

Sylvia is ayfrogs?

*gayfrogs

👍

1

Apr 6, 2022, 1:26 PM

I also heard about the rape allegations only recently. Had I known in 2019, I would have taken more steps to distance the publishing collective from Barrett ahead of publishing the #29 Leaks data.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:26 PM

For sure

But I still don't get it.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:27 PM

Which part?

Apr 6, 2022, 1:28 PM

Your pitch sounded like Barrett once I put 2 and 2 together

What was all that?

Like, hes using sylvia?

to get a visa

and owes a shitton of money to someone

Apr 6, 2022, 1:28 PM

Yeah. The marriage to the fiancee is a Plan b) for a UK visa, if the Plan A) Prove Government Conspiracy to Extradite Me doesn't pan out.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:29 PM

taxes i think u said

ok-- im not crazy-- the pitch was about that

what a tool

Apr 6, 2022, 1:29 PM

The taxes angle: as a part of his original plea agreement, he agreed to pay this company large restitution. He has said, since leaving the US, that he has no intentions to pay that amount that he agreed to pay in his plea agreement.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:30 PM

yeah-- well, thats what you get for dumpster diving

Apr 6, 2022, 1:30 PM

The IRS doesn't forget. His long term plan must be to renounce US citizenship and apply for citizenship in whatever country he ends up in.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:30 PM

But i guess they have nothing to hold him on?

Apr 6, 2022, 1:30 PM

Who's they?

Apr 6, 2022, 1:31 PM

I dont know-- cops?

I dont know who hes pissed off

i guess theyre bobbies in england

Or I guess the US for extraditing

however that works

Apr 6, 2022, 1:32 PM

He thinks there's a sealed indictment in the US. No idea what he thinks that sealed indictment is for.

In the UK he was ticketed for disturbing the peace, basically.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:33 PM

Right-- but like Assange if he raped someone -- the UK would hold him-- so the UK has no proof?

he probably leaked some shit

thats what they do

right?

thats why they would indict

Apr 6, 2022, 1:34 PM

I don't think he's being charged for the sexual assault/s I've heard about, no.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:34 PM

ok-- so its hacking i guess

Apr 6, 2022, 1:35 PM

He grooms people from the activist community who have a distrust of cops and prosecutors.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:35 PM

or drugs

but they would arrest him if he was grooming

you cant just fucck kids

wgat a pig

what

Apr 6, 2022, 1:36 PM

I don't think he's been charged for anything in the US. I think he's doing tax avoidance to avoid paying back the hundreds of thousands of dollars he owes for his plea agreement.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:36 PM

yeah-- but wtf

grooming?

fuck that

Apr 6, 2022, 1:36 PM

Not the QAnon type of grooming.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:36 PM

im more worried about whoever hes around

what?

if he's diddling kids-- they need to arrest his ass

Apr 6, 2022, 1:37 PM

The generic grooming, of impressing upon young people a set of untrue facts that lead them to trust him and enter romantic relationships with him. I'm not talking about kid grooming or underage grooming, just general grooming.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:38 PM

oh fewww

i was about to get on a plane and beat his ass

Apr 6, 2022, 1:38 PM

There is a significant age difference between him and Sylvia, but she's not underage.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:38 PM

how much

Apr 6, 2022, 1:39 PM

I don't know for sure, I'd guess about 15 years.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:39 PM

he must be 40?

so, she's 25?

Its not great

But at least hes not raping

How did all that Q stuff get started anyhow

Apr 6, 2022, 1:41 PM

No idea.

Apr 6, 2022, 1:42 PM

ok-- well what a fucktard

i gotta actually get back to work

but if you have any thing that would be a good true crime story

my distro is looking

fucking prick

Apr 6, 2022, 1:42 PM

I'll keep that in mind. I mostly focus on writing about hackers, these days, and the best ones stay anonymous, so there is not much to shoot.

(footage wise)

During the initial testing and training period, we used our own home computers to complete the tasks. We would log into the Chrome browser window and open an Incognito tab, to access the Developer guidelines for our specific language. To qualify, I answered about 100 multiple choice and short audio listening and transcribing tasks, drafted by the staffing agency to test my grammar and spelling in the language that I was hired for my expertise.

Transcribing usually involves listening to some sound tape, and then rendering that sound into a typed, written record. This written log, or transcript, can be either a verbatim record, with every “um", “ah" and false start in natural speech included and captured in the text, often useful in legal transcripts. Conversely, the transcript can be a less verbatim record, excluding those sorts of filler words, where what is most important is to capture the meaning of the words spoken, for example in a transcript of a journalistic interview or in academic research.

At Rev.com, I usually choose to work on non-verbatim transcripts. For Google, I was making a verbatim transcript of the language sounds, but not just verbatim. We were also capturing any other data in the sound, like noise, music and other features. Every different speaker was also labelled separately and specifically, as were any pre-recorded voices, like the operator voice in a voice mail system. The added complexity of the work made the work more interesting to me. The training period was paid.

I would meet the other workers via a Google Hangouts chat, including the dozen or so people who were working on my same specific language, in my case Spanish. There was a project manager in the group chat who was not fluent in Spanish, and was there mainly to answer questions about the technology.

We were told that our job was to fix the machine-produced text transcript of audio files, and that the data we generated during our work hours would go into training the company’s artificial intelligence, to improve its ability to capture human speech. In this way, we seemed to be training Google’s sound capture tools for how to actually replace us, the human workers.

The Work of Transcribing

To work, we would log in to a Google Doc spreadsheet, where my name appeared at the top of a column. In the cells under the column would automatically appear an alphanumeric string of characters. I would then copy and paste that string of characters into a separate Chrome browser tab at the end of a specific web address, which would then open the app where I was to work on each individual audio file.

Once we did that, we’d get into the actual place where we were working. The transcribing tool looked like a lot of other sorts of web-based Google products, and it was called Loft. When you opened Loft, the screen was divided into three columns, with an upper menu-type view where the time codes told me how long the audio file was, and smaller time codes indicating where within that audio file the selection cursor was placed. The menu bar also had function buttons like Play, Pause, Fast Forward or Rewind, plus a string of random words (something like "aardvark antelope artifice") that I guessed were a machine-generated name for the specific audio file. These words had nothing to do with the audio in the window, but they changed every time we would paste a new string of alphanumeric characters into the web browser address bar to open up a new audio file.

Below this menu bar, was the workspace. On the far left of the workspace there was a visual representation of the audio file you were working on, similar to how sound looks in audio editing software like Audacity or Pro Tools, with quiet audio looking like shorter lines and louder parts showing up as longer lines.

This visual of the sound waves was paired in the center of the screen with text boxes where the machine-generated and error-filled transcript would appear. On the far right of this screen appeared our options for correcting the machine transcript. In this far right column, floating text boxes allowed us to re-type the machine generated transcript, and to accurately change how the center column’s boxes would fit to the sound wave. Our job was to render every audio file perfectly in these options in the far right column of the screen. Before I started, I had to study a long and detailed document that was the Google style guide for my specific language. It defined stuff like how to capitalize, how many spaces to leave after a period, how to format the typing of different sorts of numbers when they were in the audio, etc.

For example, "if it is obvious from context that a number reflects an amount of currency, transcribe with the dollar sign $", and stuff like that. For every type of sound, there was to be a very specific correct way to render it, either in text written into the transcript box, or in the noise labelling function of the app. How to render the transcript was extremely specific. If you were working on US English files, then workers had to spell it like "Okay," whereas in Great British English (GB_En), the guidelines required the word to be spelled: "Ok". In GB_En, if a speaker said a phrase that sounded like "wanna", we had to write it exactly as it was spoken, as “wanna". In a US_En file though, such a contraction wasn’t accepted, and we were expected to type out the full correct spelling, "want to".

