Security

Using a Friendless Profile for Visibility

In Lebanon, an LGBT advocacy organisation (not to be named here for privacy reasons) created a Facebook profile with no photo and no friends to safely mobilise people who needed support and/or wanted to advocate for LGBT rights. The profile served as a way to direct people to the organisation's website without threatening peoples security or anonymity by publicly linking them with an LGBT organisation.

 

Jitsi

Jitsi is a communications program that allows you to chat securely using well-supported protocols like SIP, XMPP / Jabber, AIM / ICQ, Windows Live, Facebook and Yahoo. You can also make audio and video calls and share or stream your desktop to someone else. Conference calls and call recording are also possible. Most importantly, all of these features can be used together with a strong encryption.

ObscuraCam

ObscuraCam is an Android application that allows you to obscure faces or objects in photos or videos to keep certain information private. It allows you to black out or pixelate certain areas of an image. You can also reverse pixelate, so that only the person is visible and the background becomes blurred.

The application also allows you to remove telltale metadata such as GPS location, phone make and model, and author information.

It was developed in partnership between human rights video organisation Witness.org and the Guardian Project.

Tor

TOR is a network tool that allows you to improve your privacy and security on the internet. Using Tor helps stop a kind of surveillance called traffic analysis, which is used to detect who is communicating with each other over the internet. There is even a stand-alone browser available for download.

K9 for Android

K9 is a stable and popular email client for Android mobile devices.

A free software project created by a strong community of volunteers, K9 makes it easy to add multiple accounts and to deal with large amounts of incoming emails. It has recently added support for GPG encryption, which is a common way of sending encrypted messages.

For more information about encryption, consult Tactical Tech's Security-in-a-box guide.

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