Why was I nervous all day if I use privacy tools all the time? Because of specialisation. Professionals use professional tools, so they can be very stupid when it comes to empowering people who have only 3 hours to spend on a thing. We already discussed this in Dijon: system administrators simply don't log into the webmail interface their collective provides as a service because it's a lame and clumsy thing to do: they have their own 1337 mailreaders. Yesterday I was talking a Riseup person about their web interface: if it provides PGP support or not. He was not sure about it since he never uses this, but most users use it every day. That's why Riseup introduced a ticket system through which users can help each other: as the example above shows, sometimes the novices can learn more effectively from the advanced users than from the administrators. We had a similar dynamic in today's workshop about online privacy: the participants who achieved one task helped out those who struggled with it, and we went forward like this, step-by-step together like a swarm.
PGP or Pretty Good Privacy is a way to encrypt (and sign) your emails. It does not provide anonymity, just encryption and authentication, so your social network and communication habits are still public. You need to use anonymous remailers if you want anonymity as well, but they constitute a lore more obscure. So with PGP the Subject of the mail, the time and the addresses involved are up for grabs, but at least the body is encrypted.
The most fascinating thing about PGP is that is uses an irreversible mathematical algorhytm. Everybody has two keys: the public key for propagation and the private key which is a personal secret not to be shared with anyone even if they ask. A signed and encrypted message will be jumbled using a combination of the recipient's public key and the sender's private key, and restored using a combination of the recipient's private key and the sender's public key. Because of this you need to exchange keys with your partners, which is a fascinating social ritual, like in a Stevenson novel. At one point the United States government banned it from export because they categorised it as ammo.
So we spent one hour talking and doing a walk-through and then two hours in two small groups. We went from creating an account to exchanging encrypted messages. Of course there were problems, typically about people forgetting their passphrases just after they created their keys, and in one case we couldn't figure out what was going on until the end. The rest is nonexact statistics: at least 6 new email addresses with radical technology collectives, 8 PGP keypairs generated, 2 new Tor users on the block, and around 10 people all-in-all at the workshop. I repeated our mantra "There is no perfect security." enough times that some people asked for further explanations, so we will have a smaller workshop next week and another big one at the end of February. Another bad day for the authorities, another day when people share knowledge and arm themselves with it.
