The Cryptosphere: eyeball the whole gang!

Say hello to the best roundup of writers in the cryptozone! We’re big fans of all our writers here (that’s why they are here), so we thought we’d put them all in one giant Snow Crash party room and perform the introductions.

In order of appearance:

Lorraine Murphy by Robert Shaer

Lorraine Murphy: founding editor of the Cryptosphere. Freelancer at The Intercept, contributor to Slate, Salon, the Daily Dot, Business in Vancouver, Occupational Pursuit magazine, and others.

Lorraine “raincoaster” Murphy is founder of raincoaster media, specializing in transformative social media training, as well as President Emeritus of Social Media Club of Vancouver, and has been a professional blogger and social media trainer since 2002. She specializes in teaching beginners and those with barriers to internet use, and in social media for social change.

Her flagship blog, raincoaster.com, has been studied as part of the New Media curriculum in three universities, and the comments thread on her Mummified Fairy post has been called “one of the most beautiful things on the internet.” She once got into a flamewar with the nation of Albania, and won. She conducts workshops in the transformative use of social media for the homeless and marginalized on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Ali Eteraz

Ali Eteraz is the author of the forthcoming surrealist short story collection FALSIPEDIES & FIBSIENNES (Guernica Ed. 2014). Previously he wrote the darkly comic memoir, Children of Dust (HarperCollins, 2009), which was on the Fall Reading List at O: The Oprah Magazine and was a New Statesman Book of the Year.

He wrote on the issue of technological imperialism as it applies to the support (or not) of the Nastaliq script, used by more than 200 million people worldwide.

Douglas Lucas

Douglas Lucas is a writer, journalist, researcher, and activist most known for covering jailed journalist Barrett Brown’s case and, as part of an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks, turning Stratfor emails into U.S.­Mexico drug war articles. His work about national security matters, internet freedom, nightlife, and more has appeared at Vice, Salon, WhoWhatWhy, The Daily Dot, Nerve, and other venues. He studied philosophy and literature at TCU, graduating summa cum laude. He also enjoys writing fiction, mainly in the SF and fantasy genres. Twitter:@DouglasLucas. Email: DAL@riseup.net (PGP key available).

Douglas wrote a de-briefing and report of hacker conference HOPE-X, which he dramatically capped off with the story of watching his phone being hacked in real time. Will the real culprits step forward? We’d love an interview.

Curt Hopkins

Curt Hopkins has written about punks in Berlin, Gypsies in Granada and nerds in Nairobi for Newsweek, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, New Times and others.

He was the founding director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the first non-profit dedicated to the liberty and safety of bloggers worldwide.

Curt contributed this meditation on the nature of Anonymous and anonymity in an age of celebrity, where privacy is both un-lucrative and essential for acts of resistance. Curt is now our weekly Numbers columnist, analyzing the events of the week in poetic form.

Lucky

Jered Morgan, aka Lucky, is a 31 year old phone phreak and privacy advocate who likes to keep things simple.

Jered wrote about why he refuses to show ID when using a credit card, and why you should too.

AnonyOdinn

AnonyOdinn is co-author of abis.io. Odinn ran down the exhaustive list of non-traditional anti-bank money options in Stop the Power: How to Do Business Without Banks and offered a checklist for strategies to deal with censorship in Censorship Resistance and Decentralization Methods. We are pleased to feature Part II of this ongoing meditation in Censorship Resistance and Decentralization Methods (II).

Peter Van Buren

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq. Following his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department on his own terms. Peter’s commentary has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, NPR, Al Jazzeera, Huffington Post, The Nation, TomDispatch, Antiwar.com, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, Michael Moore.com, Le Monde, Asia Times, The Guardian (UK), Daily Kos, Middle East Online, Guernica and others. He has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air, CurrentTV, HuffPo Live, RT, ITV, Britain’s Channel 4 Viewpoint, CCTV, Voice of America, and more.

Peter contributed his humourous essay NSA Quits Spying on Americans Out of Disgust.

