Deep Lab - Art and Hacking in the Post-Snowden Age
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| Part Number | 53 | |
| Number of Parts | 177 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:31
I grew up with the internet very much evolving with me socially and it's only been more recently that I feel like the ideas and control of the internet have drastically
00:44
changed and there's this awareness of who you are online can be found out and impact your real life. A lot of people see the internet as like the last free frontier but that's totally
01:01
not true. We're so dependent on sort of corporate infrastructure at this point. Infrastructure is something that's sort of designed to be ignored and it's something that people tend to only notice when it's not working and in some very literal physical
01:24
ways and in other kind of more abstract ways there is something about the internet as it is right now that is not working. This week I would really like to try and figure out what that thing is and maybe figure
01:45
out what to do about it and I feel like this is a group of people who might be able to help do that.
02:04
Hi everyone, I'm Addie Wagenknecht, I'm Jillian York, and we're here to talk about DeepLab which is a collaborative I founded in 2013 of researchers, artists, writers, engineers, curators, and cultural producers who are interested in surveillance, social hacking, and big data aggregation.
02:23
I was just lucky enough to be invited. DeepLab is composed of people who are both experts in their field but also in creating avenues so that we as a society can embrace the complexities of encryption. The idea being that I personally believe that hacking is deeply stigmatized socially
02:43
so we constantly see this image of the hacker as being someone that has a black hoodie on that's breaking into the bank or it's a terrorist and a criminal and it's this idea of challenging and circumventing this image to people that are visible users so that we can openly embrace it in positive ways.
03:03
These complexities like PGP, VPNs, OTR, this sort of thing, Tor, I think that they're a mechanism of our culture and since the online manifests itself now, IRL, the Supreme Currency is our data and our information.
03:20
So if we're not fluent in these technologies and these tools in order to communicate, we cannot defend each other. These are all the women that are part of DeepLab at the moment. So Jillian, myself, Ingrid Burdien, Alison Birch, Ruta Sandvik, Maddie Varner, Claire
03:44
Evans, Harlow Holmes, Jen Lowe, Julia Kigensky, Lindsay Howard, Kate Crawford, Marla and Simone Brown. So I'm an artist and it took me quite a long time to be okay with that because
04:01
there's so many preconceived notions about what an artist can be and more so my friends who are hackers and programmers have always called me an artist but my friends that are hackers have always called me a hacker and a programmer so I felt like I kind of fell into this gray area between the two. This is a piece called Asymmetric Love which I developed in 2012.
04:25
It has some CCTV cameras and it plays with this idea of the ubiquitous surveillance right and this idea especially in Europe coming from America as an American is something that we constantly see everywhere as a chandelier so playing with this very common form as
04:43
sort of something as a common of oppression in Western society. I'm also really interested in atypical notions of hacking so social hacks, gender hacks. How do you take or translate events that never actually happen but rather is the truth of what is happening?
05:02
So a lot of my works deal with contemporary issues. Optimization of parenthood is this robotic arm which reacts to a baby crying and controls the speed of the bassinet based on the speed of the child's crying. It's about kind of circumnavigating these really monotonous tasks around parenting.
05:25
Also this is Kilohydra. It's kind of a play on a black box. The black box is defined as a device which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs without any knowledge of its internal workings and the implementation is completely
05:42
opaque and so what I really wanted to kind of translate with this piece is the idea of what a black box is, right? So I have these custom PCBs I designed and ethernet cables on the front and it's this very aesthetic, superficial piece but the only person that can really see what is behind
06:06
it is a person who owns it. So in that way it's very much like a node to open source culture and the ability to hack because that's the way you truly own something so you reveal kind of the back door and the workings when you remove the piece from the wall.
06:22
So I don't really know what to call myself. I mean I guess I'm an activist, a writer, a poet but mostly what I do is you know those people that, parents mostly, that try to sneak like vegetables into their children's food through creative means, for example trying to put broccoli into chocolate, that's what I do.