In order to render all the audio into textual data that the machine could read, there was a menu of options for labelling the sounds that were not words, and the text boxes that floated in the center column were to be adjusted so that the time code was exactly level with the sound wave, down to the millisecond. These floating boxes could overlap with each other, and each additional speaker needed to be identified with a number, which then became its own column (speaker 1, speaker 2, pre recorded speaker 1, etc).

Anything that was noise, personally identifiable information like a person’s name, or music had to be marked. These other sound markers showed-up in slightly different colours on the screen, separate from the text transcription. Again, this labelling had to be accurate down to the millisecond. There were keyboard short-cuts that would make the task of picking the exact timecode easier for each label, but at the start I was using just a regular laptop trackpad to select the place to mark the start and end of each audio utterance. Also, if you had to change your keyboard layout to some international layout, to type language specific characters, then the keyboard shortcuts would no longer work.

I did not have a keyboard that was optimised for the special characters unique to the Spanish language, but I was already used to switching my keyboard layouts in the International set-up menus of my operating system, to be able to type special characters like á or ñ. I was told once I passed training, the company would provide equipment optimised to my language. Eventually the promised work computer did arrive, but disappointingly, it did not include a Spanish keyboard. It was just a higher end Chromebook. An external keyboard with those specific Spanish characters was promised, but never sent. All other equipment that I needed to make my workspace ergonomic, like good headphones to hear the audio better, an external mouse to avoid use of the built-in laptop trackpad, and a laptop stand to tilt the Chomebook’s keyboard to a better angle for typing, was equipment I supplied myself. Having the work machine did at least make it possible to keep work hours and personal computing hours separate, though.

For the first period of my work, I was being paid a few cents over what was minimum wage for my jurisdiction. We were paid by the hour worked, and were told we had to meet certain targets for how much audio we processed through Loft in that time. I never had any problem with meeting these targets, and benefited from being able to adapt to my disability needs.

However, this changed when the staffing company laid me off a few months into the work, stating that Google had stopped sending them work. I later found out when they filed my record of employment with the Government of Canada, that the staffing agency told the Government that they laid me off during the probationary period. This was not the case, as my work contract had specified a probation period of three months and I worked at least six. They also laid me off before I passed the threshold of the required amount of hours to qualify for unemployment insurance. Other workers might have had a different experience, and been able to file for government unemployment benefits after this contract ended, but I was not.

Working as an independent contractor

A few weeks after I was legally laid-off, the staffing agency got back in touch and offered me to return to the same work. They were not offering to hire me back as a full time worker, anymore, with pension and vacation hour deductions. Instead, we would be contracted as independent freelancers, and had to register via a further intermediary, either Upwork.com or Guru.com. This intermediary would take a large percentage off of each pay cheque, Upwork taking between 10% and 20% of the total pay, and Guru taking around 9% (we were not informed about the differences between these platforms by the staffing agency and I had to do my own research, only later finding out that I had selected the most exploitive intermediary of the two options).

This time, there were about 100 people in the Google Hangouts chat group where all the people in my language group were to meet for work. I didn’t recognize anyone from the first period, it was all new workers, and most people only beginning to be trained in the software. It became really difficult to use the chatroom for useful training, as people began to use it for asking routine questions that I already knew the answers to, or to ask for a reviewer to look at their files so they could get paid for them. We were no longer being paid by the hour worked, either, so this training effort was unpaid. This time, we were paid by piece-work, according to how much audio we managed to transcribe.

As an independent contractor, there was also a difference in the types of audio files that we were tasked with rendering into text and noise labels. In the first period of work, we were working with cleaner audio that Google had seemingly bought from call centres. This sort of sound file had only one or two speakers, and minimal noise and music. In the second period, as independents, we were working on transcribing audio that had been scraped from YouTube uploads, so there were multiple speakers, sometimes up to a dozen, and a lot of music and noise that we needed to label. We were told that if we were having trouble identifying what was said in the audio, we should look for the specific YouTube video the audio came from, but the information of which YouTube video the audio came from was not supplied by the company. Instead, we’d have to listen to the file, try to discern some keywords like the name of the topics or the YouTuber, then search those keywords in YouTube to try to find the right video. We also had already returned the company Chromebooks, and so were fully working on our own home computers and systems.

It also became clear the staffing company was not reflecting in the Upwork contract the true nature of my work. They had hired me for a nominal $5 contract on Upwork, and then paid the actual wages to me as "expenses reimbursement". This, I think, was so that one couldn’t build one’s profile on Upwork and bid for work from other companies that might offer better pay. I was still expected to log into the Google Docs spreadsheet and keep the record there of the files that I worked on, but none of this incidental time spent on keeping the record of what tasks I worked, was reflected in the pay. Instead, they were only paying by the audio minute successfully transcribed. Even for me, as someone trained and proficient in the Loft tool, it could take 30 or 40 minutes to correctly label and transcribe all the words and noise in a three minute audio clip. So, the pay had dropped far, far below legal standards.

For some of the newer people joining the group chat, a 30 minute piece of audio could take up to a week or more to clean up and correctly label every single audio feature and utterance. The pay for the work when I was first hired by the staffing agency was $12 per hour for 60 hours a week, so $720 per week. When I was hired through Upwork, the rate of pay was to be $4 per audio minute transcribed. The highest I was able to earn in a week was $90, as we were now competing with so many more workers for the quantity of tasks available. Because of this low rate of pay, there was a high turnover in people quitting and leaving the chat. I also noticed that most of the workers who were in the Google Hangout for the Spanish transcriptions were no longer located in Canada, and were instead in countries like Venezuela and Bolivia, where a $USD pay cheque could go farther when converted to local currency. The project manager was a freelancer hired in Turkey, and the reviewers were in Argentina, Ireland, or other places.

There also began to be a big delay between when a piece of work was finished by a worker, and when it could get reviewed by a reviewer. Because we were only paid for audio that had passed muster and been approved by a reviewer, people complained about this delay in approvals. If your transcripts didn’t get reviewed quickly, it could mean no pay or low pay in a given week, depending on how backed up the reviewers were and how messy the transcripts they were seeing were. We were not paid for any of the time spent getting training in the Google Hangout chat, or the time we’d work fixing our transcripts that did not pass an initial review.

I think that the staffing company laid-off its local workforce in order to rely on contract workers, because it wanted to evade legal liabilities like paying national pension plan amounts and vacation hours. According to ​an article praising the company on Upwork​ (archived version), the staffing agency was "lean" and could hire transcribers for 70 different language groups, despite having a management staff of only one person as far as I could tell. The accounting and human resources functions were also being contracted out to different people hired through Upwork, or maybe even done by the same person, just responding from different email addresses. According to the article on Upwork, LinguistixTank’s "volume ranges from 100 to 3,000 freelancers at one time" while Google was sending projects that "can last a few days to a few months". This article says that the company’s "go-to resource" was "90% freelance talent", and the staffing company "contracted experts in HR, business coaching, and marketing", all through these so-called freelance or gig markets.

After the pandemic

Google stopped sending transcribing tasks to us freelancers in June of 2020, blaming the global pandemic. They notified workers that the contract might resume in October, but this never happened.

