CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
Except for blacklisted nations like Syria and North Korea, there is little to stop governments that routinely violate basic rights from obtaining the same so-called “lawful intercept” tools that have been sold to Western police and spy agencies. People tracked by the technology have been beaten, jailed and tortured, according to human rights groups.
It has been three years since the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) launched the open-source whistleblower submission system SecureDrop, and already its ranks of users include The New Yorker, ProPublica, The Guardian, Gawker Media, the Washington Post, and The Intercept. And just last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists became the latest organization to jump aboard.
It all begs the question: Will secure encryption systems like SecureDrop become a fixture of modern journalism? And should your news team be scrambling to catch up?
Image: Artwork at Twitter’s Santa Monica office. Teams managing shared Twitter accounts can still make use of the site’s two-factor authentication protection. (AFP/Jonathan Alcorn)
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The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.
This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.
”– Tim Cook statement re FBI request to hack St Bernardino attackers’ iPhone
IN THE WAKE OF THE ARAB SPRING, the UK riots, and Occupy Wall Street, when the same digital tools that were enabling journalists to share information and organize in unprecedented ways—through Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones—had also enabled the authorities to surveil and target their efforts, journalist Susan McGregor understood that metadata was the biggest security risk to her colleagues and their sources. With a grant from the Brown Institute, she started building a mobile app called Dispatch that allowed for secure, authenticated, and anonymous communication and publishing.
THE ROLE OF JOURNALISTS is to make information public. The irony is that in order to do so, they need to keep lots of things secrets.
They do that in all sorts of ways. Sometimes journalists promise anonymity in order to get officials to divulge what they’re not supposed to reveal. Sometimes they cloak the exchange of sensitive documents. Sometimes they conceal the nature of their stories so that governments can’t censor their work preemptively.
What news organizations don’t worry enough about is keeping the identity of their readers secret. In an era when electronic spycraft is rampant, people who go to a website looking for news can unwittingly endanger themselves just by clicking on a story or video. Governments that know who is accessing specific information can intrude in a variety of ways—by blocking or censoring the story or by targeting individuals who access prohibited information for harassment or even legal action.
As elemental as it is to keep Web-based communication secure, it’s been a largely overlooked subject by many news outlets. That’s beginning to change, thanks to aggressive efforts by advocacy groups to strengthen and reinfforce safety barriers around the Web.
Read more at CJR for story by CPJ director Joel Simon.
Image: Edgard Garrido
How data travels across the Internet
Information is divided up, sent in chunks across the world and reassembled when it reaches its destination. See the graphic. Read: Part 1 | Part 2.
BREAKING: Federal Appeals Court Rules That The NSA’s Massive Surveillance Program Is Illegal
A unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held on Thursday that the National Security Agency’s sweeping database of U.S. phone calls is not authorized by federal law.
Possible upcoming attempts to disable the Tor network
Dec. 19 2014
The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacitate our network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers in the network called directory authorities. (Directory authorities help Tor clients learn the list of relays that make up the Tor network.) We are taking steps now to ensure the safety of our users, and our system is already built to be redundant so that users maintain anonymity even if the network is attacked. Tor remains safe to use.
We hope that this attack doesn’t occur; Tor is used by many good people. If the network is affected, we will immediately inform users via this blog and our Twitter feed @TorProject, along with more information if we become aware of any related risks to Tor users.
The Tor network provides a safe haven from surveillance, censorship, and computer network exploitation for millions of people who live in repressive regimes, including human rights activists in countries such as Iran, Syria, and Russia. People use the Tor network every day to conduct their daily business without fear that their online activities and speech (Facebook posts, email, Twitter feeds) will be tracked and used against them later. Millions more also use the Tor network at their local internet cafe to stay safe for ordinary web browsing.
Tor is also used by banks, diplomatic officials, members of law enforcement, bloggers, and many others. Attempts to disable the Tor network would interfere with all of these users, not just ones disliked by the attacker.
Every person has the right to privacy. This right is a foundation of a democratic society. For example, if Members of the British Parliament or US Congress cannot share ideas and opinions free of government spying, then they cannot remain independent from other branches of government. If journalists are unable to keep their sources confidential, then the ability of the press to check the power of the government is compromised. If human rights workers can’t report evidence of possible crimes against humanity, it is impossible for other bodies to examine this evidence and to react. In the service of justice, we believe that the answer is to open up communication lines for everyone, securely and anonymously.
The Tor network provides online anonymity and privacy that allow freedom for everyone. Like freedom of speech, online privacy is a right for all.