All posts by lisa

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Tor Project

OpenArchive: A Mobile Application That Saves To The Internet Archive

A photo of the OpenArchive App on a Nexus 5 phone.Interview with OpenArchive’s Founder, Natalie Cadranel.

OpenArchive is a free, open-source mobile application dedicated to
maintaining the privacy, provenance, and preservation of audiovisual civic media. Conceived during the Arab Spring and Occupy, and currently available in beta for Android, it unites the efforts of Tor, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive to foster a virtual commons where civil liberties and digital rights are protected.

Founder, Natalie Cadranel, and supporters of the OpenArchive project will be at the San Francisco Hackathon this weekend, ready to collaborate with folks. This is your chance to get your hands on the code and contribute to the Internet Archive’s first secure, open-source mobile application. You can join the beta-testing community here.

Natalie is an archivist, researcher, and independent media advocate.  After finishing her master’s at UC Berkeley’s ISchool, she launched the OpenArchive App. The background and inspiration for the project is highlighted in her journal article Preserving Mobilized Culture. She will be engaging with the community at the San Francisco Aaron Swartz Hackathon, on Saturday from 10am – Noon, and looks forward to sharing it in the venue and spirit it was conceived.

Citizens armed with mobile devices are becoming history’s first
responders, amassing rich, contextualized, and crucial records of
their movements and breaking news. However, most of these recordings presently reside on social media platforms that can chill free speech and are subject to government censorship, privacy breaches, and data loss. While social media is an acceptable distribution platform, it does not provide sufficient privacy protections or archival preservation of this vital media.

OpenArchive’s mission is to preserve, amplify, and route mobile media to user-created collections in an accessible public trust (The Internet Archive and beyond) outside the corporate walled gardens currently dominating the online media ecosystem.

Lisa: So, is the idea that, while you are posting something to Facebook or Twitter, you might also post it to the Internet Archive, for safekeeping, for future generations?

Natalie: Definitely. This application is an alternative to social media and intended to meet the needs of three primary groups:

1) citizen journalists who no longer trust social media and want to share their documentation with organizations that respect their civil liberties and are committed to preservation and contextualization

2) archivists who are looking for effective ways to collect and preserve community media while respecting the media-creators’ intentions, and

3) those interested in using and remixing the media like news outlets, researchers, scholars, and artists.

Lisa: What gave you the idea to build this?

Natalie: As a former journalist for IndyMedia, an archivist, and digital rights activist, I became increasingly concerned about the lifecycle of sensitive mobile media during global uprisings starting in 2010. I interviewed citizen journalists, archivists, and refugees from Iran’s Green Movement about the challenges surrounding their information gathering and distribution processes.

The ethical collection, contextualization, and amplification of citizen media are issues that crystallized during these conversations. Privacy and authentication emerged as critical concerns for people who had very sensitive media on their phones, which often included documentation of human rights abuses. Popular social media platforms were not secure enough to protect users’ identities or conducive for long-term preservation and there were no alternatives at the time.

Lisa: Explain more about this problem of our social media-filled world that could just be deleted, should a corporation, such as Facebook, get bought and disappear someday.

Natalie: Companies are committed to their bottom line, not long-term preservation or user privacy.  While they are currently fantastic distribution platforms, users cannot rely on them to safeguard and preserve their content.

This platform is facilitating a timeline of a “people’s history” that
preserves and respects contributors’ content. Another benefit of
contributing this media to an archive is that it increases the
interoperability of it for future use and makes it widely available without betraying user identities or intentions.

Lisa: So when you upload to the Internet Archive, you are adding it to a personal collection at the Internet Archive, as if you had uploaded through its website?

Natalie: Yes. Exactly.

Lisa: What kinds of things might people be able to help you hack on at the hackathon?

Natalie: We currently need help with some usability and design
refinements. There are open issues on the GitHub site.

