01x08 - Revolt

[bunniefuu]

narrator: The Web transforms us.

We become data, code... uploading our very selves...

...to a place we call the cloud.

But this cloud is grounded in hardware... a chaos of code.

But with the right tools, you can find the signal in the noise.

♪♪

Buehler: I think that we live in a very barbaric society.

We still deal with our problems through the use of v*olence.

Help me, please!

At some point, some people are gonna push back.

Stein: The second you start asking questions, you start making calls.

The way they keep you is by keeping you ignorant.

I got to a point where I was like, "I can't anymore."

I found my way to the Internet.

Wilson: I believe the Internet is mostly a tool the established power can use to monitor you better than they ever did.

But the potentials do cut two ways.

People think they can smash you, but we're vicious and we enjoy the fight.

[g*nshots]

It's just so g*dd*mn fulfilling.

narrator: You say you want a revolution?

Get online.

In here, dissidents, disrupters, and firebrands tap, click, and swipe at the status quo.

Power is being uploaded to the people.

But chip away at the walls of authority and you might get taken down.

Fight for freedom and you might find chaos.

man: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

Please help!

♪♪

Wilson: I think the history of the past two centuries is one of an extremely expanding police state.

[indistinct shouting]

One with institutions which divest the people of all their wealth...

[indistinct shouting]

...hound them, b*at them, k*ll them.

People want to roll you over.

You just can't let that happen.

narrator: In a warehouse on the outskirts of town, Cody Wilson is plotting something radical.

Wilson: I'm an anti-statist.

I like anarchist politics.

I don't believe in large institutions and corporations, the modalities of police-state enforcement.

And I believe that these institutions are very weak, and that they're only puffing their chests up now because they have to hide how weak they are.

How to hit this power, this overwhelming just net of negativity that won't allow you to be anything, do anything, think anything different, dream different dreams.

And we thought, "Yeah, WikiLeaks for g*ns. Yeah, that'll be powerful."

narrator: WikiLeaks for g*ns -- open-source weapons accessible to everyone.

Two years ago, when he was 25 years old, Cody made the first fully functional 3D-printed g*n in his workshop.

16 plastic pieces f*ring real b*ll*ts.

He called it the Liberator.

We stole the narrative of 3D printing.

It wasn't just, "Oh, you're gonna make," you know, "birthday cakes and prosthetics for, you know, children with no arms."

No.

There's gonna be weapons and there's gonna be conflict, and it was a kind of little signal in all that noise of a future that wasn't supposed to happen.

narrator: A Liberator can only be fired once before it needs to be reloaded, and it's dangerous to operate.

Pull the trigger and the plastic could explode.

But that didn't slow the demand.

When Cody published the blueprints to DEFCAD, a deep-web file-sharing site, they were downloaded 100,000 times in just 24 hours and inspired fellow subversives to print and share designs of their own.

Wilson: I see this world that says only the state should have a monopoly on v*olence, and we're challenging that.

The people will have the weapons.

And you can argue, "Well, that's wrong. It shouldn't happen."

Well, it's going to happen.

The Internet means access of everything.

Buehler: I spend four to six hours a day reading these stories, commenting on these stories, sharing these stories with other people.

narrator: Elsewhere in Austin, Antonio Buehler is hunting for the truth.

[siren wailing]

woman: Johnny!

[g*nshots]

Oh, my God!

[g*nshots continue]

Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

[sighs]

The fact that many millions of people have been wrongfully incarcerated and abused, I wonder, would I recognize that this is a problem had this not happened to me?

man: Somebody's gonna get sh*t!

Somebody's gonna get sh*t!

I came from a m*llitary family and a very patriotic part of the country.

I was the first one in my family to end up graduating from high school, and then I went to West Point.

I served in Kosovo when I first got to my unit, and then I served in Iraq.

I had five years of active duty, and then I went straight to Stanford, to the Graduate School of Business, and I decided that I was gonna move to Austin, Texas.

I was on a pretty sure path.

And then my life took a detour.

narrator: On New Year's Eve 2012, Antonio was a designated driver taking a friend home from a party in west Austin.

Buehler: Fuel gauge was on empty, so I decided to pull into a gas station on Lamar and 10th.

There was a police cruiser there with his lights on, and there was a woman outside a sedan in high heels and an evening gown, and it just seemed obvious to us that there was a DWI stop in progress.

The woman in the passenger seat was pretty chill.

It just didn't seem like there was much of a problem.

Another police officer came on the scene and now reached into the car and is ripping the woman out of the car.

Don't worry about it. Help me, please!

Why are you pulling me out of the car?

Mom!

woman: Why are you doing that to her?

Buehler: I pull out my BlackBerry to try to take a picture.

[camera shutter clicking]

The officer pushes me... and puts me in a choke hold and spins me around.

