thank you thank you robots lady all right well i'm gonna actually start to move to get this started um i know more people will be logging in um but just to kind of end the awkward silence we're gonna begin so first of all welcome everyone to the event today which is cyber partisans and insiders interview on truth terror and technology in the lucashanko regime so i'm gabriella coleman and i'm going to just start off by letting you know what's going to happen today i'm going to intro introduce our fellow participants and sponsors and organizers and then after that i'm just going to basically let everyone know what is going to happen for the rest of the event so i'm gabriella biela coleman i'm a professor of anthropology at um harvard university and a faculty associate at the berkman center for internet and society i work a lot on computer hackers and hacktivism so uh next i'd like to introduce uh juliana shematowitz i uh she'll probably pronounce her name yeah almost um she is a belarusian activist and spokeswoman on behalf of the cyber partisans and so we're extremely excited to have her today she is the director of the belarus liberty nonprofit organization she's focused on using technology to empower civil societies and to advocate for human rights and you'll be hearing a lot from her today so next up is marietta bosovic osovic and she is the author of nobukov's canon from one again to ada and an assistant professor of slavic languages and literatures affiliated with film and media studies and women gender and sexuality studies at yale university so wave um next on the roster is benjamin peters who is the author of how not to network a nation the uneasy history of soviet internet and associate professor of media studies at university of tulsa then there's julia bourgeois who has been she is a graduate student at mcgill university and she's been helping with the coordination of this event and she'll be helping with the q and a and then finally this event is brought to you by all of us but is also brought to us by the art and protest initiative by the benecke rare book library the whitney humanities center and the post-war culture working group and the art and protest initiative is out of yale university and they have helped get this event off the ground so we thank them for that so what's going to happen today is i'm going to begin with a very brief overview of hacktivism and for those of you who know about activism it's going to be very 101 but at least it's just going to orient people about the history of hacktivism and help us better understand the cyber partisans in this history then i'm going to turn it over to juliana who is going to give us a brief presentation on the history and accomplishments of the cyber partisans and after that we have a series of questions that have been prepared by the organizers although ben and mariata are just going to field most of them and these questions have been pre-prepared or they've been pre-given to the cyber partisans but we're going to be hearing the answers for the first time live via juliana then for the last 45 minutes we are going to open it up to the audience for q a and there's two ways you can give your questions you can start immediately in the q a box on zoom and we will collect those and relay those to the cyber partisans we can also um you can also use your voice at that point if you'd like to answer or ask i mean a question live so i think that's it in terms of the logistics i personally just want to thank everyone who's on screen um because we've come together in the last four or five weeks to make this happen and it's just so great to be at this point so with no further ado i'm just going to um start with my brief presentation it's about 11 minutes long and then we'll turn it over to you juliana so let me share my screen here it is all right looks good everyone everyone can see it okay wonderful so as i mentioned very 101 but let's go so hacktivism it entails the application of computer-based tools and techniques for political organizing activism direct action or protest it has no singular origin manifestation much less genealogy its nature and appearance have tended to be quite sporadic and tactical until the appearance of anonymous hacktivism was a purview of small groups using distinct tactics from distributed denial of service campaigns to website defacements or tool building that were used to bring attention to various political causes or to affect some sort of social change in 1995 a journalist writing about new media artishu lia shang's film fresh kill well this journal is coined the term hacktivism to describe actions in the movie and i'll get to the plot later the phrase really only entered into popular lexicon thanks to the hacker group cult of the dead cow who popularized the term especially in the late 1990s with the creation of their sister group going by the name haptivismo ironically the cdc hacktivismo they were quite flamboyant and audacious in their rhetoric but they discouraged illegal direct action law breaking they preferred to sort of stay within the purview of the law they supported disruptive technologies like anti-censorship tools but not illegal actions such as distributed denial of service attacks when you kind of overwhelm a website with so much traffic it renders it inaccessible in contrast one of the most notable hacktivism groups the electronic disturbance theater embraced executed and theorized illegal methods notably the ddos the distributed of denial of service attack founded in 1997 by a group of artists professors and rabble rousers they were partly inspired by italian and european hacktivists and activists that had previously deployed the ddos which they would often describe as a virtual sit-in they most famously the edt they most famously attacked mexican government websites using the tool called flood net in support of the zapatista struggle for autonomy in chiapas the edt rebuked anonymity we know who they are and made the case that their use of ddos was a variant of classical civil disobedience simply updated for the digital age between 2000 and between 2000 and about 2010 hacktivism of the sort that relied on illegal actions flickered on and off and then with the rise of anonymous it was as if someone turned on the hacktivism light switch and left it on for years while initially used by nameless trolls to coordinate often terrifying harassment escapades across the internet the anonymous moniker took on new meaning in social life in 2008 and especially after 2011. in this period participants identifying with the label engaged in a staggering array of hacks and political operations designed for media uptake during this time anonymous became what media scholar marco desires defines as an improper name radically available to everyone such a label comes endowed with a built-in propensity for adoption circulation even mutation indeed groups just popped up across the globe and figures identifying as anonymous use their technical know-how and their um trollish sense of media spectacle to call for all sorts of things a moratorium on japanese whaling demand justice for victims of sexual assault and police brutality hack governments and corporations alike assist the occupations in egypt tunisia spain north america support the syrian uprising blm docks police officers who pepper sprayed protesters exposed pedophiles online and i can go on and on but they became most famous both for their support of social justice movements and especially for their hacking and because of them hacktivism became a household name and for good reason anonymous spearheaded an exceptionally vibrant and generative period of hacktivism arising independently of their