 

 

 

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Internet Archive

Aaron’s Open Library Project Lives On

Giovanni Damiola has just been added as a speaker for Saturday’s Celebration of Hackers and Whistleblowers. He will say a few words about how he and Jessamyn West have been working on the Open Library project this past year. The Open Library was one of Aaron’s first projects, right after Creative Commons.

Giovanni was a hacker at last year’s San Francisco Aaron Swartz Day
Hackathon. He ended up getting a job at the Internet Archive shortly after last year’s event, and has now taken on Aaron’s beloved Open Library project, which attempts to create “a page for every book” in existence. Giovanni revamped the site to be more stable, and a re-index found 500,000 books, authors and editions lying around. Here’s an up to date “status report“ on the project from Librarian Jessamyn West. It’s also a project you can hack on at the hackathon this weekend.

The Open Library lends books to people in countries with no public libraries, and Jessamyn  frequently uses Google translate just to read and reply to email from all over the world.

Although originally envisioned by Aaron as providing, “a page for every book, so you can find the book, so you can buy it, or borrow it,  it’s become much more than that, and is, in fact,  a lifeline to information for many countries.

As Jessamyn explains, “I was around when Open Library was first getting started, and I think the people who built it and designed it were way ahead of their time. I’m really happy to get to carry-on Aaron’s legacy of sharing as much as possible to as many people as possible.”

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Freedom of the Press Foundation, SecureDrop

Freedom of the Press Foundation: Come Hack on SecureDrop at the Third Annual Aaron Swartz Day

freedompresslogo
Come hack on SecureDrop and Celebrate the Third annual Aaron Swartz Day

From the blog post:

Next week on Saturday November 7th is the third annual Aaron Swartz Day, which celebrates the life of Aaron and the many wonderful Internet projects he created or worked on during his brief but brilliant life.

One of Aaron’s last projects was SecureDrop, the open-source whistleblower submission system, which Freedom of the Press Foundation adopted after his untimely passing in 2013. Every year on Aaron Swartz Day, we help host a weekend-long hackathon in Aaron’s honor.

This year, the hackathon will be held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco (there are also other cities holding similar events). We will be at the Internet Archive on Saturday and Sunday to help guide and hack alongside any volunteer developers who want to learn about SecureDrop and work on the many open issues.

If you’re interested, you can read through our developer guide and the new-and-improved SecureDrop documentation. On our GitHub page, there is a list of open issues, and by November 7th, many will be tagged specifically for developers to work on at the hackathon.

Please RSVP for the hackathon here if you’d like to attend.

Also make sure to stick around the Internet Archive Saturday night for the Aaron Swartz Day celebration. There will be many great speakers at the event, including SecureDrop’s lead developer Garrett Robinson to talk about the latest on the project, as well as two of our board members and co-founders, Micah Lee and J.P. Barlow.

Many thanks to Lisa Rein, who tirelessly organizes Aaron Swartz Day every year and always makes it a celebration to remember.

 

Aaron Swartz Day 2015

EU Parliament Votes To Drop Charges Against Snowden

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2015 file photo, Edward Snowden appears on a live video feed broadcast from Moscow at an event sponsored by ACLU Hawaii in Honolulu. The former National Security Agency worker, who leaked classified documents about government surveillance, started tweeting Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia, File)
FILE – In this Feb. 14, 2015 file photo, Edward Snowden appears on a live video feed broadcast from Moscow at an event sponsored by ACLU Hawaii in Honolulu. The former National Security Agency worker, who leaked classified documents about government surveillance, started tweeting Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia, File)

From the Huff Po Article:

By a vote of 285 to 281, Members of European Parliament (MEP) passed a resolution Thursday calling for EU member states to drop criminal charges against the former NSA contractor and protect him from extradition…

Snowden faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S. should he enter any of the EU’s 28 member countries. At the time of his departure, Snowden applied for — and was denied — asylum in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. The FBI pursued him relentlessly, even notifying Scandinavian countries in advance of their intent to extradite him should he leave Moscow via a connecting flight through any of their countries.

