Date: December 28, 2005
Event: 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3)
Venue: Berliner Congress Center, Berlin
Abstract: A discussion about technology, culture, the Creative Commons and the media with regards to disaster areas and warzones.
Link: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/478.en.html
Audio: http://chaosradio.ccc.de/22c3_mp3-478.html
Video (Internet Archive): http://archive.org/details/22c3PersonalExperiencesBringingTechnologyAndNewMediaToDisasterAreas
Video (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaW1ge-tTVo
Jacob Appelbaum: Today, I’m going to talk about a couple of other things other than just Iraq and Katrina. I’m going to show you a bunch of photos. I had spent a bunch of time blabbering on in slides, like where I’m from, what kind of crap I do, where I’ve been recently, why I care.
I’m not even going to bother with any of these slides, because I don’t think there’s any point in showing you a bunch of slides. I’ll just show you what I saw, and I’ll tell you a story. I think a story is more moving. I’m going to start off by telling you about photography. I see the world through a camera. I work with computers for non‑profits usually, but when I’m not doing that I take photographs.
For the last two years, I was a caretaker for my terminally ill father. In December of last year, one year and eight days ago or something, my dad was murdered. My dad was a heroin addict and so, as a result in American society, nobody really cared about him. It was a really difficult time for me, because the situation was very complicated and there was really no justice for him.
Due to the fact that he was a drug addict and due to the very peculiar way in which he was poisoned, the people that killed him got away with it. The sheer incompetence of the San Francisco police department, where I’m from in California, is astounding to me. When we talk about the oncoming police state that can bust anybody for doing anything, that can come down on all of us for little infractions, this kind of stuff makes me doubt it.
But at the same time, it really is a value judgment. People that don’t care about other humans, that devalue other human beings. They’re not going to really worry about justice for them or punishing them, because it’s just one parasite wiping out another parasite. These are just a couple of photos of my father right before he died. There he is dead.
This right here was the motivator for me to stop contributing to a world full of bullshit evil. It was the motivator for me to get off my ass and connect with the things that I’d been working towards already. Like I said, I’d been working with non‑profits, places like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, mostly environmental stuff, but also occasionally with human rights activists. All these stories about people being victimized, about really terrible things happening, the never really hit home for me until I saw this photo that I took.
It was almost like I wasn’t even there when I took this photo. It was like another world. It’s pretty much this moment that I decided that I had two choices. This was that I could take something really terrible and make something else really terrible or I could take something terrible and make something great.
I decided that I needed to leave the United States because it wasn’t a very positive place for me. After some amount of time, I did this, and I went into Iraq. I had some connections in Greenpeace that allowed me to, luckily, it allowed me to get past places that you otherwise would not be able to.
I flew into Istanbul, and I left a couple of documents behind that would keep me safe in the event of someone kidnapping me, supposedly. Although I basically had no regard for myself, I decided that I wanted to go and connect with people who had been in a similar situation as mine, connect with people who the world had left behind.
I wanted to basically make transparent what other people knew, but they didn’t really know. They didn’t really see it and I wanted to connect people to it. I started blogging about my travel in Iraq. While I was traveling, I let people ask questions and I did video interviews with local Iraqis. I went out on the streets and I took photographs of people. I helped set up Internet access at Iraqi voting stations. I climbed some mountains in Ahmed Awa, which was where Saddam dropped chemical weapons during the Anfal campaign to commit genocide against the Kurds.
I basically just settled in there for a little while, not very long. I talked to people and asked them how they were doing. I asked them what they wanted. To this day, I still talk to my friends that are in Iraq. I didn’t travel with the US military. I traveled by myself in a taxicab from Turkey. Although I did run into the US military several times, they didn’t really cause me any trouble.
The way that you would want to, if you were interested in crossing over the border is, you would fly from Istanbul to a city called Diyarbakir. At Diyarbakir, you would take a taxicab to the border city of Zakho. The way that you would take this taxicab is by basically either speaking Kurdish or Arabic of which I speak neither, though the very little teeny bit of German that I do speak, probably saved my life a number of times.
Essentially, when you get to the border, you have some money in your passport, you hand it over to them. When they ask you why you’re there, you tell them that you’re a tourist. They’ll laugh because they think that’s pretty funny, and they’ll flag you across. One of the notable adventures on this taxicab ride from Diyarbakir to Zakho is the fact that you’d drive through the holy city of Batman, which is excellent. It’s a good sign. You’re on your way to doing good things.
Once I had crossed over the border, I met with my contacts that I had previously had through Green Peace. They handed me several firearms. We got into their car and drove away. We drove through a small village of the Yezidi or Yazidi depending on who you ask.
They are a group of people that worship a peacock by the name of “Melek Taus,” which for the longest time I’ve been interested in seeing. I went and I asked them what it was like for them during the war, what it was like before the war, whether or not they were happy that Saddam was gone. It was quite a big game of telephone because it was English to Arabic to Kurdish to the local dialect that the Yezidi spoke and back. There were three translators, me, and some guy.
It was quite a long conversation, but these people were actually, surprisingly enough, very happy with the fact that America had invaded because it was beneficial to them. But that’s to be expected when you’re talking to people on the Kurdish regions of Iraq because they’re the people that primarily benefit.
Essentially, while I was traveling through this region talking with them, I’ve been traveling with Arab guards from Baghdad. These people are very kind, very nice to me. They took me to a city by the name of Erbil or Arbil depending on who you ask. Those people took me to a place where I’d be safe, and I stayed outside of the wire, pretty much everyone stays outside of the wire. The wire being the green zone in Baghdad or these are like military bases where the US Military sits.
If you’re in a situation like this, the only time that you ever want to talk to the US Military is when you tell them that you’re in‑charge and you’re going to be going now. Because they could be very dangerous and you could end up very dead very quickly.
In Erbil, I visited a number of sites and I interviewed a number of people. One of the things that I saw was a zoo full of animals that were not native. I went in and documented the zoo, took photographs of the animals.
I felt pretty bad about the animals that were there. They were pretty much the most abused animals I had ever seen in my entire life. The animals in the zoo were quite like everyone in Iraq. They were all very afraid of the master with the boot on its neck.
I decided at that point that I needed to start asking them questions. These questions that I asked them, I collaborated with people online. I had a blog where I asked people to ask questions from different perspectives. Everything from “Are you happy here now that the American forces are here? Do you feel safe now? Do you think that every day is a good day? Do you feel free?"
Just really simple questions, questions ranging from that to things like “Do you see any profits from oil? Do you see anything changing? Have you had any one in your family killed? Has anyone that you know been killed? What is it like here for you? What is your life like?” Pretty much every one that I talked to that was Kurdish was very happy about the Americans. Because the Kurdish region as I said before, had been liberated by the Americans. But the Arabs that I met from Baghdad were not so happy.
The standard operating procedure they told me of a car driving into an American convoy was to have it shot dead, stop. They’d shoot a 50‑caliber machine gun across the engine block of the car through the windshield and kill the driver, no questions asked, just because you might be a bomber, just because you could pose a threat to someone.
Most of these people have a university level education, the ones that I’ve been talking to. Their computer science degree...I think this will probably amuse most of you...means that they have been able to program in Fortran, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 if they were really lucky.
A lot of these people all served in the military. Most of them fought in the first Gulf War but not in the second Gulf War, including a sniper who actually admitted that he had shot American soldiers. He was quite interesting. He basically conveyed that he felt very bad for having done this. He every day saw the repercussions of constantly killing each other, what the war was doing, and what it solves. He said that it was worse now with the Americans than it was with Saddam and that even though it’s possible it could turn out better that he felt that hundreds of thousands of people had been killed by the Americans.
Just recently I heard my glorious, George Bush, in America saying that the body count was around 30,000, which I’m not sure how he arrived at that figure because it’s pretty much impossible to keep body counts like that. I mean 30,000 reported deaths by American corporate media, right? That must be how he came to that.
These engineers needed some help with a lot of their software problems, so I brought them Knoppix disks and I taught them how to do some network penetration. We had a long conversation about security, so a lot of these Iraqi engineers walked away learning how to do stuff with writing shell code and map and using just simple things to more complex concepts so that they have a better idea for keeping Iraq a little more secure. We turned them on to free software instead of using proprietary software, which was I think perhaps a little useful for them.
One of the things I needed when I crossed over the border was a photocopy of my passport, which if you’re going to cross across the Turkish/Iraqi border, you need to have that so that you can give it to the Iraqi and the Turkish guards. Another thing that would be helpful for you to have is press passes. I suggest that you make your own press pass. Do not work for a press agency unless you, of course, do work for a press agency. Don’t forge a press pass that says you work for NBC or CNN or something because you’re just going to get yourself in a lot of trouble if anyone goes digging. Make up your own press agency instead. It works out a lot better. Your own phone numbers, your own addresses, things like that.
If you’re going to go, also leave your plans, your intended destinations, and all these things in countries that are nearby to you. Don’t leave it in, say, America and hope that someone there will be able to find you in the event of your kidnapping and ultimate beheading. You’ll probably also find yourself in a situation where you’ll...since this is Europe, you’ll probably be very uncomfortable with this next statement, but you may end up having to carry firearms to defend yourself or at least in order to keep yourself from being the low‑hanging fruit on the tree.
While I was there, I had an AK‑47, a Glock, and a Browning 9mm because these sheer gun on my shoulder, one on my back, one in my pocket, those things stood out much like a white American with weird hair and earrings. Those things probably kept people from bothering me when there were other people that looked a lot easier to bother. Certainly, though, you would never want to go out alone. Always travel with other people. When you do go out, make sure you have a very good reason.
Some of the video interviews that I’ve done I put up online, almost all of them actually. They’re under the Creative Commons. While I was documenting most of this with the photography, videography, I put it all under the Creative Commons so that people could take it for free because the information was more important than whatever intellectual property and whatever money I could possibly make from it.
The people in Iraq are in a very bad place. It’s funny to me that it took my father being killed to really realize that, to bring myself around to feeling connected with someone else. It took a tragedy for that to happen. That’s quite unfortunate. Hopefully, it doesn’t have to happen to the rest of you that way. Hopefully, you can take the time that you have on this planet and do very good things. People like Dan Kaminsky and Rop Gonggrijp, these people that are really a part of the scene, that are really contributing, we should all strive to be more like them.
Those people, developers of free operating systems, those people are giving things to the world that has a tangible quality if it improves the life of these people. We should no longer stand idly by letting these things happen because we’re all responsible, ultimately...socially, ethically, morally...for the terrible things that have happened in Iraq and around the entire world.
To touch on some slightly nerdy subjects here, the way that I was able to distribute the videos while I was blogging, because of high demand, was because of BitTorrent. The legitimacy of BitTorrent shouldn’t ever be questioned. Any peer‑to‑peer software can be used, but I was using BitTorrent to distribute my videos. As a result, it was actually affordable for me to do so.
These Iraqis who otherwise have never had a voice before, who no one had ever listened to them before, no one outside of Iraq has ever even met them because they’re not even allowed to leave Iraq because no country in the world will take an Iraqi citizen because they could be a terrorist or some other bullshit excuse that denies them their basic right to a standard of living that is acceptable, using BitTorrent, we were able to get it out there, peer‑to‑software.
However, the way that we had to get online was using what’s called a very small aperture terminal or a VSAT. There are several other methods for communication when you’re in a place like Iraq. Coincidentally, it also works in disaster areas like Katrina. You can get stuff like a Thuraya sat phone and get Iridium gear. You can get Hughes, Tachyon, some VSAT.
The VSAT channels that we were using are monitored by the United States Government. There is definitely no question about that. The United States Government...oh, I don’t know. Name a three letter acronym. They all read my blog. You’d be surprised that they don’t hide their reverse IP information, but they don’t. Maybe there is a good reason for that. Maybe they wanted me to know.
During my time there, I actually was contacted by what I believe is a United States Navy intelligence officer who came to the area where I was and just sort of told me maybe I should go home. Maybe it was not so safe there and maybe I should get out of here because, really, this isn’t the place for me.
I pressed on. Some of the things that I saw were pretty amazing there. I mean it’s hard to fathom but there are abandoned buildings along the highways there that when you drive through them and you stop in these buildings and you look inside there are drawings on the wall that children have done of helicopters shooting their parents with machine guns and rockets blowing up buildings. Where do you suppose those helicopters came from? I don’t think they were made in Kurdistan probably. I imagine they probably weren’t paid for with Kurdish dollars either.
Again, I found myself just feeling really awful about what we’ve contributed to even though we don’t all willingly contribute thinking if that’s what we’re contributing to. We certainly do contribute through other means, when we pay our taxes, when we are silent when we hear people being bigots or racists, homophobes, when we hear people being xenophobic, when we hear them being nationalists.
We’re contributing when we don’t shut them up through intelligent rational discourse, through transparency, through showing them that what they’re doing is wrong and that these humans in Iraq are equal to all of us. Just because they speak another language, they look a little bit differently, because they have a different religion, they’re still humans.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a problem in my country where we can rationalize bombing and killing these people. Surely I thought that that was impossible for it to ever happen in the United States though. Certainly, if something terrible like this were to happen there, people in America would care. They would not stand for it.
I thought that that was the case until Katrina hit. When Katrina hit, I was working doing some bullshit programming job somewhere, and my company had just laid everyone off. One night while at a party in San Francisco, I heard a bunch of people saying, “Oh, turn off that television. I don’t want to hear any more about this bad news going on in New Orleans and in Houston. I don’t care about those poor Black people. Seriously, who cares about those people?"
I was so infuriated that I turned the television on, up louder, and I stood in front of it and took the remote and asked them how it is that they could deny the fact that these humans are suffering. That they could just go about having a party, having a good time while these people were living inside of the Astrodome or while there were people floating in the rivers, in the streets.
How, when this little girl is staring down at the remnants of her family of her neighborhood and her friends, people could just stand idly by. I heard people blaming them for their poverty. People blaming them for their crassness, for their lack of education, how they couldn’t get out when they have been so aptly warned.
When I got there and I talked to these people, I heard stories that amazed me, stories like when they were trying to cross the bridge from New Orleans into Algiers, which is on the other side of the Mississippi river, I heard them saying that the police turned their guns on them and said, “No fucking niggers on this side of the river. Thank you very much,” and then cocked their shotguns.
Can you imagine that happened in my country? I couldn’t imagine that. I couldn’t fucking believe that. That was so absurd, so enraging, so angering to me that I decided that I would expose that. I would blog about it, and I would write about it. Lots and lots and lots of people saw this.
Tim Pritlove, thank you very much for the support that you have given me during this trip. He had hooked up us with some video streaming, and he had also written about us a little bit in his blog and linked us around. Thanks to that attention, a lot of the photographs that I’ve taken here were published in European newspapers, which is really awesome. They were all under the creative commons, so there was no question about any fees for the publishing of the photos. Anyone could publish them anytime just to show it.
I interviewed these people. I infiltrated through the security of the Astrodome along with one other reporter who said that the security situation in the United States with regard to the press was something akin to the USSR. I thought, “This is my country? What’s going on here? I don’t understand. I mean, why? Why is this happening?"
When we were in there, we were almost forcibly removed twice. My traveling partner, Joel Johnson, who you may know from Gizmodo, he was actually removed from the building, and they almost arrested him for this because this was not right for him to be inside. This was like a special place. The reason it was a special place is because when I asked people how they were being treated, they didn’t have very nice things to say. They were being treated pretty badly. There were people whose civil liberties were just entirely stripped away. It’s pretty amazing.
People who in order to have a bed in this shelter had to go through strip searches because they look like they might be gangsters, who weren’t allowed to have radios because Black people listen to rap, and rap incites violence, pretty amazing. That’s a little bit of a disconnect. I believe it was George Bush’s mother that said, “What are they so upset about? It seems like they’ve gotten better now than they ever had it before.” It’s kind of a disconnect. It’s like these people aren’t human or something.
I hooked up with IndyMedia in Houston, and we decided that we were going to set up a radio station. We thought we go through the proper channels. We got the FCC permits and everything. Then the bureaucracy at the Astrodome kicked in. They said, “Oh, you can’t use our power here, and your FCC permits say you’re only allowed to broadcast in the building. So I guess you can’t have your little radio station."
The purpose of this radio station was to help these people. To give them information about people that have been found, children that have been found, people who have died. Information on jobs, things to help boost their morale things like, “If you want to come, the first hundred people get free movie tickets,” or dispersing money, just general freedom of information.
They said the only way you can set up that radio station is if you get 10,000 radios with batteries, and you distribute it. So we got 10,000 radios the next day. They said, “There’s no fucking way that you’re going to ever get those radios in there.” What happens when they have freedom of the dial? Freedom of the dial, what is that freedom of the dial? What if they were to tune to another radio station? What if they were to listen to that rap music?
[laughter]
Jacob: So I dug up all the information on all the bureaucrats and post it online, and they got some phone calls. It was posted around some pretty prominent weblogs. Some people, like Shany Jordan at Boing Boing, really supported me in this endeavor. Well I think they got more than a couple of phone calls anyway. Eventually, they caved, and we were able to get the radio stations set up. They only let us set up the radio station outside though.
