1. See “Reichstag, New German Parliament,” Foster + Partners, Berlin, Germany, 1999, http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/reichstag-new-german-parliament.
2. In 2016, the number grew to twelve thousand people. Darko Janjevic, “Chaos Computer Club: Europe’s Biggest Hacking Conference Underway in Hamburg,” DW, December 28, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/chaos-computer-club-europes-biggest-hackers-congress-underway-in-hamburg/a-18944610.
3. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, [1984] 2010). Some hackers do not ascribe to the ethic as articulated by Levy, and there are many academic studies on the diversity of hackers. Some of the academics working in this field include Goetz Bachmann, David Berry, Jessica Beyer, Paula Bialski, Finn Brunton, Anita Say Chan, Gabriella Coleman, Laura DeNardis, Marco Deseriis, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Donovan, Tor Ekeland, Virginia Eubanks, Karl Fogel, Felipe Fonseca, Volker Grassmuck, Christina Dunbar Hester, Benjamin Mako Hill, Matthew Hull, Matthew Jones, Tim Jordan, Christopher Kelty, Beth Kolko, Sebastian Kubitschko, Lawrence Liang, Sylvia Lindtner, Geert Lovink, Fenwick McKelvey, Colin Milburn, Luis Felipe Murillo, Lily Nguyen, Whitney Phillips, Matt Ratto, Thomas Rid, Renee Ridgway, Andrew Russell, Molly Sauter, Rebecca Slayton, Johann Soderberg, Felix Stalder, Ravi Sundaram, Yuri Tahkteyev, Douglas Thomas, Fred Turner, MacKenzie Wark, Sarah Meyers West, and David Murakami Wood.
4. Levy, Hackers, 16–17.
5. Levy, Hackers, 28–34.
6. Levy, Hackers, 57.
7. Levy, Hackers, 48.
8. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).
9. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason.
10. The Cyberpunk Project, http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/hacker_ethics.html: “The Cyberpunk Project (TCP) is a remotely available data-well net of files about cyberpunk subculture, cyberpunk science-fiction and general cyber culture in the form of collected information. It is the result of years of gathering data and sorting it, to compile a host of cyberpunk-information related documents and work. The TCP started in 1996 and was actively supported until late 2002.”
11. Levy, Hackers, 451.
12. Levy, Hackers, 169–170.
13. Levy, Hackers, 164–165.
14. Levy, Hackers, 222.
15. Levy, Hackers, 276, 458–459.
16. Levy, Hackers, 437–450; Richard Stallman, correspondence with the author, December 17, 2017.
17. Levy, Hackers, 448.
18. Levy, Hackers, 450. In his book, Levy divides hackers by generation into “true hackers” (the MIT hackers), “microcomputer hackers” and “game hackers”. So the statement he assigns to Stallman means that Stallman believed he was the last of his generation of hackers at MIT, not that no other hackers existed at the time.
19. Levy, Hackers, 447, 450.
20. Attributed to the early Jewish leader Hillel.
21. Initially, Stallman stipulated only the last, three freedoms, and numbered them 1 to 3. Then he realized it was necessary to articulate a fourth freedom, which he wanted to state first, so he numbered it 0, which was apt because computers count from 0 and not 1. Author’s communication with Richard Stallman, March 4, 2019.
22. Richard Stallman, “The Initial Announcement of the GNU Operating System,” in Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2002), 26–27. It is interesting that in his initial announcement Stallman said he planned to give his software away for free, however, it is important to remember that “gratis” or “given away at no cost” is not part of the definition of free software.
23. Richard Stallman, “Releasing Free Software If You Work at a University,” in Free Software, Free Society, 63.
24. Gerard Alberto and Ruth Oldenzeil, eds., Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenses (London: Springer-Verlag, 2014), 8–9.
25. Alberto and Oldenzeil, Hacking Europe, 17.
26. Kai Denker, “Heroes Yet Criminals of the German Computer Revolution,” in Alberto and Oldenzeil, Hacking Europe, 171, citing a biography on the Chaos Computer Club’s cofounder Wau Holland written by Daniel Kulla, Der Phrasenprüfer. Szenen aus dem Leben von Wau Holland (Löhrbach: Pieper and the Grüne Kraft, 2003),16.
27. Denker, “Heroes Yet Criminals,” 171, citing Kulla, Der Phrasenprüfer, 20.
28. Denker, “Heroes Yet Criminals,” 170.
29. Denker, “Heroes Yet Criminals,” 172.
30. Denker, “Heroes Yet Criminals,” 168.
31. Caroline Nevejan and Alexander Badenoch, “How Amsterdam Invented the Internet: European Networks of Significance, 1980–1995,” in Alberto and Oldenzeil, Hacking Europe, 199.
32. For extended details about this KGB hack story, see the collection of contemporary news articles in Phrack World News, part 2, no. 25 (March 29, 1989), http://phrack.org/issues/25/10.html.
33. Reenactment of the Wau-Pengo debate (1989) at the 31st Congress of the Chaos Computer Club (31C3), Wau Holland Foundation, https://www.wauland.de/en/index.php. The reenactors in this video use a transcript. I transcribed the interview from this video to make my own transcript and have used excerpts from the transcript without showing the gaps to make reading the conversation easier. The excerpts are in the order they were spoken.
34. The early Dutch entrepreneur and tech journalist Luc Sala described the after party and the kind of cross-fertilization that was going on between the European and California scenes around this time in a “personal perspective” on the early hacker/New Age magazine Mondo 2000. He stayed for some time in the communal Mondo house in Berkeley and ended up driving across the country in winter with John Perry Barlow to the latter’s ranch in Wyoming. He wrote about the California scene in “New Age & Mondo: A Personal Perspective—Part 1,” Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8, Acceler8or, March 28, 2012, https://www.acceler8or.com/tags/chaos-computer-club:
Psychedelics were the not so secret but illicit link between the various subworlds of art, literature, music, new age and technology. … convergence … was the hallmark of Mondo. They covered the whole gamut of alternativity. …
As this was the Bay Area and Silicon Valley was close, the link with the computer industry was easy and logical. There was the money and the excitement. In those days everybody looked at the new possibilities, whether it was in music with synthesizers; in broadcasting with digital media; in entertainment with the emerging computer games. And virtual reality was definitely the magic potion that would free us from the limitations of space and time, the ultimate trip, the electronic drug. Most of the people involved had a sixties background, although there were also the catch-up hippies like myself, who missed out on but were fascinated by the likes of Leary and the Zeitgeist of the sixties.
35. Re-enactment of the Wau-Pengo debate.
36. In German, an eingetragener verein.
37. Katie Krause and Ole Schultz, “Our Own Private Germany,” Matter, November 7, 2014, https://medium.com/matter/our-own-private-germany-6ce44ac93a7b.
38. Krause and Schultz, “Our Own Private Germany.”
39. Gerard Alberto and Ruth Oldenziel, “Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created Scenes,” in Alberto and Oldenzeil, Hacking Europe, 1–2.
40. Academics have done a lot of work pointing this out. See the important work of Gabriella Coleman, Alex Golub, Chris Kelty, and Molly Sauter on this subject. Journalist Bruce Sterling has also acknowledged the story is more complicated than Levy has told it. Although I have distinguished the cultural origins of hacking in different European countries, there is not space in this book to cover in any detail other groups like the early phone phreakers or the hacker underground (Julian Assange’s habitat as a young hacker) that emerged out of the phreakers, except briefly where the latter intersects with Assange’s story. Nor do I cover in detail some of the early groups that used distributed denial of service (DDoS) tactics for political protest, although I do mention some of these in chapter 11.
41. Read the Wau-Pengo debate transcribed at some length in this chapter. Wau Holland cites the hacker ethic as Levy summarized it.
42. As is mentioned in chapters 2 and 11, both Assange and Anonymous have explicitly espoused free software principles at various times.
43. Stallman received the award in 1990. The World Wide Web was invented in 1991.
44. Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 271.
45. It is estimated that contributors to Torvalds’s Linux project number in the hundreds of thousands and that its code is now more than 19 million lines long. Craig Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: The Kernel of the Argument,” Washington Post, November 3, 2015.
46. Stallman, “Releasing Free Software If You Work at a University,” 64–66.
47. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.”
48. Sebastian Anthony, “International Space Station Switches from Windows to Linux, for Improved Reliability,” Extreme Tech, May 9, 2013, https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability.
49. Aaron Pressman, “The iPhone Decade: One of the Tech Industry’s Biggest Innovations Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary,” Fortune, June 1, 2015, 25.
50. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.” According to Richard Stallman, GNU/Linux is used in internet servers, the New York stock exchange, the platforms of Google, Facebook and Amazon, and in many other places. Author’s correspondence with Richard Stallman, March 4, 2019.
51. Richard Stallman, correspondence with the author, September 17, 2018. See also https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html.
52. Author’s communication with Richard Stallman, March 4, 2019.
53. Unless a new free software smart phone comes onto the market in the meantime. One currently in development by Purism is the Librem phone. It is made entirely with free software, including its kernel. Richard Stallman, communication with author, July 6, 2019.
54. Pressman, “The iPhone Decade.”
55. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Dover, 2017), 215.
56. General Keith Alexander was the director of the US National Security Agency from 2005 to 2013. He famously advocated that security agencies should “collect the whole haystack” of personal digital information available, rather than bothering with legal warrants to look for “needles” or specific information.
57. “The 2600 crowd” refers to the name of a publication, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and an associated conference that grew out of a culture of early telephone hackers in the United States known as phreakers. In the 1960s, these early hackers discovered that a 2600 hertz tone (which could be reproduced with a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box), would allow them “operator” access to phone systems. “2600: The Hacker Quarterly,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly (accessed January 1, 2019).
58. Although he has never openly admitted it, Assange has hinted that he was responsible for the notorious WANK worm attack on NASA, too. See Robert Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” The Monthly, March 2011, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/february/1324596189/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary: “By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on the NASA computer system via the introduction of what was called the WANK worm in an attempt to sabotage the Jupiter launch of the Galileo rocket as part of an action of anti-nuclear activists. No one claimed responsibility for this attack, which is outlined in the first chapter of Underground. In an article he later published in the left-wing magazine CounterPunch, Assange would claim the WANK worm attack was ‘the origin of hacktivism.’ In a Swedish television documentary, WikiRebels, made with Assange’s co-operation, there are hints he was responsible.”
59. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
60. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 96.
61. And the start of a brave new world. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World, about a technological dystopia, takes its title from Miranda’s speech in William Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest (act 5, scene 1): “Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in’t.”
1. The “Collateral Murder” video was leaked by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. Taken from a US military helicopter, it shows gunsight footage of Iraqi civilians being killed. Crew members can be heard chatting as if they are playing a game. Assange decided that this was the leak to edit and package for the press, and it made WikiLeaks a household name.
2. Bruce Sterling, “The Blast Shack,” Webstock, December 22, 2010, http://www.webstock.org.nz/the-blast-shack. In fact, Sterling thought the cablegate affair was a “dismal saga” and a “melancholy business”: “it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allan Poe melancholia. But it sure does. Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with which this has happened. At last — at long last — the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off.”
3. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 58.
4. See “Cypherpunk,” Activism.net, https://activsm.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html (accessed June 20, 2018).
5. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 52.
6. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 78–79.
