Cyber Security Takes on New Urgency for Groups Targeted by Trump

With a few weeks to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, activists from the grassroots to large organizations like the ACLU are working to fortify their digital platforms against potential government intrusions. Many fear that a Trump presidency will usher in an age of greater government surveillance and the suppression of civil rights.

“We can’t trust Trump with the NSA,” argued John Napier Tye, who served in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2011 to 2014. “There are simply not enough safeguards in place to protect Americans from our own National Security Agency.”

Others point out that while Americans’ privacy has been eroded under past presidents, Trump may push the state surveillance apparatus to new limits. And this is especially concerning to historically marginalized communities, as technology and civil rights analyst Logan Koepke warned, saying, “People of color, activists, and community organizers disproportionately are targets of the surveillance state.”

As Inauguration Day quickly approaches, groups have been forced to decide which aspects of cyber security to prioritize. For journalists, finding secure methods of communication and information sharing is a primary concern. While mainstream industry leaders like David Remnick and Christiane Amanpour have appealed to the need for better security in the Trump era, for those engaged in activism or leftist political coverage, the threat feels even more severe.

“To prepare for life under Trump we’ll have to do more than download Signal and learn PGP,” admonished an organizer at the New Inquiry, referring to some common encryption practices among activist journalists. “We’ll have to learn how to scheme in the shadows, pass notes, and encrypt our offline communications as securely as we do our emails.” To that end, ad-hoc workshops, “cryptoparties” and online guides to digital security have multiplied across the country — and beyond — as journalists scramble to…

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