Talk on digital rights and technology for activists

by T Sun Apr 10, 2011 23:06

This was an interesting talk and was worth attending. It was covered digital security for activists mainly with reference to those involved in human rights work, but it is applicable to everyone.

While the speaker didn't go into any real detail or specific, he covered the broad outline and in many ways this allowed the talk to cover more ground. The talk was based on the booklet recently produced by Tactical Security Collective and called Security in-a-box: Tools and tactics for your digital security and which has been translated into many languages.

This covers all the main areas of security from the threat to you and your data, to email privacy, web access privacy and other aspects to recommended software and it provides good information especially for people who are new to this area. Much of the advice is pretty common sense which is about identifying the risks and deciding what data needs to be secure and not and then following secure practices.

This booklet is something that every activists should read and become familiar with.. The short booklet divided into eight chapters is online at: https://security.ngoinabox.org/

During the Q+A, it was pointed out that in numerous cases in countries such as Zimbabwe and elsewhere that a failure to secure data (i.e. encrypt it properly) led to cases where the State could read the data and information on other people was comprised.

The overall theme though was that security is not something you do once by installing some piece of software. It is an ongoing thing and you don't always know when you are successful, but you generally know when you are not. It is also the case that you can never be certain that you are fully secure.

For example [not part of the talk or Q+A] recently the group Anonymous exposed the US company HBGary and it was revealed that they write keyboard loggers and other spyware software for the US military and other actors and one key features of this software is that it was NOT detectable by practically all anti-virus and anti-spyware + adware software.
It is likely that those involved in campaigns that bring them up against multinational corporations should be aware of this because it is these sort of actors that have the deep pockets to do business with companies like HBGary and their elk.

This story was reported on Al Jazeera at: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/20....html

These URLs for the booklet and Tactical Technology Collective are:
https://security.ngoinabox.org/
http://www.tacticaltech.org/