#32c3

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

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.

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.

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.”

Journalists inside the country face oppressive laws, huge fines and lawsuits for reporting on government corruption. Digital and physical surveillance of journalists and activists is in fact getting worse. 

 We will analyse some of the existing leaks that prove such activities. We will also give a first-hand account from someone who had to literally run away from Ecuador for publishing leaked materials proving illegal espionage against journalists and citizens. Is Ecuador really interested in free speech? We don't think so and we will tell you why.

Rush Transcript:

(edited Nov. 2018)

First speaker/host: Called Ecuador how an authoritarian government is fooling the entire world

We have two speakers Pedro Noel who is a co-editor at The Associated whistleblowing press and L.B. Horne who is an activist and a writer. Their question is, is Ecuador really interested in free speech? they don't think so and they will let you know why. So please, welcome with me on stage L.B. Horne and Pedro Noel.

Pedro: Hi all, goodnight, thanks first for the CCC, for bringing us here, accepting our talk and supporting us being here. I'm Pedro Noel I'm a Brazilian journalist. I've been since 2010 working with leaks, which means restricted materials of public relevance, both publishing leaks and analyzing. Currently I work as a co-editor in the Associated Whistleblowing Press which is an NGO working in implementing running and operating whistleblowing platforms always in a local way. Among other platforms we run: in Iceland, in Spain, soon in Peru I hope. We also have a platform in Ecuador which is called Ecuador Transparente. I'll talk more about this platform later on so now let L.B. introduce themself

LB: So, I'm B. Horne I grew up in Ecuador but I started working as a journalist in Canada I then moved back to Ecuador and worked at the State newspaper there at El Telegrafo for a little bit, very short a little bit and then I went to work for an academic research group at a university. The academic research group was run by hackers and we were researching copyright and other policy issues to advise the Ecuadorian government. The first thing that I want to say and that I need to say is that I recognize that Ecuador has to be praised and thanked for the very brave act of giving asylum to Julian Assange. I'm glad that my adopted country has taken on this role in the world and stands up to the United States on this one issue, defending WikiLeaks’ right to publish and exist is a human rights issue. I think that Julian Assange is in danger of extradition and the Ecuadorian Embassy in London is the only thing keeping him safe but it would be a mistake to assume that this portion of Ecuador's foreign policy has any effect on their domestic policy, it doesn't. Government's are made up of people, and inside the Ecuadorian government like inside many governments there is a war between factions: some good, some bad.

This is a government that has been in power for eight years now and they intend to stay in power for many more. President Rafael Correa and the political party that he started are so concerned with power, they'll change the rules, that they themselves created, in order to keep power. An example of this is, well this has been going on for a while but in 2008 they wrote a new constitution that set limits, term limits. Recently they've grown so worried about whether they can win another election without Rafael Correa that there were two years of discussion about changing the constitution so that they could re-elect Rafael Correa for a third, or maybe fourth term, indefinitely.

They didn't end up doing that, they did change the constitution but Rafael Correa decided he didn't want to run, anyway, so they didn't change it, to make it friendly to him. This is just an example that I wanted to give, of one of the tactics that the Ecuadorian government has for maintaining control and that is the laws.

And I want to talk about some of the laws that they've brought in that deal with communications, especially, and how this affects democratic freedoms: journalism and free speech. But there's a second, more worrying way, that the current government in Ecuador is exercising control, and that's through illegal means.

Pedro has published documents via his whistleblowing platform that illustrate this and he'll talk about them.

Ecuador's Constitution protects citizen's right to intimacy, so we consider certain kinds, like this spying that is revealed in the documents, to be illegal. There are other illegal tactics popping up in Ecuador, stuff like threats of violence censorship, not all of it can be linked directly to the government but we'll talk about it, too.

Ecuador's intelligence services are heavily implicated especially in the illegal stuff that we see going on.

The Intelligence Agency in Ecuador is called the SENAIN, the secretaría nacional de inteligencia. It also has another short-form: SIN.  

