The hackathon runs from 10 am Saturday, November 12

to 9pm Sunday, November 13 (when the party ends).

Register for the hackathon here.

Get the livestream links here.

There are several projects to hack on during this year’s hackathon:

1. Securedrop
2. Bad Apple
3. Atlas of Surveillance
4. Disability Technology Foundation (Saturday only)

 

 

Securedrop

Members of the Securedrop team will be available to support you at the hackathon, both in person and via the project’s Gitter chatroom.

If you are already familiar with Securedrop, and are ready to jump in, you can start with this page.

If you’d like to know a bit more about the connection between Securedrop and Aaron, it is explained very well in Securedrop’s hackathon announcement:

“Later in his life, he created an open source project called DeadDrop, which was designed to make it easier and safer for journalists to receive tips and information from sources in a way that protected both parties and resisted outside surveillance and censorship.

After Aaron died by suicide in January 2013 following an prolonged and relentless crusade by the U.S. judiciary to prosecute him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly downloading academic articles, the Freedom of the Press Foundation took over maintenance of the DeadDrop project and changed its name to SecureDrop.

FPF continues to work to expand its capabilities and extend its reach to as many news organizations as possible.

As part of the event, Freedom of the Press Foundation helps host a SecureDrop hackathon at the Internet Archive in San Francisco in Aaron’s honor. This year, we’ll be working across multiple areas of the SecureDrop project, including code improvements to the SecureDrop server application and the Qubes-based SecureDrop Workstation, creating and updating documentation, improving translations, and discussing various aspects of the system related to its user experience design.

Bad Apple

If you’re interested in supporting Bad Apple, the best way you can do that is by:
1) Posting about Bad Apple on social media
2) Reviewing our code and making contributions to it or taking advantage of our API to build Bad Apple into your own projects
3) Volunteering some of your time to help us add to our databases

There are lots of other opportunities to help Bad Apple as well, allowing you to contribute in a way that takes advantages of your talents.

For example you can:
– Help us translate our website into more languages
– Provide more abstract art for us to use in our backgrounds
– Make accessibility improvement suggestions
– Help us search for new Oversight Commissions and cases of police misconduct
– …And so much more!

The Bad Apple API

For those interested in trying out our API, but are unsure of what to build, here are some good suggestions to get you started:

– Take a look at existing scripts in our code repository, and see how you can improve them.

– Create a auto-updating heat map of Oversight Commissions as they get added to our database.

– Create a Siri Shortcut allowing people to ask Siri for the contact information of the closest Oversight Commission to them, and then utilize our API to find and return the correct results.

– Integrate a search functionality for our database (using our API) into existing human rights applications and websites

– Use our API to fetch and analyze large amounts of data to create useful statistics.

– Create a web crawler to automatically search the web for the latest cases of police misconduct, then verify whether or not it already exists in our database using the API. If it doesn’t, then feel free to file a PRA request and send us the results, or leave us a tip.

– Create a bot to automatically tweet about new Oversight Commissions or reports as they get added to our database.

– Use our API to fetch data large amounts of data on oversight commissions or investigative reports, then use it as training data for an AI. This AI could then scrape the internet to find new reports and cases, and even automatically extract the desired information for us to add to our database.

– Build a wrapper for our API in another language (such as Rust, Python, etc.), to make it as easy as possible for people use it, and view/process the results in a variety of helpful ways.

Atlas of Surveillance

Through a combination of crowdsourcing and data journalism, we are building the Atlas of Surveillance, the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies.

The aim is to generate a resource for journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public to check what’s been purchased locally and how technologies are spreading across the country.

The Atlas of Surveillance is a collaborative effort between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism, and volunteers like you, who help us to search for and add to the Atlas evidence of surveillance used by law enforcement.

Disability Technology Foundation

Come meet with us on Saturday while we:

• Prototype what the repo and licensing would look like.
• Brainstorm for the organization itself.
• Come up with some sample inventions & hacks and put them online with copyleft licenses.
• Work on an open licensing and archiving plan for assistive technology inventions and hacks.