Boston BSides Keynote with Dr. Gabriella Coleman

[Applause] so um I think the title of my talk is a bit self-explanatory however its connection to security maybe less so and I will admit that it's not like there's a million connections to security but at one point there will be a very explicit one so bear with me as I get there but first I'd like to ask who here knows an who do you know any Anthropologist personally okay so very few people so one of the fun things Anthropologist is when let's just say I'm meeting um my accountant or a doctor for the first time they usually ask you like what do you do and I say oh I'm an anthropologist and and they kind of um

look very surprised and excited and usually they think one of two things Indiana Jones or dinosaurs so diing bones or digging for old temples and actually Indiana Jones is anthropology it's archaeology uh but the type of digging that I do is people I dig people and people who tend to be alive not dead um and then it's also interesting this accountant then will ask me after I explain that I'm a cultural Anthropologist um they they they then think oh you must work in the jungles of Brazil right and I go no I work on computer hackers and so when I say that they of course think oh people who steal you know my credit cards which you know

is one legitimate kind of uh definition but then I kind of have to explain no that's not quite uh the hackers that I study um so as you can imagine what is normally supposed to be about like 30 seconds turns into this like five to 10 minute conversation so I'm an anthropologist I study hackers my first project was on free and open source software um and my second project has been on Anonymous yeah the the one drug that actually improves your life Linux um and so the second project has been on Anonymous I've written two books uh they're very very different books actually the one that's blue coding freedom is a very academic book the

second one is far more of a popular book I'll actually be um asking at least one trivia question maybe two as giveaways and we're also giving away uh more books and both books are available as PDFs under creative common license so you can just Google for them so yeah and thanks my Publishers as well uh took them some convincing especially for the first one so let me now just get to the talk um which is based on Anonymous you know there's many words I've used over the years to describe Anonymous and these are a couple of them Hydra trickster confusing enchanting controversial irreverent interesting unpredictable frustrating stupid really stupid these are all the different kind of words I

use but one of the words I rarely or it's not words but I've rarely had to argue against a certain idea and I've rarely had to argue against the idea that they're terrorists now this is an idea that is out there in the world but I think it's pretty uncommon and I'm going to uh tell you why I think it's uncomon or why that Association which I think the government uh tried to make a few times fail but before I get there the reason why I'm interested in this is because I actually did think that Anonymous was the perfect kind of candidate to be tagged cyber terrorists not because they are cyber terrorists I don't think that they are

cyber terrorists but because terrorism today along with describing I think a legitimate Phenomenon with Isis and alqaeda uh and some other political groups is also a political tool used to squash descent and and uh this has been the case before 911 but after 911 the use of terrorism to um tag radical groups is unacceptable has skyrocketed and the one book that really um is quite wonderful if you're interested in this topic is green is the new red by journalist will pot will Potter and this is a quote from the book where he says since September 11th the word terrorism has been stretched and pulled and hemmed and cuffed and torn anded to fit a growing body of political

whims and it's affected a number of different groups uh in the technological sector for example Keith Alexander exgen of NSA has said you know if you use tour you can't see this very well so let me read it you are a suspect so the exact quote is the former NSA General Keith Alexander stated that all those communicating with encryption will be regarded as Terror suspects and will be monitored and stored as a method of prevention now of course who here uses tour right A lot of people and most of you actually have not been thankfully apprehended by the US government but there has been one group who has really been the victim of the political use of

the terrorism rhetoric and this is animal rights activists um especially groups who are part of Earth Liberation Front and uh the animal Liberation movement and I'm going to talk a little bit about them because I think it's important to understand why I think Anonymous was such a good candidates um so in 2004 the FBI really made uh eot terrorism a priority so in 2004 John Lewis Deputy assistant director of the FBI counterterrorism division declared in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee the FBI's invest investigation of animal rights extremists and ECOT terrorism matters is our highest domestic terrorism investigative priority and soon after this there were some really interesting kind of uh crackdowns and arrests and the one

that's actually the most disturbing has to do with a group of people who ran a website on behalf of animal rights activists but never engaged in any forms of sabotage or direct action so as my first and the hardest one because there tends to be not so many animal rights activists among hackers but what the heck let me try does anyone know the name of the group that faced arrest and jail time for running a website on behalf of the animal rights activist okay animal Liberation no it was all right that's okay no one tends to get this I mean I have to give this trivia at a animal rights conference or something thing so it's the Shaq seven