06:41
Not literally but in trying to get my message across I try to find new creative ways to do that and so I work on a number of projects. I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I helped develop our surveillance self-defense project with launch last fall and now I'm launching a new project called Online Censorship which tracks corporate censorship on the internet and ultimately you know I feel like I said
07:02
I don't really know what to call myself and so what I do is basically trying to find ways to think about the people who unthinkingly use technology and the internet and try to get them to understand the message that many of us are feeling in the audience against surveillance, against censorship and so on and so forth. So to explain my first point I'll share a little quick story.
07:22
I do a lot of work in the Middle East and a few years ago I was working with a number of activists in a specific country on a campaign against pornography censorship and now working in the Middle East against the censorship of pornography is not really a popular thing to do but the activists in the country that I was working in were trying to find creative ways to solve this problem and so what we decided to do together was petition
07:43
the government to actually offer home censorship technology for free to parents so that they could filter at home without having everyone experience that censorship. Ultimately it was not successful but another government actually ended up picking me up the idea so Jordan did this a couple years ago. They offered free technology to parents to censor for their children at home which I don't
08:05
really have a problem with as long as it's not the state and that was actually kind of an effective solution. So another big project that I've been working on like I said is surveillance self-defense and what we were trying to do in developing this was find ways to reach people who aren't concerned about surveillance at all.
08:21
We wanted to reach your average people, your people who might be concerned with I don't know for example dick pics and that's what really we've been working toward. We've translated it into I think six languages so far and we're still going and still developing and trying to find innovative ways to deliver that information.
08:40
So I was thrilled to become a part of DeepLab. Addie and I just met this morning by the way in person for the first time. That's the thrill of the internet is it not and when she invited me I think that I kind of squealed a little bit to be part of such an incredible group of women with such a diverse range of skills and interests. We've got technologists, policy people, artists, writers but everybody's working toward
09:01
the same goal and fighting the same fight and unfortunately I didn't make our first gathering. Believe it or not there was actually a conflict between that and another really awesome feminist gathering that was happening here and I had to choose which is such a wonderful problem to have but nevertheless I didn't make it and instead this was the poem that I contributed to the book that we put out over the winter and I'll be joining
09:24
them in May for the next one. So of course I think that like this is this is an example when we talk about hacking we're not just talking about technology right so this was an example of something that I would call a little bit of a hack. This was just something that we put together last fall when we were upset about a meme
09:43
that was going around it was actually several years old there was you know not a big deal around it but a friend of mine and I felt a little unrepresented by the meme. As you can see lots of incredible wonderful courageous people but we saw this and said oh everyone looks kind of male and kind of white and so we created this other meme
10:01
just trying to represent a different group of people and I think when it comes down to it a lot of the problems that we're discussing in the technology space this is you know this is exceptional but when you look at corporate technology spaces corporate technology spaces are usually about 70% white 70% male and that's a real problem and so I think that the stuff that we're talking about the stuff that we're hacking on is toward that issue.
10:26
So this is an example of something that someone in the DeepLab has been working on. Marla is an Iranian designer who's based right now out of the UK. Her work is really about data visualization and she's been working specifically on how do you visualize the Iranian internet especially censorship specifically in the country.
10:47
A lot of her information she gathers and aggregates through their speaking with journalists, citizens or people within the country and in Iran it's interesting because if you're not familiar with how censorship typically works there is it's somewhat overt anyone can become a dissident with just a few clicks.
