How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance

 (From Wired Magazine: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-organize-safely-in-the-age-of-surveillance/)

1. Decide What to Protect

The first step to safer and more surveillance-resistant organizing is what digital security experts and organizers call “threat modeling”: Gaming out what potential adversaries might seek to surveil and what needs to be protected. That means creating clear delineations around what information can be public or which conversations can happen on less private platforms, versus which aspects of your organizing must stay secret. You’ll almost certainly need a mix of both approaches.

2. Lock Down Your Communications

The core, default tool for text and voice communications recommended by every activist and security expert WIRED spoke to remains the encrypted messenger Signal. That’s because Signal is end-to-end encrypted—meaning that only the phones or PCs of the participants in a conversation can decrypt its communications—and it’s battle-tested, free, open source, popular, and simple enough to allow seamless onboarding of new members of an organization.

3. Use Secure Collaboration Tools

Organizations with a big budget can pay to implement an enterprise “client side” encryption scheme, using a platform like Google Docs but managing the encryption keys for their data with a third party like Virtru, so Google or another platform provider is shut out. For regular people who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars a year on such a setup, though, experts say there’s still a place in most threat models for normal, unencrypted Google Docs—as long as you understand the risks.

“Will Google hand over your data to the feds if they serve them with a subpoena? Yes. Is it still basically a functional tool for the thing that you're trying to do? Yeah,” says Evan Greer, the director of nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future. “And would I tell you to switch to some cool open-source alternative in the middle of the fight? Not necessarily. We're in a crisis moment right now. I want organizers out there fighting and organizing, not figuring out how to configure their email.”

The good news is that, if you do need to prioritize security in collaboration tools without the expense of an enterprise client-side encryption setup, there’s a growing list of cheaper options that are still safer than the mainstream, consumer cloud. The Switzerland-based company Proton offers a suite of end-to-end encrypted tools, including its flagship email service Proton Mail as well as Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Drive.

(A note here about the Proton Mail part of that suite of tools: Keep in mind that if you use it, your emails are only end-to-end encrypted when messaging with other Proton Mail accounts. If you email a Gmail account from Proton Mail, your message is treated like any other on Google’s end. Better to stick with Signal, which isn’t interoperable with messaging platforms that aren’t end-to-end encrypted, so it’s harder to make a mistake that exposes your communications.)

Free Proton accounts come with 1 GB of storage, and the company offers $13- and $20-per-month plans that include more storage and other features like expanded account protection. Proton also has business products for large organizations. (For cloud storage, another Swiss company called Tresorit offers an end-to-end encrypted option that’s not open source, but that some experts recommended.)

4. Meet IRL Safely

If you’re in the same region as people you’re organizing with, does it make sense to bypass all of these digital gymnastics and just hang out? In many cases the answer is a resounding yes, experts told WIRED—but there are caveats here, too. First you should do the same threat model evaluation for in-person meetings that you did for your digital organizing: Is the association between you and the people you would be meeting already public? Or is it a secret that you know each other and work together? Carry out this same evaluation for the location where you would meet and anywhere else you would go together, just as you would for where and how you host sensitive data.

If you cannot be spotted together or be seen coming or going from a secret or sensitive location, meeting in person may not offer privacy benefits. You could be observed by bystanders, followed by law enforcement, or tracked via cell phone data, surveillance cameras, face recognition, automatic license plate readers, or any of the myriad ways that you can be surveilled in the physical world.

Just as with your threat model assessment for your data, there are no doubt plenty of situations where your affiliation is already public or non-sensitive—meeting people you know from your neighborhood, for example, or people you regularly volunteer with through a religious group, labor union, or other non-secret organization. If you can be seen together without giving away anything sensitive, experts emphasize that in-person meeting is one of the most valuable and potentially secure ways to collaborate.

5. Assess, Then Act

The truth, says Distribute Aid’s Taylor Fairbank, is that all organizing that runs counter to the interests of the powerful, digital or physical, carries a threat of surveillance and its consequences. “There's always going to be some inherent risk to helping other people, unfortunately,” says Fairbank. “That's the reality that we live in, so think about what you're doing. Build your own threat model. And if you're not willing to accept the inherent risks of doing something, then don't do it.”

By Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman