Revision as of 08:06, 4 September 2015

Introduction

This manual is a community-built resource for our growing community of women and trans* activists, human rights defenders and technologists. It is designed to be a living, growing collection of practical guidance and information that uniquely speaks to our needs, experiences, and activism, both online and offline. Content listed in the manual was created in response to our community’s requests for ideas and guidance they needed, but couldn’t find elsewhere. Therefore, this initial manual content doesn’t cover many other topics that we hope to add with your support and input as it evolves here on the wiki. The current manual explores two overlapping issues:

• First, how can we craft appropriate online presences (or a series of them) that strengthen our ability to communicate and work online safely?
• Secondly, how can we collaboratively create safe online and offline spaces that enable our communities to share, collaborate, and communicate safely?

The manual grew out of the 2014 Gender and Technology Institute [1], organised by Tactical Technology Collective and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). The Institute brought together almost 80 participants and facilitators—mostly from the Global South—to focus on issues faced daily by women and trans* persons online and offline, to share strategies and tools for better protecting our digital privacy and security, as well as show we can spread this knowledge and skills with our communities and organisations. Since then, our network has expanded, so this manual has benefited from the input and review of a wide range of people. It is informed by the stories and creative practices of grass-roots activists, digital and holistic security facilitators, privacy advocates, and people making technology around the world.

The guide is also informed by the advocacy of groups like APC and others, who are working to reframe Internet rights as human rights. This involves broadening the focus of policy discussions from girls’ and women’s access to and use of technology to include technology-related violence as part of the continuum of gender based violence. Phenomena such as cyber-stalking, hate speech and blackmail violate women and trans* persons rights to privacy, work, public participation, freedom from violence and freedom of expression and opinion. It also causes us to censor ourselves or refrain from speaking up at all. This ultimately hinders our momentum in the various movements and communities we are part of.

In such a complex environment where online and offline activities, identities and realities can appear separate, but are often deeply intertwined, confusion or uncertainty about others’ intentions, identities and actions can make it very easy to end up anxious or withdrawing from activities all together. How can we then as women and trans* persons develop trust and a greater sense of certainty when using ephemeral technology to create content, interacting with others, grow trusted networks, and create safe spaces for ourselves? This manual explores some of the behaviours that you can individually and collectively adopt and adapt to develop the trust and certainty we need to continue to safely enjoy the freedoms and empowerment that the Internet uniquely offers us.

The first part of the manual looks at the (often unseen) information traces that are created and recorded as we use the Internet, online services, and digital devices. It offers various strategies and tools available for reclaiming control of these digital traces (also commonly known as 'metadata'). It describes what these traces are, how they are created, and who can 'see' them. All together, these individual digital traces form clearer outlines of who we are, what we do, what we like, and how we act. We call these aggregations of digital traces 'digital shadows,' and we'll discuss why these matter and how you can minimise them. Minimization of our 'digital shadows' online involves a powerful, creative, and even fun tactic of creating different types of new online identities. We cover the various options and ways to manage online identities, as well as the risks and benefits of each, and discuss the definitions and utility of anonymity*, pseudonyms, collective names and real names.

The second part focuses on safe spaces*. It starts with the online world and discusses how safe spaces can be created and used for community-building, organising and support. It then looks at some creative tactics for addressing exclusion and harassment of women and trans* people online. Finally, it discusses different methods for creating safe spaces in the physical world where women and trans* persons can safely communicate, collaborate, and learn from one another.

This manual, built from the first year of the “Securing Online and Offline Freedoms for Women: Expression, Privacy and Digital Inclusion” programme, was written for individuals and groups who want to improve their security and privacy practices meanwhile including gender in the equation, as well those who are training and helping others and driving advocacy on those issues. Please let us know what you think of this content and help us to improve it [2]. We also invite you to be involved in designing and co-create future chapters that will best help you, your work, and your communities.

How to use this manual

While you're reading this manual (and putting some of what's in it into practice), it's important to keep some things in mind. Including gender into privacy and security requires us to take an intersectional approach - one that engages with a diversity of culture, social status, gender identification, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and other power structures that create inequality for individuals and communities with regard to their access to security tools and practices. It also requires us to look at privacy and security with a gender perspective, by having a broad view on technology, including how it is manufactured and the laws used to govern the internet. This includes:

• Acknowledging that gender gaps, discrimination and gender-based violence are both structural and discursive in the way they are deeply embedded in language, narratives, definitions, social structures and laws. These deeply influence the conditions of women and trans* persons in relation to their access to and experience with technology and the Internet.
• Understanding how women and trans* persons in different conditions find ways of accessing technologies, and a consideration of how they can protect themselves and others in the process.
• Sharing skills and knowledge on the ground so that women and trans persons can strengthen their freedom of opinion and expression.
• Remembering it is important to make women and trans* experiences in the management and development of technologies visible (not just the digital ones, but also appropriated ones like health technologies for instance).
• Working to enable a greater participation of women and trans* persons in institutions which contribute to the governance of internet, as well as inside companies and organisations delivering services which support our networking and online identity.
• ̈Imagining liberating technologies that enables the full realisation and exercise of human rights, and that are inclusive of diversity, is the responsibility of anybody involved in creating an inclusive, accessible, decentralised and neutral internet. not just women and trans* persons only.

As part of this, when choosing to use a specific technology, system, or digital service, we should remember to consider certain issues: Is it liberating, or does it alienate certain individuals and groups? “Liberating technologies” can be defined as those that are designed mindfully, fairly produced and distributed, are rooted in free and open-source software principles, are not designed for ‘planned obsolescence’, and are built to be secure by design. In the same spirit—but ultimately determined by what users do—that the technologies, systems, and digital services we choose are not designed for or are resistant for use in gender-based violence and surveillance [3].

Many of these issues are addressed in the Feminist Principles on the Internet [4] developed by the APC in 2014, when they gathered a group of woman human rights defenders and feminist activists to a Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet. The principles look at the ways in which the internet can be a transformative public and political space for women, trans* and feminists. They place tech-related violence on the continuum of gender-based violence, making clear the structural aspect of violence, linking expanding and/or mirroring online attitudes with offline prejudices.

As valentina pelizzer hvale from One World Platform explains, the principles “should be part of the agenda of any feminist activists, individuals, group or organizations and should consistently and by default be part of Women's Human Rights Defenders strategy, because the feminism we advocate is an extension, reflection and continuum of our movements and resistance in other spaces, public and private...A space of agitation and construction of political practices so that the internet facilitates new forms of citizenship that enable individuals to claim, construct, and express our selves, genders and sexualities.” [5]

This is a process: Stay centered, cultivate patience, and practice self-care

The first most important thing to remember when using this manual, is that we have used the concept of “zen” in the title to highlight the importance of embracing technology with the calm understanding that it won't always work perfectly. Sometimes you might need to spend days pondering technology and the significance of it in your life, in your community and in the world, And other times you might need to take a break and come back to it.

We have written the manual in such a way that it collects the wisdom and advice of women and trans* activists, with a focus on issues that our community haven’t found satisfactory solutions to online. We also hope this content spurs questions, ideas, and inspires you. Most of the content here is about strategy and tactics, which invites ingenuity and creativity, and can be fun to explore and learn about.

You may notice that the current content isn’t a typical technical or security guide; it is not written with in-depth technical context or hands-on configuration and implementation guidance. It does provide links to more intermediate and advanced technical resources of this kind, but the current focus on awareness, strategy and tactics means it is does not classify certain sections as “basic” or “advanced” for readers. It invites a wider diversity of skill levels to dip in and out according to interest and need.

The current manual content should be seen as a contextualized tactics and strategy to complement the base line knowledge in Security-in-a-Box. But by necessity, the broad accessibility of the (current version) of the manual can not require or assume that readers will have a certain baseline level of knowledge and experience with digital security and privacy. But those who do will have a more detailed sense of technical nuance and context when they read this manual, and will be better positioned to absorb and implement this first set of manual content.

Learning and applying any complex body of knowledge is a process, and all of us—from the most technically skilled to the newest users—are at our own individual points in the process. It cannot be rushed, and becomes easier and more fun the more we learn and do. If and when you feel frustrated or stuck (and most of us do), remember to be kind to yourself and think about how much you've learned thus far and are already good at doing. Don't hesitate to ask questions and seek assistance, both offline and online.

Finally, since we're all at different points in the process of learning and using digital security tools and tactics, most of us have areas that we could brush up on or learn more about. In the security disclaimer section of this manual, you'll find descriptions and links to a list of basic and intermediate security and privacy topics that can enable or amplify digital tactics and strategies. Examples of these topics include: how the Internet works, how different kinds of encryption work and how to use them, how to assess your risk, how to set up and use different types of secure communication channels, and more. As this manual evolves and expands over the next few years, we hope to include more in-depth technical topics contextualized for our community and needs.

Referencesː

[1] https://tacticaltech.org/gender-tech-institute

[2] https://archive2015.tacticaltech.org/feedback-form

[3] A longer version of the methodological aspects of this introduction can be found hereː (https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Introduction)

[4] The Feminists principles of the internet can be consulted hereː (http://www.genderit.org/articles/feminist-principles-internet)

[5] A feminist internet and its reflection on privacy, security, policy and violence against Women by valentina pelizzer hvale from One World Platformː (https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/A_feminist_internet_and_its_reflection_on_privacy,_security,_policy_and_violence_against_Women)

‘Digital Traces’ and ‘Digital Shadows’

How much digital information (or ‘data’) do you think exists about you? What kind of digital information or data has been created about your identity, your social networks, and your habits when you use digital services—like Facebook and Google—and devices, like your phone and computer? How does this connect to (and reflect) who you are and what you do online and offline? If someone wanted to investigate you—possibly with bad intentions—what could they figure out from the digital data that exists about you?

It’s helpful to think of all the digital data about you —your ‘digital traces’— as information that tells a very detailed story describing you and your activities, like a ‘digital shadow’ that we create and add more data to when we use digital tools and services. The concept of ‘digital traces’ includes data that you intentionally create and see — like publicly shared tweets or a blog post on your website—which we commonly call 'content'. Content traces are created by you and others actively publishing information, which includes what you write, publish and share, as well as content that other people create about you when they tag you in pictures, mention you in tweets, or simply by communicate with you via email or messaging.

‘Digital traces’ also includes trillions of pieces of data that are created about your content that is mostly invisible to us, commonly called 'metadata'. Those traces are almost always passively created, without you necessarily realising it, or consenting to it. For example, your browsing habits and IP address are shared amongst websites you visit and services you use in order to track your behavior and try to sell you products through advertising. Both these examples of ‘digital traces' are created as we use——and add more emails, tweets, and forum comments to the digital world using our devices. Along with the content you create such as text messages, social media updates, and photos, there are also trillions of relatively small bits of metadata created and stored in the digital world every time you send an email or surf the web, or when your mobile phone or any other digitally networked device you use sends information to the Internet. These bits of data (or ‘digital traces’) can include your name, location, contacts, photos, messages, tweets and like, but can also be the brand of your computer, length of your phone calls and information about which websites you visit. In order to understand the concept of digital traces and how they add to and shape our larger, cumulative ‘digital shadow', it’s useful to break down what kinds of data are being created, how they are created, how they are collected, and who is collecting them. As mentioned above, when we use the term 'digital traces', we are talking about three types of data: content, metadata and noise.

