I gave the opening keynote at Open Source Bridge 2011 about my work as a hacktivist with Telecomix, supporting free communication in Egypt, the Middle East and the rest of the world. The keynote was not as polished as some of my previous talks due to three failed hard drives, a flood, a bashed elbow and a laptop that died 30 minutes before I went on. But I'm still quite proud of the result - sometimes timeliness matters most.

I'm not going to provide a full transcript, as I've been a little busy trying to keep the Internet functioning in Syria, which has majorly upgraded its censorship and wiretap capabilities in recent days. A brief summary of each section and a few choice quotes follow. Opensource.com has a summary as well. Find more on my YouTube channel.

Part 1 - Meet Telecomix

An introduction, a talk within a talk about Telecomix's work during the Egyptian revolution and an explanation of why we do what we do. And a very well received shout out to my friends in the FBI.

I use the word hack in its original sense, using a system in a way its designer didn't intend.

We believe that free speech is the basis of a free society. Every person who has an opinion deserves to have that opinion heard. The ability to share ideas is the foundation of effective democracy. We can have the vote, we can elect whoever we want, we can donate wherever we want - but unless we're able to talk to one another and work out whatever we collectively want to do, those things don't matter.

Part 2 - The Internet Under Attack

A discussion of recent attacks on the free and open Internet in the US, Europe and the rest of the world. An insider's look at the groups that have been fighting back, including LulzSec and Anonymous.

New communications technologies have always been a threat to people and institutions in power. Governments have responded with repression and restriction. The Internet is young; we forget it's only been 15 years since most of us had access. Other technologies, such as the printing press and amateur radio, took 100 years, or 30 years to get clamped down.

Antisec has declared war on all governments. They're gonna DDOS sites, they're gonna crack sites, they're gonna leak things.

The Internet didn't cause the protest in Egypt, it didn't cause the protests in the Middle East, but it is facilitating them and making them possible.

Part 3 - Get Disorganized

Meet disorganizations: the ad-hoc, leaderless groups shaping the future of the Internet and society. How can hundreds of people work together effectively, not only without any centralized authority, but without even agreeing on why? Also, bicycles.

Doocracy: People just show up and they just do. That is the highest organizational principle. You can come up with whatever structures and whatever ways of working that you want, but at the end of the day what matters is what you get done.

How I got through this talk without saying "autonomous zones" is beyond me.

Part 4 - What Have You Done?

An allegory contrasting a speech by Lawrence Lessig with the actions of the Piratbyrån. What can we learn about the fight for freedom from a group of long-haired Swedish twenty-somethings who succeeded where the Electronic Frontier Foundation failed?

If you can't fight for your freedom you don't deserve it. But you've done nothing. - Lawrence Lessig

Social welfare begins at 100 megabit. - Piratbyrån

If we want the Internet to be a tool for social justice or freedom, it needs to be more than just an echo chamber. If the only outlet we have is online, we're shouting in vain.

The government and corporations are not going to make this world better for us. We cannot keep relying on someone else to fix it for us. We need to start doing this ourselves.

I gave the following invited presentation at the Sheffield Doc/Fest film festival as part of a panel on the revolutions in the Middle East. The panel included organizers from Egypt's Youth Movement, documentary filmmakers embedded with Libyan rebels, a director of programming at Al Jazeera English and others. I spoke about my work with Telecomix, a volunteer group of activists who have been keeping the Internet running in the Middle East in the face of government censorship. As always, I speak only for myself, but I think I've done a good job of capturing the spirit of the work we do. A transcript follows.

Hi, my name is Peter Fein, and I've been hacking for freedom. I use the word hack in it's original sense, to mean a clever technical trick - using a system in a way its designer didn't intend.

This video is from Tunisia - it appears to show a flamethrower being used to disperse protesters. What I find compelling here is not the violations of the Geneva Conventions, but the phones - people desperately trying to get word out, to show the world what's happening. And that's why information needs to be free, right there in grainy, glorious mobile video. If we cannot see, we cannot act.

I'm an agent with Telecomix an ad-hoc disorganization of Internauts who support free communication for everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Comprised of programmers, punks, politicians, pirates, and others, Telecomix believes in person-to-person communication - the original p2p.

I sometimes act as a liaison to Anonymous, opportunistically forging connections and collaborations in the service of common goals. On that note, let me go record and state I don't DDOS, deface websites or crack passwords. And if the FBI or Scotland Yard is watching this, screw you.

Telecomix is yin to Anonymous' yang. If Anonymous takes sites down, Telecomix keeps them up. What we have in common with each other, and with the protests on the ground, is that we are truly leaderless and possessed by a radical passion for freedom. We operate as a do-ocracy, a form of organization in which the people who get things done, get things done.

Here's a little bit of what Telecomix did for Egypt. During the Jan 25 revolution, the Mubarak regime caused a nearly total blackout of Internet, cellular and SMS service.

While the Net was up, Telecomix provided tools such as TOR, VPNs and other encryption for safe communication. To restore access to censored sites, we built mirrors and proxies. Using the old school chat IRC, we served as a manual relay to Twitter, tweeting for Egyptians who were unable to do so themselves.

When the Net was down, we went low-tech. When countries block, we (d)evolve.Working with ISPs and individual users, we set up hundreds of dial-up modem lines. These numbers are now active for Syria as well. We recruited amateur radio operators from around the globe to help establish radio communication. Working with Anonymous, we sent comms and medical information, including treatments for tear gas, to every fax machine in Egypt that we could find. We also set up a reverse fax service for transmitting news out of the country. Using the network tool nmap, we scanned the entire Egyptian IP address space to find a few thousand machines that were still up. We then injected human-readable messages into their web server logs.

Future development projects include: intranet livecds using off-the-shelf commodity hardware to run a local Usenet message board, a wiki of street communication tactics, such as wheatpasting and sign making, and a howto for building two-way radios from re purposed consumer electronics.

We've been able to reuse much of this work in Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, and Wisconsin. Which was a good thing, because after working twenty hours a day for eight days on Egypt, I really need some sleep.

This is an exciting time to be a person who can use a computer. The cause of freedom calls all of us - not only programmers, but writers and artists, academics and filmmakers, philosophers and trolls. We have the power to make a real difference in the world - to help people achieve what they want for themselves. It's been a long, long winter for freedom in the Middle East and the rest of the world, but we're beginning to see signs of spring.

We are Telecomix. Join us.