[liberationtech] Call for Participants @ Noisy Square - Putting the Resistance back in OHM

[Jacob Appelbaum]

Griffin Boyce:
>   Not only am I going to be presenting three talks at OHM, I will be
> presenting talks that are (in many ways) totally dead conversations in the
> US.
> 

Congratulations. I look forward to seeing them, probably on a remote
stream but also perhaps in person.

>   It's interesting how much of the debate centers around the presence of
> police at OHM, as if American hacker cons didn't have the head of the NSA
> presenting keynotes. Or congratulating a child for doing things an adult
> could be prosecuted for. 

The debate centers around people in the community working with the
police, with the police being openly welcome, with those same police
being pushed with false arguments about how "undercover cops" will be
there anyway and so on. They are "required" by law to arrest people in
some unknown set of conditions - you know, except when you download
movies or other things where they are able to look the other way.

No one has said that the cops shouldn't submit a talk - many have even
called for debate panels and for the cops to join up. What is the status
on that? Did any of those high tech police or intelligence agencies
actually offer to join as a peer? Are they coming to share their new
forensics techniques with the community?

To arrest someone against their will is to commit an act of violence
against them. If one is required by law to perform such arrests, one
should avoid such an event - it puts the community in danger. The event
should ban anyone who is "required" to commit such acts of violence -
people should come as peers, as equal. Exceptions are required under
Dutch law, those are unfortunate - though they can stay exceptions if
the community makes a commitment to creating a safe space by explicitly
banning anyone who is required to commit such acts of violence. OHM
hasn't, sadly. Rather, suggestions of such have been looked at as
laughable, much to the surprise of many.

> I find it really hard to pass judgement on OHM
> organizers when our own ecosystem is so unbelievably toxic.
> 

I don't pass judgment on OHM orga independent of the US ecosystem. I
pass judgment specifically because of the dialog and those very same
people saying that they're not the US ecosystem. Yet we know very well
that AiVD now says that they use PRISM data - talk about a distinction
without a difference!

>   I guess it's different when the cops are Dutch.
> 

The Dutch police have FBI agents embedded in their offices. AiVD shares
data with the NSA and vice versa. The difference is that many
nationalists in the Dutch hacker scene don't see that any scenes with
such ties is possibly toxic; differently toxic but certainly
subserviently! To compare the Dutch legal system to the US in light of
the PRISM scandal makes it all the more ridiculous.

All the best,
Jacob

P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjMLZuuXDRQ