Tag Archives: Restore the Fourth

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.

Aaron Swartz Day 2013

Zaki Manian Looks Back at Last Year’s Aaron Swartz Hackathon in San Francisco

restorethefourth
Zaki Manian from Restore the 4th SF explained how last year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon in San Francisco breathed life into a small Restore the 4th chapter in San Francisco. Restore the 4th sent 4 programmers to the event, and came back with 4 more. “There was an enormous surge of grassroots energy after the Snowden revelations, and Restore the 4th was an attempt to harness that energy and direct it into directions that could create real change.”

One of the main projects that Restore the Fourth SF worked on during last year’s hackathon was the “Shame on Feinstein” campaign, which called out California Senator (D) Dianne Feinstein as a staunch supporter of Mass Surveillance. (Although she came around later in June 2014, when it was revealed that her own congressional computers had been compromised in order to access the classified CIA torture report.)

The other really important element of these civil rights focused hackathons the concept of “Weekend Warrior Activism.” “These hackathons are able to tap into an incredible resource of programmers that might already code 9-5 somewhere, in order to give them the ability to work on an important project over the weekend. This allows programmers to “code for freedom” during their precious weekend hours, making “incremental changes,” much like Virgil Griffith mentioned in his talk last year.

The latest mission of Restore the Fourth mission is helping towns deal with Police Militarization. RTF was already working on these issues before Ferguson happened, but now the plan RTF had already set in motion is more timely than ever.

“Militarization of police is a hot topic of the moment. Surveillance technologies funding license plate readers and facial recog software and mass surveillance is becoming a more local issue.” Zaki explains.

“We’re working on a municipal ordinance template, via a website and national campaign, that people in small towns and cities across the country can use to evaluate and put rules constraining how the equipment already purchased is actually allowed to be used,” Zaki explained. “We’re also working on some talking points and content that people can use, to show them how to do the research to find out what surveillance is already in your town, so you can then take action at the local level.”