Shortly after a conflict a war of numbers always bursts. OpIsrael’s second part doesn’t seem an exception to this rule. How many websites were overran by the wave of cyber – attacks that Anonymous unleashed against Israeli IT infrastructures since 7 April? Has it really been a failure as Tel Aviv’s government stated? What is the amount of the economic damage? While the operation is still running, Infoaut tries to read between the lines by interviewing some of the active protagonists on the battleground. Sync, black and anon4 are three hackers that have taken part in the assault against Israeli internet in the past days. This is what they told us.

IFF – Anonymous, even though reluctantly and with some inner tensions, officially decided to conform to the truce that Israeli and Palestinian authorities signed on 21st November 2012. The attacks that began on Saturday and those of the last few weeks (as the leak against Mossad) let us think of an action pondered for a long time. How did the debate about OpIsrael develop within your group in the last months? Which political goals did you set for yourselves? The context is different in comparison with November: at that time OpIsrael has been a reaction to the Zionist military operation against Gaza. Nowadays, on the contrary, you have made the first move announcing the operation one month ago, at the same time of the Holocaust Memorial Day. Why have you decided to start OpIsrael’s second phase?

Black – Because Israel keeps its hold on Gaza without giving up.

Anon4 – The debate has always been swinging between those who wanted to respect the truce, and those who wanted to take action with a view to 7th April. Surely, many people have continued to act as individuals or joining other teams. 7th April was decided because it is the Holocaust Memorial Day. We wanted to reframe the meaning of this symbolic anniversary in order to readjust it to the current situation that Palestinian people is forced to live in by Israeli savagery. Holocaust was not just the one that involved Jews: Holocaust is also the genocide committed by Zionist hands.. Today this word is more actual than ever. We decided to give a new impulse to the operation because of the continuous abuses and vexations towards the Palestinian people (even during the truce). There are a lot of examples regarding those. First of all, the terrible situation of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails: an out – and – out, total violation of human rights. Not to mention the case of Samer Issawi, on hunger strike as a form of protest, whose life is seriously in danger.

Sync – Obviously the strikes on Gaza last week have quickened the agenda. But, in my opinion, there is no target, no request, no hope. We are not influential enough to give ultimatums and surely Israel is not going to be intimidated by us. In my opinion this action aims more to create a media impact and a disruption in their infrastructures, besides reaffirming and making them clear they are not untouchable.

IFF – Which have been the most important targets you managed to hit?

 Black – We have a list. They are too many to be listed.

Sync – Eh! It is very complex to provide a detailed report. DdoS are uncountable by now. So are defacements, even because there have been mass defacements carried out by crews that revolve around Anons, even though maintaining their own positions.

Anon4 – Probably, among the targets on the list we pointed out to you, the most important are governmental ones and the banks. And the website of the IDF military procurement, too: it is a highly symbolic target. The tango down against Mossad has been crucial: a multitude of botnets and individuals demolished their website as a revenge against Zionist regime. We have basically bombarded any possible .gov target and the portals of Israeli Internal Affairs, Finance, Foreign Affairs and Security Authority have been defaced: the digital perimeter of Zionist government’s websites has been violated. In our opinion, this helps to transmit a clear message: you are not invulnerable.

IFF – Besides the actions that you typically carry on (such as Ddos, leaks and defacements), this time you took possession of thousands of Facebook accounts of individual Israeli citizens. Why did you opt for this kind of action?

Black – Because the purpose was to «destroy Israel». This is the reason.

Anon4 – I didn’t deal with Facebook, but I think that those who made it wanted to emphasize the origin of the accounts. Even though, obviously, not all Israeli people are Zionist.

Sync – Neither did I join this side of the Op. But, anyway, the purpose was to put under pressure Israeli citizens. Maybe they will understand what it means to feel stalked and under siege as Gazawi people do everyday. Sure, not everyone of them is Zionist! But the fact that Netanyahu was elected again lets me think that the opinions of the majority are not really sensitive to the Palestinian issue. Facebook accounts’ violation? I would define it as a “collateral damage”: exactly the phrase that Israel uses to mention the Palestinian civilians that come under their “surgical strikes”. Which are not surgical at all.

IFF – The action have been announced for more than a month: OpIsrael 2 was effectively met with a great media attention. Predictably Israel (one of the most advanced countries in cyberwarfare technologies) took its countermeasures. Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, from Israeli National Cyber Bureau, stated that “damage has been limited” and that “Anonymous has not the necessary expertise to damage national vital infrastructures, otherwise it would have not announced the attack. It wants to spark media outcry on issues they care about”. How do you comment these statements?

Black – Sure! And then why did they close gate 80 on all the .gov.il websites? They are only trying to minimize. As all governments always do when they get attacked by Anonymous.

Sync – This time, back from the first OpIsrael experience, they are approaching the matter differently. On one hand, they try to play down the repercussions of the attack, and on the other hand they emphasize the fact that it is more a protest than a cyber attack. They have resources and know – how and they are able to soften or deflect most of the attacks, but surely they are heavily affected – even only for what concerns the employment of human resources they had to muster to deal with us. Not to mention the many financial/bank and public information services that have been severely hit, even though for variable periods.

Anon4 – Undoubtedly they are very prepared and they own all the necessary tools to defend themselves. But we could answer mentioning all the attacks with a successful conclusion. Then obviously… They are using the fire extinguisher to try to blow out the flames: Israeli government can do nothing but trying to belittle such a great storm. Anon scares because it is irrepressible: you don’t how and when it could act, where and how Moreover, there is the economic damage.

IFF – That you would quantify in the numbers of…?

Black – Figures? I don’t know.

Anon4 – Some sources talk about two or three billions dollars.

Sync – Yes but it would be better not to hazard a guess.. It would be difficult to do a truthful analysis. Rumours talk about numbers very – maybe too much – high. In any case, we know that Israel opened a direct line with Cisco to have at its disposal people skilled about networking. Someone helping them use at their best the equipment they already own in order to increase their security levels through the implementation of particular techniques (such as packet scrubbing).

IFF – This operation have been joined by at least twenty crews from the most different linguistic, cultural and ideological backgrounds. How did you manage to keep together component such as RedHack (whose imprinting is strongly Marxist) with others, maybe more oriented to iconographies and practices attributable to the Islamic militant world?

