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Herald: Welcome back on the Chaos-Sound stage. I hope you had a great day so far.
And after the Algorave talk, we are happy to we're happy to host a talk by Andy
Mueller-Maguhn. He is a long-time member of the CCC. Now he is at Wau Holland
Stiftung, and he's also a data journalist. And today he will tell us a bit about
things between WikiLeaks and the CIA. And this talk is some kind of successor for
talks he gave previously. And but for all the details, he will tell them by himself.
And yes, welcome Andy. And we're happy to see what you can tell us. And all the
interesting details that are in your talk.
Andy: Thank you. OK. Good evening. So, I named this talk "When WikiLeaks bumped
into the CIA operation Kudo exposed". So, explain a bit later what that is. Just as
a reminder, the hacker community and the CCC, even in its bylaws, one of the core
things has always been information wants to be free. First sentence up the hacker
ethics brought a small snippet from Wau himself where you will not hear the sound
at this moment due to technical reasons, but where he talked about the hacking of
society through Freedom of Information. My talk will have two parts, what happened so
far and what should be done now. In the first part. I just want to refer a little
bit on the context of what I'm talking about. So, this is about what happened
surrounding WikiLeaks in the context of the CIA and the United States government.
Yeah, getting on them. I had two talks about similar topics already in 2018 and
2019 at the ..., you know, unfortunately also. No, that was still the last real
Congress. I talked about the technical aspects of the surveillance. And you will
see one image that I needed to copy from that again. Then last year, I talked a
little bit about the CIA versus WikiLeaks to intimidation tactics. That was more
what happened to me and other surrounding WikiLeaks. Now, in the meantime, this
year, end of September, came a very important article in this context on Yahoo
News, that seems to have been doing that. Some guys have been hired there, who
previously worked for Newsweek and others. The article, from 26 of September, is
called Kidnapping, Assassination at the London Shootout, inside the Secret CIA
Secret War Plans against WikiLeaks, and it did reveal quite some things. It finally
referred to my talk. It links even to the video of my talk. It takes some quotes
from it. It confirms a lot of it and adds a lot. But it also frames and was framing.
I mean, there is some disinformation that's poisoning that otherwise very
helpful article to understand what the fuck was going on. So, what I'm trying to
do today is to reconstruct the whole thing a little bit to reframe it and help
everybody to understand a little bit what happened here. The Yahoo article
rightfully distinguishes the timeframe of the interaction, so to say, between the
United States government and WikiLeaks into four to five timeframes. One of them
at the beginning of the WikiLeaks project. Or, let's say, before Snowden, so before
mid-2013, the Obama administration authored the diplomatic cables had been
published by WikiLeaks, Afghan / Iraq War Logs and so on were out. They had the view
that as long as some entity or some people are publishing, are engaging and
publishing it in journalistic activity, there's nothing they can do because First
Amendment of the United States Constitution talks about the freedom of
publishing the freedom of speech, and a freedom that does include journalistic
activity of all kinds. After the Snowden, not revelations, but the fact that Edward
Snowden was getting from Hong Kong on the way to somewhere else, but he got to
Moscow with the help of a WikiLeaks editorial member, therefore in acting in
what you could call journalistic source protection. However, that brought the U.S.