7. Timothy C. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” version 0.666, September 10, 1994, http://www.kreps.org/hackers/overheads/11cyphernervs.pdf.
8. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 81.
9. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
10. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
11. Robert Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” The Monthly, March 2011, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/february/1324596189/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary.
12. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
13. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
14. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
15. Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manfesto,” 1993, https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/16.
16. Steven Levy, “Crypto Rebels,” Wired, February 1, 1993.
17. “The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, ‘do it yourself’ (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan ‘access to tools.’” Whole Earth Catalog, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog (accessed January 1, 2019).
18. May, “The Cyphernomicon.” As Thomas Rid has pointed out, this was a bit of an exaggeration: not everyone on the cypherpunk mailing list wrote code. Only about 10 percent of them did, and 5 percent worked on encryption projects. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machine: A Cybernetic History (New York: Norton, 2016), 264–265, Kindle.
19. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 110.
20. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 123.
21. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 100–101, 129–130; Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
22. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence (accessed December 30, 2018).
23. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (Project Gutenberg ebook, 2008), Kindle, 3590.
24. John Perry Barlow, Keynote Address, Stanford Blockchain Workshops, video, November 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExKt1BNsX0s.
25. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3410–3415.
26. See “John Perry Barlow,” Dead.net, http://www.dead.net/band/john-perry-barlow.
27. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3408.
28. Barlow, Keynote Address.
29. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3360–3376.
30. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3601.
31. “Pinedale Wyoming Population History 1990–2015,” https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/pinedale-wyoming (accessed January 1, 2019).
32. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3610.
33. John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement: Desperadoes of the DataSphere,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 8, 1990, https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/crime_and_puzzlement_1.html.
34. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3619.
35. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3619.
36. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3623.
37. John Perry Barlow speaking at the Stanford Blockchain Workshops with John Clippinger, “Blockchain: Law, Regulation, Policy, the Law of the Horse,” video, November 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtMezbrA3gw.
38. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3387.
39. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3387–3400.
40. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3395.
41. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 3389.
42. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 4172–4177.
43. Sterling, Hacker Crackdown, 4182–4191.
44. MIT researchers may have invented a public key encryption system, but cybernetics scholar Thomas Rid claims that the idea originated with the British signal intelligence agency GCHQ, which kept it secret for many years. Rid, Rise of the Machine, 241.
45. Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2001), 190.
46. R. W. Apple Jr., “Twenty-five Years Later: Lessons from the Pentagon Papers,” New York Times, June 23, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/23/weekinreview/25-years-later-lessons-from-the-pentagon-papers.html.
47. David W. Dunlap, “1971: Supreme Court Allows Publication of Pentagon Papers,” New York Times, June 30, 2016.
48. In its decision New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 US 713 (1971), the US Supreme Court held that “Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” and that the government “carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.” Although there was and is still no law on the books that says the government cannot prosecute journalists for seeking out and publishing leaks of classified information as accessories after the fact, successive US governments have never done so, tacitly respecting this practice as part of the larger principle of “freedom of the press” guaranteed by the US Constitution. However, the line is increasingly thinning. The Obama administration brought an unprecedented number of prosecutions against leakers, including Chelsea Manning, and it went after journalist James Rosen for his emails and James Risen for his sources. After these cases caused a public uproar, it dropped its cases, and the Department of Justice issued a set of guidelines stating that it would not treat “ordinary news-gathering activities” as criminal conduct, without defining those activities.
49. Levy, Crypto, 190–191.
50. Levy, Crypto, 194.
51. Levy, “Crypto Rebels.”
52. Levy, “Crypto Rebels.”
53. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 75.
54. Levy, Crypto, 252.
55. Rid, Rise of the Machine, 268.
56. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 85.
57. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 85.
58. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 86.
59. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 83–84.
60. Levy, Crypto, 288–289.
61. Levy, Crypto, 290; Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 87.
62. Levy, Crypto, 266–267.
63. Levy, Crypto, 256–260.
64. Levy, Crypto, 296.
65. Barlow, Keynote Address.
66. David Hershkovits, “John Perry Barlow Talks Acid, Cyber-independence and His Friendship with JFK Jr.,” Paper, April 2015, http://www.papermag.com/john-perry-barlow-talks-acid-cyber-independence-and-his-friendship-wit-1427554020.html: “It was described as techno-utopian,” he says. “There was a certain calculation to that. The best way to invent the future is to predict it. I felt that if I were persuasive enough in giving a vision of the future in which the Internet was inherently free and could not be controlled, we had a better shot at it.”
67. Hershkovits, “John Perry Barlow.”
68. See “John Perry Barlow,” Dead.net, http://www.dead.net/band/john-perry-barlow.
69. NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system that descends from Berkeley Software Distribution, a Research Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. See The NetBSD Project, netbsd.org.
70. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 113.
71. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
72. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
73. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
74. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 127.
75. R. U. Sirius, “Cypherpunk Rising: Wikileaks, Encryption, and the Coming Surveillance Dystopia,” The Verge, March 7, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4036040/cypherpunks-julian-assange-wikileaks-encryption-surveillance-dystopia.
76. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
77. May, “The Cyphernomicon.”
78. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
1. Steven Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown,” Wired, October 1, 2002.
2. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Cambridge: Basic Books, 1999).
3. Lawrence Lessig, “Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace,” Harvard Magazine, January–February 2000.
4. Lessig, “Code Is Law.”
5. Cited in Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machine: A Cybernetic History (New York: Norton, 2016), 285, Kindle.
6. That is “democrat” with a small “d.” In American party politics, Lessig has been both a Republican and a Democrat. See “Lawrence Lessig,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig#Political_background.
7. Lessig, “Code Is Law.”
8. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 148.
9. Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” November 10, 2006, originally posted at me@iq.org, reposted at https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf.
10. Julian Assange, “Conspiracy as Governance,” December 3, 2006, originally posted at me@iq,org; reposted at https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf.
11. Assange, “Conspiracy as Governance.”
12. Assange, “Conspiracy as Governance.”
13. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 130.
14. Robert Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary,” The Monthly, March 2011, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/february/1324596189/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary. Ellsberg later became an ally of Assange and attended the Chelsea Manning trial with Assange’s lawyers.
15. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 160.
16. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 159–160. See the original source that Greenberg cites: Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010. Assange later denied this, but see also the 2006 email from Assange to John Young (presumably in the batch Young released on Cryptome) that Greenberg quotes at 159: “Hackers monitor Chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets. When they pull, so do we.”
17. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 131–132.
18. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
19. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
20. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
21. After sending Assange some cables relating to the US ambassador in Iceland, Manning downloaded 93,000 logs from the Afghan war, 400,000 incident reports from the war in Iraq, and 250,000 State Department cables. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
22. We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, directed by Alex Gibney, Jigsaw Productions, 2013.
23. Heather Brooke, “Inside the Secret World of Hackers,” The Guardian, August 24, 2011; Vernon Silver, “The Hackers Russia-Proofing Germany’s Elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 26, 2017.
24. “Chaos Computer Club,” Wikipedia, citing “CCC Publishes Fingerprints of Wolfgang Schauble, the German Home Secretary,” Heise Online, March 3, 2008, link no longer available. The event happened in 2008.
25. See “Welcome to Project Blinkenlights,” Blinkenlights.net, http://blinkenlights.net/project.
26. Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2012), 8–9.
27. Khatchadourian, “No Secrets.”
28. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
29. Khatchadourian, “No Secrets.”
30. “Assange: WikiLeaks Is the Intelligence Agency of the People,” New Statesman, April 5, 2011. Since CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a nonstate intelligence agency, however, Assange has backpedaled on the characterization.
31. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 298, 300.
32. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 302.
33. Marcel Rosenbach, “Top German Hacker Slams OpenLeaks Founder,” der Spiegel, August 15, 2011; Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 302–303.
34. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 303.
35. Rosenbach, “Top German Hacker.”
36. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 299.
37. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 301–302. For Domscheit-Berg’s side of the story, see Janek Schmidt, “Daniel Domscheit-Berg about WikiLeaks: ‘The Dispute Became So Absurd,’” Scribd, November 6, 2011, https://www.scribd.com/document/71853929/Daniel-Domscheit-About-WikiLeaks.
38. See “Chaos Computer Club,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club.
39. Mike Butcher, “WikiLeaks Watch: Julian Assange to Be Freed on Bail (Plus Bonus Downfall Parody),” Tech Crunch, December 16, 2010.
40. Esther Addley, “Q&A: Julian Assange Allegations,” The Guardian, December 17, 2010.
41. Butcher, “WikiLeaks Watch”; Michael Hastings, “Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, January 18, 2012.
42. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary”: “In July the first of the Manning tranche, the Afghan War Diary, was published. Assange held back only 15,000 of the 93,000 reports. Unforgivably, those released included the names of perhaps 300 Afghans who had assisted western forces. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid, claimed that a nine-member commission had been created after the documents were released ‘to find out about people who were spying.’ Assange was unrepentant. Both in private and in public, he argued that if they were collaborators they deserved to die.”
By contrast, it seems that the unredacted leak of the State Department cables was not wholly deliberate on Assange’s part. One version of the story is that when Andy Müller-Maguhn recovered the files of already published leaks from Domscheit-Berg and handed them over to an unnamed WikiLeaks staffer, they were posted online and also uploaded to Pirate Bay. Unfortunately, the set included four overlooked, encrypted files that contained the whole set of unredacted cables. The “slip” was disasterously compounded when The Guardian’s publisher, David Leigh, used Assange’s passphrase to these files as tech “window dressing” for a heading in his book. He had no idea what the phrase was for. None other than John Young picked up on the inadvertent leak, successfully decrypted the files, and spilled them in their entirety on his platform, Cryptome. This forced Assange’s hand to release all of the documents. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 305–307.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg has implied Andy Müller-Maguhn was the unfortunate person who uploaded the four encrypted files. See Schmidt, “Daniel Domscheit-Berg about WikiLeaks”; see also Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 299–300.
43. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
44. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
45. Manne, “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.”
46. Rosenbach, “Top German Hacker.”
47. Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn, and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks. The interview was not done at the Norfolk house, however.
48. Julian Assange, “Preface” (dated October 6, 2012), in Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn, and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks.
49. Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks, 151.
50. Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, Cypherpunks, 71.
51. Michael B. Kelley, “NSA: Snowden Stole 1.7 Million Documents and Still Has Access to Most of Them,” Business Insider, December 13, 2013.
52. This section contains paragraphs from an article I wrote for the Quebec-based revue Relations: Maureen Webb, “Les nouveaux habits de Big Brother,” trans. Catherine Caron, Relations, no. 776 (January–February 2015): 14–17.
53. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2014), 47–48.
54. Glenn Greenwald, “XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet,’” The Guardian, July 31, 2013.
55. James Risen and Laura Poitras, “NSA Report Outlined Goals for More Power,” New York Times, November 22, 2013; “A Strategy for Surveillance Powers,” New York Times, November 23, 2013.
56. See Edward Snowden, “NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Society That Does These Sorts of Things,’” The Guardian, June 9, 2013, video, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video.
57. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 162.
58. Wood, The American Revolution, 160.
59. Wood, The American Revolution, 160.
60. Wood, The American Revolution, 159. See also Gary Wills, “Evangelical Awakenings,” New York Review of Books, April 20, 2017, 26, which covers the history of American evangelism “out of doors,” a related phenomenon, perhaps, of American culture.
