Israeli outpost on january ninth those are the headlines rebel geeks is next. Facing realities growing up when did you realize that you were living in a special place a socalled secret city getting to the heart of the matter while it is activists to live in jail just because she expressed herself hear their story on the talk to aljazeera at this time. Digital Technology Offers on its intimacy an easement and in an organized. It energy to billions of calculations you know ugly scenes in discovery and meantime mention. In which everything in our lives intrigued and trapped and intended humans. It is convenient for profit and surveillance the only us is in power. To make that work easy rescue to challenge tech giants. And enable a Different Technology changes. One rep people not a problem. The the. I like the concept of the unwashed masses that no one respects the things that have good ideas coming from but its also the people who rise up and overthrow tyranny. Hacker and the trouble maker of activist. I politically identified as a non ideological in a. Legal left free carols account so we go out and find some cows we go over to the children to tell me more of that are you sure to make books to these children who you think are walter reed oh. I started programming. When i was by. I learned to read so that i could read programming manuals. I love about. This is a house that built with my family and we built it out of paper which is like this recycled paper. What we did was we just built the wall straight up and then we chain saw it out. The hole where the windows are going to be. Its completely off the grid which means that both the communications up and down go straight to a satellite and actually try to figure how to get microwave internet which is going to ball playing in tennis on top of the mountains to to bounce signals back and forth to try to get a life so to beef a bit faster. Living out here you have to know much more about whats going on with your property you have to know all the systems theres no passing it off in some ways thats very aligned with hacker culture you have to get in there and see how it works. Programmers are like digital superhero. Everybody else gets to use the technology the reality in which we play but the programmers we get to reshape the rules the physics of our digital universe. The values of hacker culture the values of social movements exist more in start ups than we ever think. Capitalism is an astounding belief that the most we can just a minute will do the most we can just of things for the greatest good john maynard keynes. Was a great. As it were my favorite shirts. On the back more work less bank. Beats move less room to since the end of the member in one thousand nine. Hundred new round where companies could go in and overturn the countrys laws and fight countries if their countries passed laws that hurt their profits. And so there was a very large protest maybe fifty thousand people. Dead b. T. O. Was supposed to be a shining moment for seattle but as we know it didnt turn out that way. Demonstrators terming to trade organization mainland it was a centralized thing. They created the narrative in the message and so in the media had this radical concept that activists that anyone concerned about the world and social change should no longer focus on convincing journalists to cover their stories but they should make the media themselves. We have to find our own ways to get the message out revolution will not be televised by the Corporate Media the couple days before the protest i walked in and joined as a volunteer. At the whole protest inside just smelling the tear gas floating under the doors. Building software that let people go online and publish their own. Web site to stuff the cranks and that more place grassroots politics in that they came from to come from things that theyre not going to young and very exciting thing is emerging here in seattle and peoples opposition to the World Trade Organization we set it up so that people are doing Live Streaming video in the streets we have laptops with all sorts of complicated Network Equipment published photos published video in the late ninetys that was a very rare thing that trade agreement ended up not being passed. That moment proved to be a shift where i said ok im going to quit my job or try and build software for social change fold. And so i spent four years setting up a computer labs and websites who are in the globalization. Oh you missed the raspberries but. There still are strawberry kids again i can still get. My friends pat hurst hes been trying to figure out how to build technology for activism to. He had this text message alert system for protest it was something called text. In the summer of two thousand and four researchers produced text my a cell phone text message broadcasting system text mob allows activists who are distributed throughout a city termine who are going i used during Chaotic Street protests there in public and convention two thousand and four was in new york and bush. Running for reelection on the campaign of continuing occupation. So by this time we had a media sort of tweet like messages single said you know one hundred fifty hundred forty character long messages they were breaking news updates and we provide these every few minutes testers were able to bypass Preemptive Police tactics by sharing information on undercover officers and police techs mum was a bit of an improvised system but the basic idea was that users would have their cell phones. And they would send messages to a server. Going online saying i want to sign up for text mob and these are the information i want i want to be a member of this group and we had this p. H. P. Web