and they only ended up being six of them but the shack seven count so they're originally seven so they were convicted under the animal Enterprise act for campaigning to shut down a notorious animal testing lab Huntington Life Sciences The Shack s campaign it involved anthract pipe bombs or a plot to hijack an airplane they ran a website on that website they posted news about the campaign legal actions like protests and illegal actions like stealing animals from WBS and unabashedly supported all of it since the federal government has largely been unable to catch groups like The Al and Earth Liberation Front prosecutors went after lawful activists in Spotlight and many of these spent two to three years

in jail uh for running websites so this is the most kind of disturbing consequence now what's interesting was this happened I believe in 2004 the trial they were prosecuted under this law that then became a terrorism law so the animal Enterprise protection act in 2006 became the animal Enterprise terrorism act and it applies to anyone who intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property used by an animal Enterprise and actually when the Shaq 7 had to appeal their case they had to appeal it under a terrorism law since that time um people who have done things like liberate minks um have been charged under the animal Enterprise terrorism act and I'm not

here to justify their actions I mean some of them are very extreme arson liberating animals harassing people who work for these companies but what is interesting and has to be noted um is that there's never any kind of loss of life right there's no murders of people and they're in fact very uh against that and so I actually do think that the terrorism label doesn't fit it should be sabotage um there's laws on the book that do work for them um and so I find this very very troubling and what's interesting is that the story I'm telling about the use of the terrorism label does not just apply to the United States although the United States is

really the epicenter of this sort of activity it's occurring in different places so there's a group in France called the tarac n and they actually managed to shut down the train system in France not all France in part of France and again their aim was not to uh do they didn't want to harm property or loss of life but they were able to kind of shut down the train system for a while and they were initially charged for conspiracy in the service of terrorism those charges were dropped the prosecution is now looking to reinstate them and this is a very good moment in France for that given uh what happened with terrorism acts I'm actually going

to Spain next week and I'm getting version of this talk and the example I'm giving there are two puppeteers who are also being charged with conspiracy to incite terrorism uh because in their puppet show um they are kind of representing vast Independence and because they are some vast terrorists by extension they're being charged with conspiracy for terrorism so um basically we're in a moment where monkey wrenching sabotage you know is being equated with terorism and so you know as you can see but I'll get more specific Anonymous in some ways can fit under that rubric if these are the trends that are going on but before I I want to talk a little bit more specifically in some ways I just

talked about the general reasons why Anonymous was in a good position to be slapped with this label um and then I want to talk about the more specific ones related to the Cyber uh world but before I do some of you might be thinking well you know I actually think that this label exists and um it has kind of Stu uh quite effectively so now I just want to convince you of why I think um they're not really associated with terrorism generally it might you know be the case for a few people well one source I have are news articles journalism articles um many of them are not positive um many of them are negative but nevertheless most news

articles refer to Anonymous as activist or activist with very few referring to them as terrorist or even a dark evil Menace the most negative word that you see are Vigilantes right uh which is not quite the same thing um that could be a fear of Retribution I mean interestingly enough Anonymous does have a couple of rules and Norms one of which is a very strong anti eth you shouldn't do anything for self-promotion and the other one is you should never attack the media and like all good rules and Norms they get broken but they get broken rarely right and so I actually think I mean know they would not like it if they were called

terrorist and indeed that you know rule would be broken more in some ways but they have been called terrorists by new organizations and they haven't been attacked right so I don't know it's a good question though because that is certainly a dynamic but that's one source another um data point has to do with the fact that about once twice a month I get emails from students all over the world sometimes it's a cheerleader from Ohio sometimes it's a middle school student uh from Peru who um are writing a paper in school for their teachers on Anonymous and they are writing about them in terms of activism Andis not in terms of terrorism right and I would assume that if a student

also was writing about them as terrorist they would also contact me and I do get this quite often and now I'm going to actually show you a small clip of a video from a middle school student from Peru who created the video for a class and you know it's not the most Stellar video in the world it's pretty good good introduction to Anonymous but I think this captures how many of these high school students and middle school students tend to see all right I'm actually going to skip the video hopefully the next one will work because the next one is pretty important I'll kind of have it just flashing in the background uh the kid sort of is

explaining what activism is uses Anonymous as one example of many and then actually he um raises a few hacks in Peru in specific by Anonymous in Peru um and for example they were doing some protests because um a cult that was painted with a bunch of murals was just rep painted yellow so Anonymous kind of attacked um the government and in one instance they left like a porn video because it's Anonymous and that's how they uh protest so that's another data point um another very interesting one has to do with the total proliferation of TV shows and films um that represent hackers and Anonymous in specific and so there's tons of them that actually have