61. Wood, The American Revolution, 160.
62. Wood, The American Revolution, 154–158.
63. Wood, The American Revolution, 159–162. Ironically and to its patrician theorists’ dismay, the egalitarian promise of this radical vision of democracy came to fruition with the addition of a Bill of Rights and a political culture in which ordinary men competed successfully for elected office alongside “their betters.”
64. Hastings, “Julian Assange.”
1. Stuart Braun, City of Exiles: Berlin from the Outside In (Berlin: Noctua Press, 2015), 121–122. In this chapter, I have drawn heavily on Braun’s excellent cultural history of Berlin.
2. Braun, City of Exiles, 123.
3. The line is taken from a poem by Paul Zeck: “Berlin, stop and think! Your dance partner is Death.” See the public poster at Beckyhollandi, “Berlin, Your Dance Partner Is Death,” Berlin: A Divided City, February 17, 2013, https://berlindividedcity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/berlin-your-dance-partner-is-death.
4. Lucy Suchman was the leader of the work practice and technology group that prototyped innovative systems developed through close collaboration with their prospective users.
5. Andrew Clement told me that Gotlieb used to tell the story of a massive pile of printouts from this computer that impressed the Americans and helped persuade them to agree to a Canadian plan for the route of the new St. Lawrence Seaway.
6. Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, “Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report,” New York Times, December 24, 2005.
7. See the public archive of published Snowden documents at Snowden Surveillance Archive, https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org. The archive is a collaborative research effort between the Politics of Surveillance Project at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE). Partners and supporters of this initiative include the Centre for Free Expression, Faculty of Communications and Design, Ryerson University; the Digital Curation Institute, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; and the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University.
8. Natalya Viktorovna Hesse and Vladimir Tolz, “The Sakharovs in Gorky,” in Robert B. Silvers, ed., The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 153–154.
9. Hesse and Tolz, “The Sakharovs in Gorky,” 154.
10. The friendship between Frederick, the patron, and Voltaire, the talent, had its tensions, with Voltaire exercising his free speech in the end to write the following about Frederick in La loi naturelle (1756):
Of incongruities a monstrous pile,
Calling men brothers, crushing them the while;
With air humane, a misanthropic brute;
Oft-times impulsive, sometimes over-’cute;
Weak ’midst his choler, modest in his pride;
Yearning for virtue, lust personified;
Statesman and author, of the slippery crew;
My patron, pupil, persecutor too.
11. These paragraphs are based on Braun, City of Exiles, 53–65, and the Heinrich Eduard Jacob quote at 65.
12. Braun, City of Exiles, 66–67, and the Rosa Luxemburg quote at 64.
13. In fact, 130,000 Berliners courageously turned out to protest his imminent assumption of power in January 1933, hanging a large placard on the Karl Liebknecht house that read: “To advance the spirit of the struggle against war, violence, fascism, hunger and cold, for work, bread, and freedom.” Braun, City of Exiles, 85.
14. Braun, City of Exiles, 135, citing Michel Contad and Michel Ribalka, The Writings of Jean Paul Sartre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 200.
15. George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets: Laura Poitras’s closeup view of Edward Snowden,” The New Yorker, October 20, 2014.
16. Packer, “Holder of Secrets.”
17. Sara Corbett, “How a Snowdenista Kept the NSA Leaker Hidden in a Moscow Airport,” Vogue, February 18, 2015, https://www.vogue.com/article/sarah-harrison-edward-snowden-wikileaks-nsa.
18. Corbett, “Snowdenista.”
19. Corbett, “Snowdenista.”
20. Laura Poitras reveals this fact in her 2017 film, Risk.
21. Glenn Greenwald, “The Intercept Is Broadening Access to the Snowden Archive: Here’s Why,” The Intercept, May 16, 2016.
22. Curtis Skinner, “Reporters Who Broke the Snowden Story Return to the US for the First Time,” Reuters, April 11, 2014, https://www.yahoo.com/news/reporters-broke-snowden-story-return-u-first-time-172716376--sector.html.
23. Carole Cadwalladr, “Berlin’s Digital Exiles: Where Tech Activists Go to Escape the NSA,” The Guardian, November 9, 2014; Packer, “Holder of Secrets.”
24. “Criminal Complaint against Mass Surveillance: We Won’t Back Down!,” Chaos Communications Club, posted June 4, 2015, https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2015/gba3.
25. Corbett, “Snowdenista.”
26. Corbett, “Snowdenista.”
27. Dante wrote about the pain of exile in his Divine Comedy. In Paradiso, 17 (55–60), his great-great-grandfather warns him what to expect:
“You shall leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.
You are to know the bitter taste
of others’ bread, how salty it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
ascending and descending others’ stairs.”
28. DefenseSystems.org published this story.
29. Cory Doctorow, “CryptoParty: Like a Tupperware Party for Learning Crypto,” boing boing, October 12, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/cryptoparty-like-a-tupperware.html.
30. Chris Irvine and Tom Parfitt, “Kremlin Returns to Typewriters to Avoid Computer Leaks,” The Telegraph, July 11, 2013.
1. Harry Halpin works on standardization working groups that he himself formed—namely, the W3C Web Cryptography and the W3C Web Authentication Working Group. In 2012, W3C sent him to present his work on web cryptography at the Chaos Computer Club congress: Harry Halpin, “Re-igniting the Crypto Wars on the Web,” video filmed December 27, 2012, https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5374-en-re_igniting_the_crypto_wars_on_the_web_h264#t=547.
2. Paul Syverson of the Naval Research Lab had the idea and obtained the initial grant for Tor. His webpage is at http://www.syverson.org.
3. Even after Chelsea Manning reportedly used Tor to make her leaks, the US government kept funding Tor. Its own diplomatic and security intelligence agents need it, and to be effective it has to be available to everyone. The diversity and number of nodes make it work.
4. Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2014).
5. Jonathan Zittrain, “The Web as Random Acts of Kindness,” TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness#t-158022.
6. Zittrain, “The Web.”
7. See another entertaining lecture by Jonathan Zittrain on the nature of internet: “Jonathan Zittrain Kicks Off the Berkman Center’s 2015–2016 Academic Year,” published September 17, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VirAb9QU0Lc.
8. Zittrain does not use the term “connectivity commons,” but that is how I picture it.
9. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 67–68.
10. Harry later told me that the informal discussions groups known originally as “birds of a feather” (BOF) meetings were now more likely to meet at a bar (a bar BOF) before the “official” BOF meeting.
11. Heidi Boghosian, Spying on Democracy (San Francisco: City Lights, 2013), 137.
12. To be fair, Morozov has subsequently written about other topics.
13. Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 208, quoting Milton Mueller in Geoff Dyer and Richard Waters, “Spying Threatens Internet, Say Experts,” Financial Times, November 21, 2013.
14. Schiller, Digital Depression, 208, citing ICANN, “Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation,” October 7, 2013, https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-10-07-en.
15. See “Terms of Reference,” NETmundial Initiative, https://www.netmundial.org/terms-reference (accessed July 28, 2019).
16. Harry told me later that the World Economic Forum (the organization that meets in Davos, Switzerland) got involved in the NETmundial process at its outset and was viewed by some digital rights activists as subverting the process. Nothing significant came of the NETmundial initiative in the end.
17. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: Norton, 2016), 334, Kindle.
18. Gabriella Coleman, “From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S91–S102.
19. Early theorists include Julian Assange, Andrew Feenberg, Geert Lovink, and David Cantwell Smith.
20. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 93.
21. Wood, The American Revolution, 94.
22. As Richard Stallman has pointed out, democracy is certainly the opposite of the libertarianism that is practised by many American adherents: “They use the name ‘Libertarian’ to pass off laissez-faire [economics] as a matter of liberty. I call them ‘Antisocialists’ because opposing what they call ‘Socialism’ (meaning any state programs that help people in general) is what they are all about, and because it’s a joke as well. But ‘laissez-faireists’ would fit them too. Or ‘laissez-foutrists’;).” Richard Stallman, correspondence with the author, January 7, 2018.
23. On this topic, see Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016).
1. The hyperlink to the Privacy International letter is broken, but see “Surveillance Company Hacking Team Exposed,” Privacy International, posted July 6, 2015, https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/1031.
2. “Ethiopia: Digital Attacks Intensify—Spyware Firm Should Address Alleged Misuse,” Human Rights Watch, posted March 9, 2015, https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/09/ethiopia-digital-attacks-intensify.
3. Ron Deibert, “Open Letter to Hacking Team,” Citizen Lab, posted August 8, 2014, https://citizenlab.ca/2014/08/open-letter-hacking-team; Ron Deibert, “Open Letter to Hacking Team,” Citizen Lab, posted March 5, 2015, https://citizenlab.ca/2015/03/open-letter-hacking-team-march-2015.
4. Alex Hern, “Hacking Team Hacked: Firm Sold Spying Tools to Repressive Regimes, Documents Claim,” The Guardian, July 6, 2015.
5. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 229–230.
6. For the whole story, including the ultimate revocation of the license, see “Hacking Team’s Global License Revoked by Italian Export Authorities,” Privacy International, posted April 8, 2016, https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/1042.
7. For links to all of its research and articles related to Hacking Team, see “Hacking Team,” The Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.ca/tag/hacking-team.
8. Hern, “Hacking Team.”
9. Hern, “Hacking Team”; Mattathias Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale,” New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/magazine/cyberwar-for-sale.html.
10. Hern, “Hacking Team.” The government of Sudan, a US-designated state sponsor of terrorism, paid Hacking Team nearly one million euros between 2012 and 2014, and the FBI paid the group $700,000. Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale.”
11. Craig Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: The Kernel of the Argument,” Washington Post, November 5, 2015.
12. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.”
13. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.”
14. Bill Anderson, “Android and the Linux Kernel Towelroot Exploit,” Android News for Costa Rica, June 23, 2014, http://www.all-things-android.com/content/android-and-linux-kernel-towelroot-exploit. See also “Hacker Geohot Releases Root Tool for Galaxy S5 and Most Other Android Devices,” Geek.com, July 16, 2014, https://www.geek.com/android/hacker-geohot-releases-root-tool-for-galaxy-s5-and-most-other-android-devices-1596797.
15. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.”
16. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.” See also the Wikileaks Hacking Team Archive at https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/5761.
17. Gianluca gave me permission to print this part of our conversation.
18. Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale.”
19. Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale.”
20. “Chaos Computer Club: Staatstrojaner Affair,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club (accessed December 30, 2018).
21. Vernon Silver, “The Hackers Russia Proofing Germany’s Elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 26, 2017.
22. “State Trojan Again on Trial in Constitutional Court,” Chaos Computer Club, posted July 6, 2015, https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2015/bkag.
1. Mattathias Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale,” New York Times Magazine, January 4, 2017.
2. Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale.”
3. Schwartz, “Cyberwar for Sale.”
4. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 108.
5. “Chat with Prof. Ron Deibert and Edward Snowden,” Rights Con 2016, video, published April 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Hy_OFkZ8s.
6. Bruce Schneier, “NSA Surveillance: A Guide to Staying Secure,” The Guardian, September 6, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance.
7. Yael Grauer, “Staggering Variety of Clandestine Trackers Found in Popular Android Apps,” The Intercept, November 24, 2017.
