Investigating the Kill Cloud | Tatiana Bazzichelli [Disruption Network Lab] & Jonas Frankki

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Hello, hello. Testing.

Hi.

Great. Let's see if we get our presentation up. So, I'm Jonas Franke from the Disruption Network Lab. I'm a creative producer, part of the organization from its founding, and it was founded by

Tatjana Bazzichelli.

Say something about yourself while we wait for the for our presentation.

Yeah, I come from Italy, in Berlin since 24 years now. And the Disruption Lab was founded in 2014. We have been active exposing systems of power and injustice since then.

All right, so our little chat is about this project investigating the kill cloud that is part of our subproject the Disruption Network Institute that you can find on the kill.cloud. We've collected all our links in the link above there that you can scan. The this project is We'll give a brief over overview. It's a mix of research and events.

And we have research fellows that are tackling the kill cloud. And the importance of this is basically to look at what we call the kill cloud from many different points of view. The kill cloud being all the systems almost all of the technological systems and infrastructures that we have around us and how they tie together into the military-industrial complex and to look at this through different researches from very specific points from within the system but also trying to like paint a big picture to get an idea of how it works and from different methodologies, right? So yeah, we're the Disruption Network Lab. It's an organization that's been going on for over 10 years.

We have organized over 37 conferences mainly here in Berlin. We have the next one coming up in November. We had one just in March about the legacy of all of the leaks of WikiLeaks for example and we always invite a mix of whistleblowers, activists, investigative journalists who have the thing in common that for in different ways they're trying to expose systems of power and injustice. Do you want to add something to that?

No, I can go.

And in 2021 we published an anthology Whistleblowing for Change which has like 30 of our speakers from throughout the years. Got a nice quote there from Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower who supported this. And yes, here we we asked our speakers to further develop their different talks. Like if you go up and check the the links on our website, there are videos of all of these 37 conferences on a lot of topics that you'll be interested in. And in this book two drone program US drone program whistleblowers Lisa Ling and Shawn Westmoreland wrote the cap at the chapter called The Kill Cloud, which served as a starting point for this project.

So, then I connect to that. Important to say also that this book is on open access. So, if you want to check it, you can easily download it. And it's very important for us to say that in the book we connect different experts from whistleblowers to investigative journalists, to hackers, to artists, to human rights defenders. So, because this is also at the core of the work of the Disruption Network Lab.

And specifically, and this is the importance of discourse of today, we speak directly and we involve in our program military whistleblowers. In this book, you will find the chapter The Kill Cloud from Shawn Westmoreland and Lisa Ling. And The Kill Cloud, I want to quote them because I think it's important to be precise, is a growing network infrastructure of global reach, dominating every spectrum of warfare, from space, cyberspace, and satellites. So, starting from this point of view, we decided to analyze together with these people asymmetric wars that are happening right now. And during the conference The Kill Cloud, that was some years ago now, we were approached by the whistleblowers with the idea to start the Disruption Network Institute because they thought that it's very difficult today to find a space that is free where to speak about war, where to research it, that is not dependent by corporations, by political private interest, but to give these people the freedom to speak about the injustice of today.

And we saw that now we are witnessing a lot of war. I mean, not now. I would say since 9/11 we are witnessing a lot of wars that are killing civilians. So, together with our conferences, like the Kill Cloud and also investigating the Kill Cloud, we have been doing a series to understand from within what is happening and especially how technology responsible for that. And specifically also we speak about asymmetric wars in which technology like AI is used for kill civilians.

So, on the website of the Disruption Network Institute, you will find various papers of our fellows. And we started in September 2023 also with the symbolic date of the 11th of September 2023 to start conducting this research. And the idea is to connect works of military whistleblowers with investigative journalists and artists together. So, we mentioned already Shawn Westmoreland and Lisa Ling. They are two whistleblowers that were part of the US drone program and they were both deployed in Afghanistan.

And it's very important to hear from them. This is really our perspective because the communities that are affected by the kill clouds are part of the global majority, but the people that are creating this technology, as we also can see in this conference today are creating these systems of oppression. So, we need the whistleblowers also coming from the US and from the countries where these systems of oppression are deployed and built up to tell us the truth. And so, Shawn Westmorelands and Lisa Ling started to work with us. Lisa Ling was part of our first fellowship rounds, so you can already find her paper on our website.

And Shawn Westmorelands is working right now, and we will publish his paper in September, investigating the kill clouds also from the point of view of the orbits and not only the grounds, because we have to understand also the implication of satellite technology.

