This sort of thinking obscures what exactly a tool is, what precisely you can trust it to do, and why. In this view either a tool is trustworthy (ie totally has your back) or it's not. In the opposite direction many activists default to trusting treating applications or service providers like they would a person. This creates a default mode where folks either refrain from using technologies when they would be better off using them, OR they use them with careless abandon, assuming that if they haven't faced state oppression yet, they won't in the future. In particular many activists gravitate towards a kind of security nihilism, presuming that all our communications technologies are insecure and nothing can really be done to secure them so there's no point. This can lead us to make inaccurate models in our heads or treat technologies with either dismissiveness or superstition. The modern tools we use are complicated and many of us don't quite understand what goes on beneath the surface. But they are simple to pickup and use immediately.
We will explain more about these two tools later. It also obscures what website you're visiting from anyone watching your connection. This obscures your location from the site you're visiting. It connects you to the Tor Network (a subset of the servers that relay information across the internet), and makes your connection to whatever websites you're visiting hard to track back.
TorBrowser is an enhanced version of Firefox that provides some annonymity to your internet browsing. Texts that were encrypted will have a small padlock icon next to them. When you text someone who likewise has Signal on their phone the text messages you send to one another will be encrypted every step of the way. It replaces the app you currently use to send text messages.
Signal is an text messaging app for Android and iPhones. We, the authors, have decades of experience as both hackers and anarchists, and we've personally assisted and trained hundreds of other activists and dissidents. Our goal is not to scare, but to be honest about the scary reality and the work that is necessary (and doable!) to achieve a significant measure of security. While we will attempt to be acessible to everyone we will not lie to you "for your own good", we will attempt to be provide a map. This is meant neither as a trivial introduction nor as a comprehensive education, but as something that bridges the gap between the two and provides conceptual understandings in addition to advice and best practices. Specifically it intends to address common usecases and threats radical activists and dissidents face and answer every question commonly asked at trainings for radical activists and dissidents. Instead this text is geared towards activists and dissidents who are already self-motivated and want to be fully prepared for serious repression from authoritarian regimes. These texts usually target "normal people" and or professionals (like journalists and lawyers) who tend to be entitled and adverse to learning new things. There are many texts that list off a few tools or programs they advise people to use while trying to hide context and considerations so as to not overwhelm.
Microsoft is a giant because Skype for Business is huge, and there's many others.#Rebel Alliance Tech Manual Dated: Jan 12th, 2017 Slack is known well in the tech industry, but less-so in other industries. Slack is not the only company that is making inroads here. It could be seen as data segregation and diversification.ģ. It's also possible Slack could be seen as more secure because an internal system breach may not include a complete Slack hosted breach. This is a much more difficult calculation and it really depends on the size of your company, the value of the information Slack will be holding, etc. Yes there are risks with cloud products, but risk is a cost consideration so you look at cost impact to the company of a breach and you compare that to a self-hosted high maintenance solution. It comes into companies from the bottom, so companies are more responding to the fact that their employees are using it vs bringing it in from the top.Ģ. The Slack model is such that your staff could start using it without even getting permission from the top. As far as it being acceptable, I think there are a few things to consider:ġ. Growth of companies like Okta demonstrate that shift. If you look at the enterprise space, bigger and bigger companies are becoming comfortable with cloud-hosting of services. It's not just the setup of a self-hosted solution, but maintenance, and otherwise.