At this point, I’ve pretty much given up on doing anything else here. So we collected some hardware donations, and it was at this point that I had a call to arms from a friend that I’ve worked with previously. He said that they needed some help in New Orleans. It was at that point that I decided it was time to go. With my partner and a van, we load it up with all the supplies that we could possibly fill. Because you would create an unnecessary burden on the disaster area if you were to come in and ask for their meals ready to eat, their water, their medical supplies.
So we brought a bunch of stuff, enough stuff that we could hopefully share with other people. We also brought a bunch of computers. We also brought Internet access. Because that, my friends, is what’s really important, information is the ability to send information, and the ability to have an open network, so people can receive information.
We left, and we drove in to New Orleans by way of Baton Rouge. We did satellite reconnaissance using Google maps so that we could have some semblance of an idea of what it would be like on the road. It just so happens that most of the roads were flooded, so getting in poses a little bit of a challenge. One of the wonderful things though was that we saw some roads that were not flooded that were very clearly not under military watch. So we snuck around the checkpoints. I’m just stopping here for a second, so I can show you some of the select photographs.
I took out the photos of dead bodies that I took because I figured this was a depressing enough talk as possible, and I wanted to somehow talk about how we hadn’t lost the war and all that nonsense. Well it doesn’t matter.
So we made contacts with US military people over the telephone, and through some clever social engineering we were able to convince them that, yes indeed. We were allowed to go inside and that, yes indeed, they were going to let us and, yes indeed. If they could please just tell everyone below them about that, we’ll be very happy. Thank you very much.
The way that was possible was by talking to people on the ground who identified needs and had given us certain pieces of information. At the time, the radical anarchist collective that we were working with had not been named. It is now called the Common Ground Collective. Those people had basically stopped serious race riots and had set up or started to set up a medical clinic. They’ve also set up food in Algiers. This is the place where it was totally abandoned by the Red Cross. The National Guard was there, but they weren’t really doing very much.
There were strange white militias roaming around throwing people of color on the ground thinking that they were looters. In this context, a looter is someone who is trying to get clean drinking water so that they don’t die. The police of course really did nothing in this situation. We all know the story. George Bush told the Canadian government that we didn’t need their help, told the rest of the world we didn’t need their help, and like the stubborn bigheaded fuck that he is, all these people who needed our help died, people sitting on their roofs for days at a time.
Although the Canadian government, much to their credit, actually arrived in parts of New Orleans before the American government did. Royal Mounted Canadian Police landing and saving people because at FEMA, the Federal Emergency fucked‑up Management Agency, I think something like that, was getting volunteer firefighters from all over the nation to come down and help.
But before they could help, they actually had to, it’s funny, watch history at FEMA classes for, I think, a week so that they could learn about the history of FEMA. Then they used them to hand out fliers in cities nowhere near the disaster. FEMA also did stuff like cutting the communications telephone lines of everyone around. I believed it was the City of Gretna, maybe. I’m not exactly sure, so don’t quote me on that. But they’d cut communication lines, so we realized that we had to have wireless connections for everything.
We had noticed also that the cellphone towers had been taken down, in some cases by the hurricane, probably other cases just by other people. We were able to see that they had set up CALS, which were basically portable clusters for cellphones. We were able to use E‑Video, which is a 3G network for sharing out, and setting up a lab and media center, so that we could get people to register for FEMA, which is basically worthless, but they needed to register for FEMA so that they could get money, supposedly.
During that time, the cellphone network was very much on and off. Most of the people that were there were there because they were seriously ill, seriously poor, seriously disabled, seriously distraught, without transportation, abandoned by their government, abandoned by their fellow countrymen. What ended up happening is that it’s still happening. New Orleans is still in a bad place. It’s not nearly as bad as it was here. There was a point while I was in New Orleans where a dead body sat on the street for 10 days, in the sun, 10 days, at least. The guy didn’t have any shoes on and the soles of his feet weren’t dirty. He was so bloated that you wouldn’t know how he died.
The police, when we pleaded with them to, “Please, please, come clean up this body, because there were children that lived right next‑door to it. He said, “Oh, that’s not my responsibility. That’s someone else.” The military, all of them and the police, and even the Blackwater Mercenaries, operating on American soil with fully automatic machine guns, they too had no responsibility for that.
Through the use of, I believe it was podcasting as well as being on the radio. Amy Goodman was able to, with Democracy Now, actually record the police saying that. She went up and said, “Is it your responsibility to clean up this body?” He said, “No, no, no, that’s someone else’s responsibility."
She said “Who, that guy over there?” “Yeah, that’s the guy.” She goes over to him, same thing, keeps going, keeps getting the same run‑around, and then she publishes it online. Miraculously, on the 10th or 11th day, they cleaned the body up.
By getting the word out about what was happening in these areas we were able to affect some change. It made me realize that it’s not totally hopeless, but it’s pretty goddamn hopeless, a pretty bad set of things that happened in New Orleans. There are a lot of military checkpoints inside of New Orleans. The way in which I was able to get through them is the same way that all of you guys hack your firewalls, and hack boxes, in your legal lab of course, identifying the systems at work and exploiting the weaknesses that are there.
I, supposedly, joined a group called Part 15, which was a loose organization of wireless nonprofits that were working together in order to restore communications in the region. While this was true, I was primarily working with the common grand collective in order to bring medical supplies, food, water, Internet access and just general help to people who had gashes in their head, that were three inches long, and no one was going to give them medical attention.
And people who were 55 years old with gangrene and diabetes and were being left to die in their house by their government, people who had no roof anymore. When you walked down the street in New Orleans, you’d see houses with lights on. The reason that their lights were on is because those people had died while they were asleep. None of those people had their bodies cleaned out.
Very few times would you actually see people that were alive, this man stayed, for example. On the buildings, there are these things called demar codes, which is pretty bad. It’s what it sounds like, the FEMA Mortuary Response Team, to kick down doors. They’d search the house and find bodies.
Here is one of the photos where we had found a nursing home. Probably one of the nursing homes, that was later on the news for having euthanized people. Where there were eight dead bodies inside. When we rolled up, and we showed our press passes. Some of which were legitimate, and some of them were not legitimate. They told us that we had to leave.
They had guns un‑holstered, just standing there, blocking our way, “This isn’t for you to see.” It was the same story all over New Orleans, nobody wanted to show the dead bodies. Nobody wanted to show the massive fuck‑ups. Everybody wanted to see order.
As a result, that’s what you saw after a couple of days, because the traditional media loses interest in anything. It’s not interactive, people can’t ask the kinds of questions that they need to ask. There was one building I found, which was a school, and the demar code, I hope is not correct, and to this day, I do not know, but, it said something over 50 on it, So a children’s school, with all these dead bodies inside of it.
The soldier standing next to the school, I asked him, “Is this possible that there are 50 dead bodies in this building?” You’re just standing next to this, I’m just wondering, “Is it possible that’s the case?” They’re like, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not my jurisdiction. That’s not for me to know."
The longer I stayed there, the more I realized that things were not changing. At some point, I had to do some interviews with some news agencies talking about this. They’d asked me, “Who is responsible for saving Algiers?” And Algiers, again, is this place across the Mississippi River. The person who’s responsible for stopping huge race riots, huge amounts of violence and bringing together a community so they could distribute supplies, without any government help, because the government wasn’t helping them, was Malee Korten [sp}. It was his house in Algiers that was used as a home base.
It was is house that was the original media center, where independent journalists, from Europe, mostly, but also the Guerrilla News Network, myself, Joel Johnson from Gizmodo and other people India media. They were able to work out of his house. They were able to write about things, without fear of being censored by the people they were staying with, without having to be locked inside their house by Blackwater Security guards.
We decided that we were going to set up a radio station with information. At this time we had learned, from Houston, and we just set up a pirate radio station, the FCC, although they were issuing permits. We decided it was not worth complying with the American federal law, because it was just getting in the way. We set up a radio station, again, with information, so that people around the area who had radios could know. We also set up voice over IP links, so that people could call their loved ones, so that people could contact people that were displaced, people could have a phone number they could be reached at.
Because most of these people were so poor and so destitute, that they did not even have a computer in their home or on their block. Some of these people had never even touched a keyboard before. Often, they had trouble dialing telephones. The amount of gentrification that happened in New Orleans as a result of this, is astounding. Entire communities are completely wiped out, completely taken.
