10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17211
This interview with Jean-Marc Manach – investigative reporter, specialist of surveillance and privacy protection on the Internet, and a wellknown French “hacker-journalist” – explores the issues of cyberconflict and cybersurveillance, focusing on the broad phenomenon of “piracy”. In doing so, the interview outlines the different definitions, framings and reconfigurations of those practices, enacted by network users, which have been labeled as “pirate” by different economic and political actors of the Internet value chain. Following Manach’s reflections, the interview provides a few benchmarks towards a critical perspective on “piracy” as an ensemble of situated practices which places us, perhaps for the best of our society, in the condition of being “all pirates” of today’s digital networks – engaged in the construction and sharing of cyberknowledge.
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2038-3460
17211
2
en
Francesca Musiani
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
piracy
“On the Internet, We Are All Pirates, and That’s Good”: An Interview with Jean-Marc Manach
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Conversations
2015-01-29
2023-06-14
2015-01-29
2023-07-27
59-72
TS
Francesca Musiani
2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17211
59
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
2038-3460
2
piracy
en
72
“On the Internet, We Are All Pirates, and That’s Good”: An Interview with Jean-Marc Manach
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17211/16091
5
                                                                         Conversation

“On the Internet, We Are All Pirates,
and That’s Good”
Interview with Jean-Marc Manach
	
  
Francesca Musiani
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
	
  
       Abstract: This interview with Jean-Marc Manach – investigative reporter,
       specialist of surveillance and privacy protection on the Internet, and a well-
       known French “hacker-journalist” – explores the issues of cyberconflict and
       cybersurveillance, focusing on the broad phenomenon of “piracy”. In doing
       so, the interview outlines the different definitions, framings and reconfigura-
       tions of those practices, enacted by network users, which have been labeled
       as “pirate” by different economic and political actors of the Internet value
       chain. Following Manach’s reflections, the interview provides a few bench-
       marks towards a critical perspective on “piracy” as an ensemble of situated
       practices which places us, perhaps for the best of our society, in the condi-
       tion of being “all pirates” of today’s digital networks – engaged in the con-
       struction and sharing of cyberknowledge.

       Keywords: Internet; privacy; hijacking; cybersurveillance; piracy.

       Corresponding author: Francesca Musiani, Institut des Sciences de la
       Communication (CNRS / Paris-Sorbonne / Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie),
       20, rue Berbier-du-Mets, 75013 Paris, France – Email: francesca.musiani@
       cnrs.fr




Introduction

    In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about the pervasive
surveillance practices enacted by the United States National Security
Agency – practices the legality of which is discussed within the American
legal system itself – issues of cyberconflict and cybersurveillance have
never been so much a matter of “current news”. Information and com-
munication technologies, Internet first and foremost, are increasingly lev-
eraged to achieve economic or military objectives – from the theft of criti-
cal data to the hijacking of industrial systems. The generalized rise of digi-

	
  
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
5 (2) pp. 59-72 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2014
60                                                             Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

