We'll talk to electeds and candidates, experts and advocates, and then open up the phone
lines to hear from you.
That's Max and Murphy, Wednesdays from 5 to 6 p.m., right here on WBAI 99.5 FM.
There was a political agenda that the council set, and anything that didn't go along with
that agenda just was put by the wayside.
One of the largest counties is Brooklyn County, 80,000 votes.
If we can flip that, we're doing a hell of a job.
That's Max and Murphy on New York City and New York State Politics, debuting Wednesday,
July 18th, on WBAI New York.
And this is WBAI New York 99.5 FM.
It's 8 o'clock on a Wednesday night.
That means it's time for Off the Hook.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
On Diddly Bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
On Diddly Bum!
Diddly Bum!
One of the things that we've been doing for the last year or so is tracking Donald Trump's
domains and all domain registration related to Donald Trump through the entire DNS.
How much is he paying you to do that?
Well, we do it as a pro bono service for the emperor himself.
Wow, because he needs people to keep track of every little detail.
Yeah.
Well, this is the interesting thing about it actually, is that obviously we're not doing
this for him, but there are a little over 61,000 domains that contain the string T-R-U-M-P
in them and we monitor the new ones every day.
Just this week there were actually quite a few about Trump baby balloons because of this
baby balloon issue in London.
Which I don't understand why we don't have that here all the time.
I totally agree.
Yeah, it just seems like the kind of thing that would make us all feel better.
Yep.
So we identified an interesting pattern of domain registrations that were then transferred
over to the Trump organization during the summer of 2016.
And when we looked into this, we sort of unraveled a very interesting and strange story that
involves the person who registered these domains, his intentions behind them, his background,
and the fact that the Trump organization was able to identify these domains and essentially
neutralize the threat, really says a lot about their ability-
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What do you mean neutralize the threat?
Well, they were going to, well, we're going to let out in the talk what was about to happen
to the, well, you know, our hypothesis, our very reasonable hypothesis about what was
about to happen to the Trump campaign and they stopped it.
So what this indicates to me is that they may be really incompetent at a lot of things,
but they actually are pretty competent when it comes to the control of information and
monitoring information and the flow of it.
And so it's going to be a really interesting story.
The cast of characters is really quite colorful here.
And I think that's about all I'll say until I actually get onto the stage.
Okay.
And I think your talk is on Saturday.
I think I'm right in between Chelsea Manning and Steve Rombom.
Oh, that's a good place to be.
Yes.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
We're going to also, by the way, have a special guest on in just a couple of minutes.
Barrett Brown will be joining us from Texas.
You've probably heard of him as somebody who has been targeted by law enforcement over
the years and has made quite a name for himself as a writer and activist and just an overall
interesting person.
He's going to be at the conference as well.
He'll be, he'll also be speaking, I believe, on Saturday, being interviewed actually by
journalist Spencer Ackerman.
I think that comes before Chelsea.
So yeah, we have a nonstop activity.
Saturday's going to be fun.
Yeah.
Well, Friday's going to be fun too.
You think so?
Yeah.
And so will Sunday.
Every single day.
It's just too much good stuff.
That's the number one complaint we usually get is there's too much, too much good stuff.
But here's some good news for those of you who can't make it.
We are streaming the whole thing.
Keep checking Hope.net.
We will have URLs for all of the rooms so that you can watch in full HD over the internet
and feel like you're there and see more than we'll probably see when we are there.
And this is basically a function of the Internet Society.
It is.
Our friends at ISOC Internet Society are doing an amazing job and putting this all together.
Of which I'm on the board for the New York chapter.
Wow.
Okay.
So yeah.
Well, that's a coincidence.
Yeah, it is.
It happens to be a coincidence.
That's right.
Very cool.
Rob, any thoughts on the conference?
I'm just really looking forward to the thing getting started so we can, I think at that
point when the conference starts, we can officially stop all the planning work.
Because it will have been planned and it will be underway.
But on top of that, I mean, so many great talks lined up.
So many great workshops lined up.
Which is something that we don't, I think, speak about a lot on the air.
But you know, there are full hands-on workshops with things like Arduinos and lockpicking.
And we're having our amateur radio licensing tests like we regularly do.
And just all kinds of...
And an amateur radio station that talks to the rest of the world.
Absolutely.
We've got Radio Statler going.
Mitch Alden will be teaching people how to solder.
There's one on making a hologram.
I'm looking at the list now.
It's all on hope.net.
And lockpicking village?
Yeah, lockpicking village.
We don't have enough time.
We don't have enough time to talk about all the things that will be in the workshops.
Absolutely not.
And throughout the whole area.
Don't forget segways.
Seg...
Oh my God.
Did we forget segways?
No.
We did not forget segways.
Segways are coming.
Yes, we will have segways.
And I don't just mean clever musical interludes.
I mean actual segways you can ride.
You know, and to go back to the lockpicking village, you know, I realized last time my
son at the last Hope, I guess it was about three, was just totally fascinated by the
lockpicking village.
I mean, we spent about an hour and a half of him playing with these locks.
And it's just, you know, if you have kids and you're bringing them to Hope, the lockpicking
village is a wonderful place to just kind of sit down, relax, put your feet up, give
your kids a lockpicking set, and just kind of let them get off to the races.
It really is very interesting to watch them try to understand how the locks work, especially
when you sit at a table and they have the translucent locks that show you how the pins
go up and down, you know, seeing their eyes light up as they figure out this is what happens
when you put a key into a door and turn it is really something fascinating.
