My name is Kevin Gallagher.
I also run the Barrett-Brown Legal Defense Fund.
Barrett-Brown is the person who originally created this thing called Project PM.
When he had this idea called Project PM, originally, in like 2009, what he was seeing was the failure of the media, and he was looking for ways to improve it, and he was really upset with mainstream pundits like Thomas Friedman and Charles Krautheimer,
who don't know what they're talking about most of the time.
Also, Barrett, as a skeptic, is interested in a scientific form of journalism.
So at the beginning, it was all very theoretical, but on the occasion of the Arab Spring, and the activity with Anonymous being involved in Optinesia, and the hack of H.B.
Gary, it kind of completely evolved into this whole new thing, where he created this wiki site, and he's soliciting volunteers to go through open source intelligence, things that are available in the public domain, and also emails that have been hacked by Anonymous out of security firms,
try to figure out what they're up to, and see what is in there that may be of journalistic import.
With that, everyone knows how a wiki works, it's just media wiki software that anybody can post and edit to and collaborate on.
So the express purpose of Project PM here is to provide a centralized, actionable dataset regarding the intelligence contracting industry, the PR industry's interface with totalitarian regimes, the mushrooming InfoSix slash cybersecurity industry and other issues constituting threats to human rights,
civic transparency, individual privacy, and the health of democratic institutions.
I think that's the angle with which all of us are approaching the subject today.
This all might seem very innocuous and innocent and very First Amendment-protected research activity that anyone might do, so actually the FBI served a search warrant on him in March 2012, and right down there on number 8 they listed the actual URL of the wiki,
which they were seeking records for.
Somehow they're interested in this wiki that's exposing the surveillance complex and the private contractors who work in collusion with the government.
And a year after that you have a subpoena that's served to Cloudflare to get all the information behind the domain that's hosting this wiki.
So clearly it's viewed as some kind of threat to the government, the fact that journalists and researchers and volunteers who were involved in this were putting together this information in one place.
Well, before I introduce this slide I'd like to introduce it by saying this is the face of evil, but I don't mean any offense to any people who may work for any of these companies.
But this is what we're talking about, is this massive Excuse me, Kevin, I'm sorry.
But as long as you're going to be talking about the slides could someone see if we can get the projector working so the people in the crowd can see the slides?
Oh, are we going with no slides at all?
Unless they can fix the projector really quickly, which I believe they can, correct?
Hack it!
Yeah, I was completely talking based on my slides.
Let's get that fixed really quickly.
We can talk faster.
Please.
Or if like everyone can come up and just gather around us.
Here comes the there's a Calvary out there and they're coming to fix the projector.
This is rather essential to our talk.
Is there like a good hashtag we can use to get help, tech support?
That might make it more interesting.
We can interrogate them.
Is there anyone with AV or support in the room?
Cool.
I think we can... I apologize for the technical inconvenience.
Is there a volunteer, a Hope volunteer in the audience?
Just yell out yes.
Okay, can you go find whomever?
Cool.
Find the person with the most power to make this happen as quickly as possible.
Oh, yeah.
We got something.
We could solve it ourselves.
Self-governance.
Do we need this?
Can you put the slides online?
I had been told that this was tested and working.
That's the projector, right?
Help is coming.
The Calvary.
Can you hear them?
I can hear them.
What a disaster.
We're going to start over.
It actually fits into the crowdsourcing paradigm that things can get kind of messy when you have a bunch of citizen journalists rocking the town.
Rocking the intelligence agencies and everything.
Sometimes it's not as pretty clean as the more swank outfits.
You
got this?
Yeah.
This looks like progress.
This
would be so disappointing if it was actually a good slideshow.
Which it is.
Maybe your part?
I think in the meantime, perhaps, Joe?
While we finish this up, one of the big things that Barrett found during Arab Spring was that a lot of these tech firms were helping out dictators in the Middle East.
Monitor all of their citizens under total surveillance.
You were watching this from your front row seat, right?
I'm just sitting at home and just knowing what these firms are up to and seeing that they could just scrape up every GPS coordinate of everybody in the Middle East who has a Facebook profile and where they could just go target arrest, beat, torture.
They did this in Egypt.
They did this in Syria.
They're doing this right now in Gaza as we speak.
And this is what we figured out.
It's been a trip.
And it's harrowing.
It's really to see this happening.
To see people like Zuckerberg and other people and tech giants who just really don't give a fuck about people's privacy and safety.
Keep going, Joe.
It's really harrowing, I think.
We see so much of what's happened in the Middle East I feel like could have been prevented if we weren't selling stuff to these regimes.
We weren't just giving them zero days back doors and just handing people's entire lives on a silver platter.
And you saw that with IRC channels, right?
This is just generally on Twitter and Facebook and literally just compiling research from every single corner of the web and just noticing these little things.
And then connecting the information to the right people so the crowdsourcing happens and funnels it up to people who get it to a wider audience.
The best way to do it, we were just blasting stuff out on Twitter and everybody else was seeing it happen at the same time.
Everybody was coming to a consensus.
Our little bubble of hacker people.
And we try to tell this to people that aren't really as technologically savvy and they're just like, huh?
To start off from where I lost video Barrett's really unique innovation was to recognize the power of the internet for collaboration and the fact that there were thousands upon thousands of these emails and no one knows what's in them.
So yeah, let's solicit people to go through them.
Yeah, this is a picture of the wiki.
I told you what its stated purpose was.
And this is the search warrant that was served by the FBI against his residence in his mom's house.
Explicitly names the URL of that wiki.
A year later, they also served the subpoena to Cloudfire, trying to figure out who was running the domain.
If they had followed that up with multiple subpoenas, they could have figured out more potentially, like who was actually editing and contributing to it.
And yeah, this is the axis of evil, I suppose.
We're here to talk about firms like Palantir, HBGary, Stratfor, Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Mantec, Gamma, Endgame Systems, Cubic.
This is the privatized side of the surveillance apparatus that does not get as much discussion as the NSA does, but yet it constitutes over 70% of the U.S.
intelligence budget.
At least 70%.
Yeah, of the U.S.
intelligence budget is going to contractors.
There's very little accountability for it all.
You can't send them Freedom of Information Act requests, for example.
Yeah, like the NSA, all those crazy acronym government agencies, they're doing a lot of crazy stuff, we all know that, but they're not necessarily doing all of it.
They're going to the private sector, and random dudes in Northern Virginia are going to work and going to these companies and doing jobs as a proxy for Uncle Sam, and there's not the same kind of oversight.
They don't have PR spokespeople that you can call, at least not that will definitely answer the phone and give you something, at least.
These guys have a profit motive, too.
More than anything.
When the whole industry is mushrooming, it's like, how much stuff can you guys possibly vacuum up and then put into your little tables and convert?
What are you guys getting out of all of this?
What are you doing with all of our taxpayer money?
I'm not a fan of the U.S.
government, but the fact is that intelligence community research was meant to benefit the public good, and now it's being run by the profit motive, so how does the profit motive and the public good mix?
It doesn't.
Yeah, so here are some examples of stories that captivated Project PM's attention.
This first one is an exclusive report that was filed by Project PM and Barrett Brown.
