3 Steps Toward Digital Security for People Of Color
For the October issue of WIRED, Edward Snowden penned a moving essay explaining why he chose to nominate the Center for Media Justice’s Malkia Cyril as one of the magazine’s 25 visionary leaders of the next 25 years. Snowden, himself selected by WIRED as one of the visionaries of the last quarter-century, specifically cites in his essay Cyril’s work to defend the digital security of “black activists, immigrant activists, and Muslim Americans”:
Malkia was fighting against the surveillance of activists and people of color before anyone knew my name. While the broader public debated whether the government should be collecting information about millions of innocent people, Malkia reminded us that some minority communities — African American activists, Muslim Americans, and others — have long been deemed “perpetually guilty.”
This perspective is what’s behind the #DefendOurMovements campaign and the Center for Media Justice’s ongoing work to create digital sanctuary for our communities. As we’ve led fights for the media and technology rights of poor people of color over the last decade, we’ve consistently come across concerns about digital security from organizers on the frontlines—especially in the face of the rising authoritarianism of the Trump administration.
Alongside May First/People’s Link, and rooted in Malkia’s vision, we developed DefendOurMovements.org this year to begin to address some of these questions and to provide resources directly to activists of color in the field. The site is updated with relevant tips and tools for digital security, always grounded in what our communities need most.
If you’re wondering where to begin, here are three steps that address some of the most common concerns we’ve heard:
1. Enable two-factor authentication.
Quincy Larson, in a piece titled “How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour,” writes that “The simplest thing you can do to dramatically improve your personal security is to turn on two-factor authentication on your inbox.” This is especially true for activists of color who are prime targets for attacks from hackers.
Two-factor authentication adds a layer of security when using email and other online services. It typically looks like getting a text message with a unique code to access your account, or some other form of additional verification beyond a password.
You can easily enable it for Gmail, but if you’d like to go beyond email, check out Authy.com’s guides to setting up this kind of security for other popular web applications—including Facebook, Twitter, and the Apple store.
For even more, read our resource on encrypting your email here.
2. Use a password manager.
As this post on the Defend Our Movements website explains, a password manager is a must-have for activists. It’s a program that gives you a secure place to store a bunch of different passwords, each one entirely unique, for every site that you consistently visit online.
We often come up with passwords based on how easy they are to remember (or how similar they are to our other passwords) which is, as the article mentions, “one of the most common ways attackers gain access to people’s personal information.”
So check out KeePassXC or another similar tool ASAP. And for more, read the full guide to password managers here.
3. Use the “cloud” securely.
From another post on the website, some key reasons why it’s important to know where your data is stored:
People use the cloud because it allows storage of more information than an average computer can store by itself. It also allows easy access to your data by any number of people working together, and it protects the data from individual computer or local server failure. The cloud is widely popular, which is why so many companies offer the service.
That’s also where the problems lie.
Google, Dropbox and other corporate providers are centralized services offered by companies whose primary concern is profit. These companies are vulnerable to legal requests for turning over data and can terminate your account at any time. Your information isn’t secure because you do not control it…
For an activist, this is very dangerous. That’s why we recommend Nextcloud…a file, calendar and contacts sharing service…Nextcloud is free software designed to be federated (many different Nextcloud sites can share with each other), and can be run by people you know and trust.
Learn more in the full guide to the “cloud” here and explore the rest of the Defend Our Movements website for additional tips!
As Snowden mentions in his piece, “if we want to have a sense of how the future may feel for all of us, we need to examine how the past and present have felt for some of us.” So in addition to maintaining the knowledge-base, we’ve released a Movement Surveillance survey with Equality Labs, which seeks to collect experiences with online surveillance and harassment from people of color.
We’ll be using this info to update DefendOurMovements.org and to reach back out to our communities with the tools they need to stay safe in the digital age. Because as Malkia has said, “in a time when it is hard to tell what’s real and what’s not, digital security grounded in authentic relationships can make all the difference.”
Join us for upcoming conversations around resources, exploring our digital bodies, understanding risk assessments, and navigating safer social media experiences. Help us continue to #DefendOurMovements and complete the Movement Surveillance survey to share your experiences with online surveillance and harassment: http://bit.ly/mvmtsurvey