government to a slightly different view of WikiLeaks. It didn't really like it, so
Obama allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection WikiLeaks, search
warrants, subpeonas, US National Security Letters. So here we're not talking about,
as far as the article mentions, about the legal investigation yet. This intelligence
work to, like they allowed them to get on them? They also, in the context of the
Snowden revelations, now, where it wasn't WikiLeaks, it was Glenn Greenwald and
Laura Poitras who had been given by Edward Snowden the material, and they published
the material together with Guardian, Der Spiegel, the others. I was also involved
with the Spiegel I should disclose. However, they tried to relabel, not only
WikiLeaks, but also Glenn, Laura and others from journalists away to like
information brokers. They tried all kinds of definitions to circumvent the
protection of the United States Constitution, you could say. That went not
that far. At least I have no actively knowledge of a criminal prosecution
running against Laura and Glenn. However, there were for sure intelligence
activities that they also reported on that everybody who was involved in the
publications, as you might know from history, the Guardian was later forced to
even destroy the computers where they had put this Snowden material and so on. So,
that was quite some things going on. In 2016, the next, yeah, like milestone in
the change of the relations between the United States government, WikiLeaks, to
say it nicely, was the publication of the DNC emails that by the definition of the
National Security Agency, like they said, this was Guccifer 2.0 was the Russian
military intelligence at GRU and that the whole publication was with the intention
to hurt the interests of the United States. This now is a first point where we
could sit back from our European perspective for a little bit and say, wait
a moment. This was about leaking. I mean, this was leaked emails. Or, however, let's
say it was emails that somehow got leaked, obtained or otherwise, but in any way,
WikiLeaks published them. What the discussion was about was how Hillary
Clinton had treated Bernie Sanders as the other candidate of the Democratic Party,
and here obviously did not make it. She made it. So, this we could call this
exposing the facts in the public interest. But as I said, the United States, at least
National Security Agency and others seem to have agreed that this was not intended
to harm the United States, not what Hillary Clinton did, but what WikiLeaks
did in this publication. I think it's important that we distinguish between how
we evaluate these things and how the US government puts this into different
baskets or categories. However, then it got much more wild, when WikiLeaks started
at the beginning of 2017 to publish, with the so-called full seven series, documents
from the Central Intelligence Agency from the CIA. Mike Pompeo was in charge of it.
I did talk about this at length, and I want to repeat this last year, so he got
very upset personally because he was also potentially personal responsible for it.
So, It was under his watch, so to say. However, the framing aspect of the article
are worth having a brief look. The what happened this year was so sad that the key
witness of the prosecution Icelandic guy called Sigurdor Thordarson made it public
that actually he lied to the FBI and that they fabricated part of the evidence based
on his lies. Also, they could have verified things. He later even was
imprisoned for his multiple illegal acts, and the Icelandic government saw it as
reason enough to declare him a danger to society and therefore lock him up. And
that's not happening that easily in a country like Iceland who normally people
are very calm and down to earth. However, the article came just after, a few weeks
after, the publications on this fabricated evidence. And it's fair to say that the
gravity of the Yahoo article was a lot higher and a lot more was discussed than
about the fake evidence of the key witness and so on. However, one other aspect that
was in the Yahoo article was a thing that is, from my reading, and I've talked to
many people, there was no evidence for this whatsoever. The Yahoo article claimed
that there was the Russian government also having like kind of officers in front of
the Ecuadorian embassy or in the immediate surrounding, preparing to help Julian to
evacuate him, so to say, from England to sneak him out, as the article says.,
Russian intel preparing to sneak Assange out of the UK. And this is a little bit
wild and it's double wild when you or when one looks at how the involvement of the
Russian government, how that upsets American people, the American media and so
on. This is such a polarized environment where the moment the Russian government is
declared to be involved, it changes everything. What's happened really here
with something different and that is that Julian had, in cooperation and in
coordination with the Ecuadorian government, found a way to legally leave
the embassy and the United Kingdom by becoming first an Ecuadorian citizen, then
an Ecuadorian diplomat, and then in theory he would have been able to leave the UK
because a diplomat on the way to a different working place has, under Vienna,
diplomatic assurances, is immune from any kind of interference. However, the article