And give us some more words about some other research that has been done or that's in progress. So, you can find also the papers of Jack Poulson and Naomi Colvin, and we have the paper of Namira Shabibi coming out in a few months. Um Jack, maybe some of you know, is worked in Google's AI research division before he quit, and he was very active in opposing Project Maven and the Google's venture into defense contracts. Um and he one of his projects, Tech Inquiry, has been a very important source of data and research for a lot of people in building other projects because he puts together a lot of public sources and also the WikiLeaks cables, for example, to make it possible for people to search and find connections um and between companies, organizations, people, military contracts um that are I mean, very tricky to understand how how they are connected to the companies because they use of course many intermediaries. So, like going there and look up any organization you know or any NGO as soon as we worked with him, we realized that okay, we can now search for ourselves and see how many steps away are we from some NGO that maybe is very close to the defense in some country for example.

So, it's a it's a very good like transparency and research database. And Naomi Colvin wrote a paper on tracking and understanding how the UK was developing their policies around autonomous weapons. And Namisha Bibi's working now on a paper for us about the the telecom networks and how they have been a bit like under underestimated and they're not sexy enough for a lot of like tech advocates to talk about. There's a lot of attention to Trojans and other more like high-tech ways of surveilling or targeting journalists for example, whereas the telecom systems he is has some good case studies from Kenya for example. They're all encompassing.

You cannot really opt out of it if you use any kind of mobile device. This data is you're constantly being tracked. There are a lot of private companies that very easily can collect and sell your information. And like this is a much larger threat. Um, And if you are working on sensitive things like this is requires another set of skills and practices not to be ignored and just to try to protect yourself against the the very high-tech ways in which you might be targeted if you're working on human rights or any other thing that might upset people in power.

And the other two researchers and artists that have been working with us is Joanna Moll and Tiana Roxane. For us is also important in this kind of configuration to invite artists to develop their research because we know that they can also um involve a different public that has a wider reach that also reaches the public in a different way because even if they work with technology, they also work for example with their bodies. They are organizing performances in relation to the discourse of the kill clouds, AI, and suppression, and also the user interface. And how technology are dominating people. So for example, Joanna Moll did a very interesting research called the user and the beast that was mapping how the what we define the kill clouds was interfering with our own body.

So researching the somatic approach of technology of domination that are also happening through the use of mobile phone because we also know mobile phones are as well systems of targeting. And this happens during war, but also happens normally when we just use a smartphone. And uh Tiara Roxanne uh is instead mapping the systems of technology of domination and surveillance at the border of US and Mexico. Also bringing the perspective of indigenous communities uh that she is part of, and she will then organize a performance in relation to her research that will happen in November. In November uh we are planning uh conference that is called AI Big Tech and Migration Control.

This will happen at the Kunstraum Bethanien in Kreuzberg, and this uh our conference number 38. So, we have really a big archive of conferences that are mapping systems of oppression through technology and at the same time help us to expose these systems of injustice. And specifically at this conference, we want we want to connect the dots uh not only to speak about the impact of AI uh in warfare, but at the same time we want to understand how uh situations like like uh borders um are used for testing grounds because we know that these kind of technologies are used first on vulnerable communities and they are tested on them, and then they are deployed on warfare. And uh at the same time, we are also witnessing an increased militarization of our urban context. If we think what ISIS is doing, but not only.

Uh I mean, we also see in Germany here the security uh complex is becoming more and more present. And so, we want to connect all these dots, and at same time, in this occasion, our fellows, Shawn Westmoreland, Namir Shabibi, and Tiara Roxanne, will present to the public the results of their investigation at the Disruption Network Institute.

Um yeah, so we have a couple of minutes to conclude. Um again, check out all our work there. We're happy if you want to and can support us in some way. We are an independent project. We fundraise for everything that we do.

And this especially for doing like a research project, as we said, this is something that is quite lacking. It's very necessary for people who have certain types of knowledge and experience to give them a place, and also to give them a a network, like we have an advisory board of people that like lawyers and activists and other researchers who can support them when it comes to dealing with their own security, with their own legal situation, if you are come from within the US military, for example, to make sure you don't end up in prison for the rest of your life when you're writing about things that have to do with your security clearance, for example. Um yeah, do you want to say something more?

and then I could follow up by saying that since today we're speaking about resistance, for us resistance comes from from first from understanding. So, we really need to map up the systems of domination, try to understand how they work, and at the same time, I and we think that since technology is not neutral, it's built up by people, first of all, we have to connect technology also with politics, with society, with culture, and we have to understand what is the world that we are building up. And so together with all these people that we are putting together the disruption network lab that we call our network of trust, we want to share this knowledge with our community. And so it's also very important the support of this community. So during the year we also do community events and then we have big conferences that happen uh uh three times the year.

And so again I think it's very important to stress that this work is completely independent. Also comes with a lot of struggle and at the same time we need to build up collectively these spaces of liberation. Thank you.

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