[liberationtech] Guardian Project update: Two years in...

Tue Oct 25 09:39:42 PDT 2011

Though I suppose the sponsors:

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Skype and Mozilla

want to keep ahead of the curve to ensure compliance with rights, but
who's?

Though as someone experimenting with Android great to see how the
Guardian Project develops.

Frank

----- Original message -----
From: "Nathan of Guardian" <nathan at guardianproject.info>
To: 
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:13:09 -0400
Subject: [liberationtech] Guardian Project update: Two years in...

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See some of you at #RightsCon today...

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Greetings mobile believers,

I am about to head into the first ever Silicon Valley Human Rights
Conference, aka #RightsCon, and though I would post some thoughts
about the state of the Guardian Project, and the world in which we
operate.
RightsCon looks to be an amazing event (live streaming here:
https://www.rightscon.org/), by an amazing organization (Access), and
it comes at an interesting time in the world, and for our project.

One year ago, I was invited to attend the first Liberation Technology
held at Stanford University, a forebearer of sorts, to the RightsCon
event today. It was a novel event, being that is was so forthright
about the possibility of liberation from oppressors through ones and
zeros. It was also quite informative, in that brought together a wide
array of participants, including from Egypt, Syria and Yemen, and
allowed them to speak directly about the variety of tactics they were
using to defeat censors, route around filters, connect diasporas to
their homeland and ultimately find fissures in the system that could
slowly be mined and widened.

I gave a short talk as part of a panel I was asked to be on, which
covered the history of my sometimes bi-polar work as an activist and a
technologist. In this talk, I discussed how the human-need focused
brilliance of Steve Jobs, should be combined with the deep
understanding of movements by Gene Sharp. I talked about how the icon
of Android has some things to learn from OTPOR! if it wants people to
join in liberating their mobiles. I proposed that the ideas of free
culture and code held by Stallman and Lessig need to be studied,
spread and embodied by activist communities, such as the Tibetan
independence groups, with home I work closely.

While it is better in person with my arm waving, you can view the
visual portion of this presentation here:
http://prezi.com/ttsj526jjlsi/libtech/

Since that event, so much has happened, both in the world and within
our work here at the Guardian Project. The recent events in the Middle
East and North Africa, have shown, that now more then ever, social,
mobile technology, combined with non-violent direct action, is a
central solution for helping citizens of this planet defend their
rights to live, study, pray, commune, transact and organise. I think
my words and presentation at that event were less about foreseeing the
near future, and more about just sensing all the components in the
air, and hoping that someone, somewhere, would put them all together
in service of a good cause.

This same analogy can be used for the state of the Guardian Project
itself. It was two years ago, we had our first breakthrough with the
port of Tor to Android:
http://openideals.com/2009/10/22/orbot-proxy/

This was about as raw as it gets - source code, a user interface made
up of a few grey buttons and a console log output, and very complex
set of steps to actually get proxying working. However, it was a start
- - "Day 0" if you will - and where I mark the public entry of our
project into the world.

Now, today, October 25, 2011, two years since Tor port, and one year
since the LibTech event, we are quite a bit further than that. We have
real, polished apps, and perhaps, some of the best user experience
design in mobile security solutions. There have been over 100,000
downloads of Orbot, both from the Android Market and through direct
distribution:
https://www.torproject.org/docs/android.html.en

Beyond Orbot, we have an entire suite of (literally "award-winning")
apps in the Android Market, covering the range of capabilities
expected from anonymous, circumventing web browsing, encrypted chat,
secure file storage, to our more original projects, such as
ObscuraCam, a privacy-aware camera app.

View all of our apps in the Android Market:
https://market.android.com/search?q=guardianproject&so=1&c=apps

We have stayed true to our open-source, grant-funded goals, and have
built a vibrant project for all to share, learn and take from:
https://github.com/guardianproject

We have also collaborated with many other human rights and activist
organizations, to ensure our tools and technology are directly
informed by their tangible day-to-day needs. ObscuraCam is a project
with WITNESS, the leading human-rights video organization, and is part
of a larger effort called the SecureSmartCam, which we aim to one day
power international human rights evidence gathering.
https://guardianproject.info/2011/09/10/progress-on-mobile-video-privacy-tools/

We also joined MobileActive, in the development of the SaferMobile
project's InTheClear app for Blackberry, Nokia and Android phones, a
mobile panic button for quickly erasing sensitive data and sending
emergency distress calls, via SMS:
https://lab.safermobile.org/wiki/InTheClear

Finally, SQLCipher for Android, our port of an existing, tested,
trusted open-source encrypted database solution by Zetetic, is
gathering a lot of support quickly, because we consciously made it
easy for developers to implement. We have a number of major partners
who will be using it in their solutions, and we hope we can talk about
them more soon.

Encrypted your mobile app data:
https://guardianproject.info/code/sqlcipher/

There is so much more to share, and I am already running long (and
late for the #RightsCon!). I also know we have quite a bit more work
to do in getting our apps to be more reliable, more stable and more
functional in all of the places where people are depending upon their
mobile phones to defend their rights, and in many cases, their lives.
We are two years into our five year mission, and we have so many good
things to announce in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned, get
your mobiles ready to power-up.

Best,
 n8fr8 and the entire amazing @guardianproject crew

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