Bits of Freedom was relaunched at HAR2009 four years ago. This morning the Dutch digital rights organization presented what has happened in the last four years. In 2009 the sense of urgency was high: the data retention law was being implemented, biometric fingerprints in passports were to be introduced and stored in a centralized database, … [Read more…]
Julian Assange, in his political-attack-surface-minimizing outfit, was pretty straight about it at OHM on Wednesday night: technologists who are involved in the exploit market or academics renting out their allegiance to the transnational surveillance state should not get any intellectual or moral respect. Smart people have many opportunities in life and moral people don’t whore … [Read more…]
Gmc (Koen Martens) opened OHM 2013 by talking about how we are all snooped on by government who are desperate to find what he called “statistical terrorists”. He wanted to know what we are going to do about this. If we know that end-to-end encryption is needed, why isn’t it part of the core architecture … [Read more…]
Looking at the submissions we had so far, we can only say one thing, we really put the resistance back in OHM. From open source cryptography to makerspaces, from citizen reporting trainings to a very special roundtable discussion on whistleblowing. Especially digital whistleblowing. A changing game Digital whistleblowing was has been around for a really … [Read more…]
This post originally appeared on the PUSCII blog on 26 march 2013 On the moral decay of the Dutch hacker scene A lot has changed since the days when the people around Hacktic set up and defined the Dutch hacker scene. The Hang Out made way for a variety of hackerspaces; Hacktic itself is long … [Read more…]