It's Ecuador's biggest problem. But the government's other institutions: the presidency, the National Assembly and the super-powerful communications Secretariat, they all benefit from the intelligence that's gathered by the SENAIN. They are benefiting from it, and they're not challenging it. So, laws need to change in Ecuador, but also its institutions need to be made to follow the law. International pressure helps, which is why we are here, so, after the end of our talk, we'll deliver a message to Correa. Because we know that he listens. And we know that he listens, because: well I found my picture in the SENAIN leaks, so I know I have a certain amount of caché.

We know he listens because he responds. He's very vocal, he does his own Twitter feed, last time I wrote about Ecuador, he responded to me on national television for 14 minutes, which was fun. (audience member shouts: what’s his account?) His account? We’ll get there, I want to first give a picture. The key to understanding him is understanding that he craves control. We had a video that we were gonna play now but it didn't work I believe that I linked to it on my blog bbhorne.com if you want to see the video later I will I will put it up there.

He craves control. He had such high approval ratings for a really long time because to a certain degree Ecuadorians agreed that keeping stuff under control was important. To understand why control is the key word, I want to give a brief outline of the 10 years in Ecuador before Correa came to power.

So, the first character in this story, is this guy. He was elected in 1996. His name is Abdalá Bucaram. He was elected despite the Hitler mustache. He was a populist, kind of unpredictable his nickname was El Loco, ‘the crazy guy’. And he really was insane, he would go on TV and sing songs, and he embezzled a whole lot of money.

Congress declared him mentally unfit to serve as president. It was a congress made up of his political enemies, they had to go against the Constitution in order to do this, in order to name his replacement, but he was kicked out of office after two million Ecuadorians took to the streets, for weeks, and shut down the country, basically. So this was the first of three soft coups in the ten years that came before Correa.

(Abdalá’s) presidency was very short it ended in 1997. Congress appointed an interim leader and then the next guy that's elected is Jamil Mahuad. He's sort of the opposite of Abdalá, he was very smart and he was a known political actor, he'd been the mayor of the capital city. He was right-wing and governed pretty predictably. During his presidency Ecuador was hit with the worst financial

crisis in generations, seventy percent of the banks in the country closed, thousands of families lost their savings. Families were split up because people had to migrate to Italy, Spain and the U.S. in order to find work.

He dollarized the economy, because inflation got so bad that Ecuador lost its currency during his presidency. And, again, people took to the streets. Shut down Quito, shut down the highways,

protested and an army general refused to stop the protesters from taking over the presidential palace And again, he had to leave, his vice president took over, and finished up his presidency. This is the second soft coup and this was in, what was it? 2001?

Yeah, anyway, so: next is this guy.

He was actually the army general who didn't stop the protests from taking over the presidential palace in 2001.

This is Lucio Gutierrez, he's another populist who was close to left and indigenous movements at the beginning when he ran, similar to Abdalá, but he quickly lost that support because he governed like a neoliberal and by this point, people just knew: okay, we can get rid of him. So they took to the streets, protested, and he was gone.

So, by the end of this … I mean, Ecuador has a young democracy. They had a military dictatorship for a while by the end of this people were pretty demoralized about - it was bad for business all the coups were bad for business … oops I skipped a slide … and people were ready for something else

So, 2006 Rafael Correa runs a campaign with a totally new party he promises that he's gonna disband Congress and call new elections to rewrite the Constitution after he wins. And he wins. He got a lot of support by promising to be different and he started out really well and a lot of us myself included were excited by his first years in office and we liked his we liked his Constitution but in 2010 he lost control and as you remember control is very important to him there was a protest by the police union that shut down streets and people were getting flashbacks - to 1997, 2001 and and 2003.

