Networks

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.

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.