Hackbloc tabled with Aftershock Action Alliance at The Next Hope in downtown Manhattan, NYC. We were able to get out a good number of HTZ #9, #10, and #10.5. We helped out with a presentation on the last day titled Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology. Smokey discussed the history of government oppression during natural disasters and covered a brief history of technology in crises situations. Evoltech spoke about the tapatio project, specific challenges involved with developing and deploying comms tools for mobilizations, and our plans for future comms development. Ringo closed up the talk with discussion of social responsibility as it applies to the hacker ethic.

I am often critical of hacker culture in general as it tends to be leaden with patriarchy, homophobia, and an acceptance of snitch culture. This conference wasn't different, but it was refreshing to hear folk confronting these issues during different discussions. Johannes Grenzfurthner's of monochrom talk titled "Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself" and the presentation titled "Informants: Villains or Heroes?" were especially interesting to me. While I have zero tolerance for snitches in the communities that I associate with I know that this is not the case with the hacker community where Emmanuel Goldstein speculated that 1 in 4 hackers would end up turning on one of their friends. Specifically relevant to this discussion was the outing of Adrian Lamo as an informant who turned on Bradley Manning for the alleged leak of the Collateral Murder video. What I appreciated from the informant talk was that it provided a forum for dialogue about snitch culture and state oppression specifically as it relates to the individual lives of victims in the hacker community where otherwise I think this would have just gone ignored and would not be addressed publicly.

Ironically, we published an article proposing a stop snitching movement as it applies to hackers in issue 9, not knowing how timely and relevant it would quickly become. It was inspiring to hear the clapping and cheers every time we brought up expelling snitches from the movement both in our presentation and the one by Wikileaks.