Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM1L-vDn0_A
Text to Translate: http://piratenpad.de/p/MNTkBv9BcX

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Good evening, nice to have you here. My name ist Stephan Urbach, I'm from Berlin and from the Internet. I live there, like many other people do too. The good thing is I don't have any slides, so you can fully concentrate on me, no pictures, which could distract you, no videos like I usually have. This is because when I was asked some months ago if I wanted to hold this talk, it was clear to me what I wanted to say. And now I stand here and have to revise my assessment completely. Need to rethink the whole topic, because the last weeks pretty much ran over us activists.

I just start where we started, as activists. When it was easy for us. That was last year when Mubarak cut of the net, and we sat in front of our displays and didn't get any news anymore and thought NO. I want my live stream from Tahrir Square. We had live streams, recorded with small cell phones. The people broke open street lamps and ripped out the power-lines to charge their telephones. It was a lot of do-it-yourself work, tent villages were set up where there was much tinkering on technology, what usually happens in hackerspaces here it was done there on the side of the street. It was unbelievable. And we got images, videos, podcasts from Tahrir Square it was very impressive - and Al Jazeera had the same images in a loop. I did it to myself, I watched Al Jazeera an entire day and and they broadcasted the same three clips in a loop. It is wrong if people say, Al Jazeera reported better, that is wrong, they just reported longer, overall. Some people blame the "Tagesschau" (Germany's main daily news broadcast) and the "heute-Sendung" (second largest) on ZDF that they didn't give us any information, from these media. And they said No, we did what we do: sound reporting from confirmed sources and somehow try to get it put into the news-broadcast.

But that isn't enough for us anymore, we don't just want the secondary or ternary source anymore, we want the primary source. Through the use of the internet we have the chance to work with the primary sources and judge it for ourselves. We tend to believe in images and texts in blogs when they talk about a regime, it sounds very pleasant when you hear that people are against a regime which suppresses, tortures, and possibly even kills. But we can't judge if this is true, and we don't know. Today in retrospect we know that it was true, what these people said. But in the moment we really can't judge that. That is always a nice breeding ground for conspiracy theories, when there is an article on Zeit Online (online edition of the largest weekly German newspaper), which we at Telecomix smuggled out of Syria and then people write in comments, "Yeah, did anyone ask the regime, what happened there?", and I think to myself "Err, No!"

We don't know if it is real, if what people write has really happened that way, yes. But we finally have more sources. We have a wide array of sources, and can make up our own mind. And when suddenly 10,000 blogs appear, which write about a regime has humans slaughtered, then I tend to believe these 10,000 blogs. I slowly tend to do that. If it is the truth, I of course still don't know. So we wanted to get these primary sources back, and we thought about how we can achieve that, what can we do to get news from Tahrir Square back on our displays at home again. And suddenly we had an idea, we had old modems in our basements and we dug up 20-year-old technology and put them in our computers, and we suddenly had dial-up servers again, like you know from back in the day, from T-Online (largest German ISP) or AOL or Compuserve with an analog modem, reachable from everywhere. And it was really exciting that every modern operating system still has the software to do that built-in. It wasn't witchcraft, we didn't program anything major, we just took 20 year old manuals and started transcribing them. And brought up to 300 people from Egypt back online, at peak. 300 people who could simply send pictures, texts and videos, in bad quality, because the connections were slow, but suddenly we had pictures and texts again, and we were happy.

That was our goal as group of activists, to re-establish communication. What we didn't think of in that moment was that people may just want to write emails to their parents, who are in England at the moment for instance. Just to tell them: Hey, I am well, don't worry. We learned that weeks later, after the whole thing was over, when emails reached us, in which people thanked us, that they could keep in contact with their family members. That they could tell them, what they experienced and how they experienced it. And we discovered for ourselves that, robbing people of the ability to tell stories is an act of war. That was Egypt, and that was easy for us, that was turning on our computers and starting a tool, and after that sending faxes to Egypt with the telephone numbers. We used faxes, a lot, really a lot and they still work. Hold on to your fax machines. Ghaddafi was a little smarter, he blocked our numbers. We had to find new numbers, but the internet was still there, I mean in Libya they didn't turn it of completely, they just slowed it down. In the nights and on weekends the connectivity was bad in Libya. So the people did it in the daytime. Some people were there and started to build up media centers, where you could go
and there where computers and really fast internet access, and they just piped it out. Wasn't that hard either.

