Community Updates

The following are community updates from the weekly Glitter Meetup. If you need to connect to anyone mentioned below, please reach out. We do practice "consensual introductions," meaning we have to check with the person before doing so. No names are associated with the summary notes. Please contact us if you have any questions related to these notes. [email protected]

September 6

• For IFF, people want to see more sessions that integrate with the Academia as there is a feeling that there is a widening gap between academic researchers done in terms of risk threats etc around HRDs and activists and professional trainers. Academics need to better appreciate the work being done by professionals in the digital physical security spaces.

• More sessions that focus on intersectional feminism, and past "white feminism" and white/cisgender/straight fragility to get things done without tokenism or exclusion.

• More sessions geared towards new people and smaller sessions for skill building for folks that have some basis.

• Remembering how far the community has come in regards to collaboration..when it was super competitive before.

• Have to have an honest conversation about collaboration. People brought up things like LevelUp and Safetag, that galvanized a responsible community of trainers, brought a lot of new faces in, and built a largely evergreen curricula which people still use today, but hard to sell because of the community-owned model. Also, hard to track numbers because a) website didn't track users so no stats on usage, and b) a community who for lots of really solid reasons doesn't report back about how many trainings and where they took place. he orgs who put out this stuff are constantly strained to both maintain it, but also to keep moving forward with new programs, as they don't get to "own" these things they created. Again, this is a long term responsible thing to do, and benefits the community much more effectively, but it means a lot of hard work above and beyond daily fixing things. Another problem is training...it takes an organization time to learn how to do it properly and create proper structures. Collaboration means being motivated by different things, and valuing other things more highly

• In Malyasia, two women were caned for having "lesbian sex." The community is there trying to mobilize to get international support. Updates to come soon. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/women-caned-in-malaysia-for-attempting-to-have-lesbian-sex

• At the same time, gay sex was just decriminalized in india

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/06/asia/india-gay-sex-ruling-intl/index.html

• In India, to increase female participation, what was effective was 1:1 participant for male and female. after few training session the participants spread the word about the importance. now a days most of the female participants willingly attend at training or meetups.

• GAMES FOR TRAINERS:

- https://openinternet.github.io/copilot/

- Yoshi Kohno at the Univ. of Washington has developed some games https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~yoshi/

- From Kseniia @ CitizenLab, a great game she developed:

The following is from someone from your area of the world. This person is willing to talk to you via email, if you wish: I'm not doing any 'games' but what I often do is drawings. That worked very well on trainings I did in Russia for feminist collectives.

We do 2 sets of drawings. 1 drawing in the beginning of the training: I ask them to draw how they send a message to their contact, and if there's something weird going on, please represent it on the drawing as well.

Usually I give 5-10 minutes for that, after first round of "oh my, I am a don't know how to draw" and so on and a round of encouragements Then when everyone is done I collect drawings, and quickly look at them. Usually there are "trends" in the group: there are some common ways in which people tend to represent how they see networking and transfer of data, and also some common ways in depicting the "adversary"/"adversaries" (e.g. the danger being on the server side, or the danger being between client and server, or in the client, or in the "physical world" (physical threat) and so on). So I give myself some 3 minutes to group these drawings according to these representations, and give short comments on these groups, encouraging every time the person for their effort and good intuitions (because very often they do have very good intuitive understanding of both transfer protocols / networking and threats), but also explaining if some things are represented in a technically wrong way.

Then I ask people if I understood them right and ask them to comment on their drawings if they wish. People like to defend their visions, and often the comments are interesting to hear - as a trainer I understand where some of the misunderstandings hide (underestimation or overestimation of risk for example...). But it's also a good point to start the discussion.

After this first debrief is done, I usually use a whiteboard / blackboard to list the different kinds of "adversaries" or failures people have drawn. Then I comment on each of them and ask people if they know how to defend from that. Again, in a feminist perspective I was trying to always let people suggest their own ideas of self-defense, and let others correct / criticize their fellows. Only in case of a very wrong intuition that can be dangerous, would I interrupt that process. However, after listening to all these comments, I would wrap up and write good tips down, and give some more advice as well as - for every kind of threat - some sources to go look into (online guides, videos...) and some tools if they have not been mentioned.

After that, in the end of the training, I would ask people to draw me a second round of drawings - how would you like the Internet to be? Draw me a perfect communication. This second round of drawings is very important for several reasons: first, it helps to cope with the stress of the training (because a lot of these women had hard time talking about threats they had experienced, and in general, security trainings give you a lot of stress to cope with).

Second, it breaks the dystopian technological visions that somehow dominate our space, and sets the imagination free to draw collective visions for better tech but also for better communities (kind of speculative fiction approach). In the end, I collect drawings and look if people dream of similar things. Surprisingly very often we see that somehow people project very similar ideas (for example in case of Russian feminist workshops, there were a lot of visions that looked like p2p distributed networks without any centralized servers or anything that would look like central points of failure). I would ask people to briefly comment on what they wanted to say, and in case when people's "dream technology" had a real correlate, I would give them tips to go check this or that tool or project (for example, Mastodon for or Briar...).

August 30

• The Police Department of Bangladesh Government opens a tender. The tender notice is to procure IMSI mobile monitoring/tracking systems, including its ultra-portable backpack version. “IMSI” stands for “international mobile subscriber identity” and the devices in question are basically eavesdropping gadgets used for intercepting mobile phone and its data traffic, as well as tracking location data of mobile users. If I’m not wrong, they essentially create a "fake" mobile tower acting between the target mobile phone and the service provider's real towers to intercept communication related data. http://bangla.cptu.gov.bd/advertisement-goods/details-60402.html

• The SecureDrop project is going to have 0.9.0 release on September 5th. If anyone wants to help in translation, they can help by joining the localization-lab-chat channel.

• Woman group in Zimbabwe is looking to start their own radio channel. If you have resources or good educational materials, let them know

• Karisma running an online campaign against online violence against women, specifically against "machitrolls" or "macho trolls" https://karisma.org.co/unidas-contra-los-machitrolles-acompananos/

• Someone in Lisbon is starting a privacy meetup.

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* Notes from talk from Nathaly on Cyber Feminist Radio and networks:

• Map of cyber feminist structures in Latin America: https://enredadas.org/2018/08/08/mapeo-de-iniciativas-ciberfeministas-latinoamericanas/

- When conducting an interview, if the person you are interviewing has to be extra careful about their privacy and/or security, someone from the radio crew will talk as them, recreating their voice. (ie, so at no time do they use the person's voice)

- Always use safe channels online and offline to talk to your interviewers

- They do have some channels like a cyberfeminist mail list and one of the rules is to have a secure mail like rise up, and we use PGP all the time to share information.

Tools that can be used to create your own radio:

Software: Audio editing: Audacity or arduor

streaming: Radiolibre.co https://liberaturadio.org/ or https://kefir.red/

Educational Manuals in Spanish: Curso virtual: feminicidio y periodismo https://radioslibres.net/curso-virtual-feminicidio-y-periodismo/

Despatriarcalizar la Comunicación: periodismo inclusivo https://radioslibres.net/despatriarcalizar-comunicacion-periodismo-inclusiv/

Escuela ciberfeminista https://escuelafeminista.red/

Recommended Feminist Radio Channels

In English:

https://soundcloud.com/icalondon/black-feminism-and-post-cyber

In Spanish:

Enchufadas: https://radiocut.fm/audiocut/enchufadas-autodefensa-digital-1/

Encuentro de ciberfeminismo Ecuador https://soundcloud.com/tristanaproducciones/encuentro-ciberfeminismo

El desarmador https://eldesarmador.org/

Cyborg feminista radio https://cyborgfeminista.tedic.org/tag/radio/

Wambra radio: http://ciberfeminismo.elchuro.org/cobertura/

tropica media http://tropicamedia.org/

La Radio q genero http://www.laqradiogenero.com/

August 23

• Someone is trying to apply SAFETAG for LGBTQ communities in South Asia.
• Totem project is an online platform helping journalists and activists use digital security & privacy tools and tactics more effectively in their work by Greenhost and FreePressUnlimited. https://totem-project.org/
• Malaysian Parliament passes bill to repeal Anti-Fake News Act last week
• IFF Fellowship deadline has been extended to August 27.
• In Zimbabwe, there was a constitutional court hearing yesterday for the just ended elections where the opposition party is challenging the results that were announced. Judgement will be announced tomorrow at 1400hrs UTC+2
• Someone is working on a due process (appeals) campaign targeting social media platforms (primarily Facebook) and would love to chat off-list with anyone interested or working on similar things.
• The Tor meeting will be happening in Mexico end of September.

About Safetag:

• SAFETAG is an assessment framework to work with organizations and help them build informed decisions about the risks they face. It provides a wide variety of different activities: some very research focused, like understanding the context the organization is working within -- each organization has a totally different set of risks depending on their context; Some are very technical, such as scanning office networks to understand what systems and traffic are on the network; and many are "interpersonal" -- simply talking to staff members, interviewing management, and running exercises to help the organization build a cohesive and shared understanding of their risks and which of them they accept, and which they want to prioritize to mitigate.

• In the best case, you should have a few people helping out -- one person who has a more digisec training background, and another who's happier sitting in the back room hacking around on things. Often funding and scheduling mean that one person has to do all three, so careful planning and preparation are important -- you do NOT want to be researching how to nmap an organization without crashing their computers in the middle of an assessment. In addition, there is value and more impact if the audit is done by more people with different skills other than a single person.

• SAFETAG scoping questions are really good to help people understand their risks.

• Some folks have it customized for working with LGTBQ in West Africa.

• SAFETAG wants to be community owned, but depends on people taking ownership/participating.

• Even though someone might be from a different parts of the world, so many common problems come up that are similar. So you may think your approach only applies to some super specific situation, but almost guaranteed someone else is facing the same problem

• Best tips, for network scanning - (a) be careful and (b) keep it balanced. A lot of the tools, even "simple" nmap, have a lot of super dangerous options, and you really never know if a computer is going to be vulnerable to a 10-year-old bug. Start super lightweight, and super low-impact, even flooding a system that may be a few years out of date can cause it to fail, and then you're suddenly halfway through an audit and have to stop to fix something you broke. Look at software versions, and peek via nmap on weird ports being open before doing anything more intense

• The other big tip is to not get trapped in any one approach. People with hacking/pentesting backgrounds tend to ignore the interactive parts, and people with training backgrounds tend to shy away from the technical pieces. It takes both, plus a solid base of research, to really understand an organization. Also, and super important, you can also spend a LOT of time digging in to some really obscure tech things, and lose the opportunity to ensure you have a holistic view of the org.

• The SAFETAG translation in Spanish is out of date. Ping them if you can help identify chunks to prioritize for funding.

• Re: network scanning, a super fun thing to do (but requires a system with a decent chunk of RAM and a few hours of access to a lot of bandwidth) is to download some vm images. vulnhub is a good repository, and MS has some testing images for old versions of windows (see the safetag reference file here for links: https://github.com/SAFETAG/SAFETAG/blob/master/en/references/network_env.adids.md). Use virtualbox to run them locally and have them all on your local network, and then you can use nmap and such locally (do this at home, you can even have it set up to truly be a "fake" network on your computer only -- do NOT do it on a shared or work network!!) This is a great way to get started exploring and using different scanning options

August 16

• New org in latin america in the works ( Con-nexo). They will be developing projects on capacity building on security, research, security support to organizations, tool development and community generation around communities at risk and security in general.
• Lots of love happening for SAFETAG fellowship
• Zimbabwe still doesnt' have a president even after voting
• Found out Digital Society of Zimbabwe was born in the IFF :)
• Folks working on security investigation framework in tails. Prototype coming soon! Github here: https://gitlab.com/scif/whiskers
• Blog posts coming out taimed at helping new auditors get in the SAFETAG mindset; as it can be very overwhelming to try and tackle the guide as it exists now
• Someone who did research on digital censorship in post-soviet states and how each country's approach differs (about a third have very free internet and about a third have internet censorship in place), is currently talking to a publisher about turning it into a book on the history of censorship in the region.
• Someone is cultivating digital security trainers to assist HRDs in Southeast Asia as many trainers are still flown in.
• Past DIF Folks asking that a community is created so they can further connect.
• Various games made by people in the community such as BLOOG: how formal and informal groups interact in crisis. we called it ENCAPE http://blog.bl00cyb.org/2017/08/interfaces-between-formal-and-informal-crisis-response/, Malicious Content, the infosec card game like Cards against humanit, and the depressing, Cards against Humanitarians" -- now JadedAid -- http://jadedaid.com/).
• First alpha version Tor Browser coming out soon!
• Maybe a hackathon with artist, process oriented.