The only place to interact with co-workers being a Google Hangouts chatroom surveilled by the company, it was very difficult to talk to co-workers about our working conditions and to find a way to form common demands. It is also hard to contact other Upwork users and fight against this practice of under-the-table $5 contracts with wages paid out as expenses. The only feedback mechanism against the staffing company would be to leave a 1 star review on Upwork, which they’d likely respond to by doing the same against your freelance profile, and prevent you from bidding for other gigs.

If other freelancers have very distinctive first and last names, it is possible to search for them on other platforms like Facebook, or LinkedIn, and contact them there to try to build rapport and trust, but as most people are language experts in non-English languages, to think about suing for damages the most profitable company on the planet in their home jurisdiction of California, where it is a massive employer with deep pockets for lobbying, is a daunting proposal.

At this point you may be wondering, can I join a union, namely ​the new Google-specific Alphabet Workers Union​? Well, no. "If you’re not currently doing work for Alphabet, or currently contesting your termination, AWU isn’t the right fit", one union organizer told me.

Because Google laid us all off in June and we never had the chance to even speak to the company directly about our work let alone our terminations, contesting our termination collectively doesn’t seem to be an option. So, is Google, the staffing agency, or Upwork the most responsible for our poor labour conditions? Is there a way to jointly merge the responsibilities of these companies, to combat how they diffuse their responsibilities to workers when they distribute contracting in this way?

In the end, we may have successfully trained the artificial intelligence systems at Google on how to replace us humans, for now. Every time you are able to switch on automatic Closed Captions for a YouTube video, or during a Google Meet conference call, to seamlessly render into text the audio of what is being said in real time, using so-called artificial intelligence, I hope you remember the people who worked for far below a living wage, to make that technology possible.

In Pleasure Activism, brown offers one such framework, a guide for the practice of pleasure that emerges from a rich lineage, and a “diversity of care tactics,” in the words of Leah Lakshmi Peipzna-Samarasinha (p. 315) to counter the scarcity mindset of much anti-capitalist organizing. The book also works as a sequel to brown’s Emergent Strategy (AK Press 2017), although I read the two books in the reverse order. 

The edited collection opens with a set of eight pleasure principles (p. 14) building on brown’s pleasure lineage. The principles at the start become fleshedout in the nine sections and subsections of the book, with chapters consisting of essays, poems, manifestos, journal entries, and edited dialogues or trialogues. Many of the chapters written by brown began as essays in her Bitch magazine column “The Pleasure Dome.” More than 30 other artists, thinkers and doers appear in the collection, either in conversation with brown or as essay authors. The principles to open the book are mirrored by the end with another list: of 11 practices, to make a path to active pleasure (p.431). 

Pleasure Activism grounds itself in the work of writers like Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, with Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” republished as a first chapter, and Butler’s science fiction referenced throughout. Given that the current president of the United States was elected on a platform ripped from the mouth of the villain in Butler’s Parable of the Talents (Butler, p.15), brown’s background is a welcome guide. Rather than an academic collection, the meat of Pleasure Activism are interviews with the people who have shaped the author’s concept of pleasure, and who speak to the ways in which engaging with joy on a cellular level should guide movement’s pursuit of a better world. She writes: “on a species level, I can feel there’s not a story for our survival in the cards and in ourselves right now” and that pleasure activism is about moving from dying to reproducing (p. 51). 

In sections dedicated to sex, drugs and fashion, among other endeavors, brown interrogates the possibilities for pleasure in the human experience and lays out the spells and rituals she follows in bringing about transformative justice. The thought is provoking: if the planet is indeed going extinct, perhaps sensations of joy hold the key for extending time? As brown puts it: “What was dinosaur humor? Those moments where you’re like: we’re going extinct, let’s enjoy it.” (p.342) 

The collection avoids veering into nihilism, nor does it propose responding to pain with hedonism. There is early disavowal of excess, and acknowledgement that while suffering can crystallise political communities, it does not contain the ingredients for liberation. Instead, brown leans on science fiction, as she believes that “all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced” (p.10). The collection of voices engages with the imaginary as urgently as it anchors itself in the physical body. 

“Hot and Heavy” homework assignments, of which there are 14 throughout the book, include instructions to track one’s consent in physical activities, and to pay attention to your nipples. brown often calls to focus attention on physical sensations and activate dormant cells. Pleasure Activism, as curated by brown, is a fitting example of the collective experience of love and the relationships that define every mass movement (p. 276) and whisper the most ancient wisdom about possibilities for a shared future. 

What brown calls her pleasure activism lineage (p.25) speaks to her trajectory as a generative somatic student and healer. Here was not the first place I encountered positive mention of the field of somatics, but it was the first time this practice was articulated as something accessible to a movement or a larger group. Previously, I might have considered somatic therapy as one branch in the field of health practices, to be purchased by privileged members of my environment, for self-contained explorations with a health specialist of the injuries they’ve carried in their bodies. 

Instead, brown invites a broader consideration of pleasure as guide through the field of healing the body. “It turns out being present is the most important part of every single experience in my life” (p. 277). Pleasure Activism can boil down to paying attention, to being present for the best parts of being human and then recreating the behaviors that contain within themselves our reasons for choosing life. Alana Devich Cyril, who shares the book’s dedication, says in her interview with brown that “pleasure is practice” and one can fall out of practice but life is better when that muscle is strong. 

The erotic component of the argument is central, so much so that brown encourages readers to give themselves an orgasm before reading each new section (p.3). In attempting to review the collection with the intention of the writer close at heart, I mostly followed this homework assignment, although it slowed down my journey through the text. Other homework assignments included tracking one’s consent boundaries around any physical touch, like hand shakes or hugs, for a week. 

The author expands new avenues for “tuning into what brings aliveness into our systems” (p. 6) and “learning from what pleases us about how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have.” (p. 252) She opens by laying out eight principles for pleasure activism, which become fleshed out in the author’s interrogations of her relationships. In the conclusion, brown mirrors these principles by offering a list of suggested practices to guide the pleasure activists, like “find the ease” and “be absolutely committed to your process” while being detached from the outcomes of it (pp. 432-433). 

From my own healing journey –frequently interrupted by self-sabotage and scarcity economics– brown’s certainty that pleasure is the missing piece has already been a revelation. I anticipate in the future I will no longer feel the urge to shirk ownership of the experience of seeking pleasure, and am game for the pursuit of making the revolution irresistible, an aphorism Toni Cade Bambara expressed as the role of the artist and which brown has repurposed to guide those who identify with her call to a pleasure-led activism (p.65). 

References:

Butler, Octavia E. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing. 

brown, adrienne maree 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press. 

While this may sound exotic to some, it was the only life I knew. Growing up in Guayaquil meant we were limited to local newspapers and a few channels on television to help us understand our world – that is, until the Internet arrived. To say I loved the Internet at first sight would be an understatement. I was only 12 years old, but within moments of logging on, I began to feel like a global citizen. Suddenly, letters from my grandparents in Canada took seconds instead of weeks to reach us. We could even livestream CBC Radio with some success.

Throughout high school, to my parents’ dismay, I’d hog the dial-up for hours to talk to strangers in chat rooms. While many of these chats were about innocent topics like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia, it still felt liberating. A pale-skinned blond kid with blue eyes, I stuck out wherever I went in Ecuador. But online, I felt like I could be anonymous and experiment and communicate with just about anyone without the sense of being watched or judged. Those were the early days of the Internet, though, and it would take around 15 years for me – and the rest of the world – to learn about mass surveillance.

