As part of CLDC’s mission, it is important to elevate resources that we find vital to the work our movements do in the world. CLDC does this for a myriad of reasons — sometimes it’s to reinforce the safety that’s instrumental to working in precarious places and times, and sometimes it’s to highlight a resource that can increase mental health and wellbeing. Today’s resource review should do both. Engaging with, and understanding solid digital security practices can keep you and your activist community safer from State privacy violations that destroy effective political organizing, mitigate the breadth and severity of arrest and prosecution, and will hopefully ensure stronger, bolder, more resilient movements. (Read the A5 protest primer piece this week.)

Good security also serves a secondary function of increasing your ability to keep your nervous system intact and working strong. When we care for ourselves and our community by taking the extra precautionary steps that are prudent in this age of digital communications and authoritarianism, we actively reduce ambient stress and the negative consequences of sloppy security practices. When you take yourself seriously, you have less to worry about.

This week we’re promoting a video that appears on YouTube, even though, as you may know, that platform is owned by Google. Google is not a friend to the activist/organizer community or the planet at large, and it helps enable the oligarchic information/tech barons running roughshod over the constitutional and democratic norms many believed were a bulwark against fascism. But the subject matter of this video is wildly important and represents a foray into what is likely the shakiest part of emerging security culture — our digital information.

This video was recorded live on March 7, 2025, at this year’s SXSW (South by Southwest) — an annual film, media, and music festival that occurs in Austin, Texas, every spring. It is a discussion about encryption in general — and Signal in particular — between Guy Kawasaki, host of the Remarkable People podcast, and Meredith Whittaker, President of the nonprofit organization and leader in digital security communication at our beloved Signal (the encrypted private messenger).

Ms. Whittaker speaks eloquently and in depth about why encrypted spaces are foundationally important in the age of digital communication we find ourselves in, as well as painting a very clear picture of what problems the alternatives can create. When asked by Mr. Kawasaki to make the case why anyone who is not currently using Signal should begin to do so, Whittaker pointedly responded:

“Now, every single message you’ve every sent in your life is suddenly on a database and a link just got sent to everyone you know. That’s your boss, that’s your best friend, that’s your dad’s best friend, that’s the weird guy that comes to your Thanksgiving — that’s everyone you know. And they click on that link and can access that database, and there’s a little AI bot that’s, like, appended onto that database so they can quickly summarize everything in that database. Search their name, search that one time you told that weird lie because you hadn’t had coffee, search that time you talked shit on your best friend ‘cause you were in a weird place and you feel really bad about it, but thank god you had Signal disappearing messages…or did you? Search that message to your doctor, search that thing you sent to your colleague that was really mean about your other colleague, search your prescription information, search the time you talked to a union organizer, search the time you reported corruption at your workplace to a journalist. All of that is on there.

How much of your life would survive that? Ok, that’s what’s on Meta servers. That’s what’s on Google servers.”

Please amplify this message to your network of friends and allies. As we often say, a security protocol is only as strong as its weakest link. By sending out this incredible talk and just a little tough love to those friends that just can’t be bothered to switch over from the messaging platform that’s been handed to them, we can better care for the whole of the community. Let’s band together, support one another, and keep prying eyes out of our communications. We owe it to our friends and allies, those we see every day and those we haven’t even met yet!