Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Hacked

Episode Date: June 11, 2013

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman tells us about her book Coding Freedom and the time she spent among the Hackers, “Chris” makes his TOE debut with a story about the alleged hacking of the New York Times by the Chinese, and your host wonders if it might be possible to hire a hacker to break into George RR Martin’s computer so that he can read the rest of the Game of Thrones story without having to wait 10 years like everyone else.   **********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. The following installment is called Hacked. Okay, what do I need to know here? Well, I have a new podcast, and I'm calling it Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. Okay. And when it comes to us, I'm hoping that we can just keep doing what we've always done. I call you up every now and then, and you tell me what you're doing.

That sound okay? Yeah, that works for me. Great. So it's been a while. What are you up to? I have been consulting for a web filtering company. Oh my God, I knew it. You're working on Prism.

No, no. The company I've been working with just does porn filtering. Oh, that's better. You're just helping the Chinese government censor democracy. Dude, I'm going to pull up the China logs for one of our products. Let's see. Okay, top five search terms. In China. Booze. Bad girls.

Doggy style. Szechuan lollipop, top party member orgy. Okay, you got to go down to like number 100,000 before you see Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. I'm not even doing international though. The client I'm working with right now is the IRS. Wait, you're installing this on government computers? I don't think this will really come as a shock to you, but porn filtering software is pretty much installed in every government agency.

Because the workers just can't help themselves. Oh yeah. The list is long. I mean the IRS is like the sixth agency that I've done. I mean, started at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Parks Department. The U.S. Forest Service. Hey, you laugh, but I'm telling you, this stuff has been installed in pretty much every agency. I mean, all the way to Guantanamo. Really? Yeah. In fact, I'm working with one of the guys who did the install at Joint Task Force Guantanamo. But I'm a little confused.

I mean, with all of these high-profile hackings in the news, why would the government be focused on installing porn filtering software rather than, say, I don't know, security software? All of these supposed hackings? That's really just desperate people searching for porn. Oh, come on. The New York Times got hacked by Chinese hackers. They were not looking for porn. Okay, the New York Times servers were broken into. But what you don't know is that this only happened

because someone was looking for porn. Alright, now you're losing me. You're going to have to spell this one out for me. Okay, so you remember the guy I was telling you about? The guy that did the Guantanamo install. Okay. The other night

after work, we went and had a few beers, and this guy told me the real story about the new york times hack it was not the chinese who was it ali muhammad balu who Ali Mohammed Baloo is a prisoner in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. Um, okay, maybe I'm stupid, but it seems to me that it would be, you know, kind of difficult to do some hacking while you're in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. Well, according to my friend, he did it with a Nubia. I don't know what a Nubia is. A Nubia is a Chinese-made smartphone.

But how does this guy get his hands on a Nubia? So Ali Muhammad Baloo is in solitary. The only people he sees are the guards. And there's one guard who works the night shift. And he's been working the night shift for about four months. And this guard is totally pissed

off when they installed all the porn blocking software because this is what he would do at night to pass the time. And he complains about this to Ali Mohamed Balou. So Mohamed Balou says, I'm really good with computers. So if you can get me a computer, I think I can get around the filters. Now, you know, it's Guantanamo, right?

The guard knows he can't bring a laptop in there. So the guard goes and buys this Nubia, because it's a powerful smartphone, and it has a big screen. And he slips it to Mohamed Bouh. And does he get past the filtering firewall? Oh, yeah, he cleared that in like 10 minutes. But the guard thought doing this pack would take all night. So he's got this cell phone, this smartphone, Nubia, all night.

So where does he go? What does he do? He goes to the New York Times website. Why would he go there? Like he has like, finally can go anywhere. Why would he go there? He wanted to see what the paper was writing about Guantanamo. Now, all this happened before the hunger strikes

and before Obama mentioned it in that press conference. So Muhammad can't find anything, nothing. So he figures, well, maybe there's something in the archives. So he tries to go to the archives, but he quickly hits the 10 article limit. He hits the paywall. Yes, but he's not going to sign up for an account. He doesn't have a credit card. So he hacks into the site. Yes. And once he got into the system, he realized he had access to all the staff email accounts. He went looking for someone who might be writing about all the people like him who've been cleared for release, cleared of any suspicion of wrongdoing, but we're still stuck in Guantanamo. And this is why the people at the New York Times thought that the hack came from China.

But I don't understand. Why didn't he write someone? It took Muhammad Baloo like four hours to find someone who he thought might be interested in Guantanamo. And according to my friend who checked out the browsing history, the phone died just as Baloo

was opening a Yahoo account. It's a Chinese cell phone. Of course the battery sucks. Anyone who's seriously interested in hackers eventually makes their way to Gabriela Coleman. I'm Gabriela Coleman. I'm the Wolf Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. As an anthropologist, Gabriela Coleman studied

anonymous and internet protest culture. She's now a go-to voice for the media when hackers make headlines. But her anthropology career begins in a much more traditional fashion. I went to graduate school to do a project on religious healing in Guyana, South America. I had even taken a couple trips there. And how do you move from religious healers to hackers? It was really just accidentally that I turned my attention to free and open source software due to a kind of political interest in patents.

And some friends kind of pulled me to the side and said, well, if you're interested in patents, you should learn about this thing called a copyleft, a class of licenses that free software developers use. And I was just blown away at the time. You know, I can't help but wonder, but what did your anthropology PhD advisors think of this? Like, what did they say when you went to them and said, oh, by the way, I'm done with the

religious healers and Guyana thing, and now I'm going to go to San Francisco and study hackers. So I definitely had to convince people to switch my dissertation topic. Yeah, like what did you say? I would say something along the lines of like there's these programmers. They call themselves hackers because, you know, they're really dedicated to computers. And they write software for free. And then the reaction would be like, for what? People just couldn't even hear what I was saying. It just would be like, well, why?

Gabriella Coleman did get the green light from her advisors, and she moved to the Bay Area and began her fieldwork. Her research on hackers is the subject of her book, Coding Freedom, an exploration of the ethics and practices of the free software movement, a movement that pretty much begins with one man. So initially, the idea of free software was the sort of brainchild of kind of one individual, Richard Stallman, hyper, you know, committed to freedom and free software, who was really disturbed, depressed by the intrusion of copyrights and patents into software, which happened quite late in the late 70s and early 80s. And so he creates this idea of free software.

He writes free software and eventually invents a legal mechanism to protect it. To live outside the law, one must be legal. You know, one of the most fascinating parts about the story of free software is that it's highly legalistic, it's legal. But Richard Solomon didn't want to actually use the law. He thought the law was the problem. He wanted to run away from the law. Like there's the law, let me go to a different country with no laws. Let's just create a commune.

He even called it a commune. But at a certain point it became clear that to fight the law you needed the law. But he did what a hacker would do, which was be very crafty. He basically said, okay, I'm going to use the law, but in a way that undermines it. So in order for you to copyleft something, you first copyright it, because then that gives you kind of sanctioned control over the object. And then you add provisions, which is the provisions of the copuleft, which then disable the logic of the copyright. So you use the very instrument

that you want to get away from as a way to disable it. And that is really kind of this magical move because on the one hand it relies on it, but in a way that it was not intended for. And that's the essence of what a brilliant hack is. And so it uses the law, but it abuses the law at the very same time. Stallman's brilliant hack enables free software programmers to develop applications and operating systems. But around the time Gabriela showed up in the Bay Area, big changes were taking place in the movement. At a conference in Palo Alto, Stallman's descendants gave free software a reboot. There was this conference in 1998 where some developers and entrepreneurs got together

and they wanted to make sure that there was a clear message that free software was not anti-capitalist, that it was actually business-friendly. And they felt that the language of free software might deter people from making that association. And so they coined the term open source as a way to de-emphasize the language of freedom and, you know, put the accent on the methodology, which is of openness and emphasize that it's a mechanism by which to build better software. In the English language, free can mean more than one thing.

