thus 2014, the year of the million autists uprising, the year of the
largest reddit circlejerk in human history, the year rascist shitposting
on 4chan crippled the internet, the year of linux on the desktops when
everyone stopped using them. and the second coming of the cyber warriors
when we donned our tinfoil anti-nsa armour, tipped our fedoras and
challenged the agents to a battle of our wits.

we anunmus
no forgiv
no forget
expect us

divided by 0, united as 1

On 02/01/14 16:33, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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