appropriating technology

this is the talk i delivered at the dialogue on democracy colloquium held yesterday in honour of the life of bob everton. i post it here for those of you who were unable to attend, or who are just interested in what i had to say there.

Appropriating Technology: Security, Internet Services and the Struggle

Notes for a Coloquium, May 6th 2005

First off, I would like to thank-the organizers for welcoming me here today – I can’t think of a better way to honour our friend and fellow activist, Bob Everton, than a participatory forum on the subjects of struggle that he knew best. It was both academically and politically that my life intersected with Bob’s over the years. He was completing his PhD in the Communications Department at SFU when I was doing my undergrad in the same Department, we both lived in East Vancouver for many years and participated in many of the same organizations and actions during that time, and Bob was a familiar audience-member at many Flying Folk Army shows. In short, we were members of the same community in struggle, and thus built a friendship based on those things in common.

When Bob was returning from Windsor, I did not find out through a phone call or email, but because the Resist! Collective received an application from him for an account on our system with a comment letting us know that he was moving back to Vancouver a couple months down the road. For those of you who don’t know, Resist! emerged from TAO Vancouver about three years ago and provides email services, mailing lists, webspace and blog hosting to individual activists and their organizations around the world – and it is this work and it’s place in movement organizing i am going to talk about today.

While Resist! is the service most Vancouver-based activists are familiar with we are certainly not the only service of our kind, and we are part of an informal network that includes Riseup.net, Mutualaid.org, Interactivist.net, and the old TAO crew – now known as OAT – it is on this handful of servers that a large share of North America’s radical communications traffic occurs on – each of us hosting thousands of users and their projects. Funding to run our boxes comes from a sliding scale user-donation model, and each of our organizations is run by small collectives of well-known activists operating by consensus. None of us utilize paid staff, though the donations we receive are generally enough to pay for bandwidth and hardware, and the day to day work of administering servers, approving accounts, setting up domains and so forth are carried out by volunteers.

Although people often think of us as the activist-hotmail, we really don’t see ourselves that way, nor do we hand out accounts indiscriminately – instead requiring applications for service to come with some detail about the individual and their activist involvement. We do this for two reasons 1) to ensure that the people using our services are on our side and 2) to preserve the bandwidth and space for projects worthwhile to our overall goals which include a pretty radical overhaul of society. There are people who do complain, both about our request for donations and about our approval process for applications, and some people have refused because of these things to move over from their hotmail and yahoo accounts – preferring instead to use these so-called free services.

I think that is unfortunate and this is where I get to the heart of what Bob Everton’s work in participatory media, democracy, and security come to…. why services like Resist! are essential to the struggle for a better world, and why individuals like myself have spent close to a decade – since the advent of the popular internet really – providing those services. The reality is, “Free Services” are not free – they are not free as in free beer and they are definitely not free in the sense of freedom – and the proliferation and attraction of these networks has real potential to damage our organizing abilities if we continue to rely on them. When we use these “free” services we not only give up our personal media space, our privacy and security, but our belief that we have a right to those things is eroded in the quest for affordable computer access.

We know that when we sign up for services we are giving our name and information to any number of direct mailing companies, but the reality is we are also giving our name, information and any data traffic assigned to us to the fbi, to the rcmp or to any other law enforcement agency that has a reason to ask for it. Hotmail and Yahoo were among the companies who willingly signed on to the now-defunct US government program Carnivore (a program designed to collect information about individual data traffic), and after 9-11 there were well-founded rumours that both companies allowed the FBI to blackbox the entirety of their mail systems. Blackboxing refers to a parallel computer system set up alongside a legit system, with the aim of collecting any and all information that passes through it – for later analysis and storage. This type of action has been compounded by an easing of wiretap and data-monitoring laws in the US and Canada which make it easier for governments to snoop utilizing these methods in a fairly indiscriminate fashion – often without warrants – and particularly when corporations open the door under the guise of protecting democracy.

In Canada there has been a white paper in discussion that is moving to a bill (check the status) dubbed the “Lawful Access” act which aims to collect wide-swaths of data about Canadian Internet users and would force internet service providers to keep logs and monitor for criminal use of their systems. If you have followed activism and IT for the past few years, you will know that the number one thing that law enforcement comes looking for in indiscriminate searches – is log files…. Indymedia, TAO and Infoshop have all been asked to produce log files showing their data traffic in a number of instances related to what the police say is possible criminal behaviour. Log files may or may not show who a user posting stories or comments is, or where they are located (or at least posted from) which is why they are of interest to law enforcement – and one way that activist servers have tried to get around this curiosity is by refusing to keep log files. Resist! for example, keeps no user log files, on any given day we could not tell you who has accessed our system and when – and although that can make challenges for system administration – it promises our users a layer of security they will not get from most other email providers. The Lawful Access Act would make it illegal for organizations like ours to refuse to collect log files and user data from each user – just in case the police ever wanted it. Lawful Access would also require that services like ours allow law enforcement to set up data monitoring hardware without search warrants, the idea being to put Canadian laws in step with already-existing US and British data surveillance legislation.

There are, of course, numerous examples of how this information is used against activism. Almost ever major summit post-Seattle has involved the RCMP or the FBI demanding log files and computer records from activist organizations. We have seen a crack-down on activist media projects such as indymedia and infoshop.org and the jailing of Sherman Austin from raisethefirst.com for materials posted on his web server. Many college and university activists have found their computer access blocked or refused after using their institution-based email accounts for organizing purposes. In the case of local activists David Barbarash and Darren Thurston, the RCMP went to their internet service providers (one of whom was VCN) with warrants that all traffic to their accounts be simultaneously diverted to an RCMP email system for analysis, as part of their investigation. As the technology has grown and morphed, so have investigative techniques designed to utilize the massive data trail that we create for ourselves each time we log in.

And this is where Resist! and services like it come in. As longtime activists, some of whom have encountered the intense scrutiny of the state at various times in our lives, we understood the value in appropriating the technology tools created by corporations and the state, and turning those into tools that were accessible and useful to people involved in grassroots organizing. A major part of our usefullness/functionality is our desire to create accessible secure workspaces and take principled stands against state surveillance and privacy encroachments as necessary. This work not only requires good planning on the technical end, but a political commitment to take risks as necessary – to host projects that are considered illegal under the Patriot Act, to be legally prepared in the event of search warrants or court orders, and to plan to lose as much information about our users on a day to day basis that we can. Resist! sees itself as part of the continuum of struggle and the projects we host reflect that – from the very community oriented “name some organization” to the earth liberation front – our work is responsive to those working for social change on all levels, which reflects the strength of radical media services owned by radicals. It is for these reasons that we ask that people seriously consider supporting the Resist! project and others like it, rather than allowing the “free” providers to use you as fodder for advertising, and to hand the cops the keys to your electronic profile.

—

When I set up Bob’s new Resist! account in 2003 I had no idea that a short time later we would be hosting his memorial site as well, and it was in fact the first time we have ever hosted a memorial site for a fallen comrade. Bob’s resistance and his work have been inspiring to the people he encountered the world over, and his commitment to supporting community-based projects no matter how difficult they could be is a lesson i wish to always carry with me as I carry forward in the struggle. Although reliance on communications technology is a sketchy proposition at best in an era of potential ecological collapse, it is what we have to work with right now – the tools we have at our disposal to dismantle the system in which we live. Resist! aligns itself with the resistance around the world and we honestly believe it is only in creating “free” spaces will we ever find freedom – only in supporting our own community services will we ever develop the systems we need to support the struggle.