Cambridge, MA – Over the weekend of March 19-20, 2016, hundreds of technologists and digital activists gathered at MIT’s modern Stata Center for #Libreplanet 2016. This year, Libreplanet featured sessions on the latest turns in the free software world, including case studies, emerging battle-lines of centralized control and open culture. Speakers discussed organizing digital measures to protect privacy while battling sweeping government and corporate surveillance trends. Unicorn Riot is onsite interviewing people and mirroring official live video feeds with permission from the event’s host, the Free Software Foundation. Our video event is here.

In the opening keynote Q/A, Edward Snowden discussed how technically minded activists can start building the next generation of privacy tools on top of a hostile telecom spying environment. He suggested to moderator Daniel Kahn Gillmor, with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, that tech activists could even create a free software app, providing encrypted privacy for emerging virtual reality tech platforms.

Unicorn Riot is planning to cover a Sunday evening protest against the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proposal to add ‘Digital Rights Management’ (DRM) controls into the HTML specification — the rules browsers use to display websites (background info). The protest and a DRM discussion panel at the MIT Media Lab at 8PM are both outside the Libreplanet event itself, but supported by many related organizations and attendees.

Unicorn Riot interviews (Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike With Attribution):

Interview with Sasha Constanza-Chock (@Schock) from MIT about community digital networks and their discussion with Edward Snowden:

Interview with Cooper Quintin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also speaking as an individual on freeing Jeremy Hammond:

 

 

You can join the IRC chat for Libreplanet here. The live video feeds are here. A temporary set of large rips from the feeds is here, posted by a supporter. Edited clips from the FSF media crew are posted here. An icecast server is here.

Steam archives below:

 

This post will be updated as things develop today. During Sunday’s conference, a lot of matters involving the future of the Internet are at stake, particularly privacy, tracking and surveillance, and corporate attempts to extend control of Internet protocols.

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