Hacking for Freedom - Pycon 2011

transcript

Hacking for

Pete Fein @petewearspants Please Pirate

Hi, my name is Pete Fein, and I've been hacking for freedom. -

Hacking for

Hi, my name is Pete Fein, and I've been hacking for freedom. -

This video is from Tunisia. It shows a flamethrower being used to disperse protesters. What I find compelling here not the violation of the Geneva Conventions, but the phones. People desperately trying to get word out, to show the world what’s happening. And that’s why information needs to be free, right there in grainy, glorious cell phone video. Here’s what I’ve done for freedom in the last few months

whyweprotest.net

WikiLeaks

I helped Anonymous organize global protests on January 15 in support of WikiLeaks and free speech. With one week of public planning, we put together protests in 105 cities around the world.

One week. 105 cities. Still think we’re just a bunch of script kiddies?

my wife would kill me

On that subject, let me go on record and say I don’t DDOS or deface.

And if the Feds happen to be watching this- Screw You.

EgyptTen days later was Egypt’s Jan 25 movement, which saw a nearly total blackout of the Internet, cellular and SMS service.

telecomix.orgMost of my work here was with Telecomix, an association of Internauts who defend free communication.

Telecomix is yin to Anonymous’ yang. If Anonymous takes sites down, Telecomix keeps them up.- What these groups have in common with each other, and the protesters on the ground- is that they are truly leaderless and possessed by a radical passion for freedom.

do-ocracyDon’t govern. Just do.

We operate as a do-ocracy, a form of organization in which the people who get things done, get things done. Here’s a little bit of what Telecomix did for Egypt:

When the Net was up we provided VPNs, TOR and other encryption for safe communication.

To restore access- to censored sites, we built mirrors and proxies

We served as manual IRC to Twitter relay, tweeting for Egyptians who were unable to do so themselves.

when countries block, we (d)evolve

When the Net was down, we went low tech. When countries block, we devolve.

We worked with ISPs and individual users to run hundreds of dialup modem lines.

We recruited ham radio operators from around the globe to help establish radio communication.

Working with Anonymous, we sent comms and medical information to every fax machine in Egypt we could find. We also set up reverse fax service for transmitting news out of the country.

[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET WE+ARE+TELECOMIX HTTP/1.1" 404 6248[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET WE+ARE+HERE+TO+HELP HTTP/1.1" 404 6248[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET DIALUP+MODEM+LINES HTTP/1.1" 404 6248[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET NUMBER+46850009990 HTTP/1.1" 404 6248[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET USER/PASS:telecomix HTTP/1.1" 404 6248

[30/Jan/2000:00:23:48] "GET IRC+irc.telecomix.org HTTP/1.1" 404 6248

We nmap’d the entire Egyptian IP address space to find a few hundred machines that were still up. We then injected human-readable messages into their web server logs.

IntranetsCurrent development projects include: Intranet LiveCDs using off the shelf hardware to run a local Usenet.

and HOWTOs for building two-way radios from repurposed consumer electronics.

We’ve been able to reuse much of this work for Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Wisconsin.

Which is a good thing, because after working 20 hours per day for eight days on Egypt, I really needed some sleep.

This is an exciting time to be a programmer and a person.

We have the power to make a real difference in the world: to help people achieve what *they* want for *them*selves.

It’s been a long, long winter for freedom, in the Middle East and the rest of the world.

but we’re beginning to see signs of spring. Join us.

Hacking for Freedom

Anonymous Telecomix

anonops.net telecomix.org

whyweprotest.net werebuild.eu

Hacking for Freedom - Pycon 2011

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