How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-organize-safely-in-the-age-of-surveillance/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/KeHNs

RARELY IN MODERN US history have so many Americans opposed the actions of the federal government with so little hope for a top-down political solution. That’s left millions of people seeking a bottom-up approach to resistance: grassroots organizing.

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Yet as Americans assemble their own movements to protect and support immigrants, push back against the Department of Homeland Security’s dangerous incursions into cities, and protest for civil rights and policy changes, they face a federal government that possesses vast surveillance powers and sweeping cooperation from the Silicon Valley companies that hold Americans’ data.

That means political, social, and economic organizing presents a risky dilemma. How do you bring people of all ages, backgrounds, and technical abilities into a mass movement without exposing them to monitoring and targeting by a government—and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, agencies with paramilitary ambitions, a tendency to break the law, and more funding than some countries’ militaries.

Organizing safely in an age of surveillance increasingly requires not only technical security know-how, but also a tricky balance between secrecy and openness, says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties. “You may want to limit access to some information to a smaller group of people, and you need to consider the platforms you are using, so that when law enforcement shows up to Google with a subpoena, there’s nothing sensitive it can hand over,” says Galperin. “But you have to weigh that against the fact that the majority of organizing is done in public, with other people, because the power of organizing is in numbers and solidarity.”

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[highplainsdem]

1. K&R!

[usonian]

2. Cloudflare or someone still put up a CAPTCHA, so here's the text up at pastebin.

https://pastebin.com/raw/6Wiuh7dC