Within the HBGary emails, he had discovered a program called Roma's Coin, and it was due to be replaced with a program called Odyssey.
It basically entailed mass surveillance against the Arab world, leveraging sophisticated mobile phone software, and a lot of things we don't understand, like linguistics and semantics and stuff like that.
They were looking for people that are experts in these things.
And obviously some of you may be familiar with the teen theme scandal, another thing that came out of this, where people were hired to go after opponents of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, and in particular WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.
A whole consortium of these firms, basically Palantir, Barrett Co., HBGary, were among them.
They were formulating this plan to feed disinformation, create messages to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, submit fake documents and then call it the error.
This was all being discussed.
And if this is...
Right, these are tactics that they were considering to deploy against WikiLeaks.
Defensive either, that's all offensive tactics.
Yeah.
Are they trying to block these off of all computer networks?
Are they trying to figure out who's reading all of these tables?
Who's gaining this knowledge?
Who in the government shouldn't be reading it?
There's so many programs going on.
Our government and our congressmen can't even possibly keep track of any of them, let alone if they actually gave a shit.
Can everybody hear in the back?
Okay, speak closer to the microphones, everyone.
So here's another one.
Back in 2012, this DOD information operations contractor called Leone Industries was basically caught in a smear campaign against a group of journalists at USA Today who had written critically of that same firm.
And they had to apologize.
Yeah, this is the type of stuff that goes on.
I think activists and journalists are of course the prime targets for these firms.
Project PM research fed into these articles.
That's absolutely correct, yeah.
This is another thing.
U.S.
government software creates fake people to spread messages via social networking.
This is a thing called persona management that entails the ability for one intelligence analyst to control multiple fake sock puppets that are basically indistinguishable from regular people, or at least the average person wouldn't be able to tell because it's replete with background and history and fake friends.
And they're using these things to spread disinformation, to gather information on a target, to discredit people and do things like that.
Similarly, there's a lot of monitoring of social media going on by the private sector.
Raytheon's riot program is one example.
This was reported by Ryan Gallagher in The Guardian.
There's a company called Bright Planet.
They advertise this project called sorry, this program called Blue Jay.
It bills itself as a law enforcement Twitter...
Star Wars.
All these things are marketed to law enforcement.
So this is a law enforcement Twitter crime scanner.
They're going to be scanning Twitter and collecting massive data sets to try to predict suspicious behavior and when a crime might happen.
These slides you're seeing are Project PM research that fed up to wider audiences with the mainstream media.
Another example is Intrepid.
It has a thing called Tartan.
It boasts the ability to identify ranks of influence within human networks and uncover hidden or missing relationships.
What that basically means is it can de-anonymize people.
You point this software at a group of people.
Applications listed national security, federal law enforcement and so on.
In their brochures for this, they explicitly mentioned Occupy Wall Street as a target.
As Joe mentioned, another one of the huge issues with this is that the firms in the West have no qualms about selling these things to authoritarian regimes or dictatorships in third world countries.
That's what happened.
This firm Emesis sold spyware that was used by Gaddafi.
Spyware which allowed them to probably detain, kill people.
More than just spyware and hacking.
Just a fully diversified machine of public relations to just say the same bullshit line over and over again.
We found this with the firm called Corvis in Bahrain.
They have a very large PR contract to basically just write articles for PR Newswire to say, hey guys, the regime of royalty is making baby steps to reform all the time.
They've had this uprising going on for the past four years.
We don't even pay attention to it.
Our government is kind of shooted off because we have a military base there.
The 5th fleet is based out of there.
Only recently I think the other day when our top diplomats went over there and they got kicked out of the country for meeting with opposition leaders.
At what point are you guys going to keep continuing this madness?
I just have a few more slides and I'm going to turn it over to the rest of our panel.
I'm going to introduce each of these people.
Finn Fisher, Gamma International.
This program was discovered being used against Egyptian activists and journalists.
It's a total, it's a RAT, which is a remote access program that allows total control over the target's computer.
This is just a screenshot of Palantir's software that they can map out networks and basically identify foci of influence.
And another issue that is significant for Project PM is the subject of zero-day exploits.
No one's really figured out what the solution is as far as regulating this.
I mean, I know there is a campaign to coalition against the unlawful surveillance exports because most of the surveillance tech is developed in the West and it's used for repression and oppression in other countries.
So with that, I think, is it Joe?
Yeah.
I'll start off.
I'm going to jump ahead a little bit.
Be sure to talk into the mic really close to it.
Testing.
Alright, so I'm going to jump ahead a little bit towards the end of Jeremy Hammond's trial.
Or not even trial, just discovery phase.
Hey, let's keep him in a hole for like 18 months while we try to like, the government's trying to avoid having to tell everybody that it was an original hacker of Stratfor that zero-dayed his way into their entire database email server and gave this exploit to Sabu.
The government had to admit this in a filing that this actually happened.
And that he, in turn, gave the exploit to Jeremy.
So they were working in tandem essentially without... Sabu was an FBI informant hacker.
For anybody that doesn't, he's been living under a rock here with lulzsec.
Yeah, so without the FBI informant's help, there's no, they probably wouldn't even have been hacked in the first place.
Interestingly enough, Stratfor is involved with Mantech with a contract for irregular warfare services.
And to conceptualize for the military how they would do these operations abroad they were just, they haven't really said what they were doing with it.
But irregular warfare is basically your non-kinetic firing weapons at each other.
It's maybe more like subversion, maybe like, I don't know, sending hookers to a politician you want to take down or something like that.
It can encompass a lot of things that it's been around since as long as humans have been beating the shit out of each other.
What about the acquisition of HBGary by Mantech?
That was also very curious, too.
Mantech just acquires HBGary and they're able to go and say, hey, we're buying your company, but we're not buying your responsibilities for all the stuff that you might have been on the hook for.
Going even further back, Sabu was involved in hacking Mantech and looting and pillaging.
I think that was what, fuck FBI Friday 1 or 2?
It was one of those?
So, FBI's involved basically, we called them hacking themselves.
I had to suspend disbelief.
I thought I had been seeing this for months and years on end and then finally it seemed like a pretty legit hypothesis.
I felt like I was a conspiracy theorist and finally it's been confirmed.
Then I have to ask myself, did they allow this to happen?
Was this incompetence or did they really want to take Stratfor down a peg?
Reading a lot of the Stratfor emails, I maybe think the latter is a lot of stuff that Stratfor's doing and have their hands in that I would probably say that's likely as well.
They had a hedge fund, they were starting a hedge fund called Stratcap that was events futures trading, so it was like another version of intrade.
So they would basically have this computer that would trade on algorithms and while they're doing this other irregular warfare thing there's just all of these other things that Stratfor is doing that would combine into one mission.
They were setting up Stratcap with a Goldman Sachs guy, so it's no small fry.
So next we're going to have Andrew Blake, he's a reporter with RT, he's covered many of these things.
I have your slides here.
Hello.
Thanks.
So yeah, hi.
My role here, I was kind of in a really particular place when Project PM was doing a lot of really important stuff.
And to go back, one thing in particular that we found out was this thing called Trapwire.
