13.4: Defending Social Movements (in the US)
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13.4.1: Defending against Surveillance and Suppression
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You may hear that there is no such thing as perfect digital security, and we agree. The surveillance capabilities of a well-resourced adversary are nearly limitless, and those that we described in “Digital Threats to Social Movements” barely scratch the surface. However, not all risks are equal, not all surveillance tools are equally likely to be used, and there is a lot that an individual and a group can do to reduce the threats due to surveillance.
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13.4.2: Security Culture
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Social movements aware of the history of informant-driven suppression by State and private adversaries have developed what is termed security culture. This term refers to information-sharing agreements and other group practices intended to minimize the negative impacts of infiltration, surveillance, and other suppressive threats to the group, its work, its membership, and broader social movements; that is, security here means something much broader than digital security.
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13.4.3: Protecting Your Devices
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The amount of data you keep on your phone and laptop is staggering. A lot of this data you will also share with your cloud storage providers, but that is the focus of the chapter “Protecting Your Remote Data.” Here we focus on protecting the data that you keep with you on your laptops and cell phones from a remote or physical attack.
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13.4.4: Protecting Your Communications
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The best way to protect your online communications is through encryption. But not all encryption is equally protective. We will focus on the concepts that distinguish between the degrees of protection.
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13.4.5: Protecting Your Remote Data
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The cloud is ubiquitous. Since the early 2000s, data is increasingly stored not exclusively (or at all) on your own device but on the servers of the companies that manage your device or operating system or whose services you subscribe to. If that data is not encrypted with a key that you control, that data is at risk for compromise.
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13.4.6: Protecting Your Identity
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In this chapter, we will focus on skills for using Tor over VPN, but these lessons apply to using a VPN. One needs to additionally remember, though, that when using a VPN, the VPN provider knows who you are and the metadata of your internet communications (and the content, if it isn’t encrypted). While we will focus on using Tor via the Tor Browser, know that there are other applications that route internet requests through the Tor network.
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