As I'm on the ground, I ask why I was arrested, and he said to me,

"Because you interfered and you spit in my face."

And at that moment, I still did not really understand the gravity of the situation.

♪♪

narrator: Stand up for what you think is right, and like that, there's no turning back.

Life as you know it is over.

He was born with the name Yisroel Avrum Stein.

Now a 23-year-old sophomore at Columbia University, he goes by Abby.

Stein: My father is the 10th generation of the founder of the Hasidic movement.

Both of my grandfathers had their own synagogues.

There was some kind of unsaid expectation that I would end up being a rabbi because of the track that I took growing up.

narrator: Abby was born and raised in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for its young, artsy scene.

But alongside the hipsters, there's an enclave for Hasidic Jews, where Hebrew and Yiddish are the languages on the street, the dress code is straight out of old-world Europe, and much of modern culture is shunned.

♪♪

Stein: Growing up, I didn't know we are different.

I believed that most of the world is Jews and most of the Jews are ultra-Orthodox.

This idea of, like, we have to be separated -- don't speak English, don't use it.

Only speak Yiddish.

That's me pretending to pray when I was 2.

90% of the times, I was a good kid and followed everything, but in my mind, I would question everything.

The idea of souls, the origins of the Bible, the origins of different laws in Judaism.

And that's something that is not allowed and not accepted at all.

narrator: Not everybody in the Hasidic world feels that way.

The Lubavitchers, another Hasidic community in Brooklyn, run chabad.org, the biggest online presence for Judaism in the world.

For them, the Internet is a vehicle for the faith.

But elsewhere in New York, three years ago, 50,000 Hasidic men gathered in a baseball stadium to rally against the potential evils of the Web.

[speaking foreign language]

And the distrust only gets more heated when you look online.

Scour social media and you'll find fervently Orthodox Jews gathering to burn cellphones...

...and crushing phones on YouTube.

[singing in foreign language]

...while Hasidic programmers have developed filters for p*rn and heresy, known as the kosher Internet.

This is one of the kosher phones that I had.

I took it to this organization who blocked everything.

They put a sticker that just says in Hebrew, "kosher," and a serial number.

It's registered to me, and everything is under control.

Everyone was, like, so obsessed with this terrible, terrible thing, the Internet.

They said it's, like, a terrible place where you have access to certain information that is terrible.

I was like, "Great, I can get information there.

Let's go see what it is."

narrator: Every rebel has to start somewhere, whether he's driven by a question or a crisis.

Buehler: I was charged with felony harassment of a public official.

The felony carries a mandatory 2-to 10-year prison sentence.

They put me in a small cell with the light on, no windows, can't even see the clock.

A lot of things went through my head.

Anger, despair, frustration... a desire for revenge.

I thought that my professional career was over.

Everything that I had been working for had been ruined.

[sighs]

Um...

I recognize that, you know, if that's the worst night of my life, it's not that bad compared to what other people have dealt with.

But, yeah, for me it was pretty rough.

[sighs]

narrator: The next day, Antonio was out on bail and learned something that could help his case.

The night of his arrest, his friend had noticed someone filming from across the street.

Another perspective on what happened that night could mean the difference between prison and freedom.

Buehler: I posted on Facebook and Twitter and Craigslist, "Did anyone witness an arrest at the 7-Eleven on Lamar and 10th?"

Interestingly, that's what worked.

Some random guy, on New Year's Day 2012, walking home, saw something happening at the gas station.

And when things escalated, he pulled out his cellphone and took a video of the incident.

Without that, who knows if I would have been pressured into accepting some sort of plea deal?

The grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to justify going to trial.

We got good media coverage.

So, yeah, the cellphone video was huge.

narrator: On social media and in the news, allegations of police abuse are going viral.

About 1/3 of the country's 1,700 police departments are using body cams to document encounters with suspects, while citizens armed with cellphone cameras are filming back.

Eyewitnesses filmed the deaths and arrests of Walter Scott...

Eric Garner...

Michael Brown... and Freddie Gray.

Videos that ignited mass protests and sparked a more than 400% increase in tweets with the #PoliceBrutality.

Buehler: Cop watching is a rare instance where you're holding the police accountable.

The police have to answer for their actions because you're documenting it, and you can share it with the world.

narrator: In certain hands, a camera is a dangerous thing -- as threatening as any w*apon.

[g*nshots]

Wilson: The g*n is like a well of power that you can keep drawing from.

It can, like any good symbol, be used for almost anything.

After I printed the Liberator, the White House directed the Department of Justice and the State Department to figure out how to stop it.

So, they sent a letter.

They said, "Look, this may have violated the International Traffic in Arms regulations."

They just threatened to squash me like a bug.

I have this, like, political desire for this exact kind of trouble.

It's enormously pleasurable for me.

narrator: Cody took the Liberator blueprints offline and fired back with something much scarier.

I know there are multiple sizes of these, so let's get some new clips.

Let's try to replace this unit.

narrator: He assembled a team of like-minded engineers and programmers to develop the Ghost Gunner.

[whirring]

♪♪

Wilson: Okay.

grinding: Works for me.

The Ghost Gunner's a computer-controlled milling machine.

Very simple.

A small little box made of metal that's controlled by software, so you can program it to do simple machining tasks.

And just so happens that g*ns are very easy to make.

The Ghost Gunner comes with the software that you need.

You just run the files, and the files take care of the rest.

You mostly watch the machine do its work, take it out when you're done, clean it off, and build a g*n.

narrator: All the parts you'll need to build your own g*n are just a Google search away, including the lower receiver that houses the f*ring mechanism.

Without a firearms license, you can only buy unfinished receivers.

That's where the Ghost Gunner comes in.

You can order it off Cody's website for 1,500 bucks.

Put the raw lower receiver in the Gunner, and in two hours, the machine drills it down.

Instead of a plastic p*stol, you've got a working AR15 as*ault r*fle...

...the w*apon of choice for the American m*llitary... unregistered and untraceable.

Wilson: Any g*n that doesn't come through the approved, regulated, commercial, or legal channels is a phantom.

It's something we don't know about.

It haunts us.

Make it in your basement. Make it in a moving van.

Stockpile all you want. Give them to your friend.

Give them to your neighborhood.

There's 500 Ghost Gunners floating around the country right now.

Little mobile r*fle factories that people are using.

Who's gonna know?

When I publish our data directly to the public domain, it's outside of the reach of the government, the State Department, the Defense Industrial Base, the Defense Department, Defense Technology Security Administration.

They can't touch them.

They're trying to touch them, but they can't.

You'll notice I'm not in jail today.

narrator: No one's been k*lled by one of Cody's ghost g*ns... yet.

But every year, about 1/3 of all sh**ting deaths are caused by unregistered g*ns, some bought off the dark Web for 8 Bitcoin, or around 2,600 bucks.

All this transparency, this uncensored exchange of goods and ideas -- it's liberating.

♪♪

It's terrifying.

Stein: I had a lot of anxiety because of the questions.

I was afraid the answers are gonna be not the answers that will fit in with the community life.

This, like, what is expected of everyone in the community, and it's pretty obvious.

Like, you never even question it that when you get 17, 18, and then you get married.

And you don't use birth control, so you just start having a lot of kids.

People expect that, and this is what happens.

[singing in foreign language]

Around the time after my wedding, I started questioning everything again.

Is there a God? This question drove me crazy.

Because I felt like no one is asking this question, so something is wrong with me.

I'm crazy.

I knew a friend of mine who had showed me before he had a tablet.

I asked him if I can borrow the tablet for a few days.

"Okay."

I found a public bathroom in a shopping center that had Internet, and I just started sitting there for days.

narrator: Imagine going online for the first time.

82 million videos.

100 million gigs of data.

60 trillion pages.

♪♪

Stein: I remember, the second day that I was on the Internet, I found this Israeli YouTube channel.

They have, like, basic intros to evolution, to the Big Bang, to biology, to, like, almost everything alive that you can imagine.

The whole idea, the whole concept was -- totally shook me.

And I had e-mail exchanges with different people who were very religious, and I remember asking them at some point, "Can you convince me there is a God, yes or no, without blind faith and without telling me that you can't understand God?"

And the answer was no.

This is where I made my final -- when I came finally to, like, "I am done."

narrator: At age 20, Abby left his community and started over.

Unsure of how to dress in the secular world or speak English, he'd revolted against the only life he'd ever known.

Stein: We got separated in May or June of 2013, and the official divorce was a few months after.

We had a kid together.

We had a son.

Not being with my son every day was the hardest part for a long time.

What am I gonna do now? Where am I going to?

Everything collapsed.

narrator: But maybe a little upheaval isn't so bad if it makes us question the way things are.

Buehler: A lot of people say, "Well, imagine if there were no police. There'd be no social order. There'd by anarchy."

Cop watching allows a different narrative to be told.

Anyone else that's coming?

No, it's just this crew.

All right.

I started the Peaceful Streets Project a few months after I was arrested.

We decided that we were going to launch an organization to push back against institutionalized v*olence.

We're in one car, you guys are in another car.

man: Yeah.

And, so, who's gonna communicate between the two cars?

When I was in elementary school, the cops in my neighborhood, they would drive around, they would give us Dallas Cowboy trading cards, they knew our names, they would talk to us, they were nice.

Once I hit 16, I was constantly being profiled.

"What g*ng are you in?"

Richard: I come from a law-enforcement family.