hacktivist predecessors like the edt they nevertheless deployed established tactics like the ddos and website defacement but they added a few new things to the mix notable was their savvy use of twitter or catchy videos their hashtags all of this to drum up support among various publics for their many operations anticipating what all groups now do on social media their most important innovation and this is where i believe their legacy lies was to generate and stabilize a novel hacktivist technique the hack and leak tactic that is hacking for the purposes of finding documents for public interest reporting and of course this has been used also by non-hacktivists as well and remember the coinage of the term hacktivism which was connected to this movie freshkill well in the film the plot partially revolves around this very tactic that is the protagonists are involved in an effort to hack a multinational company the company is involved in polluting citizens um and what's so funny or ironic is that these new media artists were way ahead of the game and forecasting a tactic that was only truly deployed 15 years later with the rise of anonymous and it's something that the cyber partisans make use of quite extensively so in this era back to the anonymous era anonymous was prolific there were multitudenous they're also a bit haphazard chaotic their security was kind of meh not so good so many hackers got nabbed and they didn't vanish but they certainly slowed down hacktivism including anonymous returned to this state of sporadic flickering though it'd still say it could be quite potent some of the half divots groups to come after anonymous like lolsek peru or phineas fisher were directly inspired by anonymous and have also been quite prolific as well take for example lolsek peru made up of a two-person crew one being a minor their hacktivist career was very short but very illustrious between 2012 and 13 they defaced the website of a copper mine company after the company's pipeline burst contaminating people in the land they defaced the venezuelan ruling party's website in support of protesters anti-government protesters that commandeered the twitter accounts of the venezuelan president they broke into the chilean air force network and swiped and published sensitive documents on arms purchases and the cherry on top was they became what and what they became famous for was breaking into peru's department of the interior they took emails there was evidence of kind of corruption after a flurry of press coverage the issue forced a vote in the government and the count was one vote shy from a change in leadership they retired early to evade capture that's two people mucking around imagine what a more organized and dedicated hacker group willing to hack to expose wrongdoing can achieve well this is the question we hope to explore today by learning more about the new um this is very cheesy cyber kids on the block the cyber partisans they're a de novo hacktivist ensemble unconnected to any previous hacker association the technologists involved in other words were not part of any subcultural hacker scene to be sure in a loose sense they're indebted to those hacktivists like anonymous who put the hackley tactic so visibly on the map because again it's one of their preferred tactics still they're forging a new path forward in ways right for study and perhaps even emulation in an article by ryan gallagher who broke the story in bloomberg news about the cyber partisan to the english-speaking world he describes them as follows the cyber partisan's highly organized and persistent hacks paired with its collaboration with former police officers set it apart from other groups whose operations have often been more who've often been chaotic and experimental i was then quoted saying i don't think that there's a lot of parallels to this they're so sophisticated and are attacking on multiple levels it's not something i've seen before so now to wrap up this short presentation i'd like to qualify when it comes to groups of hackers who break the law for righteous purposes as is the case with the cyber partisans it's true few groups have matched their high level of organization determination accomplishment and persistence and again we're going to learn a lot more about them in a moment still the predecessors did important things the edt made a still persuasive and relevant case for disobedience and law breaking and brought obviously the plight of the zapatistas to the world anonymous had massive impact partly because there were so many nodes across the globe and the hacker crews were so feisty experimental and hardcore and hacked with impunity they really put a new tactic out there for others to adopt but melding hacking leaking open source intelligence data analysis and working with those on the ground like former police officers and other groups as the cyber partisans do is quite unique they remind me a little bit of another hacker group called xnet based in spain to be clear xnet does not hack but they do receive leaks and they've made them actionable for instance they help get bankers jailed based on email leaks they received it's a fascinating story multi-year story about how they're able to accomplish it but they're able to do so because they're highly organized persistent and savvy and have worked tirelessly as a group for over a decade what this all too brief history shows is that new media artists are often the visionaries and in the case of the edt they beautifully melded practice with theory anonymous shows us how wily experimentation and a touch of chaos can engender new possibilities and then other groups like the cyber partisans show how tenacity high levels of organization and persistence can level things up significantly what all these examples show is how small groups of people working outside of official channels of power institutions can band and work together to affect positive change so with that in place i'm going to turn it over to juliana um but before i do um i along with the rest of the organizers would like to begin by acknowledging that according to the consensus of international observers the current situation in belarus is genuinely horrendous and one of the worst abuses of human rights in the world's headlines at present i think it's important to start with this sometimes with hacktivism it's easy to lose sight of particular context such as this as already noted reports trace the ongoing repression of pro-democracy activists since the august 2020 elections crediting lukashenko a sixth term in office with 80 percent of the vote it's not a good regime look if the number of people willing to risk their lives in the streets outnumbers the number of votes against the regime in contested election results in the months since the elections hundreds of thousands of belarusians have shown up on the streets to protest the outcome in response state police and thugs are reportedly picking up women and men off the street at random beating them viciously taking the phones and arresting many in their contact lists and this is the context and situation that has driven a group of people to come together as the cyber partisans in order to fight this set of abuses so now i turn it over to juliana who can tell us more about the group and the situation in belarus thank you so much gabriella let me share my screen please confirm you can see everything that's perfect amazing all right um so my name is juliana and as you might have guessed i'm originally from belarus even though now i live in new york city i've become an activist since 2010 and up until today i'm still working on bringing changes into belarus i'm very very passionate about what's going on in my homeland uh that's why i'm very grateful for all of you who joined this conference is interested in the belarusian cause and wants to hear about one of the most amazing groups still fighting lukashenko's regime without a further ado let's get started so before i'm gonna get to the cyber partisans work i want to give a short overview of the situation in belarus just to give you the context about why the cyber partisans activities are so important so belarus gained its independence on august 25th 1991 prior to that it was part to the soviet union the first and only fair elections were held in july 1994 and lukashenko won those unfortunately no elections since that time have been fair or recognized by western countries in 1996 he also unlawfully changed the constitution many people heard about belarus and mass protests only last year in 2020. however you need to know that large protests occurred in belarus since 1996. um most oftenly it was against the presidential election results but it was also against the laws that were imposed in belarus since and one of the largest mass protests happened in 2010 against the results of the presidential elections and in 2010 people were also badly beating up by the police forces the turning point for belarus and society however was the year of 2017.
that's when our political people also joined the protest it was a protest against attacks on the unemployed that lukashenko and his government imposed on people it was a so-called law against social parasites which was reminiscent of savadhira policies and it's not surprising because luka shankar is a huge fan of soviet union policies beliefs philosophies you name it so in that very year people across the country realize that this regime lives in different times it doesn't respond to people's need for development in social political and economic life lukashenko discourages progress and only cares for himself and his personnel so it all set the stage for the protest in 2020 when celina tejanovska decided to participate in the presidential elections she became a symbol of massive protest against the regime in august november 2020 people were protesting not only on fair elections but also police brutality at one point 500 000 people joined the protest and not only in minsk the capital of belarus but throughout the whole belarus they came from small towns in small towns and small villages and for some of you 500 000 people might not sound as a large amount of people but just keep in mind that the population of belarus is around 9.4 million people so 500 000 is 5 of the whole population and if you think about other protests and other revolutions 5 is a large number unfortunately this protest didn't bring desirable results more than 35 000 people were detained most of them lost their jobs most of them went through tortures rape beatings and in human conditions and prison cells many people had to flee the country and some people were presumably killed by belarusian police forces lukashenko didn't um only give orders to imprison uh regular peaceful protesters protesters but also journalists and the hijacking of ryanair plane is one of the famous examples how he according on his orders um the prominent journalist and activist roman freda savage was detained moreover more than 200 media outlets a non-profit organizations were forced to close down among other crises i should also name covet 19 crisis i think at that point before elections and after elections people realize that lukashenko doesn't care about people at all he even said many times that he doesn't believe in the virus but he's not going to help people who has the virus or any businesses that were affected because of the pandemic so people had to organize and help themselves what is more it's not only that his inactivity affect the situation in belarus his criticism towards mandatory mask mandate made the ministry of health of belarus canceled this mandate just because he criticized it so they removed signs that remind people to wear masks from transportation and of course authorities are also hiding the real numbers of people who died from covet thanks to cyber partisans who revealed that access mortality in 2020 and amounted to at least 20 000 people we know now that it's 17 times more than authorities reported and based on the information we have from western countries we know that most of these can be attributed to covet 19. and of course the migrant crisis it's all over the news right now and just couple of days ago lukashenko and his conversation with angela merkel confirmed that he would stop the flow of migrants if western countries accept him as the legitimate president and would remove sanctions from belarus which proves that there are state organized companies that help bring migrants from middle east and african countries to belarus and to the borders to the european union on this graph on my slide you can see how the numbers were increasing since august 2021 and that's when the united states and european union countries imposed sanctions on belarus so lokashanka didn't give a lot of chances to people how to participate in protest or how to show the dissatisfaction with the regime people had to get creative and smart in their ways how to fight the regime and some cyber partisans became one of these great examples how we can smartly fight the inefficient regime so it started their actions started very symbolic they hacked the state news website that you also can see on this slide and it looks usually like that and then they hacked it and showed video clips of police forces beating up people during the protest they also left some messages of how people can participate in the protest and what they should know about them so it started with only three people but by 2021 there are now around 20 to 30 people in the group what's super important is that there are no professional hackers all of them are belarusian i.t specialists which is quite significant before i get to the major hacks the cyber partisans launched i want to know that a note that many of the hacks would not be possible without people on the ground so that's when cyber partisans joined the separative movement which means resistance in belarus enjoyed their forces with the flying storks and the people self-defense brigade groups flying historics are mainly focusing on different types of physical impact operations they target private property of special police officers regime infrastructure and railroad infrastructure and the people's self-defense brigade are preparing people for future protests and teach them how they can safely help during this protest there are three major goals that this organization has it's of course the preservation of the independence of the country and considering that belarus is neighboring with russia sovereignty is the number one priority it's also of course the main target is to overthrow the lukashanka regime and not just to overthrow the lakeshank regime also to make sure that another dictator doesn't come to power so it means we would need to build democratic principles of government and make sure that there is rule of law there are no special leader in the organization all decisions are made by consul and also important to note that most of the methods that especially flying storks are using are non-violent you can see at the bottom of the slide their famous drone attack on riot police base so they were aiming at the infrastructure and they were doing it at the night time all right so now uh let's talk about the biggest government hacks in history cyber partisans hacked the ontario ministry's passport database which contains all personal details passport information telephone numbers and workplaces of every