#DNL38 · November 27-29 2026
TESTING GROUNDS
The Kill Cloud, AI & Migration Control
THE 38th CONFERENCE OF THE DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB
Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)
Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Marianneplatz 2, 10997 Berlin & Streaming
Workshop at Stadtwerkstatt, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11, 10178 Berlin
Streamed for free without registration (Workshops not streamed).
GET YOUR TICKET
Tickets will also be available at the conference venue on 27-28 november, but we recommend that you purchase them online in advance to guarantee your seat.
Speakers
Cian Westmoreland · Namir Shabibi · Tiara Roxanne · Thomas Drake · Pablo Torres Gómez · Kay · Jeff Ordower · Eslem Demirel · Ramy Raoof · Jaya Klara Brekke · Néstor Espinosa Robledo · Mais A.M. Qandeel · Dominik Winkler · Romain Lanneau · Joana Moll · Tatiana Bazzichelli
Cian Westmoreland (Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US), Namir Shabibi (Independent Investigative Journalist, UK), Tiara Roxanne (Scholar and Artist, US/DE), Thomas Drake (Whistleblower, former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, US), Pablo Torres Gómez (Sound Artist & Anthropologist, HFBK Hamburg, CO/DE), Kay (Activist & Campaigner, Purge Palantir, US), Jeff Ordower (Activist & Organiser, #teslatakedown, US), Eslem Demirel (Activist and Organiser with ORCA-Orca Resists Corporate Apartheid), Ramy Raoof (Technologist, Digital Security Advisor, EG/DE), Jaya Klara Brekke (Writer and Technologist, Chief Strategy Officer, Nym SE/UK), Néstor Espinosa Robledo (Investigative Journalist & Historian, CO), Mais A.M. Qandeel (Associate Professor in Law and Technologies/International Law. University of Galway and Örebro University, SE), Dominik Winkler (Political Geographer and Communication Scholar, DE), Romain Lanneau (Researcher, Statewatch, Legal Advisor, Front-LEX, UK/NL), Joana Moll (Artist and Researcher, Professor of Networks, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, ES/DE), Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, Director, Disruption Network Institute, IT/DE).
Schedule · Introduction · Speakers · Tickets
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Schedule
Friday 27 November 2026
16:30 CEST · Doors open
17:00–17:10 · OPENING
Tatiana Bazzichelli (Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, Director, Disruption Network Institute, IT/DE).
17:10 – 17:40 · PERFORMANCE
Tiara Roxanne (Scholar and Artist, US/DE) and Pablo Torres Gómez (Sound Artist & Anthropologist, HFBK Hamburg, CO/DE).
17:40 – 18:15 · BREAK & NETWORKING
18:15 – 20:15 · KEYNOTE
Cian Westmoreland (Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US), Namir Shabibi (Independent Investigative Journalist, UK), Tiara Roxanne (Scholar and Artist, US/DE). Moderated by Thomas Drake (Whistleblower, former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, US).
Saturday 28 November 2026
15:30 · Doors open
16:00 – 18:10 · PANEL
Kay (Activist & Campaigner, Purge Palantir, US), Eslem Demirel (Activist and Organiser with ORCA-Orca Resists Corporate Apartheid), Ramy Raoof (Technologist, Digital Security Advisor, EG/DE), and more. Moderated by Jaya Klara Brekke (Writer and Technologist, Chief Strategy Officer, Nym SE/UK).
18:10 – 18:40 · BREAK & NETWORKING
18:40 – 20:45 · VIDEO + PANEL
VIDEO: Néstor Espinosa Robledo (Investigative Journalist & Historian, CO).
Mais A.M. Qandeel (Associate Professor in Law and Technologies/International Law. University of Galway and Örebro University, SE), Dominik Winkler (Political Geographer and Communication Scholar, DE), Romain Lanneau (Researcher, Statewatch, Front-LEX, UK/NL). Moderated by Joana Moll (Artist, Professor of Networks at the KHM, ES/DE).
Sunday 29 November 2025 · Workshop & Roundtable
12:00 – 14:00 · WORKSHOP: PURGE PALANTIR · Register
With: Kay (Activist & Campaigner, Purge Palantir, US), Jeff Ordower (Activist & Organiser, #teslatakedown, US).
