their smartphones and so on can be identified and profiled by just for interactions through their mobile devices. if you post a tweet, check your bank account, send an e-mail, or check your facebook newsfeed, boom. some ad network is profiled you. that a lot of the companies collecting this data can not live up to their security claims. this data is vulnerable to hacking. security experts will tell you that any device connected to the internet can be hacked. that is not just your computers, or your smartphones, or your tablets. carsasingly it becomes our that are connected to the internet, your home security system, your medical devices, power plants, all of this is vulnerable to hacking. hacking is not just for criminals. governments all employee hackers. ony dig up information people outside of their country and people inside their country. as we have failed from edward snowden -- found from edward snowden who released a large trove of documents, our government, the nsa, exploits quite a lot of hacking techniques to acquire information. in a lot of cases, they do not even have to you. hack you. if the company is in the jurisdiction of the government and they have the legal authority to act, they just demand it from the company. there we are. am rebecca mackinnon. i am also the author of "consent of the networked." by fivened here today brilliant individuals. all of us will be telling you some things that are a little bit gary. that knowledge is power. if we want to change the way things are today, if we want to build a world that we want to live in, you have to start by understanding how this digital environment works, what the threats are. with that, i will begin my little story. january 1990. was anybody using the internet in 1990? very good. in 1990, the berlin wall came down. these photographs are the ransacked offices of the stasi, the secret police. as east germany began to fall apart, protesters went into these offices and ransacked the files. two years later, the unified democratic germany declassified all of the files. people could for the first time find out who had been spying on them for all of those years. people found out that neighbors, colleagues, sometimes lovers, symptoms spouses, sometimes parents or children were informing on them to the secret police. it was very traumatic. forward to 2009. the unified democratic berlin. exercisesolitician his right under german law to request data from his phone on allr deutsche telekom of his movements over a six- month. -- over a six-month period. takes is doing newspaper in a create an interactive graphic. you can still visit it online. it has an entire log of all of his movements throughout that entire six-month period. stasi's wet dream. neighbors anduire lovers to betray anybody. --s kind of digital dossier people can spy on all of us through our devices and platforms and networks that we are relying on for pretty much everything in our lives. between aifference dictatorship and a democracy in this delay -- digital age is going to be, do we have control over how information is collected over us? are we able to hold information collectors collectible -- accountable? do we understand who is collecting information and how it is being shared and with whom it is being shared? if there's accountability around that, and this is happening with some consent of the citizenry, then you have a chance of being a democracy. if not, you are going towards a dictatorship pretty fast. on to san francisco in 2006, a whistleblower named mark a former employee of at&t, disclosed that the national security agency had built a secret room in that room building. a communications of millions of ordinary americans were routed through that building and were being siphoned off into the secret room as they pass through that building. a number of organizations try to see the government. those lawsuits have yet to go anywhere. the point being that we started to begin to get a picture of the surveillance that was going on. how large that picture was and the extent of the surveillance, we are now coming to understand more fully, thanks to the leaked information by edward snowden. these nsa facilities are everywhere around the country. aey're collecting data on large percentage of americans. internet ise, the revolutionary. let's not deny that. the internet and mobile be used bycan citizens to overthrow governments, to get opposition leader selected who would have no chance otherwise. this technology is very empowering. but at the same time, governments are doing everything overcan to use their power the commercial networks that are within their jurisdiction to fight back. from states are security headquarters outside of cairo into the -- in 2011. after the mubarak government fell, an activist got into the headquarters. some agents tried to shred documents, and people were posting them on twitter of course false however, there were rows and rows of files. people got in there and found their own files. there were reams and reams of e- mail transcripts. there were cell phone transcripts. there were conversation logs that people have thought had been secure. there was information about data that they have been uploading and downloading from the internet. it was all captured over their internet service providers. using technology, the egyptian -- they purchased the technology from a company affiliated with boeing. what is the point here? increasinglyhat the relationship between citizens and their government is mediated through the internet. technologies are largely developed and operated by the private sector. you cannot assume that the internet is going to evolve in a way that actually empowers its citizens. if we want the internet to evolve in a way that is compatible with democracy, and compatible with human rights, compatible with the sort of society we want to live in, in which individual freedom is protected, we have to fight for it. just like you have to fight for freedom