Liberate

Until recently I had avoided learning much about computer security. I had just assumed that anything I did on the computer could be monitored by the government and I didn’t really have anything much to keep secret so why bother? Recently though I decided that regardless of what I was doing there is no reason to make it easy for the cops. I don’t want them to get access to all my personal photos, writings etc if they come up with some bullshit reason to raid my house. So here are a couple of programs and things I have started using. None of this is very complicated or takes very long.

Backing up

This is less about security and more about making sure you don’t lose everything on your computer when the cops raid. Police have been targeting computers when they raid activists and they normally keep them for at least 6 months normally longer. When you get it back there is no guarantee that it will be in working condition either. So if you have important stuff, photos, books your working on etc it makes sense to back it up. An external hard drive is just like a bigger version of a USB stick and can they can be bought relatively cheaply online by searching pricespy.co.nz . How big you need depends on what you have on your computer. A photographer might need a 500gb hard drive (around $150 online) whilst a regular user might need 80gb
(around $90 online).

Make sure your backups of data are also encrypted, I recommend Truecrypt for this. Store your encrypted hard drive off site somewhere where the cops are highly unlikely to raid. Don’t talk about where it is stored in cars or homes which are likely to be bugged. Make sure to update your backups regularly so you don’t lose too much if you’re raided.

Truecrypt

This is a really easy to use program which to create sections of your hard drive which require a password to get into. Simply download it and follow the instructions to create an encrypted section on your hard drive. You simply log into the encrypted section, copy and paste files into it or work on files already in the encrypted section and when finished log out.

The cops could get a court order forcing you to hand over passwords allowing access to encrypted drives. Truecrypt allows you to get around this by allowing you to create false areas so even if you are forced to hand over passwords the cops will only get access to a dummy section. There are plenty of guides on the website for installing Truecrypt and doing some of the more advanced stuff.

This can be downloaded from http://www.truecrypt.org/

Tor

This is a neat free program which helps make it more difficult for authorities to track which websites you are visiting. It does this by bouncing your outgoing requests for webpages and incoming data packets through anonymous routes around the globe. The analogy for this is an onion with each layer of the onion skin another anonymous router which your request for traffic is bounced too. This program is also used by the cops when they are doing stuff on the net to hide the fact that they are visiting activist sites from government computers.

This can be downloaded from http://www.torproject.org/

This is all real basic stuff and there is a need for us to get way more advanced in data security. For a more comprehensive guide to activist computer security look at: http://security.resist.ca/compintro.shtml

Next issue: Anonymous Email