does reveal some aspects of what happened. For example, the kidnapping plans, the
assassination plans that the US government considered the CIA played through ways to
kill him in the embassy, to poison him, to kidnap him from there. This kind of
extreme acts did not happen, and the article claims that, you know, justice
prevailed. White House lawyers had doubts. The National Security Council and the
heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees ensured that this wild ideas
because they were not compatible with the legal framework, not even with that of the
United States, that that did not happen. So, the article gives you kind of this
American song melody of, yeah, we had some wild things at the CIA going on, but you
know, we are a democracy and we stopped it. However, there were some actions that
where, according to the article and the witnesses and lawyers I talked to, well
caught out, extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates dealing with electronic
devices. Then there were things there we could talk about, like the article claims
that, to what was also carried out, sowing discord among the group's members. So now,
if anyone of you is longer than a few weeks in a CCC- like hacker club or
working for a journalist organization or working in any other group. I mean,
according to my little experience, there's quite a fight-club atmosphere out there
for a while, and I'm personally, I wouldn't always be able to distinguish
between is this now a CIA operated, you know, group fight? Or It's just normal
group dynamics. People don't like each other, people having disputes, people
having different ideas how to do things and so on. So, I would suggest you take
this kind of claim with a grain of salt. Not every dispute among a group has been
created by the CIA. Also, I'm very generous on bashing them. However, they
also talked at some point they changed the whole context of Julian and WikiLeaks from
a target of collection to target of destruction. Well, for sure, some things
happened there, but this is not what I can go into detail. So far, no detailed report
on it. However, the project I talked about that Julian would get legally out of the
embassy as a member of Ecuadorian diplomatic staff is coming together in a
very it's like the most critical time frame also, according to the article, and
that we were able, that we were going through with the lawyers to log files of
the embassy security service, the videos and so on. So, we have been able to
identify the timeframe and the timeframe is the 16th of December 2017 until the
26th. This is the most critical timeframe, because, around the 16th, he was
officially not only declared a diplomat, there was a publication in the Ecuadorean
like a legal "judge set" or what it's called. So like the legal publication in
Ecuador to have him declared. He had, around the 21st, the head of the
Ecuadorian intelligence visiting him. So, that means he also had the diplomatic
passport. It was fully, formally done. There was a discussion of the process and
this meeting on the 21st I had mentioned it in my talk last year was the most high
priority conversation that ever happened in the embassy, at least as far as we know
from the witnesses of the security service who later revealed to the court that they
had been, yeah, instructed on behalf of the CIA to do other things than to protect
the embassy, but to spy on Julian. So this meeting on the 21st was extremely
important to the Americans, and we do know roughly that the whole story ended through
various means, but mainly to pressure on the on the Ecuadorian government in Quito,
in Ecuador, around the 26th when they actually called the plan off because the
Americans knew about every detail, including how he would get out of the
embassy, in what type of car and so on. And they also then at some point denounced
his diplomatic status after pressure from the United States government. And in this
time frame, I make here a little bit of an event matrix, which is completely
incomplete. I have to say this many things missing for legal, for other reasons. You
know, some things are just too wild. The U.S. government, for example, would never
break into a European law office, right? We can. That's bullshit. That's conspiracy
stuff. They don't do these things. They, of course, comply with the law. However,
we have some events that are funny and fit well into our picture, for example, that
after on the Saturday, the lawyers from Spain and England were sitting together
with Julian that two days later, in preparation of that meeting on the 21st
came the fire protection service into the embassy. And those who seen my talk last
year know that one of the fire extinguishers placed in the meeting room
had the main role for holding a bug. However, I'm coming to that than we have
this observation that every day in this time frame, there was a silver gray Ford
car with sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes more people sitting outside the
embassy, seeming obviously to wait for instructions. Something to happen. I'm
coming to that and we have other things going on at that timeframe, that kind of
fit into the frame. So on the, ... I selected three events to talk about them a
few minutes. The first is this fire extinguisher. 19:26 Here you see it and in
on the right picture, you're seeing the black bottom of the fire extinguisher.