To back up a little bit, if you're not following, if you weren't following the whole thing that actually happened with these Stratfor emails was Stratfor is another one of these geopolitical
consulting jerks.
Private CIA.
And so they were hacked by, as Joe was saying, by the FBI actually.
It's true.
Basically, an FBI informant steering Jeremy Hammond, who had the technical expertise.
And this isn't like setting up a fake bomb for somebody to go be raided later.
This is, like, hacking's real.
So if you go back two and a half years ago to late 2012 Stratfor was hacked by the FBI and Anonymous and a couple thousands of emails were pilfered Five million.
Five million.
Okay, thank you.
And eventually those actually got published by WikiLeaks.
And you can go on WikiLeaks and you can read these millions of emails sent from people within Stratfor.
The vice presidents presidents.
And they're all, like, old CIA cronies.
Some of them still affiliated, obviously.
Kind of that culture exists there.
So you start going through these emails and you start just catching keywords WikiLeaks actually, after a while, built a great search function.
And you can go to, I think, gifiles.wikileaks.org and type in whatever.
Type in raghead.
Anybody wants to go.
The vice president of intelligence at Stratfor Fred Burton is notorious for racial slurs.
So one of the things that we found one day was this thing called Trapwire and it was reported for a little while in the press a few months after Stratfor was hacked.
So a few months later we start seeing that these guys from Stratfor were sending emails to each other pretty much saying, like, okay, there's this thing called Trapwire and we're Stratfor is trying to sell it to people.
But we're seeing all these inner office emails.
And it turns out that it's a surveillance system that's being sold or at least touted around.
It was sold to a bunch of different agencies, but we started seeing that this surveillance system was being sold and given to Washington, D.C.
New York PD was alleged to be using it.
Texas Department of Public Safety.
And dozens all over the world.
And what the company was saying this thing was, was, alright, we use existing PandaTilt cameras.
The infrastructure is already there.
We're just going to combine normal CCTV with facial recognition technology and we're going to combine that with... To identify supposedly suspicious behavior.
Yeah.
Predict terror attacks.
Predict.
So just creepy Orwellian surveillance.
This was before the Snowden revelations and stuff like that.
You can see here that this is what it looks like if you go onto WikiLeaks and you can go through the emails.
And you can see guys from Stratfor telling one another like, oh, let's try to sell this.
This is awesome.
We already got it here.
We got it here.
This is a system that's going to make people watch them and super creepy, whatever.
A lot of it is probably hyperbole.
We know it's installed in places.
It's creepy, but yeah, come on.
It's probably not that creepy.
But it might be.
You never know.
They like to upsell.
Stratfor likes to upsell some of their stuff.
So my role here is at the time I'm hanging out, I'm writing stories and researching a bunch of stuff.
And I start going through these emails and the more I see about... the more from the Stratfor emails I see about Trebler, the more there's just lots and lots and lots of pieces.
And that's kind of where I ended up at Project PM because I could go online and I can hop in an IRC channel or I can send out a tweet or I can send... the internet's a really cool place.
You can do a lot of talking with a lot of people about a lot of things.
Those are all basic crowdsourcing tools.
What Project PM was doing was just open source investigating these things.
Going into Google and just typing in the right words in the right places, you can find really, really frightening stuff.
The more we started researching Trapwire, the more we put these pieces of the puzzle together.
Where not only was Stratfor trying to sell the service, but it was really, really creepy.
To play off the whole tinfoil hat thing, when Wikileaks first published the Trapwire email specifically, because they were just publishing in handfuls at times, they were DDoSed for two days.
Probably just a coincidence.
Whatever.
But it was a big story.
This was happening.
They were publishing information, evidence...
As attention focuses not just on Stratfor, but on Trapwire, people start going like, okay, well who's running Trapwire?
We start going through the chain of command of people that are involved with this and you realize that the company that's running Trapwire is also running this company Abraxas, this company Intrepid, and they were doing pretty much everything else in the creepy surveillance world.
They were actually...
If you're familiar with Aleister Crowley, you'll recognize the name Abraxas.
They have all these weird mystical names.
Creepy stuff.
Total Analysis Corporation.
Asymmetric Solutions.
It sounds like stuff out of Philip K.
Dick novels.
They would deny.
They would lie.
Barrett would call them up and be like, wait.
Barrett would call them up.
They would lie.
People were actually going to outside these buildings' headquarters and taking pictures because they want to know more about these things.
There's companies that are doing really creepy things and we don't know about it.
Let's figure it out.
Sure, we can go on Google.
We can go try to find some of the PDFs of whatever you can.
It's really awesome if someone wants to go and hack something and publish five million emails with a bunch of crazy evidence.
I'm not advocating that because I think that could get me droned.
You can do that.
On top of this whole, yeah, it's creepy.
It's probably overblown.
This was a couple years ago.
When it came out, there were picked up in the Times.
Pretty much every major newspaper in the West had a story about Trapwire.
Not the Atlantic.
Do you want the mic?
Keep going.
We're on timing.
Super creepy.
The point here is this stuff does exist and even if it's hyperbole, even if it is really overblown, just recently Chicago, I believe around a year ago, started using facial recognition technology, the CPD, the Chicago Police Department.
Last year they actually caught someone using that facial recognition technology and someone was just sentenced to 22 years in prison.
I'm pretty sure you killed a guy or robbed a store.
You should be in prison probably.
If you think that prisons should exist.
Regardless, this stuff does exist and we just saw last week, I believe, a police agency in the UK is now using facial recognition technology.
They're using something called NeoFace, which I believe comes out of Hong Kong and is all over the east and all sorts of creepy stuff.
Governments, agencies, all over the world are using really, really creepy tools and you can't easily get information about it.
That's where Project PM came in.
That's when I started going and hanging out in chat rooms and being like, oh, has anyone seen this document?
Oh, cool.
Well, that brought me to this document.
And then someone else will say, oh, it's got me that document.
And then someone else will say, oh, hey, why doesn't someone go and hack something else and get all those emails?
Don't necessarily do anything illegal, but when you start talking to one another and you can use the internet as this collaborative tool, it's more than just like, well, you realize this, you're all a bunch of nerds, but you can find some pretty interesting stuff that should be disclosed.
People are spying on you and there's no oversight there.
Very little oversight.
And if you can find a way to elaborate on this information and bring it to the public's eye, it gets picked up.
People are going to write about it.
It is going to end up on the New York Times front page if it's important enough.
So if you are in that infrastructure, if you're in those companies or you know someone who is, totally just leak all of that.
Follow the Twitter handle PROJPM for Project PM and send what you find there.
We'll organize it and crowdsource, help the crowdsource crowd get into it more.
So I think, I mean, what we kind of want to do now is kind of show a demonstration of how this was all organized, how PROJPM worked, how Barrett conducted his journalism and solicited volunteers to go through documents and find stuff.
So we have Douglas Lucas.
He's a Texas-based freelance writer, researcher, and journalist mostly known for covering Barrett Brown's case.
He has been to many of the hearings and for turning the Austin headquartered private spy firm Stratforce emails published by Wikileaks into national security stories at who, what, why.
