The Militari Industrial Internet Freedom Complex

Andy is one of the historical members of the German hacker club , the CCC, teachinng computer and security, trying to enhance the policies on data protection and digital activism since 1984. He is also figthing for a better protection of personal data in the law through the Datenreisebüro since 1995. In May 2016, he did this conference at THSF, the annual hacker meeting in Toulouse, France.

With my friend Marine, we were impressed by the ideas launched by Andy, and decided to make a proper editing of the video, including French and English subtitles.

We wish you a nice conference!

How to lock a running tails with a password

As cofounder of La Quadrature du Net (a NGO fighting for freedoms in the digital age, still waiting for your support 😉 ), founder of Octopuce (my company) and more generally as an hacktivist, I often use Tails, a Linux distribution trying to enhance the anonymity of our communications and enhancing our personal digital safety.

Tails is very useful, not only because it allows me to carry important elements of my digital life in a simple USB dongle, protected by a strong password, but it also allows me to use the anonymisation network Tor in excellent conditions.

Sadly, I was missing an important feature, for me but also for all the hacktivists and journalists whose awareness I try to raise on digital freedom and personal data protection. It’s currently not possible to lock a running Tails and require a password to unlock it.

After an hour of research, I finally found a simple solution, allowing you to lock your running Tails with a password, so that you can go away from your computer for a few minutes without putting your personal data in danger.

Ladar Levison (Lavabit) at the European Parliament

A few month ago, Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, an American highly secure email company, was interviewed by the European Parliament to talk about his story against the FBI about his company’s private keys and his user’s confidentiality.

Listen to this video, its really short, and really insightful on the problem of surveillance of private communications, the right to privacy, how he fought against a request from the FBI to massively spy on his users without any control etc.

Moglen at Re:Publica: Freedom of thought requires free media

A few weeks ago, a friend show me a conference of Professor Eben Moglen, lawyer of Philipp Zimmermann (the creator of PGP), founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and Professor at Columbia University, and also a nice and well-known freedom fighter.

I found this conference so insightful, so dense in its content, and so true, that I started to share it with friends. However, many of them are not as fluent in English as they need to be, if they want to get all what Mr Moglen says. So I decided to make a proper English subtitle for it. Here it is!

Luks Bruteforce : test all your passwords

A few years ago, I started using cryptographic capabilities of Linux to encrypt my usb keys, hard drives and laptop. More efficient against the usual bad guys than a root password, this gave me a pretty good privacy for personal and professional data …

… Until that day when, after about a year without rebooting, one of my server rebooted and asked me for a passphrase … which I obviously forgot!

I didn’t find anything on the Internet to bruteforce a Luks-encrypted partition, so here is the script I produced to help me do this efficiently …