Anon4 – Let’s start from the fact that the numerous teams coordinated themselves in order to achieve a common purpose, which was to provoke an economic and symbolic damage to Israeli Zionist infrastructures. This is what a “macro” analysis shows. In addition, actions like these often imply a long series of “sub-goals”. I’m going to explain it better. You have just mentioned RedHack: the battle they carry on is lacking religious components and aims to attack the Israeli Nazi – Zionist – capitalist regime. It’s clear that the question changes with groups having a strong religious militant component: as regards them, the say “one people, one secular socialist state” is not valid. It is just as certain that such “sub-goals” nevertheless emerge in those operations in which single groups are the protagonists. This is less valid for broad reach operations like #OpIsrael where, in my opinion, the core message is “Free Gaza, Stop the genocide of Palestinian people, end the occupation!”. How is it possible to combine the action of the different teams? As I have just said, by acting for a common purpose. But let’s be careful: this does not mean that in the name of a collective goal we are going to sacrifice determinate values. In fact, we stand aloof from Nazi groups that take the chance to attack Israel in the name of anti – Semitism. Neither Anonymous, nor RedHack or other groups that are inspired by the values of freedom and equality could ever cooperate with these subjects.

IFF – It seems to be confirmed that the IDF acted on the human element to limit the damages of the attack, carrying out a sequence of arrests of hacktivists in the Gaza strip while it was ongoing. Do you think it was an isolated fact, maybe connected to the exceptional situation, or that law enforcement agencies could decide to resort to this kind of expedients more frequently in the future, to hinder cyber attacks? A hypothesis like this was presented by Michael Peck, a Forbes magazine collaborator who, on the occasion of RedHack’s attack to the Mossad, asked himself which response could adopt the latter, given its modus operandi and «its long story in deadly operations, including murders».

Sync – I don’t think that hacktivists/hackers unwelcome in Israel risk extensive and targeted persecutions, tortures or drone strikes: it would be “bad press”. I also think that arresting already known people or individuals suspected to have carried on cyberwarfare actions against Israeli state is counter – productive, as it will inevitably strenghten the opinions that many people have about the proactive, brutal and inhuman methodologies that Zionists use to prosecute their enemies or those that are perceived as such. They are only flexing their muscles to discourage any possible new participants. I think that these retaliations by the IDF mean only one think: that they are butthurt and that the damages we are causing to them are more significant than they want to admit.

Black – In my opinion it is an isolated case: this has been a great operation joined by many hacker teams. At the moment I don’t know about the number of hacktivists taken into custody: to sum it up the best thing would be to observe the developments in the next days.

IFF – How long will the operation last?

Anon4 – It is impossible to say.

Sync – No idea. ‘Till we get bored . Anyway we have to say that Israelis are blacklisting single IPs, whole classes and, in extreme cases, all the IP ranges not allocated to Israel in order to appease DDos attacks in particular.

Anon4 – How clever.

Black – Yeah.

Sync – These are effective but drastic methods. They have repercussions even for legitimate users. And in any case they are a damage to their image: it is like saying that, in order to prevent people from making graffiti on my home wall, I demolish it. It seems like our means are not that ineffective, isn’t it?

Infofreeflow (@infofreeflow) for Infoaut

#OpIsrael reloaded: «TelAviv is not invulnerable». Chatting with digital intifada ©, .

Original article in Italian

SOPA and PIPA “undermine the internet’s fundamental architecture” professor James Boyle of Duke University said. And he is certainly right. Not by chance yesterday Massimo Gaggi on the Corriere della Sera reported the sarcasm of Chinese newspapers towards the implementation of the censorious barriers entailed by the approval of these bills. There is little space for rejoicing, to say it all. If by any (unlikely) mean the Stop Piracy Online Act and the Protect IP Act would succeed, even in their watered-down versions – against those initially proposed in US House of Representative and Senate – we would be witnessing a steady twist of the Internet as we knew it in the West.

The identity of the Internet – we should know it by now – is something temporary and the transformation of its main features (as, precisely, its architecture) is able to twist the practices of social communication that run through it.

And so what? The battles against SOPA and PIPA are most righteous ones, sacrosanct, to be absolutely won. At least in a tactical perspective. But please, let’s not picture these as battles for freedom of speech and, even less, to preserve those conditions of openness that turned Internet into the biggest agora in the history of mankind. The risk here is to jump out of the frying pan into the fire, without even realizing it.

Jimmy Wales told it: ”We need to send Washington a BIG message”. And so it has been. After a 24 hours-long shutdown, the support of thousands of websites (some of which very popular) the backing of many signatories of the bills evaporated. But they who really added fuel to the fire of the first “Web Strike” were neither Wikipedia, nor even the thousands bloggers that sincerely joined the initiative, but the big internet companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and Ebay. Without the lobbying of the big ICT companies, it is unlikely that the success of the blackout would cause equally crushing aftershocks. Still, it is difficult to match such companies to concepts like ‘freedom of expression’ or ‘open internet’. It’s not like that their neighbours, the majors of discography and Hollywood cinema, would enjoy better references – they promoted uncountable legislative, repressive and technological attempts to impose some form of control over the web, to perpetuate their parasitical rent as market near-monopolists – but the 2.0 web giants that currently claim to back the open web and the freedom of speech are the very same that, for some time by now, had run entire portions of Internet as absolute authorities in closed worlds.

Even mercifully leaving out Microsoft’s presence in the “coalition of the willing” deployed against the axis of evil that threatens internet freedom, other remarkable details cannot but stand out. What to say, for example, about Amazon backing the struggle against SOPA – rightfully considered a bill able to endanger whistleblowing activities – considering the stance adopted by the company of Jeff Bezos little more than a year ago, during the sinking of Wikileaks’ network at the height of the Cablegate? How is it possible to consider Google o Facebook as warrantors of the digital rights, as these companies are building veritable “walled gardens”, watertight environments separed by the rest of the web? Companies whose CEOs, moreover, daily remove a plethora of politically troublesome profiles, or just not pertaining to their moody and whimsical policies.

«Sticking feathers up your butt», as Fight Club’s Tyler Durden said, «does not make you a chicken». And in spite of the ICT giants’ many efforts to pass themselves off as the defenders of the new library of Alexandria, the truth is another. That is, today Google and Facebook don’t call up to defend freedom of speech, but a specific business model. Theirs. The alternative at stake is not generically between freedom and censorship, but between antithetical ways to conceive the information market. The clash is between those who strive to protect intellectual products, according to a costly and obsolete logic, and those who would like to see them freely circulating to fuel the profitable cooptation of the creativity of the social networks. A political clash, besides an economical one; because in a world of user-generated-content, where the language is made by remixing pre-existent cultural objects, to decide on the legitimacy of a content means to have the power to intervene on the communication networks. But this is a power that Google and friends already wield unopposed in their private informative ecosystems, and whose exclusivity they want to retain without having to share it with anyone – as strong as they are of the centrality of their web services. Not only in the Internet geography. But also in modern social communication, of which they are fully entitled constituent elements.

The battle against the bills signed by Lamar S. Smith was the umpteenth clash of power in a Netwar started by the campaign against Pirate Bay and developed in various local settings (as the Google vs Vividown case in Italy). The hefty stake is the market of information and its rules, now written by new players that permanently ousted the old ones. There is no more space for the old fogeys like Rupert Murdoch, the utmost champion and distinguished supporter of SOPA and PIPA. He who did bring Myspace to collapse when it was at its height and was facturing billions. He who lashed against the free character of online newspapers. He of the “News of the world” scandal. He who, in spite of its tailored facades in 140 characters’ shots, remains the living embodiment of the entartainement majors’ hardline, made up by 10 years of media terrorism, defence of parasitical market attitudes and Kafkian trials against hundreds of P2P networks’ users. He who, in front of the flight of all those who swiftly retired their backing to the infamous bills (or otherwise face a diminished consent as the november presidential election approaches) couldn’t but comment with a laconic “Politicians all the same”.

Yes. The presidential election. Because the battle against SOPA and PIPA was an important step for it, as shown by the veto menace aired by Barack Obama, if these were to succeeed. A stand that is not a simple favor to the masters of Silicon Valley. Truely, ICT’s big shots are well-grounded in Washington (and particularly at the State Department’s table). But is also true that, historically, the democrats always had most strong connections with the audiovisual industry scene interest groups. Moreover, both S.Francisco and Los Angeles are fundamental pieces of USA’s soft power. But the words of the defeated John P. Feehery, a MPAA lobbist, leave little room for doubt. The content industry has no idea about how to address people, while the internet companies manage to mobilize them by means that the studios could not even think of. The “Internet Strike” last January 18 showed it clearly. Obama would have never approved a bill that could put obstacles in the way of such powerful companies, able to so deeply condition worldwide public opinion. Never he would have taken responsibility in causing a negative drift in weblife exacerbating millions of people, a lot of them being US voters. One can but imagine the possible recoils on his campaign. Obama did no favor to Google&Co. Simply, right now, he fears them.

Subdued one of the richest lobbies in the US industry, leaned on the “world’s most powerful man”, the internet companies are now left with a fistful of battles to win, to be able to lay down that very freedom of expression that they claim to defend. The EU lawsuit against Google for its monopolistic market dominance remains and, above all, the breaking up of Net Neutrality: ready to give way to a new grand design of the web, modeled after market-imposed arguments. At the threshold, a two speed Internet – one for the rich people, one for the poor – awaits us. As we were saying in the opening, architecture matters.

As we write, we hear about the FBI seizure of Megaupload and Megavideo, two of the world’s most visited websites. A repressive op with worldwide aftershocks that, regardless of its original driving force, will beef up opposition to the controversial law proposals. In the blink on an eye Anonymous knocked out the websites of all the US entertainment industry lobbies and #megaupload is on Twitter’s trending topics, while groups bent on saving Megavideo are flourishing on Facebook. Let’s see if in the next days Kim Schmitz, the founder of these websites, will be acclaimed as a martyr of free speech (and surely, of the big profits he earned by embracing the cause).

Was the one against SOPA a victory? It may be. If and only if the 99% will be able to transform a battle against obscurantism into one against digital capital, by imagining means to address towards a permanent strike (as we, not Google, like it) our communication against the global governance of information.

InfoFreeFlow (@infofreeflow) for Infoaut

The lobbies of copyright flee. Netwar, final showdown? ©, .

The historical moment in which Wikileaks (WL) acts is decisive: – it’s the moment of the crisis of the United States’ military, political, cultural and technological hegemony.

The fall of the second Wall of the 20th century (‘Wall’ Street) replicates the calls    for glasnost (“openness”) and perestrojka (“change”) because, even if within its   neoliberalist characterization, democratic ideology has experienced a degeneration.

Reforming the system is the imperative, United States’ planetary overstretching     reaches its limits from Iraq to Latin America; the executive power is weak and safeguarded by those who long for a reactionary, fundamentalist and authentically “American” resolution of the ideological crisis.

In this scenery, already complex on its own, a specter is starting to roam around,   whispering in the ears of whoever it meets: “information in revolt will be writing  history.”

‘Specter’ also seems to us the most appropriate term to describe Assange’s character, both in regard to his physical appearance and for the elusiveness with which he was able to evade international police forces and secret service agencies for quite some time.

Still the WL issue – of which a lot of chapters still need to be written – produces extremely concrete aftershocks, capable of causing deep fractures in the traditional networks of the global news system, in these days crossed by movements of breakdown, decomposition and reconstruction. Fractures that represent a point of no return, expanding themselves 360° and not one-way.

Medium is the message

Let’s clear the ground from misunderstandings. These fragmentations have little or no relation to the contents exposed by communications leaked from the US’ embassies around the world. Much of the news which WL made public among millions of people are unessential (and well-known to the insiders) details on the leaning and the path of Washington’s foreign policy.

That Italian energy policy is a bitter pill for the US, and that it also is in this way one should read Rome’s approach, first towards Russia and then towards Libya, is no news for anyone since the hostilities between the czar Putin and the Ukrainian government leaders began. Nor are the ENI interests in the construction of the South Stream gas pipeline casual.

That the embrace between Europe and its transatlantic cousin has become less warm and more formal in recent years, and that instead the deployment of the European integration processes – with the fading of their anti-soviet role – represents a concern for the US administrations since 1989, is a traceable fact in any international relations history manual of acceptable quality.

That the attacks against Google of some months ago would stem from the highest spheres of the Chinese government was testified by the target against which they were directed, their frequency, their range and, more in general, the international context in which they were at work. Not only because, since some time by now, the cybersphere is becoming a privileged battleground in the dialectics between the great powers, assuming bigger and bigger weight in the state defense budgets, but also because an ever increasing situation of antagonism between the two bigger global competitors is in development – something which is making unthinkable the presence of a player like Big G in Beijing’s backyard.

WL has to be examined with more ambivalent lenses (which is necessary to start understanding the phenomenon in all its complexity), leaving out deceitfully subjective and specialist perspectives, without forgetting (still retaining the due question marks) that for millions of people today’s mantle of formality which envelops yesterday’s commonly known facts represents a notable gap.

In the same way the barycenter of transparency (that Internet has been moving for several years in a completely asymmetrical way in favour of those who runs the global politics and economy) moved towards the threshold of the sancta sanctorum of US embassies, and this represents a quantum leap (even more in the digital age): an uncovered cauldron which, unhinging one of the distinctive features of diplomatic communication, represents a dangerous anomaly.

But quantum leaps like these are ambivalent: the meaning which they could assume is not defined a priori; it is a match which is still to be played. The billiard ball has been thrown among the others: even the black eight ball might end in the pocket.

First of all: what is WL?

This term cannot just stand anymore for the homonym organization directed by Julian Assange; we should rather refer to a metonymy, a concept that structures other ones, interrelated between themselves on various levels. The effect on the media system is an hybrid object, an explosive mixture, an offshoot of a skillful dosage of different ingredients: old and new media, P2P horizontality and stiff verticality, opacity and transparence.

