Episode: 1713
Title: HPR1713: Fosdem 2015: Surveillance vs. Free Software
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1713/hpr1713.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:08:15

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This is HPR episode 1,713 entitled Fostom 2015, Surveillance VS Free Software,
and is part of the series interviews.
It is hosted by Tube Frank and is about 21 minutes long.
The summary is interviews at the free and open source
Devlia Perse meeting Fostom in Brussels.
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Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This time I'd like to talk to you about the Fostom meeting 2015 in Brussels.
What is Fostom? Fostom is the free and open source developer's European meeting.
And it's certainly one of the biggest in Europe and it may even be the biggest in the world.
On the Fostom page they advertise it's 5,000 plus hackers and more than 500 talks.
And it is a very big meeting. It took place on the
University of Brussels, the free University of Brussels which was very aptly chosen as far as the title goes.
And the geeks practically took over the whole campus for Saturday and Sunday.
And it was just amazing to see. I went there for the first time.
I'm certainly not a hacker or programmer but a Linux enthusiast and discovered a lot of free software projects.
And some of the talks were over my head but many others were very interesting.
You cannot go to all the talks. It's just too much.
But it's just amazing what you can do, what you can hear and what people you can meet.
And I'd like to introduce you to some of the people I talk to and some of their projects.
Now one of the most interesting talks that I chose at least was one by a lawyer called Aaron Williamson,
who works with the Free Software Foundation.
And I think also the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now I have to check that.
And he gave a talk called CryptoWars 2.0 in which he gave basically a brief history of surveillance
and the pushback from the open and free software community and other activists.
From the early beginnings, the fight against encryption, up until the Patriot Act,
Snowden revelations, of course, and what happened thereafter.
And after that I couldn't help but ask him a question about the discussion we recently have here in Europe.
We've just seen another way for you in Europe because we're at the attacks in Paris.
And now politicians from everywhere pop up and say now we need to have more surveillance.
British Prime Minister Cameron says we need to be able to read any encrypted conversation like that.
How do you see that now?
I think it's really cynical the way that Cameron tried to bring encryption into that conversation.
Because as far as I know, there's no evidence that the people who orchestrated the Charlie Hebdo attacks
were at all using encrypted communications.
And so the idea that we, and constantly when we talk about these issues, the politicians
try out case studies where there's no evidence that the government couldn't have gotten what they
needed through some other means. And so yeah, I think this is a really common way to sort of try and
parlay a tragedy into unrelated regulation. It happens all the time in this conversation,
but I think that it's cynical and I don't think that it's legitimate.
How much do you think is based on the lack of knowledge from politicians? How the internet works,
how encryption works, how free software works, for example?
I mean, I think that Cameron probably doesn't know a ton and is probably listening more to his surveillance
agencies than he is to advisors related to who know anything about e-commerce and that sort of
thing. Because obviously, you have to have encryption for commerce to work online and there are
legitimate reasons that everyone should agree to use cryptography. But yeah, I think that
I think that probably GCHQ is manipulating Cameron's lack of knowledge and Cameron maybe just kind
of doesn't care what the truth is. Is there any chance that we're seeing a transatlantic pushback
to this? We're basically both dealing with the same problem. I don't see a ton of pushback
coming from the EU right now, but I think yeah, I think that it's grassroots efforts that are
going to prevent this suffering happening and pushback from the companies who will be subject to
eventual regulations. Okay, thanks very much.
At Foster Mall also had the opportunity to talk to someone from a project which is associated
with a tour project, the tour project for anonymization on the internet of your data.
And he is a part of a project which is called Nuzunya which means our onions and he explains
to us what it is all about. I'm OP, so it's just my nickname actually and do you want me to explain?
Yeah, could you briefly explain for those who haven't used tour yet what is the tour project?
Very briefly. Okay, the tour project is a network that provides you anonymity and privacy
on your HTTP based navigation. So it's your connection is rooted through three relays
randomly selected that hides your EP address and your geolocation to the website that you visit
and that hides the website that you visit from your internet service provider.
I think with many people don't know about tours, so this is to anonymize your traffic.
So the server on the other side cannot see your IP where you're coming from. That's right.
Recently with the terror attacks and everything we have heard many politicians say anonymizing
and encrypting web traffic, it's only what terrorists do. We need to stop this. We need to have
access and to see everyone, everything everyone does on the web has to be transparent. What would you say
to that? I ask these people to give me their password for the mailbox. If they have nothing to
hide, I want to see what's in the living room. I want to put a camera in the best room. If
nothing to hide, so show us everything. And these people politicians are not the most transparent
people, so I think we should not trust them. Have you in the tour project have received any
pressure due to this? I'm not directly in the tour project, so I can answer this, but I guess
tour project people are confident and now it's good. And people who can now you can run a server
where the tour traffic exits towards the web. And do you know of any people who run tour exit
note that have run two problems? On the beginning five or four years ago, yes, but now
police, police in most countries understand that they can, they can, I don't know.