It's easy to confuse free speech with, say, free beer. This is what prompted the reboot. To make sure that it is clear that free software is about rights, people will say, you know, free software is about free speech, not free beer. Or think about free speech instead of free beer. That conveys the idea that when you write free software, you've always got to make the underlying directions available for circulation, modification, distribution, but you can still charge for it if you want. So it's not necessarily about free beer. That's not where the accent is.

But in the end, actually, there is a way in which you kind of do have to make it free beer at the same time. I also like to remind people. But that's not the point of it. That's not like why people are doing it. And, you know, when it comes to software, software often requires a lot of support and services, and that's where people often make money from free software. and everything is getting redefined. But it also seems that something else happens around this time, which seems to be even more influential, and that is the introduction of the DMCA. That's right. It was passed in 1998,

the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which adds some kind of technical protections onto copyright in some interesting ways. And it was passed without much objection in 1998. But once it was applied legally, once individuals and software were criminalized under the DMCA, well, everything exploded. So there was this kid in Norway, Jan Johansson,

and he created a program called DCSS. This made it possible for people with Linux systems to watch DVDs on their computers. But under the DMCA, this program, this kind of activity, was illegal. The DMCA makes it illegal to unlock, break, copy controls or access controls in digital mediums. So under the DMCA, this Norwegian kid Jan Johansen became a criminal. And a lot of computer hackers and people committed to free software found it extremely, extremely problematic. So it was this kind of form of regulation

where copyright was butting heads directly with their kind of commitment to the idea that source code is free speech. This crackdown on software and kids, Gabriella Coleman says, is what brought hackers together. You know, hackers and free software developers come in many different shapes and sizes, and some are very politically oriented, and they will, you know, protest against Monsanto and all sorts of political causes. But the free software developers I was studying for the most part were not engaging in this sort of political street protests. But when DCSS was deemed illegal criminal under the DMCA, man oh man, these hackers, you know, hit the streets for protesting and engaged in kind of a wide range of demonstration activities. And what was really fascinating to me was not simply the street protests in support of, you know, Yon Johansson who had been arrested, you know, to kind of also state their right

to write software, they kind of performed it in playful political ways by taking the original piece of software, DCSS, and recreating it not only in different programming languages, but in song and dance and poetry. Now help me, Muse, for I wish to tell a piece of controversial math for which the lawyers of DVD, CCA, don't forbear to sue. One of the really remarkable artifacts, political artifacts to come out of it was a poem by Seth Schoen who at the time was anonymous because he was breaking the law and it was a recreation of DCSS in haiku. It was indeed a form of free speech in that programming is highly, highly, highly creative.

With the disk key, you can decrypt the title key, and that decrypts the show. Part of it was written to the judges who were overseeing the case, making the case that source code was at once precise mathematics, and you can't outlaw math, and also required tremendous poetic license and creativity, so much so he could take this piece of software and make it into this poem, which is precisely what he did. The word free may mean a number of different things, but for the hackers that Gabrielle Coleman met,

the word free has one definition, and they're willing to fight for it. You know, during the course of my research, I think it was maybe about the 10th or 11th time that someone quoted Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson that I kind of noticed, oh wow, wait a minute, something really unusual and different is going on here. It is really, really clear that a lot of these hackers imagined themselves to be part of a 200 plus year history when it comes to free expression and freedom. And what's interesting about free software is that on the one hand, it attracts people who already have those commitments and ideals.

But on the other hand, it's this, you know, kind of place where people come to be politically awakened in a very kind of dramatic way. And then they have these hundreds and thousands of peers that, you know, are not only people they can talk shop with, but talk ethics with and talk about their commitments to freedom. So it's extremely, extremely vibrant, deep and wide. The third season of the HBO program Game of Thrones just wrapped. If you're unfamiliar with the story, don't worry. I'm not going to try to explain it to you or sell you on it.