With a focus on U.S.
secret involvement in and counterinsurgency approach to the Mexican drug war.
Right, so I thought that since a lot of this PROJPM stuff was historical it would be nice for us to unveil some documents that have barely been noticed before.
Yeah, those documents.
Okay, so the documents connect with both Barrett and Stratfor.
And I'll tell you how and why PROJPM can and should crowdsource research into them.
Last week, who, what, why published my piece on frequent Mexican military aircraft and helicopter incursions into U.S.
airspace.
As part of our investigative partnership, Wikileaks has added to the top of its list of Stratfor releases my who, what, why article which was based on these intelligence products that you see right there on the screen.
Their 2011 border control reports from Texas.
We'll shortly show you one of them.
Stratfor obtained at least 34 of them in that year.
I organized them there on that page on the projector you see.
So Stratfor obtained at least 34 of them which meant they ultimately ended up at Wikileaks.
But nobody really noticed them because not many people dig into the Stratfor files.
I do.
So let me tell you about the documents.
The Austin headquartered border security operations center created them.
This here is a picture coming up of the Austin center, the inside of it.
As of about 2011, we're getting back to the picture, don't worry.
They oversaw nearly 3,000 intelligence analysts and hundreds of live surveillance cameras around the clock.
Cameras pointed at the Texas-Mexico border which is the largest section of the US-Mexico border.
So obviously all this has national security implications.
Just think of Obama's recent request for 3-point-whatever billion in emergency border funds.
This is Aaron Grigsby, then head of the border security operations center who is one of Stratfor's sources.
He's a Texas cop, specifically a Texas ranger which is the state police division overseeing the Austin border security operations center.
I surprised interviewed him and got him to acknowledge he emailed the Stratfor VP of intelligence, Fred Burton, the guy who says raghead all the time in the emails.
What was once Aaron Grigsby's center has six outlying offices called joint operations and intelligence centers.
Despite being law enforcement entities that's the name, straight out of the Pentagon glossary, militarization of police.
I found the El Paso outlying office the El Paso joint operations and intelligence center and surprised interviewed the border liaison officer there who did some of the forwarding of the intelligence products to Stratfor.
And I surprised interviewed the Stratfor analyst who was receiving some of those El Paso office emails.
I got her to acknowledge she had access to the Austin center's intelligence products in 2011, which is when she was at Stratfor.
And about the time I reminded her on the phone that the intelligence products are law enforcement sensitive and thus meant only for cop eyes only, she muttered at me fuck you motherfucker.
I'll report more on that quid pro quo relationship between the El Paso office and Stratfor in a who what why piece to come soon that I hope Project PM can contribute to by doing additional research into these intelligence documents.
So because Project PM studies the quid pro quo relationships and revolving doors between government security entities and private security intelligence contractors really control is a better word than security because as Thomas Drake said yesterday all this surveillance is ultimately about population control taking away our individual sovereignty.
These documents have personal data about us and it gets sprayed out of places like that El Paso office's Texas DPS email address to private spies like Stratfor possibly in violation of the law and thankfully WikiLeaks gets a hold of them.
Okay so let me tell you now a little bit about the documents.
So these are called Border Operations Sector Assessments or BOSAs for short.
Stratfor obtained at least 34 of them.
Where am I?
You'll note on the first page of it you can see the Texas flag there because it's created under the auspices of the Texas State Police, namely the Rangers, that Aaron Grigsby guy but it's actually military contractors who were creating these.
It was Abrams Learning and Information Systems.
Fuck you motherfucker.
That's what I refer to her as short.
In 2010 she was creating these.
She told me so.
I'm kind of tricky when I interview people.
And then she later moved to Stratfor a year later and started receiving a bunch of them from the El Paso office.
So you'll note the document on page one is marked Controlled Unclassified Information and it's elsewhere marked as Law Enforcement Sensitive.
Now page 78.
Right.
So this is the slide for Anonymous versus Los Zetas.
The caption says, quote, mask worn by anonymous members and supporters known as the Guy Fawkes mask, unquote.
Ain't that cute.
Slide's first two sentences, quote, it appears that the online hacker collective Anonymous has decided to take on New Mexico's most violent drug cartel Los Zetas.
Speculation about the scope of the conflict abounds, fueled by several conflicting reports about the hacktivist group's intentions, unquote.
Then the slide details the conflicting reports.
You can see why this stuff leads to the Department of Justice saying in Barrett Brown's case that Anonymous is trying to overthrow the government.
Because you have these understaffed, under-resourced, complete idiot intelligence analysts doing stuff like this and it gets funneled up to the higher level people, ultimately like DOJ.
Haven't proved that entirely, but that's the basic gist of how it works.
Okay, so indeed, Texas Border Control Intelligence was monitoring Op Cartel, which was primarily a creation of Anon's in Mexico.
Barrett was involved in that operation.
As Op Cartel was underway, ex-military contractors associated with Tom Ryan posted Barrett's street address online.
They stated the address was, quote, for the Zetas so they can have the right Barrett Brown address, unquote.
The Zetas were initially Mexican special forces who had been trained with U.S.
funds.
Brown fled here to New York City and was mocked by the mainstream media for all of it.
But note that today, also largely ignored by the U.S.
mainstream media, autodefensis, self-defense groups, have sprung up in Mexico for good or ill to fight back against the narcos.
So those are sort of decentralized groups, just as crowdsourcing research is decentralized.
Whatever the drawbacks of Op Cartel and the autodefensis, Barrett was ahead of his time as usual.
People mocked him.
When he was first raided in 2012, the FBI lead agent on his case, none other than the aptly named Agent Smith, did not publicize the warrant and affidavit claiming the Bureau wanted to protect Brown from the Zetas.
So the secrecy made that first raid on Barrett harder to prove.
People didn't believe Barrett.
So these documents will be for great justice when we research them.
Now I'll show you what some of the boasts typically contain.
Page two, please.
I see here a key event in finding, quote, the largest single marijuana seizure occurred in the Rio Grande Valley sector where U.S.
Border Patrol agents seized 132 bundles of marijuana totaling 3,262.05 pounds concealed within a load of produce from a 1999 Kentworth truck, unquote.
So the Rio Grande Valley is where one of those joint operations and intelligence center outlying offices is.
Now page 47, it says, has the details.
Let's look at page 47 because this is how you would crowdsource research into it if you want to help Project PM, which everybody can do.
So here we see that the weed, not weave, but weed, the pod, was, quote, commingled in a load of produce, unquote, and, importantly, that the incident happened at the Falfurias Border Patrol checkpoint.
We know the document is reporting between October 26th and November 2nd.
So now we can send a Freedom of Information Act request to Customs and Border Protection for this very incident.
Hell, for all incidents and all 34 of the intelligent products, ultimately we can all organize them and put them on Project PM.
They're not going to like that, but we will.
Then, last thing, Stratfor also obtained daily and weekly products from the six outlying offices.
So once we organize those, we can drill down to an even more granular level in the history of 2011 National Security Border Control from the point of view of the spies.