That's where they had a magnetic little box with an audio microphone, I mean,
audio bug in it, that seemed to have not only recorded, but also transmits the
conversations, in life, to the American intelligence outside. Funnily, this, ...
on the 18th comes a company, not even from London, the Iceland Fire Protection
Limited, a guy and goes into all the rooms in the embassy to check the fire
extinguishers. Now, according to the lawyers, there had been intensive
discussions with the employees, and David Morales, the owner of U.C. Global, the
company that was originally hired to protect the embassy, is known to have
talked to his people and emailed them, mentioning that the Americans want also
that all the other rooms at some point to be bugged and want access to the fire
extinguishers. We don't know exactly what happened in that discussion to the last
detail, but we know that on the 18th came this British company. And this is a little
bit crass, and I think there will be many other embassies of other countries who
will be interested to check if they don't are maybe serviced by the same company.
Now, the other nice event that I selected is the night from the 23rd to the 24th.
So, the very morning, early morning hours on the 24th of December morning, Christmas
morning, so to say, where you have the three guys sitting in the car and on the
back seat on the right side, someone reads the briefing notes, I will show you the,
oops. Don't tell me this. Hopefully it works. OK, great. The video doesn't work.
I'm sorry. I can't show you the video today. Maybe courtesy of the CIA, however.
So, the guy in the back seat browses through the briefing notes, and we have
been able to at least read part of what they have been, ... what this briefing
notes say. It says this page that we have been able to read mostly was in the event
of loss of camera coverage. So, there was a process to be established when the
surveillance cameras in the embassy wouldn't deliver pictures anymore and the
guys outside a sitting partly, according to the article, the British police guys
with guns, eight people, maybe without guns, would be ready to jump into the
scene. Crash diplomatic cars, shoot into tires of cars that would try to bring
Julian away, and so on, indicates which way he would walk out. And so there's a
few key words here that I just want to emphasize in the event of lots of camera
coverage standards, then there is talking about something called GS7 that might be
code-word for CIA or something different. MET is clearly the Metropolitan Police.
That's a normal acronym in England, and they talk about the context of the
operation Kudo. So we looked up the word Kudo. Kudo is something saying roughly
like friendship. So, we have to assume this was a joint British American
operation, and that's exactly what the Yahoo article describes. However, what it
does not describe is the legal implication, because this could well be
one of the most or best well documented breaches of the Vienna Convention,
basically saying that the premises of the mission shall be inviolable, which is,
normally means that you shall not bug, you shall not, you know, put surveillance
devices, cameras, hidden cameras or whatever. You shall not hack into the
camera surveillance system, of an embassy, asked to host state and so on and so that
intelligence do it and that the CIA was doing it. In the case of the Ecuadorian
embassy, it's already part of a Spanish lawsuit. However, the dimension is a
little bit different, as the British police seems to have access have had
access to that video surveillance, and that is potentially legally different
thing. That will be subject to some legal steps going on in the next weeks and
months. The third event I selected for relaxation issues is on the last day. You
see here two police officers carrying an astonishing amount of eight cups of coffee
for a relatively small police car. That gives you an idea what was going on there.
The British police being prepared to set aside the conference room is about in the
area where there was a trash bag on the left side is so giving you an idea of how
intense the British police was also on the scene outside. So, what is currently
happening with this and a lot of other material? Is, well, checking the violation
of the Vienna Convention then parsing together many of the events and observing
patterns and trying to see those patterns at other places. As we, of course, still
do not know the full scope of the operations of the CIA and other
intelligence agencies against WikiLeaks. This is just the tip of the iceberg, what
happened in London, but also to see where other journalists were other citizens,
where other governments, organizations, whatever were may be targeted with same or
similar ways and methods. So this brings me to the second part of my little talk.
The question what needs to be done? So, and I tried to first invite you to a
little reflection because, as some of you might know, Julian Assange presented the
WikiLeaks project in the CCC Congress, end of 2009. If I recall correctly, he made
another talk in 2010. This was very much a project of the hacker community and it was
highly welcomed at the time because it was like combining the idea of Freedom of
Information, which had always been and sharing information which had always been
the spirit of the hacker scene with those of journalists and democratic, yeah, think
tanks to ensure that we would have actually an informed society, not just
this very weird concept of an information society which does not really say anything
between the relationship between information and society. But an informed
society is a clear picture, I think. And therefore, the better wording. So, the
other question is, of course, is what? What does this whole thing? This what we
have been reading in the article and what we're now a step by step here revealing
and starting to understand. What does it tell us about the United States
government's prosecution, of DOJ, Pompeo, the CIA, all these people? How (competent)
are they really to decide to society that is based on an informed electorate, like
the people making decisions based on knowledge and voting based on knowing
what's going on? And that's slightly disturbing, I think what we what this
thought brings us to. So, here's my little ideas, and then I will just come with some
questions to the audience. So, yeah, what can we do and what maybe should we do?
This is, here, just some ideas of mine. While we could, of course, hope that the
United States, the people of the United States, the government of the United
States would understand that core democratic value was attacked here when
going against Assange, WikiLeaks and so on. So in theory, we should, we could hope
that the self-healing or the self understanding and mechanisms of the United
States society will stop this madness because they will see, Hey, wait a moment,
this is our constitutional First Amendment that we are attacking here indirectly. And
if we don't have like the publishers, right, journalists and publishers right to
inform the public, then we have nothing. Well, the second, obviously, level would
be to dissolve the CIA. Yeah, I mean, Kennedy had this idea before, shatter it
and the wind and so on. But I don't know how at least this shall continue with that
budget, with the information operations, with the influence operations, where
actually "wag the dog" is just a tiny little aspect of it. Because the question
is how shall a democratic government work as long as there's an intelligence agency
that has all the knowledge about every person involved in all the little
compromat boxes and the aspect of how to nudge and how to influence and how to
manipulate and so on? Well, and then the third aspect outside the United States,
here in Europe, is of course, the question of how can we immunize those people,
entities governmental organization and so on where it still seems possible to
understand that this is core, that journalism and the right to inform the
public by making also information and material public that governments,
corporations or whoever would like to keep secret? But if that documents are playing
a role in informing the public in the public interest and it must be allowed to
make it public, and that was what's called the Fourth Estate or the right of the
press to inform the public. Yeah, how can we do that? That of course, more a
question. And and here's my list of questions that I will want to address to
the audience. We should have 20 minutes and maybe a few seconds for a discussion
of this. So guys, how do we get Assange out of jail? Ladies and gentlemen, how do
we do it? How do we stop the criminalization of journalism and those
who ensure access to information in the public? Is this in order to achieve an
informed society? That's our duty I fear. How do we ensure a value driven community?
So, as everybody knows, the CCC had always different factions. The political and the
technical factions then came at some point a party, the event and hedonism aspects
all together. And we had a great fun time. But I'm not sure that we also took care of
ensuring that we are value driven community all the way. I mean, when we
look at this year and the NSA methods that's obviously some kind of atmosphere
between those who work in the I.T. security industry and those who maybe then
take offers from the intelligence community. And that's not the spirit of
the hacker ethics, and that's not just the spirit of the CCC, and that's not the
spirit of an informed society that people with money who instrumentalized technology
people and. You don't have to like look at the CIA as the most crass, may be entity.
It starts with the so-called Open Technology Fund. I mean, we had various
years the ability to observe how the Tor project had its issues between the two
worlds of the US government having this and that ideas and our community having
other ideas of how anonymization works. And I'm not sure we can say that our
values have been preserved and we have ensured that OTF finance projects do not
serve just some funny governmental interest. And when it was relabeled partly
from internet freedom to circumvention measures that I think gave already some
ideas on what could go wrong if, yeah, governments start to fund projects of the
so-called hacker scene. Yeah, so, this is my questions to you guys. How do we get
him out? How do we ensure our society stays intact and democratic? And how do
we, as a scene, avoid to be corrupted by governmental money and funny interests?
And I hope the moderation cannot take over and provide some answers from the
audience.