And then the conflict in Syria started. What happened until then was peaceful. The only violence was defensive force by the protesters, we didn't have a militia who engaged government troops and did not experience that. And it was in Libya -- until foreign troops arrived it was a massacre. But what we see in Syria is orders of magnitude worse. The internet is under surveillance almost 100 percent, the data packets are disassembled into their smallest details, we published that, we found the equipment in Syria and we published what happened there exactly.

And what happens are the same things that are being demanded here: data retention, filtered internet access. Things which are apparently OK in a democracy, and cost human life there. One needs to think long and hard, what do we really want, do we just want a free internet, as we activists demand, or do we want to go as far as to say, we are prepared to give up this free net for a "small percentage bump of solved crimes-statistics," as the saying goes.

In a country under the rule of law, I was told, you can do such things, this would be no problem, because there are checks and balances, control instances. We see that these controls aren't working, we saw this with the NSU (a Neonazi-Group murdering in Germany for several years, while under surveillance by Germany's FBI), the control mechanism didn't work in recent years, and that is the reason why I don't trust tools like data retention and net filters to be used by any politician in Germany in a responsible fashion. The proof why this isn't possible was provided by us, by publishing and passing on images of people whose internet access was under surveillance who were shot because of it. That are things we as activists have to live with now.

What is the benefit for people in Syria to communicate, what do they actually do? Do they send e-mails to eachother, do they plan their demonstrations? Or do they just send news to the outside? It is very exciting. Based on our contacts, we know how the net is used: It is used completely ordinarily. Shows are being downloaded, cat-pictures are being watched -- yes, everybody likes cats. Blogs are being read, news is being consumed, how is the situation perceived abroad, and the reaction on this very frustrating. Many people in Syria do not understand, why the current conflict is not a big topic worldwide. We hear from time to time in the news, when there was an extraordinary number of deaths, like now in Homs, where in one night lots of people were massacred, then it is in the news again. But as a general topic it is not being communicated. It is not a general topic in the media landscape. There is no daily report in the newspapers saying that Assad has to be toppled, only when something new and very bad has happened. I got emails from newspapers, like the Zeit for example. They have published articles, that we were smuggling out of Syria, English articles about what's going on there. These articles were translated, linguistically polished and then published by them. We have mediated interviews with local people, who told why they did it, why they went on the streets. And these are many individual stories that we get to hear, and that we carry on.

These are the stories of twenty-year-old people, that are usually going to university but then decide, they would rather live in freedom and would rather consume free media, and would rather be free to decide how to be governed. This is nothing new, we know the same thing from other countries, we know it from Egypt, we know it from Libya, but we also know it from Bahrain, we also know this from Yemen. In Yemen people have been on the streets for months and we don't hear of it. One reason for it is, that nobody is interested in Yemen, but another reason is, that we don't get news from there, because the net-penetration is at 0.3 percent. Who should pass the news to the outside? And most importantly, with which technology? Probably I will start with carrier pigeons, because I think this is very exciting.

In Bahrain there is huge movement for civil rights, a movement for democracy, that doesn't have to fight with a censored net, but with the Bahrain Cyber Army. This is not a joke, that is their real name. These are people with a burgonet on their computers - No. That is a troop of people writing pro-Bahrain blogs. They report on how great everything in Bahrain is, and that the people arrested are somehow child-murderers or fornicated or poisoned wells. That is the level on which this is happening, and there are people who believe it. These are the primary sources. What is true? Coming back to the initial question: What is true of what we consume on the net? We are still not able to know. In Bahrain I am very sure, that the well-poisoning is not true, but only because I know people there. I know people and the situation in which they live in Bahrain and I have a friend, who can not return to Bahrain after she fled as long as the regime is not overthrown or she is willing to go to jail and most likely die there, as her family did after she left.