all sorts of references Mr Robot is obviously not primarily about Anonymous but there's actually all these references um such as the famous uh Church of Scientology video that Anonymous did where they declared war against the church Scientology they actually copy that and modify that in Mr robots uh another more very kind of explicit um connection is in the film called who am I uh which is actually a really wonderful German film Blockbuster kind of Hollywood style that's not just about hacktivist it's about hacking as well there's kind of a couple of storylines and themes but Clay is trying to outdo Anonymous and LC and they're very kind of political and activist oriented I actually really recommend this movie and

if anyone wants it I have it on the US be so feel free to come to me it was really hard to initially get um and I was able to get it but now I I hear it's on the pirate site um another film that was quite surprising where Anonymous showed up was a film about a bunch of uh geek nerd kids in the hood called dope which it's about drugs dope um here they say like level Shady there's all these references to bitcoin and Aaron schs it's a really good movie so as my next trivia that I think someone will get so I've just mentioned of films and TV shows where Anonymous has been in any

other examples uhuh the it I actually don't know I haven't seen that one but they they have come up explicitly yes okay I trust you all right another [Applause] one C you know I I don't know NE okay uh one that takes place in our country's capital Oh cards yes very much so and actually some a member of anous consulted and there's all these kind of inside jokes and um they also appear in The Good Wife and Homeland as well and I've actually been contacted by like 10 other Hollywood producers who are making uh other TV shows and films so they're in the pipeline so that again they're not represented as as um terrorists that's the important thing again

sometimes malicious but not necessarily terrorists so now I want to kind of return to this question why I think this Association was very right for making in a kind of more specific register so as we know there's a long-standing cyber warfare and cyber terrorism frame right this is a framework that exists and I actually do think it's possible to have something that is close to cyber terrorism if right infrastructure is hit right but this frame has existed for an extremely long time it's not going to be surprised to anyone here one of the kind of first mentions of cyber terrorism came in 1991 with this report computers at risk safe Computing in the information age and it's the last line

which matters tomorrow's terrorist may be able to do more damage with a keyboard than with a bomb and of course this rhetoric only intensified post uh uh 911 right so another reason why I think this Association was right for making was because some quarters of anonymous engaged in high-risk hacking and in fact Sabotage full on and I'll describe some in a moment but here I'm going to quote Corey Doo science fiction writer who wrote a very nice review of my book and I think he just does a good job of capturing this high-risk hacking so in the kind of haing does by means of the fluid structureless Norms of the group half macho posturing half Uber

Savvy media pranksters ship is doubly exciting or exciting squared it is filled with drama betrayals police informance intimidation brinkmanship insane risk taking and imp passion speeches from the battlements um and for those that need a slight refresher of anonymous just in case just as a reminder Anonymous was initially a name used for inter internet trolling they were designated the Internet Hate Machine by Fox News which Anonymous kind of embraced the term um because they thought it was yeah we are the Internet Hate Machine uh eventually in 2008 there was this series of kind of trolls against the Church of Scientology they leak frogged into activism and actually started to engage in all sorts of kind of um activist activist

interventions and in 2011 in specific there was a shitload of hacking occurring under LC and anti-c and this is in some ways what Cory was referring to and in specific I personally in 2011 in the summer is when I started to get extremely paranoid myself and I was just wondering when the FBI would kind of knock on my door and try to get my data because they were you know engaging in so many Shenanigans from hacking into into security companies and deleting everything they were telling the FBI to [ __ ] off every single Friday you know this was pretty heavy [ __ ] and you know most famously in this time period they haed HB Gary which was a Revenge hack

because um Aon bar who worked for HB Gary claimed that he had infiltrated Anonymous he had found the key operatives and was going to go to the FBI with the names the names were wrong in fact they were published in the financial times and then in one evening Anonymous completely owned HB Gary put all their emails online deleted everything um and boasted about it in the Hacked Twitter account of HB Gary and you had folks like Greg hland here saying this is not haist um he's the president of AP Gary this is not activism it is Terrorism so some people were making this Association right um because of this highrisk hacking another interesting reason why I think it was

right for making was that some of the activists involved in Anonymous were on terrorism watch list one of them and that's Jeremy Hammond and thanks to some leaked documents he was um it was revealed that he was a possible terrorist organization member but you know what's interesting about it he was actually considered a terrorist not because he was a hacker but because he was Anarchist and environmentalist it goes back to that green scare right but nevertheless he was known as a kind of hacker and Anarchist and he was kind of um Under Suspicion now another reason why I think the the association was right for making was again the government really really as you all know