11:05
Internet censorship is also heavily targeted meaning that Iranian officials tend to develop really arbitrary rules and regulations that are heavily prosecuted so that you never know what you're doing online when it will have an impact so she did this really interesting kind of taxonomy of the
11:25
visualization of how the internet works specifically with users with censorship and cite by kind of a specific examples. Yeah I mean Iran is actually a really interesting outlier in how it conducts censorship but it's an outlier from the rest of the region the rest of the
11:40
Middle East and North Africa in that it's censorship is overt but it's also almost something laughable in that it's easily circumvented at this point and often overbroad sorry the rest of the region such as you know in in Saudi Arabia you have things like chicken breast or breast cancer that are censored in an attempt to censor pornography and so Iran's an outlier in
12:01
its sophistication and I think that what morale is doing is really fascinating in that respect trying to bring that to the fore and actually I'll just give a little quick pitch for a talk tomorrow Massa Ela Madani is giving a fantastic talk about Iranian internet censorship that you should all see yeah so if you're not familiar with this project I do recommend checking it out she did a really comprehensive data visualization
12:20
project which is quite astounding so next up is Harlow Holmes who's a mobile security expert with the Guardian project she was the lead developer on the informa cam app which is enabling encryption of media in real time on your mobile device what's great about this is it can basically be used as potential evidence or even a trusted source for journalists so for
12:43
example in Syria recently there was a place where much of the mobile video was pretty extensively used for documentation of war crimes but it was also heavily used for propaganda so with informa cam people on the ground can basically encrypt any sort of media to secondary sources and use it
13:02
as evidence or in a fact-based reporting and I what I really like about Harlow's work is a lot of her work is as much about enabling as it is about protecting the user so Ingrid she's okay she had a lot of really good projects and it's very hard for me to pick she has some really
13:24
amazing like I don't know I don't even know where to start with it good anyways this is a map she created in 2014 based off of the GCHQ and how it collaborates within submarine cables with specific companies so for this you'll see it's the Apollo cable who the owner is Vitaphone and then which
13:44
companies basically there's implications for so if you're on Verizon or voter I can't see from here but you can read she also recently did this project which is called networks of New York and it's a
14:03
book which is sort of a taxonomy of infrastructure in Manhattan it helps you navigate visually how the city works so it explains what certain code markings are which are typically kind of like encrypted or typically placed for things like telephones TV internet markings or even surveillance cams and
14:22
where they're placed within the city there's also runa who's doing a lot of very interesting work as a security researcher she advocates and teaches journalists how to use encryption technologies and for secure communication between themselves and whistleblower she's also a technical
14:43
advisor for the crew tripped on true crypt on a project consults and for the Freedom Foundation so I'm sure most of you are familiar with secure drop
15:03
looking at this audience but nevertheless in case you weren't it was the leaking platform designed originally is dead drop by the late Aaron Schwartz and then later picked up by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and to me what's really important about this is that we have so many we have a variety of different ways for leaking information that we have all of these different platforms and I think that you know it's a personal decision where
15:24
one chooses to leak to and having that kind of choice is incredible and having so many diverse people working on this is also incredible so I love
15:42
if there was a video here Allison birch proprietary technologies people if if there was a video here Allison birch recently recently created a mic jammer which is a piece of hardware which creates a frequency to basically block your smartphone so it's similar to putting a piece of tape over your what
16:05
do you call this I cam your cam it's about protecting people and from self censorship in an age of constant surveillance to use it you basically put your phone next to it it creates a frequency automatically and
16:20
you can speak freely something that Allison said about her work which I think also applies a lot to kind of the overall precipice of deep lab is something I would like to read really quickly she said the goal is to focus on the tools that are usable and not geared toward people who have any technological knowledge per se too often the most usable products are the
16:42
most exploitative and the most secure programs are next to impossible to figure out sounds familiar yeah which you know as you know if you're familiar with encryption like unfortunately still holds true for a lot of the protocols and and software that we're working with so I wrote a piece
17:01
for the new international a few months ago new internationalist rather sorry a few months ago about the colonization of the global internet by Silicon Valley the idea behind this was about how so many of the policies that we encounter on the corporate web web come from specific American ideas about sex and violence and that a lot of these ideas specifically are coming from the
17:20
that again that statistic the 70% men statistic and that's why I believe that Facebook's policies for example mirror the same kinds of policies that we see from the Motion Picture Association of America etc it might not be overt it might not be intentional but as any American in the audience knows our
17:40
priorities around sex and violence are a bit fucked up and so I believe that a part of the reason for these policies is precisely that the demographics that make up Silicon Valley companies now again some of you might not care about Facebook or Twitter you might have completely rejected those and that's fine and that's a wonderful ideal but I can't and so we're not in the US
18:00
right now but I still can say that globally the problem is the same technology companies especially the corporate space are dominated by men and in diverse countries by white men and so some might say that that shouldn't matter but it does matter we all come to our work with a diverse set of ideas shaped by who we are how we've been raised and what we've been through and it's plain to say that women's experiences are different and
18:22
so that's what I love about deep lab and I love about these different initiatives that are coming up is the idea that we can rethink these ideas take it back to scratch take it back to the bottom and rethink through the policy and the technology ideas that we've grown up with or experienced so he's had touched a little bit on this in his keynote but I think it's
18:44
important that we're at a time for humanity to acknowledge the structural inequalities that have been built up over the last century in favor of these white male voices I think once we have acknowledged that we can see how the system has overlooked much of the population for too long already I don't
19:01
think that this is just about women as a society we are broken and if we do not welcome more perspectives into the conversation nothing will change what I mean by perspectives is I mean women I mean LGBT I mean women and people and men and everything underneath that are not white let us talk and when we
19:21
speak listen we can change the trajectory but only if we can look up from the blown-out white windows of our screen to listen instead of tweet then we might be getting somewhere thanks so I think we have some time for
19:42
questions if there's any from the audience we're happy to we definitely have a little bit of time for questions do you want to give me a sign of hands for questions hi that's a really cool group of women you've
20:00
assembled there how did you find each other in the first place that's for you um so I was approached by a friend who's also a director his name's Golan Levin he runs a studio for I'm sorry the Frank Wright studio for creative inquiry at Carnegie Mellon and he said I really like what you've been doing with your kind of surveillance art is there something that you could do as
20:23
a fellow here that would pertain to this and so I thought about it for a while and I thought you know what would be cool is to bring together kind of the strongest most literate women I know in these fields and see what's possible and so that was really the precipice for deep lab and I brought
20:42
forward a list of women and there were some suggestions from people who are advisors and and then from there we met and the rest has kind of been developing history more questions how overrun are you with the requests of
21:02
people wanting to join that fabulous team of women so so it's been interesting because there was actually quite it I'm gonna talk about this that okay you're cool with it okay so there was actually quite a bit of criticism a few months ago the lack of trans women the lack of women of and I think that from my perspective as an individual and as a part of the
21:21
collective I felt that it was really valid criticism now there haven't been as far as I know people knocking them down the door to join but the criticism which came from a man for all you know whatever disclosure but I still felt that it was really valid and I think that you know we've we've we have a channel we talk every day and we've talked about being more inclusive we're actively trying right now to make this more inclusive because
21:42
they do think if you look at us we are a pretty white group and so for us to stand up here is two white women and go like oh too many white people in this space is a problem and so even though there's no banging down the door just yet we do welcome any suggestions that you have okay any reaching out to particular like channels or platforms I mean you're connected with global
22:02
voices and the number of other yeah potential channels to reach out to women across the world are you like focusing on anything particular so in a New York City we're gonna be doing a lot of speed workshops for like setting up encryption and getting yourself running with really basic kind of
22:24
knowledge of you know getting tour on getting OTR running getting PGP key set up and just feeling like I think it's important that people feel like they can be proactive and be enabled in that situation so we're doing that there's been people also reaching out to us who are wanting to set up kind of
22:41
satellite communities okay I'm gonna look around the last time and if not you're both gonna be around for a little bit right yeah so more questions can be addressed to you personally after the session wonderful let's give another really really big round of applause to Addie and Jillian please
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