In the summer of 2013, I was working as a Web editor at an Ecuadorean newspaper when the now infamous Edward Snowden story broke worldwide. Snowden, who fled his job at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) with thousands of top-secret documents, blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal mass-spying initiative. Finding out that the platforms I had entrusted with my photos, love letters and private thoughts were being co-opted by American intelligence services felt like a betrayal. These were places where I had built identities and friendships, and not only were they being monitored but the information was also being used by powerful government agencies for their own political interests.

Today, as a Berlin-based Canadian journalist who covers human-rights and civil-liberty stories, I am often asked “Does mass surveillance online matter?” And, more often than not, this is followed by “But don’t we need surveillance to protect ourselves?” Yes and no. With the attack on two Canadian soldiers in Ottawa in 2014, the Charlie Hebdo shooting in early 2015, the mass shootings in Paris last November, as well as a number of more recent attacks in Brussels, Orlando, Fla., the Istanbul Ataturk Airport, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Nice, France, to name but a few, online surveillance has now become a key component in the way governments wage war against terrorism. But what happens when ordinary citizens get caught up in the surveillance?

Shortly after I left my newspaper job in Ecuador, my heart was tugged by a story about a massacre in the country’s Amazon rainforest: Uncontacted indigenous people had been killed by a neighbouring tribe, and two small girls had been kidnapped. In January 2014, I wrote an article for Newsweek in which I highlighted the shortcomings of President Rafael Correa and the Ecuadorean government’s handling of the aftermath as well as the government’s harmful oil drilling in the rainforest that ignited the tensions between the tribes in the first place. Having his failures laid bare to an international audience angered Correa, and he spent 12 minutes during an Ecuadorean-television broadcast dismissing my article.

I instantly became a target. After the broadcast, intelligence officers visited my former workplaces to try to find out information about me. I believe they mined my social-media profile and that my phone calls were intercepted. My social-media and email accounts were inundated with hateful messages and allusions to violence and deportation threats. Content calling me a liar was uploaded to YouTube. As a result, I gave up my smartphone for a while. Ecuador has an active domestic spying agency called SENAIN, and I found my picture and a profile in leaked documents from the agency. (These were published by an Ecuadorean whistle-blowing website.)

When my work visa expired in April 2014, I decided not to renew it. I didn’t feel safe in Ecuador anymore and returned to Cambridge, Ont., to try to regain some control over my digital self. The Internet is a powerful tool for communication and self-expression, but when it’s turned against a people or an individual, it becomes formidable. While I can’t say that what happened to me in Ecuador would ever happen in Canada, a platform this powerful is ripe for abuse by powerful states and corporations.

This is not to say that we don’t need online surveillance. But I believe that the type of surveillance we need to protect ourselves should be limited in scope, approved by a judge and its results made available for requests so it can be examined by the public to ensure its compliance with our democratic values. Just because we have the technology to do the equivalent of kicking down the doors of every household worldwide and listening in on their conversations doesn’t mean we should. Our computers and our phones contain as much intimate detail as our homes – the protections should be equivalent.

But we seem to be moving in the opposite direction – even in Canada. Take, for instance, the controversial anti-terrorism act, Bill C-51, which received royal assent in Ottawa last year and is now law. When it was first introduced by the then Conservative government in early 2015, many reacted negatively, saying the new laws enacted by the bill would undermine the basic human rights of Canadian citizens. And even though the law was passed with both Liberal and Conservative support, more than 100 academics, as well as Amnesty International, have spoken out against the bill, outlining concerns over privacy rights and freedom of speech both online and off. Before the federal election last October, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party campaigned with promises to “repeal the problematic elements of Bill C-51 and introduce new legislation that better balances our collective security with our rights and freedoms.” But the party has yet to reveal its proposed amendments – and a public consultation is expected to continue until the end of the year.

Today there is a growing resistance against mass surveillance. After being trailed by state security in Ecuador and trolled online even while I was living in Canada, I decided to move to Berlin, Germany, where there are stricter privacy laws. The capital has become a hub for hackers, journalists, activists and human-rights workers who have gathered together to collaborate and exchange ideas about online surveillance and the future of the Internet. Some people here are working on technical solutions to the problem of surveillance by building decentralized communication systems that allow for strong encryption. Others work on policy solutions by helping to write legislation or establish case law that protects people’s privacy. A lot of the current work in this field involves trying to roll back the power of intelligence agencies like the NSA, Canada’s CSIS or the German BND. Others, like myself, work on public education: We write stories and create media that teach people about the danger we all face if the Internet becomes entirely co-opted by powerful organizations.

For me, my fight for free and private spaces online is, at first, a selfish one. I’m fighting to save that early Internet I fell in love with – the one that showed me the beauty of human connection and the power of collective action. But it is also a fight for democracy. Because how we collectively view and use the Internet is intrinsically linked to how we define equality, freedom and justice.

PRIVACY 101

PRIVACY BADGER This browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation blocks advertisers and websites that try to track your activities.

TOR BROWSER Using this browser is an easy way to protect your anonymity online. Use it instead of your regular browser to surf the Internet completely anonymously.

ENIGMAIL Use Thunderbird’s Enigmail plug-in and encrypt your emails with OpenPGP (stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”), which can turn plain text into ciphertext.

OFF-THE-RECORD If you really want to have fun with encryption, get a group of friends together (make sure there’s a techie on hand) to learn about Off-the-Record (OTR) encryption.

CRYPTOPARTY Keep your eyes open for (or organize!) a Cryptoparty in your city: That’s where information about online privacy is catching on and spreading all over the world.

OPENMEDIA This Canadian platform creates community-driven campaigns to raise awareness of mass-surveillance online. It is running a campaign asking MPs to repeal Bill C-51 and forbid the government from spying on the private communications and activities of people in Canada, whether domestically or through international partners, without a warrant issued by an open court.

How do you protect your digital privacy?

If I’m having a private meeting, we probably won’t bring out phones, and we’ll talk in a public park. I rely on a mix of analogue and digital tactics; varying routines, keepings people on a need-to-know basis, passing messages through trusted third parties, not writing everything down until it’s safe to do so, not digitising field notes until you are out of a country, not using smartphones for calls or texts. And I alwazys keep in my mind that some countries have laws against using strong encryption software. 

Why did you start to learn about strict information security practices? 

Anyone who works on gender-based violence knows that privacy can save lives. It’s absolutely required to protect the people we serve. If I inadvertedly leak information because I can’t handle my digital security, then I put lives at risk. At a training session I gave recently in eastern Europe, I was not surprised to hear that safehouses in the country do not allow smartphones. They knew the GPS and other technologies have introduced new risks. Phones infected with spyware can give you away to someone who is trying to hunt and kill you. 

Do you think privacy is dead?

If you say privacy is dead, whose privacy are you talking about? Activists in Johannesburg need privacy in order to organize their protests. A lot of human rights organizing in Ethiopia explicitly happens away from phones and the internet because of longstanding awareness of mass and targeted surveillance, by an authoritarian state. When I was woking on the camps on the Somali border, the gorvernment insisted that I take what they called a “colleague”, who was a spy, into my human rights interviews with Somali refugee girls. I passed out large sheets of paperwith coloured markers and had the girls draw for an hour., a research methos called safety-mapping and storytelling. The girls drew in almost complete silence while the spy was in the room. After an hour, the spy seemed to lose interest, maybe she thought I was doing an art project. As soon as she left the room, the girls started talking. The floodgates opened up about abductions and rapes in the hills. 