The police cornered him he needed the military to rescue him from a hospital there was a shootout people died he calls it a coup attempt and I don't call it a coup attempt I think it's debatable and that's a debate we can talk about another time but what was true is that it really scared him and after 2010 the need for control started to clash with his original promise of democracy and it's this clash with democracy that is my problem in our problem as people interested in universal human rights

So I want to talk about the laws the legal stuff has been going on in Ecuador that's threatening speech and publishing and dissent so the first one was the constitution of 2008 which as I said had a lot of progressive and good innovations in it. It affected the media because it legislated the separation between: people owning media, and other businesses.  

So: a lot of bankers got their newspapers and TV stations expropriated by the government which people supported they didn't want bankers having that much power over the media but it led to a concentration of a different sort the state never sold those media outlets and the state went from owning nine public media outlets to owning 42. And this concentration trend is continuing its papers fold and get one just recently got bought by the state newspaper and another one closed last year.

The second law is the communications law in 2013 which was really which was sort of a wish of Correa to bring in earlier but he didn't have support in the Assembly. In it there it creates the crime of media lynching which it describes as a coordinated dissemination of information which sounds a lot like journalism with the purpose of discrediting or harming the reputation of a natural or a legal person it doesn't say if that information is false, it’s: if it harms the reputation of a natural legal person and it's a coordinated publication then you could be in trouble this law also makes media outlets responsible for online comments a lot of newspapers shut down their comment sections after it and it creates regulatory agencies to enforce the murky law. The biggest one is the SUPERCOM which forces Corrections and I want to show: so this is a cartoon of a police raid on a journalists house two years ago it was done by Xavier Bonilla who is one of the country's biggest cartoonist the government didn't like it they said that he had to issue a correction on his cartoon because it showed the police being too violent I guess.

So, he drew a correction which shows the police, knocking very politely and asking kindly to take the journalists computer with them and ‘we’ll keep it in a closed envelope to preserve chain of custody and have a happy Christmas’. So, cartoonists have a little bit of fun with it this is another one that I like, they asked this magazine to issue a correction of its front-page image because they thought that the wrecking ball destroying the logo of the social service agency was not accurate and they, just … that was their correction so those little little boring. There's a lot of fines that come along with this communication law they've now issued two hundred thousand dollars in fines at least in the past two years to journalists and self-censorship because journalists don't want to get fines so there's the kind of way how much they can say and not go against the communications’ Law.

17:46

and the third law is just within the past month they changed the Constitution as I said and they made communication a public service and nobody really knows what they mean by this whether it means that communication passes to be a responsibility of the state like water and electricity but this is what journalists are afraid of and they don't really see the trend going in a good way so they were opposed to this.

This there are other difficulties doing journalism in Ecuador I experienced some and others have experienced others you can ask me about it later and then ...

So the illegal framework for control that that uh that goes hand in hand with this legal one Ecuador sort of was a star  the Hacking Team info-dump. There was a lot of evidence in the documents released by WikiLeaks published by WikiLeaks released by some friendly hacker that Ecuador is a client of Hacking Team this was the receipt I believe with the contractor THEOLA in Belize based in Belize yeah so the government denied after this information came out they denied that they had any relationship with Hacking Team of course they don't have a contractual relationship with Hacking Team they have

19:37

a contractual relationship with the intermediaries and I'm gonna let Pedro talk about what his documents show about the SENAIN  yeah okay.

Pedro: So, I'll just make a very practical example regarding two publications my organization did related to illegal surveillance in Ecuador. The platform who did that was Ecuador Transparente which is a local platform for whistleblowing use free software GlobalLeaks and yeah first publication it's from August its we publishing 31 pieces of the Ecuadorian intelligence. We’re stating that they constantly surveilled journalists, human right actors, ecological groups and politicians right they did it in two ways first they did in a physical way, in a digital way this for example is as a collection of Records like inner records of the government it's not a public information but is information that the government can gather so they were building profiles of people... so, this profile for

21:09

example is a profile of the cartoonist that LB just mentioned it that were--

LB: Of the journalist in the cartoon? No, sorry-- the cartoonist.

