Join us in April for these amazing privacy workshops. Be sure to check out the info pages and RSVP for each of these events.
All events will take place at the Stanford Law School: 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Browsing with Tor: Online Anonymity to Outsmart the NSA
Tom Lowenthal - Technologist & Activist
Tuesday April 8, 2014 - 5:30pm Reception · 6:00pm Workshop
Room 280B
Click here for more info.
In the NSA's "Tor Stinks" presentation, they call Tor "the king of high-secure [sic] low-latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting", and admit that even with their vast resources and massive data-centers, even the NSA can only effectively attack a tiny fraction of Tor users at once. In this workshop, Tom Lowenthal --- formerly of the Tor Project -- will teach us how to use Tor to browse the web safely. We'll learn a little about how Tor works, and what Tor can and can't protect against. Audience members are encouraged to bring their laptops: this is a hands-on session. You should walk away with Tor installed, and confident you can use it safely. This session is open to folks of all experience levels.
NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It
Bruce Schneier - Security Guru
Tuesday April 15, 2014 - 5:00pm Reception · 6:00pm Talk Begins
Room 290
Click here for more info.
Edward Snowden has given us an unprecedented window into the NSA's surveillance activities. Drawing from both the Snowden documents and revelations from previous whistleblowers, this talk describes the sorts of surveillance the NSA conducts and how it conducts it. The emphasis will be on the technical capabilities of the NSA, and not the politics or legality of their actions. I will then discuss what sorts of countermeasures are likely to frustrate any nation-state adversary with these sorts of capabilities. These will be techniques to raise the cost of wholesale surveillance in favor of targeted surveillance: ubiquitous encryption, target dispersal, anonymity tools, and so on.
Email Encryption: Pretty Good Privacy Even when Someone's Listening
Tom Lowenthal - Technologist & Activist
Tuesday April 22, 2014 - 5:30pm Reception · 6:00pm Workshop
Room 280B
Click here for more info.
Pretty-good-privacy or PGP is the world's most widely-used email encryption system, capable of protecting the contents of messages from interception by anyone from an ISP to the NSA. In this workshop Tom Lowenthal will introduce us to PGP, explain how to use it and teach us some of its foibles. Audience members are encouraged to bring their laptops: the session will be hands on, and you should walk away with the software installed and configured. Folks of any technical experience level are welcome at this session. There's plenty to cover, and the material will be tailored to the level of the room
How Can We Protect the Internet Against Surveillance?
Peter Eckersley - Technology Projects Director - EFF
Tuesday April 29, 2014 - 5:30pm Reception · 6:00pm Workshop
Room 280B
Click here for more info.
In this talk, EFF's Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley will survey they state of Internet security and surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. It is unlikely that we can protect most Internet users against sophisticated, targeted attacks by their own and other governments, but there is more reason to be optimistic that we might shield the bulk of users' data against the type of dragnet surveillance that the US and other governments are conducting. Peter will discuss the things that individual users can currently do to achieve stronger communications security; the (often very subtle) technical aspects to deploying HTTPS/TLS/SSL securely on the server side; some of the important places where our existing protocols are letting us down from a security and privacy perspective; the terrible dynamics of cross border-surveillance; and what we could do to change all of this.