Archivio per la categoria English

19 october: crypt ‘r die

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.

altDo 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 »

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“Freedom and rights? You have to sweat blood for them! On the internet, too.” Infoaut interviews Autistici/Inventati

“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 »

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Yes, we (s)can! (and not from today..)

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 »

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They are Legion, not cyber-terrorists

17th 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 »

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

altOriginal article here

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. Prosegui la lettura »

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The decline of the White House’s smart /soft power: when the liberal ideology of the web collapses

Talk by media activist Infofreeflow focus group at Counterpower In The Crisis, national meeting of Italian autonomous collectives, activists and social centres in Bologna last October 13-14th

We devised this presentation in an effort to share as widely as possibile a series of political and cultural indications stemming from from the last two years of global mobilizations.

The Tunisian revolution, the Egyptian one, the #15M, and also the NoTav movement did put at the centre of a world in crisis the hot issue of revolution, of its practices but also of its words. In this way these events did also reaffirm the centrality of successfully managing the communicative dimension in the present conflicts by particularly (but not solely) locating the web as a battleground where to carry out strikes in order to break down those political technologies, those narrations and those rethorical tools that legitimise austerity policies and that, using a metaphor, are the platforms, the launching pads, from which the neoliberal operations of aggression against the territories take off.

Social media, environments of electronic communication, and global platforms of communication exposed all their ambivalence, unleashing in this way a twist of the imaginary: not merely formidabile apparatus of capture of capture of social cooperation and value produced on the web – thanks to which working time expands itself until perfectly overlapping with leisure time – but spaces where a plurality of processes of subjectivation and organization of global movements multiplied as well. Obviously, no medium is by itself enough tout court in front of the complexity of a process of revolutionary organization but, at the same time, there is no organization without identity, and there is no identity without processes of communication, shared representations, and the accumulation of an historical memory of struggles. Prosegui la lettura »

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