Well, I don’t know how to bring this up…. or if I’ve just missed the article, but perhaps you could do something about the silencing effect that can often happen on Feminist internet efforts?

I often end up sharing this link as an example, but it would be nice to have more than one high-quality link:

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/11/on-blogging-threats-and-silence/

Many thanks for the suggestion. Since s.e.smith wrote that post on Tiger Beatdown in 2011, nothing has improved regarding the torrents of abuse directed at outspoken women online (and it’s not only feminists and other social justice advocates, either – being outspoken about knitting or cupcakes can also garner a woman an obsessive cyberstalking hate cadre who pound their keyboards with a persistence and intensity that similarly outspoken men rarely seem to attract).

I’ve written a fair amount on silencing tactics over at my primary blog Hoyden About Town, and ways to technologically throttle the streams of abuse was the focus of my posts here on Cyberbullies 101: Part 1 – muffling their megaphones and Cyberbullies 101: Part 2 – The Art & Science of Moderation – Free Speech vs Free Audience – these posts have various links to examples of silencing campaigns, but I haven’t collected them together just as a list of case studies (yet).

So, dear readers – moar links plz! Anything you have bookmarked over the last few years regarding this issue would be useful. Please format your links to include author/blog/title information, ideally with a sentence or few to summarise the post and/or a short quote. This is not only more helpful than a naked URL for readers to jog their memory about which posts they have or haven’t read, but it’s also much better SEO to make this page more visible for those searching for links in the future.

e.g. for the linked post in the original suggestion

• s.e. smith’s post on Tiger Beatdown: On Blogging, Threats, and Silence – detailing the constant graphic abuse and threats directed at feminist bloggers and how “this is a reality, and it doesn’t go away if we don’t talk about it.”.
  

  It’s grinding and relentless and we’re told collectively, as a community, to stay silent about it, but I’m not sure that’s the right answer, to remain silent in the face of silencing campaigns designed and calculated to drive us from not just the Internet, but public spaces in general. To compress us into small boxes somewhere and leave us there, to underscore that our kind are not wanted here, there, or anywhere.

If a relevant link happens to be one of your own writings, then please shamelessly self-promote it! And if a post of yours, or a friend’s post, gets linked by somebody else, by all means squee delightedly here in response.

In general, if somebody else posts a link that you were going to post, please respond with a note to that effect in comments.  Treat it as an upvote, and why not go right ahead and leave other topical links in your response?

In particular, if you know of a post that would fit into the Further Reading section on any of the FAQs, please please please drop a link with that recommendation – a lot of those posts referenced in the FAQs date back half a decade or more, and I’d like to expand the related links sections with more recent references as well.  Also if you think that a post already linked in one FAQ is also relevant to another FAQ, please say so.

Luckily Bora Zivkovic at Blog Around The Clock has a long and detailed post full of relevant links which includes pretty much every point I wanted to make. I’m providing a summary of his headings with some meaty quotes below, but please make sure to click through and read his post in full in order to see all the points he makes and the many link citations he provides.

A couple of weeks ago, an article was published in Science about online science communication (nothing new there, really, that we have not known for a decade, but academia is slow to catch up). But what was interesting in it, and what everyone else jumped on, was a brief mention of a conference presentation that will be published soon in a journal. It is about the effect of the tone of comments on the response of other readers to the article on which the comments appear. [...]

They specifically chose a topic about which most people know very little and do not already have any opinion. Neither the article nor the comments contain sufficient information to turn the readers into experts on the subject. So they have to use mental heuristics – shortcuts – to decide what to think about this new subject. Uncivil, aggressive comments resulted in quick polarization. Readers, although still not well informed about the topic, quickly adopted strong opinions about it.

• 1-9-90 rule

  about 1% of the participants produce most of the content, another 9% participate regularly by editing (e.g., on a wiki), commenting (on blogs and articles), occasionally producing new content (in forums, etc), and the remaining 90% are ‘lurkers’ who do not publicly participate but only read

• Where are the comments?

  most of the good, nice, constructive commenters may have gone silent and taken their discussions of your blog [to social media platforms], but the remaining few commenters are essentially trolls.

  The question every blogger in this situation has to ask is – what to do next?

