What’s a Crypto-Party, and Why Should I Care?

When I’m not in class at NYU, I run events where journalists and activists can learn how to use privacy software with Verso Books. I teach them about the Tor browser as well as how to encrypt their e-mails and instant message conversations. This post seeks to answer the two most common questions I get.

Crypto-parties are events where people bring along laptops and other mobile devices to learn how to use basic encryption tools and discuss privacy in more general terms.

Whether you’re filing your taxes, browsing the Internet, or communicating with a loved one, privacy is a fundamental human right and it’s a non-negotiable requirement for a functional democracy. Journalists need it to protect their sources, activists working under repressive regimes need it to make their voice heard, and ordinary citizens should be able to keep their professional and medical info secure.

Having something to hide is perfectly natural — what we tell to family is different to what we tell our employers or collegues or friends, and that doesn’t make us duplicious or secretive people. Under mass surveillance, though, we change how we act: we may choose not to go to a political meeting, or we may choose to stay quiet about a particular political opinion. In both cases, surveillance is chilling your expression. Crypto-parties seek to mitigate that problem.

Crypto-parties are often posited as being anti-NSA or even anti-American, but that’s not the case. The NSA, its contractors, and its global partners are collecting data about us, including our browsing history, location, phone-call metadata, e-mail content, and health information. And it’s not just three-letter government agencies: the profit margins of companies like Google and Facebook rely on building a profile of your habits and personality traits. They use the contents of your e-mails or the list of your self-reported interests to target you with ads, even when you think they’re not tracking you.

Privacy advocates say that there should be more checks and balances when it comes to consumer’s personally-identifying information online, but until legislation curbing these privacy violations is introduced, they encourage the use of encryption software, and crypto-parties are places to learn about them.

Tommy Collison is a journalism student and activist studying at NYU. The next encryption workshop is on January 30, 2015, in Brooklyn. RSVP at this link.

Photo credit to Victor Jeffreys II.