Yes news: We know news also from Wall Street, from the occupy camps, we somewhat know this from the occupy camp in Berlin, which was a smaller one. By now, we know pictures of demonstrations everywhere, of people going on the streets. We know the pictures from Poland, where many were on the streets against ACTA or from Munich where there were 18,000. And these images were first on Youtube and then on the news. We know the pictures from St. Petersburg, where 120,000 people were on the streets, filmed from the top by octocopter handcrafted in hackerspaces. This was first on Youtube and then on the news - two days later. This news situation, which we broadly already know, which I just described, enables us to judge what is happening on our own. And especially with videos. Those are especially well-suited for us to judge: What is happening there? The aerial videos from St. Petersburg were great, because I could estimate myself approximately how many people are standing there and why they were on the streets was obvious: they wanted more democracy. They wanted just a little bit more democracy and not such a farce as it was happening there. Rather simple, really.

In Poland, when they were on the street because of ACTA it was actually because they wanted more democracy, because they didn't want, that their democracy as it exists at the moment, is misused and decisions are effected because if the representatives had been there, these would have been the results. If politics uses subjunctives, something is broken -- fundamentally. Therefore the people went on the streets. When the people in Germany went on the streets against ACTA, because they noticed, that it works somehow, that you can do it, you can come together spontaneously and you can announce your protest with that this was not only an anti-ACTA protest, this was a protest FOR something, namely for a free internet. This was a protest for the ability to consume news, the ability to consume information. 

Because if YouTube were to be turned off because of net filtering in Germany, either it will happen as in Pakistan and it will go wrong, or one news source will go missing. A primary source, which we can use to judge what is really happening at the moment. This is one of the most important issues that reached us from the Arab Spring: Documentation of political processes, of demonstrations. Documentation of incidents. Generating news. What some net-activists have been claiming for years, that everybody can create news, has come true. This was shown very impressively.

What else did reach us? Apart from everybody being able to make news if we want to. We activists noticed, that it is a crap-job, one we don't want to do, one we got drawn into That's the way it is: Some become delinquents and the others become activists, and it is just a very fine line in between, because naturally we did things that are illegal in this country. We have hacked, that falls under the hacking-paragraph (German legislation), but is OK at the moment, because it is against Syria. This was chic, this is OK, two blind eyes are turned. If it had happened at Siemens, we would be in the big house.

Mentioning Siemens, those are the ones who there delivered the security-technologies there. Today, we published this in France in a newspaper. We found technology from Siemens in Syria for the surveillance of people. If you buy a dish-washer, think about who the manufacturer is. I am completely serious about that.

We noticed that security technology is a big market. On Wikileaks the brochures were published, this was nothing secret, this was just directly collected for once. There are conferences where companies sell security technology to Arab crown princes. They write on it, what you can read over somebody's shoulder. These are big posters, such as these ones here, on which is written: "Read along with Google-Mail, read along when people chat - and SMS is something we can do as well." This is written on them in bold and completely openly. This happens at the security conference at Munich, next to it, there is such a trade-fair. There such things are sold. This is the same of course on trade-fairs somewhere in Saudi-Arabia, in America, in Canada. This is a worldwide-market, and it is several billion dollars large. These are the same companies that build our telephone-network, that build our DSL network. That provide communication infrastructure worldwide.

Well, one nice example: The Syrian telephone-network was built by Siemens Syria and then sold to Syria-Tel. They got the order: "Just build it", and that's what they have done. And the order was not just "Build a telephone-network", but "Build a telephone-network, where we can do the following:" because they throw a lot of money at it, the regimes, or have done it, that was very fascinating in Iran, how much money they spent on it and then it is ordered as a complete package. There are manufactures like Utimaco from Hessen (German state), that write the software for it. Small stock company, nice firm, regional job provider, but actually manufactures software for companies, to control company-networks. There is no difference. We have companies in Germany, that make their money with the observation of people, accepting the death of these people. This is a moral twist, because the software and hardware really is important for some companies But the question is: Where to draw the line? At exports? At updates? Where does the observation start? Where does it end? These are the things to be discussed in the next month or years, because we never did discuss this. And I also believe, that there is no simple solution and it will slip towards moral issues. And these discussions are always the hardest.