Pedro: Exactly the journalist in the cartoon … or …. no, it is the cartoonist, yes. The cartoonist, yeah yeah. So, it's a profile made up of him, based on like, all his travels, like which countries, they for which countries he was going and which date and time how much money he has on his

21:34

accounts how many cars we have how many houses he have or is this is you could say that it is legal because they are using a public records, like inner records of the government then you have also digital surveillance base it on active surveillance which is surveillance based on metadata collection we don't know how yet they got this these things we suspect that it was in compliance with international service providers and

22:09

communication service providers so they were building these graphs based on for whom people were calling for whom people were sending me from whom they were receiving calls from whom they were receiving mails and then building this like detailed reports like this woman for example is a journalist for the one of the biggest television channels in Ecuador physical surveillance this is even more like this is a proof that they were really following and infiltrating in events and life events of the Mayor of

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the capital city Quito so after publishing it we were really asking an answer from the government but the answer they did actually was this the Embassy's sent a letter to our media partner for this publication in Germany that was Netzpolitik, saying that the documents should be taken out this is

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the website and that they would the journalist that Netzpolitik was

performing was not good quality journalism then they sent a letter to our ISP saying that the accusing us of four things first of the first of them copyright infringement because actually in the documents we published it there were logos from the government then they also accuse it which is more serious that we were encouraging five articles from the Penal Code one of them passive of indefinite detention so thanks for both GreenHost and Netzpolitik with the materials online and telling us that they received this material and for publishing is material think actually Netzpolitik publishes the letter they received so now I'll make ... I don't think we have too much time so make a very fast publication you are the first ones to see these files actually I'm just we just upload 15 minutes ago it's an analogy of the risk factors for Ecuadorian democracy made up by the intelligence service okay so you can see what what they consider risk factors for democratic stability and what they consider to be events of risk or democratic instability so you can see in the middle of everything is its media mediatization of factors of critical factors so for them what is most important and one of the most dangerous things is that they have media covering critical points in their society.

Then for example they have graphics like relating events with media coverage then here they have an analysis of an event of risk so they were this event of risks is concerned to the change of laws that LB said, so they were preventing

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that changing the laws would make that civil society and citizens would be enraged it and feel that their basic rights were harmed and if media would cover this like big protests cute outcome so I don't have too much time so you can search this in data that's AWP dot is, that she put es, but it's is, so you can just check it I don't have too much time to develop on this now so we have some conclusions which is: complex problems demand complex solutions. So for example is Ecuador helping the cause of free speech by providing asylum to Julian Assange of course it is, of course but, is Ecuador really interested on providing freedom of speech inside the country?

26:00

No. So you can perfectly criticize Ecuadorian policies regarding surveillance but and also support WikiLeaks actually if you fall in this argument that you can't criticize Ecuador because they are providing asylum to WikiLeaks you're exactly following the argument that the Ecuadorian government wants you, which is to avoid external criticism. Then I want to address, actually two messages first of all: this one is for you like the international community which is please help support and spread all the information because we don't have enough

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coverage about it like you most of the coverage which criticizes Ecuador unfortunately is biased by an anti-Wikileaks feeling. but actually this is like truly something that both me and L.B. we saw and experimented as journalists in Ecuador so if you can: spread this message, share this information in your channels

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or being in person or in an institutional way, we are very welcome you can also keep sending us leaks, we promise we are going to keep publishing it then to finish we I had just well actually this is we can't do

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it the present because L.B. is blocked, they were after a pretty harsh conversation on Twitter, so she can't access the president's profile but you can tweet it him, it's @mashiRafael so so that the second message is exactly to him which is this address said to the mr. Rafael Correa the President of the Republic of Ecuador so we are kindly asking him to implement oversights mechanisms in his intelligence service which could allow SENAIN to be accountable for what they do, because so far they've been acting with total impunity they are not even obligated to go to the National Assembly to ask questions from the Assemblyists.