• Comment moderation

  What does it mean to moderate comments? Different people have different ideas about it, but many focus on technical fixes.

  i.e. Spam filters/Pre-comment moderation/Post-comment moderation/Sophisticated graded moderation/Modifying comments/Engagement

  Engagement – the most important element of comment moderation is the presence of the author in the commenting thread. Responding to readers’ comments, thus showing that they are being read, observed and appreciated, is the most effective way to make sure that the discussions stay on topic and do not veer over the line of appropriateness. Sometimes a comment hurts, or makes you angry. Sleep over it. Then come up with a smart, witty, civil and firm response. Be in control of your own commenting threads:

• So, why are so many comment threads so nasty?

  Because they are not moderated! [...] If you don’t delete or disemvowel inappropriate comments, people will think you are not even reading the comment threads. If you don’t show up in person, nobody will know you are even interested in their thoughts. If you don’t delete the trolls, the trolls will take over and the nice people will go somewhere else.

  [...] And if you are a blogger, and your comment threads are nasty, you have only yourself to blame.

• “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan
  

  In this section Bora is especially addressing science blogging, which is his area. Other areas of inquiry may not share every rigorous convention of the scientific method, but the following point extrapolates well to most discussions of sociopolitical interest:

  Now let’s go back to the very beginning of this post and the forthcoming article about the effect the tone of comments affects readers. If we leave the creationist or denialist troll comments up, what does it do to the rest of the readers? It polarizes them, it makes them more certain about things than what their actual knowledge warrants, while at the same time repelling experts from wading into the mud-pool to correct, over and over again, the untrue statements and anti-facts posted by denialist trolls.

  Those of us who have pursued an education, even an amateur one, in history/anthropology are often struck by how ignorant many anti-feminists are regarding the breadth of social variations regarding conventions of gender expression over time and location. When contrarian commentors post anti-factual comments which are left to stand by the moderator, then those comments distort and suppress the subsequent discourse.

• How do you decide what is a trolling comment?

  If you want your comment threads to remain clean and civil, and to stick to the topic in the article, you HAVE to delete off-topic comments.

  [...] I am certainly not using cowardly, mealy-mouthed He-Said-She-Said mode of writing my own posts, so I will also not allow for a He-Said-She-Said pseudo-debate to develop in my comment threads. You don’t like it? Deal with it. Go and complain in the comments on [a more sympathetic blog], or on your Facebook wall.

  Those whose comments are deleted, for whatever reason, on one blog/forum?  They remain free to repost those comments on another blog/forum.  Their freedom of speech has not been denied.

• Bora’s moderation rules

  Now, I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.

  This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.

  I’ll leave it to readers to make their own analogies to feminist/anti-feminist tropes in place of the science/anti-science tropes noted by Bora.

Take Home Message

Civil rights of Free Speech do not come bundled with any rights to a free audience.

On the contrary, audiences are the ones with the right of Free Association in terms of to whose words they pay attention.  Don’t let yourself be bullied into publishing disruptive comments that drive away the commentors who add value to discussion of your posts.  Nobody is obliged to listen to anybody who is being a jerk.

There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.

And as a final rebuttal to the asinine Freeze Peach arguments – in the words of science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who happens to be rather a Glibertarian icon, people who have built a platform are not obliged to share it with anybody else – folks remain free to build their own platforms:

Hire your own hall. We paid for this one.

Don’t let other people hijack what you have built. You owe your readers more than that.

As they say in the classics, read the whole thing.

If a relevant link happens to be one of your own writings, then please shamelessly self-promote it! And if a post of yours, or a friend’s post, gets linked by somebody else, feel free to squee delightedly here in response.

In general, if somebody else posts a link that you were going to post, please respond with a note to that effect in comments.  Treat it as an upvote, and please go right ahead and leave other topical links in your response.

In particular, if you know of a post that would fit into the Further Reading section on any of the FAQs, please please please drop a link with that recommendation – a lot of those posts referenced in the FAQs date back half a decade or more, and I’d like to expand the related links sections with more recent references as well.  Also if you think that a post already linked in one FAQ is also relevant to another FAQ, please say so.

It is frustrating to live in a society where sexual violence is commonplace, and feel helpless to stop it. Many people are so disgusted and frightened for themselves and those they care about, that they do not have the patience to wait for our culture to right itself. It is from this frustration, impatience, and usually from a sincere worry for women’s safety, that people often will try to pass along rape prevention measures that may or may not be useful.

