In this episode, I consider the inter-state struggle over 5G, the rollout of which will create a new global surveillance surface. Who will control this massive new opportunity to surveil the world’s data? If China gets its way, it will be Huawei, run by ex-Chinese-military officer Ren Zhengfei. And if the precedent of the world pharmaceutical market – almost completely controlled by China – is anything to go by, there may not be much anyone can do to stop them.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

Download this episode from our website at: https://stealthisshow.com/s04e16/

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First part of a two-part interview in which Tim Tayshun (AKA Tim Curry) of EZCoinAccess discusses taking on OneCoin, the massive crypto Ponzi scheme responsible for bilking investors out of $4.6bn dollars.

We discuss: how OneCoin was supposed to work vs. the dismal reality, its colourful cast of leaders and the lengths they went to in order to establish OneCoin as a valuable investment, and the risk OneCoin posed to the growth of Bitcoin itself.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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You can also download this episode from our website athttps://stealthisshow.com/s04e15/

This is the second and final part of our interview with Enric Duran of the Faircoin / Faircoop project.

We discuss: the advantage of using Faircoin rather than Bitcoin or even Euros; the history of anarchism of in Spain and the use of pre-crypto ‘scrip’ currencies in and between anarchist communes; the need to build an infrastructure for the coming community of disaffected normies, and more.

We also take a long excursion into Enric’s backstory as the ‘Robin Hood’ of the antiglobalisation movement: how he stole half a million euros plus from banks and gave it all to anticapitalist projects, and his ensuing life in the underground. And finally, we come around to the big question: how to get to a global Commons without requiring big-state communism. Bonus: the mysterious link between Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and Enric Duran’s commune Calafou.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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This is the second and final part of our interview with Enric Duran of the Faircoin / Faircoop project.

We discuss: the advantage of using Faircoin rather than Bitcoin or even Euros; the history of anarchism of in Spain and the use of pre-crypto ‘scrip’ currencies in and between anarchist communes; the need to build an infrastructure for the coming community of disaffected normies, and more.

We also take a long excursion into Enric’s backstory as the ‘Robin Hood’ of the antiglobalisation movement: how he stole half a million euros plus from banks and gave it all to anticapitalist projects, and his ensuing life in the underground. And finally, we come around to the big question: how to get to a global Commons without requiring big-state communism. Bonus: the mysterious link between Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and Enric Duran’s commune Calafou.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

You can download this episode from our website here: https://stealthisshow.com/s04e14/

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This is part one of a two-part series with Enric Duran, leader of the Faircoin project and founder of Fair Coop. Faircoin is a fascinating experiment in cryptocurrency: a LETS-style community currency which also functions as an exchange-traded token. With it, Duran’s Fair Co-op wants to power an international co-operative movement based on ideas and principles emerging from the Catalan Integral Co-operative: peer-to-peer organization, and horizontal governance by consensus.

We discuss how the Fair Co-Op project co-opted (!) the original Fair Coin for its own use; trust and reciprocity in small communities and how crypto can extend this into the wider world; and just how to think about the ‘ecological cost’ of Bitcoin as a means to create a truly trustless global exchange network.

Enric Duran raised around four hundred thousand Euros in 2008 by creating multiple overdrafts with fake solvency, and then invested this money into building the cooperative movement in Spain in 2008, leading to the creation of the Catalonia Integral Cooperative movement in 2010. Since 2014, Duran’s focus has been on working with FairCoop to generate the alternative ecological and post-capitalist ecosystem that FairCoin is based on.

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This episode picks up where we left off in the discussion with @rabble, one of the co-founders of Twitter and Indymedia. Starting with the idea of Silicon Valley as a new empire, restructuring the world’s institutions through software, we consider the ideology of this empire, and how it differs from that of the previous order of transnational capitalism.

Have what Evan calls Silicon Valley’s ‘social libertarian’ values survived the terrific enlargement of the second-wave web services like Uber, Facebook and Airbnb into global superpowers?

Finally we discuss @Rabble’s work developing Scuttlebutt as a future platform for decentralised community, content distribution and monetisation. Are we moving away from the cycles of centralisation we’ve seen with platforms like Google and Facebook and towards a cycle of decentralisation?