They can just deny or miss the appointment as they did the last time. They said that they were going then it said, oh no, we could not go and nothing happening so so far SENAIN is working in total impunity second thing we are going to ask to Mr. Rafael Correa President of the Republic of Ecuador is to refactor the inner mechanisms of SENAIN in order

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to establish really basic standards of transparency and accountability inside SENAIN. Until he does, he doesn't do it we will continue leaking and we continue exposing and will not be afraid of harassment, we will not be afraid of legal, paralegal, or illegal surveillance

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or pressure. He must know that.

Then, this like last thing we asked Mr. Rafael Correa, president of the Republic of Ecuador, is to grant its citizens and all the foreigners which are working or living in Ecuador with one of the most basic rights of the people which is the right to communicate freely, without any interference, by any means. Thank you.

LB: What do you think? Do we have time for questions?

Host: Thank you ok so thanks very much for the talk as you can see we have a little overtime, so if you want to leave the room, please do so but quietly so if you have any questions please line up at the microphones so that Pedro and can answer them yeah so

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we've got the first question at mic number two, hi

Audience 1: So I actually work for GreenHost, actually we host Pedro's website and we wanted to say that we didn't get a warrant so we didn't actually remove any data, actually forwarded the requests because it wasn't legal so thanks I just wanted to make that clear

LB: Thank you!

Pedro: Yes thank you.

Host:okay another question from mic number two?

Audience 2: I wanted to ask if there has been reaction by the government in a legal means or I don't know with blackmailing or something similar?

Pedro: I mean us? Like, it's nothing that we can prove? Like LB just told about legal things they did with other people with us we just not said that

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they were really pressuring our potential sources. And yes in the airports it always is always shit to leave Ecuador or enter Ecuador yeah but more than that? Like, nothing. And then these letters of pressure and stuff but so far…  We think that maybe, there is some investigations going on, but so far it's just pure fear, and pressure.

Host: Okay, next question, mic number six, please.

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Audience 3: Hi, thanks for the talk. I just wanted to know, I think on the president's thing here {motions to chest} here it said : Mi poder? There, my power, what is that about?

LB: Mi Poder en la Constitution … so, “my power through the Constitution”, which...

Pedro: Which he changes.

Host: Okay so next question would be mic number three

Audience 4: Hi. I was just wondering what other types of digital tools or technologies besides GlobaLeaks or GreenHost services might be helpful to journalists in Ecuador?

LB: Well, all the

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ones that you would recommend to journalists in general. You have more experience than I do trying to train journalists in Ecuador, how to use secure technologies. It's an uphill battle. What do you think?

Pedro: Well I mean there are a lot of tools that's not just in Ecuador but in all over the globe journalists can use, but I think I'm not the best person to talk about it but you can search for exact is any text

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for Tor, or Tails...

LB: I wish I wish that journalists in Ecuador used Tor. I wish that journalists in Ecuador used

OTR I wish that journalists in Ecuador used Signal and I wish that they encrypted their hard drives because as we see there are raids, there's danger. It's not just journalists. A tweeter who tweeted what was he tweeting, she or he was tweeting about nepotism in the ministry- in one of the ministries... and he got sent to jail for two weeks, not for publishing any incorrect information just because it was considered libellous that he accused the minister of nepotism. So, regular people are vulnerable, too, and people should be protecting their their home drives and their communications because there's a lot that's going on, and it's only getting worse.

Host: Okay next question from mic number one, please.

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Audience 5: So I have actually two questions, the first is how has the judicial system responded to these new laws that regard the freedom of expression, as you put it, and the second question is according to your point of view what is the state of Internet freedom, especially of Internet censorship, in Ecuador? Thank you.

Pedro: well I think the first one LB. can

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reply maybe because also there there was a whole renewal of the judicial system, second one is that the state of Internet freedom is … actually we were going to publish another thing today ... maybe I, we can publish tomorrow, which is this: we have evidence that they have blocked both Twitter and Google, during some days, because an anonymous group ...Anonymous yeah group had published had documents of the SENAIN two years ago, so we have evidence that they actually block it, Twitter and YouTube no sorry YouTube and Google so I think

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the state of Internet freedom is, very poor.