8. Grauer, “Staggering Variety.”
9. Hacker Kim.dotcom has proposed using the reserve computing power of cell phones to create a decentralized alternative internet: “‘By the People, for the People’: Kim.dotcom to Launch Alternative Internet,” RT, November 22, 2017, https://www.rt.com/news/410606-kim-dotcom-meganet-internet.
10. Ashley Madison was an online service for people looking for adulterous hook-ups. The site was hacked in 2015, and its unencrypted data for more than 32 million members was released on the dark net. In a matter of days, members were receiving blackmail threats. Reportedly, the Chinese government cross-tabulated hacked data on civil servants with Ashley Madison data to find government employees susceptible to being exploited for Chinese espionage. Sue Halpern, “In the Depths of the Net,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015.
11. The implementation of Tor was in 2003, but onion routing was conceived and tested from the mid-1990s.
12. Vint Cerf, “Hangout with Vint Cerf,” TWiT Hangouts, video, published April 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17GtmwyvmWE&feature=share&t=23m1s. See also Craig Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: The Kernel of the Argument,” Washington Post, November 5, 2015.
13. Silkie Carlo, “Protect Your Privacy by Moving to the Dark Web,” Wired, January 8, 2017.
14. Micha Lee, “Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smart Phone to Physically Guard Your Laptop,” The Intercept, December 22, 2017.
15. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity.”
16. See “You Broke the Internet: We’ll Make Ourselves a GNU One,” Youbroketheinternet.org, http://youbroketheinternet.org.
17. “Youbroketheinternet” presentation filmed at the 2014 ThinkTwice conference, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGxjN-lfr_Y.
18. See “The Project Map,” Youbroketheinternet.org, http://youbroketheinternet.org/map. See also Christian Grothoff, Bartlomiej Polot, and Carlo Loesch, “The Internet Is Broken: Idealistic Ideas for Building a NEWGNU Network,” paper presented at the W3C/IETF Strengthening the Internet Workshop STRINT, March 2014, https://www.w3.org/2014/strint/report.html#idm29683568: “This paper describes issues for security and privacy at all layers of the Internet stack and proposes radical changes to the architecture to build a network that offers strong security and privacy by default.”
19. See “About NGI,” Next Generation Internet, https://www.ngi.eu/about.
20. European Commission, “Next Generation Internet Initiative,” https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/policies/next-generation-internet (accessed January 1, 2019).
21. “Next Generation Internet,” NLnet Foundation, https://nlnet.nl/NGI (accessed January 1, 2019). NLnet Foundation has been commissioned by the European Commission to write the NGI Vision: “NLnet and Gartner to Write Vision for EC’s Next Generaiton Internet Initiative,” NLnet Foundation, https://nlnet.nl/news/2017/20170412-EC-NGI.html. See also “NGI Study,” Next Generation Internet, https://www.ngi.eu/about/ngi-study.
22. See “You Broke the Internet: We’ll Make Ourselves a GNU One,” Youbrokethe internet.org, http://youbroketheinternet.org.
1. Adam Nagourney, Ian Lovett, and Richard Perez-Pena, “San Bernardino Shooting Kills at Least Fourteen; Two Suspects Are Dead,” New York Times, December 2, 2015.
2. Cindy Cohn profile, Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/about/staff/cindy-cohn (accessed December 30, 2018).
3. David Gilbert, “Going Dark? FBI Not So Blind Despite Apple iPhone and Other Encrypted Devices,” International Business Times, March 7, 2016. See also James Comey, “Going Dark: Are Technology, Privacy and Public Safety on a Collision Course?,” remarks as delivered to the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, October 16, 2014, https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/going-dark-are-technology-privacy-and-public-safety-on-a-collision-course.
4. Samuel Gibbs, “Snowden: FBI’s Claim It Can’t Unlock the San Bernardino iPhone Is ‘Bullshit,’” The Guardian, March 9, 2016.
5. Spencer Ackerman, “FBI May Have Found Way to Unlock San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone without Apple,” The Guardian, March 22, 2016.
6. “Secret Documents Reveal NSA Campaign against Encryption,” New York Times, September 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html (accessedDecember 30, 2018); James Ball, Julian Borger, and Glenn Greenwald, “US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet,” The Guardian, September 5, 2013.
7. Ackerman, “FBI May Have Found.”
8. Bernstein had invented a way of encrypting material that used the algorithm of a hash and was not itself an encryption tool. He wanted to test the logic of the US prohibition on the export of cryptographic tools by applying for permission to publish his results on the internet in five different ways. Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2001), 297.
9. Bernstein v. United States (9th Cir. May 6, 1999). See also Levy, Crypto, 297–302.
10. The Junger case is citable but not as thrilling.
11. The authors included cypherpunk and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) founder John Gilmore, well-known cryptographic inventors Whitfield Diffie and Ronald L. Rivest, security expert Bruce Schneier, and prominent academics with computer science and policy credentials, including Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Matthew Green, Susan Landau, Peter G. Neumann, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Michael Specter, Daniel J. Weitzner. “Keys under the Doormat: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications,” July 7, 2015, https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-keys-under-doormats-CSAIL.pdf.
12. “Keys under the Doormat,” 2.
13. “Tor Is Not as Safe as You May Think,” Infosecurity, posted September 2, 2013, https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/tor-is-not-as-safe-as-you-may-think/, cited in Sue Halpern, “In the Depths of the Net,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015.
14. Halpern, “In the Depths.”
15. The Tor Project website can be found at https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en.
16. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2012), 149.
17. “Join the Tor Challenge,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/torchallenge.
18. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 150.
19. Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Project, quoted in Halpern, “In the Depths.”
20. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 145.
21. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 150.
22. Gennie Gebhart, “We’re Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, posted February 21, 2017, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/were-halfway-encrypting-entire-web.
23. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), 88, Kindle, referring to Hannah Arendt’s work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951).
24. Snyder, On Tyranny, 88.
25. Julia Angwin, “First Library to Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops after DHS Email,” ProPublica, September 10, 2015.
26. The first Tor relay was set up in Canada at the library of the University of Western Canada, where the legality of it was uncertain. Jordan Pearson, “Can You Be Arrested for Running a Tor Exit Node in Canada? Running a Tor Exit Node Is a Risky Proposition,” Motherboard, September 25, 2015.
27. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 223–228.
28. Dan Farber, “WikiLeaks Is Winning the Info War So Far,” December 7, 2010, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-is-winning-the-info-war-so-far.
29. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets,186.
30. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 210–216.
31. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 212–213. In the hack of Barr and HBGary, LulzSec announced themselves as Anonymous.
32. “The HBGary Emails,” WikiLeaks, published November 29, 2016, https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/press-release.
33. Farber, “Wikileaks Is Winning.”
34. Barton Gellman, “The One Hundred Most Influential People in the World,” Time, April 18, 2012.
35. Andrea Peterson, “WikiLeaks Posts Nearly Twenty Thousand Hacked DNC Emails Online,” Washington Post, July, 2016.
36. Alana Abramson and Shushanna Walshe, “Emails Released by WikiLeaks Appear to Show DNC Trying to Aid Hillary Clinton,” ABC News, July 22, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/emails-released-wikileaks-show-dnc-aid-hillary-clinton/story?id=40815253; Alana Abramson and Shushanna Walshe, “The Four Most Damaging Emails from the DNC WikiLeaks Dump,” ABC News, July 25, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/damaging-emails-dnc-wikileaks-dump/story?id=40852448.
37. Alex Johnson, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: No Proof Hacked DNC Emails Came from Russia,” NBC News, July 25, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-julian-assange-no-proof-hacked-dnc-emails-came-russia-n616541.
38. Massimo Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America,” Time, May 18, 2017.
39. Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War.”
40. Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War.”
41. Leslie Shapiro, “Anatomy of a Russian Facebook Ad,” Washington Post, November 1, 2017.
42. Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War.”
43. Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War.”
44. Calabresi, “Inside Russia’s Social Media War.”
45. Brian Fung, “Darrell Issa: James Clapper Lied to Congress and Should Be Fired,” Washington Post, January 27, 2014.
46. Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, and Ryan Grim, “Top Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days before2016 Election,” The Intercept, June 5, 2017.
47. Cole, Esposito, Biddle, and Grim, “Top Secret.”
48. “Russian President Says ‘Patriotic’ Hackers May Have Meddled in US Election,” Democracy Now, June 2, 2017, https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/2/headlines/russian_president_says_patriotic_hackers_meddled_in_us_election.
49. Julia Ioffe, “The Secret Correspondence between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks,” The Atlantic, November 13, 2017.
50. Ioffe, “The Secret Correspondence.”
51. Robert Mackey, “Julian Assange’s Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was,” The Intercept, November 15, 2017.
52. Mackey, “Julian Assange’s Hatred.”
53. John Swaine and Marc Bennetts, “Mueller Charges Thirteen Russians with Interfering in US Election to Help Trump,” The Guardian, February 16, 2017.
54. Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015.
55. Chen, “The Agency.”
56. Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen), tweet, February 20, 2018, https://twitter.com/AdrianChen/status/965962680161980417. Anonymous once made Chen wear a tutu with a shoe on his head before they would cooperate with him for a story he was writing about an alleged hack on the FBI. See photo at Whitney Phillips, “Anonymous, Adrian Chen, and the Shoe,” posted September 5, 2012, https://billions-and-billions.com/2012/09/05/anonymous-adrian-chen-and-the-shoe.
57. Author’s interview with hacker, May 14, 2018; author’s interview with hacker/political staffer at Libre Planet conference, March 2017.
58. Carole Cadwalladr’s tweet @carolecadwalla: “Yesterday @facebook threatened to sue us. Today we publish this. Meet the whistleblower blowing the lid off Facebook & Cambridge Analytica,” March 17, 2018, tweet, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election?CMP=share_btn_tw.
59. Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, “Revealed: Fifty Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Massive Data Breach,” The Observer, March 17, 2018.
60. Manuela Tobias, “Comparing Facebook Use by Obama, Cambridge Analytica,” PolitiFacts, posted March 22, 2018, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/22/meghan-mccain/comparing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt. Other reports put the figure at thirty million users: Mattathias Schwartz, “Facebook Failed to Protect Thirty Million Users from Having Their Data Harvested by Trump Campaign Affiliate,” The Intercept, March 30, 2017.
61. Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison, “Revealed”; Schwartz, “Facebook Failed.”
62. Schwartz, “Facebook Failed.”
63. Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook Doesn’t Sell Your Data: It Sells You—Zeynep Tufekci on How Company’s Profit Really Works,” interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, April 11, 2018, video, https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/11/facebook_doesnt_sell_your_data_it.
64. Haroon Saddique, “Facebook Whistleblower Gives Evidence to MPS on Cambridge Analytica Row: How It Happened,” The Guardian, March 21, 2018; Paul Lewis, “‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine,” The Guardian, March 20, 2018: “Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.”
65. Agreement Containing Consent Order, In the Matter of Facebook, Inc., US Federal Trade Commission Agreement, File no. 092 3184 (2011), https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2011/11/111129facebookagree.pdf.
66. Lewis, “‘Utterly Horrifying.’”
67. Tufekci, “Facebook Doesn’t Sell.”
68. Schwartz, “Facebook Failed.”
69. Tobias, “Comparing Facebook.”
70. Doc Searles, “Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Problems Are Nothing to What’s Coming for All of Online Publishing,” posted March 23, 2018, https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/03/23/nothing.