belarusian citizen including those that have restricted access like kgb agents and cyber partisans know how much power they have in their hands and how important the security of private information is so they won't touch data related to belarusians not working for the government they stayed everything in encrypted format on a separate server that's isolated from the internet they also hacked the entire police database and got access to cameras and restricted information about the work history of every police officer they also released information and actually police calls on their youtube channel revealing a lot of interesting information that high-level police officers are discussing among each other for example they were discussing rough orders arrest orders that were given directly from lukashenko cyberpartisans also hacked the belarusian investigating committee and published personal information about those investigators who opened criminal investigations against special protesters they revealed secret information about more than 150 military assets of the high-level state security committee so now anyone can go to these maps and search for these assets or apartments um of the employees of state security committee and just recently cyber partisans got access to data on entries and exits into and from belarus over the past 15 years they're still searching it and working on it but they already know that the this database includes information on all people including lukashenko himself crossing the belarus in water by air railroads vehicles of food and just yesterday cyber partisans launched a new operation thank you so much cyber partisans i had to update this presentation right before the conference but jokes aside they claim it the largest sabotage cybers campaign in the history of belarus and the targeted academy of public administration of belarus it is a cell called lukashenko's personal school where he prepares his minions to work for the government so what they did they encrypted the whole network so now everyone that had any files or pretty much anything in the system would need to start over they changed the wallpaper on each computer in the academy the wallpaper shows information about roman bondarenko an opposition activist who according to all available sources was brutally killed by people working for the regime they also left some messages showing how people can join the secretive movement they also scratch the investigation into their previous academy hack so they hacked this academy before and according to the information they got no one found the backdoor that they used and no one found pretty much how they did it so that was an interesting information as well and they also updated the website of this academy you might ask why do cyber partisans do this why is it so important for belarusians well first of all they give belarusians tools to protect themselves before all these police force people they thought that they're untouchable and people in valoris regular citizens you know protesters they didn't feel safe because at any point these police forces can go into your apartment beat you up or bring you into prison but now since they have information where all these police officers leave now these police officers don't feel safe so it's a tool of protection for belarusians it also encourages people to join resistance movement there's so many bad news about belarus these days and cyber partisans give this hope for people you know that the the fight hasn't stopped and people continue doing things in order to change this regime they also help to justify sanctions against the regime they're working and collaborating with a number of human rights organizations and they provide them with data or information that these organizations require so what's next well they will continue working with flying historics and the people's self-defense brigade group and these groups have hundreds of groups in belarus to sabotage the regime's infrastructure and just getting ready for the next wave of protest and um short-term goals is to identify fake passwords um that's where they're gonna get from the database i just mentioned that they got the access pretty recently so these passports are issued for espionage purposes for kgb so they hope to find those and they would also check all the trips made by lukashenko his family and personnel so this is the short overview i think now we're going to go into q a session i think i might bring this slide again this is the contact information please share and follow all the social media of cyber partisans of super deep movement and of course they would appreciate your support thank you thank you juliana so much for that broad overview and also the specifics of what cyber partisans have done it's really quite stunning um and let's just now take it over let's start with the questions we're going to start with ben and mariata and yes why don't we juliana why don't you put up that last slide for a couple minutes five minutes and then we'll take it down so people could take the information of course great of course and i can i can jump in and start off the the q a session uh iliana thank you so much for that that presentation biela also i don't think anyone thanked you yet for the heroic work you've been doing to make this this event uh come together and thank you for including me and then um in this discussion absolutely thank you so much i think the the first question i want to ask to the kibber partizane is why why are you talking to us um you know the the hardly radical institutions of harvard and yale um what what informs this what inspires this are there risks entailed in that very move sure i just wanna start with this short disclosure uh while i'm gonna answering i'm gonna say we but it doesn't mean that um i the cyber partisans hacked anything i'm just reading out loud their answers so just for everyone to know um so that's the answer we want to raise awareness build a dialogue with the academia so we can learn from them as well as they can learn from us we believe in our cause and we are grateful to everyone interested in our work and are willing to spread awareness and help people in belarus fight for their rights it's also very important for us that other countries understand us better to know what to expect from our organizations that we're not some random hackers that want to cause harm or destruction we're just fighting the regime in a smart way by using other means to show a dissatisfaction with the regime and current situations the authorities didn't leave belarusians any other choice it responded to free belarusians from repressions and tyranny and return rule of law and build democratic principles in belarus okay great um so i'm gonna just ask um a question i'm mostly not gonna ask questions but i've got a couple and so you know juliana you've made it very clear that the people involved did not hail from hacker backgrounds there were it professionals so can you tell us a little bit about the general technical backgrounds of those who did the work of infiltration for example i've i've read that some were pen testers was that their main skills were there other ones around system administration or programming did they have to learn any new skills in order to go ahead with the hacking or the sabotage and then that's around those members who have technical skills there's other members who do things like data mining and open source intelligence and data analysis which is something juliana you're familiar with um can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges with working with such massive amounts of data i mean i was so struck with that slide with like oh my god that's an enormous