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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This is part one of a two-part interview with @Rabble (Evan Henshaw Plath) — activist technologist, co-founder of Indymedia, and one of the originators of Twitter. We discuss the origins of Twitter in the protest organisation tool TxtMob; Evan’s work developing Indymedia and the early days of tech’s interaction with activism; how social media is continuing to mutate politics, for better and worse; how the sorting algorithms developed by Big Social are becoming indelibly embedded in our world — and finally Evan introduces the subject of part two: Silicon Valley’s hidden mission to restructure the world’s institutions via software.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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Loomio has already come up a few times on this show. It’s an open-source civic platform designed to help people make decisions collaboratively, and it’s been used by everyone from Pirate Parties to City Councils.

In this episode I met up with with Loomio’s Rich Bartlett to discuss the relationship of software to social change — how platforms like Facebook and Slack embed coded ideas about how people should relate to and interact with each other, and how Loomio is trying to design for new modes of interaction and consensus springing up in and around the social movements.

We discuss how a truly decentralised, horizontally organized society might look and talk through Loomio’s attempts to build the software to power it. Finally, we talk about how to upgrade what Rich calls our ‘cultural operating system’. Where does change really start: with our social organization, with our software or with ourselves?

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Who controls your online accounts and identities? For most of us, the answer will be some combination of Big Social — companies like Google and Facebook — as well as a host of smaller platforms and services, all of them parceling up and selling our information for profit.

But after a series of high-profile hacks, trusting social media corporations to store and safeguard our personal information looks an increasingly bad idea. And many are understandably wary about letting platforms look after their cryptocurrency investments. Custody of our digital assets, it seems, is shaping up to be a key issue for network citizens.

Enter Dark Crystal, an Ethereum Foundation-funded project enabling users to store private keys — from Bitcoin to email encryption and beyond — with and inside their communities and social networks. To do this, Dark Crystal makes use of the mathematical magic behind Shamir’s Shared Secret, allowing groups of friends to safely store different ‘shards’ of a key, bringing it together as and when needed.

In this episode, we meet Peg and Kieran from Dark Crystal to discuss the implications of the project: what happens when custody of our most precious digital resources can be taken away from banks and megacorps and entrusted to friends, family and community? And do projects like Dark Crystal signal the beginning of a new, cryptography-based ‘information commons’?

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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Embedded in an increasing number of the devices and objects surrounding us, computers are turning the everyday world into a radically programmable attack surface. This is the subject of computer security & cryptography legend Bruce Schneier‘s latest book, Click Here To Kill Everybody. In this episode we meet up with Bruce to explore how the profusion of insecure devices, capable of being put to a variety of unpredictable purposes, is radically shifting the balance of power. Via cyberattacks, smaller states get the ability to content with the great powers — and an entirely new class of ‘non-state actors’ are being granted the power to disrupt nations.

Phenomena like the Mirai Botnet, Bruce argues, are just the beginning: we discuss a host of potential attacks on life and property, from car and thermostat hacking to ransomware against hospitals — and how ‘surveillance capitalism’ is one of the most important vectors behind this worrying new paradigm.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editing & Post Lucas Marston
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof, Sean Lynch.

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Advanced Persistent Threat is a STEAL THIS SHOW special series looking at the 2016 Bangladesh Bank Heist. Had it succeeded, this would easily have been the biggest bank robbery in history — and it was carried out almost entirely in the digital realm, using a variety of exploits and malware, in order to leverage access to the SWIFT banking network and the US Federal Reserve.

In Part One, we look at exactly what happened in the Bangladesh heist, and walk through how it was carried out. To help us through the complex story, we hear from Cheryl Biswas, Strategic Threat Intel Analyst in Cyber Security at a Big Four consulting firm.

After covering the how of the robbery, we consider whether trusted systems like SWIFT can remain secure in an information environment replete with radically heterogeneous, eminently hackable devices.

Cheryl Biswas wishes to make clear that she speaks here on her own behalf Her views do not represent those of her employer.

This episode was completed in part with funding from Film Agency Wales.

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Post Production Lucas Marston
Original Music Reilly Byrne | Web Production Eric Barch

Episode Sponsor ZCash Company

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof.

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In this episode, I reflect on STEAL THIS SHOW episode S04E03, with Cory Doctorow. One of the big themes to come up in the conversation was the European Copyright Directive — which, if passed early next year, will threaten the future of the Web as we know it. But does this threat to the future of the the traditional Web mean the moment of decentralized services like IPFS and Blockstack has finally come?

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof.

Download this Episode from our website at:
https://stealthisshow.com/s04e06/

In our second interview with Emin Gün Sirer (the first one being lost to a catastrophic file system failure!), we discuss the current state of cryptocurrency, and just what Emin means when he says that Satoshi Nakamoto is ‘dead.’ We discover the secret shared lineage between BitTorrent and Cryptocurrency, and how they both tackle the ‘chaos of the commons’. Of course TRON’s recent acquisition of BitTorrent, Inc. comes in for some scrutiny — Emin remains, let’s say, skeptical. And, finally, we look at Emin’s work on and around the all-new Avalanche protocol, which he sees as the most significant contribution to cryptocurrency since Bitcoin itself.

Emin Gün Sirer is a co-director of The Initiative For Cryptocurrencies & Contracts and associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. Known for significant contributions to peer-to-peer systems and computer networking, Emin was behind the first Proof-of-Work system for cryptocurrency, Karma, which debuted before Bitcoin. Having since become a respected commentator on and contributor to Bitcoin itself, Emin is now working on Avalanche, a new cryptocurrency protocol based on an entirely new model, promising fast, reliable transactions with significantly lower power overheads.

Hello to new Patreon supporters: Brett Gaddy, Alexander Sirazh and Liquid Reign! Thanks for your support, guys. We really appreciate it!

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season Sponsor Private Internet Access

Episode Sponsor ZCash Company

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof.

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In this episode we meet Zenna, Andre and Zack from Scuttlebutt, a P2P-based social ‘network of networks’ based around a BitTorrent-like distribution technology.

After figuring out what Scuttlebutt is (and is not) we discuss: the roots of Scuttlebutt in New Zealand, the system’s politically anarchist/libertarian ethos, how Scuttlebutt survived (or shrugged off) a right-wing deluge; and how SSB’s technical architecture eliminates the need for moderators.

With social networks like Facebook, Twitter and 4Chan increasingly becoming propagation tanks for viciously partisan net cultures, we talk about what makes Scuttlebutt different: it’s a network that resists aggregation, massification, and centralisation. Scuttlebutt is succeeding where Diaspora failed precisely because it doesn’t seek to replace the social media behemoths: Scuttlebutt is tiny by design, happy to be human, and based around the ethos of ‘solarpunk’ — a vision of a future we actually want, where high technology is put in service of humans and the environment.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak | Season SponsorPrivate Internet Access

Episode Sponsor ZCash Company

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof.

Sponsorship slots are currently full. For future sponsor opportunities, please email [email protected]

Download this episode from our website at: https://stealthisshow.com/s04e04/

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In this episode we meet Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and co-founder of Boing Boing. Cory’s most recent book, Walkaway, is a story of refusing a life of surveillance and control under a high-tech oligarchy and the struggle to live in a post-scarcity gift economy where even death has been defeated.

Over this one hour plus interview we discuss:

- Whether filesharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important
- How the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants
- Why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a society — we can all live with.

After taking a detour into Cory’s views on cryptocurrency and Bitcoin’s chances of ”bailing out’ an economy saturated with fictitious money, we move onto discussing Walkaway and a future of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ versus one of mega-rich plutocrats (think Bezos) controlling the economy — and our lives — via massive machine empires. How do we exit from a scenario in which machines make everything plentiful — but none of them are owned by us?

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Download this episode from our website:
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In this episode, we meet Primavera De Filippi, author of the recently published ‘Blockchain and the Law‘, from Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Primavera is interested in how the law will change to accommodate blockchain — and how blockchain might replace parts of the law. We’ve already seen how P2P filesharing strained the world’s copyright law: what changes will be ushered in by P2P money?

We discuss the future of blockchain-based technologies, and whether decentral systems are doomed to create new incumbents and new forms of centralisation; whether (and how) forking could be a solution against this ‘re-centralisation’; and how Ethereum’s smart contracts may have a fatal flaw that the philosophy of law already knows about.

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, with a particular focus on blockchain technologies. She is investigating the new opportunities for these technologies to enable new governance models and participatory decision-making through the concept of governance-by-design.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

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Download this episode and more from our site at: https://stealthis..

In this episode we meet Abhishta, one of the authors of the paper ‘The Business Model Of A Botnet’, from the University of Twente in Netherlands. This fascinating research was widely discussed on release, at least partly due to its insights into the astonishing sums of money botnet operators are making — and how they’re doing it. We sit down with Abhishta to discuss how Botnets are created, and the multiple ways they can be used to make profit for their operators; attacks on critical internet infrastructure like Dyn; and the surprising actors behind some big DDOS attacks on banks in the Netherlands. Abhishta fills us in on so-called ‘stresser‘ botnet operations like Lizard Stresser, a kind of rent-a-botnet model, and we consider the surprising accessibility of mother of all attacks: a DDOS against the internet itself — and how it could be used to net billions of dollars.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

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In this episode we meet Chris Beams, founder of the decentralised cryptocurrency exchange Bisq. We discuss the concept of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), and whether The Pirate Bay was an early example; how the start of Bitcoin parallels the start of the Internet itself; and why the meretricious Bitcoin Cash fork of Bitcoin is based on a misunderstanding of Open Source development. Finally then we get into Bisq itself, discussing the potential political importance of decentralised crypto exchanges in the context of any future attempts by the financial establishment to control cryptocurrency.

This is part one of a two-part interview; the second part will be released to Patreon supporters first, and then on the main feed.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

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What is the alt-right, and what does it have to do with online culture? In this episode we meet Elizabeth Sandifer, author of Neoreaction, A Basilisk. Riffing off the material in her book, we talk through the origins of the alt-right, Richard Spencer, and a potential relation to 4Chan’s Anonymous movement. Then we look at so-called Neoreactionary (NrX) theorists such as Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, asking what it is they want for the world and what their arms may (or may not) have in common with early Marxism. Finally we look at the fascinating concept of The Great Filter: what is it, how do we survive it, and are Elon Musk, Nick Land and Peter Thiel all hunting for different solutions to the same problem? And last, but not least: the many lives of The Red Pill.

Please note that although Elizabeth is referred to as Phil and Philip in the epsiode, she has since transitioned and is now known as Elizabeth.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Download this episode at: https://stealthisshow.com/s03e14/

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n this episode we meet Chris Beams, founder of the decentralised cryptocurrency exchange Bisq. We discuss the concept of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), and whether The Pirate Bay was an early example; how the start of Bitcoin parallels the start of the Internet itself; and why the meretricious Bitcoin Cash fork of Bitcoin is based on a misunderstanding of Open Source development. Finally then we get into Bisq itself, discussing the potential political importance of decentralised crypto exchanges in the context of any future attempts by the financial establishment to control cryptocurrency.

This is part one of a two-part interview; the second part will be released to Patreon supporters first, and then on the main feed.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Visit our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stealthisshow

Download this episode from our website at: https://stealthisshow.com/s03e13/

In this episode we meet Sam Woolley, director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, to dig deeper into the topic of troll farms, political disinformation and the use of social media bots to create what Sam calls ‘Computational Propaganda’. What happens when the ability to create propaganda is democratized out of the hands of governments and corporate media and into the hands of unknown, weird and downright dangerous online actors?

The paper Sam co-wrote, ‘Computational Propaganda in the United
States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online’, is available.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully)
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Download this episode on the Steal This Show website:
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In this episode we meet Vinay Gupta: software engineer, disaster consultant and global resilience guru. Vinay served as Release Co-ordinator for the Ethereum project, and is now CEO of Mattereum, ‘the first Internet of Agreements infrastructure project, bringing legally-enforceable smart contracts to the internet.’ We discuss: the idea of a ‘nerd Reich’ that has either usurped power from or merged with global governmental power; how and why we now live in a market-driven version of Orwell’s 1984; and Vinay’s concept of de-governance, and why the modern nation state is the wrong platform to solve the problems that face us today.

