| Abstract |
EFF created the Surveillance Self-Defense project (https://ssd.eff.org) to teach individuals and organisations within the U.S. about legal and technological strategies which can be used to minimise surveillance threats from US government actors. In this talk, we will discuss the lessons from this project and how to adapt or extend them to the European context. From J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO to the Bush Administration, US government actors have a tradition of using surveillance powers against individuals and civil society organisations in ways that we might consider inappropriate and wish to defend ourselves against. EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense project is an attempt to offer a succinct and easy-to-follow explanation of American law in relation to warrants, subpoenas, wiretaps and other forms of surveillance. It also discusses the readily available technical countermeasures to surveillance, and attempts to integrate these in a risk assessment model based on the U.S. legal situation. When is it safer to use an unencrypted phone conversation or a phone call using Skype? Is it safer to use email or IM? And so forth. In this talk we will discuss how these pieces fit together, and how the SSD project might be expanded to kinds of adversaries it did not originally focus on, including: law abiding government actors in Europe; government actors that do not follow the law with regards to surveillance; civil litigation threats in various jurisdictions; and illicit private surveillance.
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