February 19, 2026 Digital Rights Social
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When: February 19, 2026 Time: 14 UTC /
Check my time zone here Where: TCU Mattermost | Secure an account here Host: Erin Communicating Securely With Your Network: Secure Communications Apps, Protocols, and Best Tips During our February Digital Rights Social, we will be discussing secure communications apps and best tips to communicate securely with your network. While the conversation will remain organic, and also include space to connect with other participants, we will be inviting experts to join the conversation as well! |
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Notes
What the community is reading right now...
- The Hakawati - Rabih Alameddine
- Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
- The Expanse (series) - James S. A. Corey
- The Other Wind - Ursula K. Le Guin
- Cielos de Córdoba - F. Falco
- Seeing (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, lit. Essay on Lucidity) - José Saramago
- Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin - Andrew S. Weiss
- White Nights - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- El invencible verano de Liliana - Cristina Rivera Garza
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
- Moderation - Elaine Castillo
- Sunburn - Chloe Michelle Howarth
Community News and Project Updates
- Cyd is trying to (finally) make a dev release to delete all your wall data from Facebook! Cyd currently allows you to back up, delete and migrate your data on X.
- Global Voices Services is in the process of being launched!
- The early beta of Phoenix R&D's Air (LinkedIn, Mastodon) was launched a couple of weeks ago!
- The beta is invite-only, so if you are interested in trying it out, message @cityroler directly on Mattermost for an invitation code.
- The Escuela Común 2026 cohort has started!
- Tech firms will have 48 hours to remove abusive images under new law
Community-recommended projects and reading to explore...
- Blacksky Algorithms
- When the Internet Goes Dark: Uganda killed the internet. 400,000 people had already downloaded Bitchat
- Rise Against Big Tech
- Resist and Unsubscribe
- Fediverse Punk Month
Because a tool in itself is not a solution to securing comms...Which practices have you found most valuable to improving security and safety within your network communications?
Do you have a favorite educational resource that you share with your networks about communicating more securely?
- Locking down Signal - Freedom of the Press Foundation
- Communicating With Others - Surveillance Self-Defense from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Easy, short, and introduces a-bit-more-complex subjects. Full of links if people want to know more.
- How HTTPS and Tor Work Together to Protect Your Anonymity and Privacy - Surveillance Self-Defense from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- A community organizer’s guide to Signal group chats - The Verge
- https://securemessagingapps.com - Secure Messaging App Comparison Site
- Shira Quiz from Horizontal, developers of Shira App
- An educational and very practical resource to avoid phishing and communicate securely.
What are some of the biggest security challenges or concerns you have while communicating within your networks? Are there any lingering questions about secure comms that you would like to share?
- There are so many different applications, groups, chats, servers, etc. It's very hard to keep up with and might create a sense of having too much information to consume every hour of your day. Hopefully there are ways that we can moderate and better control this influx of information so it's not like a community equivalent to social media.
- We need to get away from everything WhatsApp. People really believe WhatsApp "encryption" is safe and secure to speak about GBV and state violence. It's not true. The digital divide between Global South and Global North is not just delayed access to resources, devices, internet services and digital use literacy, but a time lag in understanding that surveillance and data collection are everywhere... and we don't just have to accept it, we can move to alternatives.
- Big tech's increased capitulation to surveillance and fascism, lack of interoperability between platforms, and inertia are some big challenges. Migrating from discord, Slack, Whatsapp, etc. should be made easier. The question remains "to what" of course! So answering that, and making migration dead-easy, is critical.
- There also needs to be healthy skepticism of the big tech alternatives. A tool may be more privacy-preserving in its early stages, but what guarantees are in place to ensure it won't grow and evolve into a data-mining, surveillance tool in future?
