I went to the 30th annual Chaos Communications Congress.

I had known about the Congress since I was a young teen but because of the rules
surrounding photography, without being there you just don't know what really goes
on.

Although I cannot ever say whether this Congress was special, something about it
felt historic.

It was at a time when the people were beginning to wake up. When the abuses of
the NSA, and more generally the Five Eyes Alliance, went from the wild ramblings
of conspiracy theorists to words printed in the daily newspaper.

I was there when Julian Assange spoke by video link of the obligations of
the system administrators who watch over these machines of oppression.

When I heard him begin to speak, whatever I had been doing before lost it's
importance. Before even knowing who it was that was talking, I was drawn in by
the power and compassion in his words. As I found myself crowding in around the
laptop which streamed the speech to the now-silent room and it was then that I
knew what it must have felt like when, not 80 years ago, people stood silently
around their radio sets, realizing that the war had begun.

I was there when Jacob Appelbaum presented newly published leaks which showed the
Five Eyes to be even more dark and ambitious than I could have believed.

I had imagined the them as a group of passive data collectors. Tapping wires,
collecting phone calls and reading email. I had a romantic image of them
stopping once we just began to encrypt all data. Somehow I had convinced myself
that they would simply recognize that the insecurity was gone and their job was
over.

This weekend I was forced to face the reality that it was never about the
information, it's about the control. The compromise and virus development, the use
of third party computers to attack victim networks, the derailing of efforts to
build secure systems and even the intentional planting of security
vulnerabilities. Taken together it added up to one thing, a deliberate campaign
of Invasion and Occupation, all so that their flag, whatever it may be, would
secretly fly inside of every electronic device in the world.

As these revelations began to hit home, I was struck by the historical
significance of the time and place I was in. Here I was, standing on ground
which had only one lifetime ago been The Third Riche, and as the people were just
becoming aware of the new war, it had arguably become the intellectual capital of
The Free World.

I was there when the terrible news broke of the bombings in Russia. As the country
which had bravely chosen to protect Edward Snowden was made powerless to protect
even it's own citizens and as the British and American media were given some
distraction from the breaking news about their own intelligence agencies, my
conspiratorial mind could not help but see why so many governments were afraid of
letting Snowden in.

This weekend I was dragged back to a world which I thought I had left. In my late
teens, I had taken it upon myself to investigate every conspiracy theory, every
crazy alien story and every piece of disinformation which sat about the Internet.
As a bright eyed ambitious kid with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, I was
cautioned by a wise history teacher. He said I should beware of knowing everything,
for to know how the world works would make me cynical like he was.

Sometimes in a dark place, I envy the naive innocence of the people I see in
passing. Their life defined through their job, their car, their clothes, their
phone, the TV and their husband or wife. But if ever there was a blue pill which
would make the truth go away, so that I could be like them again, would I take it?
For better or worse, the answer has always been no.

I was there, behind the veil of the photography ban, I saw the swimming pool filled
with styrofoam peanuts with people jumping in and playing around. I saw the tubes
which snaked all over the building, where people could send messages with compressed
air from vacuum cleaners. I saw the projects done by the various hacker groups, I saw
the quad-copters, the 3d printers, the lights, the music, the artwork and the play.
I visited the coffee nerds table, brewed my own Saturday morning coffee and learned
about a different type of coffee press. Everywhere I went there was an ora of love,
trust and commonality and even though we all knew the stakes were high, it felt as
though we were on the right side of history. It felt as though we had the power to
create the society we wanted to live in, the power to reach into the heart of what
is seemingly such a hopeless situation and just change it, by doing nothing other
than that for which we were born.


tl;dr I went to a meeting and it seemed important