Workshop at Ernakulam Public Library, Ernakulam

October 6, 2017

Participants

We live in an era where human activity is producing unprecedented amounts of digital data. The popular saying these days is ‘data is the new oil’. The high value of this data along with the lack of awareness among people about rights has prompted corporations and governments alike to amass and exploit data for their purposes while posing long-term risks to the right to privacy and other civil liberties of citizens around the world. It has become imperative for everyone to protect their data, their privacy and digital communications.

We also live in an era of unprecedented surveillance. The technical capabilities of law enforcement and intelligence agencies are rapidly expanding, and even the best attempts at law reform can’t keep up with these new powers. Over and over again, we’ve seen these capabilities used against protected free speech activities, especially against the speech of marginalized people. Compounding the problem of government surveillance is that of corporate surveillance; we rely on a small handful of data-driven private companies for all of our computing needs, and many of these services are “free” because we are the product. These corporate entities regularly collude with law enforcement to share our private communications, searches, contacts, and more — quite often without our knowledge. By fighting against surveillance, we can reject an Internet controlled by a handful of powerful corporate entities and intelligence agencies, and take back our rights in the digital sphere.

In this context, SFLC.in partnered with Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom (DAKF) in Kochi to organize a Digital Security Training.

During the workshop we demonstrated and trained the participants on popular cryptography tools like Tor and Signal. Followed by a dedicated session on mobile security which dealt with specific measure to secure your phone from various common threats. The following are the objectives of the workshop: