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On the First Day of HOPE, Plenty to Fear

Reality checks from mysterious individuals and paranoia from very public ones at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference.
Photo: Mike

The 10th biannual Hackers on Planet Earth conference began at 10 AM at New York's Hotel Pennsylvania on Friday, but it wasn't until the 2 PM panel with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake that the fireworks really started. Attendees wearing police-like badges emblazoned with the HOPE X logo filled the lecture hall on the hotel's top floor. All the seats were taken, and audience members—overwhelmingly white guys in T-shirts—were crammed into the aisles and against the walls. The room smelled like sweat, and organizers were shouting things like, “no re-entry. This room is closed and at capacity.”

Drake, a pre-Snowden whistleblower at the NSA, was initially investigated and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Now he's free of criminal charges, but hardly has his old life back. A lifelong intelligence officer who once worked as a crypto-linguist covering the Stasi, Drake would later move to the NSA, where, in the wake of Sept. 11, he discovered fraud, waste, and abuse that disturbed him enough to bring it to the attention of the NSA's Inspector General, and eventually, to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He would later find work as a technician at an Apple Store in Maryland, and travel the world speaking intensely about the dangers of an Orwellian world.

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A well-built and serious man, Drake was being interviewed by Vivien Lesnik-Weissman, director of the forthcoming documentary Hacker Wars, in which Drake’s story plays a central role.

Like Snowden, Drake does not fit the bill of your typical hacker icon. He is tall and clean-cut and exudes the intensity of a man who believed strongly in a system that later broke his heart, before it attempted to break him.

"I'm going to use really strong language because I'm afraid people still don't get it,” he explained at the outset. “I don't have sympathy for people who try to give the government the benefit of the doubt.”

The crux of his story was one that we know well by now: after 9/11, he discovered that the NSA, for which he worked, had been given permission by the Bush White House to treat the US and its citizens as a foreign country, subject to domestic surveillance.

Disturbed that he was now complicit in a threat to the Constitution that he had signed an oath to protect, he took his concerns to an NSA attorney and was told, "we just need the data… We need to own the net. We need to know what anyone is doing at any time."

He described an NSA “pathologically obsessed” by collecting information, almost, he said, like the people profiled on the TV show Hoarders. All of it struck him as chillingly similar to the repressive Stasi, a comparison that for him only became more accurate in the aftermath of his coming forward. He thought of himself as a whistleblower and a patriot, but the NSA saw him in such an existential threat that it assigned the mole-hunting unit, usually designated to pursue foreign spies embedded in the US intelligence forces, to his case.

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In 2011, after accusing Drake of taking home secret documents that should have never been classified as secret, the government eventually dropped the major charges against him. Drake admitted to a misdemeanor, got no prison time and paid no fine, while the judge berated prosecutors for how they handled the case.

Drake warned that under this kind of constant state surveillance, we were all becoming “subjects of the state, not citizens,” and concluded with passion that, "they want to extinguish the very essence of what it means to be a human being, which is why I have dedicated my life to defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

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The crowd cheered and fans were instructed to head downstairs to ask Drake more questions. Hoping to get to the mezzanine more quickly than the crowd—a little hack of my own—I took the stairs with other members of the press, quickly ending up in the dingy bowels of the hotel, where peeling paint on the walls and menacing stains on the ceiling increased the feeling that we could very well have been in the GDR.

We met another lost person with a conference badge, a small man in rumpled clothes. In the elevator, once we finally found it, our new acquaintance said of Drake, “I don't know why they didn't just kill him.” It did not feel like paranoia to not want to get involved in that conversation.

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I found Drake sitting by himself in a cubicle that had been secreted away in the corner of the hotel's second floor. I pressed him on his comparison between the US and the Stasi. His point was about a surveillance state, but I wondered, was he worried that the comparison could alienate everyday Americans from the matter of unconstitutional domestic spying by muddying the water with implications that the US is a totalitarian state?

The crucial thing, he said, was that he had been made an example of, and persecuted with all the strength of the law, and that the Stasi too didn't persecute everyone, only enough people to keep others silent. He then repeated something he had said in his talk, which was that the Stasi was able to be so effective because they kept files on everyone.

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Do we do that? I asked him.

He smirked in an ambiguous way, as if to say, “just you wait,” or “you're so naïve,” or maybe “no, but that doesn't mean the rest of my comparison doesn't still hold water.” We started talking about the big Internet companies that were complicit in surveilling the entire world, the legal precedent that makes that possible, and the fact that they, not us, control our data. And then the bleached blonde press liaison told us the five minutes were more than up and someone else needed the room.

