Welcome to 2016! This is going to be a big year for the effort to reclaim our privacy judging by the passion displayed by the Cryptohackers who met on Monday evening last week. 50 Cryptohackers met in Melbourne, talked about why privacy is important and imagined what impact we could have on the privacy movement in the next year and over the next five years.

We’ve collated the plethora of ideas, and four themes have emerged:

  • Tech
  • Privacy awareness and engagement
  • Politics and legislation
  • Cryptohack

Tech is an important theme for Cryptohack - we are a network of technologists after all, so our biggest impact is likely to be in the tech sphere. We believe free/libre open source sofware (FLOSS) is key for the privacy movement, which is why one of our main purposes is contributing to make privacy tools better.

Tech alone can’t ensure our privacy, and we generated a few potential goals in the politics and legislation space. Being set in Melbourne, it makes sense that were are most concerned about the Trans-Pacific-Partnership becoming ratified, and repealing the Australian data retention laws. We also came up with some potential goals for raising awareness of privacy and making more people care about protecting their privacy.

There are plenty of great ideas here, but we’re still just a small community. We need to choose goals where we can use our technology skills to have the greatest impact. We’re also a global community - Cryptohack started in Melbourne, but at the moment we have Cryptohackers in over 20 time zones. We want to benefit from our diversity and have a wider understanding of the state of privacy (or lack thereof) in all corners of the world.

We think this should be a collective effort, if the reach of governments and corporations is global, then so should be our efforts. If you’re interested in helping us choose our goals, join us on Slack.

We also want to keep our core work progressing, so we’re kicking off our next series of hack nights! We’re going to experiment with virtual hack nights so that the most Cryptohackers can be involved. We’re going to start by continuing our work on Pixelated. Join us online on Slack, at 6:30pm (AEDT) on 10th February, and start putting your tech superpowers to work!

The ideas

The brainstorming method we used asked the Cryptohackers to catapult themselves one year, then five years into the future, and imagine what impact we’ve had on the world.

To help us figure out how to plan our path to some of these goals, we also asked Cryptohackers what we already have, or could have in the future that might help us reach these goals, and what will get in our way.

1 year

Privacy awareness & engagement

  • More people care about protecting their privacy.
  • We publish and maintain a list of sites/apps which violate or compromise privacy.
  • We publish writing on the history of privacy.
  • Privacy workshops and education campaigns.
    • Gamify privacy.

Tech

  • More usable privacy tools.
  • Cryptohackers contribute to a Pixelated major release.
  • Make it easy to find a privacy project to contribute to.
  • Improve documentation.
  • 1000 commits to FLOSS privacy projects under the Cryptohack banner.
  • Increase the number of sites using HTTPS.

Politics & legislation

  • Prevent ratification of the Trans-Pacific-Partnership.
  • More transparency when our data has been requested by government agencies.

Cryptohack

  • Cryptohack nights across the world.
  • Cryptohack discussion flourishes.
  • Cryptohackers learn more about security/crypto.
  • Cryptohack runs Tor nodes.
  • Cryptohack has positive media coverage.

5 years

Politics & legislation

  • Public policies on badly stored private data (especially public institutions like police, govt as well as banks) and mandatory disclosure.
  • Better whistleblower protections.
  • Anti-privacy laws revoked:

Tech

  • Zero-knowledge encryption by default across all tech (mobile, HTTP, IoT, etc).
  • Decent privacy-focused smartphone is released.
  • Email encryption is ubiquitous.
    • Find a way to hide metadata.
    • Email servers are easier to set up and run.
    • Usable on all devices.

Privacy awareness & engagement

  • Create a privacy kit that covers different kinds of privacy protection.
  • Legal profession understands privacy tech.
  • Children’s picture book on privacy (Spot and The Government Watchdog).
  • Privacy info exists in many languages.
  • Libraries continue their privacy fights.

Cryptohack

  • International Cryptohack conference.
  • Cryptohacker in parliament.
  • Cryptohack is an authoritative voice in the media on tech and privacy issues.

Things that support us in achieving our goals

  • Internal talent.
    • Robin’s writing.
  • Cryptohack network, collaboration, passion and knowledge.
  • Cryptohack is international.
    • We can speak many languages between us.
  • Cryptohackers have the knowledge of tech and issues - better than our opponents.
  • External supporters.
    • ThoughtWorks.
  • FLOSS movement.
  • Online communication is easy.
  • Privacy advocates in Australian Federal Parliament.
  • Public awareness of privacy is growing (especially among techies).
  • Good crypto tools and techniques.
    • Forward secrecy.
    • Let’s Encrypt.

Things that might get in the way of achieving our goals

  • Apathy.
  • Criminals and terrorists use crypto too.
  • Fear around privacy versus national security rhetoric.
  • Current tools are too hard to use for many people.
  • Tech ignorance in general population and particularly those in decision making positions.
  • Governments are anti-privacy and creating laws hostile to privacy and crypto.
  • Techies’ ignorance of political situation and laws.

Posted by Andrew