LB: Well, I think it's actually really interesting what's going on in Ecuador because you see the use of tactics, of softer tactics like DMCA takedown notices through YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, to get accounts shut down, to get videos taken down. And there's a massive investment in propaganda. There have been publications saying that the government hires armies of trolls, and puts them in an office, and they flood social media with, with messages to, sort of, move the conversation in the direction that they want. And so, it's kind of interesting.

I don't see a lot of those shutdowns or blockages, but definitely attempts to influence, what is said, and what is read

Host: Did you did you have

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another question now? Thank you ... so ... mic number three, please.

Ola B.: First of all I agree completely that there is a bunch of really problematic stuff going on and I really especially appreciate Pedro's list of actions and questions. I think SENAIN is extremely problematic. I have two small questions, the first one is the use of your word, the word, in the title: authoritarian. The reason why I'm asking, about is, because focusing on Alianza PAIS is not Rafael Correa, I mean they still have

36:28

an approval rating of between 60 and 80 percent... depending on how you look

LB: Do they? When was the last time you read that?

Ola B.: Half a year ago, or so? But it doesn't really matter, I mean, at the end of the day it's still a popular election system, that seems to work? And I haven't heard any allegations of voter fraud of any kind, right, so I guess like for democracy, even though there are these bad things going on, is that actually authoritarian and the second question comes with your specific history because you worked with the FLOK Society right?

LB: Yep.

Ola B: Which was funded by the government in order to investigate issues of copyright and intellectual property and freedom of speech and many of these things in order to actually make for better regulation. So, it seems to me, I mean from my perspective, this is a complicated issue, but we have a big government, that is pulling in a lot of different directions. It's very clear that the SENAIN and some portion of the presidency are pulling in bad directions but there also seems to be a lot of areas of the government that are trying really hard to go in other directions...

LB: Alot? I think that there are less, and less. And I think that there were a lot of people pulling

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in good directions and you sort of, you see them leaving as it becomes more clear how hard it is to have a progressive agenda. Your first question about the word authoritarian. Well regarding democracy, the party actually lost the last election that happened in Ecuador. They lost the Mayor elections and the Prefect elections in a lot of cities, and that, that was the last election and it was widely considered to be a rebuke of their leadership. And the next elections are in two years and it's not really looking good for them. I wouldn't bet on them. But, you're right, it is a democracy, and-

Ola B.: Do you think things gets better, if Alianza PAIS loses? Do you think the right wing opposition is going to be better for the country?

38:38

LB: It depends, who the opposition, who is, who comes next.

Pedro: I think, it's, it's not a democracy,

it's not just because people vote, that it's a democracy. Like, if people don't have information, enough, to choose, for whom they are voting, and who are their leaders, and what their leaders are doing, then it's not a democracy. So that's why I put in the title authoritarian because people they don't have information enough to judge by themselves with what their leaders are doing

Ola B.: Are there any democracies then?

Pedro: Well. We all don’t know the answer.

Host: Okay so another question from mic number three?

Jacob Appelbaum: Hi, so I really appreciated your talk, and as Pedro, we've never talked, but I talked with LB a lot, before the talk, and I was really actually glad to see that there was a separation between the idea of a uniform state and the intelligence service. And I think the only mistake in your talk is the idea that there's a uniform state, so when you say Ecuador has fooled the world, I think that there are elements of the Ecuadorian government who actually do care about Wikileaks for example the Ecuadorian government has offered to protect me from the US government and I feel very strongly that they would actually back that up, and I've been to Ecuador a number of times and while I've been there I've had very bad experiences with the SENAIN and the