I remember individual stalls stocking anything from jeans and T-shirts to household chemicals. The stalls, crowded against one another under tarp-like roofs of stretched black plastic, took over 20 blocks in the city’s downtown core.

The 2014 Notorious Markets List notes that in La Bahia, “the occasional administrative enforcement efforts focus mainly on protecting domestic IPR [intellectual property rights] and are insufficient to address the overall problem.” The U.S. Americans perceive this as threatening the economic interests of intellectual rights holders, especially U.S. American commercial interests.

The Ecuadorian government, however, doesn’t see La Bahia and the broader bustling market for unlicensed goods in Ecuador as that “problem” identified by the U.S.. Ecuador decriminalized copyright violations in 2014 and even drafted a bill to encourage the spread of “open knowledge” to comply with a national plan to create a “social knowledge economy.”

That breath will be $5

“Capitalism tries to privatize and commercialize everything,” economist René Ramirez wrote on his blog in January 2014. Ramirez is Ecuador’s Secretary for Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation; his department is behind the social knowledge economy legislation. “If it could commercialize air, it would….” he continued.

“Knowledge is an infinite resource, which could be distributed very widely if not for institutionally imposed barriers….It’s obvious industrialized countries seek these commercialized systems of knowledge and technology because they’re the owners of the highest value knowledge….We in the South are left with the role of being consumers of this science, creation and innovation coming from the North.”

Ramirez believes government on the Left, as his claims to be, should be engaged in constructing free and open knowledge systems.

Ecuador’s efforts to reinterpret intellectual property within its border stems from the principles laid out in the 2008 Constitution, the most well-known legislation passed by current president, Rafael Correa.

That constitution radically changed Ecuadorian institutions and legislation. It granted rights to nature, which led in part to a complete shutdown of the country’s mining industry exploration in 2008. Correa’s government has since developed legislation to reboot the mining industry, and in 2013, it passed a bill that streamlined the process for foreign investment in the mining sector.

“They realize their policies are not working and they change them,” says Andres Vergara, a financial analyst at a stock market firm in Quito. He says the Correa government’s legislative trajectory is typical for populist governments in the region.

Reflecting some lack of confidence in the conditions in the country, and despite the 2013 mining law reform, that same year, Canada-based Kinross Gold pulled out of Fruta del Norte, a large gold-silver project. It sold the land concession for $240 million, a fraction of the $1.2 billion it had paid in 2008.

The government’s heavy-handed involvement since 2008 in all aspects of life in Ecuador has also been reflected in total overhauls of the judicial, education and healthcare systems, as well as labour law.

“Investment into state projects is a good bet,” Vergara says. “Even if the project doesn’t work out, the investment has a lot of guarantees. When it comes to state projects, the state is reliable.”

For example, in December 2015, Ecuador paid $650 million for total payment of its 2015 global bonds, marking the first time in its history the country repaid its foreign debt on time. The move was meant to restore investor confidence and lower future borrowing costs, according to the government. A month later, it also agreed to pay $980 million to the U.S. oil company Occidental for a 2006 assets seizure after the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled in Occidental’s favour.

Most of the investments entering Ecuador are now going to state projects, such as hydroelectric dams and the Pacific Oil refinery project, because it’s one way for foreign investors to feel confident despite the various shifting legislative regimes.

 Borderline Marxist

“Foreign direct investment is more complicated,” Vergara says. “At least there’s no risk of devaluation for the currency and single-digit inflation since dollarization,” which happened in 2001.

Ecuadorian labour laws, he adds, “are borderline Marxist. We have a situation where half of the population is underemployed,” because it costs too much for small and medium-size companies to hire full-time workers and pay for pensions and benefits in addition to salaries.

“The government is currently relaxing the rules [of the Labour Code] because it’s too expensive to hire full-time workers,” Vergara says. Legislation passed in March allows private companies to reduce workers’ hours from 40 hours to 30 hours per week for six months if they can prove they’re undergoing austerity measures. Parental leave will also be extended for both mothers and fathers, and the state will fund more social services for young workers earning less than twice the minimum wage and increase unemployment benefits for those laid off in 2016.

For hiring foreign workers, the process is even more complex. In 2013, I applied to work at an Ecuadorian newspaper. I anticipated problems with the visa process and so had accepted a job offer from a state-owned paper, hoping to avoid some of the constraints on private media companies the government has enacted.

Even with a job offer in hand, it took six months to negotiate a work visa. The process involved many trips to the Ministry of Labour, where I was assisted by a Ministry lawyer.

At different parts of the process, I had to present blood tests verifying my HIV status, fire department inspection papers of the company I wished to work for, salary information for all its existing employees, certificates verifying all of my previous work experience and at least 300 hours of training hours in my field—all translated and certified by notaries and government-approved translators. Even the translators needed to attend a government oaths commissioner to verify the legality of their work.

I heard anecdotally during the process that Ecuador had granted fewer than 1,000 work permits to foreign workers that year, and I was surprised that many people had bothered to go through the process.

Eventually the Foreign Minister intervened and my permit was approved, but only because he’s a personal friend of my supervisor at the paper. If I’d been offered a job by a private media company instead, those connections wouldn’t have existed and the story would have ended differently. I wouldn’t have received the work permit without the Foreign Minister’s intervention, and he wouldn’t have intervened to help a private company hire.

Media and banking are the two sectors the Correa government has taken the most interest in constraining in post-2008 legislation. Vergara says the Correa government’s regulation of the banking sector has had a negative impact on business in the country.

Banks are obligated by law to offer credit to the state before private investors, and the state pays lower interest rates, which “takes away muscle from the financial sector.” The 2008 Constitution merged the Central Bank with the executive branch, significantly decreasing the Central Bank’s level of autonomy. Since 2008, the executive branch’s political agenda has directly influenced monetary policy.

The U.S. State Department puts out a yearly Investment Client Statement for firms considering investing in Ecuador. The 2015 guide reads as follows: “The [Government of Ecuador] is openly hostile towards private banks and financial institutions, considering them enemies of President Correa’s Citizen’s Revolution. Between 2012 and 2013, the financial sector was the target of numerous new restrictions. By 2012, most banks had sold off their brokerage firms, mutual funds and insurance companies to comply with constitutional changes following a May 2010 referendum. The amendment to Article 312 of the Constitution required banks and their senior managers and shareholders with more than 6% equity in financial entities to divest entirely from any interest in all non-financial companies by July 13, 2012. These provisions were incorporated into the Anti-Monopoly Law passed in September 2011.”

Uncertain environment

For this reason, financial and speculative markets aren’t a wise investment in Ecuador.

Vergara considers that the safest investment foreigners could make in Ecuador, besides state-promoted projects, is in established Ecuadorian companies. For example, Coca- Cola just bought controlling shares in Ecuadorian beverage company Tony. The top 500 companies on the Ecuadorian stock exchange rarely change from year to year, Vergara says, and investors can expect profits of 12% or more. “There’s good return over equity in the local market.”

New entrants into Ecuador, however, won’t find an impartial judiciary, says Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo, a Canadian entrepreneur based in Quito who advises companies wishing to set up shop in Latin America.

Biased judges create “an environment of uncertainty,” says Carpenter-Arevalo. “I invested my savings in my business and I’m left to wonder, if something goes wrong, will I be treated fairly by the law? Also, as a foreigner, I fear speaking out will lead to my visa getting cancelled or my business being harassed. As a result, I take risks—as do all investors and entrepreneurs—because you can’t be sure you’ll be treated fairly if you have to appear before the law.”

The World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index rates Ecuador 77th out of 102 countries on its most recent global index.

