Julian Oliver

In this talk Julian will outline his work as sysadmin, systems and security architect for the climate and environmental defense movement Extinction Rebellion. Responsible for 30 server deployments in 11 months, including a community hub spanning dozens of national teams (some of which operate in extremely hostile conditions), he will show why community-owned free and open source infrastructure is mission-critical for the growth, success and safety of global civil disobedience movements.

An extension of an earlier talk at C-Base Berlin, Julian will give an overview of his own discoveries, platform choices, successes and mistakes meeting the needs of 5-figure at-risk server memberships, from geo-political and legal challenges, to arrest opsec and uptime resilience in the face of powerful adversaries driving attacks on infrastructure and seized activist devices spanning many countries before and during periods of mass civil disobedience. In particular the talk is a call for all sysadmins, opsec and infosec professionals and enthusiasts to rise up and join the fight for current and future generations of all life.

In this lecture Julian will introduce projects and interventions made by himself and others that foreground Engineering, rather than Art, in the creative and critical frame, offering highly public insights into the hidden mechanisms and power struggles within our technical environment. Projects such as the Transparency Grenade, Packetbruecke and Newstweek will be covered in detail.

Art has long been celebrated as an important frame for critical reflection upon contemporary life. In the post-industrial era however, complex tools, formal languages and hidden infrastructure increasingly influence how we communicate, move and remember; now an inextricable part of our Environment.

So it follows that to ignore the languages and ideas that comprise engineering - from Computer Networking and Programming to BioTechnology and Electronics - is to become unable to describe, and thus critically engage, the world we live in. While this presents a challenge for the traditional artist, it is one that an engineer not working in service to science and industry - a Critical Engineer - is able to meet.

In this lecture Julian will introduce projects and interventions made by himself and others that foreground Engineering, rather than Art, in the creative and critical frame, offering highly public insights into the hidden mechanisms and power struggles within our technical environment. Projects such as the invasive Transparency Grenade, Packetbruecke (a location-distorting tree of 802.11 radios) and Newstweek (a wall plug that allows the owner to manipulate news headlines read on wireless hotspots) will be introduced in detail.