It is composed by:

1. A technologically advanced infrastructure that in these days was able to resist to large-scale attacks, mainly (but not only) operated through DDOS. The communication system matrix was conceived as the promise of an high level of anonymity and security in transmitting data, in order not to expose to danger the
2. sources, which – we can but speculate – are at work on different levels of the sphere of US administration.
3. A managing board who carries out duties of capital importance, among which the modalities and the release schedules of the leaks and a careful creaming off of contributors (this measure being essential in order to avoid hostile infiltrations).
4. The financial support provided by several organizations: among whom, the Wau Holland (a charismatic and recently gone figure of the Chaos Computer Club) Foundation, a long-standing hacker organization, devoted since the 80′s to a manifesto that identified in the disclosure of information a strategy to follow). This foundation, taking advantage of the German law (which allows to not reveal the donors’ names) settled itself as a secure funding system.
5. The creation of a very well devised hype, thanks both to statements of highly symbolic value and to a leaks’ disclosure which has been doled out: so far, the result has been that of maintaining at its highest levels the attention of the long tails in the web and of the global media.
6. The relation with some of the major global information media, whose role is not “just” to spread the leaks, but literally to INFORM THEM (that is, give them a form), thanks to the work of analysts able to set them in place historically and politically, and to select with accuracy which news to promote and to which ones to give bigger relevance. Otherwise, who among the “netizens” would have time, skills, knowledge and resources to peer at that huge quantity of raw leaked data? It happened with the Iraqi and Afghan war diaries. It happens even more with the diplomatic communications - as even Sergio Romano stated on the Corriere della Sera – because they are the product of a complex code, to be interpreted with the right linguistic and political coordinates. And it will be even more true at the time of the disclosure of the financial world data. It can look like a provocation but, from this point of view, WL is not providing information at all: it organizes some database according to chronological or geographical criteria. But not political ones. Moreover, the relation with some of the big traditional media assumes another meaning: when on Sunday 28th of November, shortly before the cables’ publication, the WL network came under attack, a tweet confirmed what many did expect: «El Pais, Le Monde, Spiegel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down».
7. Lastly and by necessity WL is also the thousands of websites which voluntarily decided to mirror it (that is, to publish a backup of the cable archives and to constantly update it) after the attacks suffered in the previous days.

Yet, if we try to catch an overview of these early considerations (we could add others on the joints of WL in the social networks) we easily realize that WL turns the tables and unsettles the traditional verticality of many informative national and international media systems, producing a network which splits them across. A fluid and efficient network in which, nevertheless, nodes of different importance do unquestionably exist: for example, the mirroring activity mentioned before is subject to the release made by the central node.

In the same way, as reported by the journalist Farhad Manjoo, in WL lives a necessary contradiction: its mission, also symbolized by the slogan shown on its twitter profile account (“We open governments”), is to achieve an absolute transparence through an organizational modality which takes into account a necessary level of secrecy. We are not playing the search for the oxymoron; we are simply restraining ourselves to notice that the anonymity of the sources doesn’t allow to understand which goals animate them. Goals which – it has to be said – could not match those of Assange & co. And this is not an easily overlookable issue (also because of other critical points, which we will examine later).

Therefore, we are also facing a new form of media network. A new way of developing distributed journalism, but not a P2P one. WL disintermediates the traditional information flow and moves on to immediately recreate new levels of intermediation with several cores.

The front lines of the netwar

There are many aspects still to be looked at. The scorched earth that has been created around WL this week has materially represented a preview of the tensions that since quite some time are building up around the strategical node of the web global governance.

We know that the planning of US military strategy nowadays identifies among its fundamental grounds the claim of US military superiority in providing a securing of the web for ensuring itself a “free access” to cyberspace, identified as a global common.

Therefore, if the WL issue did show the difficulties of the US government in the management of this global common, at the same time it emphasized how the planning on this issue is in an advanced phase of elaboration and implementation.

Which parts of the WL network were successfully hit?

1. Its ability to receive funding was put in check by the freezing of Assange’s Swiss bank accounts, by halting Mastercard and VISA payments and finally by suspending the Paypal account. This very last company, after initially claiming that WL was breaking the website’s policy had to admit that the canceling of the Wikileaks account was due to US State Department pressure.
2. The suspension of the hosting service by Amazon, that took place by the stimulus of an old acquaintance: the senator Joseph Lieberman, author of the Internet Kill Switch bill.
3. The removal of the DNS domain wikileaks.org (now replaced by the domain wikileaks.ch). Surely it is not the first time that a DNS domain is shut down, but it is uncommon for this to happen completely outside any agreement or law protocol, by means of an unilateral US impulse.

This last feature above all very closely recalls the contents of the COICA law proposal, unanimously approved by the US senate Judiciary Committee, on which a few words are to be said. Celebrated by RIAA and MPAA, if approved the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will be introducing processes of regulation of the web which could alter its features. Which are its guidelines?

a) The US Department of Justice is entrusted with the fight against “filesharing”: it will be able to prosecute any website that soils itself with copyright infringement.

b) by requesting various federal courts to issue an injunction against a website, the DOJ would be able to shut down a domain. But what it may be as innovative as worrisome in this legislative proposal is what Torrentfreak points out:
«If the courts then decide that a site is indeed promoting copyright infringement, the DOJ can order the domain registrar to take the domain offline. The bill is not limited to domestics offenders, but also allows the DOJ to target foreign domain owners.»

And continues:

«Aside from classic ‘pirate’ websites, the bill also conveniently provides an effective backdoor to take the whistle-blower site Wikileaks offline, or its domain at least. After all, Wikileaks has posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States»

The “censorship” of such sites will be based on blacklists completely written by the US government. No need to linger on the arbitrariness which will define them.

The coming into force and an effective implementation of such a legislative bill would have unprecedented consequences: the US government could acquire a totally unconventional role, stepping on to carry out duties exclusively performed by the ICANN (yet thoroughly criticized in the last 15 years for its de facto US-led management) until now. A legislative bill holding the US as self-appointed plumbers of the internet network, opening and closing the taps of information with the aim of directing its flow.

Something right now unacceptable for other state and regional players (it’s not a coincidence that the latest warning of the British The Economist goes: “don’t create a digital Afghanistan”). Something that may in turn signify the creation of new and separate systems of dominion in other macro-spaces on the planet, producing a fragmentation of one of the main frames of the global network (which would cease to exist as such). About this issue EFF itself stressed that

«To recap, COICA gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be “central” to the purpose of the site».

And adds:

«If the United States government begins to use its control of critical DNS infrastructure to police alleged copyright infringement, it is very likely that a large percentage of the Internet will shift to alternative DNS mechanisms that are located outside the US»

Therefore, far from being rash and neurotic, the US reaction has clear continuity lines in regard to the sedimentation of a stance towards the web with roots sinking in a past time ground.
Given the consonances between what is accounted for by the COICA and the infowar unleashed in the last few days, it looks pretty legitimate to us to ask whether the WL issue could also represent an accelerator for these processes of break-up and militarization of the web.