71. Julian Assange, “Conspiracy as Governance,” posted December 3, 2006, me@iq,org, reposted Cryptome, https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf.
72. Snyder, On Tyranny. Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He is also author of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
73. Timothy Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny,” interview with Sam Harris, Waking Up with Sam Harris, Episode 79, May 30, 2017, audio, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmI_YNGx_jE.
74. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny.”
75. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny.”
76. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny.”
77. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny.”
78. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny.”
79. Snyder, “The Road to Tyranny”; Snyder, On Tyranny (see “lessons” 11, 12, and 13).
80. Joint Comments of Internet Engineers, Pioneers, and Technologists on the Technical Flaws in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule-Making and the Need for the Light Touch, Bright Lines Rules from the Open Internet Order, In the Matter of Restoring Internet Freedom, Federal Communications Commission, WC Docket No.: 17-108, 3, submitted July 17, 2017, https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1071761547058/Dkt.%2017-108%20Joint%20Comments%20of%20Internet%20Engineers%2C%20Pioneers%2C%20and%20Technologists%202017.07.17.pdf.
81. Joseph Torres, “FCC set to Roll Back Digital Civil Rights with Tomorrow’s Vote to Repeal Net Neutrality,” interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now, December 13, 2017, video, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42898-fcc-set-to-roll-back-digital-civil-rights-with-tomorrow-s-vote-to-repeal-net-neutrality.
82. Swapna Krishna, “Internet Pioneers and Leaders Tell the FCC: You Don’t Understand How the Internet Works,” Engaget, open letter, December 11, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/11/internet-pioneers-fcc-open-letter.
83. Joint Comments of Internet Engineers, 1.
84. Joint Comments of Internet Engineers, 1.
85. Jessica Rosenworcel, “FCC Must Investigate Fraud before Voting on Net Neutrality,” Wired, December 9, 2017.
86. Cecelia Kang, “FCC Repeals Net Neutrality Rules,” New York Times, December 14, 2017.
87. Associated Press, “Nearly Two Dozen Attorneys General Sue to Block FCC’s Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules,” USA Today, January 16, 2018.
88. Sean Burch, “Senate Votes to Block FCC’s Repeal of Net Neutrality,” The Wrap, May 16, 2018.
89. Zaid Jilani, “Killing Net Neutrality Has Brought on a New Call for Public Broadband,” The Intercept, December 15, 2017.
90. Jilani, “Killing Net Neutrality.”
91. Dominic Rushe, “Chattanooga’s Gig: How One City’s Super-fast Internet Is Driving a Tech Boom,” The Guardian, August 30, 2014.
92. Rushe, “Chattanooga’s Gig.”
93. Rushe, “Chattanooga’s Gig.”
94. Dominic Rushe, “US Telecoms Giants Call on FCC to Block Cities’ Expansion of High-Speed Internet,” The Guardian, August 29, 2014.
95. Jilani, “Killing Net Neutrality.”
96. People in the digital rights movement generally do not like the name “digital rights management,” which is meant to legitimize the regime, so activists often refer to DRM as “digital restrictions management,” but that is not its name in legislation and treaties.
97. On the word creation, which often is used in connection with copyright, see “Words to Avoid Because They Are Loaded or Confusing,” GNU Operating System, Gnu.org, https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.
98. Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use, 17 USC. § 107.
99. “What Is Free Software?,” GNU Operating System, Gnu.org, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html (accessed December 30, 2018).
100. This section concerns only copyright. Other restrictions on software include the practice of not releasing source code, imposing end user license agreements, and “tivoization.”
101. In traditional copyright law, moral rights are the right of creators to prohibit modification of their work. In a famous Canadian case on moral rights, the department store Eaton’s put red ribbons around the necks of the sculptures of flying geese it had installed in the high atrium of its flagship store. The artist, Michael Snow, was not happy with the modification and sued Eaton’s successfully for violating the “moral rights” he retained in his artwork. Snow v. Eaton’s Ltd., 70 CPR (2d) 105 (1982).
102. I use the term piracy not in the sense of limited sharing of copies but in the sense of selling large numbers of copies to seize the commercial value of the original.
103. The “anti-circumvention” provisions (sections 1201 et seq. of the Copyright Act) bar circumvention of access controls and technical protection measures. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca (accessed December 30, 2018).
104. “The ‘safe harbor’ provisions (section 512) protect service providers who meet certain conditions from monetary damages for the infringing activities of their users and other third parties on the net. … To receive these protections service providers must comply with the conditions set forth in Section 512, including ‘notice and takedown’ procedures that give copyright holders a quick and easy way to disable access to allegedly infringing content. Section 512 also contains provisions allowing users to challenge improper takedowns. Without these protections, the risk of potential copyright liability would prevent many online intermediaries from providing services such as hosting and transmitting user-generated content. Thus the safe harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the growth of the Internet as an engine for innovation and free expression.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
105. John Kennedy, “Lamar Smith Decides to Postpone SOPA ‘Indefintely,’” Silicon Republic, January 20, 2012.
106. Elaine Burke, “SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the Battle for Freedom on the Internet,” Silicon Republic, January 3, 2013.
107. Baker& Hostetler LLP, “The Impact of the TPP on Digital Rights Management,” legal opinion, posted January 2016, https://www.bakerlaw.com/files/uploads/Documents/News/Articles/LITIGATION/2016/Cohen-ECLP-January2016pg11-12.pdf.
108. Known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans Pacific Partnership or CPTPP. See Mike Masnick, “With the US out, Canada Gets Copyright out of TPP, and Moves Closer to Agreement,” TechDirt, November 13, 2017.
109. Erika Werner, Damian Paletta, and Seung Min Kim, “Trump Weighs Re-joining Trans-Pacific Partnership Amid Trade Dispute with China,” Washington Post, April 12, 2018.
110. Matt Lee, “GPL Version 3: Background to Adoption,” Free Software Foundation, June 9, 2005, https://www.fsf.org/news/gpl3.html.
111. Richard Stallman, communication with the author, April 2017.
112. Read, for example, about the Intel management system debate. Denis Carikli and Molly le Blanc, “The Intel Management Engine: An Attack on Computer Users’ Freedom,” Free Software Foundation, January 10, 2018, https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/the-management-engine-an-attack-on-computer-users-freedom.
113. Kyle Weins, “We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership,” Wired, April 21, 2015.
114. Jason Koebler, “Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors with Ukrainian Firmware,” Vice Motherboard, March 21, 2017.
115. Koebler, “Why American Farmers.”
116. Koebler, “Why American Farmers.”
117. Koebler, “Why American Farmers.”
118. Weins, “We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy.”
119. Weins, “We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy.”
120. Abigail Bessler, “Obama Signs a Bill ‘Unlocking’ Cell Phones,” CBS News, August 1, 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-signs-bill-unlocking-cellphones.
121. See “Measures Governments Can Use to Promote Free Software,” GNU Operating System, Gnu.org, https://gnu.org/philosophy/government-free-software.html.
122. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave, McMillan, 2015), 14.
123. Rifkin predicts that by 2030, the number of sensors connected to the internet will be 100 trillion. Sensors will be in the roads and public squares, in every store we walk past, in every product and shipping container, in cars and transportation systems, in every device and home appliance, in our clothes and eyeware, in our bodies, and in our children’s bodies. This is already happening.
124. John Chambers and Wim Elfrink, “The Future of Cities: The Internet of Everything Will Change How We Live,” Foreign Affairs, October 31, 2014.
125. Chambers and Elfrink, “The Future of Cities.”
126. The Matrix is a 1999 film in which artificial intelligence creates a virtual reality world to subdue human beings while actually milking their warehoused bodies as an energy source.
127. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 98, Kindle.
128. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 98–99.
129. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 98–99.
130. Alex Hern, “Facebook Is Chipping Away at Privacy—and My Profile Has Been Exposed,” The Guardian, June 29, 2016.
131. Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016), 49–50.
132. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 48.
133. Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Big Tech: The Return of Monopolies?,” April 18, 2018, video, https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/event/big-tech-return-monopolies. For a slightly different parsing, see Jonathan Taplin, “Is it Time to Break Up Google?,” New York Times, April 22, 2017, opinion page: “Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market.”
134. Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 81–82; Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 93.
135. Schiller, Digital Depression, 227.
136. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 31. That said, the two companies that currently dominate the digital ad market, Google and Facebook, were expected to make $39.9 billion and $21 billion, respectively, in US ad sales in 2018. Total US digital ad sales were expected to rise to $107 billion. Rani Molla, “Google’s and Facebook’s Share of the US Ad Market Could Decline for the First Time, Thanks to Amazon and Snapchat,” Recode, March 19, 2018.
137. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 36–37, citing various sources.
138. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 249. He makes the estimate for the year 2015.
139. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 123.
140. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 37.
141. Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Big Tech.”
142. Tim Higgins, “Tim Cooke’s $181 Billion Dollar Headache: Apple’s Cash Held Overseas,” Bloomberg News, July 22, 2015.
143. Nicole Goodkind, “NYC Taxi Drivers Are Killing Themselves and Some Blame Uber and Lyft,” Newsweek, March 30, 2018.
144. Ben Way, Jobaclypse: The End of Human Jobs and How Robots Will Replace Them (Ben Way, 2013), 132, Kindle; Randall Collins, “The End of Middle-Class Work: No More Escapes,” in Emmanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Giorgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun, eds., Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 51. Both Way and Collins are cited in Robert W. McChesney and John Nicols, People Get Ready: The Fight against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 20.
145. Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, 92.
146. See Nick Srnicek’s book for a full analysis of the process that might bring this about. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.
147. Businesses are already looking at these options. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 124.
148. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 125.
149. Caillie Millner, “Why We’re Invisible to Google Bus Riders,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 26, 2013.
150. Rob Wile, “Mark Zuckerberg Has Made More Money Than Anyone Else in 2017—Even Jeff Bezos,” Time, August 8, 2017.
151. Alana Semuels, “The ‘Black Hole’ That Sucks Up Silicon Valley’s Money,” The Atlantic, May 14, 2018.
152. Semuels, “The ‘Black Hole.’”
153. Semuels, “The ‘Black Hole.’”
154. Semuels, “The ‘Black Hole.’”
155. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 97.
156. “History of US Antitrust Law,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antitrust_law (accessed December 30, 2018).
157. “History of US Antitrust Law,” Wikipedia.
158. Cathrin Schaer, “Could the EU Really Break Up Facebook’s Monopoly?,” Handelsblatt Today, May 24, 2018, https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/eu-really-break-facebooks-monopoly-925261.
159. Schaer, “Could the EU.”
160. Schaer, “Could the EU.”
161. For a good description see, Quora, “What Is General Data Protection Regulation?,” Forbes, February 14, 2018.
162. David Dayen, “The US Government Is Finally Scrambling to Regulate Facebook,” The Intercept, April 24, 2018.
163. Kevin Dugan, “Street Artist Taunts Schumer over His Daughter’s Facebook Job,” New York Post, April 3, 2018.
164. Dugan, “Street Artist Taunts Schumer.”
165. See Timothy Snyder’s Chatham House talk comparing contemporary or postmodern authoritarianism with the modern authoritarianism of the 1930s. Timothy Snyder, “Chatham House Primer: Modern Authoritarianism,” video, published October 30, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMkIYCeybBs.