Herald: All right, thank you very much, Andy, for your talk. Let's see how this
will work. Thank you, also, for your questions to the audience.
Andy: I will try, in the meantime, to fix this video and make it this one minute, 23
seconds video. Herald: All right.
Andy: I can show it, but maybe you can start to take the questions.
Herald: Sure, yeah, and yes, so let's say to the audience, please put your possible
answers to Andy's questions in the chat. I will. I will follow them as good as I can.
And so that we can have a lively discussion. I know it might be a little
bit limited because in a presence Congress, it would be easier to interact
with it with each other. And. But yeah, let's see that. And but first of all,
maybe Andy, if you have the capacity for a question from the interwebs. Then the
question would be, how did you obtain the pictures and camera footage from the
embassy? Andy: Well, this has to do with a legal
analysis of this material. I'm myself, by the way, you could switch on the video if
you wanted. Well, I am myself accusing the Spanish company to have spied on me and
other colleagues, and so I'm part of that legal proceedings. As as such, I'm also
helping the lawyers to obtain the technical evidence. There was a shitload
of digital evidence confiscated that needed forensic examination and so on. So
this is material accessible to those who have been affected by the illegal
activities performed by U.C. Global and others.
Herald: All right. Then there's also the question of are there pictures of the four
or the people inside it, but I think that's pretty much a part of the video you
have just shown or is there something different?
Andy: Is it? I'm sorry, I don't see what is being broadcasted. Do you have access
to my sliding-to-the-streaming-laptop? Herald: OK, yeah. I guess that
Andy: This is the full video where you can see the guys reading the briefing notes on
the back seat. We have been able to zoom in at (unintelligible) and so on.
Herald: And yeah, where the question was, where did you get it from? But I think you
already answered that in the previous question, because ...
Andy: That's no answer to my question. What should we shall do, guys? *laughing*
Herald: Yeah. So, we have one line of feedback, for example, that, uh, how to
get Julian Assange out of jail. One proposal is "ask our foreign minister,
give Julian German citizenship", make it a "Chef-Sache". So, part of the part of the
chancellor. Uh, that's what it means in German, in every German activities.
Question mark? Would that work? Andy: Mm hmm. It's being worked on. I
mean, the new we have a new foreign minister who is a woman from the Green
Party, and she seems to be very much a fan of United States German relationship. I'm
not sure how much she sees about a lack of values that the U.S. government represents
watching the history of the U.S. Constitution and so on. But I'm sure there
is a lot work to be done there, and the Green Party used to be also interested in
a society and stand for human rights and so on. So I would say, yes, it's
definitely it is a path to go. Herald: All right. There's also a
question, are you so be you personally still under surveillance? Do you know?
Andy: Well, I've taken some legal and technical measures, and the German
authorities have some evidence I provided to them still in their analytical labs and
so on. It's a little bit unrealistic to assume that the Americans would not
continue watching those who surrounded Assange and WikiLeaks it as a member of
the Wau Holland foundation, and we finance the, ... we financed many of the
publications and things or aspects of the publication. So, it would be unlikely that
the US lost interest. But at least for the moment, they seem to behave a little bit
more, especially after the Yahoo article. I think it became very obvious also to the
German authorities what was going on. So the article was helpful. It's just that
some aspects of the article are just pure rubbish and disinformation that try to
smoothen it up a little bit. Herald: Mm hmm. All right. May I ask you
to, maybe, just also bring up again the slides with your questions, so we will
have to put Andy: Just a second.
Herald: I think this will help to spark a bit of discussion also.
Andy: Sure, good point. ...Seem to need to browse through. Here are the questions.
Herald: All right, thank you. And, uh. Another answer to how to get him out of
jail is "Keep talking about Julian Assange and the public attend vigils". I don't
know what that means. Actually, uh, write articles, write comments. Call the
Department of Justice, talk to politicians. Communicate." So this is this
is one answer. Like, like keep, keep the word out.
