I know tokenadult recommends the Albert Einstein Institution's writings.
What are other effective and positive ways to influence the culture besides being "Angry Tech People"?
- Learn some applied cryptography and use that knowledge to write and review cryptographic software. Develop and analyze anonymity networks. Work towards development of powerful peer to peer replacements for existing centralized technologies.
- Deploy systems with this technology
- Teach others to take advantage of it
Don't waste your time and everyone else's with worthless campaigns such as this. The only real way to change is to defeat the useful purpose of spying.
Awareness can go a long way if done right.
Never take a half-measure.
Always take half-measure, if cost-benefit or your own priorities indicate it's worthwhile, and don't hide behind canned responses to justify irrationality.
>Our control regime for abusive surveillance technology must include create a societal norm that these systems are morally unacceptable.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I believe there have been wide studies even on this that have largely shown that people world wide are against such practices.
We don't just have have governments passively listening on wires is ways that are thwarted by encryption. The contemporary threat profile is
- Wholesale compromises of devices if they meet certain selectors.(Jacob Applebaum and Der Spiegel's reporting)
- Self replicating government malware with stockpiled zero days.( Flame and Stuxnet)
- Secret court orders for parties to turn over their encryption keys.(Lavabit)
- Cell phone tower dumps ( Verizon transparency report)
- Comprise of networking gear for large scale traffic analysis.
and more.
Edit to fix formatting.
You're kidding, right? Most of those are hardware attacks that were guaranteed to be possible with physical access. A few exploits for sure, but definitely 100% expected stuff. If you want to thwart such attacks, use anonymity networks under virtual environments. Or consider that perhaps you're not high value enough for them to risk 0-day exploits on.
> - Self replicating government malware with stockpiled zero days.( Flame and Stuxnet)
Yes, anyone can write malware. It's fucking piss simple. This has little-to-nothing to do with mass surveillance. Again, virtualized environments which force things over an anonymity network are relatively simple to set up and beat this.
> - Secret court orders for parties to turn over their encryption keys.(Lavabit)
This could easily be thwarted if the solutions I suggested were used. End-to-end encryption is the only sort which should be used.
> - Cell phone tower dumps ( Verizon transparency report)
Easily thwarted. Use redphone or mumble. Run Orbot or similar on your phone for more. If you don't want your phone tracked, you're probably screwed, but if it's the actual data you care about then you have options.
> - Comprise of networking gear for large scale traffic analysis.
Have a party with that encrypted network data. Get cracking. Passive or even MITM attacks don't matter against every solution I mentioned.
So please, stop with your paranoid bullshit. The cryptography is good and solves most of these problems.
Yes, anonymity networks are a key to this and must be developed further, but it's far from as bad as you make it sound.
Both approaches are useful and can be complementary, but if you have to put all your money on one horse, I think you're choosing the wrong one.
- Teach others to take advantage of it
Here you go: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
An all-in-one communication solution that is:
- encrypted (public key, as we're supposed to)
- 100% decentralized
- open-source
Wrong. The only reason that the spying is happening is that it is accepted and allowed. The mentality needs to be clear: only police states(evil states) spy on citizens (their country and others) without a clear reason (c.f. 4th amendment of the US). The concept of mass surveillance needs to be dumped into the ashbin of the US history, along with the internment camps and the Trail of Tears.
Only when the mental restraints of the police/espionage forces are lifted does strong encryption become a working requirement for free speech.
As a technical person, I would argue that our responsibility is to educate non-technical people on what is happening and the ramifications thereof - encouraging artists to explore the idea of the panopticon; encouraging writers to ruminate on the matter in fiction and non-fiction; talking to police and politicians about what security really means in practical purpose; talking to the neighbors about the implications of the coming internet of things and what mass surveillance means then.
I mean, you can do both.