amount of data um so you know there's groups that have come before like bellingcat who've published manuals and guides on how to do open source intelligence or how to do data analysis are did some of the cyber partisans turn to some of those groups for inspiration um or did you proceed by inventing your own data analysis wheel so to speak very good question so that's what cyber president's saying we don't have any members that are aware professional hackers it's not like we refuse to accept people like that it's just that kind of people never offered us assistance as of yet we do have some people that work as pen testers as you gabriella mentioned and some that did system administration web and back-end development in the past year our partisans have learned to penetrate online resources mostly from hacking books and tutorials and a lot of hands-on a lot we failed a lot learned from our mistakes and refined our tactics in some instances we get assistance from insiders that either aware or are in the system right now sometimes they advise us about the weak points of the system involved at other times they help us with keys and password will open the back door for us to come into the network though this is rare and speaking of belly kit that's my node so that's what they're also saying besides members that do actual hacking we have a team that does data analysis textual data and audio they mostly map and organize data and prepare it for publishing i wish we were as organized as ballencat but we're not there yet we do work with ballencat on some investigations we are learning from them and collaborate and i just want to know cyber partisans just published today information how they provided data um to balance that they were getting into investigation of some military men fighting on eastern european parts a country like part of the eastern europe uh i'm sorry ukraine um and they were organized by russia so they also crossed through belarus and cyber partisans provided information on these people who crossed belarus and they found some info and passport info on them i think i'm muted gabrielle sorry beth i said thanks for that and a really um great indication that you know with base technical skills there's other ways like manuals and tutorials by which people can learn this exactly it's 21st century you can learn everything by watching youtube pretty much i'm gonna stop sharing my screen right i think it doesn't matter yeah okay all right i i wanted to ask something um else about the other kinds of collectives and energies you're drawing from and i'm uh very interested in uh the the collaboration with the group the the police the ex-police can you tell us more about the significance of this sure so we were always open to collaboration to to achieve mutual goals with other organizations and political movements and mass media and the belarusian opposition specifically with bipolar we already work for about a year we like how they conduct investigations and we frequently provide them with materials and data from our databases to help with the investigations we do not collaborate with them on the actual operations but we do consult with them from time to time to better understand understand the data they analyze and also get some feedback from within the regime to better assess the impact of our operations currently we're in touch and collaborate with virtually all medium and large organizations in that position and with many small ones we invest in strategic partnerships and unification of the belarusian opposition since this is what the dictator and kgb fears the most and tries to prevent great um just a quick question so um so there's a lot of hacking there's data analysis but then there's also reaching out to the wider public in belarus and beyond can you just tell a little uh tell us a little bit about how important the publicity arm of the collective is and how many members are work media making did they change strategies over time around public messaging whether in relation to anything going on in belarus or as they learned about kind of other hacktivists in the past sure so that's what cyber presence again saying we have only a handful of people currently involved in content making roughly speaking one two people write the content one does video image editing and that's about it in the past few months we formed um collaborations with many media and bloggers to help generate content which is then also published by them humor is well can i also comment on humor right in here so humor is well probably some reflection of our character until very recently almost all the content was written by us the founders admins our content was also always playful and with some humor recently we started making more humorous content since we felt that people need it people are in depression due to the increased repressions and terror from the regime some humor is indeed to better cope with the situation we are also sure this kind of positioning really annoys regime officials it's quite humiliating for them when some playful kids hack all their systems and it's hard to keep face and demonstrate power in a situation like that great thanks so i i believe now um ben and marietta are going to um the rest of the questions or feel the rest of the questions and and do you want to show the video ben yeah that'd be perfect i think building on that theme of sort of media presentation i'm going to try to share my screen now and share approximately a two-minute clip um that i think you know actually the comment about humor already speaks to in some ways so i thought uh this also brings us to a couple of questions about regime change and what the plans are we understand not all details are available but i think it might be interesting for our our group here to observe some of the work that we've done in the past so i'm going to start about seconds about 30 seconds in and we'll play this for about two minutes [Music] eggs foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] okay so that i think gives us a flavor um about the plans for regime change over to to you marietta yeah there of course many things i want to ask about that that video but um you know sticking with the the regime change um what strikes me and again i'm somebody who works on the the cultural histories of of russia and east europe um uh across the long 20th century what strikes me is the the degree to which it's it's modernized it's for the 21st century um it's using um uh hacking and and internet cultures but at the same time it seems like a page out of lenin's handbook of um take over the means of communication strategic groundwork just enough buy-in from the population at large and this is how you you overthrow a regime um that of course begs the question of you know if this works if you pull this off is belarus going to become the model for regime change elsewhere and of course the the frightening follow-up to that is what about right-wing extremists and so that's what they're saying um regarding regime changes in other countries we just can't tell we just don't know the hybrid approach of cyber ops with boots on the ground is innovative and we haven't really found adequate perils anywhere else and we of course study the experiences of all revolutions including the american revolution but the main point is to get people's support once we hold the victory we'd be able to say what works and what doesn't maybe i could build on this um too i think there's there's you know just so much to celebrate and the candor the willingness to kind of lay out a platform that is public reaching um i'm interested in the the plan to think about the slow release of sensitive data and how might that help us