Refugee urges thousands at hacker congress to use skills to help newcomers

Practical computer skills can make a big difference to the lives of refugees, participants in Hamburg’s Chaos Computer Congress were told. Photograph: Axel Heimken/dpa/Corbis

(The Guardian)Fatuma Musa Afrah was 16 when she touched a computer for the first time in Kenya. Somalian by birth, she insists that people use the word “newcomer” instead of “refugee” to refer to her.

Musa Afrah inaugurated the largest hacker conference inEurope, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, by declaring she knew nothing about the field of IT. Linus Neumann from the Chaos Computer Club, which has organized the congress every year since 1984, had to work hard to convince her to come.

“As hackers, we think a lot about virtual gates and how to overcome them. But away from [the] keyboard, our confidence and resources in overcoming gates is limited,” Neumann said.

Musa Afrah’s experience defeating borders to survive as a newcomer was a perspective congress organizers dearly wanted to share with the 12,000 hackers attending the sold-out conference this year.Germanyaccepted one million refugees in 2015.

“A lot of hackers and IT experts don’t know much about our kinds of problems, so it’s my opportunity to educate them about who we are and what problems we go through,” Musa Afrah told the Guardian. She described simple actions, like boarding a train, as contributing to the alienation she felt when she arrived in Brandenburg in 2014. Simple tools, like cellphone apps and practical education, can make a large difference in the lives of newcomers, she said.

After the first day of the conference, Musa Afrah said she was impressed by the passion of the people she had met. She praised the Freifunk group, a non-commercial community initiative that has helped set up more than 100Wi-Fi hotspots at refugee housing centres in Germany.

“Technology doesn’t solve everything. Things are not solved by robots, they are solved by human beings,” Musa Afrah says. “But internet is a key connector right now. Internet is one of the fastest ways of networking with the world, and providing solutions to a lot of things.”

At a conference dominated by talks about the latest security vulnerabilities discovered in debit card payment terminals, or explorations of post-quantum cryptography, Musa Afrah’s message was simple: a challenge to individuals to rediscover their humanity and use their skills to spread education and capacity to vulnerable individuals.

For Musa Afrah, the culture shock was mutual. “I’ve never before seen people who have more friendship with computers than with human beings,” she laughed. “They are very nice, intelligent, open-minded, but most of them are so busy with the internet.”

TheChaos Communication Congresscontinues for another two days, with all the lectures are beingstreamed live online.