Actually, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit my love for George R.R. Martin's medieval, magical universe. A couple of summers ago, I was in France, and I downloaded all five of the books that the TV show is based on to my phone and read them all in one go. This was before I learned that the author, George R.R. Martin, is slow. In fact, he probably won't finish the next book for maybe five or six years. So a couple of weeks ago, I got to thinking, what if I hired a hacker? Someone who could break into George R. R. Martin's computer and get me a copy of what he's written so far. Perhaps I could even get an

NSA-style backdoor, and I could read the chapters as he typed them. Well, I went looking on some hacker websites to find someone who might be able to do this, and I found a hacker who goes by the handle The Spoiler. He said he could do this. And in less than a week, he got back to me. He said he actually had a draft copy of the next book in his hands. But he also told me that he wants $10,000. So I asked him if we could chat and negotiate. He agreed as long as I used this program called Jitsi,

which I've downloaded and installed. Hello? Spoiler, are you there? Yes, I am. So can I ask you something? Why do you call yourself the Spoiler? First of all, it's Spoiler, not the Spoiler. Okay, and what's with the dollar sign instead yourself the spoiler? First of all, it's spoiler, not the spoiler. Okay, and what's with the dollar sign instead of the S? Because I get the cash, I get the hash, and I kick the ass.

You do know that cash and hash don't rhyme with ass, do you? You know who you're talking to, right? All right, so I want to ask you about George R.R. Martin's servers. How did you get in? How did you hack in? I just melted down his firewall. It invaded. Okay, and how do you know it was his server? First of all, I could look at the logs

and see all the script kiddies who tried to come in before me. The name of the server was the Citadel. The name of the drive was RDND. RDND. Like Research and Dungeons and Dragons. This is amazing. But weren't there passwords?

Oh, you know what the password was? What? Dragon boobs. His password was dragon boobs. That's so amazing. I mean, it's kind of obvious, though, because that's what a lot of people actually call the TV show. But anyways, so what you're saying is that you were able to get inside this R-D&D drive

and grab a draft copy of his next book, which is called The Winds of Winter. That's right. Now, before we can talk about the price, you know, because $10,000 is an obscene... Bitcoin. Okay, 10... Bitcoin. 10,000 Bitcoin. Yes.

Before we talk about the price, though, I'd like you to read me something from this book so that we can establish that it is the real thing. Two paragraphs. All right. That's great. Now we're talking. Can you see if there's a chapter called John? Because there's this really big cliffhanger at the end of the last book.

Just going to open something at random. Fine. The second he saw her he knew he would fall for that woman as she jumped off her huge black dragon. Drogon, calm down, she said anxiously. He watched her

and he could not take a breath. Silver haired and purple eyed Darnese Targaryen stood in front of him and he stared at her with astonishment, his true queen. We are here to fight the machines, she said calmly. You mean the White Walkers, Jon asked? No, Daenerys said. These creatures are machines made by the first men of the Andals, machines that killed their masters and now threaten to enslave us all. That's it? That's all I'm giving you.

10,000 Bitcoin, and you can have the rest. I don't even know where to start here. The White Walkers are like these creatures that are like zombies. So it's impossible that they could turn out to be robots. I'm sorry, but I think you got punked. I mean, like, this is just, there's just no way this is the real thing. Are you trying to insult me? No, no, I'm sure you did all the stuff you did, but

I think he left you a fake manuscript or something, or a fake PDF, because this is fan fiction. I swear to you, there are no robots in this story. Well, I'm scrolling through this thing now, and there

are robots everywhere. Mad robots. Ice robots. No, no, no. I'm scrolling through this thing now and there are robots everywhere. Mad robots. Ice robots. No, no, no. I'm going to say this for the last time. If you want this manuscript, it's going to cost you 10,000 Bitcoin. But I'm telling you, it's not the real... I'm out of here. Great.

Now I'm going to get my ash kicked. By spoiler. You've been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Hacked. There are more installments of the Theory of Everything, including text, audio, and video extras, at toe.prx.org. And this is where you can subscribe to the Theory of Everything podcast.