disliked Anonymous very much but I like to kind of remind people of it uh in a more tangible way this was a that was also kind of leaked as part of the Snowden documents and it is a slide about tour and what it's used for and they recognize that there's some good elements to tour that people living in oppressive countries cument firewalls and the bad uses are you know uses by pedophiles State actors can launch attacks without being attributable and Anonymous and wellet right so they're there with the pedophiles and stuff like that now there was one attempt in in specific that I think was a very kind of clear but oblique attempt to associate

Anonymous with terrorism and it came in this article uh in the Wall Street Journal which was published in February 2012 does anyone remember this article by any chance or recognize it so it was an interesting article um it was published exactly on February 21st 2012 and basically it quoted or it really reported that Keith General Alexander who at the time was the director of the NSA that he had briefed officials in the White House in a secret meeting Alexander claimed that Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a Cyber attack now you know it's very vague language could have the capability is very different from

saying they want to do it but nevertheless as a form of kind of rhetoric it's very clear what is being done here they're being kind of considered as such an evil Menace that they might have the capability and desire to take down critical infrastructure to me this was a very strong attempt and what's interesting was that I actually think it totally failed and it failed because Security Experts like many people in this room came back and said and talked to the mainstream media and said it's extremely unlikely um experts consider such a scenario to be extremely unlikely and then Anonymous spokespersons to miss the whole idea as ridiculous and it never really gained any traction I'm going to

go back to that story a little bit later um but now I want to transition to why this attempt uh failed why the you know associations that were tossed out there uh failed so that's what I'm going to do for the rest of the talk all right there's a you know like most things there's never one or two reasons there's a handful of reasons the first um reason has to do with timing and who Anonymous supported in its early activist history although Anonymous is well known for its um highrisk hacking it's not the only thing that it has done right uh it's engaged in many many different kind of activities and in 2010 late 2010 it

intervened um when Wikileaks was censored by Paypal Mastercard and visa and some people may remember this because this occurred after Wikileaks released all these diplomatic cables uh the US government got incredibly mad and basically asked uh all sorts of Corporations to stop processing services to um assign in Wikileaks and what was so fascinating about this was you know songs in Wikileaks are very kind of controversial right but nevertheless a lot of people who didn't like Wikileaks or Assange nevertheless were a gassed at the fact that there was this kind of preemptive form of censorship including journalists who really disliked Assange um and this was a moment when the government again was incredibly upset as Assange and in fact um I don't think

Sarah Palin was actually saying this this a good matchy purs alaa and Taliban leaders here's an attempt to associate Assange with um terrorism and Anonymous rose up at this point with a very very large DS attack there was over 7,000 people that showed up on one of their chat channels um over 30,000 downloads of low Orban Cannon happened and again a lot of um First Amendment loyalists don't like Doos attacks for obvious reasons right but nevertheless I think a lot of people supported this um action just because people were so upset that Wikileaks was censored so also what occurred was that there was a unbelievable amount of media articles about this event right and so

the framing that occurred at that moment was going to matter greatly so actually I went back and and looked through many of these uh articles and newscasts and again all over the place it's not always positive it's often very negative but very rarely is it about cyber War um or terrorism and now I'm going to actually show you a clip that I hope works because it's such a good video of CNN um and they are reporting on the attack here's the real meaning of wikileak story The powerlessness of world government and institutions in the internet era in the last few days supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have launched operation payback shutting down major websites like Visa

Mastercard and PayPal one of the alleged perpetrators is all of 16 years old Nick o is the perfect person to speak to this new wild wild net he's been on The Cutting Edge of social media and politics he ran Howard Dean's 2004 presidential internet campaign and teaches about technology and government at Harvard's Kennedy School it seems a little bit scary to me that anybody can organize an attack on an institution and shut them down what does that mean it's almost like a sit in right I mean anybody could go sit in the lobby of a bank and shut the bank down for an hour that's a fascinating metaphor I've never even thought about it this way but but

it really isn't I mean this is a few people first of all sit requires many people second of all it only shuts down that one little Branch this was right at the heart o of the internet infrastructure for major Global institutions and they went kaput and how many people did it take to organize this it took a few people to organize it but but hundreds of thousands to participate it's a denial of service attack what they do is they get lots of people to all request the website at the same time and they figure out ways of automating it but it's still a broad coordinated activity PayPal shuts down Wikileaks account but you can still give money

