Digital Rights

Digital Literacy Is a Survival Skill

When I trained the people who would carry messages across the border, I did not teach them theology first. I taught them navigation. How to read terrain. How to identify patrol patterns. How to move quietly. How to react to the unexpected.

The theology was the reason. The navigation was the survival skill.

In the digital age, the equivalent survival skill is digital literacy. Not the ability to use a smartphone. The ability to use it without being monitored, tracked, or compromised by entities whose interests do not align with yours.

The Cost of Disconnection

The internet went down. Not from a technical failure. From a decision.

Someone in a government office decided that the people in a specific region, at a specific time, should not be able to communicate with each other or with the outside world. The decision was implemented. The network went dark.

This is an internet shutdown, and it is the most underreported form of political repression in the world today.

Operational Security for Activists

If you are reading this, you are probably organizing something. A protest. A mutual aid network. A documentation project. An underground publication.

You are doing this in an environment that is, at minimum, indifferent to your work. At maximum, actively hostile.

You need operational security. Not paranoia. Not recklessness disguised as courage. Operational security.

This is how you build a network that survives.

First Principle: Trust is Earned in Increments

You do not trust someone because they are passionate. You do not trust someone because they showed up to a meeting. You do not trust someone because they say the right things.

The Backdoor Is Always a Front Door

A government official announces a new initiative to ensure “lawful access” to encrypted communications. The language is careful. They are not asking to ban encryption. They are asking for a mechanism – a key, a process, a capability – that would allow authorized parties, with appropriate legal authorization, to access encrypted communications when necessary.

This sounds reasonable. It is not.

I am going to explain why, and I am going to explain it not as a technologist – there are many qualified people who have made the technical argument – but as someone who has spent his existence understanding what happens when a government gains the ability to monitor the communications of its people.

Three Rules for Building a Network That Survives

I have built networks under conditions that made failure fatal. Not metaphorically fatal. My network’s failure – the discovery of a contact, the interception of a message, the compromise of a safe house – meant execution. Mine, and the people connected to me.

Under these conditions, you learn to build differently. You learn to build for the failure you have not yet imagined, because the failures you can imagine are the ones your adversary can imagine too.

The Safe House Was a Kitchen Table

I want to correct a misconception about networks that has become pervasive in the digital age. The misconception is that networks are technological.

They are not. Networks are human. Technology is a tool that networks use, but the network itself – its resilience, its capacity, its trustworthiness – is a function of the human relationships at its core.

I know this because every network I built was centered on a kitchen table.

The Border Is a Network Problem

I crossed the border between China and Korea fourteen times. Each crossing required a different route, a different assessment of patrol patterns, a different calculation of risk. The border was not a line. It was a problem, and the problem had solutions, but each solution was temporary, and the cost of getting it wrong was death.

I describe this not because the details of 19th-century border crossing are directly applicable to the present. I describe it because the structure of the problem has not changed. What has changed is the terrain.