For example, most people seem to express relief and concern when passing along the chain letter “Through A Rapists’ Eyes”, for they finally have something that seems concrete and relatively easy to follow. Unfortunately, it’s largely comprised of rape myths (eg. – there’s no proven correlation between clothing or hairstyles and who rapists tend to target), and self-defense tips based on stranger-in-the-alley tropes that may or may not serve any use should someone be targeted.

Much of the safety advice that is given out is aimed at potential victims (quite often young women), that seems solid and constructive, but that largely ignores the social and societal context in which the violence happens, and also fails to take into consideration the practical realities of women’s lives.

Fortunately, there are steps that we can start working on right now, today, to help reduce the instances of sexual violence.

We can make sure that we always get enthusiastic consent from our partner(s), that we respect their boundaries, and that we take full responsibility for our actions with/ against others. Rape is not just an act committed by strange, mentally-ill men against women. We all need to ensure we ourselves do not commit any form of sexual violence, regardless of our gender expression, of how long we’ve been with our partner, whether we’ve had sexual relations with them before, whether we mean it “as a joke”, whether we’ve had a bad day and are looking for a pick-me-up, regardless of how turned on or sexy we’re feeling. It is all of our responsibility to ensure we do not commit acts of sexual violence.

We can join in public protests and events that give support and solidarity to survivors and let perpetrators know the community is ready to have them held accountable:

• 20 things you can do to transform rape culture

We can learn how to intervene as bystanders:

• Hollaback! I’ve got your back!
• The Red Flag Campaign
• Making a Difference Workshop – PPT
• University of Arizona – Sexual Assault Bystander Prevention
• Where Do You Stand?

We can do our part not to give rapists a social license to operate:

• My Friend, The Rapist
• My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude. How do we clear that up?

We can do our part not make rape jokes so that we make our culture safer for survivors and less amenable to rapists:

• News article: “Teens who assaulted 16-year-old thought it would be ‘funny’”
• Daniel Tosh and the reason rape jokes aren’t just jokes
• Who hears you, when you speak about rape?

We can talk about and teach people about enthusiastic consent:

• The (Nonexistent) Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Consequences of Enthusiastic Consent
• Using Enthusiastic Consent to Fight Rape Culture
• Sexy Time: Enthusiastic Consent

We can believe people when they report, and prioritize them above their abusers:

• News article: “Penn State tantrum”
• News article: “Alleged gang rape of girl, 11, ignites firestorm in Texas community”
• News article: “Cheerleader Has To Pay $45,000 To The School That Kicked Her Off The Squad For Refusing To Cheer For Her Rapist”

We can understand the many different forms rape takes:

• Rape: Toronto Rape Crisis Centre
• The Not Rape Epidemic
• We’re Telling

We can challenge victim-blaming:

• News article: “Horrific: Journalist Sexually Assaulted in Egypt, Mass Victim-Blaming Ensues”

We can hold abusers accountable for the crimes they’ve committed, rather than let them off because their rapes weren’t “rapey” enough:

• News article: “Rape victim ‘inviting,’ so no jail”
• News article: “The rape question”
• News article: “British Judges Free Child Rapists, Say 12-Year-Old Girls “Wanted” Sex”

We can also support women in asserting and maintaining their boundaries:

• Another post about rape
• The art of “no”.
• The art of “no”, continued: Saying no when you’ve already said yes.

We can be more picky about the rape prevention measures we pass on:

• Nine Real Self-defence Tips
• Circle of 6 app

We can learn about rape myths to make sure we’re not perpetuating them:

• Dispelling The Myths About Sexual Assault
• SlutWalk Seattle – Frequently Asked Questions

A big part of stopping rape is ensuring that rapists are held accountable for their actions and not allowed to rape again. This can be accomplished through different ways. It can happen through the legal system if the victim chooses to report and is believed by police and the case is successfully tried and the judge enforces a sentence that reflects the seriousness of the crime. It can happen by removing the supports in place for perpetrators to revictimize survivors or attack new victims (silence and rallying around the perpetrator and alienating the victim can have this effect). It can happen by empowering the survivor by letting them know they’re not at fault and the crimes committed against them, whether by a stranger, a partner, a trusted authority figure, or a family member, etc, won’t be disregarded, at the very least not by their support circle.

