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The Peng Collective is a group of culture jamming activists based in Berlin. [1] In 2016, the collective was part of the Berlin Biennale, [2] in 2018 of the Manifesta Biennale [3] and the Athens Biennale. [4] In 2018, they were awarded the Aachen Peace Prize. It was originally founded as Peng Media in 1998. Since 2019, the group offers free consulting for climate-change related issues.
Through actions of tactical media, [5] the Peng Collective wants to inspire other activists and civil society organisations to be more courageous in their campaigning methods. "Let's learn from our enemies," one of their members says in an interview. "If you look at the economics of corporations, their state of mind is: 'let's look at every possible gray area of laws and use them.' And NGOs just don't do that." [6] They are known for wearing animal masks as sign of biological appropriation whenever they are on stage and to break the law "whenever necessary for the greater good. And yes, the arts can be a greater good."
They got international media attention when they held a presentation called "Your data, our future" in the Name of Google at Europe's largest tech conference re:publica in 2014. All presented products were designed to gather more data from the consumers, claiming that this is in their best interest. [7] [8] After Google threatened them to take down their parody website, [9] the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) supported them legally:
Unfortunately, Google's skin was not thick enough to withstand this relatively gently ribbing. The company wrote a polite note to the collective, expressing their sincere respect for political commentary—but nonetheless demanding that Peng! revise the site and assign the domain name to Google. Note to Google: polite trademark bullying is still bullying. EFF responded to Google on Peng's behalf, explaining what should be obvious: the site was pure noncommercial political commentary. Trademark owners should not and cannot punish activists simply because they happen to use trademarks in the course of that kind of commentary.
— Corynne Mcsherry in an EFF letter to Google: Parody Is Not Trademark Infringement [10]
Invited as fake persona to a conference of the oil company Shell, they created an oil spill on stage instead of the expected presentation. [11] [12] The evening was a public relations event organized by Burson Marsteller in Berlin, where one member of the Collective could enter the stage because he claimed to have created a car that is cleaning the air.
In 2015, the group infiltrated the Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin with a fake polar bear and The Yes Men to go on stage and insist that divestment from fossil fuels is helping more against climate change than charity projects. Pussy Riot, who was invited as speaker to the charity gala came to support them, when the organizers of the event tried to silence them with security guards. [13] [14]
In May 2015, they developed a bot script that scans Twitter for abusive and sexist language. Once detected, plenty of automated Twitter profiles would reply to those tweets with an invitation to a self-help program for trolls to become feminists. [15]
In September 2015, the Peng Collective staged an association named Intelexit helping anyone working for secret services to quit their jobs and transition to civil life, be it for ethical or psychological reasons. [16]
During the launch of the campaign, they rallied with an advertising trucks and mobile billboards in front of several secret services workplaces around the world like the German BND, the GCHQ Headquarters in the UK, the US military bases in Germany Dagger Complex and Lucius D. Clay Kaserne and the NSA's Headquarters in the US, Maryland, where they also drove to the employees lunch place Café Joe [17] They also performed an airborne leaflet operation over the Dagger Complex with a drone advertising for the exit program. [18]
Intelexit now operates phone booth installations in arts and journalists venues where participants can call up secret service employees such as the FBI, NSA, CIA and private subcontractors like Trovicor or Booz Allen Hamilton in the US, but also officers from Germany, France, Canada and Great Britain. [19] The organisation invites people to set up the call installation all over the world to create an ongoing dialogue between civil society and the intelligence community.
In Schwenke (Halver), Peng! had founded a fictitious CDU local association, which appealed to party leader Angela Merkel to campaign against the export of small arms in the next legislative period. This appeal was also reported in international media. Later the communication guerrilla action was confirmed by Peng!.
In the same week, Peng! started an alleged recall of small arms from the manufacturer Heckler & Koch by sending letters to US arms dealers on its behalf. The web pages of Heckler & Koch in the US and Germany were then provided for several days with the news that they had been the victims of a hacker attack and fake news. [20]
In the same week, the group released a video documenting how they awarded a peace prize for the arms industry and how Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems only left shortly before the alleged award ceremony.
As part of this series of actions, Peng! published five legislative proposals for the renewal of the War Weapons Control Act and for the "Rescue of Article 26 GG".