I'm not gonna say that policing was perfect 20, 30 years ago.

It has changed and gotten, I believe, far worse since then.

You don't need to get arrested.

man: Can't have downtime.

You're not gonna get arrested tonight, okay?

The Houston police just sh*t a double amputee in the head at point-blank range, and I thought, "How did we get to this point? Is it too late to go back?"

Like, if we don't have --

Buehler: Well, I think you two will jump out, and then you two will jump out.

Joshua: Shortly after I left the Occupy movement and it started crumbling, Antonio put out the call for the first Peaceful Streets Project meeting, and I answered the call and never looked back.

He's up front, so you and I are watching him and each other.

We ready to go?

narrator: At 10:00 p.m., Antonio and his crew head out for a roving patrol, canvassing the city in search of police activity.

[police radio chatter]

They stream police radios over Wi-Fi and track the cops with the Waze app that tips users off to cruisers stopped in the area.

That might be a -- yeah, this is maybe a DUI stop.

There's a stop back there.

DUI stop at the next intersection.

Call them. Call them.

Most nights, there's not much to see.

But that's not the point.

If the cops are going to patrol, Peaceful Streets will, too.

When they listen in long enough, they sometimes stumble onto something big.

Three suspects, one has a g*n.

Got it.

You think they went north?

[sirens wailing]

There we go. There we go.

♪♪

[siren wails]

♪♪

Buehler: Right now, we got three cop watchers on this side -- me, Joshua, and Steve.

narrator: The Peaceful Streets crew has walked into the middle of a confrontation between Austin PD and an allegedly armed suspect.

But for tonight, at least, the cops seem fine with them showing up.

man: Do you have a suspect in this incident here?

We do. Yeah, we do have some suspects that we have detained, that we're talking to right now.

Buehler: We want to see police officers treating people with respect, but at the same time, where there's a police officer abusing or mistreating someone, we want to document that situation.

narrator: As risky as it seems, it is legal to film cops in the line of duty.

But it's a fine line between filming and obstructing justice -- a line Antonio keeps testing.

Since January 1, 2012, I've been arrested six times.

They indicted me on interference with public duties for filming an undercover police officer.

I got arrested in 2013 in Gonzales, Texas, for telling a cop to go f*ck himself.

I have no respect for people who think that a tin badge gives them the authority to dehumanize other people.

♪♪

narrator: 24 hours later, Antonio and his crew are downtown, patrolling the entertainment district on foot.

Another night, another opportunity to challenge authority.

Buehler: Policing is an institution that is corrupt and should be abolished because it can't be reformed.

What we need to do is find different alternatives.

There needs to be agitation.

Something needs to shake people's understanding of the world to get there.

man: Hey, check this out.

[whistle blowing]

Oh, sh*t.

Watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out.

Hey! Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

Hey, hey, hey!

They have mace out!

[chatter]

♪♪

I would say I'm an idealist in where I want to see society go, but I'm a realist in that I don't get what I want.

Stein: It was a lot of hard steps -- terribly hard, hard steps.

Going online literally saved my life.

People commune, people find each other, and you can be a heretic together with someone else.

For me, mainly what it told me is that I'm not crazy.

narrator: On Facebook, Abby found a community called OTD, meaning "Off the Derech," or path.

It's a closed group.

Members want to remain anonymous while they connect and build communities of choice in groups, forums, and threads.

Stein: I think I was part of a big revolution.

There was always kids who didn't fit into the box.

So, I slowly start reading more of the liberal Jewish philosophy, and come to the point where I'm like,

"Yeah, Judaism is man-made, and that's beautiful."

[singing in Hebrew, clapping]

narrator: Abby still recites the old prayers, but he's traded Hasidism for a Jewish Renewal temple on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

[singing, clapping continue]

Stein: Some people call it a hippy synagogue, and that's what I like about it.

The energy, the environment.

It's people dancing and jumping.

It pretty much changed my life to the better.

And right now I feel like I'm basically living the dream.

Buehler: The costs have been pretty significant for doing what I've done for the past 3 1/2 years.

I lost a lot of friends.

On January 1, 2012, if I didn't stand up for that woman and yelled at the cops, I could have just stayed on track with what I was doing.

But that was one opportunity in my life to make a stand, and I actually did it.

I'm happy that I did it.

narrator: The Internet is an incubator for every rebellion, disseminating ideas, upending the status quo.

Whether that inspires you or appalls you depends on your idea of progress.

I don't think that ideas should just be thrown into books and that they should gather dust.

I want to inflict an idea.

Where there is a fear of the people on behalf of the government, there is liberty.

And where there's fear of the government from the people, there's tyranny.

I don't have a message for, like, a general people.

I have a message for a coming people, though.

You're welcome. [chuckles]

♪♪♪♪