I think it's a great kind of kid's area, even though it's populated by a bunch of lockpickers.
That's true.
And you might think it's strange for kids to be picking locks, but that is a part of
the hacker community.
In fact, our friends at Maker Faire get that as well.
And if you go to one of their events, you'll see crowds of kids figuring out locks and
opening them.
And it really is educational and a valuable skill to have.
Yeah, my own lockpicking skills, I generally practice the most every two years at Hope.
But every time I go, there are like young kids on either side of me, totally blowing
me out of the water in terms of their skills and just how good they've gotten at it.
And there's so much going on.
There's great stuff to educate you and interest you and spark your interest in directions
you wouldn't have realized before you got there.
Another interesting activity that's related for people that may not be able to be a part
of the actual event or just want to come during the day one time is our concerts.
And in fact, I believe those are going to be downstairs in a new part of the facility
late night.
I believe Saturday is the concert or Friday Fridays is look out for updates.
But we don't often get a chance.
We're so busy with all the other stuff to to advertise or promote.
So I just want to remember to say something today that if you just want to come for a
day be a part of the fun and hear some good chip tunes and electronic music, you could
just come to Hope and participate in that particular event, the concert and it is incredibly
entertaining and you'll see bits and pieces of all the activity there.
And it's a good way to participate if you can't get into the actual show.
Also talking of performance, Hackers Got Talent will be happening again.
That's right.
Jason Scott will be on hand to usher in all these talented people with different kinds
of talents that you might not know hackers have.
And I think that's taking place Saturday late night.
So check the schedule.
There's so many things we might not know off the top of our heads when they are.
But if you go to Hope.net and look at the schedule, you'll you'll see all of them there.
Hey, Barrett Brown is joining us right now.
Barrett, are you there?
Absolutely.
Welcome.
Welcome.
And let me just start off by saying thank you for all you have done, for the courage
you have shown, for the battles you have fought.
I know it must not have been easy.
You know, it's easier than it looks.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Well, let's let's learn something about about your history.
And I know that many of us have heard the story about how you were sentenced to 63 months
in federal prison.
But I want to go a little bit before that, because I understand that when you were a
kid, you were creating your own newspapers on your family's computer.
And I kind of like to learn something about that as well.
Like what what what kinds of projects were you involved in that inspired you to move
on to other things?
Well, I was fascinated by the prospect of being able to reach, you know, hypothetically
everyone in the world.
And that was a possibility that was just sort of coming into our imagination while I was
a child.
And my mom dated briefly, had a Bloomberg terminal back before the Internet was something
you could buy in someone's home.
Wow.
But, you know, and that I saw that one day when I was seven or eight and just it occurred
to me this was a thing of immense power.
That's amazing.
That is something.
That's a proprietary financial operating system and tracking package by Bloomberg, right?
It's our custom platform.
OK.
This was the thing you would see in offices back in the 80s.
For like traders.
Very much one of the first.
Sorry?
For like traders.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Yes.
It was it was a you know, and and what struck me was that the person who owned this happened
to be very, very wealthy.
And I had this vague idea that this was a source of his his power and wealth, this dream
terminal.
So, wow.
What was mentioned.
So what kinds of things would you would you create with it?
Well, I mean, I never actually used that.
We did have a Macintosh that I grew up with and wanted to read from, you know, I think
I was three when I got it or two.
So it was obviously an influential part of my my makeup.
And I thought I'd use it for a number of things.
Choose your own adventures using folders and documents whereby you would open the folder
and there'd be two more folders.
Right.
Right.
No, no.
So, you know, making newspapers, making satirical newspapers, starting when I was about 10 or
11 and getting a little bit better at that over time, reading about the Internet, you
know, in that first time magazine that came out covered the cover reading that the strange
new world of the Internet and the whole magazine filled with these features on various things
like BBC boards, things that I hadn't seen yet, but which I knew was going to be something
that I wanted to to use someday.
Wow.
And well, you certainly have you certainly have pursued that and and done all kinds of
interesting things.
You know, I wanted to ask you about these sort of old newspapers and things that you
made bouncing off of interview we did a couple of weeks ago with Jason Scott, who runs text
files dot com.
Do you happen to still have any of these old newspapers that you created when you were
a kid?
Yeah, I believe my mom has several of them.
I mean, it's amazing.
We should definitely hold on to these things, archive them.
You know, this is a little piece of history here, the sort of the germ from which all
this grew.
Potentially.
Potentially.
We'll see.
We'll see how much.
We'll see how successful I am in the big things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so let's let's fast forward a little bit to a few years ago.
The issues with the Stratfor email leak and all that.
You got in trouble for for publicizing a link, I believe, to to where these emails
could be found.
Is that correct?
That's what I was ultimately charged with, that with that Stratfor incident, which the
FBI had turned out had known about.
There was an intrusion, just Stratfor, Stratfor, Stratfor is a intelligence contracting firm
out of Austin.
It's been around for quite a while and does a couple of different things.
Some of what some of the stuff that it does behind closed doors was revealed by this hack,
which I had known about before it happened and, you know, was involved in efforts to
try to redact information out of that, which is what they ultimately got me on.
They said it was a they charged me with successfully with accessory after the fact, eventually,
for having called the company and said, look, these hackers, they have not yet decided what
to do with these.
They may be dumping them online, in which case I want to make sure there's nothing in
here to get someone hurt if you have an informant under a foreign dictatorship or something.
So let me know.
That's ultimately the conduct that I actually had to plead to.
Now, originally before that, I was facing about one hundred and five years total worth
of charges, many of which from having copied this link that the hacker had posted to Stratfor
documents in an anonymous chat room.