These might not have the same emotional impact of telling women to always carry handguns or mace, and some of them deal with rape after-the-fact. Sexual violence is an insidious crime that can be committed a million different ways by a million different sorts of perpetrators, which is why there’s no neat and tidy cure-all for it. However, these are all very important steps I hope everyone will try to endeavour to take part in, because they can make a real, tangible, and immediate difference in people’s lives.

If there are any other tips you’d like to pass on, please leave them in the comments and I’ll add them.

Damsel in de Tech is a thirtysomething feminist blogger from Toronto, working the male-dominated field of IT. In her spare time, she is an organizer for SlutWalk Toronto, and volunteers on the local rape crisis support line. That work, and finding herself continually combatting the same old rape myths, stereotypes, and lies informed by sexism, racism, ableism, and Hollywood-inspired detachment from reality, led her to begin blogging. Why retype the same arguments ad nauseum to people who do not put a fraction of the thought or energy into their own responses when she could just flush out her arguments online and then copy & paste the results? When not working, volunteering, writing, or waging battles against online trolls, she likes to watch MST3K, host vegetarian pot lucks, and sing karaoke very badly and enthusiastically.

This post was originally published at Damsel Indetech’s blog.

Slutwalk Toronto links: the website is a good place to get background info and context, but it doesn’t get updated much.. The Facebook pages & Twitter feeds are where the action happens.

If a relevant link happens to be one of your own writings, then by all means shamelessly self-promote it! And if a post of yours, or a friend’s post, gets linked by somebody else, by all means squee delightedly here in response.

In general, if somebody else posts a link that you were going to post, please respond with a note to that effect in comments.  Treat it as an upvote, and by all means leave your other links in your response.

In particular, if you know of a post that would fit into the Further Reading section on any of the FAQs, please please please drop a link with that recommendation – a lot of those posts referenced in the FAQs date back half a decade or more, and I’d like to expand the related links sections with more recent references as well.  Also if you think that a post already linked in one FAQ is also relevant to another FAQ, please say so.

The intellectual shallowness of those who rely on unabridged dictionaries which offer a simple etymological translation as a definition has been pointed out many times (and it’s the reasoning behind Macquarie Dictionary announcing that the definition will be expanded to better reflect the nuances of current usage in their next edition). The New York Times language maven William Safire did a particularly good job of explaining some of the subtleties in 2008 when Hillary Clinton was also accused of misusing the term (as noted by Mike Seccombe in the Global Mail).

Here’s what Safire wrote:

“Senator Hillary Clinton used a word recently that has been changing its meaning. In charging that she has been treated more harshly in the media because of her gender than Senator Barack Obama has been treated because of his race, she said, ‘It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists.’

Safire continued: “The word misogyny has since its earliest recording in 1656 meant “hate or contempt for women.” The etymology of misogyny is straightforward: In Greek, miso means “hatred,” and gune means “woman.” A misogynist is a woman-hater. I thought Clinton’s choice of the word was in error, and that the word she meant was sexist, meaning “one who discriminates based on sex” — that she had been treated unfairly because she was a woman. When I looked up the word she chose in the Oxford English Dictionary online, however, I noted that the meaning of misogynist had changed, slightly but significantly. In 1989, the definition was “hatred of women”; in the 2002 revision, the definition was broadened to “hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women.”

Thus, sexist and misogynist are now in some respects synonymous. Because sexist has been so widely used, apparently misogynist — in the same sense of “prejudice” rather than “hatred” — now carries more force with those who are familiar with the word,” wrote Safire.

Even Safire over-simplifies the OED for his readers there – I can tell you now that there is no way that the definition of any term in the OED in the past century was ever only 3 words long – that would have just been the first meaning offered, even back in 1989. Let us also hope that nobody huffing about other people’s purported lack of language precision/purity has happened to teach their children or grandchildren to call road-rolling machines steamrollers at any time within the last many decades since they’ve all been diesel-fuelled, because that would display a blatant double standard, wouldn’t it?

Now I’m going to offer a few more nuances to the distinctions between sexism and misogyny, adapted (to enhance clarity) from a comment I left on the Butterflies and Wheels blog this week.