With this Campaign PENG called people to snatch goods in supermarkets and to pay unions of the producers in the global south instead. They created an online-system with which it is possible to do so through their website, seemingly an online-shop. You can thus pay eight unions fighting for the rights of the workers while PENG is fighting for the introduction of a law in Germany with which you can take German companies accountable for the violation of human rights abroad. [21]
PENG created a photo-booth in which you could create portraits that contain your own face and from someone else by morphing them together. The technology was based on neural networks by OpenAI and megapixels by Adam Harvey. [22] They themselves created a German passport that contained both one member from their team and Federica Mogherini. They also sent five passports to co-artists in Libya with whom they morphed the faces to let them enter Europa as both real and symbolic gesture of civil disobedience against the border regime. [23] The photo booth was further shown in Vienna and Munich on art exhibitions.
On the Athens Biennale 2018 named "ANTI", Peng contributed by installing a call center with six Greek employees paid by German tax money on minimum wage who are calling the financial regulation institutions for six weeks. They ask them questions that are being posted on their website and try to get them to explain the logic of financial argumentation in understandable language. [24]
ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primarily based at "The Doughnut" in the suburbs of Cheltenham, GCHQ is the responsibility of the country's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, but it is not a part of the Foreign Office and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary.
Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security founded by Boris Hagelin in 1952. The company was secretly purchased for US $5.75 million and jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018. The mission of breaking encrypted communication using a secretly owned company was known as "Operation Rubikon". With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.
GCHQ Bude, also known as GCHQ Composite Signals Organisation Station Morwenstow, abbreviated to GCHQ CSO Morwenstow, is a UK Government satellite ground station and eavesdropping centre located on the north Cornwall coast at Cleave Camp, between the small villages of Morwenstow and Coombe. It is operated by the British signals intelligence service, officially known as the Government Communications Headquarters, commonly abbreviated GCHQ. It is located on part of the site of the former World War II airfield, RAF Cleave.
William Grady Ward is an American software engineer, lexicographer, and Internet activist who has been prominent in the Scientology versus the Internet controversy.
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence. Informally, Five Eyes can also refer to the group of intelligence agencies of these countries.
Gemalto was an international digital security company providing software applications, secure personal devices such as smart cards and tokens, e-wallets and managed services. It was formed in June 2006 by the merger of two companies, Axalto and Gemplus International. Gemalto N.V.'s revenue in 2018 was €2.969 billion.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet civil liberties.
The Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), now Computer Network Operations, and structured as S32, is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has been active since at least 1998, possibly 1997, but was not named or structured as TAO until "the last days of 2000," according to General Michael Hayden.
Tempora is the codeword for a formerly-secret computer system that is used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This system is used to buffer most Internet communications that are extracted from fibre-optic cables, so these can be processed and searched at a later time. It was tested from 2008 and became operational in late 2011.
XKeyscore is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.
Bullrun is a clandestine, highly classified program to crack encryption of online communications and data, which is run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has a similar program codenamed Edgehill. According to the Bullrun classification guide published by The Guardian, the program uses multiple methods including computer network exploitation, interdiction, industry relationships, collaboration with other intelligence community entities, and advanced mathematical techniques.
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which he obtained whilst working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad, Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
The Day We Fight Back was a one-day global protest against mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the UK GCHQ, and the other Five Eyes partners involved in global surveillance. The "digital protest" took place on February 11, 2014 with more than 6,000 participating websites, which primarily took the form of webpage banner-advertisements that read, "Dear Internet, we're sick of complaining about the NSA. We want new laws that curtail online surveillance. Today we fight back." Organizers hoped lawmakers would be made aware "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in 2013. The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from the former American National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Wooloo is a Danish artist collective founded by Sixten Kai Nielsen, Russell Ratshin, and Martin Rosengaard.
The Internet Research Agency, also known as Glavset and known in Russian Internet slang as the Trolls from Olgino, is a Russian company engaged in online propaganda and influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests. It is linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, and based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Riseup is a volunteer-run collective providing secure email, email lists, a VPN service, online chat, and other online services. This organization was launched by activists in Seattle with borrowed equipment and a few users in 1999 or 2000, and quickly grew to millions of accounts.
Intelexit is an international project that helps intelligence officers to exit their organisations because of ethical or psychological reasons. It is a project from the Peng Collective, usually known for subversive campaigning and tactical media and was launched on September 28, 2015.
Jean Peters is a German Journalist, Author and Tactical Media Artist born on the Croatian Island Vis. He is known as founding member of the Peng! collective, with which he won the Aachen Peace Prize in 2018., and his investigative journalism at Correctiv. In 2022, he was awarded Reporter of the Year for a joint MeToo investigation.