Starting out in the 1990s as a computer programmer, Gupta shifted his attention to environmental and infrastructure risk around the turn of the century, becoming involved with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a leading US think-tank dedicated to the sustainable use of energy and resources. He was on the editorial team for two of its books, the Pentagon-funded Winning the Oil Endgame and Small is Profitable, winner of the 2003 Economist book of the year. Since then, his work on state failure and critical infrastructure has seen him contribute to US Department of Defense research projects, consult for the engineering and design firm Arup on urban resilience and most recently, take on a role as an associate fellow at the UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies in London.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Riley Byrne
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak
Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Download this episode on the Steal This Show website:
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It seems everyone’s getting in on the “fake news” game today, from far-right parties in Germany to critics of Catalan separatism — but none more concertedly than the Russian state itself.

In this episode we meet Ben Nimmo, Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, to talk us through the latest patterns and trends in online disinformation and hybrid warfare. ‘People who really want to cause trouble can make up just about anything,’ explains Ben, ‘and the fakes are getting more and more complex. It’s really quite alarming.’

After cluing us in on the state of information warfare today, we discuss evidence that the Russians are deploying a fully-funded ‘Troll Factory’ across dominant social networks whose intent is to distort reality and sway the political conversation in favour of its masters.

We dig deep into the present history of the ‘Battle Of The Bots’, looking specifically at the activities of the fake Twitter account @TEN_GOP, whose misinformation has reached all the way to the highest tier of American government. Can we control or counter these rogue informational entities? What’s the best way to do so? Do we need ‘Asimov Laws’ for a new generation of purely online, but completely real, information entities?

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Riley Byrne
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email [email protected]

Download this episode at StealThisShow.com
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In this episode we meet Diani Barreto from the Berlin Bureau of ExposeFacs. Launched in June 2014, ExposeFacts.org supports and encourages whistleblowers to disclose information that citizens need to make truly informed decisions in a democracy, aiming to shed light on concealed activities that are relevant to human rights, corporate malfeasance, the environment, civil liberties and war.

We start by discussing Diani’s Cuban heritage, the recent mysterious aural attacks against diplomats in Cuba, and how her work with Telecomix trying to network the country attracted the unwelcome attention of the American Heritage Foundation. Then we move through a range of topics including whether the media establishment has lost the power determine what counts as ‘reality’ in political discussion; Facebook’s political function and whether it’s more like a branch of government than a company; how the new information incumbents like Facebook, Twitter and Wikileaks are coping with their status; and if Silicon Valley’s mantra of “disrupt all the things” is actually resetting our social landscape in favour of the unpleasant and unwanted alt-right.

Diani Barreto is a Cuban-American painter, media artist, translator, information activist and independent researcher on whistleblowers and hacktivism.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Riley Byrne
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch
Presented by TorrentFreak
Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize
Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

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In this episode we meet ZCash’s Paige Peterson. ZCash is a privacy-enhanced fork of Bitcoin that can provide fully anonymous transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography.

We discuss ZCash’s relationship to Bitcoin and why Bitcoin could use a community manager; how the first P2P revolution in filesharing is segueing into the P2P money revolution – even bringing along some of the same developers; the role ZCash could play in hyperinflated economies like Venezuela’s, and even closer to home; how (and if) government can continue after a general shift to using crypto as money; and finally we delve into New Hampshire’s libertarian Free State Project, whose participants are doing a kind of ‘live philosophy’ on how future communities run on Bitcoin or ZCash might work. Could we have socialism without centralisation or ‘big government’?

Paige has been immersed within the peer-to-peer technology world for 5 years and counting. Through roles with mesh networking startup Open Garden, P2P storage and communications company, MaidSafe, and as Co-organizer for the San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup, she has gained appreciation for the diverse applications of decentralized networks. She is interested in a wide variety of digital media and tech entrepreneurship and is an advocate for open standards, user privacy and decentralized technologies. After receiving a BFA practicing experimental tech art with a strong focus on complexity in nature, her interest was drawn towards political and technological activism centering around concepts and tools for individual empowerment.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Riley Byrne
Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch
Presented by TorrentFreak
Sponsored by Private Internet Access & Premiumize
Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

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