166. Snyder, On Tyranny, 11–12.
167. Snyder, On Tyranny, 12.
168. In a 1940 speech, Hitler stated that “Nationalism and socialism had to be redefined and they had to be blended into one strong idea to carry new strength which would make Germany great again”: David Evon, “Hitler and Trump: Common Slogans?,” Snopes.com, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-again, March 4, 2016.
169. Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). This version is a recent republication with an afterword by Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian.
170. Cass Sunstein, “It Can Happen Here,” New York Review of Books, June 28, 2018.
171. Andy Müller-Maguhn has said approximately the same thing in Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2012), 95.
172. Heather Brooke, “Inside the Secret World of Hackers,” The Guardian, August 24, 2011.
1. Harry Halpin, email to the author, August 31, 2018. Harry Halpin and Tunisian activist Slim Amamou hosted Julian Assange at the 2015 World Social Forum in Tunis. See https://towardfreedom.org/archives/activism/making-a-better-world-the-2015-world-social-forum-in-tunis.
2. Encryption had not yet taken off among them, though, making them vulnerable to crackdowns. In the Middle East, for example, activists used VIBER, an Israeli messaging app, rather than more secure alternative tools.
3. Jasmine Ryan, “Anonymous and the Arab Uprisings,” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2011.
4. Ryan, “Anonymous.”
5. Mattathias Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011.
6. Andrew Fleming, “Adbusters Spark Wall Street Protest,” Vancouver Courier, September 27, 2011.
7. “Anonymous Joins #OCUPYWALLST,” Adbusters, posted August 23, 2011, http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/anonymous-join.
8. “Occupy Movement,” Wikipedia, accessed July 30, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement.
9. Carmen Pérez-Lanzac, “Democracia Real Ya prepara una convocatoria mundial para el 15 de octubre,” El País, May 30, 2011.
10. Chris Barton, “‘Occupy Auckland’ Protest Speaks with Many Voices,” New Zealand Herald, October 29, 2011, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10762353.
11. Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal, “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education,” Dissent, Fall 2012, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-no-plan-the-slow-death-of-public-higher-education.
12. Cornel West, “Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street: It’s the Making of a US Autumn Responding to the Arab Spring,” interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, September 29, 2011, https://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/29/cornel_west_on_occupy_wall_street_its_the_makings_of_a_us_autumn_responding_to_the_arab_spring.
13. Hao Li, “Occupy Wall Street Protest Names Single Enemy: ‘Neoliberalism,’” International Business Times, October 15, 2011, https://www.ibtimes.com/occupy-wall-street-protest-names-single-enemy-neoliberalism-323631.
14. Mattathias Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011.
15. Roger Lowenstein, “Occupy Wall Street: It’s Not a Hippie Thing,” Bloomberg Business Week, October 27, 2011.
16. Shannon Bond, “Obama Extends Support for Protesters,” Financial Times, October 16, 2011.
17. “Occupy Movement,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement (accessed July 30, 2018).
18. Robert Pear, “Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds,” New York Times, October 25, 2011.
19. Li, “Occupy Wall Street Protest.”
20. Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018.
21. Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent.”
22. Aimee Picchi, “A $500 Surprise Expense Would Put Most Americans into Debt,” Moneywatch, January 12, 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-afford-a-500-emergency-expense, cited in Umair Haque, “Why America Is the First Poor Rich Country; Or, How American Collapse Is Made of a New Kind of Poverty,” Eudaimonia, May 23, 2018, https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-17f5a80e444a.
23. Leslie Albrecht, “One-Third of American Households Have Struggled to Afford Either Food, Shelter or Medical Care,” Marketwatch, September 27, 2017, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/one-third-of-american-households-cant-afford-food-shelter-or-medical-care-2017-09-27, cited in Haque, “Why America.”
24. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
25. David Harvey, “Technology and Post-Capitalism,” video, filmed September 25, 2017 at The World Transformed by Novara Media, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g18JoOZsoEMat.
26. Laurie Penny, “Protest by Consensus,” New Statesman, October 16, 2011.
27. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, recorded in Hervé Bourges, trans. B. R. Brewster, The Student Revolt: The Activists Speak (London: Panther Books, 1968), 97–107. This interview originally was published in Le Nouvel Observateur on May 20, 1968. The interview also can be found online at https://medium.com/@AM_HC/jean-paul-sartre-interviews-daniel-cohn-bendit-5cd9ef932514.
28. Lizzy Davies, “Occupy Movement: City-by-City Police Crackdowns So Far,” The Guardian, November 15, 2011; Tom Burgis, “Authorities Clear St. Paul’s Occupy Camp,” Financial Times, February 28, 2012.
29. “Occupy Homes,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Homes (accessed December 30, 2018). See also “Occupy Our Homes,” http://occupyourhomes.org (accessed December 30,2018).
30. See “Operation Anti-Security,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec (accessed December 30, 2018), and sources cited therein. See also Paul Carr, “Watch Out, LulzSec: The CIA Is Adept at Wiping Lulz Off Faces,” The Guardian, June 22, 2011.
31. Charles Arthur, “LulzSec Members Jailed for a String of Sophisticated Cyber-attacks,” The Guardian, May 16, 2013.
32. “Operation Anti-Security,” Wikipedia.
33. “Anonymous (group),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) (accessed December 30, 2018).
34. This is what Yascha Mounk, lecturer on political theory at Harvard, has called “illiberal democracy.” See Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
35. Harvey, “Technology and Post-Capitalism.”
36. For this primer, I am indebted to Samer Hassan, professor of computer science, Madrid, whom I interviewed at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, in March 2016.
37. Trebor Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism,” filmed at #PDF18, published June 18, 2018, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcPUARqRsVM.
38. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, eds., Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism—A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (New York: OR Books, 2016), 11–12.
39. Scholz and Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own, 12 (emphasis added).
40. Scholz and Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own, 12.
41. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
42. See “The Platform Conservatism Consortium,” Platform Conservatism Consortium, The New School, https://platform.coop/about/consortium.
43. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
44. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
45. Scholz and Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own, 210.
46. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
47. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
48. Chris Lehmann, “The Populist Morass: Why Liberal Policy Savants Deplore Rule by the People,” The Baffler no. 42 (November–December 2018):14.
49. “Co-operative Commonwealth Federation,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Co-operative-Commonwealth-Federation (accessed January 1, 2019).
50. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
51. See “Tool Library,” Farm Hack, http://farmhack.org/tools.
52. “The Free Farm Manifesto,” Farm Hack, http://farmhack.org/tools/free-farm-manifesto.
53. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
54. I learned about this experiment from Sean O’Brien, visiting fellow at the Yale Privacy Lab, at the March 2016 LibrePlanet conference. See the Anarcho Tech Collective website at https://thebasebk.org/anarcho-tech-collective.
55. See the Enspiral website at https://enspiral.com.
56. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
57. Scholz and Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own, 181.
58. Ben Kersey, “The Troubled History of Diaspora: The $200,000 ‘Facebook Killer’ Launched on Kickstarter,” Motherboard, October 8, 2012; Casey Newton, “Mastodon.social Is an Open-Source Twitter Competitor That’s Growing Like Crazy,” The Verge, April 4, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15177856/mastodon-social-network-twitter-clone.
59. Charley Locke, “Remember Ello? You Abandoned It, But Artists Didn’t,” Wired, May 17, 2016.
60. Casey Newton, “Ello Is the Doomed Utopia We Can’t Stop Building,” The Verge, September 30, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6874727/ello-is-the-doomed-utopia-we-cant-stop-building.
61. See the lists of projects on the Redecentralize.org website at https://redecentralize.org/interviews.
62. See “RSS,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS (accessed December 30, 2018).
63. See “GNU Social,” GNU Operating System, https://www.gnu.org/software/social. According to its website, GNU Social merged with the SatusNet project in 2013.
64. Katrina Brooker, “‘I Was Devastated’: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Invented the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets,” Vanity Fair, July 1, 2018.
65. Newton, “Mastodon.social.”
66. Harry Halpin, correspondence with the author, August 31, 2018.
67. “OwnCloud,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OwnCloud (accessed December 30, 2018). See also Steven Vaughan-Nicols, “OwnCLoud: Build Your Own or Manage Your Public Cloud Storage Services,” ZNet Edition US, October 11, 2012, https://www.zdnet.com/article/owncloud-build-your-own-or-manage-your-public-cloud-storage-services.
68. “Raspberry Pi,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi (accessed December 30, 2018).
69. The Free Software Foundation webpage on single-board computers warns readers that “Until the nonfree startup program is fully freed, these boards are useless in the free world.” “Single-Board Computers,” Free Software Foundation, May 15, 2013, https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers.
70. See the lists of projects on the Redecentralize.org website at https://redecentralize.org/interviews.
71. Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kastokis, “Peer-to-Peer: A New Opportunity for the Left,” Roar, January 12, 2017, https://roarmag.org/essays/peer-to-peer-bauwens-kostakis.
72. See the Freenet website at https://freenetproject.org.
73. See “Netsukuku,” Source Forge, https://sourceforge.net/projects/netsukuku.
74. “FAROO,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAROO (accessed December 30, 2018).
75. See “Osiris,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris_(software).
76. “Peercasting,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercasting (accessed December 30, 2018).
77. Specifically, a GPLv3 license. See “A Few Questions to Discover PeerTube,” PeerTube, https://joinpeertube.org/en/faq.
78. See “Own Your Memories,” Textile, https://www.textile.photos.
79. See the lists of projects on the Redecentralize.org website at https://redecentralize.org/interviews.
80. Zoe Corbyn, “Decentralisation: The Next Step for the World Wide Web,” The Guardian, September 8, 2018.
81. Bauwens and Kastokis, “Peer-to-Peer.”
82. Lehmann, “The Populist Morass.”
83. Carmela Troncoso, Marios Isaakidis, George Danezis, and Harry Halpin, “Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from Fifteen Years of Research and Deployment,” Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, no. 1 (January 2017): 404–426, https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/popets/popets2017.html.
84. Christopher Cannucciari, Banking on Bitcoin (Studio Gravitas Ventures, 2017).
85. Scholz, “The State of Platform Cooperativism.”
86. Louise Matsakis, “Minds Is the Anti-Facebook That Pays You for Your Time,” Wired, April 19, 2018.
87. Nigel Dollentas, “DTube: Steemit User Builds Foundations of a Decentralized YouTube,” BTC Manager, August 23, 2017, https://btcmanager.com/steemit-user-builds-decentralized-youtube.
88. See the Twister website at http://twister.net.co.
89. Corbyn, “Decentralisation.”
90. Jonathan Nieh, “Brave Browser’s ICO Raises $36 Million in Thirty Seconds,” CrowdFund Insider, June 2, 2017, https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2017/06/101301-brave-browsers-ico-raises-36-million-30-seconds.
91. Primavera de Filippi and Samer Hassan, “Blockchain Technology as a Regulatory Technology: from Code Is Law to Law Is Code,” First Mind Journal 21, no. 12 (December 5, 2016), http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7113.
92. Charles Hoskinson, “The Future Will Be Decentralized,” video, filmed at Tedx Talks Bermuda, December 4, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ufCT6lQcY.
