PDM Videos
Democracy is Obsolete
NYC: June 13, 2012
Peter Fein is an Internet activist, computer programmer and media hacker. Since 2010, he's been a participatant in a global, post-national adhocracy of Internet-fuelled political movements. He is also the founder and lead developer of the Mirror Party project, a distributed, censorship-resistant social mirror network.
Pete is an agent with Telecomix, an a activist cluster which facilitates free communication around the world. Called "Tech Support for the Arab Spring", Telecomix helped keep Egypt online during the 2011 revolution, using everything from advanced encryption to dialup modems and fax machines. For the past year, Telecomix has published news and videos from Syria and provided daily communications support to on-the-ground activists. When the cluster discovered US-manufactured censorship hardware being used by Syrian government, Pete explained the evidence to the press, resulting in EU export controls and US sanctions on the technology.
Pete is also a propagandist and strategist with Internet collective Anonymous. He helped plan 2010 protests in support of Wikileaks, which mobilized actions in over 100 cities globally in under two weeks. He was an organizer and media liason during 2011 transit protests in San Francisco, which resisted mobile phone censorship & police brutality. Called OpBART, these protests helped forge collaborations between Internet and street activists that would prove critical to Occupy Wall Street later that year. In 2012, Pete worked behind the scenes to advise and amplify demonstrations against the ACTA copyright treaty, which brought tens of thousands to the streets all over Europe.
Prior to becoming an Internet activist, he rode bikes, cooked food and wrote code. While he mainly tweets from collective accounts, Pete occasionally opines at @petewearspants / wearpants.org. He thanks #telecomix IRC for help writing this bio.
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