Micah Sifry introduces Personal Democracy Forum, now in its twelfth year. The NSA-Snowden Affair broke right as the last PDF was going on. The first theme of the conference is “Save the Internet” – this could be the year that the battle really happens. Many people that are trying to keep the Internet open and free are here. The open Internet is threatened because of how the whole system is regulated or not regulated correctly. Net neutrality will also be a big topic today.

But we have to remember why it matters to save the Internet. Our second theme is “The Internet Saves”. The Internet saves lives, it saves money. You will hear a lot of amazing talks over the two days about that subject.

Micah introduces Bruce Schneier. He has been a central figure for us to understand what the Snowden affair means for the open Internet. He is in London and we’ve got him via telepresence.

One Year After Snowden

Bruce Schneier

Bruce wants to remind people that NSA surveillance is robust. When you have the budget of the NSA and want to do A or B, you do both. It’s robust technically, legally and financially. There are two things about this story that are not getting enough play:

The correlations: The press is talking about location data, buddy lists, and so on. They don’t talk about how that data is correlated and how it’s used. We are debating things like drone surveillance without talking about facial recognition and other databases. This is a harder story to tell. The exception is the Washington Post story about location data. We have to start talking about the privacy and fairness and liberty harms of using the data. The power to sort becomes the power to exclude.
We need to hammer more on corporate surveillance. We have built surveillance to be the business moel of the Internet. All of these surveillance systems are being used by corporate entities and the NSA is piggybacking off them. Those two are becoming inspearable.

This is larger than the NSA. We think it’s just a US-UK phenomenon but this is what all countries are doing or will be doing. A lot of the NSA programs have open source hacker analogs. THere’s no magic inside the NSA. This means we have to present this as a choice. It’s not a spying arms race. Do we build an Internet that is vulnerable to all attackers or do we build an Internet that is secure to all users?

When you look at solutions, the NSA might have a bigger budget but they are not made of magic. They are constrained by laws of economics, physics, math as the rest of us. Our solutions have to leverage those laws. The point of encryption is not to stop targeted attacks but to stop bulk surveillance. Ubiquitous encryption makes it more expensive to surveil. Everything we look at will be an economic argument, a mathematic argument, or a physics argument.

We are living in a world where a secret court can make a secret ruling. In that court, law trumps tech. He sees this primarily as a legal battle. We won’t win this unless we win the social battle. The drivers of this are fear and convenience. Fear of China, fear of citizens rebelling etc and convenience of services provided by surveillors. That is a very broad social argument.

How to Fight Mass Surveillance: Reset the Net

Holmes Wilson and Tiffiniy Cheng

Micah introduces the next speakers. Their Fight for the Future organization has been at the lead for SOPA-PIPA battles.

They are starting a coordinated effort to fight mass surveillance today. There are seven people in the Fight for the Future organization. Today is the anniversary of the first NSA stories we heard.

When the NSA stories came out we had to figure out who to trust. They were spying on anyone regardless if they did anything wrong. The NSA is hard to stop.

Fight for the Future rallied the web to come together and kill SOPA. People thought that was impossible but they did it. But the NSA

There is no silver bullet. Mass surveillance is deep and complex. They are attacking privacy in so many ways with so many laws. We couldn’t live in a world where the government has this much power over this many people. Other governments are racing to do this.

Obama is not the most corrupt president (they show an image of Nixon). But he does have the entire NSA apparatus at his fingertips.

Mass surveillance is illegiimiate and it’s a time bomb. It robs us of the world we want to see. Our institutions are failing to protect us. How can we do something?

The NSA are targeted surveillance masterminds. But when they do bulk surveillance, they are more like scavengers, like raccoons. They can only get in if we leave the top of the trash can open. For years, we’ve left the doors open. And that’s the NSA’s weakness. They are extremely vulnerable to us taking steps to protect ourselves.

We are an activist organization. We are launching a campaign today called “Reset the Net”. Today we are able to attack the NSA in the point where they are weak by securing popular services and by making security popular.

WordPress is announcing SSL by default. Tumblr is announcing SSL by default and secure browsing sessions. Google is launching a plugin that brings end to end encryption in Gmail. EFF is launching a relay of TORs. Namecheap is offering super cheap SSL certificates. Sendgrid, an email provider, is encrypting how their emails travel across the Internet. We have huge sites taking huge steps to increase mass security and privacy on the Internet.

Services like TextSecure, ChatSecure, Redphone, Tor should be on your phones and your browsers. Use Adium for secure chats if you are on a Mac. Fight for the Future is driving traffic to privacy tools. Reddit and Mozilla are doing huge privacy steps. Minecraft is bringing security to kids. Cloudflare. Thunderclap.it.

Credo Mobile is emailing all its users. SpiderOak is distributing security tools to its users. Google Play is launching a security tools campaign. Twitter. There are thousands more sites participating in this program.

The bottom line is – can we fix everything? No. The NSA can find a way in. But can we make mass surveillance too expensive to be worth it? Hell yes.

It’s going to be a long road. But the bottom line is that we can win. If we lead, the law will follow. If we can plant this idea in the next generation of developers we can have end-to-end security and privacy built in.

People are asking us “How does this compare to the SOPA blackout?” We say, “That was symbolic, this is real. We are actually blacking out people’s data from the NSA’s grasp.”

We have a choice – Freedom or Surveillance. They invite collaborators and partners.

Encryption is for Everyone

Jillian York

Micah introduces Jillian York, Director of International Freedom at the EFF. She is going to talk about how encryption works and why you should use it even if you think you have nothing to hide.

The NSA might be picking up the broadest information, but other countries are doing this too. Jillian was recently in Tunisia where they have been surveilling their populations for many years. They were on the frontlines of surveillance before the Arab Spring. This will become increasingly more common.

Bruce talked about the legal battle. There’s the policy battle we are fighting in DC which is important. There’s the society battle – that privacy matters, freedom of speech matters. There is one more battle that is the most important for us – that’s the technology battle. She shows a quote from Edward Snowden.

“Encryption works – properly implemented strong cryptio systems are one fo the few things you can rely on” – Edward Snowden

The thing that you can do today, right now, is use encryption.

But what is encryption? Encryption is the process of encoding messages or information such that only authorized parties can read it. End-to-end encryption means that you hold the key to decrypting your message and no one else, even your email provider, can read your message.

She shows slides mentioning encryption tech like PGP, OTR, TextSecure, ChatSecure and RedPhone. There’s an important battle here – the techies in the room need to think about UX to make these systems easier and more friendly. She wants to build a strong mainstream crypto movement. Instead of thinking “NSA-proof” technology, we want to think about “harm reduction”. You all probably know people who say “I have nothing to hide”.

Here are some reasons to still use encryption when you think you have nothing to hide:

You don’t know every law on the books
Metadata leaves enormous clues
Governments change – Just because you don’t have anything to hide from today’s administration, you never know what the next one might do
Even if you don’t have something to hide, someone you know probably does. If you are a journalists you have sources you need to protect. It’s important to not just think about yourself but about those who you are communicating with.

But how do you do it? Jillian’s mom who is a sys admin suggested adding some ways to take action.

Encryption Works by the Press Freedom Foundation
Tactical Tech’s Security in a Box
Surveillance Self-Defense – EFF’s comprehensive resource