The new EU proposition specifically asks countries to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.”

Snowden called the vote a “game-changer” on Twitter, adding, “This is not a blow against the US Government, but an open hand extended by friends. It is a chance to move forward.”

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Video

“Terminal F” Explains How Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison Helped Snowden Get Asylum In Russia

If you haven’t seen this yet, you are in for a treat.

The film features Ed Snowden, Julian Assange, and Sarah Harrison, explaining first hand, how they managed to assist Snowden on his journey from Hong Kong to the Moscow Airport, and, eventually, to safety (obtaining political asylum in Russia).

Come to our celebration of hackers and whistleblowers that make the world a better place, November 7th, 7:30 pm. (Reception 6pm.)
(Tickets $10, $20, Free)

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference 2015

Two New Talks Added to Privacy-enabling Mini-Con, Courtesy of the EFF!

Just Added! On Saturday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be participating in the Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference going on at the San Francisco Aaron Swartz Day Hackathon:

At 1pm, Cooper Quintin, Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will talk about the what, where, and how of Privacy Badger, EFF’s privacy-enhancing creepy-tracker-blocking browser extension. Come learn how you’re being tracked online, and how you can use Privacy Badger to take back your privacy as you browse the web.  (People will also be hacking on Privacy Badger at the SF Hackathon.)

At 4pm, Brad Warren, a Let’s Encrypt Developer, will present Let’s Encrypt, a joint project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Akami, Cisco, the University of Michigan, and open-source developers around the world. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated Certificate Authority which anyone can use to quickly, easily, and securely set up HTTPS on their website in minutes–and the best part is you don’t even need to be a cryptographer or an experienced sysadmin to use it! In his talk, Brad will explain why setting up HTTPS is so difficult without Let’s Encrypt, how Let’s Encrypt is different, and how you can use Let’s Encrypt to secure your website and help bring the world one step closer to a completely encrypted web.

RSVP to the Privacy-Enabling Mini-Con (or the SF Hackathon).

It is likely the live event (at 7:30 pm on November 7th) will be sold out. Get your moderately priced or free ticket now. Thanks! :-)

 

Announcements, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Surveillance

Tonight! See Cindy Cohn in Los Angeles: “A Report Back From the Legal Front Line”

October 28, 2015 – 7:00pm to 9:00pm
First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles
2936 West Eighth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90005

 

EFF

Mass Surveillance: A Report Back From the Legal Front Line

First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles will host a discussion featuring Cindy Cohn, EFF’s Executive Director. A leading voice in the legal struggle to defend digital rights, Cindy has worked on First Amendment and privacy cases since 1993, when she served as the outside lead attorney in a successful First Amendment challenge to U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. She currently represents First Unitarian Church in its lawsuit challenging mass NSA surveillance, an issue she will address earlier that afternoon at oral argument in Jewel v NSA, a preceding case raising similar arguments.

Join us at First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles (2936 West Eighth Street) to learn more about mass surveillance, the struggle to defend your rights, and how you can help build the movement wherever you live.

Please RSVP to help us plan accordingly:
https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/event/register?id=103

Cindy Cohn, Legal Director and General Counsel for the EFF. Photographed by Erich Valo.
Cindy Cohn, Legal Director and General Counsel for the EFF. Photographed by Erich Valo.

 

Cindy Cohn will be speaking at this year’s Aaron Swartz Day Evening Celebration, November 7th, 7:30 pm, at the Internet Archive, in San Francisco. (Reception 6pm)

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference 2015

Come to the Aaron Swartz Day Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference

RSVP for the privacy-enabling conference, November 7 and 8, in San Francisco, at the Internet Archive.

The SF Hackathon will be going on downstairs, where Garrett Robinson will be there, in person, with other folks from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, working on SecureDrop.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the “Great Room,” there will be a Privacy-enabling Software Conference that starts at the very beginning, for folks that are savvy enough to know they need encryption, but kind of don’t know where to start.

Again: this encryption and privacy-enabling training starts at the very beginning — with the folks from Keybase, who will be providing both a beginning and an advanced tutorial for folks who are just starting out:

10 AM: Session 1:
* Motivation: why encryption, what is public/private key encryption, and why is secure public key distribution important.
* The Keybase solution: social media proofs, client/server architecture,etc.
* Step through generating a key and installing Keybase
* Using Keybase via the website (https://keybase.io)

Break 10:50am-11:10am

11:10 AM Session 2 (advanced):
* Why you probably shouldn’t use Keybase via the website
* Using Keybase on the command line (or native app)
* Using Keybase with an email client
* Looking up public keys using Tor
* Preview of the Keybase File System

Lunch 11:50am-1pm

At 1pm, Cooper Quintin, Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will talk about the what, where, and how of Privacy Badger, EFF’s privacy-enhancing creepy-tracker-blocking browser extension. Come learn how you’re being tracked online, and how you can use Privacy Badger to take back your privacy as you browse the web.

At 2pm, Micah Lee, of The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, will be giving his “Encryption for Journalists” workshop, so that journalists, librarians, researchers, or anyone else needing to, can protect their sources from prying eyes.

At 3pm, Micah Lee will cover using Onionshare and SecureDrop.

At 4pm, Brad Warren, a Let’s Encrypt Developer, will present Let’s Encrypt, a joint project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Akami, Cisco, the University of Michigan, and open-source developers around the world. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated Certificate Authority which anyone can use to quickly, easily, and securely set up HTTPS on their website in minutes–and the best part is you don’t even need to be a cryptographer or an experienced sysadmin to use it! In his talk, Brad will explain why setting up HTTPS is so difficult without Let’s Encrypt, how Let’s Encrypt is different, and how you can use Let’s Encrypt to secure your website and help bring the world one step closer to a completely encrypted web.

On Sunday, Alison Macrina, librarian and privacy activist and the director of the Library Freedom Project (a partnership among librarians, technologists, and privacy experts that helps people take back their privacy in an age of pervasive surveillance.will offer some solutions to help subvert digital spying) will be presenting from 11am-1pm (with a break from 11:50-12:10):

Come learn about strategies for keeping your information safe from government and corporate surveillance! Alison will teach basic concepts in information security, and cover tools like Tor Browser, NoScript, passphrase management, safer searching, encrypted texting and other mobile security strategies, and more.

Lunch from 1-2pm

At 2pm, Zaki Manian from Restore the 4th will be presenting an introductory tutorial to using Tor Anonymity System on desktop and mobile computers. He will cover the Tor security model and practical application choices to make.

At 3pm, Zaki will give a developer-level talk on “the care and feeding of Tor hidden services.”

RSVP for the privacy-enabling conference.

And be sure to come to the evening event.

The Constitution

How Ed Snowden Chose the Constitution Over A Non-Disclosure Agreement

Ed Snowden was on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Star Talk with Ed Snowden Part 1” on September 18th, and Neil asked him some pretty amazing questions that really clarified the issues surrounding Snowden’s actions when he blew the whistle on the U.S. Government’s surveillance of its domestic population.

Turns out, there’s no such thing as an Oath of Secrecy, for CIA and NSA agents; only a Civil Non-Disclosure Agreement (“SF 312″ — that’s the thing that says ” you shall not disclose secret or classified information”). Then, on your first day on the job, you take an Oath of Service “to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

These were the two documents that Snowden had to weigh against each other, when he made his decision to choose the Constitution over “SF 312.”

There’s a question here of “is this something that’s some sort of minor, one-off departure from regulations? Or is this a fundamental, continuing, and massive violation of the Constitution? When you have the National Security Agency, for example, as the courts said, operating outside of the law. In fact, in violation of the it. And violating the 4th Amendment rights of 330 million Americans, every second of every day. That, I think for most people, would change their calculus. — Ed Snowden

Here’s a transcript from the interview excerpt:

(at 49:23 in)

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

An issue many people have about whistleblowers, such as Ed Snowden, and, of course, Daniel Ellsberg, from back in the 60s and 70s, when the Pentagon Papers were released, is that, they were “under oath” by the government to protect its secrets, and that they directly violated this understanding or trust. I raised this point.