think about uh putting pressure on regime change so in particular i know there's probably limits on what we can say here but it'd be interesting to know what the cyber partisans can say about the release of sensitive information on the telegram channel what hopes for the pressures that might be placed there is there a way that these materials could be used in say international criminal court against lukashenko in the future is that part of the overt plan is there data how long do we hope the leak will last um of course as already evidenced by the crimes of the police there's um you know the coveted data that we talked about where uh by a factor previously of 14 out of 17 the regime has undercounted the number of coveted death rates so is there ways that this material could be used to put pressure international pressure um or illegal orders against the peaceful protesters so there's a number of different ways that i think we can imagine sensitive data being put to pressure um also is there anything you uh can say about how hard it was to actually crack these databases um can they comment on those cyber defenses of the lukashenko regime relative to anything else that they might be improved to how has their measures changed over time anyway just a a broad opening uh invitation to think about the consequences of this this particular approach for slow pressure uh and uh how the experience has gone so far sure i'll read the response in a moment i just want to add something for myself is that uh it's a very famous fact that lukaszenko prefers loyalty over professionalism and as much as cyber partisans are great in their work it also you know we need to keep in mind that not really a lot of professional people work in the government that's why it was so easy to break it uh now i'm going to read cyber parties and censor we already have a year of experience of linking materials to the public domain and witnessing feedback from the public we notice that there is limit to how much info information people can digest and anything over that limit barely has any contribution also it takes time to process all the vast amount of data we have for those two reasons we decided to release materials more gradually this also creates more pressure on the regime since it's almost impossible to ignore us once we're always in the news every week a new investigation or leaks of internal phone calls or hacking of new databases and so on we're pretty much on all free media channels every week for many months now we think this kind of pr strategy works well for us the regime's cyber infrastructure is neglected and our accomplishments are partially because of that nevertheless we also have quite a few talented volunteers that make it possible to exploit the existing vulnerabilities to gain access our most well-known operation heat paved had also an important boots on the ground component where the access to internal networks of the mia was enabled by bridging the internal network to the internet for a regime's facility thanks to our broader super alliance we can carry out this kind of hybrid approach which is a high risk high gain tactic i want to ask about what happens after let's assume it works let's assume you bring down a regime what what happens after do you the members of the group intend to go into or stay in politics also how how would you describe your politics um aside from anti-lukashenka anti-moscow anti-washington anti-many things what are you for what kind of regime would you like to see in belarus we developed a political plan for the transition period that starts with a successful uprising and ends with three democratic elections in belarus most of us plan to stay in the iet and cyber security fields we have plans about an independent cyber security body that would assure the security of government assets in the new belarus we also have some thoughts about developing a city of the future sort of highly automated high-tech city around which something like the silicon valley can form this is way into the future but it's a general direction where we would like to go time some might decide to go to politics eventually but our main mission is to end the regime and keep the sovereignty of belarus and return to democratic forms of governance as for international relations we think that the interests of a number of countries intersect in belarus it's not only actors from brussels but also from kiev beijing and ankara they understand that their interests need to be acknowledged as long as they don't contradict belarusian national interests moreover the presence of different political actors especially if we consider investments creates a balance of power it can be considered as an instrument for strengthening the country's security as there will be not just one dominant player and belarus learned the hard way that consequences can be if there is only one dominant player in the country so we are ready for dialogue with all of the above states we mentioned it's fascinating many follow-up questions um we've already touched a little bit about the character of humor and the attempt to you know lift the spirits of the people and i thought we might pivot to two questions on the general kind of public-facing aesthetics of the messages messaging that the group has been putting out um and i mean after all any kind of you know public face immediate choice no hacking can be fully hidden which is interesting and the public side is very interesting um so in the v-day video that we watched an excerpt of in particular there's this clear reference to a harkening back to victory day and armistice against the nazis and the extraordinary trauma that bella russians in particular have endured on the tank fields of world war ii i suspect that many in the english-speaking audience or west may not you know instinctively understand the impact of world war ii on belarussia and how that still plays out today i wonder if the group might comment on what work does the motif of v-day do for the cause and why yeah it's a very interesting question uh we see that the second world war played a huge role in belarusian's life around 20 to 33 percent of the population was lost during the war and of course it affected the generations of belarusians belarus was one of the most affected states so it's a huge tragedy there are there are a lot of taboos around this topic in the society especially considering how the second world war is seen in west and russia in the western countries the victory day is a day of remembrance and understanding that something like that can never happen again in russia it's celebrated with honor and is usually portrayed with a message we can repeat it again belarus in the in the middle but mostly for people worries the worst possible thing and luke keshenko plays on that well he is constantly repeating that he is the only guarantor that can save belarus from any war within and with other countries when in fact he now threatens with war to belarusians saying that he will start if they don't accept him as a leader such repressions and threats are a vicious cycle for belarusians for more than 100 years people haven't processed yet all the horrors from the second world war and let's not forget stalin's repressions in a way that's why lukashenko is successfully suppressing and terrorizing people right now as the violence is the only thing people learned in the last 100 years understanding and processing all these horrors will have will help the nation to move forward fascinating um for the second piece i'd like to pivot to the question of gender and i'm going to drop into the tac um chat uh a link where anyone can see you know the normal cyber partisan logo um again the group has