tal espionage, tracking and surveillance is unveiled not only by the recent
Snowden revelations, or by WikiLeaks' activities, but also by the con-
struction and the organization of an increasingly widespread and lucrative
market of surveillance technologies and equipment.
    This context also brings about novel ways for the practices gathered
under the label of 'piracy'. On the one hand, Internet users and citizens
seek to respond to pervasive surveillance via a number of 'bricolage' prac-
tices that build, develop, hijack or pirate technical artifacts to secure their
Internet connections and prevent third parties to access their data
(Musiani, 2011). On the other hand, the development of surveillance and
decrypting techniques is a powerful leverage in the development of com-
puting in a “common good” perspective, as history reminds us (Musiani
and Schafer, 2011). To understand 'piracy' as a phenomenon – its defini-
tions, framing, reconfigurations – it is important to understand the extent
to which practices that have been labeled as 'pirate' by different actors of
the Internet value chain, economic and political, are de facto largely pre-
sent and popular amongst users: a phenomenon which places us, perhaps
for the best of our society of sharing and knowledge, in the condition of
being “all pirates”. We have discussed surveillance and its hijackings, dig-
ital bricolage and piracy, with “hacker-journalist” Jean-Marc Manach, on
November 26, 2013.
    Jean-Marc is an investigative reporter, specialist of surveillance and
privacy protection on the Internet. For reasons that he details during our
conversation, he defines himself as a “journo-hacker”. Jean-Marc is most-
ly known for his blog on Le Monde website, called “Bug Brother”, and
for his past and present contributions on popular French information
websites such as, for example, InternetActu and OWNI. Among his in-
vestigations, of particular note is the one that involves Amesys, the
French firm which – we learn about it in 2011 – has sold to the Kadhafi
regime the surveillance technologies that allowed him to place his oppo-
nents under strict surveillance. Jean-Marc is a founding member of the
Big Brother Awards France, an award ceremony organized by Privacy In-
ternational and destined to governments and firms that “do the most to
threaten privacy”. He has served on the board of Nos oignons [“Our on-
ions”], association promoting the development of the digital network Tor
in order to “guarantee information, expression and communication liber-
ties”. He teaches several courses in journalism schools, on themes of in-
formation security and protection of sources. His most recent project
(since September 2013) is a WebTV programme on the website Arrêt sur
images, where interviewees are reached via the Skype programme. His
website is jean-marc.manach.net.


                                       ***
Musiani                                                                      61
    FM: Let's start with a piece of most recent news. The Pogoplug firm
announced yesterday the release of Safeplug, a “49-dollar box” aimed at
securing Internet connections of users via a “plug-and-play” Tor. What
does your experience within “Nos oignons” tell you about the likely fu-
ture of this experience? Can the Safeplug box work from a technical
standpoint, and be largely adopted by users?

    JMM: Technically, it's something that has been done by hackers for a
long time now. In this particular case, we arrive at the commercialization
of a product, the stage after the prototype. I have a hard time in figuring
out precisely the economic potential of this process – if a company can
make a profit with this. What is sure, however, is that in the middle of the
Snowden affair, this is happening at a very specific moment. One of the
problems with the Snowden affair, is that most people will tell one of two
things: either “we knew already”, or “there is nothing we can do about
it”. The first point is certainly not true: there is plenty that this affair has
indeed revealed or made public; and as for the second, of course not –
there is plenty one can do, and could have done even before the Snowden
revelations. These, however, have led people to build or experiment with
things, both at the micro level and by organizing DIY “laboratories” to
secure their Internet connections and prevent third parties (the NSA in
the first place) to access their data and wiretap communications massive-
ly. At the same time, there are the 'giants', Twitter and Microsoft, turning
to HTTPS... This little gadget, Safeplug, is part of a global movement, an
effort to secure the Internet again. What is interesting with this box is
that it is meant to be placed between the computer and the router – thus,
whatever the protocol used, all the traffic is meant to go through Tor –
not just Web traffic.

    FM: The release of Safeplug is but the latest occasion to reflect upon
an issue that has been at the core of my research (Musiani, 2013) – and
that of several STS scholars of communication technologies (Aigrain,
2011) – for the past few years: the shaping of decentralized alternatives to
the most popular Internet services of today, as a possible way to improve
the protection of privacy and the security of one's online identity. What
do you think of this “technology-based” approach to security and priva-
cy, and its effectiveness vis-à-vis other strategies, such as written law or
user education?

    JMM: One of the main geopolitical influences that the United States
have exerted on the Internet has been, and still is, the worldwide propa-
gation of the idea that law cannot be trusted. The U. S. is a country that
does not trust its institutions: so, for example, it is a lot simpler to obtain
information that concerns institutions, most notably thanks to documents
such as the Freedom of Information Act. It is a very powerful instrument,
which may even allow to declassify NSA documents. A fortiori, with the
62                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

