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Courage at the 2016 Logan Symposium

At this year’s Logan Symposium in Berlin, the Courage Foundation held workshop on the issues we’ve faced in our two years as an organisation and hosted a live video call with Lauri Love

This year’s Logan Symposium has just concluded in Berlin, bringing together journalists, technologists and others. During the conference, the Courage Foundation hosted a workshop on how best to connect the communities attending the Logan Symposium around solidarity for individual truthtellers as well as some of the broader issues we’ve faced in our two years as an organisation.

As many of our beneficiaries are prisoners, and several of them in the United States, a major issue we’ve come across is solitary confinement. Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, and people we support like Chelsea Manning have all had to endure this psychological abuse — digital activists, at the frontier of information battles, are often especially targeted for retaliatory treatment to set a deterrent. If we can make prisoners’ rights more of a priority within hacking and digitally active communities, we can better provide those suffering the US justice system with the legal and financial help they need.

Aside from assisting beneficiaries by helping sustain their legal defense teams, Courage is committed to raising awareness about the issues and revelations that they expose. We have created the Snowden Document Search, the most comprehensive archive of Snowden’s revelations in a searchable, accessible format, to honor his desire to inform the public and because the database empowers journalists and activists to put the documents to practical use. The same has been done with the Stratfor GI Files to show why Jeremy Hammond deserves our support — journalists quickly reported on some of the more scandalous news stories, but the full repository allows us to see the files’ continued value over time.

People like Jeremy Hammond therefore got thinking about how to describe who we support — we chose ‘truthteller’ over ‘whistleblower’ because the latter, though it’s accruing support in the west, excludes those who expose truths from the outside, extracting information rather than sending it outward. We shouldn’t hold hackers and whistleblowers in opposition; the false dichotomy protects one and condemns the other. We should instead cultivate a spectrum of solidarity — each member of the information-exposure process, hackers, sources, couriers, journalists and publishers, rely on each other and they all deserve our support.

What would better protect this range of people, we advocate, is a public-interest defense. If we legally establish that exposing information in that vitally informs the public at large should be protected, people across the spectrum should be covered. Edward Snowden has long said that he would face trial if such a defense were available in the United States — as it stands currently, the Espionage Act bars such an argument and heavily favors the prosecuting government in proving merely potential for harm.

While the lack of a public-interest defence for national security whistleblowers has attracted some attention in the past few years, due in no small part to growing public awareness of the legal situation facing Edward Snowden in the United States, we believe it is important to recognise that other communities of truthtellers face similar arbitrary restrictions on their freedom to express themselves in the public interest.

Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes online civil disobedience that would be a misdemeanor offline into a felony, and which make no distinction as to motivation, meaning acts of political speech are treated no differently from stealing credit card numbers for profit. And, within Europem, banking secrecy laws restrict the ability of financial services whistleblowers to adequately inform the public – Rudolf Elmer was mercilessly pursued by the Swiss authorities for sending information to WikiLeaks and Antoine Deltour, the alleged LuxLeaks whistleblower, is appearing in a Luxembourg court on 26 April 2016.

We concluded our workshop with a live video call from Lauri Love, who explained why he’s facing and fighting extradition to the United States and what people can do to help him.

Courage would like to thank the Logan organisers for welcoming our workshop and helping us reach an important network of technologists, lawyers and journalists alike.