dbosk / protesting-future

Applying Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: One Alternative Future of Protesting

One Alternative Future of Protesting

This is a chapter on the technical possibilities of the future of "Protests in the Information Age". It is a chapter in a book with the same title:

@inbook{FutureProtests,
  title = {Applying Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: One Alternative Future of 
    Protests},
  author = {Daniel Bosk
    and Guillermo Rodriguez-Cano
    and Benjamin Greschbach
    and Sonja Buchegger},
  booktitle = {Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital 
    Practices and Surveillance},
  editor = {Lucas Melgaço and Jeffrey Monaghan},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  year = {2018},
}

Repo structure

The chapter source is in the chapter/ directory.

The main TeX-file is protesting.tex. This file contains the preamble and the document environment. The actual contents is then \inputed from other files.

There is a short set of slides in the slides/ directory.

Compilation

To compile the document, you must have cloned the repository and checked out all its submodules:

git clone --recursive [email protected]:dbosk/protesting.git

Or, if you have already cloned it without the --recursive option, run

git submodule update --init --recursive

To compile the document, simply type make in the terminal. There are usually options to compile using make(1) in e.g. TeXmaker, TeX Studio etc. too.

To check the number of words, run make wc. This uses detex(1) and wc(1) to estimate the number of words.

protesting-future's Issues

Define and use "protest" and "demonstration" consistently

Protesting can be done by means of a demonstration, but is not limited to that. A demonstration can be physical, i.e. people gather in a location. A demonstration should also be possible entirely electronically --- we don't have much of this perspective, shall we add that?

Daniel Bosk @dbosk commented 10 months ago Master
Define protest: physical mass-protest against regime.
Edited 10 months ago
Daniel Bosk @dbosk Title changed from Use "protest" and "demonstration" consistently to Define and use "protest" and "demonstration" consistently 10 months ago

Guillermo Rodríguez Cano @gurc commented 10 months ago Master
Have a look at @bgre underlined in page 3 of the file sent with comments

Add bio for Benjamin

We still miss a bio for Benjamin.

[during] Add discussion of censorship resistance

If the protest is electronic --- e.g. by electronic voting, by liking a post on a (D)OSN --- then we don't want Eve to be able to censor it.

[intro] [conclusion] Clarify (set) our scope (delimitations)

We should explain our scope and delimitation in the introduction:
Will we do a survey of the field?
Will we provide an overview of ours and related works?
Will we provide an overview of our work only?

From the reviews:

"Second, there is also some unclarity about the nature of the contribution of this article. The authors seem to claim they have themselves developed the PETs they propose for protest ("In this chapter we will describe some privacy-enhancing tools that we have developed and that we believe are useful in the context of protesting" (p. 5)), but afterwards they seem to mainly mobilize a host of tools developed by different people, thus taking them from the state of the art (the reviewer cannot check this given the anonymized nature of the paper).

"I guess in this sense the contribution of this article would reside in mobilizing and presenting existing PET tools for the community of protesters, provide them with a manual so to say."

"At the same time, I think it may be lacking a degree of focus in terms of its purpose. It is unclear to me who its audience is: activists? academics? computer scientists?"

[before] Add figure of full-mesh network

There is only text, maybe some illustrating figures could be useful. E.g. illustrate the mesh required for group communication.

[after] Make "after" section connect better to the rest

From the reviews:

"4) The last part of the article on "after protests" is not really about privacy-enhancement. It would be interesting to see it better connect to the general idea of the text."

"I am also not sure that the ‘after a protest’ section is complete: while combating misinformation is important, there are also challenging problems in terms of what to do if a participant is arrested or disappears that may have technical implications, and are not covered here."

Fix %TODOs in text

Write about Gossple

Gossple might provide an interesting alternative to finding others interested in the protest.

Daniel Bosk @dbosk commented 10 months ago Master
More specifically talk about privacy-preserving profile similarity computations, e.g. BLIP.

Daniel Bosk @dbosk commented 9 months ago Master
Gossple is closer to solving the problem than the user search solution, so it might be worth covering.

Enable group-citation again

Before submitting the chapter, we should enable the commented-out group-citation option for the acro package.

Push commits and branches to KTH's git repository

Push every now and then... or set some hook... :)

Edit abstract

From reviews:
the abstract is too direct. better to rewrite in a more fluid way.
make it clear to the reader that you mean "used by demonstrators”, and not “used by public authorities to monitor protests".
Edited a month ago

General editing

From the reviews: "I would also say that the text could use a good editor in terms of language (there is a lot of passive voice and it can be difficult to follow in some places)."

Write about Passwords in P2P

This is not of central importance, however, it is of interest how "usably secure" such a system is.
Edited 9 months ago

Daniel Bosk @dbosk commented 9 months ago Master
Should we write about passwords in P2P? My impression from Benjamin's description is that this takes the current state of passwords to the decentralized setting, nothing more. So it's just as vulnerable to the state adversary as the centralized systems.

Are the needs real or just what we imagine?

