An activist web log in the digital age

As cofounder of La Quadrature du Net (a NGO fighting for freedoms in the digital age, still waiting for your support 😉 ), founder of Octopuce (my company) and more generally as an hacktivist, I often use Tails, a Linux distribution trying to enhance the anonymity of our communications and enhancing our personal digital safety.

Tails is very useful, not only because it allows me to carry important elements of my digital life in a simple USB dongle, protected by a strong password, but it also allows me to use the anonymisation network Tor in excellent conditions.

Sadly, I was missing an important feature, for me but also for all the hacktivists and journalists whose awareness I try to raise on digital freedom and personal data protection. It’s currently not possible to lock a running Tails and require a password to unlock it.

After an hour of research, I finally found a simple solution, allowing you to lock your running Tails with a password, so that you can go away from your computer for a few minutes without putting your personal data in danger.

A few month ago, Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, an American highly secure email company, was interviewed by the European Parliament to talk about his story against the FBI about his company’s private keys and his user’s confidentiality.

Listen to this video, its really short, and really insightful on the problem of surveillance of private communications, the right to privacy, how he fought against a request from the FBI to massively spy on his users without any control etc.

A few weeks ago, a friend show me a conference of Professor Eben Moglen, lawyer of Philipp Zimmermann (the creator of PGP), founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and Professor at Columbia University, and also a nice and well-known freedom fighter.

I found this conference so insightful, so dense in its content, and so true, that I started to share it with friends. However, many of them are not as fluent in English as they need to be, if they want to get all what Mr Moglen says. So I decided to make a proper English subtitle for it. Here it is!