Which could be the presumed next moves made against WL?

A. di Corinto claims that «the next step will likely be that of preventing indexation in the search engines of the WL-related web resources» (one has to ask: will Google and Baidu take the same measures?) and, we might add, it has to be understood what move Facebook and Twitter will make who, even if not confirming the hypothesis of excluding WL from their platforms, neither denied it (while instead they did readily cancel accounts and web pages belonging to the organizations that had led in these hours the attacks against the enemies of WL instead).

Finally, two other remarks.

An essay by Mark Pesce traces a parallel between WL’s possible evolution and the filesharing systems. What we imagine to be a good omen actually spots another possible vulnerability of WL, perhaps even deadlier than the DDOS attacks that are hitting it. Assange’s organization bases its reputational capital on the reliability and the truthfulness of the information it releases. In this way it creates an aura of trust around itself, on which the fluid links which it is able to interweave and its society-building action are based. A dynamic very close to that of the big social networks or of the P2P systems. By which means the distribution of copyrighted contents on the filesharing networks was fought? By putting false or forged material up there. Since WL’s sources are anonymous and therefore each single document has to be verified in its authenticity, it has to be asked if a flooding of well-made forgeries sent to WL (we refer to this specific category because Assange himself pointed out that there are hundreds of people sending material to WL) could not somewhat flood the publication mechanism or bypass the control mechanism, leading to the publication and distribution of unauthentic documents: the trust which WL did create around itself right now would be broken.

But the front of the cyberwar features, in turn, plays of light and darkness and has many participants: a cross-party reaction of users and hacker communities (even very different among themselves) brought a counterattack against the financial brokering services Mastercard and Visa, preventing access to them. Applications and web pages were released, thanks to which anyone was able to participate in the attack against the networks that hampered WL’s activity. Moreover, Peter Sunde revived (by no coincidence closely to the wikileaks.org domain blackout) the proposal to create a distributed DNS system, able to resist the meddling of governments and militaries. A proposal that in turn, after the events of these days, could be seriously taken into account by many people, and that would mark the nth break-up of one of the fundamental infrastructures running the web.

Technological totems and the taboo of the networked conflict

The WL effects don’t end here, but play a devastating role on the ideological ground marking, in our opinion, the end of various web theories, that with this event reach their zenith, yet at the same time touching a ceiling of irreversible contradictions. Another paradox to be added to the list.

First. Let’s try to imagine the WL issue from a reversed point of view.
Assange is a Chinese dissident which exposes classified documents to the world, reason for which he is arrested and imprisoned. Along the usual lectures on the internet as a democracy-exporting tool comes the peace Nobel prize nomination within 2 days, plus a silent sense of gratitude for providing tools and information through which the international projection of the Chinese image undergoes a reframing and weakening in terms of public opinion.
It is an absolutely symmetrical perspective to the one which is unfolding in these hours.

And we cannot deny to enjoy a subtle pleasure in noticing how some pseudo-intellectual bloggers who are filling their mouths by now with buzzwords and slogans after celebrating for years the figures of Anna Politkovskaja and Yoani Sanchez, can proudly include Vladimir Putin as well in the ranks of the democratic fighters for “freedom of speech”, while on the other side of the barricade stands Barack Obama, the man for whom the internet was one of the main driving forces in the run for the White House. Thanks to this, but not only, he could set up the broadest political marketing operation ever seen, mobilize the social movements, start a copious fund raising and bring back to the ballot box ample groups of population in such a difficult context as the US’ one; plus, also and above all, he did impress in the collective imaginary the brand of the network and of the open government as something symbiotic to a change that did never came true.

Second. The stance of Amazon and of the other big US transnational corporations in the effort of clogging WL‘s network and its branches is a blow from which the prophets of the techno-determinist and neo-positivist optimism will hardly recover. The typically liberal paradigm adopted for years by such people as Negroponte gets smashed as a result: such points as <<The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately be more effective means in reaching the goal of plurality than any law Congress can invent>>, the call to a diffusion of democratic principles through the development of electronic telecommunications and the consumption of hi-tech products, or the overriding of censorship through the “beneficial power” of the global communication channel may finally sink into oblivion, with the definitive demonstration that digital technology isn’t at all a <<natural force bringing people towards greater world harmony>>.

Third. The neo-enlightenmentist dream of Rosseauian legacy of a democracy of individuals that comes into existence in the folds of an anarchical infrastructure dies miserably at the same time as it is reaching one of its great goals: the transparence of power towards the social. The blanket is too short: if it is pulled from one side, it leaves the other uncovered and the individuals, once again, end up being rotating particles around intermedial frames (those of the news and politics) that determine them.

Fourth. That a call for a serious reflection on the concept of the common good applied to the internet is of greater and greater urgency is out of discussion. In such a background as the one which is taking shape in these days, that concept cannot be given neither as fundamental right, nor as something already present in the material relations that shape the internet. Simply, it can be imagined as a conflictual ground. And acted upon as such.

Working on the fractures

Lots of people on those days uncorked champagne to celebrate the end of the “old world” without realizing that, inside of the upheavals produced by WL, full-fledged members of that club are acting, and that in turn they will do an absolutely conventional – but nonetheless effective – use of the leaks, in terms of national and international public opinion manipulation. Besides the already mentioned Putin, we mustn’t forget Netanyahu, which thanked WL hat in hands (and also performing a nice bow with a pirouette) for its disclosures on Iran: another piece in the construction of the political frame which legitimates Israeli aggressiveness in Middle East.

What does this mean? It means that the fractures produced by WL aren’t one-sided at all, as many commentators would like them to be, but that they must be imagined, organized, readdressed in frames according to a grassroots and partisan point of view and used in the making of subjectivities.

Let’s make a counter-example: which effects on a global scale would had sorted a critical re-appropriation of sense through the contextualization of hypothetical, 2003-published “Iraqi War Logs” at the peak of the “No War” mobilizations by the movements’ media, coming along with an appropriate tactical stance in the streets? Their pressure on the anesthetized journalism of the Bush era, and on the authorities themselves would have been unbearable.

Break and continuity, fractures and fragmentations, old and new players: a white-hot crucible of contradictions that cannot be avoided. Even if the picture of an old order is shattered or it gets chipped, the shards which fall on the ground will not immediately establish a new one. It’s up to us pick them up before someone else does. This, or the WL metonymy could take yet another meaning. That of a new spectacular global format to be watched beyond the screen of your LCD TV set or netbook. And little changes if you retweet info or do participate in the televoting: Julian Assange is hosting, while Earth’s powers are at each other’s throat.