* * * * *

Sexism is an impersonal bias against the competence and influence of women, and impersonal is easily and far too often confused with being rational/logical/scientific/common-sense. Thus impersonal sexism has been reflexively institutionalised in society so that it has a huge impact on large numbers of women and girls as a class e.g. ideas such as girls don’t need an education because they’re only going to get married, or girls aren’t good at maths/science, or women are happier running a home than competing in the workforce etc etc

Misogyny is a far more personal and emotional prejudice, resulting in contempt, scorn and dismissiveness towards women who step outside the bounds sexism lays down as appropriate. Misogynistic anger openly displayed against women who challenge their sexist preconceptions is part of an intimidatory silencing tactics arsenal, and of course the perpetrators don’t display those tactics against women who stay within the notional boundaries – approval is the reward for behaving appropriately. Watching misogynistic outrage, contempt and public shaming from fathers, uncles, brothers, husbands, teachers, preachers etc against other women – the unacceptable women – shows daughters, sisters, nieces and wives what awaits those who step out of line. The threat of male anger and potential violence is the whip misogynists use to ensure women’s compliance with sexist stereotypes.

Misogyny also often wears a mask until there aren’t any witnesses – because that makes women look like liars, which makes dismissing and shaming them even easier. Once seen in action these misogynists are easier for individual women to avoid, but establishing plausible deniability is part of the gaslighting side of the silencing tactics, so it is difficult to convince others that the angry contemptuous threat was really there.

Because misogynists are also sexist (although one can be sexist without being misogynist) they ride the coat-tails of the broader societal sexism and punctuate it with extremes, particularly whenever they have institutional power.

Another commentor at B&W noted that for them the distinction between sexism and misogyny is that misogyny is dehumanising, whereas sexism is not necessarily so.  This post is already long enough, so I won’t explore that further, but it’s another layer of nuance which appears to have merit.

* * * * *

To close, I offer this opinion from another language maven: David Crystal writing in 2006 about the general principles of words like ‘massive’ or ‘incredible’ being used in ways beyond their original meanings (and the frequent misconceptions about how recent those usage changes may or may not be):

The [journalist correspondent] is against people loading words ‘with powers beyond their meaning in the dictionary’. If that was a valid principle – you must only use words with the meaning recorded in the dictionary – English vocabulary would hardly have developed at all, and we would have cut ourselves off from the kind of expressive richness we see in, say, Shakespeare, who was one of the best meaning-extenders the world has ever seen. It is also a misconception of how dictionaries come to be written: lexicographers record meanings as they change, and if there is a widely used meaning currently missing from a dictionary’s pages then it is a weakness of the dictionary rather than of the language.

Words change their meaning.  That’s what they do.  New words, too, arise to describe changes in how we live our daily lives. Without such flexibility in language changing over time to meaningfully describe social/political/technological change then communities, cultures, philosophies, nations and peoples stagnate, and I don’t think even the most virulent misoneists want that.

In general, if somebody else posts a link that you were going to post, please respond with a note to that effect in comments.  Treat it as an upvote, and by all means leave your other links in your response.

In particular, if you know of a post that would fit into the Further Reading section on any of the FAQs, please please please drop a link with that recommendation – a lot of those posts referenced in the FAQs date back half a decade or more, and I’d like to expand the related links sections with more recent references as well.

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. ~Cypherpunk Manifesto

GeorgieBC first explains why privacy is necessary for all of us, then Sarah Stokely expands on privacy matters and outlines the basics of using Tor as one of the tools for online privacy.

* * * * *

First posted on September 22, 2012 at GeorgieBC’s Blog. You can listen to the speech on SoundCloud

SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

Cryptoparty Melbourne

Hello CryptoParty. My name is Georgie online, Heather Marsh to some people and other things to other people. I would like to talk to you all a bit about privacy and anonymity. We all know privacy is essential in high risk activism, but it is so much more than keeping bloggers from being killed. Privacy is for us all, it is a right we used to have and most people do not realize we have lost it, or that we ever had it.

Most people in democracies feel that freedom of the press is essential in a democracy; this is because we need information about our government in order to participate in a democracy. This freedom has been turned on its head so that people now feel they have the right to see Kate Middleton’s breasts but not foreign policy documents. It’s the other way around. Foreign policy documents are subject to censorship that is not compatible with democracy. Kate Middleton has been subjected to surveillance in violation of her right to privacy. The news obsession with celebrities and their private matters is there to distract you from the real news which they are not showing you. They tell you what US president Obama’s daughters wore to school when we really need to know if he is going to bomb Iran.