I took that link, pasted it into my Project PM chat room, which was for our crowdsourced
investigation into these other companies in general, which we've been doing for nine months
by that point.
And that people filed up having credit card numbers and they knew that I'd never open
the file.
The forensics showed that they could see from the chat, which they had the entirety of,
that I didn't know what was in them at the time that I copied and pasted the link and
that no one, clearly no one in my group was interested in credit card fraud, this is journalists
and researchers.
Nonetheless, I would you know, they ultimately were able to use that as part of relevant
conduct.
Even though I never got convicted for that, they added it to my sentencing, essentially,
which is one of several unfortunate aspects of the criminal justice system that kind of
got publicized in the course of my case.
Now, before we go on, I should note that Stratfor was not really what this was about.
It was what they ended up considering to be the most viable thing to charge me with.
The investigation in me had begun via secret search warrants that were sealed until the
time of my sentencing, which had begun about a few weeks after my role in exposing the
Team Themis scandal, which involved Pallanter, HB Gary, a few of the firm's in-game systems,
some of which were later investigated further, some of which weren't.
This Team Themis thing that was sort of a DOJ-led operation to go after activists and
to go after groups like WikiLeaks, to go after their financial contributors as well, using
techniques like DDOS attacks in some cases that were, of course, if you and I did them,
we would be charged for it.
So that that was the real thing this was about.
I had done a pretty good job after the initial hack of making sure the press got this story,
understood this story, and later on, with a number of other people, oversaw a pretty
successful investigation into these companies, into these emails, after the press had kind
of gone its separate way.
And that was really, you know, that's shown by my search warrant, which was executed four
months after Stratfor, and didn't mention Stratfor at all.
It mentioned HB Gary, in-game systems, my group, Project PM, and the website on which
we compiled our information about all this, echelon2.org.
Well, I wanted to ask you about that.
You mentioned that you were trying to get this information out to the press, making
sure that the public was aware of what was going on.
But it's my understanding as well that you were also at least initially subject to a
gag order that prevented you from disclosing a lot of information to the press, or even
having your attorneys talk to the press about this.
How did that affect you initially?
That was later on, when I was already imprisoned on these charges.
But that came about, I continued to write from prison for outlets like The Guardian,
that I've been writing for, for a while about these same issues.
I wrote a piece right after Snowden came forward, basically, you know, I told you so piece,
referring back to some of the other similar programs and companies, as the ones, you know,
mentioned in the NSA files.
After, you know, in the course of the article, I did not refer to my case at all.
But the prosecutor claimed in open court that, quote, or that I had been, quote, critical
of the government, unquote, and that I should thus be slapped with a gag order.
And the judge ultimately agreed.
And so I was not able to talk about my case, which, of course, changed very clearly on
all of these cases.
That was the reasoning they used, because you were critical of the government?
That's a direct quote that was reported at the time.
And that's not even the craziest thing they did in the course of the charges.
You want to tell us a crazier thing?
Yeah.
There was one book that was seized and listed on a list of evidence from my home during
either of the raids.
There was two raids, one initially, which was when I was arrested, and then one six
months later, when the SWAT team came and got me.
The book that they took as evidence of a crime was the Declaration of Independence.
And I made sure to bring attention to that at my sentencing when I asked the judge if
I could get that book back, if he could look in to see whether or not it was used to commit
a crime, and if not, to return it to my lawyers.
So there's an order from the judge that was also commented upon in some of the coverage
back then, in which he does have them return my Declaration of Independence.
So there was a lot here that, on an individual basis, was a bad sign, but kind of showed
something was wrong to the extent that the press, even the less attentive press, understood
from very early on this retaliation.
And that's just one of several, just on its own, kind of bizarre things that happened
in this, that kind of make it easier to show what this actually was, what this prosecution
was.
I mean, I think the Declaration of Independence was used to commit a crime, but it was 200
some odd years ago, and it was under British law.
So the statute of limitations has been gone by now.
They're still steamed about that, so.
Another question here as well.
To go back to the Stratfor leaks here, when you were coming across this and when you were
looking at them, I mean, did you have any idea that there was going to be so much information
there, so much about private intelligence collection?
And I ask this because I feel like the relevance of the Stratfor breach is still prominent
today.
I mean, people still use that breach to do open source intelligence research and analysis,
to do link analysis, to see what people are up to several years back.
You know, it was a real treasure trove of data there.
You know, what was the feeling when you were just first exploring this?
Well, contrary to a lot of the press accounts, I never, I was never one of the ones who were
going to the Stratfor emails.
Those went straight to WikiLeaks after we convinced the hackers involved that that was
the best move in that case.
And they made them available gradually via searchable form.
And I was, there was a few things that came out of those hacks that I commented upon widely,
including Trapwire, which was a facial recognition system that on itself wasn't something I was
really terribly interested in.
But what did interest me was the failure of press coverage after that, when they couldn't,
the press, in the course of talking about it, seemed not to understand what company
it was that was actually making it, what company those were attached to, et cetera.
My main thing that we did with Project PM, in terms of our crowdsource researching, was
those 70,000 HP Gary emails that we had gotten eight months prior, and which never systematically,
you know, were subject to a real intense search.
And so we did that over time and came out with things like RomasCoin, which was a very
vast apparatus involving surveillance and propaganda by an unknown U.S. agency that
a number of these companies were working on a re-compete for.
They were trying to get the contract from Northrop Grumman, which we held previously.