These other data in the BOCES, they have statistics on kidnapping of migrants, quote, unquote, apprehension of illegal immigrants, data on cartel movements, data on the hunt for mythical terrorists supposedly crossing the border, and much more, including tons of pictures.
Grinning Texas cops in cowboy hats photographed next to trucks with drugs they seized.
Finally, let me show you the last thing that we've organized so far at the Project PM website.
One sec...
You'll note that the title of it is 2011 Texas Border Security Intelligence Products.
So far, we've only organized the border operations sector assessments, the BOCES.
We found a smoking gun between the border liaison officer Lloyd Shook at the El Paso office sending one of these BOCES to Victoria J.
Allen, aka, fuck you, motherfucker.
So...
2011 Texas Border Security Intelligence Products, the one we've organized so far, the 34 BOCES, and we're going to continue organizing the daily and weekly reports, and we'll have a whole map, a whole history of 2011 border control in Texas.
And we can do that with photographs, we can make maps, we can make visualizations.
And you'll note here, the intelligence products, we've got the dates, so it's set up like a calendar.
We've got the dates that the reports cover, the direct links to the intelligence products at Wikileaks Press, thanks for that, Wikileaks Press, or the BIN links at Wikileaks, and the link to the Stratfor email at the Wikileaks website where the product was attached.
So finally, now you have the organization that you need to begin researching these products on your own, all of us together.
There's something, you know, 80 pages times 34 documents, there's going to be enough to go around for everybody until the end of time.
Read them, Google what you find, send FOIA requests, surprise interview people, they'll say fun things.
And then tweet your findings to me, at Douglas Lucas, or to Project PM at P-R-O-J-P-M.
That way we can better understand the public-private intelligence complex, which is ruining so much, including Barrett Brown.
And I do recommend Douglas' latest article, because it talks about Mexican military incursions over the border that apparently, according to Stratfor, are happening regularly.
Yeah, last month's Arizona incursion where a Mexican police helicopter flew into Arizona airspace and shot near U.S.
Border Patrol agents is no fluke.
These intelligence products, these BOSAs, show examples of Mexican military helicopters doing this sort of stuff frequently.
And that's just one thing.
Helicopters, okay, so let's find, you know, cartel members crossing the bridges.
They do that.
But what was the comment of the head Stratfor exec when asked about this?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was Fred Burton, again the guy who says raghead all the time.
He was...
Yeah, he does.
He's a one-of-a-kind character.
You couldn't invent him for a novel unless you were Philip K.
Dick.
So what he said about these helicopter incursions is that they happen all the time.
And don't tell Alex Jones or Glenn Beck because people will freak out once they realize what I found, which is that Mexican military aircraft are crossing the border all the time.
I actually combined my Stratfor research with the Freedom of Information Act request that showed Mexican military aircraft entered something like 94 times between 2010 and 2012 entered U.S.
airspace.
And you can find all of that on whowhatwhy.com or at the wikileaks.org slash GI files list of releases that's at the very top due to our investigative partnership.
Excellent.
And so our last speaker we're going to hear from, and I'm not sure if there will be time for questions, is Lauren Pespisa.
She works with Transparency Toolkit and she's kind of working on tools that can improve crowdsourcing, improve the analysis of large data sets and the visualization of these things and so on.
So tell us about that.
I was in Project PM around all this time all this stuff was happening and I was seeing how it was in a way somewhat tedious to go through all these emails and documents and we were all doing sort of by hand.
And yeah, you know, you search on wikileaks you search for keywords and stuff, but there really wasn't too much analytics software that we could use to put all this stuff together real fast.
So it made it sort of a sub sort of small group of really interested people that were passionate about it to begin with.
You know, like making fun of NSA contractors and embarrassing them is just something that is one of my favorite pastimes.
And especially with a lot of other people in Project PM felt that way too.
And it was... Do you have more?
Okay.
It was fun.
We've got the Transparency Toolkit up there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I don't want to go too far into it because we need to have an actual release and stuff.
But this is sort of what we've been working on, what I've been working on with my founder for the past six months or so and he's been working on it longer and it's a data analytics platform that connects to a lot of different data sets like OpenGov stuff,
Sunlight Foundation, Wikileaks, and will enable people to sort of visualize stuff better.
There's like timeline tools and
table generation.
You can chain tools together to make even more interesting comparisons and network graph actually.
It's just more effective.
This is what most startups do now is analytics stuff.
If we had this when Project PM was going on, we would have been releasing three times the amount of discoveries and it would have been a lot more...
maybe Barrett would have gotten a lot more credit because I know that when...
before Snowden's leaks came out or revelations came out, Barrett was sort of still sort of a conspiracy theorist like all those weird people at Project PM finding this stuff.
This was stuff published by major media organizations but people still didn't really take Barrett seriously and then we were really vindicated when Edward Snowden came forward with all the revelations about surveillance technology.
Oh yeah, we told you.
We've known this for a long time guys.
Absolutely right.
What is this Lauren?
That's a network graph of the NSA contractors on LinkedIn.
We scraped LinkedIn searching for all the acronyms and secret programs like PRISM and stuff like that and found that most of them, a lot of these contractors post their secret programs they're working on to their public LinkedIn profile.
We can easily generate a network graph to show the connections and how big these programs are and how many people work on them.
It's kind of embarrassing to them, which is always fun.
I did see once, actually a couple of cops on LinkedIn decide to put like, I'm an expert in network exploitation.
Which of course is shown to everybody on the internet and then later he's hacked and run out of the entire state.
And he has no idea why.
And it's like, well if you put on your LinkedIn that you're a cop and you're exploiting people's computers, it's gonna like, the whole world is gonna come at you.
Oh, like Aaron Barr?
I forget his name, but this was a case I saw.
So I think we've illustrated quite aptly why this Project PM thing in the wiki was viewed as a threat to the FBI and the powers that be.
I think we have time for just one question.
And there's a microphone just right over there, I believe.
Two questions if you run really fast up there.
Well, so there is the Project PM wiki, which you can still visit.
However, some of its information is outdated because the founder has been in jail and hasn't been so active.
But I've written a few articles where you can catch up on what all this work was.
My name is Kevin Gallagher.
Just look, I have a couple on Huffington Post.
There's one on DailyDot that just covers the issues that Project PM was into, particularly the private intelligence contractors.
You can also help.
You can also help us, Corey.
You can also help yourself.
Anyone can help.
This is the whole point.
You didn't have to be all pretty and nice.
You can like, directly do this yourself, too.
You can jump in and join Project PM.
It spreads the legal liability around.
You can check out my Huawei latest report this week.
It's my pinned tweet.
And you can check out the forthcoming one I'm going to have.
And I'll get that fuck you motherfucker transcript out one way or another.
Hey guys, I posted this question to Snowden before on Twitter.
Did he answer you?
No.
I mean, there was no answering from... no questioning him at all.
But I want to ask this to you, Andrew, actually, particularly.
How do you guys, as well, feel about your activist work against one civilian state and against one repressive colored state is used to whitewash the reputation of another actively military aggressive state?
I'm talking about your work with RT.
I'm talking about Snowden's work with other Russian media.
I just want to hear your opinion about it.
I just think that everything that's happening... I don't like secrets.