39:59

presidency and the vice-presidency actually protected me, from the SENAIN, until I left the country. So my experience is this. I'm sorry to follow in the leftist tradition of giving a five-minute speech and then asking a self-answering question, but I'm gonna do that, and you're gonna love it. So, they protected me, and they let me know that the SENAIN is dangerous, and that even if you're a guest of the presidency, if the SENAIN doesn't like you, you're gonna end up in a ditch with a bullet in your head. So, if you can imagine, these are the political class of Ecuador that are explaining to me that they don't have the ability to protect even their guests who they in theory want to protect. So to call that one country and to say that the SENAIN and the Ecuadorian political class are the same is a hmm I feel like it's a simplification that betrays your lack of

40:52

information about how these power structures actually exist and I feel like the SENAIN are extremely dangerous and it follows a pattern we see, all around the world, which is that the intelligence services of the world are out of control. They have total capture of telecommunication systems and they actually capture the political class, inside and out. I mean the presidency is very worried about the SENAIN tapping his phone calls, for example and there's no way that you can protect against an intelligence service of your own service And so I think all your criticisms here are actually pretty much centered around the SENAIN and the fact that there are external forces that are trying to empower the SENAIN and to overthrow the Ecuadorian state and I mean I've met the Department of Defense the the Minister of Defence I've met-

LB: The former Minister of Defense the former … one of those who has left the government recently

Jacob: Absolutely, but listen when I met her, one of the things that she was very clear about, was that there are elements in the Ecuadorian government, especially the SENAIN, who are fucking scary and

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they want to kill people like Correa and her, and I think you can't say that that's the same. There's an internal political struggle, and there are really good people who put their life on the line, some of whom have actually been killed, some people who have died. And there's also elements of the CIA in that country. I met the head of counter-intelligence, I had dinner with him. That was fucking awkward, let me tell you. Do you want to talk about pressing for end-to-end encryption and not getting anywhere? That was a conversation like that.

I didn't give him any drugs, and … I would have, I just didn't have the opportunity.. but but the point is to, to say, that this as one thing, is the mistake and so I wonder if you can acknowledge this is my question can you acknowledge that the SENAIN is the big big problem and

that they actually control the political class, and that the political class is afraid of them and not the other way around

Pedro: Yeah it's like like I think LB. also told that SENAIN was a problem we also

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like I personally think that SENAIN is part of a bigger problem which is like as LB told there are a bunch of other kind of legal measures which are restricting freedom of speech I agree with that SENAIN is a different thing from from government and in some some ways they don't respect actually Correa's intentions for example we have evidence that they spy even on Alianza PAIS

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which is the which is the Correa's party even though I think that Correa has power enough, to change these policies and try to change SENAIN from yes from the beginning let's say restructure SENAIN. I mean maybe he doesn't want or it's not political worthy for him to try to do it now especially because elections are coming but I think then that's that that's also actually the the purpose of this talk we said we're not going to

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just criticize the government but in the end we will try to demand some small two things to Correa which is to implement an oversight mechanism for SENAIN, and restructures denying in order for you to have basic standards of transparency and

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he has the power to do that

LB: And what he's gonna say after this talk is, he's Correa is gonna go on television and say SENAIN is accountable there are prosecutors in their office that approve every intercept we Correa founded SENAIN, I mean it was his baby, in 2009 and he's gonna say, we wrote this new plan for national security, we got rid of all the old cops and we formed our new agency. He defends them public, and he's very bad at accepting criticism and making reforms and it's one of his biggest his biggest downfalls so I don't know I mean you can at some point you have to lay some blame on him for his handling of them, if you want to believe that the SENAIN is so evil that the

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president of the country can't reform them or challenge them or make any changes. I will hold a different view, but I agree with you that they are the biggest problem.

Host: Okay, I had got one more question from mic number two

Tarek L.: I was just wondering in terms of the discussion about SENAIN, I mean I think that well I was wondering actually how you view it in an overall context? I mean is I guess: who's the Bulldog is it SENAIN who sort of has been raised and bred by Correa, who then says, well, we're even afraid of this thing? Or is that the opposite, sort of: SENAIN really is in control, able to do what it wants, with Correa scared of it and really unable to move

Pedro: It's more complex, you cannot simplify in this way, but I think for me SENAIN it's part of a global problem know which is a problem of the intelligence complex as Jacob said. But in my feelings is: SENAIN really got out of his control, and if he can't do anything now or if he was doesn't want to do anything he is the accomplice.. but I think yeah it's I did the two things like he exercised some control on it but in the other hand there are somethings SENAIN does, without asking him, and he cannot really stop it anymore.

Host: There's another question from the mic number three

Jacob A.: So I mean, I'm glad that you said that because I could have just sat down but

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I'll take this opportunity to say one other thing which is that the SENAIN being the primary problem, the question that's open to me is: how do we deconstruct the intelligence service? I

47:00

mean I'm of the eliminate the state, crypto world, you know: you want to get rid of the state, the state's dangerous. you know, you know...when you do cryptographic signatures, for example or

when you build laptops or something and in general maybe we want to also take that tactic also for States, real states

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and so maybe Ecuador would be better off, if you had a revolution. I'm not sure, but maybe but then the question is: what about a limited revolution so what are the actual practical things that you can do to get rid of this end I mean like for example the way that people think about states with a person in charge of them for example, Obama: is he really responsible for every bad thing that happens in America? Every time a cop shoots a black person, which is every single day? Right? I feel like we have to think about States differently than we think about people, right? And so, in this case, the question is: what does the political class of Ecuador, and what can we as an international community do, to destroy the intelligence service of Ecuador? And I feel like that's the question we should be asking, because that's a thing we can turn into a political action plan. And a subversive counter-revolutionary action plan frankly, yeah?

48:00

To actually do that. But the question is: what do we do how do we do that? And to all of our friends in SENAIN, say hey oops, you got us! But, what do we do? To take that down. How do you get rid of an intelligence service, because if we're gonna hold him responsible what is the actual thing we need to do? Like, go burn the building down? Probably, don't do that, that seems like a bad idea ‘cause you know, they can just move...

LB: They have a really nice building, they have a pool

Jacob A.: Probably where they'll find all of our bodies, the next time we are in Quito. But hey, you know, you got to die someday. So, but what do we actually do, what do we actually do, how do we do this, like for example, we know they do mass surveillance, they asked me actually to build a mass surveillance system to wiretap the entire country of Ecuador

LB: I’m glad you said that. I know that and I couldn't add it to my talk, but there you go.

Jacob A.: So check it out. So I told them to go fuck themselves and I reported them to the presidency and explained to the presidency that they had asked me to do this specifically to bypass the judicial review because they wanted to wiretap judges in the political class, and I said wow you want to wiretap the democratically elected leaders and they said no no it's a translation problem and I said I you know I speak enough Spanish. And it was the president's translator actually that translated it, so I don't think it's a problem I think you're proposing a coup and yeah like I have your names and so, you are fucked. So the thing is: what do we do to stop that? I think the answer is we deploy crypto and we have political responses to that, but what do we really ask from Correa? Because when I went to them they said, you know: what do we do? And I think it's a big open question because you don't take on a military or an intelligence service lightly and when you do you lose they kill you and these guys I mean these guys actually told me the CIA followed me to Ecuador and they ejected a CIA agent, which was very awkward, by the way.  And so you know what a complex situation. So what do we actually do about that? For me I know just don't go back to Ecuador but for people in Ecuador that's not really an option so what action plan do we actually have now I can't believe I told you all those things but fuck it.Light it on fire.

LB: I can't believe you told us all those things either I have a headache now

Jacob A.: Yea, well you know, the coffee here is great, but the dexamphetamine is even better .. I mean, just kidding.

Pedro: First of all I think like Correa must be must feel responsible

Host: Okay I'm sorry for a last question but we come do not answer to that so

LB: I don't think anybody can answer.

Host: Thanks a lot for the talk all the questions for the conversations and

[Applause]