Aaron Barr, the disgraced CEO of HP Gary Federal, who had to resign after we unveiled the Team
Themis conspiracy, he had actually been heavily involved in that program originally and was
also a big part of this re-compete with other firms.
In fact, Apple and Google met with them, we know from some of those emails and some of
the actual sort of Google meetings documents, about working with TASC, I believe it was,
Archimedes Global, and HP Gary on this project.
As you can tell, there's a lot of backstory here.
It's amazing...
Can I answer your question?
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry?
Go ahead.
Well, you know, just in general, yes.
I mean, it's something where it very early on became obvious these were important.
One of the first things that was found was this massive Team Themis scandal, which was
enough to get the attention of the press for quite a while, actually.
The problem is they just didn't pursue it to where they needed to.
But it became clear that, look, this was a window, an unprecedented window into this
very fundamentally important sector that is very much tied up in information technology
and information in general, and which operates using methodologies that a lot of people didn't
expect existed, and which, even now, with so much of this documented, not just by us,
but by pretty mainstream outlets here and there, it's not something that's in the consciousness
of the average reporter.
Even the average tech reporter will see profiles on Pallanter and Peter Thiel that don't even
mention this.
There was one on the Intercept, and then the Clinton Intercept was co-founded by Glenn
Greenwald, who was the guy named as a target of that Team Themis scandal that the DOJ allowed
to go forward.
So there's a lot here in terms of how the press works, how it doesn't, you know, what
the failures are, and what we ultimately have to do to make sure that these things don't
just get exposed.
Well, I'm seeing a lot of indication of how the press doesn't work.
It seems like you had to hold their hand to get them to actually see the story.
Absolutely.
And that was very much, that was a large part of what I did back then.
I wrote about some of this stuff myself, including the Ramos-Coyne thing, and some aspects of
persona management, which was another very, very far-reaching, very telling methodology,
whereby CENTCOM, using the contractor Intrepid, which is a subsidiary of Cubic, were asking
people, and now have these programs whereby a single person can control some large number
of very realistic fake online personas using software-assisted apparatus to help them maintain
conversations with different people over time without getting mixed up, blah, blah, blah.
We have some patents from that technology and things like that put forward.
So there was a lot here that Eton and Tone, I think, would have merited more long-term
attention from the press altogether, if you look at it, and look at what's been acknowledged
about what's in these emails.
It's a horrible crime, in terms of our press history, that this has not been really brought
into the public conversation.
Well, you're right.
That is the horrible crime.
Whereas the way it's been portrayed, the horrible crime was people daring to see these emails
in the first place.
But when you look through what has been revealed, it's simply staggering, the amount of corruption
and collusion of all sorts, and it's what the role of the press is to reveal this kind
of thing.
Do you think your efforts have paid off?
Are there more reporters out there now, after talking to you, after being guided in this
way that are more alert, especially in these times where we really need a press to be able
to investigate and see what's actually out there?
Are more journalists getting it now, in your opinion?
Well, yes, simply because we've had a number of opportunities to make sure this thing is
revisited.
My entire case, my entire criminal case, was one great big opportunity to just have articles
in The Nation and Who, What, Why and New York Times come out describing my case and mentioning
these issues.
Those companies are just inextricably wound up in my prosecution.
So to the extent there were documentaries about this, you know, dozens and dozens of
articles, newspaper pieces, it was something that got brought up over and over again.
Now, hopefully, very few of these articles really went in the comprehensive overview
of what it was that we discovered, what this was really all about.
But some of them did a very good job of that.
And of course, the information is always out there for anyone who really cares enough about
it.
That's where we get to the problem, is the caring.
But it's something that I'll have more and more chances to try again, you know, to get
people interested in this.
I've got a book coming out early next year.
It'll be a pretty major release from Frost, Strauss and Garreau.
So you know, to the extent that I get more credible, to the extent that I win national
magazines awards and stuff, my argument hasn't changed.
The facts haven't changed.
But it does make it easier to appeal to editors and producers that this is real and it's been
written about by their respective colleagues and all that.
It's just something that they have difficulty, producers and editors in particular, even
ones with very relatively good outlets, really have a difficulty believing that something
big and fundamental could have been missed by their peers.
And that's something that those of us who've been covered by the press have less trouble
believing.
You know, we're talking about this issue of, you know, understanding and reporting.
To go back to what happened here with respect to H.B.
Gary, with respect to Stratfor and Aaron Burr, and this, you know, really seemed to have
affected H.B.
Gary and Aaron Burr, you know, considerably in the aftermath of this.
But it seems to me like there might be an interesting parallel here, because on the
one hand, we have, you know, the hackers, the hacker community, people who are peeling
back the layers of this industry of private intelligence collection and the military-industrial
complex and collusion and lack of media attention and all this.
And the Stratfor breach was really a first look at all of this happening.
And it gave us a glimpse into a world that nobody had really seen before, that nobody
had really understood before.
And for a lot of people, it was extraordinarily scary.
Yet, on the other hand, if you think about this from the government's perspective, they
also had the same sort of situation, where when this happened, they then were confronted
with these amorphous, decentralized hacking groups, Anonymous, LulzSec, all these sort
of decentralized international groups comprised of characters that existed entirely online
that they didn't necessarily understand either.
And it seems to me like there might be a parallel here in terms of what they did to
you.
And I'm specifically talking about, Barrett, what they did with respect to your legal defense
fund.
When they subpoenaed the records from, I think it was WePay.
Is that correct?
Yes, WePay.
WePay.