Content is the data that you actively produce: your emails, text messages, blog post, tweets, phone calls, online purchases, pictures, and videos.

Metadata is data about your data, including how and when you created it, where you stored or sent it, when and where you got online to upload it, and more. Most metadata is information that is needed for the basic infrastructure of our digital systems—including the Internet and our mobile phones networks—to work properly. Metadata enables your email to be delivered correctly, for the files on your computer to be found and stay where you left them, and for you to be able to receive text messages and phone calls from around the world almost instantaneously.

Noise is the data that is created by either the manufacturing process that creates physical devices and hardware, or by how they physically move and operate, like how a disc spins in a hard drive. the infrastructuretechnological. An example of noise is the common SD card that we use to record and store digital photographs in our cameras. Each SD card has unique ‘scratches’ that are produced by the machines that manufacture them, similar to a person's fingerprint ridges. These make microscopic changes that are not visible to the eye, or impact the quality of data stored on the SD cards, but these tiny unique changes to the stored data can be recognised by computers. In the case of SD cards, this means that every image or file can be traced back and matched to the SD card it has been stored on.

Who can collect our ‘digital traces’?

You may wonder how important one picture, one message, or one phone call could possibly be. It’s also common to think that there is so much data out there that nobody knows what to do with it, or cares that much about it.

However, there are many parties interested in it for all kinds of reasons, and advances in data analysis means we can do more with large amounts of data than ever before. Companies collect it in order analyse your behaviour and habits in order to sell you products and services, as well as to make what they sell you ‘better’. They also sell their data and analysis about you to other companies—and even governments—for profit. As we saw from the Snowden documents, governments want access to as much data about you as they can get, even if it means breaking national and international laws. In worst case scenarios, governments want this same level of total access in order to control and manage societies, which can include targeting marginalized groups, censoring media and online activity, or even trying to 'wall' their country off from the rest of the online world. Individuals may want this information to spy on, harass, or blackmail family members, spouses, or ex-partners. Some individuals and independent networks may want to steal it from companies and governments so they can sell financial information for profit, or even add to their profiles on certain individuals and groups they are interested in.

Data collection and data analysis is increasingly sophisticated. We see the outcomes from that collection and analysis in how we are marketed to and provided increasingly more convenient services, but very few people see or understand how much corporations, governments, and individuals know about the intimate details of millions of people's lives through data collection and analysis. The different types of digital traces we create are recorded and stored. Those traces are constantly being collected, sorted, and analysed by various parties to create or complete profiles on you. Routinely, every time a new piece of data or metadata is created, it's also recorded and aggregated along with other data for analysis, and then added to your profile. These profiles are ever-expanding, and give those who create and have access to them immensely detailed insight into who you are, what you like, who you know, what you do, and your daily habits and interactions with others. Often, in-depth data collection and analysis can lead to things about you that you may not even know or realize. (One example of this is the numerous ‘health’ apps and tracking devices that people use to monitor their exercise, food intake, and physical movement so the apps can track and analyse how the user may—or may not—be improving their health, and give them new, individually tailored advice on how they can do better. Aside from a small handful of exceptions, all this data is collected and stored by the hundreds of companies who provide those apps and tracking devices.)

As mentioned above, data is collected for a variety of purposes. Data-based user profiles can be bought and sold to advertisers and governments, and all types of data can be used to control, suppress, or silence activists, domestic partners, and organizations. Aggregated and analysed user data can be used to create harassment strategies by people who want to damage your reputation or attack you for your views or beliefs. All of the aforementioned actors can have access to your digital shadow. They might access it in different ways, including surveillance of your activities, physically accessing your unencrypted devices, exploiting how data is shared between applications, or through researching publicly available data sources about you. They can use some of this data to locate new and unknown sources and types of data about you, and then eventually aggregate and analyse everything they've about you, your life, your activities, and who you know.

We frequently hear companies and services (and even some researchers and non-profit organizations) argue that they protect users by anonymizing* the data they collect, so your 'privacy' is safe with them. But it has been proven again and again that our data traces are so unique to us—just like our fingerprints—that if data analysts have a small sample set of data about us, they can analyse that information to uniquely identify and reveal individuals according to the distinctive types and patterns of digital traces we create that form our ‘digital shadows’.

Depending on who you are and what you do, you will probably have different concerns about the kinds of data or ‘digital traces’ are the most sensitive for you, as well as who can access them. This may make you feel vulnerable, or at least uncomfortable. But you are not alone, and there are a number of things you can do to reduce the creation and capture of your digital traces. You may also wonder how the data you create may be used about you now in the present by today’s corporations and governments versus how years and years of data about you could be used in the future by whomever has access to it then. Worldwide, there are very few laws in effect that regulate data collection or protect us from this historically unprecedented level of data collection. This makes it even more important for us to support privacy-protecting laws and standards with an eye to the future as well as the present. It also makes it important that we remain aware of this issue that is intentionally kept as ‘invisible’ as possible to the benefit of corporations and governments, and find ways to tell others about it. And finally, we can fight back by regaining control of the digital traces we create and limiting who can collect and use them. And we can help show our friends, networks, and family members how they can do this too.

Relevant links:

• Trackography: (https://trackography.org/) an interactive map exploring how the global tracking industry is recording your online behaviour.
• What is Metadata?ː (https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/573) Privacy international video explaining what metadata is and why we should care about it.
• Do not track: (https://donottrack-doc.com/en/about/) is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy.
• In Limbo: (http://inlimbo.tv/en/) is a documentary about internet privacy, digital identity, and online communications in which you can enter your own data enabling to see your digital self being peppered throughout the film.

Further Readingsː

• Sticky data: Why even 'anonymized' information can still identify youː (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/sticky-data-why-even-anonymized-information-can-still-identify-you/article19918717/)
• An image showing a tweet and all the metadata associated to itː (http://blog.iinet.net.au/protecting-your-privacy/image01-copy/)
• Ed Felten explains how you can tell someone had an abortion from studying the metadata of their phone calls: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/27/heres-how-phone-metadata-can-reveal-your-affairs-abortions-and-other-secrets/)
• Hello Barbie points at the limits of eavesdropping, privacy and how devices are sending data to third actor partiesː (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/03/11/privacy-advocates-try-to-keep-creepy-eavesdropping-hello-barbie-from-hitting-shelves/)
• The five eyes alliance: (https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/51) Privacy International explains the global communications surveillance arrangement of english-speaking States and what it means for your privacy.

Exploring

We can't know exactly what happens to all of our digital traces when they're created, nor who has to access to them. This itself is a problem. Although this situation might seem dire, there are a number of very simple ways you can learn more about the kind of data traces you're creating, who likely has access to them, as well as how to reduce the quantity and types of digital traces you create, as well as who has access to them. Companies and governments want users to give up and believe that this is the ‘way things should be’, because they are profiting enormously from the data collection and analysis environment enabled by Silicon Valley and other tech companies. You can control and reduce what is known about you without completely walking away from mobile phones, computers, email and social networks. The trick is to understand that it’s a process of learning and making small changes in how you use technology and various digital services. A lot of it is quite fun and interesting as you learn more about how technology works, and how to fool and trick companies, digital services, and others. For some of us, we need to be aware of when we feel paralyzed by paranoia, or feel like ‘giving in’ to the powers profiting from the current digital environment.

We encourage you to demystify these issues for yourself and with friends. Explore tactics for reducing and regaining control of your digital traces, and minimising—or creatively fabricating—the 'digital shadow' that companies have used to construct profiles about you. Some examples of how you can minimize your traces and regain control include reducing the amount of data you know or learn that you give away; consciously stripping valuable information from the content you create and share; learning and practicing the art of self-doxing* to be aware of what others can know about you (more on this below), and creatively developing ways to alter, separate, or re-create your online presence and identity.

The strategies and tools detailed below can increase your privacy, and help you to be more secure both online and offline without being less vocal or reducing your activites online. As we move towards regaining control over our data, good places to start is to see what that data looks like, and explore the size, depth and characteristics of our digital 'shadows'. Below are some tools to help you do that.

Relevant links:

• Trace My Shadowː (https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow) is a tool produced by Tactical Tech that allows you to see some of the traces you are leaving online, and it offers a lot of tips on how to protect your privacy.
• My digital shadow: (https://myshadow.org/visualisations/animation) is a short animated video by Tactical tech explaining digital shadows.
• Do not track episode: (https://episode3.donottrack-doc.com/en/) about how facebook can profile you.
• What is My IP Address?: (http://whatismyipaddress.com/w3c-geolocation) The W3C consortium enable you to test and understand how geolocalisation happens when you connect to internet.
• Google location history: (https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0) is a good complement to understand how much information about your movements Google holds.
• Digital Shadowː (https://digitalshadow.com) is a Facebook app developed by Ubisoft which illustrates what third parties can know about you through your Facebook profile.
• Panopticlickː (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. By using this application, your browser will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.
• Lightbeam: (https://myshadow.org/lightbeam) is a browser add-on that visualises the relationships between the sites you visit and the third party sites that are active on those pages.
• Immersion: (https://immersion.media.mit.edu/) is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.
• OpenPaths.ccː (https://openpaths.cc/) is a tool that allows you to track your location history over time with your smartphone. You can then visualise this data and see what kind of story it tells about you.

Self-doxing

Another strategy for knowing and exploring what is already available about you online is to ‘dox’ yourself. (The word ‘dox’ is a shortened version of the word ‘documents’.) Doxing is the act of gathering detailed information about someone using sources that are freely available (although it can also involve illegally gaining access to personal data when used to attack others). Please note that ‘doxing’ is typically defined as the act of both gathering personal data about someone and then publishing it online in order to endanger, harass, or threaten them. Or it can be used to defend against someone who is doing those things. Here, we are suggesting you dox yourself in order to preventatively know what is available about you online, and even take steps to reduce that data when possible. Successful doxing depends on the ability attackerto recognise valuable information about the target, and use this information in combination with other discovered data traces to construct as complete and comprehensive a set of data about them as you can. This technique is used by activists, investigative journalists, and hackers (both good and bad) to profile subjects and organizations of interest. Doxing premisedis also used to profile individuals and organizations by adversaries who want to exploit human and technical networks for malicious reasons. Criminals, spies, stalkers, and harassers also ‘dox’ their targets. Of course, this same practice and approach can also be used to learn more about someone we have met online before we give them our full trust.

'Self-doxing', or researching what is openly available about you online, is a technique that can help you make informed decisions about what you share online, and how. Once you’ve doxed yourself, take a look at the data you’ve accessed and think about what a stranger may be able to figure out or reveal about you from what they’ve found. If you feel you and others close to you (such as fellow activists) are at increased risk, you may want to look for publicly available connections between you and members of your network as well.

Methods used for doxing include exploring archives, images, government databases, phone directories and other publicly available information; querying searchprivacy-protecting search engines like Startpage (https://startpage.com) or DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com); looking for a person's profile in specific services or on social networks; and searching for information in public forums and mailing lists. Doxing can also include looking up the public information on the owner of a website through a simple "whois search" (through websites like http://www.whois-search.com/ or similar).

Remember, if you are doxing other people, your research activities are leaving digital traces about you and your activities. Web services you use, and sites you visit may be collecting identifiable digital traces about you that you may not want them to have if this is a concern. So if you decide to dox others using the resources listed above, you may want to use tools that can anonymize the IP address* that uniquely identifies where you are physically accessing the Internet. One of the best tools for anonymization is Tor via the Tor Browser (https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en), which integrates Tor with the Firefox browser to make it easy to use, although users should remember to turn the built-in NoScript extension on, check to make sure Tor is working by checking your IP address, and keep Tor Browser updated. Tor does not guarantee anonymity (https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#AmITotallyAnonymous) because it cannot protect people from not taking the steps listed above, nor from making simple privacy mistakes, such as using Tor Browser to enter your real name and other sensitive information into a web form.

Finally, if you find certain details about you online that are highly sensitive, or if you just want to systematically remove certain data traces about you as much as possible, there are things you can do. In the section below called ‘Regaining Control,’ there are tips and links about how you can alter or remove data you have created, as well as how you can ask other platforms and individuals to remove data that they’ve posted about you.

Further Readings:

• Preventing Doxing by Crash Override Networkː (http://crashoverridenetwork.tumblr.com/post/108387569412/preventing-doxing)
• So You’ve Been Doxed: A Guide to Best Practices by Crash Override Networkː (http://crashoverridenetwork.tumblr.com/post/114270394687/so-youve-been-doxed-a-guide-to-best-practices)
• Advice on doxing harassers as a way to gain more information about them when assessing your level of potential risk from them: (https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gathering-information-to-assess-risk)
• Tips on how to self-dox yourself (or to dox someone else): (https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=93870)
• How Feminists can use the anonymity tool Tor, by Fembot Collectiveː (http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2015/05/06/toolkit-anonymous/)

Social mapping

While we have explained what steps you might take to explore the and traces you leavedigital traces that make up your ‘digital shadow’, you will also need to enlarge this exploration to people you interact with online in order to gain a sense of what your online identity and various social networks 'look' like online. Most of us have encountered challenging decisions about how to manage our personal, professional, and other ‘selves’ with our online accounts and identities. We many have only one identity that we use to connect with all our different networks, or we have taken steps to ‘separate’ our identities online, even though this can entail creating and managing different accounts and the different ‘social domains’ we use them to interact with. This has been an increasing safety issue for many activists, as their personal, professional, and activism networks can overlap in ways that can lead to greater levels of risk for our networks and us.

Everyone belongs to several social domains--your work or advocacy networks, your family networks, friends, sports teams, etc. Some networks may feel safer than others. For example, you may be more vigilant about what you share and how you share when it comes to your work or advocacy activities, but far less so when you interact with friends on a social networking platform like Facebook. If you use a single identity in all your domains, or if you always use your real name online, it becomes easier to gather information about you and to identify your vulnerabilities. For example, if you reveal in an online dating site that you like a particular kind of person, an attacker who wants to ruin your work or advocacy activities might trick you into sharing personal information with a fake profile designed according to your preferences, and then use any sensitive information you’ve shared with them through that fake account to blackmail you. In a generic everyday example, a prospective employer may find potentially embarrassing posts or information about you from your personal domains that you’d wish they wouldn’t have accessed.

These things are only possible, however, if your work identity, your personal identity, and your online dating profile can all be connected to the same person, and this is why separating our social domains can be useful. To separate your social domains, it's helpful to first map them out and identify which ones could potentially expose you most. You can do this by thinking about your different activities and personal networks, and reflecting on how sensitive each of these are in order to better separate the domains that are sensitive from those that are not. You can do this by considering the data that you handle in the different realms of your life and ask yourself: What would happen if this particular data suddenly disappeared, or if it was seen, copied, and distributed by someone hostile towards me?

Example: Polish computer security researcher Joanna Rutkowska developed a Linux distribution based on the concept of “security by isolation” called Qubes OS. In this system, each social domain is isolated in a separate virtual machine. The three basic domains Rutkowska identifies for herself are:

• The work domainː This includes her work email, work-related PGP keys, reports, slides, papers, etc. She also has a less-trusted “work-pub” domain for things like accepting LinkedIn invites or downloading pictures for her presentations.
• The personal domainː This includes her personal email and calendar, holiday photos, videos, etc. She has also added a special sub-domain to this called ‘very personal’, which she uses for encrypted communications with her partner.
• The untrusted (or red) domainː These are activities that she considers the least trustworthy and the highest risk. For her, this means browsing the web and using untrusted apps, and not sharing any sensitive or personally identifiable information. don’t require her to provide any sensitive information.

Although this is a fairly technical example, it illustrates how Rutkowska uses isolation of these domains as a security strategy She recognises that security measures can always be vulnerable, and so she reduces her risk by not having everything together in one place that can be targeted for attack. This example can be applied in other ways to your own social domains: By splitting up your social identities and domains, you no longer have a ‘single point of attack’ by those trying to find out everything they can about you under your single ‘real name’ identity, and potentially using this single identity to attack you online. You’ll read more about ways you can design and manage different types of online identities online for your various ‘social domains’.

Further readingsː

• You can find more details about Rutkowska's scheme here: (http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html).

Regaining control

Finding out what data exists out there and can be accessed by others by self-doxing is an empowering first step. There are also measures you can take to control what content and metadata you give away. When you publish content on the Internet, it is always a good idea to ask yourself if what you are posting is public or personal and who could have access to it. Even if the information is connected to a public event and not to your personal life, the names you mention or the images you upload may contribute to a more comprehensive picture about who you are, what you are doing, where you are doing it and so on.

This does not mean that you should silence yourself online, or not participate in public events, but to justby take some basic steps to limit your risks. A useful way to decide which steps you should take to improve your privacy and security is to think about how you can increase the cost or amount of effort it would take someone who wants to surveille or attack you.

Basic measures for reducing access to your content and data:

• When giving personal information to a web service, make sure the service provides an encrypted connection for you to access it from (the url should begin with https://). You can use the browser add-on Https Everywhere for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers, provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help you force https connections with websites that offer encrypted connections (Seeː https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere).
• If you use it correctly, Torbrowser' will mask your IP address, thereby increasing your anonymity online (Seeː https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/anonymity-and-circumvention).
• You can install privacy add-ons like Privacy Badger, Adblock Plus or Ghostery on Firefox, Chrome, Safari browsers. Through your browser’s settings, you can also review and improve your privacy- and security-related settings, including deleting cookies on a regular basis (See: https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/firefox/windows and https://help.riseup.net/en/better-web-browsing).
• You should use strong and different passwords for each web service you use - if not, someone that intercepts or gains your main password could use it to access your all your other accounts that use the same password (Seeː https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/passwords).

Mindfully publishing contentː

• When sharing personal details about your life, often you can use private profiles that can only be accessed by selected contacts. When using these on commercial social networking platforms, you should be aware of regular changes to the privacy policies of that platform. There have been cases where privacy settings have been changed, exposing pictures, content and conversations of private groups.
• When writing or posting images about public events online, you should ask yourself if the information you spread about individuals, places and other details could be used to identify and/or put someone at risk. It is always a good idea to first ask for permission to write about individuals and events, and perhaps also establish shared agreements about posting information about public events with fellow attendees and participants.
• Faces in pictures can be blurred or obscured with an app called ObscuraCam, a free camera application for Android devices. (https://guardianproject.info/apps/obscuracam)

Reducing your metadata:

• You can switch off the GPS tracker in your phone or camera. You can also limit various apps’ access to your location data, contacts, and pictures in your phone settings. You can also read more about alternative tools that offer encrypted mobile communication on mobiles (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/smartphones)as Text Secure for text messaging (https://whispersystems.org/#) and Ostel (https://ostel.co/).
• When registering a device or software such as Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others, you don't need to use your real name. This prevents the metadata created when using this device or software from being connected to your name.
• When publishing content online you can change files from ones that contain a lot of metadata (such as .doc and .jpeg) to ones that use less metadata (such as .txt and .png), or you can use plain text.
• You can use tools to remove metadata from certain files. For images there is Metanull for Windows (https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-africa/metanull/windows). For PDFs, Windows or MAC OSX users can use programs such as Adobe Acrobat XI Pro (for which a trial version is available). GNU/Linux users can use PDF MOD, a free and open source tool. (Note: this tool doesn’t remove the creation or modification timestamp, and it also doesn’t remove the information about the type of device used to create the PDF.) For a full guide to removing metadata from different file formats, see Tactical Tech's resource: https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-mena/remove-metadata.

Blocking access to content and deleting accountsː

• Temporarily blocking content from Google Search results: (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en&lr=all&rd=2) describes how to use the Temporary URL Blocking tool to block search results for websites. This does not actually remove content, but it blocks older (and potentially more sensitive) content from search results until you can make updates to your website(s).
• The Suicide Machineː (http://suicidemachine.org) is a tool that facilitates the process of deleting social media profiles. This tool was forced to stop deleting Facebook accounts, but instructions on how to do this can be found here: (https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674).
• AccountKillerː (https://www.accountkiller.com) has instructions on how to remove accounts or public profiles for most popular websites and social networking services.
• JustDelete Meː (http://justdelete.me) is a directory of direct links to delete accounts from web services and social networking services.

Creating and managing identities online

Most of us have encountered challenging decisions about how to manage our personal, professional, and other ‘selves’ with our online accounts and identities. We many have only one identity that we use to connect with all our different networks, or we have taken steps to ‘separate’ our identities online, even though this can entail creating and managing different accounts and the different ‘social domains’ we use them to interact with. This has been an increasing safety issue for many activists, as their personal, professional, and activism networks can overlap in ways that can lead to greater levels of risk for our networks and us.

Usually, most people who separate how they interact with their different social domains (especially work and personal life) still use the same identity, which is usually their ‘real name’. But with the nature of the work we do as WHRDs or as feminists plus the increased risk of attacks and harassment we have simply due to our gender or sexual orientation, there are other options to consider and explore. Targeting, harassment, and gender-based violence online represents tremendous and ever-increasing problem that remains almost entirely unaddressed by those who control many of the online spaces we use. Currently, women, trans* and other marginalized individuals struggle to find safe spaces online, as governments, online communities, and both corporate and non-corporate services and websites stumble in their attempts to adequately address what have become hotly contested ‘spaces’ and ‘cultures’ online.

In this section, we’ll continue the process of reflecting on what our current online identity or identities are, what social domains we use those identities to communicate with, and how we may adjust and re-invent our online identities and activities in ways that are safer and more efficient for the work we do as WHRDs. We’ll describe the different types of online identities, how they are used, and the trade-offs of using one over another. We’ll then dive into how to create new online identities, how to create believable pseudonyms and ‘back stories’ on platforms that require ‘real names’, the ins and outs of managing multiple identities, and how you can use certain tools, platforms, and devices to complement the management of your identities online.

Using your 'real identity' vs. other options

Once you have identified your different social domains (and the activities and networks that go with them) from the ‘Social Mapping’ section at the end of Part 1, we need to think about how we can improve the ways we interact with our various social domains online. The first question to consider is whether or not you want to differentiate your identities according to the social domains you’ve identified for yourself, or if you'd rather stick to your official name and true face for each of them. There is no ‘right’ answer to this or any of the options in this section, but this process and the consideration of your options will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of how you currently operate online. You may want to keep your work connected to your legal or "real" identity because this gives it legitimacy, or you’re so well established that reversing this would be problematic for various reasons. Or you may think that your activism should be anonymous* (more on this below). All these are potential decisions that need to be thought through carefully, and speaking about these decisions and trade-offs with friends who do similar work can be immensely helpful.