We lost 20 activists in Homs, within three nights. Their communication was monitored, the intelligence services came and took them. And we have the images. Through secure connections, which we built, we have the images, and gave them to Amnesty, they show how these people were tortured. And that is the internet too. There and here! We have images of American torture prisons, of CIA-Prisons where people are tortured and we found them on the internet. This is one thing we also learned from the Arab Spring, it works. We can be anonymous, we can anonymize it, we can blur the traces. And with it we can show what happens outside. This is unbelievably important, this is somehow new. Wikileaks has started it, very big and was suddenly gone. And by now we don't need Wikileaks for it. We need many small platforms. We need many small groups who have mastered the technologies. Because, to be honest, most people out there using their computers, being on the Internet, don't know what they are doing. And this is OK. We have built it that way, that they don't have to know. We have built the net to be used by everybody. We didn't explain to them how to blur their tracks. We didn't explain to them what watermarks in images are, with geo-data. We didn't explain to them how to remove them.

That is what we need to do now in manual labor. And that is what we do. Every night, when we arrive home from work, we activists walk to our computers and take a look at what new things we got. Sift through the material, remove watermarks and other traces and hand them over to Amnesty International, the Red Cross and others. And despite the ongoing human rights violations nothing happens. Syrian people are begging for help from the outside and they really cry for help, in interviews, in blogs, in videos which they publish. They beg for help, but they are a primary source, we don't listen to them. As hard as it might sound, the primary source is not a good source in such a case, for an intervention. What will be the lessons of the Arab Spring? Most of all doubt, questioning, and not knowing what is right? Not knowing which way to go. Where do we as the international community have to go?

What is OK for me as an activist to and what is not? We intervene in the decisions of a sovereign nation, with the Americans this would be a reason for the collective defense case. We take action against Syrian infrastructure, which is in part property of Iran, so we attack Iran. We declare digital wars and carry them out and we win. Because the admins there aren't that good most of the time. But what would happen when suddenly people from Syria were to do that in the U.S. or in Europe? If they were to break the German data retention infrastructure? What would be the right reaction then? We don't know. These are questions that reached us. And we note again and again, questions are what reached us most, here in Europe and in Germany. 

Besides the knowledge that you can document many things, we pose questions to ourselves, all day. We ask questions about morals, what is right and wrong? and we ask questions about the whereabouts of people. And we are happy every time an armed conflict is over and then there is an election, and the news reach us: "Islamists to take over the reign." No, most of the people from Egypt are islamists. So out of thin air, there is the criticism: "Ohh now the to Islamists have taken over the reign in Egypt, and everything is as bad as it was before." We forgot, or we haven't learned to pause since we are on the internet. We didn't think about the people of Egypt yet having to have their cultural revolution, not in the sense that they are allowed to vote freely, but in the sense of what is a free pluralistic society. We built our ideals for that, because we live in them. It is easy for us, totally easy, totally obvious, but for the people in Africa this isn't the case.

And it is a long process and we need to learn to pace ourselves. We need to have a little more patience. And what will be learned here? I could go on for the rest of the evening, I will try to keep it short. I could just open my laptop and show the files that reached us. We understood that across borders young people think alike. People who grew up with the net, have similar political ideas. They dream of a free pluralistic society without discrimination due to color of the skin, race, gender, religion, or whatever. They don't care if the person on the other end of the line is Christian, Jewish, a Buddhist or whatever. They simply don't care. That is what I learned. That people think more freely than they are allowed. They think in a very modern fashion, very liberal, they have the same dreams I had when I was 20, and it is the same everywhere and the differences we think we have culturally come much later. They're there for people who are now 40 because they didn't grow up with it. Without seeing these other people and just talking to them. Hey, it doesn't matter if it is a women or a man, it doesn't matter Christian or Jewish. And it doesn't matter if the person is from Asia or North America. I learned that the societies in Northern Africa will change slowly.
And that it is a biological problem, which will is solvable by time. 

I learned that we need free infrastructure in Northern Africa, so that the people that think freely or want to think freely now get the chance to be free. Even if it is just in a chat window where they can exchange with others. That is much more valuable than any education or any educational websites. Free communication is the key to a free human. We learned that the freedom of a society has to be measured by the freedom of their internet access. The more free the net is, the more free a society is. And and unfree net brings with it unfree people. Since an unfree net means that somebody is afraid of it. Yes, there are people who are afraid of the internet. For example my father, who simply doesn't understand it. This fear I had to take from him slowly over years, these were long, difficult conversations. But there are people who are now 40 or 35, who fear the internet because they don't understand. Because we never showed them. Because we didn't show them how beautiful the internet is. Most people, when they hear "internet" think porn, more porn, and Google. And Facebook. But the net is so much more.

The net is wonderful. The net shows us new borders and new horizons. The net shows us an infinite room, to exchange art, culture, science. Yes there are many crazy people on the internet -- otherwise I wouldn't be there either. It is of course also full of conspiracy theories, full of abstruse things. But the beautiful things outweigh. That is cat pictures, that is fan-fiction where people get creative and simply continue the Harry-Potter-stories. That is people who remix pictures of ponies and somehow break gender barriers with it. They educate and teach with colorful pictures. Easy, understandable, intuitively unterstandable. This is the net too. This is what's denied to the people of Northern Africa, because they could learn to think free, and free thinking is harmful to a dictatorship. No dictator wants a smart people. Then the people would know that something isn't as it is supposed to be. No dictator wants an unmonitored people, because then it would be able to do things behind his back. And most of all no dictator wants news to leave his country.

I learned, that is what reached us, that we have to protect the freedoms we have here. In our own country we have to fight data retention, net filtering and monitoring and whatever net-damaging things the European Comission thinks of. We need to fight the music companies that want, due to their alleged usage rights, filter websites. We have to fight the VG Wort here (German organisation for printing rights) who want to disallow quoting in certain cases (fair use). We need to fight on these small fronts, to keep the greater good. Because if these things vanish one after another, because somebody won a legal battle again or lobbies push a bill through, so that specific things have to be removed from the net, we will only find out that we have a Germanynet when it is too late. And people who know how to build their own nets will still have a free net. We need to teach as many interested people as possible how the net works, exactly. In Afghanistan we are currently teaching people how they can build routers from consumer hardware, electronic scraps, load it with software developed in Germany, use them to get free networks, and communicate with this village to village.

That is also a bit of freedom, those people won back, after they are supposedly live in freedom already, now they get their free communication, which is not built by a government but communication infrastructure they can control themselves, where they themselves can decide whether they want to keep operating them or not. Where consumer hardware, consumer scraps we would have thrown out is used to build wonderful things. There is a village in Afghanistan which have built a network, wireless, and they have a wiki, where women who can't read or write can teach themselves those skills. In which kids can learn to read. There is - there is software running, from Europe, which shows very simply with symbols on the display what you need to do, to use these computer. Without the internet they wouldn't have that. And without the freedoms we have been defending here for years, we wouldn't have been able to get it there.

The Arab Spring shows us what a net the CDU (largest conservative German political party) envisions looks like, the European Commissions envisions, how the fisheries committee of the European Comission envisions it, and also how the BKA (German FBI) envisions it, and how the intelligence services envision it. We learned what happens if these visions become a reality here. I don't want to have to encrypt the emails to my father -- because I first would have to explain it and second because it bugs me. And I don't want to tell people all the time why they should have to do so, because I don't want our communication to be endangered. Because I don't want us to have to fear to communicate. I don't want to have to start to remove geo-data from pictures, to remove metadata from videos because we have to fear our own government. This is what we learned from the Arab Spring. Those things we don't want. Things for which we need to fight, so that these things can't happen.

We learned from the Arab Spring that you can build friendships over the internet, deep friendships. I remember how my father said to me, you can't make friends over the internet. That is just as dumb as saying that you can't have pen pals. You can form deep friendships over the net escpecially in times of war and revolution, people take joy in everybody listening to them -- Hey don't ruin the talk by coughing. Probably paid by a local group -- They take joy in people listening to them, who simply ask: "How are you?". And I built friendships with many people, not only there, but also to other activists in Sweden, in France, in Northern America, Australia, and we share what we experience, these deep human emotions over the internet. Expressed through some colons and braces. Things that are written between two asterisks, things that start with /me - who take deep joy in when you say "Let's meet in better times."

And that is unfortunately what I can't do with some of them and I would like all of you to stand up for a moment of silence for the victims in Syria. <SILENCE>


Thank you.
Yes, what arrived here from the Arab Spring is that we need to fight, we need to feel compassion, and we need to redefine at what point intervention with military violence is acceptable. How many lives need to be lost until the free world finally acts and stops the slaughter? How many proposed laws do we have to tolerate here in Germany and Europe until it becomes dangerous? And another result is that even on the internet people can be incredibly grateful.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Thank you

[End of talk, Q&A session]
Host: If there are any questions, i have a microphone here. You raise your hand, I come to you and you can ask a question.