When they subpoenaed those records, it sounds to me like there might be an interesting parallel
here in terms of what was done to companies like HBGary and then what was done to you
and your supporters, because they, by subpoenaing those records and getting the identities of
the people and the networks of individuals that were supporting you, then began to peel
back the onion layers of what was happening on the internet that they just did not understand.
I mean, have you ever thought about that parallel?
Yeah.
A large part of this conflict is basically what you've described.
It's one side trying to find the kinks in the other side's armor and the other side
doing the same thing.
And a lot of that involves investigation, acquiring information.
It's definitely, as a matter of extent, something that is very much more in play than it was
previously.
But of course, you always had the FBI wants to find out what the mob is doing.
The mob wants to have insiders, the typesetter, and the local beat police spy on them.
It's an old cat and mouse game that exists, whether it's a revolutionary group or a criminal
organization or anything that the government finds itself opposing, going back to the anti-war
movements and civil rights movements, which were, of course, very thoroughly infiltrated.
And going back to the Bolsheviks, who had a Duma member who turned out to be a Russian
secret policeman.
You know, the Russians were very good.
They pioneered a lot of the, what we call, human intelligence capabilities 130 years
ago.
So yeah, this is something that, yeah, what you said is accurate.
And it's definitely a big part of this.
That's the struggle we're going to see proceed over the next few decades in different forms.
It'll sort of ebb and flow like it has recently.
I mean, remember 2011, the period between 2010 and 2013, when Snowden came forward,
that was the big era of enforced transparency, right there, or 2009 and 2013, starting with
Bradley Manning.
So they react.
They look at their options.
They look at what the threat is.
They try to extrapolate and see where this is going.
We do the same thing.
And so they have an array of responses that sort of apply to all situations and may or
may not be good, may or may not successfully adapt to us, just as we may or may not successfully
adapt to them and get to the point where we're really on their level, where we're capable
of confronting them on even terms.
I think you raised a very important point, though, and people might not realize that
what we're talking about here predates the Snowden revelations, predates the Manning
revelations.
The fact that that happened afterwards, did that change the atmosphere at all for people
realizing what was going on?
Certainly.
And obviously, it obviously cost a lot of reporters who were covering my case to bring
... That was something that was brought up.
It was something that obviously made us look more prescient.
Back in 2011, 2012, when we were actually doing these things, I did get a fair deal
of positive coverage from journalists who understood the importance of these revelations,
and that's why you'll find them referred to here and there back then in Bloomberg Business
Week and Atlantic and all that.
But on the whole, I think those other revelations, aside from help make it easier for me to make
my case, as time goes on, also made it easier for the public to understand that there's
something wrong here, that the press really had a chance, a good chance, back in 2011,
to fully explore and did not take that chance.
But with these revelations and also with the various facets of this US-Russia conflict,
bringing things like persona management and bots and propaganda apparatus into the public
conversation, yes, certainly.
It makes it easier for me to explain what persona management is, and it makes it easier
for me to make the case that this is something that you mainstream political party chair
need to know about.
And had you unknown about it a few years ago, things could have worked out differently.
Most definitely.
Do you find that most average people get what you're saying or are receptive to it?
Certainly.
I mean, these are things that are better talked about in documentaries.
There's two on Netflix alone about what we did with Anonymous for the Tunisian Revolution
and these investigations into the intelligence contracting world.
It's something that is kind of made for popular consumption.
It has something to draw them in.
It has the hacking element, which people, at least back then, found very interesting.
I think they get spoiled.
It's something that the press, the average editor, the average journalist says, oh, look,
there's a hacking thing.
People like that.
And that was our great advantage back then, because it's very difficult to really get
people to pay attention to these important things.
But obviously, when there's some sugarcoating around a bit that interests people, that takes
the burden off us to say, hey, look at this.
They're already looking.
The question is, can we get them to understand what they're looking at?
I want to shift gears here a little bit and talk about what you're involved in now, your
latest project called The Pursuance Project.
It's described as such, Pursuance is open source software that provides a better way
to organize online.
It provides an integrated suite of digital tools, all designed to allow activists, researchers,
journalists, artists, coders, anyone with talent and a little time to collaborate on
projects large and small, working within customized, evolvable entities called Pursuances.
Think of a Pursuance as a mission-oriented project slash organization slash group that
people on the platform can join and contribute to.
The website is pursuanceproject.org.
I know you're in the middle of a Kickstarter.
Tell us what's unique about this particular project and what it is that should appeal
to people here.
There's two major problems we set out to solve with this.
This process really began about 10 years ago when I first created something called Project
PM that later on became the crowdsourced investigation in intelligence contracting.
But before I got involved with Anonymous, it was actually a means of building a very
primitive version of the same apparatus.
What this is, if you think of an ocean with a bunch of living organizational charts swimming
around like jellyfish and evolving and kind of changing form over time, building connections
to one another, and all those jellyfish are composed of individuals and organizations
that came into the system, got involved with another person or persons and built from there,
that's kind of what this is.
It's like scaffolding around a state.
It is a mass collaboration environment in which it's, first of all, not content neutral
like Facebook, for instance, or Twitter, that you actually have to at least give lip service
to a few tenants that we have, that you oppose the surveillance state, however you understand
that term, that you oppose the police state, however you define that, et cetera.
It's populated first by us, by picking about 1,900 people that have signed up thus far,
and 1,900 people in our organizations.
We sort of hand-populate that system, all of them can bring on others over time.
So it expands very rapidly without facing the same degree of overburdening with people
who may not be proper users.