93. Giulio Prisco, “W3C and MIT Media Lab Host First ‘Blockchain and the Web’ Workshop,” Bitcoin Magazine, July 8, 2016, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-w-c-and-mit-media-lab-host-first-blockchain-and-the-web-workshop-1467989496.
94. Mike Masnick, “EFF Resigns from W3C after DRM in HTML Is Approved in Secret Vote,” TechDirt, September 18, 2017.
95. See, for example, MIT Media Lab, public dialogue on DRM, video, filmed April 5, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3kfXtXRgk0; Richard Stallman, “The W3C’s Soul at Stake,” Free Software Foundation, posted May 2, 2013, https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/w3c-soul-at-stake; Cory Doctorow, “W3C, DRM and the Future of the Open Web,” boing boing, February 13, 2017, https://boingboing.net/2017/02/13/the-w3c-drm-and-future-of-th.html; Peter Bright, “Over Many Objections, W3C Approves DRM for HTML5,” Ars Technica, July 10, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/over-many-objections-w3c-approves-drm-for-html5. See also DefectivebyDesign, https://www.defectivebydesign.org.
96. See J. M. Porup, “A Battle Rages for the Future of the Web,” Ars Technica, February 12, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/future-of-the-www-timbl-drm.
97. MIT Media Lab, public dialogue on DRM.
98. See Porup, “A Battle Rages”; Masnick, “EFF Resigns.” Parties engaged in the debate pointed out that corporate members of W3C paid membership fees of approximately $80,000 but academic and nonprofit groups paid about $8,000.
99. MIT Media Lab, public dialogue on DRM.
100. Richard Stallman, correspondence with the author, September 2, 2018.
101. MIT Media Lab, public dialogue on DRM.
102. MIT Media Lab, public dialogue on DRM.
103. Masnick, “EFF Resigns.”
104. Brooker, “‘I Was Devastated.’”
105. Giulio Prisco, “The Internet Needs a Solid Re-decentralization: Tim Berners-Lee,” Crypto Insider, undated, https://cryptoinsider.21mil.com/internet-needs-solid-re-decentralization-tim-berners-lee.
106. Brooker, “‘I Was Devastated.’”
107. CSAIL, “Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s Next Project: A Platform That Gives Users Control of Their Data,” posted November 2, 2015, https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/web-inventor-tim-berners-lees-next-project-platform-gives-users-control-their-data. Berners-Lee’s “linked data” solution was one issue that helped to derail the W3C Social Web Working Group. Representatives from the Solid team pushed through standards such as Linked Data Notifications, while many others in the developer community preferred a nonlinked data solution. See Harry Halpin, “Semantic Insecurity: Security and the Semantic Web,” paper from the Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Society, Privacy, and the Semantic Web: Privacy and Technology, PrivOn@ISWC 2017, https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/semweb/privon2017.html.
108. CSAIL, “Web Inventor.”
109. Prisco, “W3C and MIT Media Lab Host.”
110. Brooker, “‘I Was Devastated.’”
111. Harry Halpin has criticized its design from a security and privacy point of view. See Halpin, “Semantic Insecurity.”
112. Prisco, “The Internet Needs.”
113. See Decentralized Web Summit, https://decentralizedweb.net/about.
114. Prisco, “The Internet Needs.”
115. See Decentralized Web Summit, https://decentralizedweb.net.
116. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20.
117. John Kennedy, “$1.4bn Investment in Blockchain Start-ups in Last Nine Months, Says PwC Expert,” Silicon Republic, November 2016, http://linkis.com/Ayjzj.
118. Rob Marvin, “IBM, Microsoft, Are Building Our Blockchain Future: and They’re Not Afraid to Butt Heads,” PC Magazine, August 4, 2016, https://www.pcmag.com/article/346729/ibm-microsoft-are-building-our-blockchain-future-and-theyr.
119. Michael Halloran, “Blockchain, Mobile and the Internet of Things,” Insight, March 17, 2016, https://insights.samsung.com/2016/03/17/block-chain-mobile-and-the-internet-of-things.
120. “Perspectives: Break Through with Blockchain: How Can Financial Institutions Leverage a Powerful Technology?,” Deloitte, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/financial-services/articles/blockchain-series-deloitte-center-for-financial-services.html (accessed August 3, 2018).
121. “Blockchain Explored by 90% of Major North American and European Banks, Survey Finds,” CCN, October 26, 2016, https://www.ccn.com/blockchain-explored-90-major-north-american-european-banks-survey-finds. Blockchain is especially interesting to the financial industry because it is capable of running smart contracts that can execute all kinds of financial transactions, such as options, swaps, coupon bond payments, cross-border transfers, the clearing of over-the-counter derivatives, purchases using escrow, and many other kinds of settlements. Adam Hayes, “Is Ethereum More Important Than Bitcoin?,” Investopedia, January 4, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032216/ethereum-more-important-bitcoin.asp.
122. Hayes, “Is Ethereum.”
123. Frank Chaparro, “97% of All Bitcoins Are Held in 4% of Addresses,” Business Insider, January 11, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-addresses-2018-1?op=1.
124. Chaparro, “97% of All Bitcoins.”
125. Abhishek Singh, “What Is the Major the Limitation of Blockchain Technology?,” Quora, updated January 2, 2018, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-major-limitation-of-blockchain-technology?share=1.
126. Elliott Krause, “A Fifth of All Bitcoin Is Missing: These Crypto Hunters Can Help,” Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2018.
127. See, for example, Neil Gandal and Tyler Moore, “Bitcoin Price Manipulation PutsTrust in Cryptos at Risk,” Asia Times, June 27, 2018, http://www.atimes.com/article/bitcoin-price-manipulation-puts-trust-in-cryptos-at-risk. See also Sue Halpern, “Bitcoin Mania,” New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018.
128. See, for example, The Next System Project, https://thenextsystem.org; The Zeitgeist Movement, https://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com; David Bollier, “The Future Is a Pluriverse,” posted December 5, 2017, http://www.bollier.org/blog/future-pluriverse; The New Economics Foundation, https://neweconomics.org; P2P Foundation, https://p2pfoundation.net; Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org; and a host of like-minded discussions.
129. Joe Guinan and Gar Alperovitz, “Democracy and Decentralization: UK Labour Leaders Reframe Socialism for the Twenty-first Century,” Truthout, February 25, 2016.
130. “Election Results 2017: Jeremy Corbyn Says May ‘Underestimated’ Voters,” BBC News, June 9, 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2017-40208861. Labour won 262 seats to the Conservatives’ 318, which left the Conservatives eight seats short of a majority and having to form a coalition government with a small fringe party, the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists (DUP).
131. Guinan and Alperovitz, “Democracy and Decentralization.”
132. “Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Councils Should Run Local Services,’” BBC News, February 6, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35508740.
133. Guinan and Alperovitz, “Democracy and Decentralization.”
134. Guinan and Alperovitz, “Democracy and Decentralization.”
1. Anne Koch, “These Spanish Activists Have Taken Punishing Bankers into Their Own Hands,” The Nation, November 14, 2016.
2. Like SOPA in the United States, the “Sinde” law allowed an administrative commission to shut down, without judicial supervision, any web page that showed links to or allowed irregular downloading of copyrighted content. “Anti Austerity Movement in Spain,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-austerity_movement_in_Spain (accessed December 30, 2018).
3. Suzanne Daley, “Leading the Charge against Spain’s Mortgage Crisis,” New York Times, December 20, 2013.
4. Ada Colau, “Ada Colau, Barcelona’s New Mayor, on Spain’s Political Revolution,” interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, video, June 5, 2015, https://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/5/from_occupying_banks_to_city_hall.
5. Colau interview.
6. See “Ada Colau llama criminal al representante de la banca en el congreso,” published on February 6, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz175s8gjs0. For translation, listen to the Colau interview.
7. Daley, “Leading the Charge.”
8. Colau interview.
9. Colau interview.
10. Colau interview.
11. Colau interview.
12. Colau interview.
13. Sol Trumbo Vila and Matthijs Peters, “The Bail-Out Business,” Transnational Institute, February 22, 2017, https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-bail-out-business.
14. See Koch, “These Spanish Activists.” See also Trumbo Vila and Peters, “The Bail-Out Business.”
15. See Trumbo Vila and Peters, “The Bail-Out Business.”
16. For more details, see Koch, “These Spanish Activists.”
17. See the @15MpaRato website at https://15mparato.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/story-citizen-lawsuit.
18. See Koch, “These Spanish Activists.”
19. This conversation between Jean-Paul Sartre and Daniel Cohn-Bendit was first published in Le Nouvel Observateur on May 20, 1968. The translation by B. R. Brewster was collected in Hervé Bourges, ed., The Student Revolt: The Activists Speak (London: Panther Books, 1968). It has also been published online at Medium at https://medium.com/@AM_HC/jean-paul-sartre-interviews-daniel-cohn-bendit-5cd9ef932514.
20. Larry Lessig, Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress (New York: Twelve, 2011). See also Larry Lessig, “#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt,” The Blog, HuffPost, October 5, 2011, updated December 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/occupywallst-then-occupyk_b_995547.html. Lessig quotes Thoreau: “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root.”
21. Trumpland, directed by Michael Moore, distributed by Michael Moore, 2016.
22. I was thinking of Caravaggio’s Cardsharps, painted around 1594. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardsharps_(Caravaggio).
23. See, for example, Reilly Jones, “A Critique of Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Extropy 17, vol. 8. no. 2 (1996).
24. Cristobal Montoro, the Minister of Housing at the relevant time.
25. With the exception of France, no other country had a greater proportion of its population volunteer in Spain than Canada. Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada, Speech on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion Monument, Ottawa, October 20, 2001, http://archive.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=1331.
26. See Ross Tieman, “Barcelona: Smart City Revolution in Progress,” Financial Times, October 25, 2017.
27. Decode is one of the projects the Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty (BITS) is working on with the city of Amsterdam and twelve other partners. It is exploring solutions using blockchain and cryptography that are supposed to give people better control over the data they generate in their homes and cities by setting rules about who can access it, for what purpose, and on what terms. As Francesca Bria, the chief technology and digital innovation officer of the city of Barcelona, has described it, Decode conceives of data as a shared resource to which citizens can contribute, while being able to access it themselves as a common good without proprietary restrictions, to solve problems like traffic congestion and air pollution. The idea is that citizens will set their own anonymity level so that they cannot be identified without explicit consent, and they will keep ownership and control over data even after they share it for the common good. The common data infrastructure, in turn, will be open to local companies, coops, and social organizations to create long-term public value. Francesca Bria, “Our Data Is Valuable: Here’s How We Can Take That Value Back,” The Guardian, April 5, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/05/data-valuable-citizens-silicon-valley-barcelona. The BITS project has been harshly criticized by citizens and activists. See also the trenchant civic criticism of Google’s “smart city” project in Toronto, Canada. Ava Kofman, “Google’s ‘Smart City of Surveillance’ Faces Resistance in Toronto,” The Intercept, November 13, 2018.
28. See Tieman, “Barcelona.” See also Gemma Galdon, “Technological Sovereignty? Democracy, Data and Governance in the Digital Era,” CCCBLab, posted April 25, 2017, http://lab.cccb.org/en/technological-sovereignty-democracy-data-and-governance-in-the-digital-era.