And if you're doing anything to anyone, anywhere, in any part of the world, other people should know.
Everyone, everywhere.
Especially the bad things.
The problem is that, for example, on RT, being one of the main voices of Russia to the rest of the world right now, your credible and substantial interesting work is put next to the blatant lies and blatant Russian propaganda.
He's the most credible person at the network.
It's all just different jurisdictions.
There's a Russia jurisdiction.
There's an Al Jazeera English jurisdiction.
You can publish stuff wherever.
I'm a freelancer.
Work with whatever jurisdiction is going to get your info out.
I say, guys, your work is used to whitewash the reputation of Russia's aggression.
How do you feel about it?
Can we go to the next question?
You can talk to me about that when I'm not on stage.
Everybody in the world can read websites from any jurisdiction.
It's a global audience.
Barrett was a big proponent of going after, in particular, what Russia's been doing.
The fact that he's in jail right now and not here on this stage, just trashing Vladimir Putin is an absolute travesty.
And we'd like him back now.
And Jeremy, too.
And Wormer.
PayPal 14 and all the other political prisoners.
Our political prisoners.
We want to fight this menace, but when our government is locking up our own hackers and our own best and brightest people, it's a heresy.
Our research doesn't... I would like to think it does not help whitewash Russia's abuses.
We're over time, so please keep it quick.
Alright, just to be brief, we've just heard from Edward Snowden and the revolutions that he revealed is that we're being spied on, right?
But what you're talking about is a relentless campaign of cyber warfare, essentially.
Some of it against U.S.
citizens.
How does it make you feel that the narrative currently in the media surrounding cyber warfare and this stuff is about we are being spied on?
Something that many of us have sort of known for a while.
Whereas what you're talking about is essentially domestic cyber warfare.
Yeah, we need to look at the state and local levels.
We need to look at the private security contractors that work within the U.S., often on the state and local levels, sometimes on the national levels.
It's not just the U.S.
intelligence community's 16 agencies, it's also state police departments, stuff like that, that get ignored in favor of the global coverage.
One last thing, all of the emails I've read at Stratfor I think would be put together nicely as a very dark sitcom, like a true detective or American dad, except like really racist.
Go for it.
Bo Wilmon, let's make that happen.
Thank you for your permission.
One more.
Alright, you guys were talking about how...
Alright, I got it.
Hello.
Good evening, Hope.
Okay, we're just slightly delayed but while we're getting things together up here, I have a couple of very brief announcements to make.
If you like what this guy's doing and you're into other forms of electronic music, there's a chiptune concert going on downstairs at 10pm down behind the escalator to the mezzanine.
And if you were there last night, you know how insane and wonderful it was.
If you weren't there, this is your last chance to make up for that.
So check that out.
As you all should know, but I'm going to announce it anyway, all the talks were pushed forward an hour, so you're watching now a talk that was scheduled on your programs and on the posters to start an hour ago.
And also as a result, the time travel for dummies panel is pushed forward to 3pm yesterday.
It's going to have been wonderful.
Okay, we're going to do a little more setting up up here and then get started.
So...
Is the sound running?
Am I making sound yet?
Let me see if I'm up here.
I'm making sound.
Oh.
Should that be making sound?
There we go.
Okay.
Now is it making sound up there?
The purple cable?
This guy?
How about now?
It is not very loud.
Nothing
coming out?
Okay, no problem.
I don't want to make a laptop speaker.
Maybe it's not going all the way in.
I have a tiny headphone jack.
Nothing ?
Is it going that way?
Can you put it through?
That should be buzzing.
Can you all hear that?
This is like the tiniest laptop speakers.
I would hate to forego the sound system.
Yeah.
Nicely done.
We thank you all for bearing with us.
After what we pulled off this afternoon, everything takes a little extra love.
Try that.
Oh, hey.
There you go.
Without further ado, I am happy to introduce the electric waist orchestra, Colton Jackson.
Give it up.
We are going to get to that.
My name is Colton Jackson, and this project is electric waist orchestra.
I will be up front about the fact that orchestra is an optimistic moniker at this point.
This is a club I started at makerspace Urbana back in Illinois just a few months ago.
There is a few demos I have to show off so far.
If demos are 50-50, one of these will work.
This one is going okay.
The rest of them, we might hear, we might not.
I want to tell you a little bit about makerspace Urbana.
Without what we had going on there, none of this stuff I am going to show you would have happened.
It is a humble makerspace.
I want to talk about makerspaces.
I like seeing the audience.
That is great.
Makerspace Urbana, if you haven't visited your local makerspace, I encourage you to.
If your town doesn't have a makerspace, you can start one.
In our makerspace, it is mostly big open tables, lots of power outlets.
We did get a 3D printer recently, which I 3D printed my glasses on.
I would love to talk to you about that.
The 3D printer brings a lot of people in.
You would be surprised how many people you can get to come into your makerspace just by having the screwdrivers you need to repair your laptop.
Most people don't have those screwdrivers.
We do a lot of repairing.
We have a community help desk.
They leave a lot of extra computer parts behind.
We upgrade the RAM and hard drives.
We stock that in the back.
I grew up in the IT world.
It is not free to get rid of.
Sometimes you can find someone who will let you toss it away.
It does cost money to get rid of it or incinerate it.
Anywhere you go, any IT department, they will have stacks of hard drives.
They are not useful to anyone anymore.
You can get a thumb drive that is faster and more portable.
I saw all of this stuff that we had.
I saw how wasteful it was being.
I wanted to find something to do with it.
That was my inspiration for what I started doing.
Makerspace has happened because I ripped open an old hard drive.
While I was tearing it apart, I saw a post on Hackaday that you can spin a motor and it creates a sine wave.
I thought, well, I have done some music and enough electronics to know that I can amplify and control things with sine waves.
As I was taking apart this hard drive and soldering wires to the back of it, I had some friends who were like, what are you doing?
That is what makerspaces are about.
When you get a bunch of people hanging out and working on their own projects, you get this access to expertise that I think money can't buy.
You are sitting across the table from an electronics engineer and you are saying, I don't know how a motor works.
He says, I will tell you.
I will get the whiteboard out and explain how a motor works.
I was soldering to the motor and some guys were like, I don't know, what are you doing over there?
I was like, I saw you can get a sine wave off of this.
The guys were like, let's learn how to use the oscilloscope.
I got a free one-on-one lesson to use an oscilloscope and learned about ground and positive and basic electronic stuff that I didn't know yet, but I knew it was easy enough, especially when you are surrounded by guys that know their thing.
So we tried it.
We basically had a lot of fun.
Just tearing into an old hard drive can be a lot of fun because usually computers are these black boxes that a lot of people are afraid to touch or afraid to take apart because if they break it, they have to call their nephew and be like, oh, I...
So these are black boxes that are mysteries to a lot of people, maybe not people here, but it's fun for people to take things apart when they don't usually get to.
Especially if there's no penalty for breaking it.
That's what we're doing here.
We're breaking these things so we can do something else with them.
So we tear everything out.
We rip the reading head out and it's just a nice silver disk with a couple of contacts on the back that you can solder directly to.
So we got that going and we hooked it up to the sine wave.