because you do not engage in the way in which your physical society is being governed. weber makes the most effort to shape that society will shape it to their greatest advantage. this is what we need to be working on. as i mentioned, the internet is challenging. in a a lot of very important ways, governments are trying to fight back. maprestingly, this is a that was developed recently published recently by the oxford internet institute. they resized all of the countries on the planet based on their internet population. then they colored each country according to which website is the most visited website in that country. , those arered countries where google is the most popular. all of the blue, countries where facebook is the most popular. china is a big green because idu, a bigdo -- ba internet company. except for china, cause extent, iran, and russia, all of the other countries, the most dominant web services are american. knife you combine that information with what we are now learning about the nsa and the effect it has had and it's relatively unfettered access to information on communications happening on these websites -- arguably there are some controls over how they can access and what they can do with the -- of americanut citizens and u.s. persons -- there is virtually no meaningful control over what they do and how they collect information of non-us persons. person,re not a u.s. and you are looking at this map, and you are thinking about this map in the context of what we have learned from edwards out in, you might be -- edward snowden, you might be mad. you might feel that there is a power imbalance going on here. a lot of government are pretty bad. this is the president of brazil. she recently spoke at the united nations. she accused the united states of breaching international law. completely failed to respect the privacy of anybody who is not an american on the internet. why does this matter? if you are an american, why do you care about non-americans and if their privacy rights are being disregarded? it relates to how we use the internet. this is something called the international telecommunications unit. internationale telephone and satellite system. last year, they tried to assert control over how the internet is for native and how standards are developed. the u.n. body chose a block of governments. they came close to go, but another block of government, democracy is working with companies, working with citizens fought back. right now the way the internet is governed and coordinated is very decentralized. it involves engineers and companies and a lot of nongovernmental and fusions. say, was an effort to governments need to reassert sovereignty over the internet. it was blocked last year, and the nsaately because of revelations, a lot of the governments that were voting for a more democratic centralized internet are starting to rethink. they are starting to talk about something called data sovereignty. that means that governments are now discussing new laws that would require web services and internet services and telecommunications services who want to serve the citizens of a particular country -- the data needs to be stored and managed in that country. mean indoes that practice? they're doing this because they do not want the nsa to have the outrage they have. there is a troubling side of that. there's one country that is already asserting sovereignty over data. it is called china. this is one of the results. facebook is blocked in china. this is what you get when you try to visit facebook on a chrome browser from within china. facebook will not housing services that are meant to serve chinese customers inside china. so you cannot access facebook in china. this is the kind of world that would become more of a facsimile of the international telephone system, rather than a free and open internet. that is because you have a lot of people who feel that their rights are being violated. in my book, "consent of the argue that we need to start taking charge. we need to think of ourselves as citizens of the internet. citizens of this networked world and not just passive users. we need to start telling government and telling companies that run our services that we want our rights to be respected onlylso recognize that if some people's writes are respected, and not others, ultimately no one's writes will be accepted -- respected. to the environmental movement. it is starting to emerge. very soon, there will be a march on washington to demand an end to unaccountable surveillance by the nsa. aople can also begin to join lot of international movements. there is global voices online, which i am part of. one way that an american can start to get involved with these issues is the electronic frontier foundation. g and get ato esf.or lot of information about what is going on and how to protect yourself in the future. there are a lot of drives and information about rallies that you can attend. there are a number of other organizations. tois up to all of us determine how our internet evolves. just as if you want chicago to be covered in a way that actually respects the rights of its citizens, is the citizens do not get actively involved in a governance, if the citizens have no idea how chicago is governed, who is exercising power and how, then you are not going to really be able to affect changes in that governance. you have to participate and be involved as. you have to make your views known. consumer, we can exercise a lot more power than we are doing right now is stop not only in terms of what you choose to use and not use, but is a vocal critic. a lot of these companies do respond to public criticism. lets exercise our power and not be passive users. citizens of active this networked world we are in. are some people who are so upset about the abuse of power in our digital lives and to also have technical skills that they've joined a group called anonymous. i'm sure many of you have heard of it. their slogan is, we are anonymous. we are legion. we do not forget. expect us. that is their battle cry since they emerged in 2008 from a number of message boards where people began to post their withrsations and opinions anonymous not giving their real names. there's definitely a real ethic in that community about the importance of anonymity. also gone after a lot of organizations and governments that they do not like. laces that they feel are abusive. the church of scientology, government agencies in the united states, israel, tunisia, uganda, the westboro baptist church, sony, etc.. one of our guest today is the author of "we are anonymous." new york magazine called this book the insider account of the hacker movement. she will share with us both some of her stories from her book, but also she will talk about some of her new work on mobile tracking. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. thank you so much for that introduction. it is a real privilege to be here at chicago ideas week. i am a journalist with forbes. i started off in radio journalism and i joined forbes in their london bureau writing about business and marketing currencies. two years ago, i started focusing on technology. a couple years ago, i started writing about anonymous. i read a book about it. now forbes magazine probably isn't the kind of publication that you would expect one of their journalists to write about a bunch of young anarchic people who go around subverting things on the internet. they do not make much money at all. and writingain why about anonymous, in 2010, forbes "the platform. that allowed journalists like me to focus on a topic that we were interested in and write about it with as much frequency as he wanted. i got lucky because in that same year, december, anonymous carried out one of its most notorious attacks against a series of financial companies. they wanted to avenge wiki leaks and the arrest of julian assange . i have always been interested in disruptive figures and underground societies. i got tired of reading about rehashed articles online and i started interviewing some of the reporters. withually, i made contact some of the senior organizers and realized that this was not just a group. it was a whole culture with a history. they had dedicated and their own language. and their own language. that fascinated me. i became obsessed of tracking these guys. i got in contact with some senior figures who created a splinter group, lolsec. i would track what they were doing in the public eye. i would track what they were doing with sony pictures and fox news and even the cia. a very hair-raising moment i had hackers threatening to destroy the company i work for. i saw my sources get paranoid. i was able to meet some of them face to face. some of them got arrested. it was quite emotional at times. i learned that a lot of these guys were young men, unemployed, quite isolated in society. they were extraordinarily intelligent, but they often lacked common sense. they were full of contradictions. for example, it is jake david lehman face to face while he was still part of lulzsec. online he was, topiary. he was one of the leaders of lulzsec. face to face, he was this scrawny young man who was not good at socializing and quite shy. he is not like that anymore. this was a while ago. i also learned about a website called 4chan. you will hear about this for my colleagues. this is a website that anonymous started and it has been called, i will not see -- say the word, but it is the armpit of the internet. it hosts a lot of graphic violence. it is a place where people come to discuss their fears and their proclivities and their inhibitions. one of my interviewees, who i call william in the book, he allowed me to take a picture of him by covering his face. for many yearsn every day. this was his life. it was a place where he could honestly talk about things in a way that he could not the off- line world. it was a real community for him even though he knew no names. let me give you a brief rundown of some of the key things i learned about anonymous and what it was. first of all, when we were first reading reports of anonymous, they were referred to as a group of hackers. that is not true. it is not a group. it is a network of ever shifting notes -- niodes. most of them are not hackers. they were just good at trolling or knew the community very well. also the attacks that they carried out were very easy to do. they would download simple web tools from the internet, which had been previously created for penetration testing by i.t. security guys. it would support those tools and use them to launch cyber attacks. super easy to use. another key thing i learned was about the huge amount of year that exists in anonymous. red-hot paranoia, constant. order that fear was about getting arrested. -- part of that fear was about getting arrested. part of that fear was about getting doxed. is you have your online identity unveiled. they would sometimes spend more than a year cultivating a nickname online with a personality and everything else. name isas you are real revealed, the value of that identity was lost. this was a problem for people like jake davis when he was found out to be the real tell. . butdy wanted to be doxed, that threat was constantly being tossed around. that raises a lot of questions about privacy. anonymity was the one true way to experience privacy in an age when corporations and governments know more about us than ever before. last december, about two years after i wrote my book and researched unanimous, i moved from "forbes" in london to -- transferred to san francisco where i started studying and researching technology in silicon valley. and i can't begin to tell you what a jump into the deep end that was. and also how surprised i was by the blase attitudes i was encountering among executives, startup, entrepreneurs about the privacy of consumers that they w

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