Snowden revelations, we have seen how the NSA is indeed violating
American law. In France, this defiance vis-à-vis the State may be there,
but it is not embedded in the system; however, an increasing number of
people, thanks to the Internet, are starting to be careful.
     The solution is often thought to be a technical one, given that address-
ing the issue from a legal standpoint always takes more time. The privacy-
by-design (PbD) approach1 is technical, cultural and financial at once.
People have been fighting for a long time towards this objective, but the
interest of many firms is still lacking. Here again, thanks to the Snowden
revelations, several States and companies will increase their security
budgets, and this may, in turn, increase the large-scale adoption of PbD.
Snowden has explained that the fundamental reason behind his revela-
tions is that we are experiencing a turn in our conception of human
rights. He thinks that, had he further delayed, it would have been too late
to know if it is the Matrix that controls mankind or vice-versa, if there is
accountability, transparency, responsibility. Maybe it is already too late,
by the way. But in any case, we are in the middle of a turn.
     This also applies, in my view, to education. A two-year-old child will
know how to use an iPhone, while a fifty-year-old adult will need to read
the instructions booklet. Well, the reason behind the success of the iPh-
one, is that there are no instructions to be able to use it. We are in a situa-
tion where teachers know less than students, because they were not born
with the tools; in addition to this, the former were born in a situation
where the act of teaching involves someone who speaks and someone else
who listens – not a logic of co-participation and sharing, to which the In-
ternet has accustomed us. Denmark is, to my knowledge, the only country
which authorizes students to have Internet access open during their ex-
ams: Danes asked themselves why the day of their exam would have to
be... the only day of their lives with no Internet access – they understood
that the most important thing is not to memorize passively, but to know
how to look for, and find, the most useful information at just the right
time. I am quite skeptical that we will be able to fully incorporate this vi-
sion in our educational system, to set as our main objective the improve-
ment of common knowledge. There are some 'islands'... for example
François Taddéi and his Center for Interdisciplinary Research2. But over-
all, I do remain skeptical, especially when I am a witness to the 'strategies'
of legislators. A few years ago, to educate children about questions relat-

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1
  The PbD idea is developed by the Privacy and Information Commissioner of
Ontario (Canada), Ann Cavoukian, in the mid-to-late 90s. It proposes that, as the
legal framework is deemed insufficient to ensure the protection of privacy, the
latter be introduced directly into the design and the implementation of computing
systems and networks (as well as in the elaboration of responsible design and use).
2
  François Taddéi, engineer and biologist, promotes innovation and interdiscipli-
narity in education and research, especially thanks to the activities of the Centre
for Interdisciplinary research (CRI, www.cri-paris.org), which he directs.
Musiani                                                                    63
ed to copyright violations, they were sending people in schools to tell stu-
dents not to do this or that – with a similar approach for social networks:
don't share too much, it's dangerous! Which is, of course, the best way to
make sure they do just that. To discuss dangers and opportunities of shar-
ing at once looks like a more constructive approach to me.
    A final point, in terms of education, needs to be made on the differ-
ence between the fact of making computing technology available, and
making available the infrastructure that actually empowers people to use
it. It is of little avail to equip entire schools with laptops if you don't
equip them with power outlets and high-speed connections, as well. We
need to move beyond our relationship to computers as gadgets if we wish
for education to become an actual tool vis-à-vis issues of security, surveil-
lance, privacy.

    FM: Let us go back in time for a while. You are famous for your in-
vestigative reporting work on the themes of online surveillance and priva-
cy, but you said on the occasion of our first contact that you have become
a journalist 'by chance'. Indeed, your 'journo-hacker' trajectory (as you
define it yourself), is hardly reflecting that of the average journalist. In
2001, you publish a book on French experimental cinema of the Seven-
ties. Your two book-length works, Big Brother Awards (Garnier et al.,
2008) and La vie privée, un problème de vieux cons? (Manach, 2010) [Pri-
vacy: an issue for old fools?] on surveillance and privacy respectively,
come out in 2008 and 2010. What has led you to become interested in
these two themes?