chosen almost uniformly masculine or masculinist voices and masks which maybe not uh and similar at the same time we wonder what in particular work is being done in the logo uh is there is this a logo of a smiling woman does she have a cup of coffee uh can we comment on the really vital question of gender i would note that the book that marietta and i are writing our subtitle is you know hacking myths of men and machines or there's a clear gender component to here we'd love to know more about the group's approach to gender in establishing a popular hacking movement the log is sort of a genderless hacker wearing a hoodie we do have female team members one of the videos we released had female voices as well i can send you guys this the link to this video though i must agree that almost always it's male voice recording the voice and making it unrecognizable is a difficult task coincidentally we mostly have males that are both willing to record their voices and can speak clearly with confidence and know how to process audio to make it unrecognizable thank you building from that question in a sense i i wonder about the references in various media again to the ex-secret police ex-bowl ex-belarusian secret police what work does that do for the cause why you said uh so they guessed that you mean x oman x right please so he's a member of our broader alliance separative he's not a leader he's one of the speakers of the alliance you don't have a single leader again as i was saying decisions are made by a council so he's just a public face and we can't tell anymore what you know she's exactly doing and our last prepared question um then returns us to the headlines of the moment uh there's just and juliana i'll note of course your uh presentation already spoke um rather strangely to this question but i would we'd be interested in biting the group's response to the ongoing breaking headlines even this morning there was a announcement of the immigrant camps on the belarus on the belarus side of the polish border being swept to where we don't know it's de-escalating the international intentions but we would love to know how the group responds to lukashenko like weaponizing black and brown immigrant bodies in response to eu sanctions um i think we've already touched upon the larger situation so i won't describe it except to note just how awful it is and you noted that there's clear data 20 000 migrants from august and november we wonder um what potential does the group have to impact to the migrant crisis and if there is any comment on that sure i'm going to give you a pretty short answer but we definitely can follow up once december partisans join the um the call and the document where they would respond so we have recently announced the hacking of water control databases which might shed some light on the issue but the amount of data again in this databases is hard to comprehend it's huge it would take some time to analyze it and produce real insights we also might have phone recordings of government officials about this issue but it's too early to say so i think that's it for the prepared questions right i mean there's probably a lot of follow-up i know i had like a million follow-up questions but um you know because the cyber partisans need to be secure we decided on this format where we gave the questions but they wrote them out and we've heard them all live together for the first time and so now we're gonna transition to um the second part which is getting your questions to the cyber partisans and that's kind of happening now um and it's just going to take a few minutes for that transition to happen so as that happens i just want to say a few comments and then we'll move to that um i mean thank you again uh yuliana for transmitting those answers and for the cyber partisans for giving such concise and thoughtful uh answers um you know there's so many striking aspects um that relate to both the cultural specificity and the political specificity of belarus right and then on the other hand there are certain um aspects or qualities of their campaigns which have to do with the digital condition we can say you know one of the answers i was really struck by was how you know when you have so much data as the cyber partisans have accessed if you just dump it all it's not going to affect any change right the question is how do you make it actionable how do you make it so that people care about this and as you noted releasing it um in a kind of trickling manner with other campaigns is one method and again i had brought up the example of xnet because they are very savvy around that question both having timed releases and then also taking the emails for example that showed banking corruption and making a play that was staged in barcelona and madrid with very famous actors to bring the information to the people because i think that's always one of the problems with hacking and leaking is again this massive information is like a tsunami of the launch of information that people often don't really know how to process so i think the answers really gave us a sense of um the the conundrums that that activists face in relation to data elites um so obviously i have more to say but now i want to let you liana know let us know how we'll proceed with the kind of answering of some of the questions that have come through the q a box which we've transmitted to the cyber partisans so i think yes the questions added to the document we'll share so i'm gonna share my screen so you can see the answers okay um i will also um read out loud the answers so we don't have awkward silence um so here we go wait a second one second let me share it properly and juliana do you want one of us to read the questions while you read the answers yes okay uh okay so this is unanswering questions um keep in mind you know um cyber partisans are answering it in live session so you know it might take some time for them to type everything in but we have one question that's already answered why don't we begin with that question so sergey asks will protest always remain non-violent or will they also have to strike violently on day x because nothing else will change and that's what cyber partisans are saying protest and nonviolent and we plan to keep it that way acknowledging every citizen has the right for self-defense and so i think they are planning to respond in a moment that's what they're typing in right now so i'll ask the question and give some context because not everyone might know the groups uh being referenced in the question so the question is it seems like some of this work lines up very closely with similar work being done by sources of ddos secrets and other similar groups ddos secrets is a transparency platform whistleblowing platform that came in the wake of wikileaks that indeed takes leaks from hacks and also from ransomware attacks um and other places and publishes them and also works with journalists and other researchers to make this information accessible so is that a fair comparison do you see a complementarity or allegiance with those collectives and ddos secrets is based in the united states uh so cyber partisans are slowly typing that we're open to collaborate with other groups we developed safe mechanisms to do that for example today it was released that there was a release of a bell and get a bellingcat investigation that they worked on as well we contributed the data and i think i think it's also good good maybe place to share the email address um cyber partisans guys if you can post uh your email address right here so people have it not only in the chat so this is the link to the balance investigation you can also find it on cyberpartisan's twitter account and yeah and