It's a means of solving the problem, which I think is a big problem in the 21st century,
which is, how do you get large numbers of people with no prior relationships into a
space where they can organize and build something out of it?
And that's a problem that we've kind of faced with organizing online groups and movements,
whether they be formal or informal, or more specific, anonymous, that's the key problem.
And obviously we now, a few years later, have a great deal more, we know a lot more
about that.
We know more about the broad implications of it, and we know a lot of the little sort
of mundane things that come up in that process.
And so we've got all those things to bear on the designing of this system.
Yeah, that sounds like one of the most important features, because when you do have something
running on a platform like the internet, you tend to have a rush of interest when you publicize,
and less sort of control as that interest peaks and then falls off.
You're left with a whole lot of people that are there for what reasons may be difficult
to sort out, but that's fascinating.
That's exactly it.
That's exactly the problem.
And you face those different aspects of that problem in different situations, whether it
be an actual institution with a building, or something like Occupy Wall Street, or something
like Anonymous, or something like these sort of online, hashtag-based movements that do
a great job of expanding very quickly, and can maybe focus people's attention to go to
a series of protests, as it did recently with this ICE situation, but which tend not to
be able to sustain themselves.
So if you think of something like Anonymous or Occupy Wall Street as a jellyfish, or some
kind of globulous organism without a skeleton, imagine pursuance of the exoskeleton that
grows along with it, giving it structure that's agreed upon by the people involved,
but also allows that jellyfish to keep evolving, unlike an institution.
This actually has a lot of parallels to the interagency emergency management systems that
the Forest Service employs, and other crisis management structures, but in this case, specifically
for the surveillance state.
I'd like to know, how do you vet people?
How do you know that the people are saying they get it when they really do?
How do you know they're not infiltrators of one sort or another?
We don't.
That's one of a couple problems, including the risk of security intrusion by competent
actors that we cannot solve to anyone's satisfaction.
What we do instead, just as we have in encryption, and allow people to access using whatever
tools that they use in an educated way, knowing its limitations, the other end of that, the
populating end, our philosophy is that if we take some steps that sort of automatically
help to ensure that this population of users that we're trying to empower are largely composed
of the people we think they are, and that those people are open society advocates of
different kinds, who may have different political backgrounds, but agree on these core principles
of an open society, if we do that, we will accomplish something.
Now beyond that, the way we discourage and de-enable infiltrators, or just people who
don't belong there, people who are, you know, who can always bring chaos to a project without
being a cop, people who are just, should not be there, disruptive.
We know them well, yes.
Yeah.
There's a number of structures in place here that sort of, in general, sort of tend to
prevent them from arriving in large numbers, and then secondarily, allow the individual
participants who are building these pursuances, organizational charts, and spending them,
to ensure that to the extent those people get in, their ability to harm things is minimized,
whereby they can still be put to work on things, you know, on minor things that, you know,
are not hugely important, and get a chance to contribute.
So there's a number of ways that pursuants can be set up such that new users have no
real access to the information that a foreign adversary might want, while still, you know,
kind of allowing them to contribute in ways that do prevent a barrier of entry for an
intelligence contractor, you know, the national cybersecurity forces of a dictatorship abroad,
or anything else.
And there's more to it than that, but those are the broad, that's our sort of broad philosophy,
our approach here, is to tell people, look, we have no, without taking on very authoritarian
powers over exactly who gets in, and subjecting people to scrutiny, and, you know, all that,
we can never guarantee that everyone in here will be on the up and up.
What we can do is discourage, discourage them, make it harder for them to do damage, and
give you the tools that you can use to decide for yourself exactly what level of personnel
security that is appropriate for your group.
Right, they can slowly establish merit through these tasks, and work their way on this, this
project or pursuit.
You know, and on the other hand, I wanted to bring up sort of the flip side of this.
If we're creating a pursuance to serve a certain population of users that want to be engaged
one way or the other on the internet, and work in some kind of collaboration, because
they're activists, they're working on a certain cause, you must have given certain thought
to the fact that if this is some sort of centralized place where people can collaborate, you may
in fact be doing a disservice to these users that you're trying to serve.
If let's say you're served with a subpoena, you must have given some thought to the fact
that, you know, legal process will inevitably be served upon you, and you have to make a
decision about what you're going to do with certain user data, or even certain metadata.
And how do you prevent or how have you sort of designed around that obvious threat?
Right, of course, given that I spent four years in prison, it would be kind of surprising
if I hadn't thought quite a bit about those issues.
It would also be surprising if we hadn't been asked those things very early on, rightfully
so.
And so we have a number, there's a number of ways we have gone in which to make that
very difficult and very unlikely.
One of those is working closely with Patricia Jansdottir, the Icelandic member of parliament,
head of the...
Friend of the show.
Oh, Birgitta, yes, we know her well.
Yes, yes.
She's a board member on pursuance, and now sort of our global ambassador, working with
other state and private entities.
So we have, we will not be having servers anywhere where the US can get them, for one
thing.
For another thing, I don't want to go into the exact terminology, so I don't want to
get it wrong, but Steve Phillips, our lead developer, who comes out of the crypto community
and sort of hyperspace community in San Francisco, works at a noise bridge quite a bit, he and
other people who have contributed to either input or actual coding have approached this
in a way...
It's some decentralized method.
You have to remember, I have no computer background, all my...
When I saw that Bluebird terminal, again, I was very interested in being able to organize
people, but I don't really care what was going on inside.
But we do have people who have written explanations of that, you can find them part of our Kickstarter
page, as well as in the talks we did at Aaron Schwartz Day, a few other things, radio programs
here and there.
