Howdy. Nope, I've never been to Defcon and don't plan on attending
this year, either. Have never really been interested in the technical
side of things. Also kind of depressed over the extent to which
Anonymous has lost steam, seems to be in serious danger of becoming
irrelevant. Anything of a crowd-sourced nature is only going to be as
productive as the crowd in question, and so many of the people who
were attracted to Anon for the right reasons due to what was being
accomplished last year have just sort of gone off, leaving the IRC
venues with a sort of brain-drain situation. Meanwhile a newish venue
that has some promise by virtue of being overseen by some of the
better, more hard-working Anons, Voxanon, has been under constant DDOS
attack for two weeks, and as Echelon2.org had moved to their servers
recently, that's been down, too (along with Project PM IRC, which had
also moved there recently). Lesson there is that all it takes is one
party with a powerful botnet to disrupt the work of dozens of people.
Anyway, have mostly been spending my time thinking about what lessons
can be learned from last couple of years and trying to figure out how
I can best make use of them and encourage others to do so as well.
Broadly, I still think the way forward is smaller, better-defined
groups like Telecomix that can practice quality control and which
won't attract the wrong sort of person and which are less vulnerable
to both infiltration as well as mundane factors like attracting too
many people with no real desire to be effective activists. Anon was a
shaky foundation on which to build a movement, in large part because
of this lulz/trolling tradition. And it's not going away anytime soon;
hopefully it will still be able to facilitate connections, training,
education, etc and prompt people to pursue new methods by which to
counter states and other corrupt institutions. But the momentum seems
to be gone for now.

Anyway, I've been asked to participate in Business Week/Bloomberg
panel on security next month, which will be filmed and featured in
their various outlets, so I'll be in NYC for a few days to do that,
and perhaps I'll have a chance to meet up with some people and get
some things moving with Project PM.

Let's try to talk soon.


On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Jay Leiderman <jay@leidermandevine.com> wrote:

Jay Leiderman
Leiderman Devine LLP
5740 Ralston St #300
Ventura, California 93003
805-654-0200
jay@leidermandevine.com

Sent from my iPhone

-- 
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748