what's i think interesting about this is again a lot of the kind of organizations that have worked in this domain have tended to be small and somewhat scrappy i mean again bellingcat i think is um an exception obviously a group like wikileaks got quite big and organized and ddos secrets is also you know got a firm footing but nevertheless it's a lot of these small independent groups um and now we're in a moment in an era where some of these groups are like working with each other for the first time you know and of course there's there was some of that in the past but i think that this is a particularly uh potentially generative period for that kind of cross-national cross-organizational collaboration but of course there's issues of trust as well probably also issues of different styles of organizational culture that impact the way that some of these groups work with each other yeah while several parties and so typing uh i think you guys um gave us the very similar question about other hacking groups and i think we didn't touch upon it so you can just read about the pre-gaming question and answer it's about the if they um you know reach out to any other hackers and they think about other hackers so um they're also saying that um you don't know much about groups similar to ours they've heard about groups in iraq and china but we've never been in contact with any hackers though they know that in russia for example similar groups would have had more hard times since cyber security is more developed there though the leakage of the torture videos somewhat proves that even with fair cyber security you can't prevent leaks when people within the system try to fight the system um but in general the policies um just to note here that cyber partisans do not get involved with politics in other countries so they're not going to provide any help or assistance um in any other country they're only interested in resolving the crisis in belarus and that's you know and then after that of work on rebuilding the iet and cyber infrastructure in belarus since it's in a really terrible shape um and now i'm gonna read out the their answer on the second question that they don't have enough um they don't know enough about russian hackers to really say again you know just they don't know um but they've seen some ops allegedly done by them um and they definitely have some talented hackers and we have next question yeah their questions are coming in they're very good i know this is a bit slow but um you know it's a nice counter to the speed of the digital um if you want us to read the next question while they typed um so this is from yeah uh louis melenson i'm i'm guessing on the pronunciation is the private information gained by the cp such as addresses of police officers kept private or was it released publicly if so what kind of independent actions have been undertaken thanks to this publicly released information in other words has the general population embraced this new information and started acting on its own or has this information helped other initiatives could you provide examples you release data and regime cronies and workers to the public mostly on black map work it's kind of a broader project um and um the telegram channel it's called correctly cradley belarusi it means punishers of belarus it's all in russian so but you know you still can check this telegram channel we get really positive feedback from the public people are very supportive even if you make mistakes you can see that the like dislike ratio in our videos is quite good and i want to add that um you know a lot of people watch these youtube videos again you need to keep in mind the population valories and that there are not many viewers on other any other videos related to politics and cyber partisans have a lot of views it's an interesting subject for everyone in belarus there's a couple yeah more coming coming in juliana i mean as as the answers are coming i'm gonna ask you a question what's it like to be a spokesperson for an you know a now internationally famous um you know activist group um it's amazing i'm so impressed and so proud of everything they're doing um of course i'm a little bit scared um you know i still have sometimes dreams of fukushima chasing me with a gun as i think a lot of belarusians do but you know try to assess our fears rationally and you know i'm safe in america so i have to do it with something and that's even like a small thing of reaching out um advocating for what is going on in belarus and of course in general um we just i think everyone at all of what a cyber partisans are doing everyone is proud belarus is pretty famous in it technology and how productive and professional people there so it's i think just a continuous inspiration each time i'm connected with cyber partisans or hear about them in social media or anywhere else how much of your time is dedicated to this more or less i mean i'm sure it shifts but achieved um i would say a lot i'm also working with their political representative dmitry shigelski so it's it's not only worked with cyber partisans but some you know drafting and english documents or something like that related to the general strategy of bringing changes into belarus um i would say i don't know five hours a week maybe more maybe less it depends but it takes some time but you know it's an important cause absolutely okay it looks like um a couple other questions are being answered ben do you want to read the next question i'd love to so frank bayek asks we learned this week of bella russian government involvement in the ghost rider disinformation campaign which was seeking to undermine nato among other goals do you have information on or insights into that campaign and the involvement of the lukashenko government can you corroborate it we'd be happy to see evidence if you have it yeah we don't have proof from then the regime of them during these attacks but from sources from within and from materials we got from the hex we understand that this kind of facts i would then discover that of what the regime in belarus can do um they did mostly periphery hacks nothing from internal networks from what we've seen um and you know they're gonna talk more about the assessment um they during the engagement with internal affairs organization and organizations like that they we found many hacking tools that are used to hack into computers and cell phones i'll just pop in to say that frank is an amazing journalist who covers cyber related um [Music] issues also in latin america so he's a good person if you ever want to talk to him on these matters and maybe i could just add a comment on their response to frank's question you know i'd love to know what frank would think too but it strikes me that there's this curious parallel between how the discovery of the internal tools of repression within the regime namely like discovering within lukashenko's own police department a number of tools that can be internally used against it has a kind of resonance with the cyber partisans response to the larger historical trauma of world war ii namely that there's a there's a way that lukashenko represents the internal oppressor right who who like moscow insists on a kind of it's me triumph or nothing um or or death or tragedy for their tragedy and there's this uh i don't know i don't know if that's too too wide too speculative but um it's really interesting i think how sometimes the practices here are reproducing larger historical patterns so i'll just observe that speculatively that's very interesting oh so they added to this question that once they got into internal networks their assessment that these hacks can be done by beginners or intermediate
2021-12-06