29. See Paul Mason, “Technology and Post-Capitalism,” video, filmed at The World Transformed by Novara Media, September 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g18JoOZsoEM.
30. I later learned that the project ran into challenges in its execution. The giant tech company Cisco became the city’s main industry partner, and activists and political allies felt it had become a disaster. The experiment shows the kind of radical agenda citizens might attempt to push through when they gain control of their democratic processes. However, it is also a cautionary tale about how easily the smart city model can work against citizens’ interests and raises the question of whether democracies should try to implement it at all. Google’s experiments in Toronto offer a similar cautionary tale. See Kofman, “Google’s ‘Smart City of Surveillance.’”
31. “The Former General Director of the IMF Rodrigo Rato Went to Jail,” Quebec Telegram, October 26, 2017, https://qtelegram.com/the-former-general-director-of-the-imf-rodrigo-rato-went-to-jail/1600.
32. See Steve Rushton, “Rato Finito: Spanish Citizens Send Most Corrupt Banker-Politician to Jail,” PopularResistance.org, posted March 25, 2017, https://popularresistance.org/rato-finito-spanish-citizens-send-most-corrupt-banker-politician-to-jail/, for all the facts in this paragraph.
33. Alexander Stille, “Not So Funny,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018.
34. Stille, “Not So Funny”; Gianroberto Casaleggio and Beppe Grillo, Siamo in guerra: Per una nuova politica (We Are at War: For a New Politics) (Milan: Chiarelettere, 2011).
35. Stille, “Not So Funny,” citing Oliviero Ponte di Pino, Comico e politico: Beppe Grillo e la crisi della democrazia (Comic and Politician: Beppe Grillo and the Crisis of Democracy) (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2014).
36. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
37. J.H., “The Economist Explains Italy’s Five Star Movement,” The Economist, October 24, 2016.
38. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
39. Tim Parks, “Italy: Who Ever Wins Won’t Govern,” New York Review of Books Daily, February 14, 2018.
40. J.H., “The Economist Explains”; Stille, “Not So Funny.”
41. Jan-Werner Müller, “Italy: The Bright Side of Populism?,” New York Review of Books, June 8, 2018.
42. Stille, “Not So Funny,” citing Roberto Biorcio and Paolo Natale, Politica a Cinque Stelle: Idee, storia e strategie del movimento di Grillo (Five-Star Politics: Ideas, History and Strategies of the Grillo Movement) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013).
43. Müller, “Italy.”
44. Stille, “Not So Funny,” citing an article by Ponte di Pino from September 2017 in the online magazine Doppiozero.
45. Stille, “Not So Funny,” citing di Pino, Comico e politico. In 2018 more members were purged for failing to have give a third of their salary to the party’s microcredit fund for small businesses, as required by Grillo.
46. Stille, “Not So Funny,” citing Marco Canestrari and Nicola Biondo, Supernova: Com’è stato ucciso il movimento Cinque Stelle (Supernova: How the Five Star Movement Was Killed) (StreetLib ebook).
47. In 2017. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
48. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
49. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
50. Müller, “Italy.”
51. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
52. Stille, “Not So Funny.”
53. Stille, “Not So Funny,” for all of the facts in the paragraph.
54. Formerly the Northern League.
55. Sofia Lotto Persio, “Italy’s New Government Is Steve Bannon’s Dream Come True,” Newsweek, June 1, 2018.
56. Mark Hume, “Dark Windows Illuminate Problems in Vancouver’s Real Estate Market,” Globe & Mail, updated May 17, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/dark-windows-illuminate-problems-in-vancouvers-real-estate-market/article31822833.
57. In a recent dialogue about the experience and effects of the political uprisings of 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bendit juxtaposed the idea of a “a flexibility dictated by capitalism” and “a flexibility enacted by human beings themselves.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie, “1968: Power to the Imagination,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018.
1. “End of War Graffiti in Berlin,” film clip, http://www.budgetfilms.com/clip/12051 (accessed December 30, 2018).
2. Postwar photo of graffiti on the walls of the Chancellery, undated, in Hans Christian Adam, Berlin: Portrait of a City (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), 329.
3. Deborah Cole, “Berlin Woman Revives Red Army Ghosts in Reichstag Graffiti,” Times of Israel, January 11, 2018, https://www.timesofisrael.com/berlin-woman-revives-red-army-ghosts-in-reichstag-graffiti.
4. Cole, “Berlin Woman,” for all of the facts in this paragraph.
5. “Berlin Wall and Migration,” Mass Migration as a Travel Business, https://www.business-of-migration.com/migration-processes/other-regions/berlin-wall-and-migration (accessed January 1, 2019).
6. Klaus Wiegrefe, “Who Ordered the Construction of the Berlin Wall?,” Der Spiegel, May 30, 2009.
7. Wiegrefe, “Who Ordered.”
8. Wiegrefe, “Who Ordered.”
9. Hans-Hermann Hertle, “The Berlin Wall Story: Biography of a Monument” (Berlin: Verlag, 2011), 39.
10. “Berlin Wall,” History.com, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/berlin-wall-built (accessed December 30, 2018).
11. Hertle, “The Berlin Wall Story,” 42.
12. Hertle, “The Berlin Wall Story,” 44.
13. John Vinocur, “Soviet and East Germans Sign an Economic Pact,” New York Times, October 6, 1979.
14. Felix Denk and Sven von Thulen, Der Klang der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2014), 247, quoting DJ Clé.
15. These facts about Friedrichshain were gleaned through observations and conversations with two residents of the neighborhood, artist Andrea Neuman and her partner, over an evening I shared with them and Heidi Boghosian (former executive director of the American National Lawyers’ Guild) at a local restaurant in the area.
16. Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manfesto,” 1993, https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/16.
17. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence (accessed December 30, 2018).
18. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, New Series 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968):1243–1248.
19. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1245.
20. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1245, citing J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).
21. Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” 1246.
22. Andreas Tzortzis, “One Wall Down, Thousands to Paint,” New York Times, March, 8, 2007.
23. Johnston, Jules, “Donald Trump Kisses Vladimir Putin on Wall of Lithuanian Restaurant,” Politico, May 14, 2016.
24. Lauren Said-Moorhouse, “Donald Trump and Boris Johnson Pucker Up in Street Art,” CNN, May 24, 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/24/europe/donald-trump-boris-johnson-street-art-kissing.
25. Taly Krupkin, “Graffiti of Trump Passionately Kissing Putin Goes Viral,” Haaretz, May 18, 2016.
26. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men.”
27. Timothy C. May, “The Cyphernomicon,” version 0.666, September 10, 1994, http://www.kreps.org/hackers/overheads/11cyphernervs.pdf.
28. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, about the fallacy of nuclear deterrence, depicts a nuclear first-strike attack ordered by a deranged US general, and the comic attempts of the president’s war cabinet to stop it. When they summon the Soviet ambassador, they learn the Soviet Union has a “doomsday device” that will launch nuclear weapons against any ‘first strike” and cannot be overridden by human command. This fact is supposed to ensure deterrence, except that they omitted to tell the Americans. Peter Sellers plays the president, a nearly unfazeable RAF exchange officer, and the mad nuclear expert and former Nazi, Dr. Strangelove.
29. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (Project Gutenberg ebook, 2008), Kindle. Free download at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101.
30. See Thomas Frank’s excellent book, Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016), especially chapter 9, “The Blue State Model,” and chapter 10, “The Innovation Class.” Frank writes: “Innovation liberalism is a ‘liberalism of the rich,’ to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society’s wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy—a system where everyone gets an equal chance and the truly talented get to rise. Once that requirement is satisfied—once diversity has been achieved and the brilliant people of all races and genders have been identified and credentialed—this species of liberal can’t really conceive of any further grievance against the system. The demands of ordinary working-class people, Gruman says, are unpersuasive to them.” Frank, Listen, Liberal, 196.
31. See the following articles, among many on the topic: Tory Newmyer, “With Uber’s New Hire, Obama’s Alumni Invade Silicon Valley,” Fortune, August 19, 2014; Juliet Eilperin, “Why Silicon Valley Is the New Revolving Door for Obama Staffers,” Washington Post, February 27, 2015; Noah Deponte Smith, “Eric Holder and the New Revolving Door,” National Review, July 21, 2016.
32. I exaggerate, but see Frank, Listen, Liberal, 201–201, 231, and 194. See also David Dayen, “The Android Administration: Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship with the Obama White House, in Two Charts,” The Intercept, April 22, 2016.
33. Frank, Listen, Liberal, 201. See Brody Mullins, “Google Makes the Most of Its Close Ties with the White House,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015, and Google’s response reported in Paul Sawyers, “Google Responds to Wall Street Journal Allegations,” Venture Beat, March 201, 2015, https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/27/google-responds-to-wsj-allegations-microsoft-visited-the-white-house-more-than-us.
34. See discussion of this topic in Molly Sauter, The Coming Storm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 137–140.
35. Author’s interview with an anonymous Anon.
36. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 63.
37. Gabriella Coleman, The Hacker Wars: The Battlefield Is the Internet, directed by Vivian Lesnick Weisman, a Vivian Lesnick Weisman film, 2014. See http://thehackerwars.com.
38. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 68.
39. Jasmine Ryan, “Anonymous and the Arab Uprisings,” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2011.
40. Ryan, “Anonymous.”
41. Ayesha Kazmi, “How Anonymous Emerged to Occupy Wall Street,” The Guardian, September 27, 2011.
42. From an Anonymous press release quoted in full in Abby Zimet, “OpWisconsin: Anonymous Takes Down Koch Brothers,” Common Dreams, February 28, 2011.
43. See “Operation Anti-Security,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec (accessed January 1, 2019), and sources cited therein. See also Paul Carr, “Watch out, LulzSec: The CIA Is Adept at Wiping Lulz off Faces,” The Guardian, June 22, 2011.
44. Charles Arthur, “LulzSec Members Jailed for a String of Sophisticated Cyber-attacks,” The Guardian, May 16, 2013.
45. “Operation Anti-Security,” Wikipedia; Josh Halliday, “Serious Organised Crime Agency Takes Down Website after Hacking Attack,” The Guardian, June 21, 2011.
46. “Operation Anti-Security,” Wikipedia.
47. Andrew Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers (New York: Plume, 2013), 215–216.
48. Arthur, “LulzSec Members Jailed.”
49. See “LulzSec,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec (accessed January 1, 2019).
50. See hqanon, “Being an Anonymous Hacker: In the Eyes of Jeremy Hammond,” January 1, 2015, Anonhq.com, https://anonhq.com/anonymous-hacker-eyes-jeremy-hammond.
51. Mike Masnick, “LulzSec Jeremy Hammond Pleads Guilty to CFAA Charges; Faces Ten Years,” TechDirt, May 28, 2013.
52. “Anonymous (group),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) (accessed January 1, 2019).
53. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 141.
54. US Code, title 18, section 1030.
55. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 197.
56. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 142.
57. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 144.
58. Ryan J. Reilly, “Loading Koch Industries Website Too Many Times in One Minute Just Cost This Truck Driver $183,000,” HuffPost, December 2, 2013.
59. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Radical Right (New York: Anchor Books, 2017).
60. Reilly, “Loading Koch Industries.”
61. Sauter, The Coming Storm, 144.