    JMM: Indeed. In my early days, I didn't wish to be a journalist: I
wished to become part of the film industry. During my days as a universi-
ty student, I discover experimental cinema and documentaries, and I be-
come passionate about it. I start creating fairly peculiar movies: film festi-
vals didn't want any part of them, because they were too much of a doc-
umentary, and documentary festivals didn't want any part of them be-
cause they were too much of an experimental movie. So I started to write,
just a little bit, because I wished to “defend” my movies. The French Ci-
némathèque was at that moment elaborating a catalog, on the occasion of
a big retrospective on experimental cinema, and I suggested to include a
chapter on a historical episode that had never been told: the deliberate
decision that had been made of not providing any funding to experi-
mental cinema. This article was excluded from the volume, for very
opaque reasons of lack of space. I was disheartened by the fact that in a
creative milieu such as cinema, thirty years later after the facts I was talk-
ing about, it was still possible to censor some things.
    At the same time, I was discovering Internet – by chance, I was at the
time writing for a journal which had a high-speed Internet connection,
which was still very rare; Internet connections were mostly done with
56Kbit/s modems. I was starting to fool around with Web pages, mainly
64                                                           Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

my personal one. That's where and when it happened: in 1999-2000, I
obtain a high-speed access, I start to become interested in the Internet,
and that's when the report by Duncan Campbell comes out, talking about
the communications surveillance and espionage ECHELON system
(Campbell, 1998). My encounter with the Internet happened at the time
when I also found out that the entirety of networks was under surveil-
lance. I started to become interested in this from a journalist's viewpoint:
to protect my sources. Journalists didn't have any set of instructions to
manage this: by turning to the world of hackers, I realized that instead,
they did – they knew how to protect their private life, they knew how to
use security software. I started to read, then to translate and publish doc-
uments of instructions and best practices. That's how I became interested
in these topics.

    FM: The documentary Une contre-histoire de l'Internet [A Counter-
History of the Internet], directed by Sylvain Bergère and co-written by
you, emphasizes developers and/or activists, and shows the extent to
which they have made the Internet what it is today. What was the genesis
of this project? What is the advantage of this approach to account for the
history – the histories – of the Internet?

    JMM: A vast majority of people who retrace the history of the Internet
explain that the network was conceived on demand of the U. S. Army to
resist a nuclear attack. Well, Internet was conceived just as much by LSD-
addicted hippies! This history had never been told before, and documen-
taries about the Internet were often of the anxiety-inducing type, assimi-
lating Internet users to pirates, hackers to criminals... I wanted to show
that it is also thanks to the hackers that we have the Internet. It has, in-
deed, been funded initially by the American army, but such is the case of
Tor, as well – the obfuscation network on which we bestow all kinds of
vices today. There is so much stuff we owe hackers – in a broad sense: the
promoters of sharing, of the openness of source code, of free software, of
an interest in transparency and a keen preoccupation with privacy...

   FM: This also entails a re-definition, in the eyes of the public, of what
a hacker actually is...

    JMM: Very much so. Especially in France, indeed, where the hacker
figure has been 'demonized' for so long. In fact, it is the DST [Direction
for the surveillance of French territory] that put together the first team of
hackers, in the early Nineties, and when this became known, nobody
wished to be defined as such any longer. In 2001, I was attending the first
French symposium on network security, and half of the attendees were
wearing a uniform: the conference was taking place in the very premises
of the Ecole militaire! We had to wait for 2007 in order to have the first
hacker festival of France and the 'coming-outs' of people defining them-
Musiani                                                                   65
selves as hackers. Last year, France hosted almost a dozen network securi-
ty-related conferences, gathering internationally-renowned hackers – an
unthinkable thing just a few years ago. The 'demonization' of the hacker
also helps accounting for several things we have discussed earlier on, the
approach of the educational system to digital matters. It also explains why
we have been targeted, as TV viewers roughly at the same time, with a
portrait of the Internet as a nest of paedophiles and nazis – so ludicrous.
But this happens a lot more in France than in other countries, and I think
it is linked to the top-down manner in which our State is organized. They
have several faults in the United States, but there, if you try to build a
company and fail, your chances increase to obtain funding to try and
build another: in France, if you have failed, you're busted. That's what
the hacker culture is about, as well: to integrate failure into development.

   FM: In regards to “dominant histories” and the formatting of dis-
courses that derives from them: we often have the impression, thanks to
the way it is treated in the press, that the history of Internet surveillance
revolves around the United States. Is it indeed the case, or at least, it it
the case to that large an extent? Does this history hide discourses and
practices – State-driven, company-driven, or a mix of both – of which we
should be more aware?

    JMM: We cannot understand the development of computing and
networking without understanding that it also derives from the efforts
undertaken in order to break secret codes during World War II. The
Enigma programme, which had led to the development of Alan Turing's
first prototype of computer, is an example of this. The development of
the telecommunications industry has paralleled the development of the
surveillance of telecommunications. A humongous amount of money has
been destined to this development during the Cold War, as well. Internet
is the “comet's tail” of all these episodes. Today, the market of telecom-
munication espionage and surveillance is estimated at 5 billions of dollars
per year. These espionage systems were once exclusive purview of intelli-
gence agencies of the biggest countries, like the United States, China,
Russia, France. Not anymore. A number of small- and medium-sized
companies are proposing services in this field.

   FM: Is it the Amesys affair you are talking about? As a reminder,
Amesys is the French company that – as we learned in 2011 thanks to
your investigative work and that of the Wall Street Journal – sold to the
Kadhafi regime the surveillance technologies that allowed him to put his
opponents under surveillance, and to monitor the entirety of Internet
communications alongside mobile and satellite networks in Libya.

   JMM: Absolutely. Today, any dictator, just as any American county
sheriff, can buy in a very simple manner any kind of telecommunications
66                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

interception devices. People, libraries, institutions, countries: there is a
true military and industrial complex that is put into place, including sev-
eral private contractors – Snowden was one of them. It is a business that
was not at all existing at this level before 2001. So, to come back to your
question, we speak too much of the U. S. and the NSA, but it is because,
paradoxically, it is a country that has a culture of distrust towards institu-
tions, where phenomena such as whistleblowers and the right to declassi-
fy secret documents do exist. It is not the case in Russia, or in China....
nor in France or in the United Kingdom, whose governments do, howev-
er, violate law in the exact same manner or at least, are heavily suspected
to do so. It is, indeed, a paradox: the U. S. are a great democracy, with
plenty of people fighting for their individual rights, and that's what allows
us to have these documents; elsewhere, we do not have this opportunity,
and lacking documents, we do not really know what is the extent of sur-
veillance in our country. One of the lessons showed by Snowden in this
instance is perhaps that, in this sense at least, the United States are a bet-
ter democracy than France is.

   FM: The privatization of Internet governance, the important role
played by industry, voluntarily or forcibly, in the regulation of content
and freedom of expression has been central an issue in my research for
quite some time. Beyond Amesys, is this a theme you cross paths with in
your work, and how?

    JMM: Since the early 2000s, we have spoken about self-regulation,
both of civil society and private actors. An interesting example, in France,
is the now-defunct Forum des droits de l'Internet [FDI, Forum for Inter-
net Rights], where, precisely, representatives of ministries were gathered
with civil society and company executives. This has allowed to avoid
some mistakes, and it also prevented several laws from being debated ex-
clusively by politicians that, oftentimes, do not understand neither the
functioning nor the capabilities of the technologies they wish to 'regulate'.
Since then, the FDI was closed, and the Hadopi3 law created...

   FM: The multistakeholder model is also that of the Internet Govern-
ance Forum. The central idea of this arrangement is precisely that we
“just” engage in dialogue there, but this dialogue...

   JMM: ...allows to avoid a number of missteps! Well, the FDI has
helped to a lot more than that, but as one of our invitees for the docu-
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
3
  The Hadopi acronym stands for Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des œuvres et la Pro-
tection des droits d'auteur sur Internet and indicates an agency, created in 2009 thanks
to the so-called “Creation and the Internet” law, which is mainly known to have been
the first one to administer the “graduated response” or “three strikes” procedure as a
means of copyright enforcement.
Musiani                                                                  67
mentary was saying, “those who talk do not throw bombs at each other”.
Talking allows to avoid an excessively schematic and grotesque vision of
the Other – the contrary of what happened when our former President
declared that he wanted to “civilize the Internet”, for example. How can
one think that this point of view, not dissimilar to that of colonizers, can
be applied to the Internet? The extent of this impossibility is highlighted
by the (limited and not relevant) practical effects of the Hadopi law: a
150-euros fine, and it was not even the fault of the individual, but of his
ex-wife who had used the connection unbeknownst to him. What mat-
tered was that the Internet subscription was in his name.