Let’s use an example of a journalist considering these issues. She may have more credibility and more job opportunities if she uses to use her real identity for her writing. Or she may decide to keep her real name confidential and use a nickname (or ‘pseudonym*’) for her work, which means taking various precautions so no one can connect the two spheres together. This may mean she has to work harder to build her credibility as a journalist, and some potential employers may not want (or be able) to pay her for her work without knowing her real name, but separating her online journalism identity from her real name and identity is important and valuable enough for her to work a little harder.

A second example that illustrates these options and trade-offs is an activist considering her choices. If she wants to use a pseudonym for her online activities instead of her real name, she should consider that she may be showing her face as part of her activism-related activities in the real world (such as speaking at conferences, participating in demonstrations, or attending small events). Can she keep all images of her doing her activism-related work offline? If not, her online pseudonym will be linked to her face in online images, and her face can be then also be linked to her real name in other social domains, such as her personal account on social media. This could eventually ‘unmask’ her online activist identity, defeating the reasons why she originally chose to use a pseudonym.

It’s also become increasingly difficult to understand and remain aware of all the kinds of data and metadata (‘digital traces’) we create when using many apps and functionalities via multiple devices—especially mobile phones and the emerging number of networked devices that we describe as the ‘Internet of Things’. This has made various types of online identities much more challenging to create and maintain effectively and safely without revealing identifiable information about ourselves and our networks.

Considering how potential online identities can improve your safety (and the safety of those connected to you personally and professionally), it’s crucial to accurate assess your risk, as well as the technical skills and abilities you would need to use various types of online identities safely. You also need to assess which kind of identity you’d use in a given context. These questions illustrate things you should be considering when evaluating alternate online identities:

• Would my safety, job or livelihood be at risk if my real identity were known?
• Would my mental health or stability be affected if my participation in certain activities were known?
• Would my family or other loved ones be harmed in any way if my real identity became known?
• Am I able and willing to maintain separate identities safely?

These questions illustrate elements of basic risk assessment processes that you should apply when thinking about how your online identity (or identities) impact—or are affected by—your digital security and privacy. Assessing your risk helps clarify your options and needs when considering different strategies for separating your identities online. These range from full transparency to full anonymity, and include as many separate identities as you think are needed and possible to for you to maintain to do your work safely. Because of the risks involved with WHRDs’ work, we recommend doing as in-depth a risk assessment as you’re able, and to seek assistance if you need it.

Further readings:

• Tactical Tech's guide to risk assessment: (https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-mena/security-risk)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation's guide to threat modeling: (https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/introduction-threat-modeling)

"Real" names

Author Kate Harding talks about her decision to start writing under her real name, dismissing the recommendations that are generally given to bloggers to follow practices like 'writing under a pseudonym, making that pseudonym male or gender-neutral if you’re one of them lady bloggers... masking one’s personal information, being circumspect about publishing identifying details, and not writing anything that might inflame the crazies'. Instead of putting responsibility on women, Harding says, problems of harassment should be handled by society as a whole, including men. However, she also acknowledges that the decision can be a dangerous one.

For exemple the project Geek Wiki Feminism reveals how certain groups of people are disadvantaged by policies thatrequire individuals to use their real or legal names. These include women, queers, trans* persons, differently-abled persons, children and parents. The costs to individuals from these groups when they have a public profile attached to their real name can range from discrimination (in employment or services) to arrest, imprisonment or execution in some contexts. For a comprehensive list of which groups of people are affected (and how they are affected), see Geek Wiki Feminism (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

Further readings:

• Kate Harding talks about her decision to start writing under her real nameː (http://kateharding.net/2007/04/14/on-being-a-no-name-blogger-using-her-real-name/)
• How Facebook's real name policy affects LGBTQ persons: (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/facebooks-real-name-policy-can-cause-real-world-harm-lgbtq-community)
• Geek Feminism Wiki - Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?ː (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)
• At the Human Rights Council, APC together with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the International Lesbian and Gay Association delivered a joint statement highlighting the importance of encryption and anonymity for people who face discrimination and persecution based on their sexual orientation and gender identityː (https://www.apc.org/en/node/20587/)

Anonymity

Anonymity is keeping your identity and any uniquely identifying details about you completely private and separate from the work, activism you do and/or opinions you voice. On anonymity, Vani, a human rights activist, writes: “I am a regular social network user. I voice my opinions on a range of topics. But I remain faceless and nameless” (http://internetdemocracy.in/media/women-bloggers-seek-safety-in-anonymity%20speaks%20of%20their%20participation%20on%20social%20networks%20anonymously).

Anonymity may be a good choice for certain contexts and activities if you don't need to gain other people's trust, if there are few or no people you can trust, or when you don't want to expose yourself and others in your life to increased risk. Similar to other options below, it requires being mindful of the ‘digital traces’ you create, as we discussed above in Part One. For example, commitment to anonymity means you have to be very disciplined about not revealing your ‘real IP address’, similar to not revealing your ‘real name’. (For this, Tor Browser and trusted VPNs can be critical everyday tools you use.)

Anonymity may also be a good option from time to time when you are doing certain online activities that are more sensitive than other work and online activities you do under other types of online identities. For example, you may want to remain anonymous when researching or participating in message boards about sensitive health issues, or when discussing censored content or highly political issues in online environments that are possibly monitored.

Anonymity can also mean using elements of other types of online identities. For example, if you want to communicate with someone that you don’t entirely trust or want to reveal your ‘real’ identity to (for example, someone you met on the sensitive health issue forum in the example above), you may want to set up a one-time account using a pseudonym to communicate with them over chat or email. When operating anonymously online, you may also want to use one-time pseudonyms to comment on a blog post or news site, or to establish a one-time nickname to identify yourself in a single chat session.

But total anonymity can be difficult to maintain, especially as you create larger amounts of content over long periods of time. The odds increase that you (and others who know your identity) may make ‘mistakes’ and reveal identifying ‘digital traces’ about you through your content or metadata that uniquely identifies you. Additionally, anonymity can also be risky in countries where it’s automatically considered a ‘red flag’ by authorities that may think an anonymous user is trying to hide something or doing something wrong. Anonymity can also be lonely and isolating, which leads to questions a blogger suggests asking yourself: “Can you have a network to protect you and also be anonymous at the same time? Would visibility be a better strategy for you?”.

When you adopt anonymity as a strategy you may use pseudonyms, but these should not be used across different networks or social domains, and some may only be used once and then discarded. Because of this, anonymity differs from persistent pseudonymity.

Further Readings:

• The anonymity decision for bloggers: (https://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2015/05/01/to-be-or-not-to-be-anonymous-how-should-bloggers-decide/)
• How the real identity of the blogger behind the Gay Girl blog was revealed by online investigation: (http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/new-evidence-about-amina-gay-girl-damascus-hoax)
• How to Remove Your Online Identity for achieving full Anonymity on the Internet: (http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/remove-your-online-identity-ultimate-guide-anonymity-and-security-internet-0131741/)

Persistent Pseudonymity

Anonymity may be a good choice for certain contexts and activities if you don't need to gain other people's trust, if there are few or no people you can trust, or when you don't want to expose yourself and others in your life to increased risk. Similar to other options below, it requires being mindful of the ‘digital traces’ you create, as we discussed above in Part One. For example, commitment to anonymity means you have to be very disciplined about not revealing your ‘real IP address’, similar to not revealing your ‘real name’. (For this, Tor Browser and trusted VPNs can be critical everyday tools you use.)

Anonymity may also be a good option from time to time when you are doing certain online activities that are more sensitive than other work and online activities you do under other types of online identities. For example, you may want to remain anonymous when researching or participating in message boards about sensitive health issues, or when discussing censored content or highly political issues in online environments that are possibly monitored.

Anonymity can also mean using elements of other types of online identities. For example, if you want to communicate with someone that you don’t entirely trust or want to reveal your ‘real’ identity to (for example, someone you met on the sensitive health issue forum in the example above), you may want to set up a one-time account using a pseudonym to communicate with them over chat or email. When operating anonymously online, you may also want to use one-time pseudonyms to comment on a blog post or news site, or to establish a one-time nickname to identify yourself in a single chat session.

But total anonymity can be difficult to maintain, especially as you create larger amounts of content over long periods of time. The odds increase that you (and others who know your identity) may make ‘mistakes’ and reveal identifying ‘digital traces’ about you through your content or metadata that uniquely identifies you. Additionally, anonymity can also be risky in countries where it’s automatically considered a ‘red flag’ by authorities that may think an anonymous user is trying to hide something or doing something wrong. Anonymity can also be lonely and isolating, which leads to questions a blogger suggests asking yourself: “Can you have a network to protect you and also be anonymous at the same time? Would visibility be a better strategy for you?”

Further readings:

• The many reasons people use pseudonyms by the EFF: (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/case-pseudonyms) Geek Wiki Feminism on Pseudonymousː (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Pseudonymity) and a bingo about it (http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/08/anti-pseudonym-bingo/)
• Why we need online alter egos now more than ever: (http://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-we-need-online-alter-egos-now-more-than-ever/) (‘Alter egos’ being a synonym for pseudonym here.)
• A blogger on how human error exposed her pseudonymous online identity, putting her work identity at risk : (http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/04/14/on-refusing-to-tell-you-my-name/)

Collective Identity

Another way to be anonymous is through collective anonymous participation. For centuries, groups and like-minded people have participated anonymously in historic protest movements, or have created ground-breaking artworks and thought-provoking pranks under collective pseudonyms. In addition to enabling members to ‘hide’ their identities, these collective personas often create an aura of almost magical power from their actions. Anonymity through collective identity can translate into a number of concrete activities and resources, from a private group or mailing list that puts out collective statements, to a shared Twitter account. While the same security and privacy concerns apply, working as part of a collective anonymous identity means having the ‘power of the crowd’ behind you, and can offer a good option if you don’t want reveal your identity as part of a movement.

But be aware that the ‘power of the crowd’ can also be the ‘tyranny of structureleness’ (in reference to Jo Freeman workː http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm), or even ‘mob mentality’. The collective may choose to do things that you don’t agree with, or things that will put you at unacceptable levels of risk. In some cases, members of collectives have been prosecuted for illegal acts even if they played low-level roles in the collective, and simply being a member of a collective can increase the level of scrutiny, surveillance, and risks you experience. So if you are considering acting as a collective identity, choose wisely and do your research before joining.

Some examples of collective identities:

Captain Swing: the identity used by farm workers in protest letters written during the English Swing Riots in 1830 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Swing)

Luther Blisset: this was originally the name of an Italian footballer that became adopted and used by many artists and activists for various actions and even a series of books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_%28nom_de_plume%29)

Guerrilla Girls: an anonymous group of feminist and female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world (http://guerrillagirls.com/)

Netochka Nezvanovaː may be the name of a collective, or it may actually be the pseudonym of a single women. (The name itself means ‘Nameless Nobody’ in Russian, from a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky). Netochka is the ‘human face’ of a software tool kit used to manipulate digital video in real time, but her activities and actions add to the reputation and mystique of the identity. Netochka used to give the interviews to promote the software, but she was frequently represented by different women when she showed up in person (http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/)

Anonymous: is perhaps the most widely known contemporary collective. It is a loose international network of activist and ‘hacktivist’ individuals and entities. Anonymous became known for a series of well-known stunts both online and offline, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, website defacing, and publishing illegally obtained corporate documents and emails. They’ve targeted governments, religious groups, individuals, and corporations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29) .

Kolena Lailaː was started by a group of young women bloggers in Egypt in 2006. The initiative devotes one day a year to mobilizing all Arab woman bloggers to speak out on different forms of oppressions they face; Kolena Laila means ‘we are all Laila’; Laila is the protagonist of ‘The Open Door,’ a novel by Latifa El Zayyat )(http://yfa.awid.org/2010/04/blogging-initiative-amplifies-voices-of-young-arab-women/)

Further readings:

• Gabriella Coleman's 'Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous' is an anthropological recounting of the glories and disasters of Anonymousː (https://boingboing.net/2014/11/20/hacker-hoaxer-whistleblower.html)
• 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness' is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group that concerns power relations inside collectivesː http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
• Guerilla girls website contains useful resources about women in artː (http://www.guerrillagirls.com/info/index.shtml)

Comparing strategies

You should now know more about different types of online identities, what they offer, how they overlap, and the trade-offs involved in using them. You’ve probably thought about how different types of online identities would work well for communicating with others in different ways, and are pondering the steps you would take to—for example—create a pseudonymous blog about gender-based violence in your community, and how you might establish a strong online reputation isolated from your ‘real identity’ and social domains. But, as mentioned above, it is crucial to understand the benefits and drawbacks for you and your specific needs and situation in terms of your safety, the requirements of implementing a specific type of identity, and the technical abilities that identity requires for your specific level of risk. Since the community this is written for is women and trans* human rights defenders and activists, many of you probably have a certain level of increased risk that would require a relatively strong baseline of technical knowledge and skills in order to safely create and manage these types of online identities.

Since this initial content in the manual is avoiding hands-on technical advice and ‘deep dives’ into tools and digital systems, it’s important to remember that you will probably need to know how to use a range of security and privacy tools well (for example, Tor Browser), since employing many of these identities require fairly advanced knowledge, awareness, and skills to avoid making mistakes that could reveal enough data to expose one’s true identity and even the identity of others.

For example, to effectively establish and use an anonymous or pseudonymous identity without creating or exposing information that can uniquely identify you in the hostile environments that most WHRDs operate in, you would need to have a more in-depth knowledge of the many kinds of traces that are created when you use a wide range of tools, platforms, devices, and systems; which ‘digital traces’ you would need to prevent from being created or only allow to include non-identifying information; the potential ways the data and metadata you create can be captured by others; knowledge about who runs and owns the sites that you use, and what legal jurisdictions they and their servers are under; as well as a strong working knowledge of how to secure your own devices and systems.

Therefore, to use these identities well enough to withstand surveillance and monitoring in hostile environments requires a certain level of technical skills and knowledge because of the number of variables, technologies, systems, and actors involved. Choosing to limit your use to certain platforms over others could help with many of the challenges, but not all of them. We suggest when possible talking with others who have used these types of identities in similarly high-risk or hostile environments as part of your research before choosing to use one or more of them unless you are simply exploring and trying a type of identity in a safe and innocuous context, which is an excellent way to gain practice and a sense of what each of these identities entails.

Another thing to consider when assessing your risk and then considering whether or not to use different types of online identities and which ones you should use, is what kind of ‘worse case scenarios’ you could handle if one of your online identities became compromised and your ‘real identity’ was revealed. For some people it could have very serious repercussions that could cause harm or prevent them from operating. For others, it may be problematic, but it would be something that they could absorb and move on from, and no one would suffer serious harm. This illustrates how much these decisions depend on each individual, as well as how they decide to use these identities to interact with their various social domains, including the activities they do as women and trans* human rights defenders.

A final reminder: If you choose to use one of these online identities, remember to keep your ‘social domains’ effectively separated. No matter how many domains you identify in your digital life, and how many corresponding identities you create, on the Internet every identity—even the one bearing your real or legal name—becomes a “virtual” persona and should be managed carefully.

The pros and cons of the various identity options described above:

Real name

• Risk: Using your "real world" identity online means you are easily identifiable by family members, colleagues, and others, and your activities can be linked back to your identity.

• Reputation: Others can easily identify you, thus gaining reputation and trust is easier.

• Effort: It requires little effort.

Total anonymity

• Risk: It can be beneficial at times, but also be very difficult to maintain. Choose this option carefully.

• Reputation: There are few opportunities to network with others thus to gain trust and reputation.

• Effort: Intensive as it requires considerable caution and knowledge. It will probably require the use of anonymisation tools (for example Tor or TAILS)

Persistent pseudonymity

• Risk: Pseudonyms could be linked to your real world identity.

• Reputation: A persistent pseudonym that others can use to identify you across platforms is a good way to gain reputation and trust.

• Effort: Maintenance requires some effort, particularly if you are also using your real name elsewhere.

Collective Identity

• Risk: Possible exposure of your real world identity by other people's actions in the group.

• Reputation: While not a way to gain individual reputation, you can still benefit from the reputation of the collective.

• Effort: Although secure communications are still important, it requires less effort than total anonymity.

Creating a new online identity

Once something is on the Internet it will almost always persist online and on private servers in some form. You may think that deleting certain sensitive data from social networking platforms and web services are enough to protect yourself, but remember that metadata cannot be deleted (or found) as easily. And using just one identity throughout your whole life—in all your work and personal domains—creates a bulk of information that makes it easier to profile (or ‘dox’) you.

One option to avoid this is to leave an old identity behind and create a new one, or (as discussed above) several new ones for each of your social domains. You might also choose to still use your real identity in some areas, and your new alternative identities in others. Even if you don't feel an explicit need to have more than one online identity right now, it is worth familiarising yourself with the process. That way, if you get trolled or harassed online in the future and need to create one, it will be easier to do. As with all security and privacy tactics and tools, you will learn better when you are not facing a direct threat, especially one attacking your online identity and reputation. The effects of distress and fatigue affect our ability to engage with the systematic processes of risk analysis, security planning, and skill-building.

Besides all of this, creating new online identities can be really fun and is an essential part of how the Internet began: as a vast and endless new playground to reinvent one’s self and be whomever we dreamt of being. Once you have decided that you want to experiment with multiple identities and have chosen what kind of identity (or identities) you want to create, you may want to take into account the following recommendations:

• You should select your social contacts for each one carefully, and avoid sharing contacts with other identities you use for different activities. This effectively creates separate social domains, with separate accounts, email addresses, browser profiles, apps, and if possible, even devices.
• Your various identities should not linked to each other, or to your real identity. Remember that some of these connections can be tenuous as for example when signing up for a new pseudonymous email account using your real phone number, or using a persistent pseudonymous when creating a one time use disposable email.
• Creating additional disposable identities can be useful, as they can be discarded easily if compromised. These can also be created for new acquaintances (when appropriate) as introductory profiles to get to know somebody before you include them in a more trusted network.

Creating names and life stories

As discussed at length above, many platforms have ‘real name’ policies, so if you want to use commercial social networking platforms under a false name, it is better to use a credible name and surname rather than more ‘imaginative’ ones that seem fake. Or you may want to use the information in this section to create and use accounts you only use once, or devices that you only use once but need to create a fake identity and details for in order to access.

Once you have decided on a name, a surname, and a username for your virtual persona, you should do thorough research—perhaps also using doxing tools and techniques—to find out if someone else is already using that name. After all, if you wish to develop your own reputation, you don’t want to be confused with someone else, especially if they don’t share your views of the world or if your activities might put them at risk!

Then you need to create a story for this virtual persona, because if it comes with a story it makes it a lot easier to maintain. This can be really fun and challenging. You can invent a new story if you feel particularly inspired, or base your story on a “known” person’s story, a superhero, a fictional character from your favourite novel, or adopt a “collective identity” like Anonymous/Anonymiss or the Guerrilla Girls. In any case, when you create an identity you should conceive of a whole virtual persona, an avatar that needs to be nurtured and developed in order to become credible.

Relevant links:

• Fakena.me: (https://fakena.me) is a privacy-oriented '"fake name generator" that will give you all the fake info you need to set up an account (fake name, birth date, US only address, username and password) as well as a link to an associated guerillamail mailbox.
• Instant Internet Decoy: (https://decoys.me) creates convincing but entirely fictional people who have birthdays, locations in several countries, families and even answers to common security questions.

Credible personas

A virtual persona or identity can't be just a name with an email address and a series of web accounts. If you keep all your core identifying traits in all your personas—such as your gender, profession, preferences, or even the unique way you write and words you use—it might be possible eventually for a dedicated person to connect the dots and link your pseudonymous personas with your real identity.

• Work: Your persona should have a job that is different from yours, but not so different that you don’t know anything about that field: For example, they shouldn’t be a surgeon if you don’t know anything about anatomy! Also, you may want to vary where you work in terms of city and country.

• Skills and interests: Similar considerations should be made to select your persona's skills and the main topics they focus on and write about.

• Psychological attitude: A good way to give your persona depth is by creating some "weak spots" which are not the same as your own. So when the persona gets attacked, you can laugh about it and not experience harm. For example if you have a good sense of humour, try impersonating a humourless person!

• Linguistic fingerprint: Although more advanced, it’s possible to be identifiable through a "stylometric analysis" that can identify the author of a particular text if they have enough samples of their writing. If you’re concerned about this, analyse how you write, what kind of typos you tend to make (you can utilize a spell-checker to help with this), and what kind of phrases and sentence structures you tend to use. You can complicate any potential analysis by using different writing styles that could involve the words you use, the structure of your sentences, unusual use of capitol or lowercase letters, and various misspellings you typically wouldn’t make. If you have a number of personas, you could potentially create a simple rule for how each writes, and keep track by saving them with your passwords and login information for each persona’s account(s).

In any case, you should always remember that on the Internet, each of your identities—even those connected to your real name—is a “virtual” identity, and it is always better to decide what character traits you want to expose in each of them. Creating a somewhat fictional character may even be a good idea for your “real” online identity in some cases.

Relevant links:

• Tips for creating a rounded character for your identities: (/https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?page_id=94049)
• Helpful tips for inventing a new identity: (http://anonymissexpress.tumblr.com/post/117939311235/you-may-have-noticed)
• Artist Curtis Wallen's experience of creating a new online identity: (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/how-to-invent-a-person-online/374837/)
• Tips for building your online credibility: (https://gigaom.com/2008/10/30/building-your-online-credibility/)
• On the Internet nobody knows you are a dog: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog)
• An oral history of the first cyberfeminists: (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-oral-history-of-the-first-cyberfeminists-vns-matrix)

Managing several identities

Maintaining multiple identities does take some work, but like most of these practices, it just requires some curiosity, patience and attention. After a while, it will become habitual like everything else we do online (think of how complex our social networking habits are!) The main point is to always stay vigilant in order to keep your identities separated, or else they will very quickly begin to mix with one another. As a start, you can keep notes on your identities to help you to avoid any awkward situations where you confuse one with another (but do think carefully about where you host or keep those notes!) There are also technical things you can do:

• Create different browser profiles so that your browsing habits are captured under different identities, on Firefox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles and https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles) or Google Chrome (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824)
• When creating a new email account or social media account for an identity, it is a good idea to connect to the server’s website using Tor Browser and, if a contact email address is required, to consider using a disposable email address instead that you only use for that account. But be mindful that the email provider you choose doesn’t also collect and reveal the connections between that new ‘disposable’ email account and your real identity – for example, this can be almost impossible when trying to create a disposable Gmail account from Google via a Chrome browser when one of your main ‘real identity’ email accounts is a Gmail account. Consider using other email providers you usually don’t use for your ‘real identity’ email accounts.
• Write up and establish ‘basic house cleaning’ steps you take as you ‘enter in and out’ of the accounts for your different identities. This includes logging out of accounts, erasing cookies, not having your browser save your passwords, etc. And—as will be discussed below—if you have the option of only using certain devices to access accounts for specific identities, this is a incredibly useful way to use and manage your various accounts.
• If you have the resources and motivation you can separate your identities per device or operating system. This can include using virtual machines for instance, as explained at the end of this chapter.

Disposable email addresses

For some activities and social domains you need to manage rounded personas, in order to gain a strong reputation and trust from other members of the community. In other cases, though, all you need is a ‘disposable’ email address that you only need to use for opening an account in a platform you don’t trust with your ‘real identity’ and information. Using disposable email accounts will reduce the number of traces connected to the main email address(es) you use for your work or personal life, and have the bonus feature of minimising the amount of spam in those accounts. Below are some services that can help you set up disposable accounts and addresses:

• Anonbox:(https://anonbox.net) is a service provided by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) gives you a mailbox for a day.
• Guerilla Mail: (https://www.guerrillamail.com) lets you choose your email id and holds any mail you receive to it in a mailbox for one hour.
• BugMeNot: (http://bugmenot.com) allows people to share their email logins and passwords created for platforms with free registration, for anyone to use.

Another option is to set up a mail alias. This a different email address that is connected to your main mailbox. The advantages of this approach are that this email account will not expire, and if it gets compromised you can just dispose of it and create a new one. But beware that it is very easy to check what the source email address (i.e., your main email address) is, so don't use this method when you really need to disguise your identity.

Relevant links:

• While not every mail service allows users to create mail aliases, this service is offered to every mail user of Riseup (https://we.riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org).
• A list of autonomous email providers listed by Riseup: (https://help.riseup.net/en/radical-servers)

Commercial social networking platforms

Before choosing to use any social networking platform there are some basic security and privacy questions you should ask, regardless of which identity you plan on using:

• Does it provide an encrypted connection (https) for all uses of the site, rather than just during login? Are there any problems related to the website’s encryption?
• According to the platform's End User Licence Agreement (EULA), Privacy Policy and/or Data Use Policy, how is your content and personal data handled? With whom is it shared or possibly sold to?
• What privacy options and features are provided for users? For example, can you choose to share your videos securely with a small number of individuals, or are all your videos and other content public by default?
• Is the geographical location of the servers known? Under which territorial (and therefore legal) jurisdiction do they fall? Where is the company registered? How does this information relate to the privacy and security of your activity and information?

Now when you think about crafting a separate identity and letting it out on commercial social networking platforms, there are additional precautions to take:

• It is important to not expose yourself by revealing your ‘real’ IP address location, so we recommend using tools that mask your IP address—such as Tor Browser or a trusted VPN—to connect to those platforms.

• When creating a social networking account for a new persona, use the unique browser profile you have created for that persona (mentioned above). Make sure to check the platform’s privacy settings so that you know what you are making public, who can see what you post, who can contact you, who can look you up using search, and what your contacts can see and do (e.g., can they tag you in pictures? can they write on your ‘wall’?)

• Have fun with the profile information you provide but remember that this information is publicly available, so think about the message you want to convey with it.

• Make sure your contacts do not overlap with your other identities, and your different identities don't "follow" one another. It is particularly not a good idea to follow your pseudonymous personas with your real identity. If someone is looking to unmask one of these personas, the first thing they will look for is who the account follows, and who follows the account. For the same reason, we should avoid reposting posts or other content published by one account with another account.

• To make your identities look like different people, you can publish from your various accounts at different times of the day. Some social networking platforms, like Facebook, allow users to schedule the publication time of their posts.
• It can be a good idea to follow, from your pseudonymous profiles, other people who might reasonably be considered the real owners of that profile. To further distance your real identity from your pseudonymous identities, you can also write (and hashtag on Twitter) posts under your pseudonymous profiles about events that you are not attending, especially if they are taking place far away from you. It can also be fun to publish and then delete posts that look like you have exposed your identity, so as to further confuse anyone who may try to unmask you.
• If you are using a GPS-enabled phone, most social networking platforms will display your location where they can. This function is generally provided when you interact with the platform using a GPS-enabled phone, but the network your computer is connected to may also provide location data. It's always a good idea to double-check your settings - particularly on photo and video sharing sites to make sure your physical location and other metadata is not being collected and shared with media you share or post online.
• If you access social networking platforms via mobile apps, it is better to use a different app for each separate account, so as not to post something to the wrong account by mistake. There are several apps that can be used to carefully manage your social networking platforms. It is, however, a good idea to use a different one for each identity, to reduce the risk of giving away your real identity.

Relevant links:

• Terms of Service; Didn’t Read: (https://tosdr.org) provides a summary in "human language" of the Terms of Service of many popular social networking platforms and other websites.
• Tools for scheduling Facebook posts: (https://www.facebook.com/help/389849807718635)
• Tools for scheduling posts on Twitter and other platforms: Buffer (https://buffer.com) and Postcron (https://postcron.com)

Further readings:

• Tactical Tech analysis of terms of services: (https://myshadow.org/lost-in-small-print) provides a collection of companies' privacy policies, edited to help you parse through their small print.
• Facebook action by Women, action and the media: (http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/)
• 6 Tips for Protecting Your Communications From Prying Eyesː (https://www.propublica.org/article/six-tips-for-protecting-your-communications-from-prying-eyes)

A different machine for each identity

There are various approaches to digital security, but one of the most realistic approaches is security by isolation, which assumes that all security measures can be vulnerable and therefore focuses on harm reduction by preventing possible attackers from accessing the ‘whole system’ that needs to be secured. This is what underlies the strategy of using multiple online identities in isolation from each other—it takes a single target that is difficult to defend (your ‘real identity’) and turns it into multiple targets (your various online identities) that—if done correctly—are difficult to identify and then ‘attack’ because they are not associated with one another—they are isolated by design and implementation according to your unique social domains.

Now let’s extend this strategy from separate and isolated online personas (and the online accounts you use them with to communicate with distinct social domains) to the devices you use. Most of us use the same operating system on the same device to create, use and manage all our online identities, since we usually only have and use one computer and operating system. Because of the way we are uniquely ‘fingerprinted’ online via our browsers and apps (see EFF’s Panopticlick (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) to see the how unique your browser is to all sites you visit), we have to take extra steps to ‘appear’ different when we use our different online identities. One of the ways we do this is by varying the browsers we use, and creating and saving separate browser profiles that we use for each online identity.

But by always using the same device (usually a computer) and operating system on that device, you unavoidably increase the chances of making mistakes, no matter how carefully you separate your profiles and do everything ‘right’. For example, you may accidentally sign into a pseudonymous account using the browser profile you have assigned to your "real" identity, which leaves distinct metadata behind that seems unusual compared to the browser profile you usually use for that account, and can even inescapably link that pseudonymous account to your real account if someone is paying very close attention and is capturing your browser data when you log in. You could also get infected by malware that enables your attacker to monitor everything you do online, including all your activities using your many carefully crafted and managed identities.

To mitigate these risks (which are very common human errors—nobody’s perfect!), you can use a different device for each of your online accounts (and their respective social domains), which reduces the possible harm caused by potential spyware or human error. Most of us don't have those kind of resources, however. Therefore, an inexpensive (and usually free) option is to use a different operating system on your one main computer by using a GNU/Linux live distribution like Tails (https://tails.boum.org/) or by creating ‘virtual machines’ that run ‘inside’ your computer’s main operating system. A virtual machine (VM) can be described as a simulated computer with its own operating system, which runs as software on your physical computer. You can think of a VM as a computer within a computer. Using VMs can be useful for a wide range of things, including anonymisation, sharing machines with other people, or for opening untrusted and potentially harmful attachments ‘isolated’ in the VM from your main operating system in order to avoid a potential malware infection of your entire system.

The three tools proposed here — Tails, Whonix and Qubes OS — provide you the additional protection of separate operating systems for managing your alternate identities without having to use multiple computers, and can be incredibly powerful tools to make sure you don’t reveal your true identity when you’re using the your other online identities in isolation from each other. Even better is that these solutions (detailed more below) are free and open-source Linux distributions that have been designed to maximise the privacy and security of its users.

Tails, or The Amnesic Incognito Live System: (https://tails.boum.org/) is a live operating system designed to help you use the Internet anonymously and evade censorship. It can be run on almost any computer directly from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card, and then be shut down without leaving traces on your computer (or other device you use). It forces all the computer’s outgoing connections to go through Tor, and blocks attempts to make direct, non-anonymous connections to your computer. Using Tails is pretty easy, although some of what you can do (and the apps you can use) are limited out of necessity; despite this, you can do everything you need in order to use and maintain your online identities, including your ‘real’ identity, although you cannot access the content on your computer that you’ve stored there (such as photos and videos). You can still access your email accounts, and transfer media over to be used in Tails via USB stick, SD card, or other portable media. If what you want to do with your virtual identity requires anonymisation, then it may be worthwhile to take the initial step of installing Tails on a USB stick and launching it on your computer. Tails is also a good option also if you have very few resources, if you don’t have a computer of your own, or if you often use computers at Internet cafes or at your workplace and want to be safer. As mentioned above, if you want to keep the files you have created when using Tails, or save your actions, you need to enable this option (also known as ‘persistence’ (https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/persistence/index.en.html)) when you first start it. Tails is an well-established, highly respected project that has been developed for many years and is used by a wide community of people.

• System requirements: Tails should work on any computer manufactured after 2005 (https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/requirements/index.en.html)
• Documentation: https://tails.boum.org/doc/index.en.html

Whonix: (https://www.whonix.org)is an operating system created to run in a virtual machine that is designed to protect your anonymity, privacy, and security by helping you to use your applications anonymously. A web browser, IRC client, word processor and other tools come pre-configured with security in mind. Whonix is a relatively recent project and the community using it is still rather small.

• System requirements: You will need a good machine where you can run Virtualbox (https://www.virtualbox.org) in order to install Whonix (https://www.whonix.org/wiki/System_Requirements).
• Documentation: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation

Qubes: (https://www.qubes-os.org) keeps the things you do on your computer securely isolated in different virtual machines so that if one VM gets compromised, nothing else will be affected. This way, you can do everything on a single physical computer without having to worry that one successful cyberattack harms your whole system, potentially revealing all the connections among your various identities. Qubes OS is a good choice if you want to keep all your activities inside your own computer without having to install anything else.

