Comment is free : Observe, Make, Hack: reflections on a hacker camp

The outdoors gathering sparked passionate debate and disagreement – but we all chose to be there to tackle the difficult conversations that will shape our future

The lights of the Observe, Make, Hack festival. Photograph: @micahflee

Last week marked Observe, Make, Hack – the largest outdoor gathering of hackers, academics, activists and spooks descending upon a campsite in The Netherlands for a week once every four years.
Wandering around the paddocks on the first night of camp, the laser lights and smoke in an empty space known as Rainbow Island at the edge of the camp caught my attention.
“A bit sad isn’t it? That huge space, filled with lights and nobody dancing ...”, I said. Hacktivist Jason Gulledge paused beside me before answering: “Imagine it as a practice run. We all live in our dreams of what could be.”
I fell into crowd-sourcing news back in 2009, sharing thousands of articles about Wikileaks, hackers, the Pirate Bay, Anonymous, Lulzsec and mass surveillance. I eventually took a professional role crowd-sourcing news from online social media on behalf of print media outlets.
I’ve seen some fairly shocking images scrolling down my screen in those years – bloated corpses of Syrian babies, teenagers murdered in Bahrain, Occupy protesters pepper sprayed and beaten: the 24/7 gore of the journalism sausage. And in that time, many of the digital dissidents myself and many others followed and interacted with – Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, Anakata, Jake Davis and more – have one-by-one been prosecuted, persecuted and jailed.
And we’ve been witnessing the never-ending ramp-up of military contractors, constantly clamoiring for billions to take military action over claims of cyber war. That’s not to say there aren’t online threats, but it’d be nice if our governments were as willing to put their dollars into defending critical infrastructure as opposed to launching offensive attacks.
Frankly, news in recent years have been a little depressing, which is how I came to book a spur of the moment, round-ticket from Australia to Europe, desperate to find a thread to hold onto – a belief that the future holds something more than the dystopian reality that has rushed up on us, fermented into a pervasive Big Brother regime of NATO-state condoned totalitarian surveillance. And so in the background of all this gathered perhaps some of the most interesting people alive on the planet.
There was Thomas Drake, NSA whistleblower; Jesselyn Radack, a US department of justice whistleblower; the geeks behind GlobalLeaks, the the first open-source whistleblowing framework; Christopher Schwartz, the young editor in chief behind New Eurasia (one of the only English-speaking news websites featuring activists from Central Asia); the hackers of La Quadrature Du Net such as Jérémie Zimmermann, who led the fight against ACTA and members of hacker collective Telecomix, who slipped across the Turkish border to collect information on the Syrian government surveillance.
In the first mass hacker camp in Europe since the revelations of NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, international theory and politics were furiously debated.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, spoke via video link, discussing the new international body politic being thrashed out in online, hyper-connected networks reaching far beyond beyond the civil society we once knew
Eleanor Saitta also prodded the future of humanity, not only poking at whether democracy really requires rough men doing evil deed into the night to preserve its sanctity, but also questioning the reliance of nation states on surveillance to survive.
Ex-Wikileaks volunteers Herbert Snorasson and Smári McCarthy talked of societal cybernetics; former-CIA agent Ray McGovern took to the stage wearing a "ARREST BUSH & OBAMA" t-shirt; and of course there was Vinjay Gupta, who announced “we’re fighting for free software running on top of hardware that was manufactured by slaves.”
Don’t get me wrong. It was wasn’t some utopian little coffee-house philosophy club gathering. The spooks and the freedom fighters were jammed shoulder against shoulder, and boy was there friction.
FoxIT, a contractor for the Dutch national intelligence agency, attended and quickly found their tent graffitied with red spray-paint. Similarly, the whistle-blowing panel, hosted next to a session on remote SIM-card hacking, made more than a few people squirm.
Yes, it was difficult at times – a strange mix of people. But we chose to be in that space together, because opting out meant more than just opting out of a camp in a sheep paddock in the Netherlands; it would have meant opting out of practicing the difficult conversations that shape our future.
On the last night of the camp, the Italian hackers cracked open 40 liters of brain-scorching grappa, and suddenly there was drunken, twisted dancing amongst the pyrotenics and lighting effects practiced to precision for days before the crowds converged. The Party at the End of the Universe, built on dreams of what the future could hold, was well worth the wait.