And I wish we had video, but I never figured out how to get micro HDMI going.
So you can look up videos.
I got some videos on YouTube.
Electric Waste Orchestra.
But yeah, we hooked this up to an oscilloscope and you spin it and it produces a sine wave.
The faster you spin it, the higher frequency the sine wave.
And I can...
I'll go ahead and start a demo with just this guy.
I got a chip that works pretty well.
Oh, wait.
Gotta leave my bag down there.
Do I got a suitcase sitting over by?
Oh, forget it.
I can do it.
So basically I did it in software first.
Figured out how to control sound with this as an input device.
And then I figured out an analog amplifier later.
And let's see what I can show you to start off.
So I'm using this software I don't know.
Raise your hand if you've ever heard of Max MSP.
So any of the electronic musicians guys have probably seen what Max MSP can do.
So I'm using Pure Data, which a lot of you guys might have also heard about.
But it's an open source branch.
I don't know if that's the right term.
But the guy that did all the math in the back end for Max MSP went off and started his own project.
It's all open source.
And it works pretty well.
And it interfaces with Arduinos.
So when I unplug it, it starts making noise.
So how many of you are familiar with Arduinos?
Probably a lot of you guys.
Super popular with hobbyists.
So I'm here.
I'm not selling a shield.
I didn't make a new shield for the Arduino.
I just figured Arduinos is something that a lot of people already have.
So I thought this is kind of an opportunity to take stuff that people have lying around.
If you've got a hackerspace, you've probably got a stack of Arduinos around too.
And we've got free software.
So I wanted to make this a really cheap tool chain.
So anyone that has these parts can start playing around with it.
So with the hard drive motor, it's as simple as hooking up one to the analog input.
So the Arduinos have the analog inputs, which if you've ever used a voltmeter or an oscilloscope, it's essentially, it's an analog to digital converter.
And any amount of electricity between 0 and 5 volts gets converted to a digital number.
It's between, it's like well, it's 10 bit precision.
So it's anyways, anywhere between 0 and 5 volts gets converted to a number between 0 and 1.
And you can pass that on to the synthesis software.
The pure data software has a Arduino library.
You can pass that information on.
So you can hook up one of the wires to analog in.
And it has six of those channels.
So that's, I'll get to the guitar.
It's six channels leads to six hard drives which leads kind of to a guitar way to play it.
So one's a ground and one's analog zero.
Gives you the ability, get this thing out of the way.
Let's see if I have my code ready to go.
Multiplier.
Reset.
So live demos suck, right?
Let me just, if this thing was working let me just get back to that.
This is the first thing that I figured out.
One hard drive.
Analog input.
I can make it spin.
And so with pure data, you get that number as just an input.
It comes in serially.
And you can send it to whatever function you want.
So there's an oscillation function that takes frequency as an argument.
So you can and this comes in as a number between zero and one, like I said.
So you can just multiply that input until it's in a range of frequencies that you want.
And start spinning it up and getting really crazy, really crazy noises.
But I wrote some code.
It's all up on GitHub.
Like I said, this is trying to get other people into it.
And so it's all open source, using open source software.
And so the code I wrote basically acts as kind of a capacitor resistor circuit.
So it smooths the signal out.
It comes in as a sine wave.
But since this particular ADC only reads positive voltage, it gets just the top end of the sine wave.
So it's like chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.
And it's also sampling it a certain number of times per second.
So it's grabbing different parts of the sine wave.
So really it's just kind of voltage spikes that I read off the hard drive.
And it's like a couple hundred millivolts.
A small amount of electricity.
But I can bring that into my code and basically have code that the faster you spin it, the longer you spin it, the louder the volume goes up.
But as soon as you stop the disk, the volume drops back to zero.
So if I can at least connect on that again.
File not found.
It's not a file.
Ah, ah.
Yes.
Things are happening.
Be
heard.
So I'm surprised you didn't say Mr.
Blue Sky, because it is a play off an electric light orchestra.
I wish I could play covers for you.
So like I said, it's six channels, and then the rest of them it just goes through common ground.
So that's what noise sounds like.
So yeah, the voltage readers kind of just float around the halfway mark, so it makes noise and nothing's plugged into it.
Wow, that's exciting.
So the flyer I put up around this to advertise for my club is just Makerspace Urbana.
I wanted to have a club where I could get electric engineers and electronic musicians in the same room together.
I thought they had a lot to teach each other.
But they don't often run into each other.
Urbana, it's a college town, University of Illinois.
And the music department and the engineering department are on opposite sides of campus.
They just don't often run into each other.
So electronic musicians and electronic engineers don't usually run into each other.
But I think they had a lot to teach each other, and I had been learning from them just hanging out at Makerspace.
So I wanted to get them in the same room.
So I whipped up a flyer, put a picture of the oscilloscope on it, and said, electronic engineers, electronic musicians, come in and we'll learn from each other.
We'll futz with this stuff.
We'll learn some code.
We'll learn some electronics.
At first I thought I was just going to get invited engineers and musicians, but I got some guidance from a friend that I'm not a musician or an engineer, so I should invite people that are like me, just people that are interested in learning about electronics and music.
So that's when it kind of got this identity of being not just a clubhouse for engineers and musicians, but also an educational opportunity where people could come in and learn how to solder, just simple soldering wires to the back of the hard drive.
They could learn a little bit about what these components are inside the computer.
So not just hard drives, but also the circuit boards they could just tear into and be like, oh, what's this?
What's this?
And just kind of have fun learning about what's inside these things.
Or you can dig into old telephones and see all the circuits inside those.
So it's fun just to tear into the stuff.
But if you're hanging out with experts that really know what's going on here, and then you've got people that don't know anything yet, like me, then it's a really fun exchange.
You get these experts excitedly talking about the things that they know.
And people that are really interested in the fact that they showed up in this space where people were willing to teach them.
So this is also a learning experience for me.
Usually I'm presenting this to four to five people at a time.
Walking into this room, I think the number of people who knew about Electric Waste Orchestra tripled in here, so this is great.
So the firmware on the Arduinos, it's actually just one of the examples.
It's called Fermata.
And one of the examples is just Fermata Analog Simple.
It just passes along all the analog electronic information.
And it doesn't look like it's loaded on the Arduino now.
That's weird.
If I can find where I set my suitcase, there's something in the front pocket I want to show off.
Is it by your photo stuff?
Examples...
We can make this a little bit more casual, instead of me just trying to make my demo work.
If any of you guys are hardware guys, we can do a Q&A, but we'll get back to the demos and stuff.
But I want to hear if you guys have ideas of how you could use circuit boards and hard drives.
What other hardware have I not thought of?
If you've got an idea of materials you have on hand that you can imagine a way to make an instrument.
Thank you very much.
I can't believe I left that out there.
Okay , so I can show off this analog circuit anyway and get this going.
So this is an op amp.
It's an LM324.
This is a circuit a friend of mine designed.
I'm telling, he's too generous.
So I'm going to plug this in.
It's noisy, but that should be okay.
So this just hooks up to the hard drive.
So this is something I came up with after playing with the software.