But we do have all the information sort of collated there on the exact specifications
of how this network is distributed, so as to avoid that very complication.
Right, so there's a mechanism for double-blind identity and so on.
Absolutely, yeah.
And there are several others aside from that.
Steve Phillips, our lead developer, also creates something called LeapChat, which is
a zero-knowledge communication platform that's integrated into this.
We have input from former NSA people, like Thomas Drake, you know, of course, who...
He's not on our board, but he came and spoke at our panel we organized for RightsCon recently
and has been involved kind of just helping us out.
So we have...
We also have John Kiriakou on our board, a former CIA torture whistleblower.
So we have a number of people who, to the extent that there's something we forgot, will
have no problem telling us.
But again, anyone who wants to see those specifics should go to the Kickstarter page and look
at the links there.
There is a great deal of solid information about that that I'm just not qualified to
convey on a hacking radio show.
We're speaking with Barrett Brown, a journalist, essayist, activist, and really somebody who
can motivate, I think, a lot of people to actually get involved.
And one thing you said that really struck a chord with me is seeing the power of the
technology without having to dive in and understand every little bit of it.
Because I think so often we tend to get mired down in that, where if you use the wrong terminology,
all of a sudden everything you say is invalid.
I think just by focusing on what the power of the actual tool can be, you leapfrog over
so many stumbling blocks that normally would get in your way.
Absolutely.
That's especially true, because Twitter has many, many critics of both useful and bad.
Otherwise, that will come and explain these things to you at great length.
It happened today.
They're in real life, too, but all over the place.
But Barrett, I want to give you the opportunity to give out the info so people can get involved
in the Kickstarter, can get involved in the project, whatever you want people to know
about.
Yeah, absolutely.
So pursuanceproject.org is our main website.
There's a link to the Kickstarter at the very top of that.
That's the easiest to remember.
There is a Kickstarter link, of course, but I wouldn't know how to go about saying it
in a meaningful way.
So just go to pursuanceproject.org and you'll see the link to the Kickstarter there.
That's right.
The website itself has plenty of information and links to articles that have appeared in
the New York Observer, Wired, Vice about this project and kind of what it does from their
standpoint.
Obviously, it's useful for crowdsource research, bringing activist groups into emergence, taking
NGOs, nonprofits, letting them better mobilize effectively and really viably use large numbers
of supporters.
All of that thing.
It helps them to figure out how they want to work together and makes it easy to do that.
So we have a number of constituencies and we have a number of other groups, organizations
that have kind of given us a nod, you know, because of that.
So all of that can be seen at the website.
So I may not mention the topic of like not prioritizing, like not getting fixated on
technical specifics and making stuff more usable, making it so it's more available to
more people.
Can you talk more about like your choice to use, like for the, according to the FAQ, you're
using like a front end clients like mobile and web, you're going to use, it's going to
be JavaScript based, like React, React Native and Electron.
Those have been criticized by the cryptography community for being like very vulnerable to
like lots of attacks.
But on the other hand, they also make it easier to port apps to multiple platforms to get
into the hands of more people.
Can you talk about like how you come to that decision and how to choose whether to prioritize
security or availability?
Well, the actual nuances of security wasn't, it's not a decision I would ever make because
I'm not, I'm not competent to make that decision.
He said that all of the specifics and sort of the grand, the larger picture was also
thought out by our technical people, of course.
And they've explained a lot of the specific reasoning on that.
Steve Phillips is on Twitter under, like, at Aleema Steve, E-L-I-M-I-S-T-E-E.
And he's talked, he's engaged with a lot of our critics, including one today, about things
like Tor and why, you know, despite these reservations that, you know, even Tor has,
you know, that no one really denies who's educated on the issue, those are things we
certainly facilitate.
Beyond that, so I couldn't speak to, for instance, JavaScript.
I have no idea what's different from JavaScript than any other coding language.
I know nothing about it.
But what I can tell you is that our larger security philosophy here, both in the technical
sphere, is based on the proposition that we're up against very, very competent adversaries
who have historically, and just in recent history, have been shown to be able to infiltrate
any number of things that were not widely viewed, maybe viewed by specialists, but not
widely viewed as vulnerable, and that they're going to surprise the specialists every now
and again.
And they have.
And so we tell people that, well, first of all, most people using the pursuant system
are going to do more mundane kind of things than the kind of thing that we have to worry
about, that we have to worry about security for, and that no one should come on to hear
or use any system, up to and including having a personal conversation two feet away without
knowing the specifics of what's vulnerable and what's not.
Parabolic microphones have been around for quite a while, so have police informants.
So I make certain to always point out that this is not 100% secure, and nothing is.
And that's something that everyone should keep in mind, no matter what they're doing,
and no matter under what medium they're doing it.
Yeah, I think that's a good and very realistic attitude when involved in this sort of thing.
And I also think, and maybe this is a bit unusual, that you actually learn something
when there are infiltrators.
You learn their techniques as well, assuming that you find them, and you usually do.
You learn about your vulnerabilities, but you also learn about their tactics.
And I'm not saying people should seek out infiltrators, but I think what Barrett is
saying is that to some degree, you can expect it, no matter what sort of system you're using.
Certainly the attempts, whether or not they're successful, that desire is always there.
Certainly.
I mean, we had, a day after Aaron Barr went to the Financial Times and said he'd infiltrated
the Anonymous server and identified all of our quote-unquote leaders, you know, we had
all of his notes.
And so did the press.
Wow.
And so we learned a lot from those notes, and some of the stuff in me about them, which
I confronted him on the phone about, put up on a recording.
And there's other measures that, you know, as someone who's not a intelligence specialist,
I can assure you, and it really doesn't even like the subject, you know, I'm a historian
by temperament.
McClatchy is by temperament, not a modernist.
I can tell you that it's not hard to think of ways in which to squeeze more juice out
of that lemon.
Calls to former employees, you know, thinking out a phone call and questions you might call
and ask the vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, as I
did once, and listed in my indictment, as I believe.
There's all number of, you know, that was one of my favorite things to do, is call them
early on.
It's like Gestapo, ask them questions, record it, and very often, if you think through beforehand,
you can ask questions that are going to yield accidental answers that, you know...
This is why you're dangerous.
This is why the authorities, this is why the authorities are so scared of you, because
you do things like that, and you think these things through.
Certainly.
That's, you know, that's nice for me.
It's very complimentary that they do feel that way from time to time.
And I think, obviously, that's an endorsement right there.
I mean, basically, this is...
The DOJ has been interfering with this project in particular by having cut off my income
until from about a year ago, up until literally today, when my publisher was now allowed to
pay me.
Really?
Wow.
You know, they sent subpoenas.
There's articles about this as well.
They sent subpoenas to The Intercept, to Macmillan Publishers.
I heard about that.
And then after that, they ordered my publisher not to pay me any money until further notice,
or they work out the garnishment.
I do owe $100,000 to Strapper because of that hack at the FBI, as shown in other court documents.
And this is something that's very standard.
When people are prosecuted, they try and cripple them however they can, but if you're ingenious,
you always find a way.
Voltaire, you have one more question?
Yeah.
You haven't...
It's understandable at this stage of the project, but there hasn't been a security audit yet.
And would you consider adding, for a stretch goal on your project, a security audit?
I think...
Well, a security audit is definitely one of the basic things that we're acquiring money
for to begin with.
In addition to that major security audit, we're also going to be asking certain other
semi-public figures on a pro bono basis to also have a crack at it, you know, to some
extent.
That's great.
And the source code is available.
It's under the FARO GPL, so anybody can use it.
It also requires that when it's out in the wild, it's going to require that all the end
users get their modified source code, which I highly commend you on.
Yeah.
Now, Barrett, running out of time here, but I just wanted to ask you quickly, how do you
find that you mesh with the hacker community?
Has this community been supportive of your ideals?
Is this a positive environment?
Well, back at Anonymous, it was very mixed.
Obviously, there was a lot of people that did respect what I did, that knew exactly
what I had been working on.
But there was others who got a lot of their information in the same place Soccer Moms
did.
You know, in the magazine and NBC.
And so I sort of took some of those things literally and thought I was going around calling
myself the official spokesperson or whatever.
But since then, a lot of people that were my opponents back then or now, you know, have
changed their minds.
And we get a lot of help from people, the Aaron Schwartz people around him, for instance.
We get a lot of help from a lot of people who have a background in activism, whether
or not they understood what I was doing back then.
You know, the DOJ going after me like that was very helpful in a number of ways, and
one of which was giving people a chance to see in writing, in a courtroom setting, you
know, what it was that I was actually doing, as opposed to some of the things they might
have believed I was from press coverage and whatnot.
I don't work with a whole lot of hackers directly myself right now.
But there's a number attached to this project who are looking forward to using it to help
develop tools and whatever.
I've never really, you know, I've never hung out with hackers, if I could help it.
Well, you're coming to hope, so you're going to meet a whole lot of them.
I've been there before, I've read it myself.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Well, we're looking forward to having you over there.
One final question, though.
A lot of our listeners, not a lot, but a fair number of listeners find themselves incarcerated
one way or another.
And I just think your words could be very inspirational to somebody who finds themselves
being prosecuted, being muzzled in one way or another.
Is there anything you can tell people that might have them looking forward to something
that they can accomplish as far as revealing the truth or just simply getting past these
hurdles?
Yes, actually.
There's something very specific I can tell them, which is that one of the first pursuances
that will be created when the pursuant system starts will be run by us and will be dedicated
to prison reform.
We'll make use of contributions from current inmates.
We'll potentially be working with some other groups that I don't want to name yet, but
you will have heard of them if you're into prison reform.
And we're going to be ensuring that these administrative remedy forms that you are filling
out trying to get a court to allow you to challenge the due process violations to which
you are subject, we're going to ensure that those start working differently, that we've
got a very long-term plan that's going to start soon to get that done.
That's great.
One more time, give out the information for the Pursuance Project, how people can donate
and help make it a reality.
If you go to pursuanceproject.org, there's a link to our Kickstarter at the top of the
page.
We also accept Bitcoin donations, and there's information for that on the donations page
on pursuanceproject.org.
Just Google Pursuance Project, you'll find a number of articles by Wired and The Observer
talking about the potential uses of it for journalists or for researchers, that sort
of thing.
There's a number of articles about how NGOs can use it, how individuals can use it, and
what it might accomplish in the long term.
Great.
Well, Barrett, thanks so much for talking to us over this last hour, and we really look
forward to seeing you at HOPE.
Thank you very much.
I look forward to it as well.
All right.
Have a good night.
Adios.
And that was Barrett Brown speaking to us.
And again, he will be at the HOPE Conference.
Details on who else will be at the HOPE Conference at hope.net.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll be back again next week with a pre-HOPE show.
I'm sure we'll be all going crazy at that time.
Until then, have a good night.
Stay tuned for The Personal Computer Show.
See you next week.
Bye.