    FM: This is, indeed, one of the points argued by the engineers audi-
tioned during the discussions of the Hadopi law project: it is not possible,
for users, to have the technical and material certainty that they have in-
deed secured their Internet connection...

    JMM: Yes, I had said that too: your law project isn't going to be sus-
tainable because you cannot ask somebody to have the technical compe-
tencies to really secure his or her Internet connection. Specialized, big
companies, with important financial means, do not manage to do this.
The answer I obtained was: as we live in a capitalist economy, we will cre-
ate a market, and companies will find a solution. Four years later, in this
economy of markets, there is no security solution that has been labeled as
valid by the Hadopi authority. It looks like things are a little more com-
plex than an ultra-liberal, capitalist vision of the Internet.

    FM: After WikiLeaks, notably, the profession of investigative reporter
and that of whistleblower seem to have entered a new era (Brevini et al.,
2013). Have they indeed, in your opinion? I am thinking in particular
about an issue that is common to journalism and scientific research – that
of the investigator's relationship to her sources. How do you tackle this
question in your work?

    JMM: After 1999-2000, I have started writing “instructions” to secure
sources, as I have briefly mentioned. I didn't need to use them that much;
however, a certain amount of information, and even scoops, that I was
able to obtain, I obtained them because I knew how to protect my
sources: they trusted me and they knew how to contact me in a confiden-
tial and secure manner. WikiLeaks has changed the situation in two re-
spects. First: it has revived investigative reporting, on paper mostly. Be-
fore, newspaper owners were telling us that thanks to the Internet, where
everything is free, there is less and less money for newspapers. Julian
Assange and WikiLeaks arrive, propose to have access to important doc-
uments, and here come the Guardian, the New York Times, mobilizing
dozens of journalists for months to work with WikiLeaks and complete
the investigation. Because of the Internet, investigative reporting no long-
68                                                             Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

er worked; thanks to the Internet, it has been revived again. Secondly, we
have seen the rise of data journalism. Indeed, that's what happened to
me: I became a journalist because I started to analyze data thanks to end-
user computing capabilities, even before the label “domestic computing”
existed. Here again, we witness the renaissance of investigative reporting,
of whistleblowers, and I am hoping that there will be an increasing num-
ber of the latter, because our democracies are in thorough need of them.
    At some point in our documentary, Assange recalls the expression of a
NSA whistleblower who was explaining that we are at a “turning point”,
a key moment – all we need is to turn the ignition key. And if we do, we
balance into a totalitarian society, because all technologies, the entire sys-
tem, is in place. If Snowden hadn't done what he did, we can easily figure
that in two, five, ten years, some entity would have been in the position of
monitoring absolutely everything. What looked like a Hollywood legend,
when “Enemy of the State” came out in theaters, is becoming more and
more of a reality: today, we all have a small tracking device in our pockets
– the smartphone. Traceable by intelligence agencies, traceable by the po-
lice, traceable by companies because we allowed them to do so ourselves.
The dream of the Stasi, in fact! This is the importance of what Assange
and Snowden have done. The former may be confined to an embassy
building in London, but before that, he has fostered a global debate, and
has had several important geopolitical effects, notably the Arab Spring;
both of them have revolutionized journalistic practices – journalists are
re-acquiring the 'fourth power' that was theirs, i.e. asking others to be ac-
countable. The ethics of Assange and Snowden is in fact the hacker phi-
losophy, that which was conceptualized in the early 80s in the United
States: the act of hacking is an act of mobilizing for the privacy of citizens,
for the transparency of institutions, for citizens' ability to control institu-
tions rather than being controlled and manipulated by them – make it so
that institutions are at our service, not the other way around (Auray,
1997; Himanen, 2001; Jesiek, 2003). This programme is at the heart of
WikiLeaks, and of what it prompts journalists to do.