server. And appears the web server is a great whats your phone number and whats your email provider in there then it would send email providers emails to the Company Sprint eighteen th t. Mobile. And that would then send a email message that became an s. M. S. And those would go back and forth. The problem was eighteen t. Very soon discovered this and said you cant do that give us lots of money being a bunch of activists who didnt have a lot of money. We decided that we were going to do that instead what we built was a. A sneaky system around that we build a what is called a peer to peer network. And we build a little java applet. And we put that applet in the in the media web page. And whenever we want to send an s. M. S. We send it out to all of these little applets running on many thousands of peoples computers that uplift would then do the communication to the eighteen t. s of the world from a new ip address and says oh you need person youre not doing this anymore in one thousand pieces happily ill deliver a couple s. M. S. Is for you but not a lot and it started working and so we built this system that let us send forty fifty thousand s. M. S. Is an hour through text mob without. Having to pay for any. Text in the media on the other optimism or is a major precursor to what has become a media. I was a broke activist traveling around living in a v. W. Bus that i bought for two hundred dollars and i saw this contract on craigslist listing the company trying to create a new media of communication and i was like im all for democratizing the media all do this this is the picture. Not a very good picture. But thats thats the demo. Of the original twitter and weve been video got lost. And this is the original team that got split up to work on twitter so we divided up the teams internally who florian. And noah. It looks like the picture was taken in a club or something. The whole team said lets look at text messaging lets look at social networks lets look at building stuff. When we took text and looked at it we said well ok this is interesting but it doesnt have the social model that blogging has and so the transition from twitter to text mode is that that reading relationship in the a. P. I. And the openness of the web. Over the summer it went on i actually personally after we launched twitter which. I didnt realize what i myself was doing by part of the team that i helped create and hire and partially that the way the technology worked and a part of its roots in text bob and other projects i didnt realize the values that went into it you dont have to be conscious of the values that youre putting in things when you do it. This is one of those sort of the biggest commercially focused open source conferences nonsense theres i. B. M. And theres a paper and microsoft. They dont necessarily agree conducted by politics but theres none of this like you should be shunned because you want to overthrow capitalism. Or you. Hear. The. Good. That the couple years i worked on twitter and then seeing it grow totally changed my life. Ive done a lot of interesting projects and ive traveled around the world and built lots of software. Its a box filled out box he did the box exactly ok. And then one day i was talking to subpoena bill about how to build software for oil rigs and i realized that is interesting is the problem was. Id. Lost track of the desire and the need to focus more directly on changing the world. And so i wrapped up my projects and Everything Else i said that i needed to refocus and apply the lean startup techniques apply big data play start of Technology Open source all of the things back to the activist world nuts thats where i am now. Heading up to seattle were going to drop in on a new project called the. Emerging ization and Software Project thats been working for a number of years to create secure communication it was a very big problem with the way our email and mailing lists the way your communications work. People think that theyre sending a private letter and it turns out that what theyre sending are postcards. Believe team reach out to me because im one of the people that has bridged the gap between the activist world and the startup world. There are not a lot of anarchists Angel Investors and so they wanted to find someone who could advise them on on raising money or being a viable startup all the same time knowing that they dont want to abandon the larger political vision of why theyre doing. It. And he gets its reviewing important to have the capacity to organize without all of your information being completely exposed and i think its an accidental question for social change and no i dont think that it will be possible in the future without the capacity to communicate. Whether its behavior tracking whether its Business Intelligence or whatever other forms of analytics. Its the data that mattered not. On what most people in the telegraph the radical to community. Ive worked with in that sort of. The people who are dollar big. Theyre going to stumble into more Efficient Solutions than the people who use intuition i guess taking a step back i would say all aspects of governance are increasingly becoming systems of code and analysis and data and certainly the lesson out of the dotcom of two thousand. When the nasdaq internet stocks last verse and other value in a week was that the Companies Left standing were the ones with the biggest databases and so that trance that lesson and that transformation has led to this current rise of surveillance as a business but surveillance is really a subset of this process of. Social control through data and. To go and work for Silicon Valley is not selling out in the sense of like oh that band used to be cool and they