through PayPal to the Klux Clan I mean this was a political action these hackers took an an act of civil disobedience is this something we should admire I I absolutely think it's something we should admire you know they're standing up for a political for a political value they believe in which is a radical free speech on the internet I'd argue maybe it's the only value the internet actually has you say you admire them how far does that go I mean cyber war is the New Frontier China is hecking in China could shut down our grid where where do you draw the line of what's permissible I mean I wouldn't equate this with cyber War I don't want you

know why not well because I they didn't I don't know that they broke any laws right well all they did was show up all they did was show up all they did was request the website a lot of people requested the website at once if China were to do that and were to try to overwhelm our internet structure would that be cyber War well that you're talking about a sovereign state going after another sovereign state critical infrastructure well what was a nons sovereign 10,000 people who were anarchists well let's get real this was a brief attack that actually uh disabled a few systems for a very short period of time it's very analogous to a Sit I'm GNA leave it at

that uh but there you see how um one host was really trying trying to kind of get him to sort of admit that this was a major Act of cyber war and was saying it was hitting at the heart of critical infrastructure it was the PayPal blog for Christ sakes it's like the furthest thing from critical infrastructure and um has a Blog yeah yeah like it was the I know PayPal has a Blog what do they put on that blog um and it's true it was actually the websites were down for very short periods of time right um it was spectacular because so many people contributed and they were a lot of different sites but

nevertheless it was very helpful to have this person kind of re in the problematic rhetoric but you could imagine if they had brought in an expert who in fact said yes this is cyber War right CNN still commands a lot of power to set the standards in the frames and that didn't happen in this case now what's interesting with this question of timing is that soon after these dos attacks which happened in December 2010 in January 2011 Anonymous got involved in the Arab Spring and quite dramatically uh this was Tunisia these are Tunisian uh school children who are thanking anonymous because Anonymous were uh was one of the first groups to get videos out of the country that then

was reported in Al jazer and these sorts of places and this was interesting because I think the social Revolutions of 2011 were particularly important to prevent that Association because Anonymous was so present in these social revolutions which had a lot of support um in large sectors of the society it became a little bit harder to take the acts of let's just say hacking and sabotage and simply frame them as terrorism okay the next example is probably one of my favorite ones the adoption of the guy Fox icon and it's um today an an icon that is is often associated with protest descent Revolution but for most of British history in specific guy Fox given the

fact that he tried to blow up the British Parliament that was um headed by a Protestant and he was a Catholic for most of British history he was like Britain's Osama Bin Laden he was really a negative figure remember remember the 5th of November was to celebrate guy Fox but to celebrate the fact that he did not succeed and he was executed right this was a celebration um of killing the terrorists and so what's fascinating is Guy Fox today you know is controversial right he doesn't have a squeaky clean uh image because in fact he tried to blow up Parliament we all know this but nevertheless the association is quite positive and it's quite positive uh

because of popular culture and in specific V for Vendetta the graphic novel and then the film really sealed the deal in terms of that transformation but what you may not know is that the association um between guy Fox and kind of more positive revolutionary action came earlier than these two pieces of media and it came um the first book that kind of represented guy fox in a positive way was a hisorical romance it's called guy fox or the gunpowder treason and it's also called a historical romance and it was published in 1850 um I'm actually reading the book right now and uh and this was the first book that kind of disassociated him with terrorism and what happened next was

especially important was that people started to write children's books um where they represented guy fox in more of a positive way so this icon I think because it has positive associations is kind of rubbed off on Anonymous but I think the story is even a little bit more complicated than that so who here has seen or read Thief for Vendetta okay a lot of people um it's very very popular for good reason really kind of good material and I think for some people not all but for some people the film today strikes a little bit more like reality Than Fiction just because uh a kind of fascist surveillance state is something that um has been somewhat

confirmed by Edward Snowden and we also know that government officials have kind of lied to the American public and so there's a way in which fiction seems a little bit closer to reality an anonymous who kind of takes again on some of the quotes from the film people should not be afraid of their governments government should be afraid of their people ring true to some people today and I do think that there's this really fascinating Loop where you have you know historical reality with guy Fox that then gets represented in literature um that then takes on a new kind of uh historical reality with guy fox actually appearing on the streets like in the movie fascinating but this