It’s amazing, because this American disaster is a lot like the other American disaster I witnessed, Iraq. It’s the same thing over and over again. The disconnection, the lack of feeling of humanity, the lack of these people being worth living for, helping, saving, none of that matters, apparently. There were a few people that did care. It seems like, even now, it’s not part of the American archives. It’s like Hurricane Katrina almost never happened. The Iraq War, “Isn’t that over already? I haven’t heard anything about it."
But, it isn’t. The reason it isn’t getting better and the reason things are not improving and the reason the war isn’t ending is because we’re letting it be that way. We are all complacent in the murder of hundreds of people in the accidental deaths, through starvation or whatever the case may be. However someone would die with their shoes off, in an area of New Orleans that didn’t even flood.
When we all stand idly by, we contribute to this. We can’t do that anymore. We have to stop that. The things that happened to my father, it took me a long time to realize it, but it’s not an isolated incident. The things that happened in Iraq, they’re not an isolated incident. The way that our Western society exists is on the back of other societies. We’re actively exploiting those societies so that we can have a better standard of living. But we’re closing our eyes to the real cost of this. The real cost of this is that we are killing people every day.
The day before yesterday in Baghdad, I was told by a friend of mine, that six car bombs went off. How far into the war are we now that six car bombs could go off? That’s quite amazing to me, that that could happen still. It’s still happening right now. The war is still going on. People are still suffering. People are still dying. In New Orleans, there are still people who don’t have houses, who’s houses have been demolished, who’s family members have not been found.
[39:45]
What you can do? It’s up to you. It depends on your skill set. I think that it’s important to realize that there’s a world outside of the computer. Of course, almost everyone here knows that. I’m sure of it. You’re conscious. You’re awake. You’re paying attention. But the question is, “What are you working towards in your life?”
Are you trying to find fulfillment through empty, meaningless material wealth? Are you trying to look your best so that you can find a mate? Are you trying to just be happy and content? Or, are you trying to eradicate the things that you, yourself, would not want to endure? Are you trying to make the world a better place through strong photography and awesome system administration? Are you volunteering your time? Are you working for non‑profits? Are you working for commercial organizations that help those people? Are you working for privacy, amenity, freedom, transparency? I’m sure you are, because that’s what we all need to be doing now.
This concept that we’ve lost the war is wrong. The people that are dead, the people that I saw bloating in the sun, the people whose family members in Iraq have been eradicated by the American government, the people who, to this day, live in fear that the standard operating procedure of the US Military is going to wipe them out.
Those are the people who lost the war. We are all alive. We are still breathing. We have not lost the war. You would be a coward to say that we have lost the war and to give up. Don’t give up. Fight every battle. Stand against injustice. Stop this crap from happening in the future, because, it will happen here again, and every country in the world and everyone else in the world will ignore it, if we continue to be complacent at it. When it happens in America, when it happens in Iraq, when it happens to the Armenians, when it happens to the Kurds, when it happens to anyone, we have to stop it. We can’t let this happen again.
[applause]
If anyone has any questions, I’m sure there are lots of the technical details that I left out, like I didn’t really tell you about the fact that there are great covert channels of communication when you have satellites that are monitored by the American government.
I didn’t really talk about people using crypto. There aren’t many people using crypto. Reporters who report things over the Internet, are often visited by people from the military telling them to change their stories when they report them to the editors. I didn’t really talk about that or touch on any of it. There are lots of specific details that I can give you.
[43:00]
Audience Member: Do you think personal publishing, the web blog things, helped you somehow in making other people pay attention?
Jacob: I definitely think so. I think that the hundreds of thousands of people that read and contributed, they definitely were able to make phone calls. They definitely were able to get people to care, to donate money, to donate hardware, to donate their houses for people to sleep in, and to bring food. There are so many people, that when I tell them about what I’ve seen in Iraq and what I’ve seen in New Orleans and Houston, those people, they give up their lives to go do something else.
I have a friend, her name is Katy, whose last name will go unnamed for now, who, after seeing and hearing this, when I originally talked about it at Webzine, in San Francisco, she joined the International Solidarity Movement and is in Palestine now. Working for these people who are being oppressed by Israeli Apartheid. That’s awesome. That’s what we need. Just that fact, that this one person went and did that, is worth it for me.
When I went to Iraq, I knew that I would either come back whole, or I would come back full of holes. Either way, the parts of me that needed to die, the parts that didn’t care, that didn’t have compassion for other living human beings, and other living beings that weren’t human, those things are gone now. That’s what’s important, is that we all lose this disconnection, that the person sitting next to you is not equal to you, is not worth caring about. Any more questions?