They can search problems to people that run exit notes because when you run an exit note,
you don't know who came in and what's come out. You just transport information, so
I'm representing Noseonion, that's a French based organization that runs exit notes. And we have
some police contacts, they ask us what's that IP address and we just say it's an exit note,
we don't know everything, thank you bye. And that's it, they don't bother you anymore.
No, not anymore. If you run an exit note on your own name, on your house with your IP address,
you can expect police to knock at your door, that's why we encourage people to gather in
collective organization to run exit note because an association doesn't have a door to lock on,
to knock on, so it's safer to run exit notes collectively than personally.
And the fact that there is websites that like the Silk Road, which was taken down by the CIA,
I guess, that ran in tour. Is that bad for your reputation?
It's bad for our reputation, but that's a global world problem. You can buy drugs on the streets
and that's why some streets have bad reputation and some street don't. It's not really a
door issue, bad people will use every means they could have to do their bad stuff and yeah,
it's bad for us, but now you can see that Mozilla's running some tone notes, it's not an underground
network, it's kind of a public network. It's about the community, do you know how many
developers are working on tour, where are they? I don't know, as I say, I'm not in the top
project, so I don't know how many developers, but there are some, a lot of developers and
a lot of good developers, really. And so just to what about Nuzonio, what is it,
and like a daughter project of tour or something? It's a French NGO, non-profit association,
that run exit notes. And we are some of our volunteers, our volunteers in the top project,
so we kind of relate it, but it's really local to friends, it's like the tour service.org
organization, the US, and we encourage everybody in their countries to gather and to do the same
as as like gather and run exit notes collectively. Thank you very much.
Okay, and I am now with Matthias Kushner from Free Software Foundation Europe.
Hi Matthias, what's in the nutshell, what do we need to know about the Free Software Foundation
Europe? Free Software Foundation Europe, make sure that people are in control of their
computers, of their technology. That's the main goal of FSB. And how can you achieve that?
We achieve that by explaining people the relationship between technology and society and
the economy, and we provide resources to volunteers all over Europe to promote Free Software.
We do lobbying for Free Software. We get people together who can solve problems which we
have at the moment in Free Software community, solve them and go further, so those are the main things.
Are you are you bastion Brussels, if you say you're doing lobbying in work way?
We have we don't have an office in Brussels, but our current president is living close to
two Brussels and so we do lobbying here with the Commission and the Parliament, but also in other
Parliament like in Berlin or in local governments, in other countries. So we talk with politicians
there and explain them how they can benefit from Free Software. Do politicians know a lot
about Free Software already? Do you have to teach them? They know more and more about Free Software.
So we want started to ask questions, official questions before elections, for example, and so now we
have a broader set of data how well informed they are. And before the beginning, when we started to
do lobbying with FSB, it was like, oh, what are they talking about software? I don't care about
software, so I don't listen to them. But after several years now in the replies they sent to
our questions, you see that they know what Free Software is and they begin to understand
implications of software to our society. So it's a good development there for our parties.
But of course, I mean, it will still take us years until they fully understand why Free Software
is important for society. One of the issues is perhaps the openness in documents, something like that?
Yes, one of the issues is always like open standards in general so that people can exchange
documents or also other protocols and they don't have to use the same software. So we explain them
not why open standards are important so that in the end Free Software can compete with non-free
software because it's using the same standards. In the recent discussion, after terrorists,
the tax politicians always come out and say we need more control, everything needs to be visible,
everything needs no encryption, whether in crypts or stuff like that is potential terrorists.
Are you taking part in that discussion? Partly, I mean, we always explain people that it's
important that society can control technology and that it's important that everybody can
make sure that he controls or she controls what's going on on the computer and what is going out on
the computer. So this is an issue for governments themselves so that they make sure that the information
stays in their area but it's also for everybody, for all people around us that they are able to do
this. So yeah, with all the briefs now and the discussions we of course have to explain again
what benefits we have from keeping things private, keeping things secure for yourself and that
saying everybody has to use no encryption. I mean, what should we do if banks are not allowed to
use encryption? So why should individuals not be allowed to use encryption? So yeah, and what we do
there is we explain people how they can encrypt stuff with our leaflets about email encryption. We
also distribute that to politicians like in the European Parliament. We translate that into several
languages so there's no language barrier and we think encryption is important for free society.
Okay, that was my little roundup of Fostom 2015. If you would like to hear more, you certainly
have seen that Ken Fallon has done dozens of interviews of the very interesting at Fostom
as well and put them out well before I put this on HPR. There's a little sound cloud page
that I add in the show notes where there are some more interviews I have done. If you want to see
a picture gallery of photos I took at Fostom 2015 to see what it looked like. I also add a link on
the show notes. This is Juby Frank signing up for this time. Thanks for listening and take care.
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