What he said took me to a new place. Because, part of me is saying, “Look, you’re making America a less safe place. These are secrets. Of course, we’re gonna have secrets. And you can’t have all secrets that everybody knows because then you cannot conduct operations that would be in the interest of protecting American lives.

So it was a clear point to me, and presumably, others. But, why did he not get it? Was there some other thought process going on in his head, that I had yet to glean, or perhaps others had yet to see?

Let’s check it out.

NT: Where’s your allegiance? Wasn’t it to the NSA? Didn’t you swear allegiance to be “Secret Agent Man?” I mean…

ES: That’s a really good question, because that is actually a fairly common criticism. Was that, some say, ya know, I broke an oath. But they actually aren’t familiar with the way that the oath and the non-disclosure agreements and so on. How the secrecy agreements work in this community.

I didn’t swear an “Oath to Secrecy.” There’s no such thing, when you join the CIA or the NSA. It doesn’t exist.

There is a government form, called SF 312. A standard form of, ya know, bureaucratic legalese. That’s a civil non-disclosure agreement. That says you should not disclose secret or classified information or whatever. There will be possible civil or criminal penalties, and so on, if this occurs. But then, at the very first day, you walk in to service as a government officer, a staff officer, of the Central Intelligence Agency. You take what’s called the “Oath of Service,” which is not to secrecy, which is not to protect classified information. It’s “to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

So, the question is “What do you do, when your obligations come in conflict. When you have a standard government form on the one hand. The civil agreement. A non-disclosure agreement.

NT: SF 113 or whatever it is…

ES: “SF 312.”

NT: 312, Okay (laughing).

ES: And then you’ve got “The Constitution” on the other. And it also matters, “what is the significance of these breaches?” There’s a question here of “is this something that’s a, some sort of minor, one-off departure from regulations? Or is this a fundamental, continuing, and massive violation of the Constitution? When you have the National Security Agency, for example, as the courts said, operating outside of the law. In fact, in violation of it. And violating the 4th Amendment rights of 330 million Americans, every second of every day. That, I think for most people, would change their calculus.

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, SecureDrop

Come to this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon

INVITATION

This year we are celebrating whistleblowers and hackers that work hard to make the world a better place, and, specifically, the “SecureDrop,” anonymous whistleblower submission system, now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (originally prototyped by Aaron and Kevin Poulsen).

There’s also an “Encryption Training for Beginners” day going on in San Francisco, upstairs all day, at the SF Hackathon. (See below for more details.)

Now, thanks to SecureDrop, whistleblowers can connect directly, safely and anonymously to news organizations, such as the Washington Post, Guardian, The Intercept, the New York, Gawker, and other news outlets.

Evening speakers include:  Garrett Robinson (Lead Developer, SecureDrop), Alison Macrina (Library Freedom Project), Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive), Cindy Cohn (Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation), Micah Lee (Co-founder, Board Member, and Technologist at “The Intercept,”) Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks volunteer, Security Expert/Citizen Four, Tor Project), and John Perry Barlow (EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder) and Special Guests.  See more details in the INVITATION.

In San Francisco, at the hackathon, there will be a mini-conference for beginners to receive training on encryption and privacy-enabling software.

In the morning, the Keybase folks will be giving tutorials on encryption basics and tools that you can use to protect your privacy.

In the afternoon, Micah Lee, Technologist for The Intercept and The Freedom of the Press Foundation, with be giving his “Encryption for Journalists” tutorials. Then Micah will give tutorials on OnionShare (a P2P-based anonymous whistleblowing submission platform) and SecureDrop. Details on mini-conference/hackathon