From the reviews:
"In keeping with the author’s comment in their conclusion regarding the need to face the “engineer’s disease” of failing to thoroughly analyze user needs before providing technical solutions, I’ve tried to reflect on my own experiences organizing large scale demonstration before writing this review.
In that light, I’m not convinced that some of the needs identified by the author are real, or if they are, whether they are the most pressing ones faced by protest organizers and participants. I think there needs to be more empirical evidence referenced in the paper which substantiates the author’s choices to that effect.
I would therefore encourage her/him to seek out academic research related to these issues, or perhaps look for some kind of needs assessment type documentation emerging from social justice communities. What are the real problems faced by anti-authoritarian activists attempting to organize demonstrations in the Middle East, for example? I am also not sure that the ‘after a protest’ section is complete: while combating misinformation is important, there are also challenging problems in terms of what to do if a participant is arrested or disappears that may have technical implications, and are not covered here.
I would also encourage the author to engage in a critical reflection about whether technical solutions are in fact always the most effective or efficient solutions to the problems faced by these groups (for example, is it realistic that activists would seek out otherwise-strangers as outlined in section 2.1 to organize public demonstrations using a digital tool like this?)"

Address all the (small) comments from the reviewers

Ensure there are references where needed

Currently some statements might benefit from the backing of a good reference. We should read through and look for weaknesses in the argumentation.
Reveiwers comments:
ChapterComments2.pdf, p 3

Add link to book on Amazon?

Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance

Ensure consistent roles and terms for Alice, Bob and Eve

Alice is the organizer, Bob is a participant and Eve is an agent working for the regime's intelligence agency.

Change title

The title "Some PETs" is very general. It must better reflect the chapter. The current alternatives are:

1. Applying Privacy-Enhancing Technologies: One Alternative Future of Demonstrations
2. Demonstrations in the Age of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
3. One Alternative Future of Activism: Demonstrations in the Age of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
4. A Look to the Future of Demonstrations
5. Applying Privacy-Enhancing Technologies to Activism: The case of Protests

Rewrite and add footnotes for too technical parts

From the reviews:

• "There are parts where the language is, for example, too technical for a larger audience. Adding footnotes here and there would be of great help."
• "at times the article ventures into complex technological territory",
• "the technical explanations (for example, of public key crypto) are either (a) too long if the reader is assumed to have any technical background or (b) go into too much detail for non-technical audiences."
• "If the piece is intended for a technical audience (like a computer science journal) it may not be the right fit for this specific book. If the piece is included in the book however, then from my perspective, the technical explanations (for example, of public key crypto) are either (a) too long if the reader is assumed to have any technical background or (b) go into too much detail for non-technical audiences."

Add discussion covering that this technology can be used by terrorists

From the reviews:
"The article could mainly be seen as manual of privacy tools that can be used for protest. In this sense it is more about advocacy than analysis. There is limited attention for the concept and nature of this protest. The phenomena of protest is by itself not analysed, but rather taken for granted as something that needs to be facilitated.
Whereas this is definitively something that could be argued for in case of dissidents and protest in authoritarian oppressive regimes, one could also argue that these technologies equally facilitate organisation of less morally praiseworthy networks, like fascist or jihad movements. The
article does not raise awareness with regard to these aspects when articulating security wired infrastructures.
This becomes clear in the way only one scenario is used in the paper (of which different aspects are then analysed): a case of gender protester Alice against a totalitarian government.
But let’s tinker with the scenario. Let us replace ‘Alice’ by the fascist ‘Klaus’ in most of the scenarios and the totalitarian government with, let’s say the UK government. And let us substitute the aim of peaceful protest with organising a violent street riot or a coordinated attack on a well-guarded state agency or immigrant centre.
This shows that there is more socio-political complexity to these issues beyond laying down the technological infrastructure.
Perhaps this point deserves some attention for the purpose of this book.
Although this seems primarily an article in the field of information security, the link with protest and activism however does call for some reflection on such socio- political aspects. In this sense I would say that from a political theoretical perspective the article is underdeveloped."

[before] Add figure of pull and push model

Illustrate how Alice writes a message and how Bob and Carol fetch new messages.

[intro] Rewrite intro to situate the chapter

From the reviews: "3) It would be a good idea to re-write the intro to better situate the chapter. We are fine with the 'manual' style, but it needs to acknowledge how technologies are extensions of social actors - whether its gov'ts, fascists, or anti-fascists. The problem with the 'manual' style - as one of the reviewers pointed out - is that we might be providing info for fascists."

More framing of what is to come and why in the rest of the section

I'll have a go at that on Friday

Cut some details from sections on communication

Sections:

• "Communications between people"
• "Holding discussions"

Discuss which third parties have access to centralized communication and how

We write:

When using a centralized communications service, such as Facebook,
the level of security and privacy we can achieve is that the postman carries
non- transparent sacks. The business model of most such services is to read
peoples postcards to better profile their interests and thus deliver better suiting
advert- ising. Here, third parties cannot directly see who is communicating with
whom. They can only see that something goes to and from the service.
However, all information is available internally to the service. This means
that there are ways of learning this, for example through PRISM (Greenwald
and MacAskill
2013) of the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The reviewer comments:

%Which kind of third parties are these, when compared to the
%case of e-mail? Advertisers? Or other parties? And
%can advertisers read the content in e-mail systems? Google
%lets them advertise on keywords, but not read the mail
%itself for instance. Or hackers? 

This part has been rewritten so that this particular text is not longer there, but it's still interesting to explore further. Actually, Eve should be able to identify activists by using advertisements based on keywords.