Privacy and Anonymity Tutorials for Journalists
A spotlight on a 2018 Global Sprint project
Guillermo Movia (@deimidis) is a longtime Mozilla community member, co-organizer of Hackshackers Buenos Aires, and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. He works with free software and researches their work while building open source networks in Latin America and Europe. Guillermo was selected to join this round of Mozilla Open Leaders with his work on privacy and anonymity tutorials for journalists.
I interviewed Guillermo to learn more about these privacy and anonymity tutorials for journalists and how you can help at the Global Sprint 2018.
Tell me about your project, “Privacy and anonymity tutorials for journalists”
We knew that journalists in Argentina, at least, didn’t have much knowledge about tools and procedures that can help them to protect their privacy and anonymity and the privacy of their sources. Last year there were some “information leaks” and the journalists involved had big issues on how to write about it.
The idea of this project is to create tutorials on privacy and anonymity tools that are easy to understand and follow, but with a focus on tools and procedures that journalists need to follow.
What inspired you to create privacy and anonymity tutorials for journalists?
As I said, there were some episodes in Argentina were journalists weren’t ready to work with sensitive information. When you ask them, maybe they tried to use these tools in the past, but didn’t succeed or didn’t have time and knowledge to follow technical documents about encryption, etc. In recent years there were some good examples and good tutorials about privacy, but none of them are translated to Spanish or are focused on journalism (e.g. http://datadetox.myshadow.org/ )
How does this project related to the work you’re doing with privacidad.global?
Our goal is to spread the word and teach world citizens about privacy and anonymity in the digital world (but focused on Spanish speaking citizens). Privacidad.global will have three modules: a) a blog to share news and collaborations from specialists, b) a wiki with tutorials and workshops and c) an anonymous forum to have the space to ask questions and found support (available through TOR). This project will be related with the second module, and at the same time test other ways to talk about these tools
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
There are different types of challenges. Being able to open and promote the project was a big one. In the end I decided to create all the documentation in Spanish and if there is someone interested during the sprint, they can ask for a translation to English.
There is also the problem of creation of the material. The first idea is to have one example tutorial ready for the sprint, plus templates so others can create new tutorials with the same format.
What kind of skills do I need to help you?
Great question! We will need:
- Design and educational skills to help us create content that is easy to understand
- Technical knowledge about privacy and anonymity tools
- Ideas on which tools and procedures need to be created
- Local knowledge on threats that journalists can have in some countries (as an example, there were reports of Pegasus used by Mexico government)
How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2018?
We will have ready some “first contribution” issues on GitHub and a place where we can discuss ideas on how to “design and teach” these tutorials. Also a pad for open ideas board will be available.
What meme or gif best represents your project?
Join us wherever you are May 10–11 at Mozilla’s Global Sprint to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Register today