(Translated by InfoFreeFlow Crew – thanks to Kemal Kamel and Lilix for their help and support;)

Wikileaks – fragments of global disorder ©, .

We did meet him at the MOCA2008 – an hacker camp, north-European style, organized during last august in Pescara, Italy, by Metro Olografix, historical virtual community among the most active on the Italian scene in the last decade – and here’s the result…

InfoFreeFlow (IFF): How did you get interested in telephony and phone lines, even before
you
started to do phreacking?

Captain Crunch (CC): Because I was in the military and I had the need to call home, just to be
in touch with friends and family; I was able to use military lines to make
calls for free, even before the Air force would grant their availability.

IFF: And how did you get interested in phreaking?

CC: It was sort of unintentional. I was approached by a person who called me
and told me he was a phone phreack. It just sparked my interest.

IFF: How did you contribute to the development of the Homebrew Computer Club
and what did it mean to you?

CC: I wasn’t really the particularly involved person in that, I was just one of
the members. I was, at the time, just one of many other people who did made
profound changes in the industry. Steve Wozniak, Bob Marsch, Gordon French,
Lee Felsenstein, all these people were the Homebrew Computer Club founders:
they had a very strong interest in building home computers, which I did
share.

IFF: Which is the feat you are most proud of?

CC: I wrote the first word processor program for the Apple ][ (Easy Writer); eventually I began to work up on it to put up one idea.

IFF: That is?

CC: I needed a word processor program to document a FORTH system that I was
developing; I had hundreds of documentation and I needed a way to make nice
type print; by then there was no word processor program for the Apple, so I
wrote one!

IFF: What can you tell us about the Crunch Box, the Intrusion Prevention
System based on OpenBSD on which you did work some time ago?

CC: It’s in the past. I used to have the Crunch Box along with other people,
which were not really doing what I was telling them to do.
It became a risk for me to be involved with that, expecially when they were
reselling it at the military, so I abandoned it.

IFF: What do you think about the state of Network Neutrality in the USA?

CC: I think the network should remain neutral, definetly. The network should
just be open and free to use: and if you going to pay for the bandwidth,
you keep the bandwidth.

IFF: And about the new role of the phone companies, which claim control
of the
internet traffic as contents’ distributors?

CC: Phone companies should be just carriers and not have control over the
information. Information should be handled by someone else and this is not
the phone companies.

IFF: Lastly, which are your other interests beside telephony and computer
science?

CC: I have a lot of interests…one of my main interests is right now…killing
my body! ’cause it is really screwed up.. So I engage in yoga training and
healing as well as, simply, in reading and relaxing. My recreational
activities also included going to raves; now I can’t do that anymore,
though I’m hoping someday I may go again! I’ve been having some problems
physically, medically and haven’t be able to do that, so I’m spending lot
of time dealing with those.

IFF: Thank you for all, Captain!

CC: Take care!

InfoFreeFlow Interviews Captain Crunch ©, .

This year Info Free Flow‘s hank has unravelled through various interdisciplinary moments: as a miniature social network, this time an "analogical" one, heterogeneous tools were employed for a comparate examination of our technological milieu, tagging diversely from time to time the phenomena which interest us, and from which we are interested, and socializing them with others. In other words, by doing networking.

Networking means gathering heterogeneous experiences, reprocessing one’s acknowledgements in the light of others’ contributions and self-building physical, digital and mental frames appropriate to help progressing the exchange of ideas.
However, this is not enough. Crossing the main themes of last years’ computer science debate, a critique of the networking tool becomes appropriate in regard to a serie of its fruition nodes: what communicate and what not (privacy), by which means that can be achieved (web 2.0 rather than darknets), how to ensure data and profiles portability, which usage will be made of them (licence of appropriation of the transmitted information/knowledge by third parties and profiling).
However, two are the fields that define the type of network we are going to criticize; that is, the network infrastructure and hardware and the range of users that relate themselves to it with their own practices.In advanced capitalist societies, with the exceptions of pockets of digital divide in which there is no convenient investment for privates and the public is lacking, the network connection infrastructures progress and their subscription costs decrease: the capital’s strategy is to include into the market the widest possible range of users, to raise profits connected to the long tails. For this purpose, the web is favourite as advertising media, since traditional ones such as newspapers, radios, tvs and door-to-door sales are unable to feature such specifical ads as Google’s AdSenses, in regard to new consumers’ requests.

Specularly to this economical interest, very keen to expand and extend itself, capabilities of networks’ liberatory usage were long perplexed. Referring to wireless technology, for a long time manufacturers of these devices did not release drivers’ sources, repressing chances of their modding and customization by users.

In front of this merely functional use of the wireless medium, envisaged by the thousand limits and restrictions of public laws and private contracts, the challenge is that of promoting the attitude of experimenting, testing, playing with this technology and design alternative uses for it, in order to satisfy needs and desires and re-appropriate oneself of income inasmuch as grassroots technologies become able to replace or enhance the costly pre-packaged devices that monopolize the market.

Other themes highlighted by the exponential growth of web technology and the number of entities that are interfaced with it are those of privacy, anonimity and techno-control. In the last five years, the boost of data’s transmission speed and storage capacity made feasible a diffusion of information in high quantity and quality, far cry from before.
Techno-control is born when is made possible on a large scale their association with physical subjects, that by then are turned into digital subjects.
The digital subject configures itself in turn as an everchanging nexus of informational flows, which unintentional dissemination – operated by movement and making of transactions inside and outside the web – rises concern about their monitoring and usage by third parties, and need to protect them with appropriate habits and technologies.

The projection on the web that individuals and collectives make of themselves, by inserting – not just willingly, but even in detail – their personal data on social networks such as Myspace, Youtube, Flickr and Facebook results in publication and categorization of preferences, tendencies, projects and agendas.
If from one side these frames represent a source of opportunities of communication, networking and collective consciousness building, that does not come for free: personal and collective data hold an intrinsic value that is embezzled from time to time by commercial profiling, using users’ aggregated consumption preferences in order to sell them the lastest gimmick on the market, to provide with information on them he who should decide about their compatibility with some job, or by further fueling statal techno-control’s pervasive machine.

Not anymore (or better, not only) then an archetypal orwellian big brother, monolithical, statal and repressive but a variable geometry of big brothers, each one owning one or more closed databases of information about millions of profiles that, starting from a captivating model of consumism of relationships, by defining the coordinates resulting from the crossing of their data can point one’s location – on the cyberspace’s map and beyond – with absolute precision.
A determination which tastes deterministic by the time in which, followed by appropriate means of conditioning such as targeted advertising and subtle inculcation of socio-cultural stereotypes into an individual, favours conformation in his consumptions and relationships until their complete predictability, a condition that casts man’s evolution and saddens his existence. Control through utmost transparence.