14:00 – 15:00 · BREAK & NETWORKING
15:00 – 17.00 · COMMUNITY ACTIVATION · Register
At Stadtwerkstatt. With the active participation of the speakers and the audience. More information will follow.
The 2025-2026 fellowship programme by Disruption Network Institute has been made possible with support from Luminate.
Conference funded by:
Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt (Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion), Luminate, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, Re-Imagine Europe (Co-funded by the European Union).
Partner Venues: Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien, Stadtwerkstatt.
Streaming partner: Boiling Head Media.
Technology Partner: Geier-Tronic.
cooperation partner: ARCHIVE BOOKS.
Media Partners: Il Mitte, UntoldMag
TESTING GROUNDS
The Kill Cloud, AI & Migration Control
While those at the top of the most prominent corporations are among the richest and most powerful people on earth, their position is based on the work and disadvantage of millions of people and the direct or indirect oppression of many of us. The ecological impacts of modern technology fall disproportionately on the Global Majority, and it affects us all in different ways in our everyday lives.
Artificial intelligence is actively reshaping how conflicts are managed and how human rights violations are documented. Wars are increasingly used as testing grounds for new lethal autonomous weapons, advanced recognition systems, biometric surveillance, and AI-driven programs to identify targets. Simultaneously, surveillance tools such as cameras, facial recognition, biometrics, and motion sensors are being deployed to expand AI-powered surveillance and data collection, particularly in areas like migration management, asylum procedures, and border control – but also within our urban environment, including the city of Berlin, as the recent debate on the implementation of predicting policing has been demonstrating.
Since 2023, the Disruption Network Institute, has been focusing on investigating “The Kill Cloud”. Concept coined by whistleblowers Lisa Ling and Cian Westmoreland, the Kill Cloud is a warfare infrastructure that stretches through sea, land, air, space and cyberspace. This conference presents new investigatory research by the three DNI fellows: Cian Westmoreland (Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US), Namir Shabibi (Independent Investigative Journalist, UK), Tiara Roxanne (Scholar and Artist, US/DE). Tiara Roxanne, together with sound artist Pablo Torres Gómez, will also stage an artistic performance exploring the impact of AI and military technology on communities with limited civil rights at the border between US and Mexico.
The conference TESTING GROUNDS: The Kill Cloud, AI & Migration Control, explores the risks associated with the introduction of artificial intelligence, automated target recognition, and data extraction into our everyday lives, both online and offline. It demonstrates how these technologies have previously been adopted in war zones and at borders, which have served as testing grounds, to be then expanded to civil society at large. To gain a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding this phenomenon, we aim to explore the role of data capitalism, monopolies of Big Tech, AI and surveillance technologies that promote a worldview grounded in exploitation, extraction and domination.
Through the work of our research fellows, including whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and artists, we are developing research about the risks of ubiquitous surveillance, automated extraction and AI in warfare. We are currently witnessing an alarming reduction of spaces of interaction and sharing knowledge, as well as the targeted persecution of communities that engage in critical thinking, whilst the internet is increasingly becoming the domain of corporations that contribute to the restriction of both digital and physical rights and get complicit in wars and the killing of civilians.
Alongside, free spaces for digital communication have gradually been constrained. A recent example of this is the US State Department’s sanctions against the Italian collective ‘Autistici/Inventati’, which for 25 years has been providing activists and many others with platforms and tools for digital self-defence and independent channels of communication. This digital crackdown seems to be a consequence of a systematic repression that is taking place at a global scale – considering that last July the United States Department brought together governments from across the globe to address "the rise of far-left political terrorism as a transnational threat" - as they put it.
We want to expand our work and research connecting investigative journalists, whistleblowers, human rights activists and organisations to investigate the wider use of AI in the military and its relationship with related technologies, such as drone warfare and the “Kill Cloud” that underpins the US drone programme and goes beyond it.
This conference and the related community programme are an occasion to share ideas and practice around social, political, and technological injustice. But they are also a call of action for cross-collaboration in Berlin and internationally.
On Sunday November 29, a community meetup and a workshop will involve Berlin-based activists, communities, and initiatives to share skills and create new tools to fight digital injustice. We plan to discuss and generate new possible routes of social and political action within the framework of social and environmental justice.
25 years ago, we believed that another world was possible. We invite you to join us to make this statement once again a part of our present.
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Speakers
Cian Westmoreland
Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US
Cian Westmoreland specialised in C4ISR technologies in the United States Air Force, serving at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan in 2009 with the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron, where he helped network air and space assets with ground operations and distant command centers. After receiving an award and conducting research into civilian casualties connected to his unit’s operations, he left the military to study International Relations. He became an outspoken critic of the U.S. military’s overreliance on remote killing in the Global War on Terror, citing its lack of accountability and the strategic blowback it generates. His current research focuses on the networked and diffused decision-making processes in modern warfare, particularly as they converge in the development of autonomous weapon systems (AWS).
Namir Shabibi
Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, as well as a research and media consultant. His specialisms include AI, autonomy, surveillance and tech in national security, counter-insurgency and war. Namir has published reports and documentaries for the BBC, the Bureau, Foreign Policy, The Independent, Middle East Eye, and VICE News, among others. He also undertakes investigative research for advocates, and has served as an expert witness on cases related to counterterrorism, covert operations and state surveillance. Namir is currently a pro bono adviser to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, and gives visiting lectures at a number of British universities.
Tiara Roxanne
Scholar and Artist, US/DE
Tiara Roxanne is a scholar and performance artist whose work rethinks the ethics of AI through an anticolonial, eco-feminist, and cyberfeminist lens. Their research critiques how digital technologies rely on the extraction of resources from Indigenous lands and examines how these infrastructures carry colonial legacies inscribed in land, bodies, and memory. They are the author of the forthcoming book with University of California Press (2027), which develops their concepts of digital attunement and the technological haunt. Tiara has presented at ARS Electronica (Linz), Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Leuphana University (Lüneberg), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), Cambridge University (UK), among others.
Thomas Drake
Whistleblower, former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, US
Thomas A. Drake is a decorated Air Force/Navy veteran and former NSA senior executive who exposed intelligence failures, multi-billion-dollar fraud, and post-9/11 warrantless mass surveillance through every lawful whistleblower channel and then the press in the public interest before facing a 10-count Espionage Act indictment in 2010. A global advocate against privacide – the systemic destruction of privacy and autonomy as a human right – he warns that unchecked AI-enabled surveillance and power enable tyranny through Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" where ordinary officials commit extraordinary harm through institutional complicity, as well as malice, as the engine of state abuse. He remains a leading voice on our precious freedoms and as witness against the moral failures of humanity.
Pablo Torres Gómez
Sound Artist and Anthropologist, HFBK Hamburg, CO/DE
Pablo Torres Gómez is a researcher, sound artist, and anthropologist whose practice listens, imagines and crafts geoaffective assemblages, engaging vibratory modes through which earthbound relations emerge. With(in) these modes, Pablo unsettles the notion of silence in contexts of planetary extractivism, moistening forms of ecological belonging beyond imaginaries of separability and permanence. Torres Gómez is a PhD candidate in Art in Practice at the HfbK Hamburg, holds a B.A. in Social & Cultural Anthropology and a M.A. in Design & Computation from the UdK Berlin. He is associate director of the Listening Biennial, and his work has been activated at documenta15, LABVERDE, Ars Electronica, TBA21’s Ocean Archive, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, among others.
Kay
Activist and Campaigner, Purge Palantir, US
Kay is a Black socialist organizer, trainer, and strategist who has contributed to building and strengthening social movements across the world. He is currently a campaigner with the Other Side Project, where he focuses on campaigns aimed at stopping Palantir and their leaders from enabling and driving ICE kidnappings, genocide, AI warfare, mass surveillance, labour displacement, and fascism.
Jeff Ordower
Activist and Organiser, #teslatakedown, US
Jeff Ordower has over 30 years of community and labour organising experience, mostly in the US. He has helped rideshare drivers and renewable energy workers fight for better working conditions. He has organised dozens of mass actions and has run numerous campaigns at the intersection of class and climate. Currently, Ordower is working to build mass resistance to the tecnofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Eslem Demirel
Activist and Organiser with ORCA (Orca Resists Corporate Apartheid)
Eslem is an activist, previously worked as Big Tech employee and is engaged as organiser with ORCA (Orca Resists Corporate Apartheid) to reclaim full agency over technology.