Andy: Yeah. I mean, let me briefly try to interact with whoever gave that
suggestion. I think it's well known that in Germany, in France and some countries,
there was quite some campaigns going on at the last months, quite some people on the
street acting for Julian and a series of events and so on. Also, a little bit in
England, but England seems to be a very tough under two aspects. The one is that
they don't have that of a self understanding of a country with a
constitution guaranteeing freedom rights, You know the United Kingdom does not have
a constitution and it doesn't have what's called constitutional rights. It does have
similar statements, but they are not as clearly defined and as a value system of a
democratic society. So, most British people, if you ask them to do something
for freedom of press like the press, these assholes, what should I do something for
them? It's all very complicated and a bit polarized over there. So but then the
other aspect is that the UK government, to say it bluntly, there's quite some people
who say that the UK government does what the US government says. And in this case,
there is no way, according to that interpretation, that you can avoid the UK
government handing Julian over to the Americans. So, the problem needs to be
addressed in the US. And Germany and other European countries have a different
history, obviously, and I'm at least sure that if Julian would be in Germany, I'm
not sure he would be not having any issues, but there would be a different
discussion. However, the question how the so-called old Europe or the continental
Europe that is now even more ignored, after a bitter exit from the Brits, can
have any influence here in England, I would say forget it on the US. It's more
complicated. But for the moment, it seems that similar to what happened to Julian
and WikiLeaks in our own community, that there was quite a time-frame when the
reputation to character assassination had took on so much that actually he was seen
as as a persona non grata more or less. The United States political atmosphere is
even more complicated and more polarized between left, right and nuts, and whatever
that, it seems a very tricky task to bring some sense into that discussion. As long
as you have the military intelligence apparatus and Hillary Clinton saying,
like, "hang him on the highest trees". So there seemed to be quite, and that's also
mentioned in the Yahoo article, a revenge aspect of the United States legal system
here. Not only Pompeo, that want to, yeah, basically, to kill Julian as a symbol that
no one should ever try to reveal the dirty laundry of the United States. So yeah,
this is a bit tricky and we will need more ideas and how to also initiate a better
discussion in the United States, maybe. Herald: Mm hmm. Related to that. Another
answer we got was, for example, of how to how to stop the criminalization of
journalism. And maybe also other question of these questions is a vote for the right
people. And uh, while it probably can help for some things, and what comes to my mind
is, I mean, indeed, in this and also other prosecutions and trials, very often there
are some, uh, some ancient laws involved on those grounds. People could get
prosecuted, right? Isn't it, for Julian? There is. There is the Intelligence Act,
or what's the name of...? Andy: It is called the "Espionage Act". So
basically what the U.S. prosecution does is there's a so-called secret grand-jury
that might have even more investigations running against Julian, and WikiLeaks than
that what has been put into the extradition inquiry to the U.K. at this
point. However, that one already accuses him to violating the Espionage Act, not
declaring him having spied for another country, but funnily having revealed
secrets to the American public and to the, of course, public of other countries.
That's what they call espionage. That's a little bit ridiculous. And it is, however,
even more of a concern watching the fact that a U.S. journalist would be able to
claim the protection of the First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech
and the right of publishers and journalists and so on. However, they deny
that because he's not a U.S. citizen. So the US partially exports their laws and
says, Well, you violate that against this American law called the Espionage Act, but
they do not grant him the protection of the U.S. legal system. And that is, to
call it hypocrisy is, I'm sorry, is too nice. This is just really fucked up.
Herald: Mm-Hmm. OK. Shouldn't, try to get rid of, maybe like, the Espionage Act or
or at least... Andy: I am all for it. Dissolve the CIA,
get rid of the Espionage Act. I'm all for it. I just fear that at least part of our
community will have to become, I don't know, lawyers, lobbyists. Maybe we need to
look for better communications with the US hacker scene and see if they can kindly
get into political consciousness mode and get for a moment distracted from
technology developments into society development and see what can be done to
ensure that in the future, we have the right as a citizen to know what's
happening in our name by government and so on.
