March 12th 2010, 6pm-9pm

Digital Security and Tactics For (and By) Anti Authoritarians is an one night attempt to share information and skills on digital security, tools, and news between an anti authoritarian tech and activist community. It will be a 3 hour meeting with presentations on basic digital security practices and tools from

* Ringo of Olympia Hackbloc presenting on basic computer security, privacy, encryption, and anonymity
* overview and use of Tor by Jacob Appelbaum,
* tentative report back from Elija of riseup.net,
* and a discussion of next generation tools for activists by Elliott Madison, arrested in PA during the G20 action for allegedly using twitter.

An interesting story has come out from the The Register. Basically this guy got jailed for taking a principled stand and refusing to divulge the credentials necessary to decrypt some data of his. One sentence in particular seemed interesting to me (emphasis added).

"During sentencing, the judge seemingly confirmed that NTAC staff had been unsuccessful in their attempts to crack the encrypted files - or had not bothered trying. "To this day no one really has any idea as to what is contained in that equipment," he said. One file encrypted using software from the German firm Steganos was cracked, but investigators found only another PGP container."


I'm not sure what being "cracked" means (possibly a bad passphrase?). I would find it surprising that this person, who meticulously encrypts his hard drive and even mails himself encrypted flash drives would choose a bad password; especially if he had used two layers of encryption. It could be that the Steganos software uses weak encryption or has a backdoor somewhere. It sounds like typical snake-oil encryption software, touting on its site, "Put in the data. Shut the safe. Uncrackable".