is another really important reason okay so moving right along another reason has to do with anonymous is flexibility SL incoherence one of the things that Anonymous is famous for is that they stand for uh nothing and everything right they kind of can appear to fight um rape culture in the United States as they famously did with OP stubo to fight police brutality as they did in Ferguson um you know to hack one of the kind of most prolific groups in Latin America as well as te Peru who almost brought down the Peruvian government when they hacked into um government servers stole email that showed you know massive government corruption and the government almost voted to dissolve because of this hack

so they're a little bit everywhere and some people might think that this is totally unique to Anonymous but in fact it's not there's a political phenomena called multiple use name and this professor Marco desz has written a book which looks at various examples from Captain swing to Anonymous to Luther blet and basically um this multiple use name is usually an alias or character that is owned by no one and that different groups claim to um to attribute action so Captain swing was the name of a character that different farmers in Britain would use um to lay claim to actions where they destroyed maer that they thought was threatening their livelihood Luther blette was created by a bunch of Italian pranksters

in the 1990s and then it spread all over Europe to coordinate pranks so Anonymous is a multiple use name and I think unlike Alf or EF these animal rights campaigns which are only about animal rights so they're a little bit more contained so it's a little bit easier to tag their one action with terrorism with Anonymous since there's so many different things going on it becomes a little bit harder to say well you're terrorism because those acts which might perhaps be a genified of terrorism like sabotage um might be candidates but is protesting police brutality on the streets an example of that so I think that's another reason another one has to do with their

symbolism again Anonymous is extremely controversial especially in the Tech Community I've met people who love them hate them don't know what think about them right all over the place but one thing is clear they do symbolize anonymity so while they are involved in many different operations um their symbolism their name symbolizes that which is under threat today right it's a real open question whether we will have anonymity in the future um and I think some people who don't necessarily like their actions or their style of activism nevertheless respect the fact that there's a kind of group that is championing anonymity and so it receives some measure of support from a community that otherwise may actually not like their actions now the

next example is an interesting one and it has to do with Isis so Isis is a very interesting group because unlike al- Qaeda they actually really turn to social media to recruit and spread propaganda and one of the interesting things is that Isis was quite popular online in 2012 also a year where Anonymous was quite popular and quite visible and I actually think that the circulation of anonymous propaganda which usually entailed some guy sitting behind a desk with a guy Fox mask um telling people to rise up versus a video of a beheading which I won't show you uh is quite different right and a lot of people could differentiate between the kind of gruesome um videos produced by

terrorists and those Anonymous ones and so while in some ways sometimes journalists would say isn't Anonymous like Isis in terms of how they're socially organized um and I think connections can be made there nevertheless the type of material being thrown out by these two different groups made it such that I think it made it just a little bit harder to tag Anonymous as terrorist and then loan behold then Anonymous started to fight fight the terrorists um and this happened after Charlie hebo attacks and after the more recent ones as well and there's a lot of things I can say about this that I won't but this was a very interesting moment especially because the main mainstream press CNN CDs oh my

God they loved operation Isis even when just the videos were announced and nothing had been done they were reporting on this um and this is an example from CBS where they did you know I don't think 2015 was a huge year for at least english- speaking anonymous hackers but just because they fought Isis it was for CVS well all of a sudden if you have Anonymous fighting the terrorists then they're not the terrorists right so this is another kind of layer although I want to say that my little arguments were in existence before off Isis as well but this in some ways kind of sealed the deal but now I want to finish with my last example ex

Le and it has to do with a single kind of event that occurred in January 2012 and I want to just make sure that I have all the details right so I have a couple notes here um so in uh 2012 a bunch of European countries and other countries around the world were looking to ratify ACTA the anti-trade counterfeiting act and it was you know on the one hand very with government and on the other hand it was very unpopular with citizens and especially Geeks um and so on and so forth and in Poland in specific ACTA was being um considered and Polish people were so well some Polish people were so against ACTA that there was protests on

the streets and one day there was 10,000 protesters against ACTA in Poland so in the midst of kind of popular revolt against against ACTA Anonymous launches operation anti ACTA and it says welcome to operation anti- ACTA we encourage you to spread the word of anti ACTA far and wide the top priority is to steal and leak classified government information including emails and documentation Prime targets are polish government websites and other high ranking establishment figures now what happened next so this uh was announced I think January 12th or so and indeed Anonymous engaged in a lot of Dos attacks and they were took down the Polish government websites all this stuff so citizens are hitting the streets and