Herald: Mm hmm. All right. Yeah, because for example, I remember a couple of years
ago, I don't know whether it was in the 2013, the year of Snowden or later where
we also had a talk at Congress about the German post surveillance, for example,
where back in the,... I think it was the seventies. Uh, where we had the "Nato
Truppen-Statut", got into play. But there was a verbal note from the from the forum
to the German government who told the allies, Well, we will be part of the "Nato
Truppen-Statut" and all but don't be afraid you will be able to have these
powers. And as before, under Allies law, you could say, and only after this, uh,
the information the the investigative journalism of I think it was a historian.
(...His toleration?...) Exactly. Mr (...Fischer-Bot...). But uh, only after
that came out, uh, to government had to say, OK, well, we want to stop this. And
now this at least officially is over. Andy: Well, I mean, it's not really over.
Germany is still a member of NATO, and these regulations are still in place. And
just to have it said, I mean it. The vault 7 revelations. If you look at the
publications of WikiLeaks, you will see the modules the CIA had developed to make
software, a Trojan, a malware, whatever kind of manipulations, to look like, it
was coming from a specific country timezone. So to make a malware or attacks
on it systems make them look like they come from Russia, China, Iran, you name
it. North Korea issued a list as well. And this is the scenario we're looking at
already. If you if you look at the news, what happened the last years, we had all
these attacks, it was Russia, it was China, it was Iran, It was North Korea
must probably have forgotten some other people who it was blamed on. But the
discussion that the CIA would be having the tools to make attribution misleading
to a country. So what's called a false flag operation in military terms is
creating a scenario where exactly we as a NATO member are now looking into military-
like conflicts again, because the media environment has been so poisoned with, "it
was those guys and those guys hacking our I.T., our parliament, our, you name it".
This worries me. It worries me that we as a technical community have not spent more
attention to avoid the media environment was able to like, create again just
paintings of enemies and create an atmosphere where war between countries
seems possible again. And that's something that's deeply disturbing to me. And I
think this is something we have to work on more as a community also to ensure that
technical knowledge is not abused for like, yeah, political games by withholding
information. Herald: Mm-Hmm.
Andy: And what I should mention is, yes, we are only having about two minutes left
here, something I didn't agree to be available for a little discussion and a
whistleblower tent that's somewhere in that virtual world. And the audience will
hopefully find it. Herald: All right.
Andy: So then or whatever it's called. Herald: Uh, sorry, and once once again,
what's the name of the of the whistle blowert tent..
Andy: Of the dog whistle blower village? Herald: Okay, all right. So go out to the
whistleblowers tent. And so after after this talk. And so maybe one last question.
Is it possible to sue the UK government for the treatment of Assange before the
European Court of Human Rights? Andy: And it's a little complicated.
What's happening right now is I don't think other talks have covering it is that
Julian tries to avoid his extradition and there is specific aspects of this which he
might at some point be able to address at the European Court of Human Rights. That,
in theory, could stop his extradition, but only if specific criteria are met, met and
so on. How much now the UK government will listen to it after the Brexit, and so one
is its end due to political atmospheric reasons. That's a little tricky. The
European Court of Human Rights is not part of the EU agreement, so it doesn't matter
that the UK stepped out of the EU, but it is still an instrument of Europe and not
of the friendship between the United States and Great Britain. So. The
atmosphere of the British government does not suggest at this moment to be overly
sensitive to anything coming from continental Europe to say it carefully.
And that's pretty bad. All right, so, yeah. Thank you, Andy, for your for your
talk. For everyone who's interested in to form a discussion with you, please go over
to the whistleblower. Talk on this channel at cos it's on the stage. The next talk
will be reproducible building network infrastructure by Astro, which will start
at 9:30 p.m.. So tune in for the next course on a talk as well. And that's it
for now. Thank you.
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