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Back upstairs, I got into a conversation with two guys around my age. One was a self-identified “maker” with a a giant 19th century style beard, and the other one was a good-looking, comparatively nondescript guy in a flannel shirt. I had overheard them saying something about Drake in the elevator, so I asked them what they thought.

Only the redhead had been at the talk. “He's got a vendetta,” he said. “Someone who's been wronged or thinks he's been wronged is obviously going to have a strong take on all of this.”

His friend was more circumspect, but equally dismissive: “Things are different now from how they've been before. Things are changing quite a bit in our lifetimes and this is one of the things that is changing, but that's inevitable.”

We continued to talk about hacking in general and I told htem that I had always been interested in it because I was interested in how systems worked, and because the only math I've ever been good at, geometry, was interesting to me because I liked finding ways to solve proofs in unexpected ways. I thought this was a foolish example, and I sounded like what I was: a girl who couldn't code at a hacker conference. But they said it was a great analogy.

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Then the redhead left and I was alone with the flannel-shirted man, who was so helpful and such a good listener that I wasn't really interviewing him anymore. So what you do? I asked him, trying to get back on track, "what's your day job?"

He replied: “we've been talking around it all conversation and we need to continue to talk around it.”

A few moments later, he was gone and I realized that nearly all my notes from that conversation had been things I'd said myself.

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Reeling a little from my encounter with mystery, I loitered by the elevators, wondering when they might be hacked, when an interactive media artist and designer struck up a conversation with me. He said the most important issues now were cybersecurity in the mobile space, and solutions for when the power goes out. He also told me that I need to get off of Gmail, slowly, by word-of-mouth, without linking it to my new account.

Perhaps no single moment encapsulates the mood of the conference more than what happened next. He told me admiringly that I reminded him of Laura Poitras. She and I are not exactly physical replicas of one another, nor can I claim any other similarity with her, aside from being a woman asking questions about cybersecurity. But it was clear that this was the highest of compliments. Here, actresses or famous writers or television-famous foreign correspondents weren't important. Here, Laura Poitras was a pop star.

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An unidentified attendee of HOPE X, with a bottle of hacker favorite Club Mate. Photo: Imran Hafiz

A graduate student who studies artificial intelligence told me he had traveled from Berkeley to be here because he was interested in “the disconnect” he perceives between how people think about AI and what he experiences in the lab daily. A lot that people think science-fiction is already reality, he said. He didn't really identify with the hacker or hacktivist culture, which he thinks can be misogynistic and homophobic. He cited a conversation he once had with a programmer who, upon hearing that he worked in artificial intelligence, said, “like that gay guy?” By which he meant Alan Turing.

Maybe because of that, he was less interested in the Thomas Drake story than everyone else seemed to be. He argued that it was creepy that so much is being collected, but said that Drake hadn’t “delivered the final punch,” which would be proof that the NSA wasn’t just collecting data, but was using it to further some other destructive purpose. “I'm more freaked out by Google than I am by the NSA,” he said.

As soon as he said that, an angry European-accented voice yelled across the dirty carpet: “You had a willing partnership with Google! There are no personal secrets that they have that you didn't give to them. On the other hand, the government is not supposed to spy on you and they are, against your social contract.” The conversation quickly hit a fever pitch and the European stormed away before I could record more of his thoughts.

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Moments later, the incensed man returned, apparently having used his outrage as an excuse to make a run for the bathroom. He told me he's is an engineer who has lived in the US for many years and asked me not to specify his country of origin or employer. He told me that his name was “Emmanuel Goldstein… Richard Milhous Nixon.” He says that the crucial issue about surveillance is not proof that it's been used for nefarious purposes, even though the examples of it being used in local law enforcement are myriad.

“They're putting together the mechanisms to get there," he said. "I hope they don't, but there's a lot of historical precedent that if you put the mechanisms in place, someone comes and puts it together.”

Still, he remains somewhat optimistic, referring to worse periods in American history, like the Japanese-American internment. “We recovered from that," he said. "This could be another phase that we ultimately realize is untenable. We have the mechanisms still for recovery.”

As for Google, he believes they take these issues very seriously. For instance, "they could easily manipulate the stock market. They have much more information than hedge funds. They're not doing it, probably because they're enlightened enough to know that if they did it, bad things would happen.”

He goes on to point out that oppressive governments cut off Twitter, Facebook, and Google instead of relying on them to collect data, as they might do if those companies were corrupt. “It's a social problem, not a technological problem," he said. "Why am I on Facebook? Because all my friends are there. Do I put incriminating personal information there? No.”

He admitted that he works for one of the big tech companies—the sort that Thomas Drake was adamant the NSA is in bed with—which either makes his certainty on this subject more or less compelling.

Before he went to the next panel, he summed up his point of view with a quotation from Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me six words written by any man and I will find reason in them to hang him."