The Riseup Collective presents:

Why security matters?

Every email takes a perilous journey. It might travel across twenty networks and be stored on five computers from the time it is composed to the time it is read. At every step of the way, the contents of the email might be monitored, archived, cataloged, and indexed.
However, it is not the contents of our online communications that our adversaries find most interesting: a spying organization is most concerned with whom we communicate. There are many ways in which this kind of mapping of our associations is far worse than old-fashioned eavesdropping. By cataloging our associations, a spying organization has an intimate picture
of how our social movements are organized— perhaps a more detailed picture than we have of ourselves.

This is bad. Really bad. The US government (like most governments) has a long track record of doing whatever it can to subvert, imprison, kill, or squash social movements that it sees as a threat (forest defense, black power, native rights, anti-war, civil rights, organized labor, anti-slavery and so on), and now they have 2all the tools they need to do this with blinding precision. We believe that private communication, without eavesdropping, and without mapping of our associations, is necessary for a democratic society. We must defend the right to free speech, but it is just as necessary to defend the right to private speech. Unfortunately, private communication is impossible if only a few people practice it: they will stand out and this will expose them to increased scrutiny. Therefore, we believe it is important for all of us to incorporate as many security measures into our online lives as possible.

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