• System requirements: Qubes OS requires a very powerful computer (http://qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements). This can be a hindrance for some, but if you feel that you really need to protect yourself against potential digital attacks, the investment may be worth it.
• Documentation: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/

To sum up, none of these tools protect you from every threat (and no tool ever will), so we shouldn’t look at them as ‘silver bullets’ or a ‘magic potion’ that will make you invulnerable. Nevertheless, by using any of these options according to your needs and resources, you will raise the level of effort that an attacker will need to harm you, making a successful attack—as well as harmful human errors—less likely.

Relevant links:

• Wider comparison of other such operating systems:(https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others)
• Qubes developer Johanna Rutowska describes how she partitioned her life into security domains: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html

This chapter of the manual has looked at how to include gender into individual security and privacy practices by focusing on the question of identity; explored what digital traces are and what they can ‘tell’ about us individually and how we can regain control of those traces and the stories they tell others about us. It also covered how mapping our various social domains can help us manage our lives and activities more safely, and explored how creating different types of separate online identities can be a powerful tool for working and playing online safely.

But most of us also want to safely communicate and organise with others online. So, how do you create and maintain pockets of community online that are safe, trusted havens for sharing, support, and dialogue between those who share common goals, views, or ideas (whether it be within your organisation or more broadly within your communities). Given the hostility, types of digital gender-based violence, and targeting we can experience online, what are strategies for increasing our visibility and resistance in inhospitable spaces which exclude or harm us. This second chapter of the manual looks beyond the choices and practices available to us at the individual level, and delves into the creation and management spaces that are safe for us—both online and offline.

Safe Spaces

Safe spaces can be understood as spaces that are created though explicit community agreement, or through implicit sharing of values. They enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community. Safe environments for discussion and awareness-raising have played a key role in many women's liberation movements.

As explained by Sandra Ljubinkovic, safe spaces are important for any integrated approach to security because they enable an environment that support people to express their emotions without fearing any judgment: “Creating a safe space is crucial for creating a sense of physical safety as well as a sense of confidence in a group. It is important for participants who usually have no time to relax to feel comfortable and enjoy simple things­. And if they live in a country where their lives are in danger it is even more crucial to make sure that they feel physically safe. Safe space in a group means a space to feel comfortable and speak openly and freely about feelings, challenges, and emotions as they may arise. In the workshops where issues personally affect people (whether those are physical, emotional, or spiritual threats and challenges), participants may have strong emotions as they do their own inner work facing their own oppression, privilege, anger, hurt, pain and suffering”.

Safe spaces can be temporary and take place during a one time event or training, they can also become permanent spaces where collectives or organisations embed the basic principles of safeness, support, respect and inclusiveness in their own space management. Whatever format or style is used, a safe space should allow allow women and trans* persons to access and learn about technology and related fields without having to fear sexist language and attitudes, being challenged, mocked or mansplained. There are many possible event formats and styles which can support the creation of safe spaces, both online and offline, to allow women, trans* and other groups to communicate and exchange in a nurturing and welcoming environment.

You might assume that the online communities you create or take part in through social media, discussion lists and chat channels are inherently democratic, non-hierarchical, participatory and relatively safe. However online spaces often reproduce the same hierarchies, privileges and power relations that exist in society, in the offline world. It's important to be mindful of this and to think through ways to mitigate and limit these downsides in order to get the best out of our spaces. Using such strategies is about caring for ourselves and for the communities we are part of. Making these issues explicit and visible is also about agency, social justice and feminism, helping us to better shape the spaces we care about, we organise in and within which we grow.

This section, will first look at building safe spaces online for enabling a better and safer collaboration among us through the use of mailing lists, chat, and other collaborative tools such as forums, wikis, pads, blogs and alternative social networking platforms. It will also look at how to use these tools tactically, in a way that supports the creation and maintenance of safe space. The tools that have been highlighted in this section have been included because they are free and open source, and are designed and administered with increased privacy and security in mind, minimising the amount of traces we leave online.

Second, the section will focus on strategies of resistance in public spaces which are not inherently safe - for instance Twitter and Wikipedia. Those examples are designed to give us insight into how we can create safety online collectively by developing feminist counterspeech, storming and swarming together in order to protect and support each other.

Finally it will loop back to the offline world and discuss ways to build safe spaces offline in the physical world, such as through women and trans* only or mixed spaces, to learn and Do-it-Together.

Further Readingsː

• What is an online safe space: (http://safespacenetwork.tumblr.com/Safespace)
• Digital Security – from silencing to claiming safe spaces: (http://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/digital-security-silencing-claiming-safe-spaces)
• 6 Reasons Why We Need Safe Spaces: (http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/08/we-need-safe-spaces/)
• Caring Queer Feminist Communities: (http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/04/caring-queer-feminist-communities/)
• Politicizing Self-Care and Wellbeing in Our Activism as Women Human Rights Defenders: (http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/politicizing-self-care-and-wellbeing-our-activism-women-human-rights-defenders)

Collaboration

Mailing lists

Mailing lists are one of the oldest forms of social networks, allowing a group to discuss and organise, to exchange information, video, audio and images. A mailing list is a list of addresses to which the same information is sent simultaneously. The most common types of mailing lists are announcement lists and discussion lists.

If you have decided within your group that you need a secure communication channel and that you do not want to use corporate services, there are some good alternative services to choose from, often recommended for human rights defenders. Riseup, Aktivix and Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) are all free services that prioritise security and user privacy. Riseup in particular has many feminist- and queer-oriented lists and is therefore a great place to host your mailing list. On their website you can also have a look at the lists that already exist.

Riseup lists: https://lists.riseup.net/www/

Aktivix lists: https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo

Autistici lists: http://www.autistici.org/en/services/lists.html

If you or your organisation has your own server you can also install your own software for managing mailing list and ensure that all your communications remains hosted and safe in your own machine and can not be intercepted by unintended third parties. More information at: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_mailing_list_software).

Encrypted lists: If you want a high level of security, there is also the possibility of encrypting mailing lists. However, it is important to understand that this requires every participants to the list to already use encryption software like PGP or GPG. This type of list, based on software called Schleuder (http://schleuder2.nadir.org/) and developed by Nadir.org, is designed to serve as a tool for group communication, but this time with a strong emphasis on security.

Open or closed?

Once you are ready to create your mailing list you need to decide whether it will be open or closed.

Open: An open list allows anyone to subscribe, and then once they have joined the list, to receive announcements or participate in the discussion. Subscription can either be automatic, or it can be approved by a moderator. This type of mailing list is good for reaching out to your potential allies, contributors and followers and keeping them update about your activities. You can set an open list by checking out the configuration or admin options of the list when you are creating it.

Closed: Another option is to keep your mailing list closed. In a closed list, membership is limited, and all subscribers require approval before they can join the list. It's possible to have a list that is publicised - ie that everyone knows about - but still closed. This type of list is useful when you want to discuss sensitive or personal topics and be sure that all members in the conversation are trustworthy.

Note that sometimes the archives of a list can be made public to anyone on the web, and will also therefore end up on search engines (like Google). Check if keeping a list open to new subscriptions automatically implies that the archives of the list will be made publicly available, or if they will only be accessible to those who have the subscription password. Sometimes you can choose whether you keep the archives public or not.

If you intend to talk about sensitive issues (and talking about gender related topics is often a sensitive issue!) or if trust within the group is important for creating your safe space, you might want to set up a closed list and to keep your archives closed. If you do choose to leave your archives accessible, it is important to inform everyone subscribed to the list that any delicate topic or personal detail that pops up in your discussions will be potentially visible to anybody.

Relevant links:

• The Frequently Asked Questions for administrating mailing lists on riseup.netː (https://help.riseup.net/en/lists/list-admin/faq)

Policies

Agreeing on a mailing list policy - a set of do's and don'ts for the list - from the start will save you a lot of time and possibly difficult conversations. Even on a closed list, publishing your policy - which should include the ways in which moderation takes place and how to report violations of the policy - can be helpful in creating the online safe space you want everyone to feel comfortable in. Your policy can address tensions like the fact that being free to express emotion is an important feminist principle, but losing your temper and attacking someone you don't agree with on the list is not ok. In the end any good mailing list policy will set its own rules for achieving a correct balance between freedom of expression and opinion and impeding flames and racist, sexist, or homophobic attacks for instance to take place within the list.

Having a visible and explicit policy sends a strong message about the value of maintaining the mailing list as a safe space. It can also help you to decide who can be added to your list and who not. To make sure that the policy does not get forgotten, you can regularly remind subscribers about it, with a link at the end of each mail you send out.

Relevant links:

• Sample mailing list policies that can be adapted and used for your own purposes: For women-only communities (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Statement_of_purpose/Women-only_communities) and for communities including men (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Statement_of_purpose/Communities_including_men).

Administration

Administrating a list: involves handling subscriptions and moderating content. You can choose how many administrators you want your list to have. Be aware that if your list suddenly becomes very chatty, this might be too demanding for just one person. Besides that, any communication tool including many members should not rely on only one person for administration duties. Take into account that this person could have problems, disappear or simply become abusive because of their power. A list can also be collectively managed and you can distribute those responsibilities among members of the list.

Moderating a list: as a general rule, moderation has two main goals. A well-moderated community will be more efficient in producing and redistributing useful information to its subscribers. Besides, good moderation will increase the accessibility and openness of online communities by enabling respectful dialogue among its members.

Remember that any online safe space will apply the basic principles of net etiquette and that any good administrator, moderator and mailing list policy should review, adapt and include those principles in their core social norms and values and ask members of the list to discuss, understand and accept those. In a nutshell net etiquette requires users to: remember to be nice as we all experiment feelings when communicating, keep messages brief, do not shout, protect personal information, help others, and to not send mails if feeling angry! For more information see: (http://www.networketiquette.net/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology)

Mailing list examples

Before setting up your own mailing lists, you might want to engage with some of the established mailing lists focused on gender and technology. For example:

Open Mailing lists:

Take Back the Tech!: the mailing list associated with the collaborative campaign to reclaim information and communication technologies to end violence against women. To register: https://lists.takebackthetech.net/mailman/listinfo/takebackthetech

FemTechNet: is a network of scholars, students, and artists who work ontechnology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields including Science and Technology Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies. To register: http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/mailman/listinfo/femtechnet

Queer Feminism Geek: is a network of feminist, queer and trans* hackers, makers, geeks and artists who organise activities and assemblies at the Computer Chaos Camp and Congress. To register: https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/queerfeministgeeks

Subscription after endorsement by others on the list:

Fembot: is a network of scholars and students who focus on gender, media & technology. To register: https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/fembot

Femmehack: is a list created to organise a Global Feminist Hackathon that took place past 23th of May 2015 in loving memory of Sabeen Mahmud, a Woman Human Right Defender shot to death in Pakistan: https://f3mhack.org

TransHackFeminist: is a list created after the first THF convergence in 2014 where intersectional feminists, queer and trans* people of all genders met to better understand, use and ultimately develop free and liberating technologies for social dissent: http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/files/2015/01/THF_report_Eng.pdf

Chat with IRC

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a chat service which can be hosted on different servers and accessed through different user clients. It provides the ability to set up channels or chatrooms which allow many people to contribute to a discussion in real time. IRC also gives you the option to encrypt your communication. You can’t embed video, audio or pictures, but you can link to them.