A friend of mine was like, well, you can just hook up an op amp to it and amplify the signal and see how it sounds.
This is actually a pretty good instrument now.
See, it's just producing a sine wave.
I love this place.
I was hanging out in the hotel lobby and showing this off to a guy.
He was like, oh, it sounds more like a square wave.
I think your op amp is clicking the signal.
And I'm like, yeah, thanks.
So this place is awesome.
It is producing more of a square wave sound, but it is just the signal just amplified.
There's no programming going on here.
Once you can get a little bit of a feel for it...
You can get a feel for how quickly you spin it and start playing.
Kind of
like...
So this is something I just started playing the other day.
It's a totally new form of instrument.
You have to kind of get a new feel.
So just like your muscle memory on any other instrument, the muscle of how fast you flick it is how it gets to a certain pitch.
It's a new style.
It's something to work on, and you can actually start playing music with it, potentially, if you're dedicated to it.
But with the code, it's really interesting to find out...
You can program what sounds it makes.
Whatever signal comes out of it is what you got.
But if you go the software route, you can say, okay, well, at this voltage, if I'm producing 100 millivolts...
If I'm producing...
If I'm producing 100 millivolts, then play a C.
If I'm producing 120 millivolts, play a D.
You can do that stuff in software-defined.
And if I can...
I'll try to get that coming back up here.
Standard...
And yeah, I did want to talk a little bit about why using e-waste is kind of an interesting material.
Not just because it's a free material, and we all have it stacked up.
But it's like... If you wanted to design a physical instrument to play digital music... And I like the idea of that, because with all these sounds, you could just write code to produce these sounds.
But I think it's really valuable to have a physical interface.
I'm gonna move that from my crotch.
So...
I think it's really valuable to have a physical interface to the digital music, because it's just something more tactile.
Something that you can actually get up on stage with, and not just sit on the laptop.
So I had the idea that I did want to design physical instruments.
But if you had sat down on a radio shack, or in a hackerspace , and you have all these knobs, and sliders, and touchpads , and you can design any instrument in the world, it's kind of like a really daunting blank canvas.
I kind of think it's hard to imagine something that you haven't seen before.
You're just bound to come up with something that's been designed before, just like you're trying to think of what you could draw on a blank canvas.
But when you kind of go rummaging through your garbage pile, and you see a ScanMan controller board, and it's got all these kind of nice , big solder points on the back that you can touch, it creates, like, it gives you something to work with.
It also gives you boundaries to work within.
You have to start thinking, okay, I have to make something out of this material.
Now what can I make?
And you end up with an instrument that you wouldn't have otherwise designed from scratch, because you had to work within boundaries that have been given to you, or at least what you picked out, because it was sitting in front of you.
And some of this stuff, I also wanted to start making stuff with this, because I thought it was really attractive.
I mean, maybe some of you guys can empathize.
It's like, there's a good aesthetic to circuit boards.
You know, this sort of, like, really kind of chaotic, but it's very organized.
I wanted to, you know, get this stuff out of the garbage bin.
It's not, you know, it's separate from the garbage bin.
It's just, like, sitting up and gathering dust.
And I wanted to do something with it.
Well, so I went over all this.
With musical instruments, it's kind of a fun thing that you can get people together on, and people that wouldn't otherwise have come in for a soldering lesson or to learn programming, it's like, oh, I'll try to build a musical instrument.
I'll see what it looks like.
Sorry?
I think hard drive was the first thing, because basically I had been futzing around with Arduino.
I knew that I had the analog converter, and I had seen this software that could use the analog.
So the hard drive was the first thing that I saw, okay, I can make a signal with this, and I can control something with that signal.
These ISA boards are really fun, because so I looked up, like, a schematic and figured out, okay, it takes 5 volt.
I can provide 5 volt with an Arduino.
And as the power goes through all this, when you, like, touch the kind of cross circuits, you know, short circuits with your fingers, you know, your fingers conduct enough electricity to screw stuff up.
So you can short circuits and change the voltage that's coming out of all these data pins.
So it communicates with the computer through these data pins by shifting the voltage up and down really rapidly.
But actually, especially with this really old stuff, one of these pins just like, it's just like a floating point number.
It's just sitting at this number, and I can make it go up and down if I had my hardware running.
Done uploading.
Ah.
Okay, I'm gonna unplug it.
You're out?
Almost there.
So I'm coming to you guys, basically, with like, you know, this kind of, this is the stuff that we came up with in our club for a few months.
And I'm really looking forward to talking with you guys afterwards and figuring out what kind of new stuff we can make.
And I'm glad that I get this chance to show it off.
Okay, so...
I'll go over how this is coded to give you an idea of what's possible with this software.
So essentially, it's six oscillators that each have a frequency set to them.
And the volume of that oscillation is set to zero until you spin the hard drive associated with that oscillator.
So I think in this version...
oh, that's noise.
Okay, so it's...
Okay.
Noise is coming in somewhere.
Okay, so it's...
It should be quiet right now, but it's wired funny.
There's extra noise happening.
So it's...
Okay, so I'll shut it up for a second.
It's turning the volume up on each of those notes as I spin it.
And I have the numpad.
It's just a USB numpad.
There's something hacked about it.
But there's a function in Pure Data where you can make things change as a response to keystrokes.
So when I hit the number one, it sets notes to all... and it can use MIDI numbers.
So you can set in MIDI values, like 70, 74, 76, and set what note each hard drive is going to control.
And then as I go up the numbers on the numpad, it can kind of go up the scales in whatever scale you want it to.
I tried to do a C major scale.
I think one of the notes is wrong.
But yeah, so you can program it any way you want.
And when you're...
I don't know.
It's really neat to sit down with people who don't know music and show them that this is a way that they can start playing music.
You don't need to get muscle memory around your piano.
You can just program the code to respond to whatever interface you have going.
So it's...
I think you guys get the idea.
...
So to not do myself some further failed demos, I'll say that's kind of to wrap it up.
But we got this room for another 20 minutes.
So if you guys want to come up, this stuff works better in a non-stage setting.
So come up and see some of this equipment I got.
And we'll kill the rest of the time.
So thank you.
You're welcome to try out the guitar.
So come on up and get your picture taken.
Hello.
Here I am.
Okay.
Good evening, Hope.
From this strange position, it is my pleasure to introduce the next presentation.
But before I do that, just a couple of announcements.
First of all, you all look really weird from this angle.
Second of all, just a reminder that the concert is going on tonight at 10pm by the escalator that leads up to the mezzanine on the first floor.
If you were there last night, you know how insane and wonderful it was.
If you weren't there last night, this is your chance to make up for that dreadful, dreadful state of affairs.
So tonight at 10pm, check that out.
A couple other things going on.
As you know, the talks are all pushed forward an hour, but I'll mention it anyway.
All the talks are pushed forward an hour.
Due to stuff running over earlier today.
Also, as a result, the how to install Linux on your time machine talk has been postponed to 3pm yesterday, but it's going to have been wonderful.
If you got your TV begun when you registered and there was a stack of batteries for you to take a battery...
Trip glasses, rather.
Not TV beguns, thank you.
If you got your trip glasses and you saw the little packages of batteries...