Griffin Boyce

Griffin Boyce is an independent researcher focused on censorship, usability, and communication. He’s also an open-source software developer, with a keen interest in educating the general public about online privacy. His projects include Cupcake (wrappers for flashproxy), Satori (censorship-resistant software distribution), and Stormy (easy Tor hidden service creation). Griffin introduced the Cryptosphere to the concept of ClipboardSec.

Heather Marsh

Heather Marsh is a semi-regular contributor to the Cryptosphere as well as a human rights and internet activist, programmer and political theorist. She is the author of Binding Chaos, a study of methods of mass collaboration.

In 2010 she became administrator, editor in chief and domain holder for the Wikileaks endorsed[1] news site Wikileaks Central. She used WL Central to tie Wikileaks releases to current events and advocate for social change under the slogan “News, analysis, action.” The Action section contained protest calendars, petitions, and information for activists. The site published in 16 languages and protests were listed for over one hundred countries. A Canadian activist, she created Take the Square Canada and worked with activists around the world to “encourage and facilitate connection and communication for the revolution”.[5] Some of those groups were the South Korean Hope Riders, the North African Day of Rages, the Chinese Jasmine Revolution, the Spanish Indignados/Take the Square movement and the US Occupy movement. She began writing A Proposal for Governance in November 2011 and was invited to the Berlin Biennale from April – June 2012 to work with other hackers on creation of the Global Square. She represented the Berlin Biennale hackathon at the World Free Media Forum in Rio in June 2012.

Ian King

Ian King’s on-again, off-again journalism career has careened up and down the Canadian province of British Columbia. While he started writing in Prince George, he’s best known in Vancouver as the former news editor at the legendary Terminal City Weekly. After that paper folded, he was 24 Hours’s man at Vancouver City Hall and wrote a much-lauded and often-despised political column. Following yet another round of layoffs and the frustrations of freelancing, he went north to Fort St. John, where he now works on control systems in the gas fields. This occupation helps satisfy his wanderlust and exposes his to all sorts of odd techogizmos. Once in a while, he ends up writing again; in this case, about himself in the third person.

Despite being recruited to contribute to The Cryptosphere, he still considers himself a washed-up hack. Ian profiled Canada’s Sergeant at Arms in Kevin Vickers, Canadian badass and a new standard for security and law enforcement.

GonzoPhD

Gonzo PhD is a semi-regular contributor to the Cryptosphere. In professional life, he is an infosecurity consultant. In his spare time, he creates festive headgear for Twitter avatars; by appointment only. His most recent contribution to our site is The Dream Leads to Nowhere: the Farcical Use of the “Anonymous” Collective’s Imagery to Instill Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in Corporate Warfare.

Ian Campbell, Neurovagrant

Ian Campbell is a writer and rogue technologist working out of Central Massachusetts. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, updating the Neurovagrant blog once in a while and incessantly lurking on both Twitter and IRC. His primary interests include futurism, foreign policy, information security and surveillance. Ian contributed his thoughts on why encryption is not just a good idea, but an actual civic responsibility, in I Have Something To Hide.

Hamilton Nolan

Hamilton Nolan is the longest-tenured writer still at Gawker Media. His work there includes publishing the serial Hello from the Underclass: Stories from the Unemployment Line, as well as exposés of working conditions and profit margins at Walmart and Amazon. Explaining his metamorphosis from PRWeek hack to champion of the proletariat, he told Romenesko, “I realized very early on that you can be friends with everyone or you can say what you actually think about everyone, but you can’t do both. If you want the privilege of saying exactly what you think about media people, you have to accept that you might not be that popular with media people. But I feel like I’m OBLIGED to speak the unvarnished (and sometimes mean) truth as best I can, because our role here is to say that stuff for all the people out there who aren’t in a position to say it, but wish they could.” Hamilton supplied The People Want To Be Able To Live, a cross-post from his regular perch at Gawker. Author photo via the Daily Banter.

ro0ted

ro0ted is founder of the hacker crew of the same name, one of the oldest hacker groups still active. He is an ebook author, tutorial writer, and contributor to Cyberguerrilla. He shared with us his advice for choosing the best VPN of all.

Joe Fionda like a Sir

Joe Fionda is a New York based Italian-Irish American actor and associate producer of The Hacker Wars. When he isn’t creating lulz for film & TV he is editor & tech ops for globalrevolution.tv.

Anabelle Bernard Fournier

Anabelle Bernard Fournier is a freelance writer and professional blogger whose work spans lifestyle, arts and culture, sexuality and business. She also tries to teach undergrad students how to write business documents, and hopefully is successful most of the time. She’s far from a grammar nazi, but has major issues with passive sentences.

She’s a devourer of books with an addiction to libraries. Because free books. She’ll read anything, from literary fiction to investigative journalism to science-fiction to memoirs, but in general prefers the sci-fi stuff. She also knits, crochets, sews and plays the flute.

Maybe one day you’ll get to read some fiction she wrote. if you keep asking for it, maybe she’ll get to writing some.
Anabelle is the Cryptosphere’s Book Editor. You can find her reviews under the Reviews tag.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., a native of Japan, is a writer, columnist, researcher, and First Amendment advocate. She is a former contributing writer to WL Central and has been covering issues of free speech, transparency and the vital role of whistleblowers in global society. Her writing has appeared on diverse outlets such as Counterpunch, CommonDreams, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Global Research and Antiwar. Her work has been published in the At Issue Series; The Occupy Movement by Greenhaven Press, Global Issues, Local Arguments by Pearson Education andKrytyka Polityczna Global Activism by Autonome Universität Berlin. She currently resides in the SF Bay Area and is a guest writer at Falkvinge &Co. on Infopolicy, where she explores the role that Bitcoin and other decentralized platforms play in strengthening civil liberties.Twitter: @nozomimagine. Email: nhayase@riseup.net (PGP key ID: 0x37780FFE)

Tyler L. Jones

I’m Tyler Jones. I’m just a normal guy in an abnormal world; I’m also an Information Security fanatic. I am currently pursuing a Master’s of Science in Information Technology with a heavy concentration in Security. I’m a #MegaNerd, but I’m alright with that; it’s the age of the geek, after all. I hack things, or so I’ve been told. I study intelligence gathering techniques for a living. The Internet is my domain; welcome to my world. You won’t be able to hide here.

Kitty Hundal

Kitty Hundal is the owner of Kitty Hundal Dot Com Solutions which provides professional services to small business, non-profits and professional offices. She is the author of several blogs and joint author on the new blog, hacktivist culture.  In addition to writing opinion pieces on current events, she is also in the process of writing her first novel to be released in June, 2015.

Raymond Johansen

Raymond Johansen is a global privacy advocate, hardcore pirate, Norwegian Pirate Party activist, and also an advisor to FreeAnons. Raymond works on causes all over the world trying to help all those oppressed and in danger. He fights against torture and for refugees. He also has been hunting pedophiles, right-wing haters, and government shills. Raymond is known for working on high profile causes like Freeanons, Free Barret Brown, Free Jeremy Hammond, and Pirate issues. He has been very vocal in all things relating to mass surveillance. His voice is one of those that are important to a large number of people fighting to keep our freedoms intact. He has a lot of very high profile friends in teh Pirate movement, Occupy and Anonymous.

Lauri Love

Lauri Love is a UK-based activist, technologist, miscreant, ne’er-do-well, alleged criminal mastermind and threat to western civilization, freedom and autonomy enthusiast. We’ll probably get on fine, unless you prefer money and power to principle. Distributed throughout the cosmos https://keybase.io/nsh

Stanley Cohen

Attorney. Activist. Freedom Fighter. ‘Certified Selfloathing’ Jew. AntiZionist. Prolific. Beard Aficionado. New Yorker. Unfortunately tenacious Yankees fan.

Stanley’s contribution to the Cryptosphere was the long read Prison America. As a resident of one such institution, he knows of what he writes.