Telecomix

Tele Comix was an association of Internet activists who organized as a decentralized cluster. Their goal was the defense of freedom of expression. Tele Comix became known through the help to circumvent network censorship during the Arab Spring. The name Tele Comix was used by both Werewolf build and Tele Comix itself. Were Build a collaborative project that proposes and discusses laws, as well as information about politics and politicians was collected.

History

Tele Comix was at the suggestion of Erik Josefsson at a seminar on monitoring, the Swedish FRA law and laws that have been implemented at this time in the European Parliament established on 19 April 2009. Josefsson asked the audience for help to prevent the surveillance laws in the European Parliament. In the evening after the seminar created a group Telecomix. During the first months, the focus was on the telecoms package, the retention and the FRA law. The work consisted in obtaining information about the laws and the policy behind it, public discussions and art projects.

During the Chaos Communication Camp 2011, the servers were temporarily shut down to some of the IRC server because of the extreme fatigue of the activists. A little later, but they were back online.

Origin

Tele Comix has its roots activists and in a very heterogeneous hacker scene. Many of the founding members also took part in and around The Pirate Bay. Similarly, there are overlaps with the Julia Group and La Quadrature du Net, as well as with the Hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen in Malmö. To be a member of Tele Comix is a rather vague term. Only formal ritual is to enter the IRC channel. In 2011, activists from Tele Comix interviews began to give and to speak at conferences such as the Chaos Communication Congress.

Projects and actions

Actions in Egypt

While initiated by the Egyptian Government Internet Blackout early 2011 Telecomix built in the course of " Were Build" on a parallel internet infrastructure in Egypt. Many members and then also the French Data Network presented old modem hardware on their private numbers here as dial points available and faxed, among other things, with the help of Internet activists of Anonymous, the identification numbers in public institutions, universities, hotels and others. Addition, they made packet radio connections.

Actions in Syria

As in Egypt Telecomix built here from new access to the Internet, enabling in this way revolutionaries to provide reports to the network and to report on the events. On 15 September 2011 Tele Comix directed to all connections to Syrian Web and directed Internet surfers to a website with instructions to bypass censorship.

In addition, activists invaded by Tele Comix in network infrastructure and were to gain access to logs with lockout policies and published this. For analyzes of the data obtained, the activists were able to identify a track to U.S. manufacturers of surveillance technology. U.S. senators from the Democratic and Republican parties then requested an investigation. The leak was criticized by Jacob Appelbaum, because it incorporates too many sensitive information about users Syrian.

Actions in Libya

During the revolution in Egypt in 2011 but also the escalation of the Libyan civil war Telecomix instructions brought into circulation, how to handle state blocks of broadband with a landline. These services were used, which were offered by Tele Comix and other activists.

Various projects

Tele Comix operates a search engine based on Seeks. It is a open source and based on peer -to-peer search engine that allows anonymous Internet research. The searches are sent encrypted by the peers.

In addition, Tele Comix uses a MegaHAL - chatbot, who was named Cameron. One member describes her as " the computer-generated representation of us all".