sold out and made money its not its not like selling out its like switching sides. Using our labor its very important to be building something that is not potentially part of a dark disturbing. You go and work for Silicon Valley the current game is Building Technology that could be used for talent areas social control. But if you dont collect data if you dont want experience get the stats of it then. You determine that its good. To achieve the larger politically it needs to be something that exists and to get Widespread Adoption and thats a thats a company in this world. You know i spent five years travelling around setting up protests and Building Community centers and technology for activist groups with the goal of changing the media and the project which i told my friends i was selling out work at the start up a larger effect of transforming the media. Twitter. Facebook or twitter its a very good way for communication to have your power control for maybe one it looks like the media like the t. V. I want to get some t. V. Or whatever the are controlling everything now we could if youre going to i just make a capsule and it did you all the picture i just uploaded very little actual protestor cordie on twitter. But the public speech and the personal feeling about them is completely different. I. Let people share ideas and me and share photos and share videos and shape the media and shape their own narratives. Only. Activists only people who wanted to achieve social change use a technology that its very easy to get rid of so in the case of text mob it was easy to eventually block and shut it down because people only used it at protests but when people used twitter of protests twitter got used for lots of other things. To transform the world in the way we make social change we need the tools of social change be used enables everyday lives for things that have nothing to do with social change. Chaos Computer Club camp camp and every four years its where the european Hacker Community gets together and play. And connects with each other in a face to face real world. This is a community that created the leaks this is a community they created tor is a you know the community that says the privacy is important and this is the the communities that build the internet. Its a campaign with power cables and computers long as it doesnt rain its great but what it means its everybody rushed to get the Circuit Breakers and turn off the power is all that and. What i want to know. What do you think we should do but just be brutally honest about how we should get. Encrypted email into the hands of lets say a million lets say a billion people and like like what should we do like next next month be next year needs to. Launch products under different names with different designs with different sales pitches and Everything Else to see what people will sign up for you would basically say lets build two web pages lets do one who lets begin with like i think when you think it was at one one my pages heres a v. P. N. Is great and we see if youll sign up for that name another pages of emails great and we see how many people sign up for that everything will thing you think you can do in the lead cloud for and make you launch ok before you build it. The startup world has figured out how to do stuff and do things that make their Software Work better in we think that selling out. If you dont do the experiments at all youll never build something that gets used but i think like the problem is. With the people here is because they know that the kind of realize that the start up stuff might work a magician techniques there but when they see start up people and they see that the people who work and start are directed primarily by money or by fame i mean everyone here is camera shy no one who wants to be famous people want to be anonymous and thus like i kind of think that that actually is causing all of this weird. Paradox of the like we know and already we need in order to be successful as revolutionaries we need everyone to use the stuff thats like that that the disconnect is almost ethical does this connect but its not necessary disconnect of the techniques with them so. I want to talk a little bit about why people are using start ups or corporations communications off where and why theyre not using us and in particular i want to encourage us to steal ideas and techniques from from the capitalists in the start of community. Its a race that we face its a race between different applications to get security in occasions we need to win the race and right now. Were not going to win that race. Right now we have all these different projects very bravely in valley fighting out there and were not learning quickly so we need we need to build things that people use we need to build things that people want to use the things that people love. As Software Developers as people who work in startups as people who care about the future of the world we have to look at where technology is being built how its being built what values go into it because those are the values that will then shape future society. Airborne vehicles harvesting every pic you take every click you make public in everything all the waves also possible. But its time to watch the what can we blame that on the deep sea this is the first civilian. And we are creators. All. The engineers at this. Business update scrolled to you by Qatar Airways going places together. Business updates rolled to you by Qatar Airways going places together. With. The foreign ministry. This is al jazeera. And i know that im Laura Carlisle this is the news hour live from doha coming up in the next sixty minutes hong kong democracy activists walk free after a victory in