This talk will teach you what tools to use (and not use) under certain conditions and how to overcome state-level attacks on your communications on a shoestring budget should you need it. While many of the threats to electronic communications have been discussed for decades, the revelations made by Edward Snowden showed us the scope and scale of the intrusion on our basic rights as humans and professionals. When dealing with confidential information and conducting sensitive investigations you need to be able to protect your sources, yourself and your story (in that order). This means securing both content and meta-data relating to any communications you have by electronic or other means. In the case of journalists, the ability to effectively provide confidentiality could determine if sources will communicate at all. Glenn Greenwald was almost passed over for the scoop of a lifetime because he did not have encrypted email functionality on his laptop at the time Snowden was trying to contact him. Journalists and citizens have now begun to include their email encryption PGP/GPG key fingerprint on their business cards and in their email signatures, so potential contacts know there is the option of secure communication. Encrypting email will be one of the options you'll have at your disposal at the end of the workshop as well as anonymous browsing and the ability to encrypt files for safe storage. The software we teach is free (as in cost and free-as-in-freedom - more on that in the talk). It runs on any post-2007 laptop that has Windows, Linux or MacOSX on it. To be secure your installed software must still be supported (so no Windows XP for instance). Because of the very different technical internal workings of tablets and smartphones we currently do not support them.
The CIJ handbook has a more detailed explanation of our reasons for this.
