p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- What’s descrfibed as a “practical guide to help activists from around the world use the Internet safely under repressive regimes” has just neen released by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The foundation says ”Surveillance Self-Defense International’ is an offshoot from its ‘Surveillance Self-Defense manual,’ an online how-to guide for protecting private data against government spying in the US which, “reflects the fact that the best strategies to achieve privacy are very different for people in the U.S. and people living elsewhere, sometimes under authoritarian regimes”.

Among other suggestions, “Be Careful of What and Where You Publish,” the guide warns, stating »»»

a)   Avoid publishing material under your own name, or including facts that might be clues to your identity, unless you are willing to take the risk that authorities will target you for reprisals.

b)   Avoid publishing material through hosting services that have a commercial presence in your coun-try, or which are likely to cooperate with your country`s government. Be aware that some coun-tries have treaties which lead them to assist other countries` law enforcement requests.

b)   Only publish material through services that use https.  You should see the https pre?x in the browser address bar, and an unbroken lock icon in your browser window— not just during login, but the entire time you are using the site.

The guide also has ideas on how you can help others escape surveillance and censorship »»»

1. Run a Tor Relay
Donate some of your bandwidth by relaying encrypted traffic between Tor nodes.  Follow the instructions linked below, but be sure to disable exiting from your machine, unless you intend to run an exit node (see section 3 below) http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en#setup

2. Run a Tor Bridge
Act as a bridge, to help people in countries with extreme Internet censorship and surveillance practices:
https://www.torproject.org/bridges#RunningABridge If you aren`t sure whether you should run a relay or a bridge, read this.

3. Consider Running a Tor Exit Node
Unlike running Tor relays and bridges, running a Tor exit node requires signi?cantly more care, organization, and commitment.  Tor exit nodes are the machines which pass traffic out of the Tor network and on to its ?nal destination on the Internet.  Exit nodes are vital to the operation of the Tor network.  But, unlike the rest of the network, much of the traffic they carry is unencrypted.  Tor exit nodes are the machines that will be fetching websites for dissidents in Iran or Burma to read; they are the machines that will be sending blog posts on behalf of those dissidents; they are the machines that will leave digital logs behind on the websites and servers they visit.  But because Tor can be used for any purpose, it is also possible that Tor exit nodes will generate complaints about copyright infringement, web-spamming or other forms of antisocial network activity and those would be associated with the exit node`s IP address. If you decide to run a Tor exit node, it is important to anticipate the possibility of such complaints, and  ensure that you don`t get blamed for antisocial things that a few of the hundreds of thousands of Tor  users do.  You should therefore read the Tor project`s advice on running exit nodes.

4. Run a Proxy for Friends
If you have friends in a country where Internet censorship is a problem, you could run a private proxy for them. Unfortunately, in order to do this securely, you will need to obtain an SSL certificate for the  proxy; this is quite an involved process. If you run a Unix operating system, understand what shell access is, and trust your friends, you could give them shell accounts to use to create a personal proxy with ssh -D

By staff technologist Peter Eckersley, ‘Surveillance Self-Defense International’ can be downloaded from http://www.eff.org/wp/surveillance-self-defense-international.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

July, 2009

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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