57 months ago A primer from activist collective Extinction Rebellion on smartphone security for people participating in activist organizing and protests. A how-to guide, as well as some philosophy and guidelines for developing a good security culture to support activism and disruptive public actions.
With the rise of government monitoring programs, qTox provides an easy to use application that allows you to connect with friends and family without anyone else listening in.
While other big-name services require you to pay for features, qTox is totally free, and comes without advertising.
Nowadays, every government seems to be interested in what we're saying online. qTox is built on a "privacy goes first" agenda, and we make no compromises. Your safety is our top priority, and there isn't anything in the world that will change that.
qTox is a client made to work with a decentralized protocol called Matrix. To learn more about that: https://matrix.org/
He describes how difficult it is to tell whether a phone is spying on you. He says the only way to be sure a phone is off is if you can take out the battery, although you can also monitor it with a meter that detects radio waves. He also mentions that he uses faraday cages for his own devices, to physically prevent signals from coming and going.
He goes on to discuss the larger issues of mass surveillance; how "terms of agreement" have been used disingenuously to force us into this situation; how certain legal precedence has disingenuously forced us into this situation by grossly extrapolating certain exceptional legal cases to apply to everyone at all times; and how big data has become such big business that there is a lot of power and influence in motion to try and maintain this era of surveillance.
He has also mentions his recently released book called "Permanent Record" all about how this surveillance stuff all works, and the implications.
He also plugs an article that he wrote with Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang called "Introspection engine" that goes into a lot of detail about one way to mediate these intrusions by using an always-on meter to detect whether radio radiation is going in or out of a phone. Ideally, the meter could be built into the cover on your phone. That article can be found here: https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/introspection-engine/ - but it looks like that's just a proposal, taken from the full 16 page booklet that goes more in depth about making it work here: https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf
70 months ago REMINDER: Install HTTPS-Everywhere on your browser, if you haven't already!
HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications by always trying to redirect any HTTP to a HTTPS version of the same website. That way you won't accidentally access the insecure version of a website, if it has a secure tunnel set up.
This #protip💬 is especially important right now, because https://tilde.camp has HTTPS now! But I haven't managed to set it up to redirect from http to https on the server-side, so it's up to you to remember the httpS, or install HTTPS-Everywhere so you don't have to remember a thing! This means, although the dark forces can see that you're visiting tilde.camp, they won't be able to deduce what exactly you're doing there without great effort, so this makes your browsing much more secure.