Part 1 of our Series: “Recovering the Web after Snowden”

“Surveillance is the business model of the internet.” In the beginning oAf June 2013, Edward Snowden´s disclosures on the ubiquitous spying system of the NSA make global headlines. Two weeks later, Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security technologist and author, is giving this outstanding talk to Google engineers. They listen closely as Google is described as one of the “feudal security giants” of our time. They are not aware that Schneier was also one of the few citizens of the United States to be entrusted with the entire trove of Snowden´s documents. Glenn Greenwald had asked him to help out on technological details and secret service jargon.

Human society runs on trust. We all trust millions of people, organizations, and systems every day — and we do it so easily that we barely notice. But in any system of trust, there is an alternative, parasitic, strategy that involves abusing that trust. Making sure those defectors don’t destroy the cooperative systems they’re abusing is an age-old problem, ones that we’ve solved through morals and ethics, laws, and all sort of security technologies. Understanding how these all work,- and fail -, is essential to understanding the problems we face in today’s increasingly technological and interconnected world. (Bruce Schneier)

Groklaw is slang for “to really grasp the world of law”, or in Pamela Jones’s words, a “place where lawyers and geeks could explain things to each other and work together, so they’d understand each other’s work better.”

In this document, a lady well-known in the free world, Pamela Jones, delivers a short message of “thank you” on behalf of thousands of computer geeks and lawyers swarming around their unique online platform, groklaw.net. This sound file is a rare piece of digital history as one will otherwise only find drawings of her or texts by her, she had learned the hard way to be very protective of her privacy.

In 2003, Jones was working as a paralegal, a research assistant, at an US law firm. Being technically minded, she was able to help out fixing problems with the IT infrastructure and was proficient in using both operation systems, Microsoft and Linux. Next to researching cases she had also joined the emergent blogger movement when a major attack on the entire model of Free Software and its legal security was launched: The infamous lawsuit attack by Linux-vendor SCO on Linux and, later, IBM, a novel Linux partner. Their plan was to threaten all Linux users into paying some hundreds of dollars a year because SCO claimed to own the copyright to its historical predecessor, the Unix operating system.

In reaction, Pamela Jones, or “PJ” in short, saw the need to get hackers and lawyers to start talking and learning from each other. Yet the more results their common endeavor would produce, the more unscrupulous the attacks became. Not only is FUD a nuisance to deal with when publicly standing up for freedom in politics, but also in the world of software production. It implies for somebody to willfully create “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” against somebody else.

And when, not surprisingly, FUD attacks were soon after launched against her own person, the hackers at groklaw knew how to get her back. They launched a campaign proclaiming that they are “all PJ” and continued to collect counter-proof against the allegations made against Linux in court. Four long years after, in 2007, SCO’s case was finally dismissed, yet also a model of collective effort had been born. Meanwhile, other companies collaborating with the Free and Open Source Software economy like SUN Microsystems or Google got caught up in legal battles around copyright and software patents and found that people at groklaw to help them out as well.

In retrospect, Pamela Jones has been starting one of the most efficient, low-cost and influential examples of self-organized crowd sourcing intelligence in recent years. Every day, thousands of hackers kept on reading her articles, discuss options and collect details of computing history that were needed elsewhere. Especially the news section of groklaw has been used by many members of the Free World in order to keep track of important and funny ongoings, the ones that might actually matter.

Yet the story does not end here. Groklaw had helped to win the legal assault on Linux. Many other cases were pondered, many complicated problems researched and analyzed by many thousands of lawyers and programmers. Six years later, however, on August 20th, 2013, the platform is shut down with one decisive blogpost by Pamela. She starts off by writing about her experience of being robbed during a visit in New York. And she compares it to her change in feelings of groklaw since the Snowden documents revealed the ubiquitous spying on all online communication just some weeks before.

She quotes from the book Private Matters - In Defense of the Personal Life by Janna Malamud Smith that the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School is hosting as a document for students to read:

“The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition.”

She does not activate the comment section. She recommends collab.net

The audio file conserves the recorded message by Pamela Jones on the occasion of groklaw.net receiving the Annual Free Software Award for Social Benefit 2007 by the Free Software Foundation, next to Harald Welte from gpl-violations.org.

In a rare interview scenario for internationally acclaimed artists, Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Robert de Naja (3D) of Massive Attack are talking about their views on the recent, global phenomenon of the Occupy Movement. They have been playing a Thank-You-concert for the Protagonists of Occupy London on December 6th, 2011, at a newly squatted venue called “Bank of Ideas” that had been used by the bank UBS before. Thom Yorke speaks of the documentary “Inside Job” to have opened his eyes about the conceptual architecture of complexity that the finance systems has construed for itself and believes that most politicians do not understand more than he and are merely told to “mop up” the chaos created by others. “we’re just really proud that our fellow human beings have got their shit together. It’s great.” Thanks for the transcript to @spentrails (on Twitter).

Daniel Ellsberg is a well known figure in the United States of America as he leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers to the press which lead to the Watergate affair later and forced President Nixon to resign. 

He joins students that have just been re-occupying the Sprowl Plaza at the University of California Berkeley, a significant place in the history of the country as the protests against the Vietnam War started exactly there.

Ellsbeg comments might be surprising for most listeners: he confesses that he had lost hope in a betterment of the over-all political situation, but when he say the group decision making of the students who voted for which decisions to take in a democratic manner, he says to have regained hope.

He recalls the recent chain reaction of events that lead to the very situation he is interviewed in: Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking the Cablegate files, being in detention, the documents themselves inspiring the changes in Tunesia and Egypt. These, in turn, gave rise to the Occupy Movement which spread to Berkeley, where the generational change started in the 1960ies. Ellsberg assertains that a contemporary youth movement can be seen to evolve now.