In our grandparents day they had a wonderful thing called mind your own business. They did not give their first names to people they had just met. There were layers of trust you went through to get to know someone and you owned the truth about yourself. This expectation of privacy for individuals is gone and we need to bring it back; transparency is for public organizations and actions which affect the public, not for our private lives. Perfect strangers will now demand any detail of your life and feel they have a right to it. We know the surveillance culture has won when snooping is a virtue, equated with being open, honest, and having nothing to hide while a request for privacy is met with shock and hurt and group shunning. We need to start refusing to provide personal data as much as we can, privacy is a basic right and if we do not use it we will lose it. We have lost it.

It has been proven enough times, famously by Julian Assange and Bradley Manning but in many other cases as well, that authorities do not need to see any transactions or have evidence of any criminal activity to destroy your life; it is enough that you pull attention, that they are aware of your existence. The fact that you are doing nothing wrong or illegal is no protection if you have attracted the attention of someone with power or mental instability. Governments are not the only people on the internet; if you start expressing opinions you will find far more interesting opposition as well. Anonymity, once lost, can never be regained; even if you have no intention of ever expressing a controversial opinion, privacy should become a habit, like brushing your teeth.

Besides the safety aspect, online anonymity is cherished by internet dwellers as the only means to pure thought exchange, where ideas can be judged on their own merits, unclouded by preconceived judgements based on unrelated data.

I started out as a programmer, and there was a time where even just my voice would have made anything I said instantly discredited, people only listened to opinions on programming or politics from baritones and tenors. That is still the case in some circles, there is a reason my online names are usually sexually ambiguous or male. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science faced the same obstacle when it became widely known that he was homosexual; there is a very sad quote from him, “Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.” We have lost far too many brilliant ideas because of bigotry against the place they came from. Many women in history would never have been published if they did not publish as men; many brilliant thinkers have been attacked based on irrelevant personal data such as race, age, or opinions on unrelated topics and their ideas have been lost. Until we live in a world with no bigotry, anonymity is the only way for these voices to be heard.

In order to move to an idea driven system, away from a personality based one, we need to all stand up for privacy for us all. Crypto parties are an amazing initiative; Privacy is fun; Tor and PGP and OTR are very fun to use, and when you are comfortable with them, maybe you will also tell the next person who demands personal data from you to mind their own business which is also fun. I hope you all have a great evening!

* * * * *

First published as a slide presentation on 22nd September by @stokely: you can view the slides on GoogleDocs.

#Cryptoparty Workshop: Tor

Saturday, 22 September 2011, by @stokely

This is NOT copyright. It’s in the public domain. Use as you wish.

Why are we here?

• we’re in an era of strong government action against internet users
• 250,000 Australians under surveillance (excl ASIO)
• there are two main areas under attack – piracy, and free speech
• International legal(?) action against Wikileaks, Megaupload
• Strong Government interest in the use of online social networks by political activists (Arab Spring, Occupy)

Global problems for cyberactivists & cyberdissidents, bloggers & journalists

*Reporters without Borders- Press Freedom roundup 2008:
- “Predatory activity is increasingly focused on the internet.”

• 1 blogger killed
• 59 bloggers arrested
• 1,740 websites bocked, shut down or suspended
• more online journalists incarcerated than other journalists for the first time
• Internet censorship in China, Cuba, parts of the Middle East
• western companies including Google and Yahoo selling or modifying their products and services to enable censorship regimes

LESS security, MORE surveillance

It’s never been particularly safe to communicate by email or on social networks due to insecurities in the tech, and it’s about to get worse. WHY?

• Increased surveillance of activists. There have already been subpoenas on Australians’ Twitter accounts & Twitter last week said they’d comply MORE with requests from the Australian police.
• The US government is strengthening laws to control the internet (See the proposed SOPA/PIPA laws)
• As signees of the Free Trade Agreement with the US, Australia is legally obliged to enforce laws like the DMCA in Australia. So their law can touch us.
• Social networks are voluntarily censoring (Twitter announced geo-censorship of tweets yesterday).

Legal disclaimer

• I am not a lawyer, and this workshop is not about your legal rights or responsibilities.
• Seek legal advice. Use your common sense.
• This workshop will give you some simple tools to stay safer
• The key word is SAFER, not 100% safe.
• Today we’ll show you one or two layers in the security ‘onion’ – we’re not promising to protect you from the world’s best hackers or the FBI. If you are Wikileaks and people could die based on the information you’re sharing, basic security is not enough. You need to learn more about how to keep yourself, your communications and your community safe.