something very unexpected happened on January 26 2012 so while casting their votes in Parliament some members of the Polish government concealed their their faces with paper guy Fox masks so at the height of an anonymous campaign government officials parliamentarians had adopted their symbol one Anonymous activist blogged about the importance of this act and wrote Anonymous is not unanimous and opinion on Doos is perhaps more divided than any other tactic indeed this very faction in consultation with antiac ACTA has been calling for the last several days but after this photo of Polish politicians protesting ACTA went viral yesterday it's time we all reevaluate the role legitimacy of Doos these parliamentarians were wearing Anonymous guy Fox mask while the

parliament's website was down due to a Doos by Anonymous we can't emphasize this point enough this is a game Cher from my perspective I think this was a game Cher for how it legitimated Anonymous not simply their tactics right I mean this was a big deal for many people a lot of my students don't know that guy Fox is about be for Vendetta they think about it in terms of anonymous right and so here was government officials in government Chambers taking on the guy Fox mask at this point it also became a bit harder to tag Anonymous as terrorists right uh a legitimate government so perhaps it won't come as a surprise when I tell you

that that Wall Street Journal article that I referenced earlier it came out two weeks after this new story came out so this story came out about a month after a little less than a month and I actually don't think it's entirely accidental in certain ways I mean I can never prove it but there was really no evidence at the time that Anonymous wanted to engage in a Cyber attack that they had the capability to engage in a Cyber attack it really felt like form of propaganda to me you know and at the moment that it came out I was incredibly concerned and worried and um uh as an anthropologist who's an expert on Anonymous I talk to a lot of kind of

media organizations and journalists but it was really the Security Experts that mattered at that point you know as an anthropologist um people are not going to take me as seriously with security concerns as Security Experts so I was incredibly relieved when Security Experts many who again disliked Anonymous claimed you know what there's no evidence of this um that there's more squirrels currently that take down um critical infrastructure than a group like Anonymous right now of course uh critical infrastructure is vulnerable right we know this I'm not saying that in fact that's what frightens me so much about this scenario is that I think under different conditions let's just say there is a Cyber attack against critical

infrastructure let's say there is loss of life let's say the attribution is a morphous and let's just say it is tagged towards Anonymous game over right and so I really appreciate uh when experts are able to kind of um give their advice and set the record straight in some um way so now just I'm going to wrap up with a few very very final points first of all uh you don't need the cyber terrorism framework to um squash descent right A lot of people have gone to jail because of their work in Anonymous in the United States most people got two to 10 years in jail uh with often fines that were close to a million dollars in Europe

people tended to be in jail for zero days couple months three months and the longest was 15 months so big kind of disparities also remember how I had mentioned the shack seven um there's kind of like the shack one in Anonymous and that's Barrett Brown who was a journalist who contributed to Anonymous as Barrett Brown and uh he received five years simply because he was too close to the hackers and was willing to kind of take their information and put it out to the public it's a bit more of a complicated case and I can't go into the details but five years for doing no hacking no conspiring it's astounding so these kind of forms of you

know um prison sentences can go a far away in squashing descent irrespective of the terrorism label but once again like I said I think Security Experts can really set the record straight as to what's appropriate and inappropriate um when activists and activists engage in political action and and to finish you know we are in an interesting moment this is a statute in Berlin that's going to travel of Chelsea Manning Assange and Snowden um and again all kind of controversial figures but the fact that they're out in the public visible being memorialized is very different from something like the animal rights activist who again you may not agree with their tactics but I think calling them terrorism has gone too far and

they're marginal ghetto eyes not visible so we're in this really kind of interesting moment where these characters are being memorialized in art and film um which will allow them to continue doing their activity I hope and this is where I'm really closing that I'm not going to be back here in five years giving another talk of bides with the parallel different story that from 2010 to 15 it's a story where they escaped the terrorism frame and I might come back back um to tell you the story in 2020 of how they were caught by this rhetorical trap I certainly hope that won't be the case um and I will leave it at that so thank you very

much I think there's a little bit of time for questions so Wonder there so you know you you've set the stage by talking about an example a guy thoughts where you had a single instance a single plot and then with the animal live guys where uh this is a continuing threat to terrify people not to even get into the space and yes they may be bombed and burned whatever else when you think back to what you're saying about Anonymous just in general we have conspiracy laws that you know the law is what it is but but from a moral standpoint what's your point of view on to what extent you should be accountable when you contemplate joining

an organization participating alongside organization associating organization that you're taking on the characteristics of what the organization has done before with Anonymous with with Anonymous and you know you can you can take the position terrorists they're not terrorists I mean equally you seem to be saying though if you associate with stop hunting or whatever you're not necessarily or maybe something l if your point of view is that Anonymous are terrorists then why associate with them why not a different well this Isis Point like you know you are taking there's knows andology come and that's it right understanding I'm

