Hi! We’re Riseup Labs, the research arm of the Riseup Collective. We’re working on our very first educational project, and you could be part of it. We invite you to contribute story, theory, and your advice for using computers safely and securely in activism and organizing.

Activists know about security culture. The goal of this project is to ensure that security culture is a healthy culture online.

Have you got some experience to share? We are particularly interested in:

• Critical analysis of the web-based tools that are available now (myspace, facebook, gmail, evites, riseup lists, etc.) What works and what doesn’t work? What are the risks and what are the pitfalls?
• Your Stories. Share your experience with online security, or digital security offline. Do you have a success story? Sad stories welcome, too.
• Practical advice. On the level of “how to pick a good password and not write it down”—-good security for the rest of us.
• Theoretical and historical analyses of privacy and security issues faced by social justice organizers, especially around:
  • relational surveillance: analysis of social networks via email and phone transactions.
  • data profiling: the aggregation of consumer data in order to build detailed profiles on the consumption habits of everyone.
  • tethered devices: devices that are controlled via a ‘tether’ by the manufacturer. On the desktop, trusted computing can be seen as a way of achieving tethered computing on an otherwise agnostic and innovative device.
  • geospatial surveillance: location tracking via RFID, cell phones, IP addresses.
  • biometric surveillance: biometric face scanning, DNA databases.

Please email questions, material, or proposals to security_zine@riseup.net. We will need articles by April 26th.

Love,
Riseup Labs