While there is no way to be completely immune from surveillance, following our advice below will keep you and your comrades much safer. We will be updating this page with more guidance on how to most effectively organize in an age of widespread electronic surveillance. Stay tuned!

To protect yourself, your comrades, and actions, we recommend everyone take the following minimum digital security steps.

  1. Install all available security updates for your phone and computer.
  2. Use Signal ( android | iphone | desktop ) for text messaging and voice calls.
  3. Use the TOR Browser ( desktop | android ) to visit websites whenever possible especially for research.
  4. Use strong passwords ( explained here ) — a different one for each of your logins, using a password manager.
    1. Open source programs like KeePassX (mac/windows/linux) are always preferred.
    2. More feature-rich programs like 1Password (mac/windows) may be preferable: however, we urge strongly against syncing passwords over the internet (e.g., dropbox, icloud, or 1password teams). Run a WLAN server instead.
    3. NEVER give anyone your password.
  5. Encrypt all of your data!
    1. Your smart phone ( iphone | android ).
    2. Your computer hard drive ( mac | windows | linux ).
    3. Your computer backups ( mac | windows | linux ).
  6. Be aware of what you post to social media and whether it could put you & your comrades at risk.

Email security

Email is inherently insecure. Getting set up to encrypt your emails is not as hard as you might think. However, since the weakest link in any system is often the user, you should be sure you are using encryption correctly. We recommend deploying encryption using Thunderbird, an email client that works on mac, windows and linux. For step-by-step instructions on setting this system up, please see this document. Once you have set this up, folks will be able to send you encrypted emails and you’ll be able to send encrypted emails to anyone who is likewise set up. To be most useful, it is best to set up a group of people to all be able to communicate with each other. To request a training to help get your group set up with email encryption, please contact us.

Updated August 7, 2017