Part 1: Secure your email

Your email is not safe

• Vulnerabilities are human and technical.
• Human vulnerability: choosing easy to guess passwords, sending email to someone untrustworthy who forwards it to the authorities or a newspaper, sharing your password with someone who loses it.
• Tech vulnerabilities: Spyware like keyloggers, your password could be cracked, your login might be insecure (http), transmission of your email over the internet might be insecure.
• At least two ISPS will handle your email – the sending & receiving ISP. Do you trust your ISP? (Don’t). They are subject to Australian law and are routinely asked to provide information from/about their customers.

3 steps to safer email

• Keep your computer free of viruses/malware
• Keep your password secure
• Encrypt your email

Viruses/malware

• Malware exists to steal passwords, and to get exact copies of everything you type – it’s called keystroke logging.
• Players of online games like World of Warcraft get targetted by keystroke loggers, who capture their game login password so they can steal their accounts. It doesn’t just happen in the movies. It happened to me.
• Keep your software & operating system up to date, and install some anti-malware/anti-virus software – here are some step by step tips: https://security.ngoinabox.org/en/chapter-1

Protect your password

• Change your password. Today.
• This should be common to anyone with an ATM card, but it’s not
• Change it regularly, make it not personal to you (ie birthdays), mix in numbers, letters & capitalisation
• As a memory aid, use a mnemonic like:
• ‘To be or not to be? That is the question’ which becomes ’2Born2b?TitQ’
• One password to rule them all: Password manager software like KeePass
• http://keepass.info/
• Uses one master password to access & manage all your passwords.

Login securely

• You need your email to be secure at the point of login (if you’re using webmail) and when it’s travelling the internet to reach the recipient of your mail.
• Webmail is less secure because you are trusting the content of all your emails to the company that’s sending it. (ie Google).
• Consider switching to an email client (email software like Thunderbird or Mail for Mac instead of using a web-based email like Gmail or Yahoo)
• Riseup is an email service run by and for activists that can be securely accessed by webmail or using an email client like Thunderbird (https://riseup.net/en)
• Choose a webmail provider that uses https to login.

Using https for your logins

• https uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to add a security layer to normal web pages (http), you’ll already use it for online banking.

• Gmail uses https by default. To check if it’s turned on:
• Sign in to Gmail.
• Click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, and select Mail settings.
• In the General tab, set ‘Browser Connection’ to ‘Always use https’.
  If you’ve never changed the setting before, no radio buttons will be selected, even though the default is indeed ‘Always use https’.
• Click Save Changes.

Encrypt your mail

• Unencrypted email travels as-is online, meaning anyone snooping can read it.
• Encrypting mail means encoding it so snoopers can’t read it.
• Later we’ll break into groups to show you how to use Tails to encrypt mail and files and use keys to ensure that the sender (you) and the receipient are who they say they are.

Activity: Secure your webmail

• Break into groups
• With your group leader, work out if it’s possible to turn on https for your webmail and make sure it’s turned on.
• Change your password! Choose something more secure.

Secure your browsing

Use https everywhere that you can

• If you use the Firefox browser, you can install the “HTTPS Everywhere addon” so it happens all the time.
• Download it here: https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-button.png
• There will be an HTTPS Everywhere button at the top right of your Firefox toolbar which lets you see & disable a ruleset if it’s causing problems with a site. eg if you try to get on a hotel wifi connection.
• There is no excuse for not using HTTPS-everywhere

Set Facebook & Twitter to https

• To make Facebook use https, go to the Account Settings menu, change the default value in the “Account security” sub-menu to https.
• More info here: https://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130
• To turn on https on Twitter, go to your account settings (https://twitter.com/settings/account) and tick the box next to “Always use HTTPS” which is at the bottom of the page.

The Tor browser

• Tor is an online security project.
• Tor has been described as “a second Internet running inside the existing Internet”. It allows people from countries with strict regimes to bypass blocking and monitoring software.
• There’s a video of the Tor project creators talking about how governments and corporations have tried to block Tor.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DX46Qv_b7F4#!
• Tor bounces your online communication around a network of relays run by volunteers, instead of going straight from your IP address to your destination. This means it prevents people who might be spying on your internet connection from learning what sites you visit or learning your physical location and it lets you access blocked sites.

