radical-networks/speakers/sophie-toupin/index.html

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<h3>Sophie Toupin</h3>
<img src="sophie_drawing_0.jpg" />
<p>Sophie Toupin is a researcher, activist, and feminist hacker based in
Montreal, Canada. Her work explores the linkages between technology and
activism through ethnographic studies and projects. She co-founded a
feminist mobile hacklab in Montreal: Femhack and is involved in creating
a feminist server managed by a feminist tech collective.</p>

<hr />
<h2>Presenting</h2>
<h3>Anti-Colonial Hacking: The Case Study of An Autonomous Encrypted
Communication Network Developed During the Struggle Against Apartheid in
South Africa</h3>
<p>In the 1980s, freedom fighters and hackers from South Africa built an
autonomous encrypted communication network that allowed activists
infiltrated on the ground in South Africa to communicate with the senior
leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) based in Lusaka,
Zambia via London. The encrypted communication network was set up as
part of Operation Vula to attempt to launch a people's war and
ultimately liberate a people's from apartheid. The ingenuousness of the
encrypted communication system is such that it used an assemblage of
technologies including computers, algorithms, tape recorders, acoustic
modem couplers, the international telephone system, among others to
adapt to the difficult context and condition on the ground whether it
was the ubiquitous surveillance by the police state, the lack of
infrastructure or the lack of electricity. This hidden chapter of
history sheds light on one of the most exciting, but untold story of
what I call anti-colonial hacking.</p>

<p>This story is significant for multiple reasons. By shedding light to
this hidden history, my presentation will help enlarge the goals,
aspirations and political nature of the assemblage of transnational
technological and communication networks. It will also allow to give
credit to a continent of the world, Africa that is often eclipsed from
the limelight of technological "innovation" and hackerdom. Moreover, it
will create solidarities between movements with different situated
knowledge, positionalities and contexts without suppressing the
significant and important history of each of them. The desire to craft
an autonomous and non-commercial encrypted infrastructure to bring about
liberation to a people is reminiscent of the work of today's tech
activists. This history fits in the history of tech activism and should
be recognized as such to open up the possibilities of thinking about the
use of crypto and the assemblage of variant forms of technologies for
liberation struggles.</p>