    FM: Has anything changed in the ethics of journalism, faced with this
plethora of data and sources?

    JMM: I don't know if it has changed anything for journalism ethics as
a whole. Myself, I have had some issues when I had to manipulate, during
my collaboration with WikiLeaks, Syrian mail. I was indeed not that dif-
ferent from the NSA: it was, after all, millions of emails from Syrian citi-
zens. But I haven't found much – apart from the jokes Bashar el-Assad
was sending to his assistant...
    Otherwise, recently, I have changed my Twitter status and I present
myself as “hacker-journalist”: just a few years ago, I could not have done
this. Now, it is possible to qualify oneself as a hacker and nonetheless ar-
gue that you are doing good things. I still get, quite often, the question
Musiani                                                                                                                                                                                                                            69
“but then, you're a hacker, it means that you can pirate mailboxes?” –
while I have done nothing illegal apart from what other investigative re-
porters have done: being in possession of some information I am not
supposed to have. But it is my job. I follow the hacker ethos, actually, I
am not quite sure of what they are being taught in journalism schools as
far as ethics is concerned. Maybe, with Big Data, with yet more infor-
mation at our disposal, journalism will be confronted to yet more novel
ethical challenges.
    What is interesting is that this situation gives more power to develop-
ers and hackers. So, there is a debate, as well, to figure out whether a
hacker who goes to work for intelligence agencies lands on the “dark side
of the force”. Working for the NSA, is it good or is it bad? It's complicat-
ed. A priori, if one is American, it is perfectly legitimate for him to create
an intelligence service that will collect information with the purpose of
protecting Americans. But does this make it legitimate to spy indiscrimi-
nately on everyone?
    Hacker profiles are increasingly sought after, by governments and
companies at once, especially in the aftermath of Snowden. There is no
doubt that this confronts the hacker to his own ethics.

   FM: As you know, this interview has [initially] taken place within the
frame of a dossier exploring “piracy”. How is the appellation “pirate”
present in the questions that interest you? What practices are associated
with it – practices constrained, mobilized, “recycled” and made theirs by
governments, companies, by different means such as espionage or surveil-
lance?

    JMM: For a few years, I have been teaching a course at the University
of Nanterre in a department which was educating legal scholars to Inter-
net-related issues. My mission was to increase their awareness of their
practices and their very perception of the Internet. The first question I
asked students was the following: “Those of you who have never pirated
software, ripped a DVD, downloaded a copyright-protected mp3, please
raise your hand.” There was but one who did – the law enforcement of-
ficer on his continuing education stint. Nobody else. And my turn again:
“Welcome to the Internet. If you don’t understand this, you will not un-
derstand those who are called the “pirates” of the networks: all of us are
pirates of the networks.” We all are pirates, and always have been.
    In 2005, the French National Assembly voted the DADVSI law, with
the aim of fighting against piracy – this law was punishing the fact of hi-
jacking DRMs4, the restraining devices preventing the copy of digital con-

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
4
  Digital Rights Management (DRM) devices have the objective of controlling or
limiting uses of digital works, thanks to a system of encryption and conditional
access. They can be applied to different types of material devices supporting the
70                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

