Our second day at the #31c3 was also very nice - we want to summarize our impressions of the second day in this blogpost. But before we start we will let you know how we finished the first day.
As you might remember we mentioned that we will view the movie “Citizenfour” by Laura Poitras at midnight.
The movie was very exciting and serious about the topic, but humor wasn’t missing, too. In general the movie deals with the events regarding to the leaks of Edward Snowden; the global surveillance disclosures and the story about the biggest mass surveillance in human history. The complete story, beginning with the first meetings between the source (Edward Snowden, who first called hisself “Citizenfour”) and the journalists (Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill), is portraied and the movie ends with the leak of the main material of Snowden in media. The film generates a really strange feeling: On the one hand you can empthasize with him, but on the other side you really can’t imagine how it might be in such a situation. But in general the movie fascinated us and also the standing ovations after the movie show that we were not the only people who think that Snowden did the right thing - he is somebody who is really idealistic, so idealistic that it nearly seems to be unhumanable. All in all one must say that “Citizenfour” is a very nice domcumentary and it’s definetly a must-seen for everybody who is intrested in the issues arround the mass surveillance of the secret services and the invasion of privacy of millions of people.
After about 3 hours of sleep (it was not enoght, but c3 is only ones a year :) ), the second day started with the Talk “From Computation to Consciousness” by “Joscha”. We were a bit late and missed about the half of the talk. However, the last part was quite interesting. After that we’ve split up and Sebastian heard the talk “Beyond PNR: Eploring arline systems” from saper. The speaker explained in detail which information is exchanged between airports. To tell the truth, Sebastian was too tired to remember all the important stuff. Tim walked around a bit and looked at some cultural and art stuff. In general the Chaos Communication Congress is not only about learning how to hack something, it’s also about the lifestyle and art - check out our Twitter @internetwache and then (by looking at our pictures) you might feel a bit of the atmosphere.
During our spare time we joined the lounge of @digitalcourage and listened to a small talk by paduluun about his work and the history of digitalcourage. Digitalcourage is a german privacy and digital rights organisation located in Bielefeld. They organize the Big Brother Award, support diffrent campains regarding privacy and run an anti-censorship DNS. Digitalcourage is still looking for nominations for the “Oscars for data leeches” aka. BigBrotherAwards 2015 - so if you have an idea just drop them a nomination on the website: Big Brother Award 2015 Tim plans to join them in 2015, because he lifes near Bielefeld and is also very intrested in privacy topics. The talk by Padeluun was very informative and we really enjoyed it. Often you can get a better impression by people if you can see them talking live (in opposite to a stream) - that’s another reason why we love to be at the 31c3.
Later there was a very nice talk about: “Global Civil Society under Attack” by Michael Carbone and Tim attended it. Carbone is an activist for human rights in the digital age and is the manager of Tech Policy and Programs @AccessNow The talk was about different problems regarding (small) civil groups which often haven’t the power or knowledge to secure their networks and websites - this is where “Access Now” comes in: they help those organisations to build up a secure tech-infrastructure. So the groups can focus on their main topics and change the world. We think that the idea behind AccessNow is awesome.
The last talk had the topic: “net neutrality: days of future past?” The speakers highlighted some very intersting information about the current situation of net neutrality and called the major rules for net neutrality. It was kind of a backview of the (savetheinternet.eu campaign)[https://savetheinternet.eu/] and it pointed out the importance of this central question is for the freedom of internet again.
We spent the last couple of hours sitting at the “noisy square” watching some missed talks (e.g. Tim watched the talk of Jakob Applebaum and Laura Poitras regarding the newest Snowden Leaks on Spiegel) or enjoying banging basses in the “Halle” next to it. We didn’t want to turn into zombies, so we decided to leave the congress at midnight to be ready and refreshed for the 3rd day.
Sorry, for the delay - but yesterday we meet a lot of people and were still tired, so we finished and posted the blogpost today.
Cheers, The Team of Internetwache.org
PS: If you ever wanted to enjoy the speed of a 40 Gbit/s connection (capped to 1Gbit/s per switch), C3 is the place to be. I’m sure Acunetix will run faster. :D
Links to all mentioned talks:
- From Computation to Consciousness - How computation helps to explain mind, universe and everything
- Beyond PNR: Exploring airline systems
- Global Civil Society Under Attack - Reports from the Frontlines
- net neutrality: days of future past? - Taking stock after two years of net neutrality in the Netherlands
- Reconstructing narratives - transparency in the service of justice