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areally illegal are not and Nam people's perception and reaction will be based on what they know about right people know very different things about anous depending on which moment that they saw right so I of eics of why people deci to take the name what that all try to is that precisely [Music]

because so um I was civilian support to law enforcement for about 10 years I got to watch the internal discussions in a sort of removed way and it was fascinating to me because uh I saw at the federal level they tried to push the terrorism narrative especially at the height of [ __ ] FBI Fridays right um but sort of regularly in between to and the only place that that had that that narrative had any purchase was the officers didn't pick it up the administration sometimes picked it up but um and I mean the police unions are incentivized to make everything seem like as big a threat as possible but I didn't see it in the rank and file

nearly as much as I expected it to I just thank you I me that's precisely that summer because of FBI Friday because of all the against you know police organizations against the government I was like actually a moment where there weren't so many I there was activity with occupying so on so forth but nevertheless I was like this is the time this is the period why isn't this happening and this is precisely why I'm presenting it as a puzzle right that has to be explained um and I also curious and this is where I don't actually have the data so much but you're absolutely right that like I was not I assume that police and

law enforcement were totally behind that Fring but high level administ was not using the t-word I I read their releases I you know what I mean they weren't making that Association certainly was not being made in Canada as well they're not even bothering with DOs prosecution you know what I mean and it's interesting uh why that's the case but maybe uh a word of caution so uh in the United States communism was very popular um in the 20s and 30s and then the US government engaged in um very VIs trials and prosecutions against Communists especially in Hollywood and they actually held public hearings and it was very well known that there was a campaign against Communists it was very

dirty word and then in the late 50s it became very unpopular um and That explicit above the board visible campaign disappeared um and one good thing from the outside that the harassment against Communists ended but it didn't end this is qu what occurred in the 60s and 70s which was like a secret government program that initially attacked communist then attack a lot of political activists Pro Co Pro yay you win a book and So Co till Pro was a systemic kind of government program first to discredit Communists but then a lot of activists from the right to the left including Martin Luther King they um threaten Martin Luther King where they asked Martin Luther King to commit Sude for

example uh or else that they would tell the world that he was involved in this there and so what was very visible occurred very invisibly so then I sometimes wonder oh is there a different tactic that's going on that we don't see I mean maybe I'm thinking too conspiratorially you know but nevertheless it was so curious for the reasons you've highlighted so maybe one more question um thanks Dr Coleman for your talk I'm a big fan of your work one of the things that you that I surprised me a little bit but I wonder if you might address the that there there's an abstraction problem impact in judging Anonymous actions that actually equates pretty well with the challenges we have

as a security community in getting investment getting budget that sort of thing and so could it simply be that it's that abstraction and not understanding how does that impact me individually doing that is is at the and should a cyber physical inci happen that gets attributed to them would point right I think first of all it's a great question and you know it's really interesting too because um while L was happening I was living in New York City and I hung out with a lot of infoset guys there and was interviewing them and so many of them like love well sex because it made their job easier they were able to go to their managers who went the and they

were able to get more money for security precisely because there was a tangibility you know like every day m is boasting about this pack that where the Chinese and others are very silent right and so that abstraction became a little bit more tangible and they were able to kind of get more resources just reminded me of that I think that's a good good point but just two things um animal rights activ this was fascinating before the concerted push to make them out to be terrorist I mean it really was a concerted push um to have that happen they were reported favorably in the New York Times and other places I was kind of shocked right iort of did

assume a little bit very physical right that simply was netive Association but there had to be some that was put into it but I think you're absolutely right because of that very material basis it made that work easier and I I do say that the second that there is a attack against critical infrastructure that leans the L of Life the game will change and I think at that moment it will be a lot easier to kind of for that connection I think it's a little bit harder especially for people who are not involved in computers it's still hard for them to to the heck is going on and that could be manipulated in positive negative ways right which is why that

CNN report mattered so much the commentator had actually said that was critical infrastructure and we you know two in away from loss of life like a lot of the American public would been like that was scary you know I mean but that didn't happen in that case but yeah once critical infrastructure hit lots of and then that's associated with activism I think it's kind of G well I think time is up someone want to book there and I'll be around for the next couple [Applause] hours