CryptoRave 2017 (São Paulo, 5-6 May 2017)

From Friday 5 to Saturday 6 May 2017, a network of Brazilian activist collectives convened CryptoRave 2017 at Casa do Povo in central São Paulo's Bom Retiro neighbourhood — the fourth edition of what was already and would remain the largest free-and-open cryptography, privacy, and digital-rights convening in Latin America, with over 2,500 attendees predominantly from South America, 140-plus registered activities (twice the 2016 edition's count), and a 24-hour continuous programme of talks, workshops, and exchanges on security, cryptography, hacking, anonymity, privacy, and network freedom. The 2017 edition is the corpus's anchor for the CryptoRave annual line, the corpus's first Brazilian Event, and the corpus's first hacker-and-activist-register Latin American convening — pairing the cryptography-and-cypherpunk-rooted Brazilian grassroots organising tradition with the corpus's existing policy-and-advocacy organisational anchors via the Listatona workshop that Coding Rights co-organised with the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), and via the investigative-journalism debate featuring Joana Varon of Coding Rights and Andrew Fishman of The Intercept Brazil.

Context

CryptoRave was founded in 2014 in São Paulo as a direct response to the Edward Snowden revelations and to the wider 2013-14 Brazilian civil-society debate around the Marco Civil da Internet — the Brazilian civil framework for the internet — that had positioned Brazil as a regional and global reference point for rights-based internet policy. The convening grew out of a 2013 CryptoParty (~300 participants) into a 24-hour continuous format by 2014, drawing over one thousand people that year and over two thousand at the 2015 second edition at Centro Cultural São Paulo. By the 2017 fourth edition, the convening had stabilised at the ~2,500-attendee scale and was being organised by a volunteer core of roughly ten people, with more women than men in its lead team, drawing on a wider partner network of more than five organisations and twenty individuals. At the 2017 edition the named organising collectives on the event's own site were Actantes, E-Ativismo (Escola de Ativismo), Intervozes, Saravá, and Encripta Tudo — a partner roster broadly continuous with the later four-collective steering structure (Escola de Ativismo, Actantes, Saravá, Marialab) recorded at the 2023 sixth edition.

The convening's standing posture is crowdfunding-only — government and corporate funding is refused as a matter of organising principle — and a Safe Space Policy, Ada Lovelace gender-and-technology space, and explicit racial-diversity policies are core organising practices, in Elisa Ximenes's framing as a core organiser. The 2017 edition recorded 601 crowdfunding contributors underwriting the free admission. The convening's substantive frame across editions — set out on the 2017 site as "segurança, criptografia, hacking, anonimato, privacidade e liberdade na rede" and continuing into the 2023 edition's "sem privacidade não há liberdade" — anchors a Brazilian and Latin American cypherpunk-rooted tradition that overlaps with but is methodologically distinct from the policy-research register of organisations like Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, and the wider Al Sur consortium.

What happened over the 24 hours

CryptoRave 2017 ran as a single 24-hour continuous programme of over 140 registered activities — talks, workshops, hands-on technical sessions, debates, and an after-party — distributed across Casa do Povo's three floors and overflow venues. The international keynote roster spanned the cypherpunk-and-surveillance-journalism register and the activist-design-and-feminist-hacktivism register at once. James Bamford — the American investigative journalist whose long career documenting the U.S. National Security Agency had become canonical reference material for the post-Snowden cryptography community — delivered a keynote on the surveillance landscape beyond the Snowden revelations. Lili_anaz, a Mexican researcher working on feminist hacktivism, and Sasha Costanza-Chock of MIT delivered the activist-design keynote pair, on strategies for communicating security and cryptography concepts to general audiences rather than only to technical practitioners — directly addressing the convening's standing commitment to making digital-rights discussions publicly accessible. Intrigeri, a core developer of the Tails operating system that Snowden himself used, brought the tooling-and-software-development register into the programme.

The investigative-journalism thread anchored on a debate between Joana Varon of Coding Rights and Andrew Fishman of The Intercept Brazil on independent investigative journalism in the surveillance era — connecting the Brazilian feminist digital-rights register (through Varon) with the Snowden-files investigative-journalism register (through Fishman, who had been part of Glenn Greenwald's Intercept Brasil team since the publication's launch).

The most directly corpus-relevant programmed block was the OONI / Coding Rights collaborative line. OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference — the Tor Project's network-measurement initiative that documents internet censorship and traffic interference globally — co-organised with Coding Rights the Listatona presentation and workshop, in which participants were walked through OONI Probe's network-testing methodology and how the tool performs measurements of website blocking, censorship, and surveillance behaviour. The workshop's operational purpose was to harvest crowdsourced test-list URLs from across South America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and the wider region), substantially extending OONI's regional test-list coverage with locally-meaningful URLs that the network-measurement community could then run against from inside those countries. The Listatona was the principal site at which the Coding Rights / OONI partnership routed Brazilian and wider Latin American civil-society knowledge of locally-blocked or locally-surveilled sites into a global open-source network-measurement infrastructure.

Coding Rights additionally used the CryptoRave 2017 floor as the launch venue for a workshop on the Map of Internet Territories project — the Latin American internet-infrastructure mapping project named in the Coding Rights project portfolio as a study of the physical infrastructure and power dynamics of internet access across the region — making CryptoRave 2017 the project's first public-workshop airing.

Coding Rights at CryptoRave 2017

CryptoRave 2017 is the corpus's clearest single-event anchor for Coding Rights outside its own programme infrastructure. The organisation appeared at the convening through three distinct programme threads. The Listatona workshop — co-organised with OONI — connected Coding Rights's standing work on Brazilian and Latin American surveillance and censorship-monitoring to OONI's global open-source network-measurement infrastructure, harvesting locally-sourced test-list URLs and walking participants through OONI Probe's methodology. The Map of Internet Territories workshop used the CryptoRave 2017 floor as the public-workshop launch site for one of the Coding Rights project portfolio's regional-infrastructure mapping lines. And the investigative-journalism debate — Joana Varon with Andrew Fishman of The Intercept Brazil — placed the Brazilian feminist digital-rights research register alongside the Snowden-files investigative-journalism register in a single working conversation.

The same edition's keynote pairing of Sasha Costanza-Chock with lili_anaz also anchors a Coding Rights cross-reference, via the longer-running collaboration between Costanza-Chock and Varon that would, four years later, produce the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies card-deck workshop methodology in partnership with the Design Justice Network.

Significance

CryptoRave 2017 is the corpus's first Event located in Brazil, the corpus's first Event located in Latin America, and the corpus's first Event in the cryptography-and-privacy-cypherpunk-rooted hacker-and-activist convening sub-type — closing the Brazil event anchor (previously zero), the Latin American event anchor (previously zero), and the cryptography-and-privacy-convening event sub-type (previously zero) in a single record. It is also the corpus's anchor for the standing CryptoRave annual line — an annual, free-admission, volunteer-organised, ~2,500-to-3,000-attendee Brazilian convening that has run with broad continuity from 2014 across editions in 2015 (Centro Cultural São Paulo, 2,000+), 2016, 2017 (the 4th edition recorded here, Casa do Povo), 2018, 2019, an interruption around the 2020-2021 pandemic period (with online-only or rescheduled editions), 2022, 2023 (the 36-hour 6th edition at Centro Cultural São Paulo), 2024 (the 8th edition at the Mário de Andrade Library, 10-11 May 2024), and forward into 2025 and 2026 — making the convening line, alongside the Coding Rights project portfolio and the wider Al Sur consortium, one of the three durable Brazilian and Latin American grassroots digital-rights infrastructures in the corpus's frame.

In the corpus's wider regional-convening shape, CryptoRave pairs with the EngageMedia-anchored Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly line for the Asia-Pacific, the Paradigm Initiative Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum cadence for pan-Africa, and the SMEX Bread & Net unconference for the West Asia and North Africa region — supplying the corpus's Latin American regional-convening anchor. The four convening lines together cover the principal regional shapes of the make-AI-good movement's grassroots and civil-society layer outside the corpus's North-Atlantic core, though CryptoRave is distinct from the other three in register: where DRAPAC, DRIF, and Bread & Net are civil-society digital-rights assemblies anchored in NGOs and policy-research organisations, CryptoRave is a cryptography-and-cypherpunk-rooted hacker-and-activist convening anchored in volunteer collectives and a refused-corporate-funding posture. That register-distinctness is itself substantive: it marks the Brazilian and Latin American digital-rights tradition's grounding in cypherpunk technical-practice communities alongside policy-research organisations, rather than in policy-research organisations alone.

CryptoRave 2017 is also the corpus's first anchor on the Brazilian Marco Civil da Internet and post-Snowden Brazilian civil-society digital-rights tradition more generally — the policy-and-organising context that produced Coding Rights as a 2015 founding, that produced the wider Brazilian feminist-tech and decolonial digital-rights field Joana Varon's career has been substantially located in, and that anchors the corpus's Brazilian thread.