Against this, self-formation about personal data management acquires a central value; then turning viable a tactical and contingent usage of mainstream social networks, with the chance of starting, crossing and building in parallel and perspective – also thanks to free software – digital unmercified spaces, platforms keen about data portability and communicational channels more respectful of privacy, such as proxies and decentralised networks.

Web 2.0: Entropy of Selfmanaged Networks versus Distopy of Transparence ©, .

The technology-knowledge duo represents more now than ever one of the keystones of information society and it surely is one of the most important tools in the daily practices of biopolitical dominance over the individual.
An ever increasing extension and range of intellectual property and its juridical declentions, architectures which control and filter contents, social networks which retains very little "social" background, steady and systematical violation of the right to privacy are just few elements which make up the background for the steady informational flow of global networks.

Info Free Flow suggests socialization, spreading and debate of counter-knowledge, produced by processes of collective sharing and multipliable thanks to networks’ virality, usable for a wide-ranging re-appropriation of communication, against devastation of the political and cultural agora carried out by the corporations of information, show business and proprietary software, and by the ambiguities of the popular concept of "open society".

We want be able to learn and spread knowledge in a self-managed way. We want to think, fancy and play with technology outside fixed boundaries, going straight to its source, deconstructing it, reassembling it piece after piece to ending up disassembling it again, in accordance with our need or simply for fun, producing widespread skills and rebuffing any fragmentary "specialistic elitarism".

The event enjoyed, during the two editions of 2006-2007, attendance by some of the most important and active Italian underground ( and non-underground ) realities, in years on the hacking’s scene: the Autistici Inventati crew, the Winston Smith project, the MolleIndustria videogames designers, the research group Ippolita, the cultural agitators of Copydown and the Netsukuku developers.

In parallel to the more decidedly counter-informational moment, the Info Free Flow crew aims to realize, using esclusively open GNU/Linux software, media infrastructure open to accessibility, interactivity and usability from any user with any level of computer science alphabetization.

Not lastly, a goal of IFF lies into experimenting with web radios, darknets and informal use of wireless technology. For now, we started by cabling up entirely the Laboratorio Crash and building up a small Internet Point which we will made accessible to anyone who will visit us at the venue.

Who are we? ©, .

Digital technology and expansion of internet gave life, since when they started to
spread broadly, to a veritable revolution of power relationships in the informational and communicational realm.
That is, it has made possible for an huge amount of people linked together to access, thanks to the
language of the bits, to broad quantities of information, to publish them and share them without any mediation
at all, nor any filter and therefore any censorship in their diffusion and browsing.

Growing
widespread use of these new technologies allowed the development of
complex social networks and virtual communities made up by real
individuals that, under the banner of creative cooperation and free
exchange of knowledge valourized their subjectivity (with the needs and
wishes it expressed), experimenting in a whole new lot of practises:
technical, political, artistical, novellistical, scientifical.

And everything about it takes place during a first phase much alien to state and governative control and market
influence, whose role first is reconsidered, then objected and finally well opposed.

P2P
(systems for sharing and exchanging music, movies and any other kind of
content inside a common network) little by little is dissolving the
system of intellectual property and the logic of culture mercification
that comes with it. Big corporations, which enjoy a monopoly in the
entertainment industry, see threatened along with their mediatory
stance in content distribution (software, music and video) also their
mainstream built on profit and characterized by a dismal cultural
misery. Musical labels and novellistic experiments are born and,
adopting a self-managed creation and distribution, decide to give value
to the inner meaning and freedom of the intellectual process of a
work’s creation, instead of its commercial implications.

Forms
of telematical protest like Netstrikes begin to be employed: virtual
parades where thousands of people occupy targeted sites’ bandwidth and
prevent access to them, blocking their activities. The first one was
organized by ECN in 1996 against the French nuclear tests at Mururoa,
and many other had followed.

Tactical
media (Isole nella Rete, Tactical Media Crew, New Global Vision,
web-radios, Indymedia) finds favourable soil and multiply, being active
protagonists in the struggles and conflicts of the last years, and in a
totally independent and horizontal way they can involve thousands of
people by trying to break the monopoly of information of the official
and institutional media, that we know being one of the key elements of
the rule of unique thought and capitalism.

Free
operative systems based on the Linux kernel boom, sons of the
practical, libertarian, anti-authoritarian and non-bureaucratical
mentality of the hacking spirit. Free software, implemented and
continually improved by countless legions of programmers, testers,
debuggers and simple users who can access the source code of which it
is made, grows more and more. The focal point that differentiates this
creative effort with a background of social experiment isn’t that much
gratuity but creation of programs free of any kind of intellectual or
economic monopoly.

This breakdown of the informational cycle, that comes with a communicative insurrection multiplied by the informatic
technology, made the peaks of the pyramids of power tremble, shaken in their basements. And Internet
has increasingly become a stage for conflicts and a net of unsolved tensions.

Governements,
institutions and global corporations react against this with a blind
and senseless fury (at first) and with more subtle strategies (then)
trying to normalize the net and leading it back inside the parameters
accounted for by the global market. Net frame must be changed, laws
that regulate it must be changed, general perception about it must be
changed. The imperative is for Internet not being a field of free
communication and access to knowledge anymore , but becoming a big
global super-market built in such a way to shape all its users into
possible consumers. The ultimate objective is the creation of a
"secure" informational environment, that means "protected" and purged
by any form of dissent and opposition or to "risk factors" that could
hindrace the flow of capitals and the commercialization of the net.

In
the last years we are witnesses of the development of a wide array of
tools to control the net’s information. Tools of control that, let’s
highlight that, are effective when the range of their action is made
possible and distributed on multiple layers, thanks to the realization
of powerful legal gimmicks, exploitation of existing technical
characteristics and introduction of new ones with clear functions of
surveillance, conditioning and repression.

From one side, network architectures and hardware that builds up computers and the software that we use on it are
more and more conceived and developed in such a way to result

0#
in some cases (as for server logs, cookies, web filters) as clear and
present tools of surveillance and monitoring on our activities,
attitudes, the way we move in the internet, which sites we visit, who
we talk with, which content we store on our HDD, what we do and when.

1#
In other cases as devices of limitation to resources and knowledge
otherwise available in the net’s mare magnum. Such an example is the
DRM (Digital Rights Management). Employed for the first time by Sony in
a musical cd, it is a kind of technical limitation which aims to manage
the whole life cycle of a digital object (a movie, a musical record, a
software, an e-book, an image) and that of its copies in such a way to
enable perpetual collection of property rights. These of which we are
talking about are certainly technical topics that anyway implement
clear political choices, that in the end state about who, how, when and
at what price can access the Net, and what kind of Net.

Political choices
that we find also in national and international legislations, more and
more repressive and blatantly arrogant. A frame of control of the
system of intellectual property, as brutal as inefficient, is started,
with the promulgation of laws that criminalize P2P (like the Urbani
decree), make possible a constant monitoring of file exchange networks
and lead to some repressive moments in which forced shutdown of various
servers of filesharing networks (such as Razorback2, e-donkey200, WinMX
and earlier the progenitor Napster), due to authorities’ seizure or
legal menaces by the majors, and prosecution of thousands people (even
if no one ended in some satisfying effect), takes place. Meanwhile,
intellectual property rights are extended beyond any conceivable period
and accordingly, without any reasonable criterion (except for the
odious one of exploitation of communal knowledge), the ensemble of the
targets of such rights is broadened, taking into account things that
until yesterday were considered common goods: from the most ordinary
foods to vernacular music, from the most basic mathematics’ alghorytms
that consitute the operative systems of our computers to universitary
research, not to mention the (human or else) DNA sequences.

And
after semptember 11th the endless war unravels also in the global
fabric of the net: in 2003 FBI seizes illegally the Indymedia servers
in London. The following year, Autistici/Inventati suffers seizures,
first of a satyrical site (in which the active role and participation
of Trenitalia in the Iraqi killings was exposed) and then of the
content of the mailbox server’s hard disks, that hosted the mailboxes
of thousands users. The Pisanu decree (approved in 2005) thanks to the
artificially-constructed panic and the silent approval of the majority
of the Parliament’s political forces, gives approval to a package of
laws that enables a practically endless data retention of Italy’s
internet users, therefore making social control on the net more and
more extended and pervasive.

Even
the market plays its role in this match: many are nowadays the efforts
to cooptate and fraudolently discipline the practices of free
communication and diffusion of information, trying to bring them back
in the framework of the production-consume cycle. The most visible and
blatant tests are those involving creation of sites that on behalf of
the big discographical industry sell mp3 for few dimes (destroying
every logic of sharing and exchange). Other softer and subtler tools
are linked to the open-source software (OPEN IS NOT FREE), that dumping
the concept of freedom proper of the free software and of the hacker
culture propose themselves to the market as a suitable commercial
strategy, ready to expropriate without too many political and ethical
dilemmas the knowledge and experience of the net users, transforming
even cooperative moments into a model for business and profit. Without
forgetting the role of search engines that, though being absolutely
necessary to surf the ever-raging and bursting sea of the net, are also
commercial services that alter in totally arbitrarian ways (often due
to commercial interests and strong censorship pressures) the ranking of
the websites.

As
a background for this ensemble of tecno-control, market conditioning
and authoritarian legislation, we find the mediatic terrorism by the
ufficial organs of television and press: more and more Internet is
presented as an "hut" notoriusly frequented by violent dissident
subversives or reckless pedophiles. An evergreen is the old story of
the nefarious hacker that, thanks to his operative systems make dams
explode and floods entire regions of eastern China, practices black
magic online with the Bestie di Satana through MSN, desecrates the
holiness of the Vatican’s site by using the mouse to fornicate with the
animated gif of the Saints Peter and Paul or melts the ice of the poles
if needed. The P2P is blamed as the epicenter of a fair share of the
world’s undoings: from vehicling violent and uneducative contents to
sorting centre for communiques by Al-Qaida or that month’s other
fashionable terrorist organization.

So we see how
constructing hierarchies and closing access to information (and
presenting as a fiendish misdeed the idea of share it) an effort to
impose a behavioural censorship on the user’s interaction with
techonologies is taking place, a forced normalization of the digital
device use. An use that becomes limitant and limited and that flattens
one’s ability to mold the matrix of reality in an autonomous way,
altering the interaction with the machines and converting them (well
often without the subject knowing about that) into control devices or
into mere objects ready for consumption.

To
avoid the shutdown (or the radical transformation) of the net, armored
bit after bit by control architectures, by lawsuits from the
copyright’s and patents’ corporations, by oppressive bureaucracies and
obscurantists law formation processes, we must be able to trace some
escape and opposition routes against knowledge mercification and global
control strategies.

A
critical and creative attitude and the knowledge of the functioning
mechanisms of the machines and digital devices allows their liberatory
and playful employment, useful to fulfill needs and wishes
(communicational or else) but also to disarray, circumvent and
monkeywrench endlessly the closed systems based on profit created after
control and scarcity. In this way, a self-formation and a costant
research for knowledge become necessary; they cannot be just related to
a merely individual intellectual process but are to be found into
participation, exchange, cooperation and moltiplication of the
knowledge that unfolds in the many and chaotical social communities
driven by the same happy passions: the will of a free communication,
the need to satisfy needs and give way to one’s wishes and his
curiosity, putting firmly hands on the machines and enjoying total
access to the information.

But
if we do recognize the inherently capitalistic nature of the dynamics
of surveillance and control of which we have talked, then we do
recognize the need to move in a much broader perspective, too. It is
necessary to add to the practices of the opening and re-appropriation
of the socially-made knowledge also the creation of virtual and
non-virtual places, not having them just be neutral nodes of knowledge
transmission – because this could turn out to be a double-edged sword.
If the P2P is just perceived as a tool to get the last christmas
efforts of the Vanzina Bros, the Hollywood trash, the conservative and
trickily fascists videogames designed and realized with the Pentagon’s
support, then it risks to become the next "weapon of mass distraction".
If we are satisfied by just burning proprietary programs with unknown
code, then we do no such thing other than favour who retains their
monopoly, contributing to spread closed standards and formats,
unchangeable and unaccessible to everyone (so risking in addition to
stumble upon gimmicks of surveillance on our actions). But even if we
consider Linux just as a free (even if now it isn’t always like that)
and more efficient substitute of Windows, then we risk to give way to
new forms of open capitalism. And in the same way, even if we manage to
digitalize and make available every university text we do need (a very
demanding task indeed!) this wouldn’t change at all the process of
In/formation that storm us making us precarious always ever.     

The main point today isn’t that much (or at least not only) in the opening, but in the framing of the alternative
dynamics that participate in production, re-elaboration and diffusion of knowledge.

It
isn’t enough to be able to use a computer and know the source code of
the operative system, but is important to self-grow a critical
conscience about both working mechanisms of digital media and how these
affect informational flows that pervade the everyday of the net (and
not only) and go to prime much wider political, economical and social
processes.

The keyword is making networks with different subjects with whose a critic of virtual tools could be done, and
with whose experiment against-knowledge and counter-knowledge to enable us to be (and be perceived as) active
and autonomous subjectives in the creation and upkeep of a free Internet.

Let’s
free knowledge and spread free standards, damage official networks and
build some alternative ones, learn about surveillance systems of the
informational society to counter their effectiveness, breed a
subversive stance in the use of technology and use it to flank social
struggles and magnify their impact.

Copy.Riot Project
B.A.Z. Crew

From information control to digital resistance ©, .