Nevertheless, “innovating in Ecuador can be extremely rewarding because there’s so much inefficiency begging to be disrupted,” says Carpenter-Arevalo.

While the U.S. may consider La Bahia a threat to its commercial interests, it also represents the bustling appetite for consumer goods in the growing Ecuadorian middle class and the opportunities for success for those willing to play by local rules. In recent years, Guayaquil has attempted to control the sprawl of the informal market by building covered stalls where merchants can locate their wares. It’s still the place where Guayaquileñxs buy $5 “Levi” jeans, street-refurbished cellphones of dubious origin and dollar DVDs of the latest releases. But kittycorner to the informal vendors, large chains have also opened up storefronts, and the same customers who skirt the copyright industry to stock their music collections will buy a refrigerator or a TV at the registered storefront down the street.

A final caution about Ecuador is that one’s fate can change rapidly. Today, my only way to visit La Bahia is via Google Street View. My journalism career in Ecuador ended abruptly in 2014 after I published a journalistic article in Newsweek pointing out inconsistencies in government oil policy on paper and in practice, and a human rights disaster in the Amazon region of Ecuador unfolding as a result of the inconsistencies. After President Correa went on TV to call me a liar, my work visa was not renewed and my bank account was flagged. I left the country and have seen many others who landed on Correa’s bad side suffer my same fate or worse.

One of those targeted was Anne Roth, who has been advising the German Left party during the government’s investigation into US surveillance. She is no stranger to these type of attacks, she said, but when threats come from her own government she has a framework for what to do.

“It was a Friday night, almost midnight in Berlin, and no lawyer in sight. I emailed the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because I thought they might still be awake. A few moments later I saw people tweeting about it, and that felt relieving somehow because in that instant I knew it wasn’t about me personally.”

In the two months since, campaigners from EFF and developers from anonymity tool the Tor Project have joined the activists in demanding more information from Twitter. In an open letter published in January, the group asked a detailed list of questions, including whether attackers gained administrative access to Twitter’s servers.

“Why does Twitter suspect that the attacks came from state-sponsored actors? Has Twitter identified any specific state as the source of the attacks? Were these automated brute-force attacks, customized attacks with a human behind them, or something else?,” it demanded.

Twitter has still not responded to the letter, campaigners said.

The notifications are thought to be the first example of Twitter warning its users of state-sponsored attacks, yet the campaigners say the company has not released as much information as Google, who have sent similar warnings to users since 2012. After sending its first batch of notices, Google’s information security team gave an interview to the New York Times, and their VP of engineering published a blog post with more information.

“Twitter should make a public statement explaining their rationale for sending out these warnings, as Google and Facebook did before it,” says Jillian York, a director at EFF, a digital rights campaign group based in San Francisco. York did not receive a warning from Twitter, but has previously received five similar notices from Google.

It felt like I was personally targeted, and that’s scary, especially when you have no idea who’s targeting you

The original warning sent from Twitter in December recommended users take steps to secure their accounts, suggesting using Tor to connect to the service and EFF’s guide on using social networks anonymously.

“Twitter’s users deserve to know which government has gained access to their account,” says Kate Krauss, spokesperson for the Tor Project, the non-profit that develops the anonymity network. “Twitter’s complete silence on this point is puzzling.”

Sent on or just after 14 December, the notification warned: “As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors. At this time, we have no evidence they obtained your account information, but we’re actively investigating this matter.” The statement said Twitter had no additional information it could share, but said the attackers may have been trying to access users’ IP addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

Tweet source

The lack of information from Twitter has led to speculation within the group about both the motive and the culprit of the attack. Some suggested that use of Tor could be a common factor, while others suggested the nation state implicated could be anyone from the US or UK, Germany, France, Russia or China.

The group includes members of the French digital rights advocacy group La Quadrature Du Net, the US-based Seattle Privacy Coalition, the international digital rights organization Access Now, developers of the anonymity software Tor and other privacy activists and writers from Canada, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. One of the affected users is an activist tweeting about the war in Donetsk, another a journalist covering the German parliamentary investigation into surveillance by the US National Security Agency.

Anne Roth, one of the 50 targeted, has been advising the German Left parliamentary party as part of that investigation and had to gain security clearance for her government job. “It is my job to investigate activities of the ‘Five Eyes’ and probably not too far fetched to assume that this is of interest to different secret services,” she said. “My partner was arrested with a terrorism charge (in Germany) years ago, and later released, charges dropped. We lived with anti-terror surveillance for years.”

“When I first saw the (email from Twitter), I felt a moment of shock. It felt like ‘oh no – here they come again’,” Roth says. “It felt in that moment like I was personally targeted and that’s scary, especially when you have no idea who’s targeting you.”

Another affected user, German security consultant Jens Kubiezel, observed that around 30 of the affected accounts almost exclusively connect to Twitter through Tor, although 10 users said they never used it. “While the accounts are geographically widely distributed, some of them use Tor to access the web. So there is a chance that really all used the same server,” said Kubiezel. Other activists dismissed the idea that Tor was the common factor, saying that the only common factor was Twitter itself.

Twitter was praised in 2011 when the company contested a Department of Justice gag order accompanying a subpoena for the data of the member of the Icelandic parliament and other Wikileaks volunteers. “Twitter resisted (the subpoenas) in secret, not for PR,” says David Robinson, of the targeted activists. “Though they lost in court, they modelled admirable corporate behavior.”

Twitter has repeatedly declined to comment or to confirm whether it was still investigating the breaches.

A spokesperson pointed to a previous public statement in which the company acknowledged that users accessing the site via Tor may have to navigate anti-spam measures: “Twitter does not block Tor, and many Twitter users rely on the Tor network for the important privacy and security it provides. Occasionally, signups and logins may be asked to phone verify if they exhibit spam-like behavior. This is applicable to all IPs and not just Tor IPs.”

Google has warned users of this type of attack since June 2012, and Facebook since October 2015. Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they will follow suit, although are not known to have issued any warnings yet.

One person was missing: their new executive director, Shari Steele, who had been introduced publicly a few days earlier to much fanfare at the world’s oldest gathering of hackers: the annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.

Steele says it’s accurate to describe her as avoiding the spotlight. “That is the way I work, and how I will continue to work at Tor,” Steele told the Guardian. Former co-workers confirmed: she likes to work behind the scenes, and is extremely effective doing so.

Steele comes to Tor after 15 years as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization she joined as a staff lawyer in 1992 shortly after it was founded. A trained lawyer, Steele advised, among other bodies, the US sentencing commission on suitable terms for computer security offences and the National Research Council on encryption policy.

Perhaps most significantly, it was her decision, as head of the EFF in 2004, to take Tor under the foundation’s wing that is the reason Tor exists in its current shape, according to Roger Dingledine, who helped found the Tor Project in 2006. Steele won’t herself take the credit for that decision, but it earned her the loyalty of Tor staff and devotees.

The Tor Project itself is the US non-profit responsible for the development of the Tor network, a suite of software for online anonymity and censorship circumvention. Tor was originally called The Onion Router because the software keeps its users anonymous by disguising their internet traffic under layers of relays – like the layers of an onion.

“The basic idea is you have your software, it pulls down a list of the 8,000 relays,” or network nodes, computers running Tor’s relay software, “and it builds a path through three of them so that no single relay can learn where you’re coming from and where you’re going,” explains Dingledine.

For many developers, there is an ideological and moral incentive to contribute to the project. “One of the reasons I feel that my work on Tor bridge relays is so important is because I get to help people all over the world, in various situations, circumvent internet censorship and be able to freely access information and communicate their ideas,” said core developer Isis Lovecruft. “Without being able to do so, all progression of science and human understanding could grind to a halt.”

Although it claims more than 2 million users per day, Tor has had trouble gaining traction with people who only associate its anonymity features with criminal activity and child abuse.

In remarks to the House judiciary committee in October, for example, the FBI director, James Comey, who has campaigned to make automatic encryption illegal, referenced CryptoWall, which accesses and encrypts files on a victim’s computer and will only release them on payment of a ransom. CryptoWall was the first to use Tor to host the sites where the criminals demanded payment. “All this gives cybercriminals an additional layer of anonymity that makes them even more difficult to track,” said Comey.

Earlier in 2015, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department Leslie Caldwell told Washington’s State of the Net conference that as much as 80% of the traffic on Tor involves child abuse material.

Wired immediately said the statistic was wrong; Caldwell was misrepresenting research that had found that 80% of hidden services (ed - now called ‘onion services’) measured by one study purportedly involved child abuse. The figure of 80% was not measuring all Tor traffic. Onion services account for 2% of Tor traffic.

Regardless, Tor has struggled to disassociate itself from the nefarious users of internet anonymity. On their home site, they make user-cases for journalists, law enforcement, whistleblowers and also the military; Tor started as a project of the US Naval Research Laboratory in 2002.

“The media has really picked up on this story of Tor and the dark web,” says Steele, adamantly.

“The reality is that the dark web is collateral. The people who are working on Tor are not doing it for the dark web. That’s not what it is; that’s not what it’s about or what people care about.”

Steele describes those who work on Tor as “freedom fighters”. “The people who are working on the Tor project are doing it because they care desperately about the technology and they care desperately about what the technology means to the world,” said Steele.

“They see themselves as being freedom fighters. And they should. They love the product and the organization, but the organization hasn’t reciprocated. It hasn’t supported them at times when they have been out there; they haven’t been able to depend on the Tor organization. Sometimes there isn’t a lot that can be done to help, but sometimes there is.”

A survey of 130 Tor staff and volunteers in September 2015 says: “The Tor community self-reports as being overworked and stressed.

“Contributing factors include worry about people’s personal privacy and security, unhappiness about what they felt was bad behaviour in the Tor community, and a lack of job security and access to healthcare and other benefits,” it found.

Steele says some of those things are problems she can fix as executive director.

“One of the key things is to build up the organizational side of Tor. Tor already is producing amazing products. And the technologists who are working at Tor are really, really bright. They didn’t need someone to come in there and restructure that. What they really need is someone to build the support system so they can all be focused on doing their good work. Stuff like bank accounts, health insurance, raising money.”

The core Tor survey also found that Tor’s funding model was a big point of concern for staff, with many concerned that a single funding source from the US government makes Tor’s future vulnerable and damages its credibility. “A third [of those surveyed are] saying the Tor Project should probably aim to entirely stop taking US government money. People internal to Tor are likelier than external people to say they don’t like the US government funding model.”

Steele agrees that Tor’s funding model so far has been unusual. For a tool that advertises itself as capable of government circumvention, the appearance of funding itself mostly with US government grants is bad. Tor advertises on its homepage that Edward Snowden used Tor to protect himself from the most technically proficient adversary on the planet – the US National Security Agency. Steele says there are many other funding models to explore for Tor.

“They have built the organisation around a university research model where they fund specific projects and have to have separate budgets for each of the projects they’re working on … It’s not by any remote stretch of the imagination the way a traditional non-profit is funded,” she said.

Despite being a registered non-profit organization, Tor hasn’t been getting as much money from individuals, foundations, from corporate donors, from running events, or other schemes. “There is a whole world of funding opportunities that they haven’t even explored. And I agree – it actually makes Tor very vulnerable.”

Steele spoke modestly and only briefly during Tor’s keynote speech to the 3,500 people at the event, acknowledging that her priority would be to diversify its funding sources. “Government funding has been really difficult for us, specifically because it’s all restricted and so it limits the kinds of things we want to do. When you get the developers in a room blue-skying about the things that they want to do, it’s incredible – these are really brilliant people who want to do great things. But they’re really limited when the funding says they have to do particular things.”

Steele introduced a funding drive that has raised $170,000 so far, including the obligatory slogan T-shirt: “This is what a Tor supporter looks like,” it says.

Wendy Seltzer, who has been on Tor’s board since the organization was founded as a non-profit, says that Shari can be behind the scenes and yet everywhere at the same time, consistent and powerful.

“For example, the way she supported the legal team at EFF was by doing lots of things that needed to be done but weren’t the sexy out-front things. She gives people the support they need to go out and do those things. She’s not afraid of being out of the limelight when it’s necessary and letting others move forward as they see fit. Bringing those strengths to Tor and continuing to enable Roger, Jake and Nick, Mike, Karsten and Isabella and all of the team to go out and develop the technology and advocate for its use, and build the product, she will help to – more than keep things running – to move things forward.”

Despite her deliberate low profile, Steele bears a significant burden: to fix an organization that many people see as integral to the architecture of a free internet, yet is straining to keep up with the financial and technical demands on its resources. “I’m ready,” Steele says about the challenge ahead. “I still have some fight left in me.”

Published first at The Guardian

Moazzam Begg, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee, was unable to address Europe’s largest hacker convention in person because the British government confiscated his passport. The British Pakistani who spent two years at the US detention facility – but who has been declared not guilty of terrorism charges – spoke to the event by video link, urging developers to continue building free software encryption tools for political resistance.

“What did I ever do to these governments? They took me from my home in Pakistan to the world’s most notorious prison,” Begg said. “If seeking justice and accountability they think will harm them, then I will continue to do that. Nobody is above the law.”

Begg was addressing the Chaos Communication Congress alongside British Muslim convert Cerie Bullivant. Both were speaking on behalf of Cage, the UK campaign group that fights for the rights of communities affected by the war on terror, and said the technology developed by people at the convention was key to their campaign work.

“When your whole reason to be is to hold the state to account, to ask questions of people that don’t want to have questions asked of them, it’s essential that we can protect our sources, that we’re not being undermined in those operations,” Bullivant told the Guardian.

“But also just to build solidarity. Muslims are used as the canary in the mine. But next on the list are activists and dissidents” – like some of the people in attendance in Hamburg.

“There’s a massive push to try and separate us, to tell people on the left that you’re regressive if you stand by the Muslims. The fact of the matter is we’re all here to work for a common goal: that is individual liberty and freedom, and not to have a surveillance state that is unaccountable.”

A moral duty to talk about this violation of human rights

Begg was detained in Pakistan in 2002 and transferred to extrajudicial detention centres in Afghanistan’s Bagram internment facility and, later, at Guantánamo Bay. In recent years, he says his unjust persecution has continued as his assets have been frozen and his families’ bank accounts closed – including his 11-year-old son’s bank account – under laws designed to freeze the assets of terrorists.

In 2014, he was released from the British high-security prison, Belmarsh, after a terrorism prosecution against him collapsed. Begg had spent months awaiting trial over terrorism charges related to a trip to Syria when it emerged that police and prosecutors had obtained secret intelligence material that undermined the terrorism case against him.

Begg was introduced to the audience in Hamburg by Jacob Appelbaum, a prominent member of the hacker community who has volunteered for WikiLeaks and is an employee of the Tor Project, a free software tool for online anonymity.