[44:35]
Audience Member: I’d love to know more about the satellite technology you were mentioning.
Jacob: The satellite technology that I was using was a Hughes system, which is basically 1.5 megabit down and something like 512 up. It has about five seconds of latency sometimes, which is pretty awful. It’s not encrypted over the air in a way that is secure. When I was communicating over the satellite, I used SSH tunnels. All the satellite protocols seem to do really funky stuff with TCP/IP. Almost everybody has DNS‑caches and proxis for everything. Everything that you do that’s encrypted, it’s kind of weird. When you send a SYN, you get a SYN/ACK back immediately. But, that’s not possible, because the packet has to travel into space, back down, once into the Thresher uplink, it goes on the Internet. Just the mere fact that this kind of mucking around happens, it means things behave unreliably. DNS is captured by pretty much everybody. It makes phone conversations kind of difficult, it’s like using a half‑duplex radio with someone that’s never picked up a telephone or something.
That was a stationary v‑set. You can get mobile v‑sets, that do tracking at 110 kilometers an hour, on a vehicle. Which would probably be really useful to you if you needed to do stuff like the Falun Gong did when they hacked Chinese television, more props to those guys and Captain Midnight. Those technologies are a little bit more expensive. The people that were using satellite phones that I knew there, were using Thuraya satellite phones, and it’s pretty expensive. It can be, I believe, over a euro a minute. They’re going to work only outside, unless you set up lots of antennas inside. Yes?
[46:50]
Audience Member: You mentioned a question that you asked your partners in Iraq and in Kurdistan. What are the main questions they asked you? Are there any ones that stand out in your memory right now?
Jacob: Yes, there’s one that really stands out in my memory actually. “Why is this happening to me?” was one of the questions that I was asked, all the time. “Why is this happening to me? Why are the people of your country letting this happen?"
I couldn’t give them a good answer, because I pay taxes to the United States government, and those taxes go and make bombs that fall on their buildings. I couldn’t come up with a good answer, but lots of people have been working toward good answers, saying that we don’t want that to happen anymore.
The other question they wanted to know, “Do people realize that we’re just like them? We just want to have a family and live safely. We just want to be loved. We just want the same freedom that you supposedly have in America.” Pretty much, everyone just felt like, they were shocked that people didn’t realize how bad it was every day.
"Do you realize how bad it is every day? Every day I leave my house, I kiss my wife goodbye, because that may be the very last time that I ever see her alive, every day,” pretty intense. I said, “I didn’t know that. I don’t think very many Americans know that."
When I was on a flight from New Orleans, leaving on my way to Atlanta, I sat next to a woman who was, it was pretty appalling what she had to say. She said, “I just don’t understand and then she shoved some food in her mouth. How it was that these people and then she shoved some more food in her mouth, did not leave New Orleans?
I mean, I heard that we needed to leave. After I heard it on the television, I got in my car and I drove to my summer house in Georgia. I don’t understand why these people didn’t leave. I mean, what’s wrong with them? They had ample warning. I heard that the mayor said they were going to send buses for everybody."
I told her that most of the time, the buses didn’t come, and most of the people didn’t watch TV, because they couldn’t afford one, and, pretty much, nobody there had so much as a summer home, let alone actually owning their own home. She couldn’t understand this. It’s that kind of disconnect with our own neighbors that allows us to have that kind of disconnect with the world and everyone in it. We have to strive to get rid of that disconnect. Any more questions before I go?
Audience Member: Have you met many people in the time you’re traveling around which are at the same point as you are? I mean the point you say, “I spend the maximum of my life and my energy to doing such things to help other people."
Jacob: I have, I’ve met lots of career activists that do this. These career activists now are living under watch lists with tapped telephones, the repercussions of caring about the planet, the environment, about social justice, equality of rights, economic equality, just freedom. These people are all in bad places as a result, places like Greenpeace, for example.
While I no longer work there, they could be considered a terrorist organization by certain wings of the American government. The price, certainly, is high for doing this. But, there are other people out there that are doing it. I’m not suggesting that you give up your live and stop buying things and just go live an anti‑materialistic, Buddhist monetary life style or something like.
I’m suggesting that we be conscious in our life of the things that we support, not just with our dollars, but with our feet and with our mouths and with our work. All right, if there’s nothing else, “Thank you."
[applause]