Question: So, you build a personal relationship to the people at the other end of the line. Aren't there moments where you want to tell them "Don't do this. Go and hide instead. What you're doing right now is dangerous" Especially if they are so young?

Answer: You do tell them. But they won't be persuaded. Muhammed was 20 years old, three siblings, ah, three sisters, two brothers, lived with his parents in Homs, an engineering student. And I asked him "Why are you doing this?" And he said "Because I want to be free". That is the driving force behind so many people who are doing this. They want to be free. They don't want to be afraid that they'd end up in prison for certain thoughts. In Cairo on Tahrir Square there was a different motivation. There people were angry about the corruption, and they didn't want girls walking through the streets to be raped by police officers, and they didn't want these police officers to be acquitted in court, they didn't want a government that promises change all the time and then doesn't implement it. There wasn't even a beginning to that. This was a different sort of dissatisfaction. The same in Lybia: they simply wanted to be free. Free as in freedom. To be able to think and say what you want, without ending up in prison or in a intelligence service cell. This motivation is is difficult to understand for us, I think. I think some people from the former GDR, who were at the Monday protests, they know why they protested. It's the same reasons behind it. People want to be free. People don't want to live in fear. When we took to the streets in Berlin, with the slogan "Freedom instead of Fear", it's because of the same reasons. And yet it is a lot more immediate over there. And Muhammed said, if he doesn't start, it will never happen. So he did it.

Question: A reply to the foreword, to the speaker of the foreword, the sentence about corruption, joblessness, you don't have to go to the third world -- I can spontaneously think of Germany as well, by now. Second point, all thesources, the primary sources of the activists from YouTube, wherever, but also in the so-called established media, the alternative media, there is such a wide spectrum from here to here (gesticulation), and the ordinary person does not know what he should believe; with all the background-information, Lybia, OK, there was a proper stir with friendly help from NATO, and what you heard, the current situation, it got even worse. One junta is gone, the next junta arrives; torture, murder still happens, but now with flipped signs. If that's desirable, we don't know. But the oil springs sputter again, that's something different. On Iran, Syria, well, Syria is extremely difficult because the sources are so sparse, but as a background again, Syria is connected to Iran, and at the moment everybody is gunning for Iran, and whether there are any connections, externally controlled, is it desirable that Syria disappears as a supporter of Iran and the Hisbollah too, and... 

Answer: I want to interrupt you for a minute since this is developing into a geopolitical digression. My drive is that people are able to tell stories and I want that people live, like that. In Syria they don't have either, anymore. People are being slaughtered and being barred from telling their stories. And as I said, the question on when the Western countries are willing to intervene in such a conflict has to be discussed anew, and we can't solve this question here tonight, that'll be a discourse that will probably take multiple months and years.

Question: The question is whether the western countries are not already intervening, but in an inofficial capacity.

Answer: That's a question I cannot answer and do not want to answer.

Question: To the speaker from just now, maybe we should think about what happens to the unemployed in Germany and to the unemployed in... Speaker: Sorry, I cannot understand you very well, can you please speak up

Question: I just said to the guy speaking before me that he should think about what the unemployed do here in Germany when they go jobless here, and those who go unemployed over there somewhere, that is a big difference. Question: On the cultural aspect which you spoke on, since you talked about the islamists which won the Egyptian elections, no matter whether they are moderated or not, what you described is a fight for the freedom of the network, that is the one fight. I'm currently interested what you are doing, or what is being done in general, to create platforms for the society to have their cultural war or cultural discussion on modernization. Since I understood you to say in the beginning, or I don't want to have understood you that way, but the Bahrain Cyber Army which you talked about, those are paid people. But despite that there surely are conservative people in Egypt which have discourse over the media such as the internet or blog sor some such and which are trying to create new societal discourse on what modernity in this country is or what it could be, and of course there are the modern-thinking, probably mostly younger people, but these people still have to come together and talk with each-other, surely you can't delineate between paid hardliners and modernized young people or something like that, there is a line between that, and there has to be a type of societal discourse, no?