Security culture training

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Digital security

It's good to have lots of questions about "security." This section is designed to point you in the right direction towards existing resources based on your concerns, fill in the gaps where they exist, and equip you with enough Internet street smarts for you to feel safer online. Use the following table to find the best resources for your situation.

👍 Many thanks to CommunityRED for inspiring the foundational structure of much of this guide.

🚧 TK-WORK IN PROGRESS: This guide is a work in progress. Feel free to tweak / add resources. See also Persona-based commsec training matrix in-progress notes. For substantive discussion, use the issues section.

💡 How to use this table: TK-TODO: TL;DR: The cells to the left and above of "your cell" are also relevant to you!

		DEFENDER
		Individual	Vocal community member	Targeted activist
		I'm just an ordinary person, but I've been harassed online and off for being Muslim/LGBT/queer/a woman/not a citizen/etc. What can I do to protect myself?	I've been vocal about my political beliefs online/at school/at work, and I'm now I'm worried about a backlash. I may or may not have been involved in some community organizing and advocacy groups.	I've been personally targeted for my activism and for speaking out about issues important to me already, and I want to do everything I can to protect myself from sophisticated, dedicated, frightening attackers.
ATTACKERS	Harassers	Scrub your personal data from the Internet, i.e., see this guide	🚧 TK-TODO Install Google Authenticator for your accounts	🚧 TK-TODO
	Corporations/small institutions	Lifehacker: Everyone's trying to track what you do on the Web. Here's how to stop them Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's Consumer Guide on Workplace Privacy and Employee Monitoring - an overview (and more links) on the legalities of asserting your privacy rights as an employee of a company	🚧 TK-TODO	🚧 TK-TODO
	Governments/State actors	Defending against ICE raids (like this guide?) Surveillance law - a free Stanford course	🚧 TK-TODO	🚧 TK-TODO

📝 Editor's note: This is a braindump following up from a recent commsec training; please feel free to organize.

• "A gentle introduction to threats and how to defend against them" - This is a video and a heavily-hyperlinked transcript of a presentation I first put together for CryptoParty Albuquerque in 2015, published on my personal blog.
• "Know Your (Digital) Rights" - my co-organizer from CryptoParty Albuquerque put together a legal primer, which we also have a video recording and heavily-hyperlinked transcript for posted on my personal blog.
  • Another resource, especially useful for employed people, is the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's Consumer Guide on Workplace Privacy and Employee Monitoring, which gives an overview (and more links) on the legalities of asserting your privacy rights as an employee of a company.

In addition to these primers and the links included in them, additional useful resources are:

• PrivacyTools.io - Simply start at the top and read down the page. This is as guided an introduction to privacy issues and what to do about them as it gets.
• EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense Handbook - A thorough treatment of anti-surveillance software, along with tutorials for how to get them installed and working on your system.
  • If you're feeling overwhelmed by all of this already, consider spending just a little bit of time to walk yourself through the SSD's Security Starter Pack.
• PRISM-Break! - An overwhelmingly large digital reference card for all the privacy-enhancing tools available to you for a particular platform, purpose, or protocol. Be cautious here, some of the listed tools are experimental, not audited, or worse.
• Security in a Box - A slightly dated, but still generally solid, resource website featuring much of the same content as the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide, but with a regularly updated blog. Created and maintained by the TacticalTech.org collective.
• MacOS security and Privacy guide - A solid and complete guide on securing your MacOS system. You can skip to the sections you want to secure and follow the guide as you want.

There's a ton of stuff in there, and learning about how to defend yourself from governments, corporations, or malicious individuals on the Internet is more involved than simply picking up one or two tools. But a few well-chosen tools does give you a really, really good start. Taking some time to familiarize yourself with the above guides will hopefully help you become even more capable.

Movement building

• No Badjacketing - understand how the State gets us to do its dirty work for them, and how to avoid being manipulated by inflitrators.