From the Cyber Resistance crew (wwww.cantiere.org) we get a little manual for managing as best as possible your smartphone in prospect of #19o: apps, habits and good practices of communication to use during a rally.

Do you remember Seattle? Do you remember those demonstrations that, at the millennium’s turning point, were crowded by men and women that had already understood where the neoliberal globalization wind was blowing and that didn’t want at all to be thrown in the trash-bin of “the end of history”? Those were the days in which we were starting to discover that we could be media, days during which a strong awareness of how urgent it was to implement independent communication networks was making its way inside social movements; along with the need for a widespread and user friendly technological culture.

Demo after demo we could see one more phone, camera or videocamera joining up the myriad of lenses watching over the rally, documenting its actions or recording on tape the police forces abuses. Prosegui la lettura »

“We do not conceive our structure as an answer to state control, but more in general as the only decent thing coming to our mind that could guarantee freedom of expression and avoid uncontrolled profiling by companies and governments”. These are the first words typed to us by one of the Autistici/Inventati fellows in a chat room of their network. A necessary clarification, especially after the fallout of the Snowden bombshell started to be felt also in Italy. In the early days of August, Lavabit and Silent Mail – two privacy-oriented US webmail providers – were forced to shut down because of NSA threats. Hundreds of thousands of users were suddenly left without tools for safe communication and many of them resorted to A/I looking for an alternative solution. Within a little while, the collective was flooded with subscription requests for its services. An event that marked a moment of difficulties for our local hacker crew, to a point when the opening of new accounts had to be temporarily suspended. This fueled a heated debate among those participating in the project on what next steps to undertake. It is difficult, for now, to say how datagate will change the self-managed communication projects. Autistici only knows that it will be able to face the new challenges on the horizon with a certainty maintained for more than 10 years: that of being not a mere webmail service but a community. A community that now needs the support of anyone feeling to become part of it. Prosegui la lettura »

Datagate: is PRISM a scandal? Maybe. Or maybe not. Because in the global economy realm violating privacy is the norm, not the exception.

One of the most widespread illnesses, intrinsic to the explosion of the global communication fluxes, is “recentism”. With this term, we define a process for the formation of knowledge lacking a long – term historical perspective or strongly influenced by a recent attention wave provoked by the media. The infection is viral and curiously it affects equally those who praise the web as an inherently democratic technology and those who don’t miss a chance to yell at the totalitarianism of “dataveillance”. A case of this syndrome that could be included in a manual is the current debate about the PRISM scandal, already renamed “datagate”. Let’s see why.

First of all the existence of the Echelon system (an invasive and global surveillance network, ancestor of the current one) has been known for at least 15 years. Its onset hails from the post – Second World War when the United States planned its development, assisted by Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Prosegui la lettura »

17^th May. At dawn the Roman DA Office and the CNAIPIC^[1]kick off operation “Tangodown” against some alleged members of Anonymous Italy: four people end up under house arrest, while six others are searched by police and dozens of computers and IT devices are sequestered by security forces. All those people are charged with the same accusations: criminal conspiracy aimed to damaging IT services, illicit IT communication interruption, abusive access to IT services. In the following weeks Anonymous’ reaction is not long in coming: a steady stream of attacks first hits the Roman tribunal website, and then the ones belonging to security forces’ unions SIULP and SAP. Finally, they go for the big prize: they put the Ministry of Interior in their sights, whose servers get violated while stolen materials are published on the web. This would be enough to deny the prosecutors’ official version that, a few hours after the arrests, was already talking about “having decapitated Anonymous’ leadership”. And yet many other doubts are surrounding police detectives’ conduct: from resorting to anti – terrorism laws towards the activists to charging them with associative crimes that, if confirmed during the trial, could cost the defendants jail terms ranging from three to seven years. Infoaut decided to read between the lines and interviewed lawyer Fulvio Sarzana, jurist and specialist in information law, that has been focusing on digital technologies and internet for ten years. Prosegui la lettura »