tent. I thought this was ludicrous: I have been a Linux user for ages, thus,
my machine cannot read DRMs for which you have to go through Mi-
crosoft or Apple, thus if I wish to read a DVD which I have bought in a
legitimate manner, the only way I have to do it is to pirate it. This law was
making a pirate out of me, while a priori, I am a free software user, and
therefore part of that small minority of people who never “pirate” soft-
ware.
     Thus, today, we cannot understand the Internet, the economy of shar-
ing and access to knowledge, if we do not realize this. The totality, or
near-totality of people on the Internet have at some point found them-
selves or put themselves in the position of violating the law, which is, after
all, an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of humanity. And also
peculiar is the fact that, if something is forbidden on the Internet, it reap-
pears generally somewhere else, in some other form, some other way. Of
course, we can talk again about Hadopi, who thought that to have people
secure their own computers all you need to do is to “create a market”.
     The word “pirate” is strong – it reminds of violence, crimes, blood...
and illegality. And yet, to what extent was somebody like Gutenberg har-
assed by authorities of the time, when typography was first introduced?
Did he experience the same problems? I think that the person who says
the most interesting things about this is Eben Moglen5. According to him,
people fighting against piracy are also fighting for ignorance, illiteracy,
poverty, for the interdiction of search for alternative solutions and bot-
tom-up problem-solving: for economic interdiction against economic em-
powerment (Moglen, 2010). As the Internet enables so many things, the
Monsantos, the Vivendis and the Sarkozys of this world interpret it as a
loss of the power they still cling to. But I do not see how it would still be
possible to look backwards: it will not be possible to prevent people from
getting informed and from sharing, even if it involves the “piracy” of a
few files – which is, by the way, often a lot simpler than buying them.
     Then there is the “sexy” side of the pirate, and I think hackers have
often played upon this side, the playful and adolescent one. But ultimate-
ly, I think we can make this assessment: on the Internet, each and every-
one of us is a pirate – and that’s good.

                     FM: In your opinion, what should we expect as far as evolutions of

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
fruition of digital works, from DVDs to tablets, and they can limit access in a va-
riety of ways, according to geography, software, or specific reading functions.
5
  Eben Moglen is a professor of law and history of law at Columbia University,
New York. He is the founder and director of the Software Freedom Law Center,
which defends, pro bono, several actors of the free software domain, including the
Free Software Foundation. His argument is that free software may be understood
as a fundamental right in todays's society, due to its heavy dependence on com-
plex technical systems. He is cited as the inspirator of the decentralized social
network, Diaspora*.
Musiani                                                                                                                                                                                                                            71
surveillance are concerned, in the next few years? As U.S. President
Barack Obama stated recently, is information – the ability to appropriate
it, aggregate it, control it, “making sense” of and with it – the main 21st-
century weapon?

    JMM: In the next few years, I think we can hope for a redefinition of
the legal landscape, and of what intelligence agencies may or may not do.
Only Americans can decide this, despite the “pressure” put by Europe
and other actors. We can also expect a redefinition, within the IETF6 and
other instances of Internet governance, of security and privacy protection
norms so that there may be more privacy by design (Cavoukian, 2010),
maybe even more security by design. Not only thanks to what Snowden
has done, but simply because an increasing quantity of things depends on
our connection to the Internet, and the fact that it is properly secured.
The SCADA and a number of industrial systems are now connected via
the Internet and other networks, and this may raise very important ques-
tions, because if electricity, thus connection, is cut, it will also be possible
to cut off the supply of water, or other critical infrastructures. We are
witnessing a militarization of the Internet, not only via surveillance, but
also thanks to the so-called “offensive cyber-war”, the hijacking of sys-
tems for purposes of espionage, possibly destruction.
    We have been talking about the risks of cyber-war for years – I think
we’re fully in it right now. Assange is secluded in London, Manning will
stay in jail for thirty-five years, several hackers close to Anonymous will
not do without years in prison, and let us not forget Aaron Swartz’s sui-
cide, while he was facing a politico-legal machine which he did not think
he could fight. On the other hand, we have a Nobel Peace Prize as the
American President whose administration has launched a true “witch
hunt” against whistleblowers. But my conviction remains, however, that
hackers have already won. Even if we are still a minority, still mostly de-
monized, we have won because the general direction of History can no
longer be switched – and the hacker ethos is here as it has never been be-
fore.



Acknowledgments

This interview has first appeared in French on the journal “Tracés”. The complete
reference to the original text is the following: Francesca Musiani (2014) ‘Sur In-
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
6
  The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an international and informal
group (without statutes or formal membership), in principle open to every indi-
vidual, but mostly composed of computer scientists and engineers. This group
participates in the production of many standards that shape the Internet today, by
issuing specification documents called Requests for Comments (RfCs).
72                                                                  Tecnoscienza - 5 (2)

ternet, on est tous pirates, et ça c’est bien.’ Entretien avec Jean-Marc Manach, in
“Tracés. Revue de Sciences Humaines”, 26, pp. 235-247 (http://traces.revues.org
/5963).


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