Ramy Raoof
Technologist, Digital Security Advisor, EG/DE
Ramy Raoof is an internationally recognised technologist and security advisor working at the intersection of technology and human rights. Over 15 years, he has built operational resilience, threat intelligence, and digital safety for journalists, activists, and civil society operating in high-risk environments globally. Ramy has advised European Union on integrated security, serves as a Non-resident Fellow at TIMEP, and sat on The Tor Project’s Board of Directors (2017–2021). Having led security and tech initiatives for Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and Red Cross, his work supports human rights investigation and protection of at-risk communities. Honors include the 2023 Burke Award, Access Now's Heroes of Human Rights 2017, Deutsche Welle 2016.
Jaya Klara Brekke
Writer and Technologist, Chief Strategy Officer, Nym SE/UK
Jaya leads the development of the Nym ecosystem of operators, community, business development, and comms. She is an advocate for privacy as the foundation for human rights and has spoken about and written numerous papers on decentralised technologies. She holds a PhD from Durham University Geography department and is an expert advisor to the European Commission. Her research contributes to public, industry and policy debates about emerging data economies, decentralised data infrastructures and blockchain technology. Her work focuses on the impact of technological systems on humans, their relation with the world and sense of self.
Néstor Espinosa Robledo
Investigative Journalist & Historian, CO
Néstor Espinosa Robledo is a Colombian investigative journalist and historian specialising in open-source intelligence (OSINT), digital surveillance analysis, and civil liberties in Latin America. Founder and lead investigator of Periodismosint, an open-access data journalism laboratory, he has also worked with Cuestión Pública, TvCucuta, Karisma Foundation, El Colombiano's newspaper investigative unit. His work traces digital violence against journalists, land dispossession, illegal mining, migrants, and transnational financial networks. He is a winner of the Data Sigma Award (2023) and the WAN-IFRA Latam Prize (2022), and a finalist for the Circulo de Periodistas de Bogotá (2024).
Mais A.M. Qandeel
Associate Professor in Law and Technologies/International Law. University of Galway and Örebro University, SE
Mais Qandeel is an Associate Professor and a licensed lawyer with 20 years of experience at national and international organisations/institutions around the world. She has extensive experience in international humanitarian law and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research covers a range of topics, including AI at war, digital discrimination, the rule of law, data protection and privacy, international cyber norms and legal aspects of cybersecurity as well as international human rights law and international humanitarian law.
Dominik Winkler
Political Geographer and Communication Scholar, DE
Dominik Winkler is a political geographer and communication scholar focusing on social struggles for freedom of movement. His work examines how conflicts over borders and mobility are mediated, and how struggles against borders can be connected to broader struggles against militarisation and fascism, as well as for social justice. He has been involved in various groups within the broader migrant solidarity and anti-racist movements. In this context, he is particularly interested in how digital border infrastructures shape possibilities for surveillance and control, as well as strategies of resistance.
Romain Lanneau
Researcher, Statewatch, Legal Advisor, Front-LEX, UK/NL
Romain Lanneau is a legal researcher specialising in the digitalisation of migration and asylum governance. At Statewatch, he researches policing, surveillance, data protection, and the use of technology in European migration policies. He is the author of several reports, including the “Data Protection Handbook on Asylum and Migration in Europe”, and has trained more than 300 practitioners and advocates across Europe. Romain is also a legal advisor at Front-LEX, where he works on strategic litigation to defend human rights at Europe’s borders. He has advised organisations including the European Network Against Racism, Fair Trials International, and Data Rights.
Joana Moll
Artist and Researcher, Professor of Networks, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, ES/DE
Joana Moll is an artist and researcher from Barcelona. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam (DE), Escola Elisava (ES) and Escola Superior d’Art de Vic (ES).
Tatiana Bazzichelli
Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, Director, Disruption Network Institute, IT/DE
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the founder and director of the Disruption Network Lab. Her work focuses on whistleblowing, network culture, art and activism. Since September 2023, she is also the director of the Disruption Network Institute, a centre for investigation and empirical research into the impact of artificial intelligence on new technologies of war, automated weapons and networked warfare. She received a Ph.D. in Information and Media Studies from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, in 2011 and is the author of Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013) and Networking (2006). For three years until 2014, she was a curator at the transmediale art & digital culture festival in Berlin.