How Tor Works

Step 1: Alice’s Tor client obtains a list of Tor nodes from a directory server

Step 2: Alice’s Tor client picks a random path to the destination server. All the intermediate links are encrypted (green) only the final link to the destination is unencrypted (red).

The Tor browser

• You can install & use Tor software, or use the Tor browser to make your web browsing (more) secure.
• BE AWARE of Tor’s limits. It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don’t want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use Torbutton while browsing the web to withhold some information about your computer’s configuration.
• What does this mean? External applications are not Tor-safe by default, and can unmask you.
• Tor is TCP only, and then apps can send your IP address, so it’s good to use vetted apps.
• One way around this is to use a transparent Tor proxy like Tails (https://tails.boum.org/)

The Tor browser bundle

• An easy way to use the Tor software is to download and use the Tor browser bundle.
• This means just by using the Tor browser, you’re protected by Tor software.
• It’s available for Windows, Mac or Linux.
• It can also run off a USB flash drive (AKA USB key). This means you can safely browse from any computer, by using your USB key.
• Download the Tor browser bundle here:
• https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

Tor check

• Make sure you’ve actually got it working right.
• Once you’ve got the Tor browser installed, visit the Tor Check page: https://check.torproject.org/
• It will detect whether you’re using Tor or not, and tell you.

Need help?

• On IRC: #tor
• Or: http://irc.oftc.net/

Suggested Activity: Set up a secure browser

• Install Firefox & HPPTS Everywhere and/or the Tor Browser
• Make sure you use the Tor Check tool as well!

Tools for Activists & Bloggers

Highly recommended:

• Security in a box: https://security.ngoinabox.org
• Riseup email for activists: https://riseup.net/en

Resources for safe publishing online

Highly recommended:

• Reporters without Borders handbook for bloggers and cyberdissidents
  (PDF download: http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/RSF_GUIDE_PRATIQUE_GB_v6.pdf)
  Includes information on how to blog anonymously and technical ways to get around censorship
• Arts Law Centre of Australia Online – Legal issues for bloggers:

  http://www.artslaw.com.au/legalinformation/LegalIssuesForBloggers.asp

• EFF guide for bloggers

  http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal

Tails – the amnesiac incognito live system

• Tails “is a complete operating-system designed to be used from a DVD or a USB stick independently of the computer’s original operating system. It comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc.”
• The Tails website is here:

  https://tails.boum.org/security/index.en.html

• You can read an article about it here:

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-distro-tales-you-can-never-be-too-paranoid

Suggested Activity

• Set up a USB key with Tails for secure computing
• Use Tails to encrypt files, email, and instant messaging

Thanks!

• Thank you for coming to #Cryptopart to learn and share what you know
• Remember ‘each one teach one’ – please find someone who needs to learn this stuff, and teach them!

I can email out this presentation with handy links to information and downloads, if you email me (sarah.stokely@gmail.com) or tweet me (@stokely).

Cheers!

Hi! My step-sister’s 14th birthday is coming up and I’d really like to get her a feminism 101-ish book. She’s experiencing trouble at school (girl-hating, slut-shaming, sexism and pressure from boys, etc.) and I’d love for her to have feminism to turn to.

The only two feminist 101 books I know of are bell hook’s Feminism is for Everybody and Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. While the former is a little too advanced for my step-sister (she’s quite sheltered), even though it’s quite short and simplified for bell hooks, the latter is not very intersectional at all. Do you have any other recommendations?

It’d be great to find a book written with intersectionality in mind which contains info on slut-shaming, body positivity, abortion rights, internalised misogyny, etc., which is easy to understand and digest for young girls who aren’t educated about things like privilege and oppression and class, etc.

Something written by a woman of colour is preferred and, while this is not a necessity, it would be great if the author were British or Australian (to help with the context and language). Failing this, do you think it would be a good idea to get her both Valenti’s and hook’s books, and have her read FFF first and FifE after? Sorry for the long question…thanks a lot for your time! Take care.

We have an existing thread on Top 5 Introductory Texts, but I feel most books on that list don’t quite fit the bill for a 14 year old girl’s first book on feminism, especially with the requested combination of intersectionality and simplicity. Thoughts, dear readers?