“This person is the canonical example of someone who is completely innocent,” Appelbaum said. “He should be able to come in person. The fact that he cannot travel here is a fundamental violation of his human rights … We have a moral duty to talk about the things that are taking place.”

Cerie Bullivant was detained for three hours en route to Germany, he claims. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Bullivant lived under a control order, a type of house arrest, for two years and was jailed for six months in a maximum security prison on suspicion of links to terrorism. When his case eventually went to court it was dismissed by the judge for lack of evidence.

“I was never given any reason. To this day I still don’t know what I was even accused of in the first place,” he said.

On his way to the event in Hamburg, he claimed, he was detained for three hours and interrogated by German authorities at the behest of British law enforcement.

“These are cases of due process. Muslims and the suspect community are the canaries in the mine. People are more likely to be accepting of these things when it’s posed as a terrorism issue.”

Bullivant warned the audience that if abuses to due process are tolerated by society when they happen to Muslims, it will affect others in the future and erode the principles of justice.

‘I thought: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong – I’ve got nothing to fear’

Begg spoke about the importance of encryption tools, to protect vulnerable communities from suspicion. He told a story about an interrogation in Bagram when he was forced to listen to a woman’s screams in an adjoining room and told they belonged to his wife, and shown pictures of his children that British authorities got off his laptop. Begg said he was threatened by the CIA during his interrogation to be sent to Egypt “like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi”, whose confession given under torture was used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.

“This is what is so important about encryption programs. It isn’t because we have anything to hide. It is because we have experience of those people who are mastered in the arts of torture and abuse. Any of the information that they can use and get a hold of about you, they will use against you,” said Begg.

Bullivant attempted to travel to Syria in his early 20s, long before the current civil war started, he said. He wanted to work in orphanages and teach English. Before his flight, he was detained under Schedule 7 and interrogated for 10 hours.

“I was going backpacking basically, to learn some Arabic … I gave then my entire life story, from terrible grungy rock bands to what jobs my grandmother had. My thinking at that time was: I have nothing to fear, I’ve never done anything wrong.”

MI5 agents told him at the end of his detention in the airport that though he was free to travel, as a convert to Islam he fitted the profile of someone who was going to go off and become a radical. He was told not to go anywhere that could be misconstrued.

Bullivant still wanted to work with children and was offered a position at an orphanage in Bangladesh, which he thought satisfied the MI5 agent’s request. A few days before his flight he was put under a control order, indefinitely.

Later Bullivant and his lawyers discovered that a friend of his mother’s had called a terror hotline, while drunk, and said she thought he might have been radicalized because he was a new convert planning a trip to Syria.

“They’d taken the rambling, drunken phone call of somebody that I hadn’t seen in two years – and taken it as verbatim proof that I was an extremist. And two and a half years of my life, flushed down the toilet. Just mad.”

Little known to the rest of the world, a team of open source software developers played a small but integral part in helping to stop the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone, solving a payroll crisis that was hindering the fight against the disease.

Emerson Tan from NetHope, a consortium of NGOs working in IT and development, told the tale at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.

“These guys basically saved their country from complete collapse. I can’t overestimate how many lives they saved,” he said about his co-presenters, Salton Arthur Massally, Harold Valentine Mac-Saidu and Francis Banguara, who appeared over video link.

Tan was dispatched to Sierra Leone in October 2014 with a vague mandate: “Go there and improve things.”

The problem that most urgently needed solving was distributing wages to healthcare workers on the frontline fighting the epidemic.

“In the old system, nobody gets paid, for months,” Tan said, which caused multiple problems. Doctors and nurses were forced to take money from patients, he said, undermining people’s confidence in the health system at a vital time. And when healthcare workers went on strike, Ebola patients in hospital quarantines broke out in search of food, exacerbating the spread of the disease.

When millions of dollars began pouring in from international sources, it wasn’t clear how to distribute it to the 30,000 healthcare workers needed to tackle the epidemic because until that point, payroll had been handled in cash. Tan said he was sometimes handling “kilograms of money”.

“Sometimes I would just weigh it, because it’s easier to weigh a stack of money than to count it.” The country’s central bank at one point informed him they were going to run out of bank notes. On top of those problems, there were only eight ATMs in the entire country.

Time was a pressing concern. A UN official told Tan: “We have a couple of months, or we’re going to lose the region.”

To solve the problem, Massally and his team drew on existing open source software solutions for payroll management, biometrics, logistics and accounting.

“None of this would be possible without open source software and frameworks,” Tan told the audience at the technology conference. “You could not possibly develop systems this quickly for such low amounts of money without the existence of this huge open source ecosystem.”

The team cannibalized Sierra Leone’s existing voter registration machines to create a payroll enrollment scheme. They couldn’t use fingerprint biometrics because it would have created a cross-contaminating risk, so they used open source facial recognition software called OpenBR to enroll healthcare workers.

Then, in conjunction with other groups and individuals working in Sierra Leone, they developed a mobile money system that substituted cellphone-minutes for cash, and created an automated payment system.

They completed the core system in two weeks, going without sleep for days at a time, knowing that millions of lives depended on their work.

“I still have some health concerns from drinking too much caffeine,” said Massally.

“People were paid on time, 100% of the time”, Tan said, “for the first time in Sierra Leone’s history.” As a result, people’s faith in the healthcare system was restored, he said, drawing a direct link between that and the end of the Ebola epidemic.

As of 7 November 2015, Sierra Leone is considered to be free of Ebola. A total of 3,955 people lost their lives in Sierra Leone, more than a third of the total deaths associated with the 2014-15 west African Ebola outbreak.

Musa Afrah inaugurated the largest hacker conference in Europe, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, by declaring she knew nothing about the field of IT. Linus Neumann from the Chaos Computer Club, which has organized the congress every year since 1984, had to work hard to convince her to come.

“As hackers, we think a lot about virtual gates and how to overcome them. But away from [the] keyboard, our confidence and resources in overcoming gates is limited,” Neumann said.

Musa Afrah’s experience defeating borders to survive as a newcomer was a perspective congress organizers dearly wanted to share with the 12,000 hackers attending the sold-out conference this year. Germany was on track to accept one million refugees in 2015.

“A lot of hackers and IT experts don’t know much about our kinds of problems, so it’s my opportunity to educate them about who we are and what problems we go through,” Musa Afrah told the Guardian. She described simple actions, like boarding a train, as contributing to the alienation she felt when she arrived in Brandenburg in 2014. Simple tools, like cellphone apps and practical education, can make a large difference in the lives of newcomers, she said.

After the first day of the conference, Musa Afrah said she was impressed by the passion of the people she had met. She praised the Freifunk group, a non-commercial community initiative that has helped set up more than 100 Wi-Fi hotspots at refugee housing centres in Germany.

“Technology doesn’t solve everything. Things are not solved by robots, they are solved by human beings,” Musa Afrah says. “But internet is a key connector right now. Internet is one of the fastest ways of networking with the world, and providing solutions to a lot of things.”

At a conference dominated by talks about the latest security vulnerabilities discovered in debit card payment terminals, or explorations of post-quantum cryptography, Musa Afrah’s message was simple: a challenge to individuals to rediscover their humanity and use their skills to spread education and capacity to vulnerable individuals.

For Musa Afrah, the culture shock was mutual. “I’ve never before seen people who have more friendship with computers than with human beings,” she laughed. “They are very nice, intelligent, open-minded, but most of them are so busy with the internet.”

The Chaos Communication Congress continues for another two days, with all the lectures are being streamed live online.