While IRC can be a great tool for facilitating collaboration, there are things to bear in mind if you decide to use it. First, IRC can take a little time to get used to, depending on the skills in your group. Second, developing relationships across a purely text-based channel such as IRC can be challenging. Writing is not easy for everyone; and some in the group might not be using their mother tongue.

Accessing IRC through your browser: There are several ways to chat through an IRC network. The easiest way to start out is to access an IRC network directly through your browser, such as one from Indymedia (https://irc.indymedia.nl/) or Freenode (https://webchat.freenode.net/). You can get set up immediately by creating a nickname and a channel, which you can then give to your colleagues to connect with you.

Accessing IRC through a chat client: Connecting to an IRC network through your browser is, however, not the most secure option out there. If you are a more advanced user, or if you have already tested out IRC out and think it will work for your group, it can be better to access your chosen IRC network from a chat client.

There are a few different chat clients which you can choose from, including Jitsi and Pidgin. You can read more about these clients and how to use them on Tactical Tech's Security in-a-Box: Jitsi (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/jitsi/windows) ; Pidgin (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/pidgin/windows).

How to use a network: Advice and instructions on using an IRC network can be found on Freenode (https://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml), Autistici (https://www.autistici.org/en/stuff/man_irc), and Indymedia (http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/IrcHowTo) The last two also allow us to anonymise our connections through Tor.

Facilitating a meeting: Once you start an IRC meeting, it is useful to appoint a facilitator to keep track of time. This person might also be in charge of making sure the discussion sticks to the topics at hand. In order to create a welcoming environment and a safe space, acknowledging and valuing the voice of everyone is key on IRC. When you start a conversation, take time to greet people - in particular newcomers.

When facilitating a conversation:

• Set a time limit and stick to it because IRC meetings can be very tiring.
• You might decide that people should be given turns to speak in order to ensure that everyone has space to express themselves. You can simply assign turns in alphabetical order of nicknames (or any order you want to give) for each of the points addressed. This can help structure the conversation and stop one person or a small group of people dominating the conversation.
• IRC can go very fast, particularly if there are many people involved in the discussion. Getting everyone to slow down and read all the inputs can decrease frustration.
• It can be useful to end your input with “over” or "done", so everyone knows when you have stopped speaking.

Whatever the facilitation methods you choose, communicate them explicitly to all the participants beforehand, for example in the email where you invite people to join the meeting.

Forums, Wikis and Etherpads

Chat services and mailing lists can be extremely useful, but they will only take you so far. When it comes to managing collaboration between people living in different places, you will probably find yourself looking for something with more functionality.

Internet forums: One of the oldest tools used for public discussions online are internet forums, where discussions can be hosted over time and are at least temporarily archived. What really distinguishes a forum from a mailing list or IRC chat is that it has a tree-like structure and can contain a number of sub discussions, each with a different topic.

Wikis: If you are looking for a tool to collaboratively write a text with many sections, or even to create the initial structure and content for a website, a wiki can be a useful tool. A wiki is a web application that allows for hierarchical structuring of content and tracks the edits and additions of the users, easily allowing you to revert changes, and move and delete content.

Both forums and wikis need to be hosted on a server, so you'll need to know how to set one up and manage it.

Etherpads: For collaborating in real-time on documents, Etherpads are a great resource. They are also a good alternative to corporate services like Google Docs, and are far more effective for co-editing text than, for example, sending mails back and forth. The main thing you need to check for in an etherpad is that it is hosted with an encrypted connection (via SSL). A list of such etherpads can be found here: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite.

• To create a new etherpad (ie, a new document that you are going to collaborate on), you need to decide on the name of the URL. Because each pad is open to anyone who has the URL, you should give each pad a long and inventive name, so that it can't be easily guessed. For example: https://pad.riseup.net/p/feminists is not secure. A more complicated URL such as https://pad.riseup.net/p/FeministsRockAndTheyWillBeDoingGreatThingsToghether is much more secure. Once the etherpad has been created you can send the URL to your friends and colleagues to start collaborating on a document.

• If you are worried about your etherpad being found by others, you can also consider a password-protected pad. For more on this, see: https://www.protectedtext.com/

• Etherpads allow you be anonymous, use a pseudonym or use your real name. There is a colour-based system that differentiates the contributions of each participants on the Etherpad, so you can always see who is contributing what.

Blogs and websites

If you are part of an organisation or group, you might want to publish information about yourselves, your work or write opinion pieces. A blog is a good vehicle for this and can be as easy as signing up to a blogging platform and choosing a name and a "theme" or visual template. There are several blogging platforms that are both user-friendly and free:

Wordpress: (https://wordpress.org) very popular and easy to use, open-source.

Noblogs: (http://noblogs.org) security-oriented blogging platform based on Wordpress with some tweaks for additional user privacy, managed autonomous servers, Autistici/Inventati.

BlackBlogs: (http://blackblogs.org) similar to Noblogs, managed by German tech collective, Nadir.

If you want a complex graphic layout or need to install particular tools that are not offered by Wordpress and its plugins, you can create your own website. For this you need to get some space in a server through a webhosting service. There are many services out there, but since they generally aren’t free, the options to stay completely anonymous are reduced to creating a website with Austistici/Inventati, which by default does not connect the users of its services with real identities. To learn more about Autistici/Inventati’s webhosting service, visit: (https://www.autistici.org/en/services/website.html)

If you want to use your own domain name, bypassing payments and identifications may get difficult unless you use Bitcoin or another anonymous payment system. The personal data you will provide will not only be stored in the registrar’s internal archives, but by default will also be recorded in a database that can be easily queried by anybody through a simple command in a search engine (whois) or on several websites (e.g: https://www.gandi.net/whois). To avoid this, you can register your domain with the data of an association and use a prepaid credit card that is not connected to your own data (if available in your country). Alternatively, you can use a registrar like Gandi (https://www.gandi.net) that offers private domain registration for individuals whenever possible.

Alternative social networking platforms

Mainstream commercial social networking platforms can be extremely useful if your intention is to publicise as widely as possible an event you are organizing or a project you are launching. You can think of them as a megaphone - a great tool for getting attention and drawing a crowd but not ideal for communicating anything sensitive or private. There are numerous reasons why they are not considered security or privacy conscious. To begin they have very strict terms of service that could justify their decision to close your accounts if they find that your contents go against their rules. They also profile the users and send the information to advertisers. If you add to this the ever-changing terms of service and the interactions with other apps and features that make it very difficult to understand clearly what actually happens to your data.

So be strategic. Limit the use of commercial social networking platforms to specific projects you want to publicise to a wide audience. For other purposes, there are alternative social networking platforms that give much more freedom to their users and don't profile them. These are community-based, distributed rather than centralized, based on free and open-source software and privacy-friendly. Examples include:

Diaspora: (https://joindiaspora.com) offers a community driven micro-tweeting platform

Crabgrass: (https://we.riseup.net) has been around for more than ten years and constitute a solid and sustainable social networking alternative.

Friendica: (https://friendica.com) enables users to integrate their contacts from different social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Diaspora, GNU social, App.net, Pump.io, etc)

Relevant links:

• How social network policies are changing speech and privacy norms: (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135175216204375.html)
• Helpful chart comparing various alternative social networking platforms: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking)
• How to create Crabgrass groups: (https://securityinabox.org/en/hands-guide-content/crabgrass-groups)

Safe spaces in the public sphere

There are many spaces which will feel inherently unsafe either because they explicitly or implicitly exclude women and trans* people, or because they harbour bigots. There are a number of ways to counter the vulnerability and intimidation we might feel online. One is through caring for our personal and collective safety, through using security -and privacy- enabling tools and techniques and managing safely our online identities. Another is shaping with others methods to reclaim and stay safe in the public sphere. Organising collective actions can be a powerful act of resistance, bringing attention and visibility to the situation and in turn helping to bring about transformation.

Counterspeech

Creating counter-narratives online, or "talking back" - is one strategy for making sexism visible and for responding to online attacks and harassment. It can be an effective tactic to create a sense of belonging and make visible the effectiveness of collective actions online. Counterspeech can be used for exposing hate/deceit/abuse/stereotypes, promoting counternarratives and clarifying facts, advancing counter values, uniting communities and sharing experiences. When planning for counterspeech it is important to ask who should be reached out? What will be its main aims (awareness, changing norms, support target, share experiences)? And how it will be achieved (parody, humor, mock, fact checking, call for action/consequences). There are many examples of feminist counterspeech in action - many of which you have probably seen and appreciatedː

• The Everyday Sexism Project (https://twitter.com/everydaysexism), for example, catalogues instances of sexism experienced by women on a day-to-day basis
• #sirtimizidonuyoruz (#weturnourbacks) used by Turkish women, and men, to post pictures showing them turning their backs to sexist statements made by president Erdogan.
• The more recent women scientists campaign showing what #DistractinglySexy (https://twitter.com/search?q=%23DistractinglySexy&src=typd) looks like after a nobel laureate sexist remarks
• Byefelipe (https://instagram.com/byefelipe/) is an Instagram account which reposts abuse by men who turn hostile when rejected
• The UN Women campaign against the sexist Google autocompletion searchː (http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/women-should-ads)
• The feminist gender and tech remix of the book “Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer”: (http://caseyfiesler.com/2014/11/18/barbie-remixed-i-really-can-be-a-computer-engineer)

Storming Wikipedia

Counterspeech can also include tactics to enable the inclusion and visibility of women's and trans* persons contributions inside universal free knowledge platforms such as the Wikipedia. There have been many studies that have criticised the way in which knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. A 2010 survey (https://web.archive.org/web/20100414165445/http://wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf) conducted by the United Nations University found that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors identified as female. The fact that Wikipedia’s contributors are mostly men in their twenties and thirties, and disproportionately western, are important factors that influence content.

Women who have played a significant role in history are also often missing from Wikipedia, and feminist, queer and trans* content is often challenged. For instance the case of changing the name of whistle blower Bradley Manning into Chelsea Manning in the Wikipedia became a very complex issue as the following article explains (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/24/chelsea-manning-name-row-wikipedia-editors-banned-from-trans-pages).

The lack of gender and cultural diversity in the content on Wikipedia demands creative responses. Because of this partnerships, research, community organizing, socio-cultural and technical interventions should all be considered as pointed at by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Storming Wikipedia or organising Edit-a-thons are two possible interventions. These enable participants to learn collectively how to edit and change content to better reflect their communities and histories. Learning how to edit Wikipedia can seem daunting, so collectively editing and creating pages is a great way to confront fears; to Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) in a safe space. Besides you will learn about the Wikipedia community values and principles and how such a large community-driven effort has, through the development of bottom-up social rules, become the most important encyclopedia in the world. All together, Wikipedia remains an important space worth investigating and reclaiming! Organising a wikistorming involves gathering a group of friends (and friends of friends) who want to learn or already know how to edit Wikipedia, and identify a safe space in which to hold the event. It can be held in someone’s home, in a community centre, at an art centre or at a community organisation. Wikistorming can (and should) of course be organised for any day, but Ada Lovelace Day in mid-October and International Women's Day on March 8 are two specific days on which such gatherings often happen. A wikistorming can last for half to a whole day. Before the wikistorming or as part of it, decide which Wikipedia entries you want create or which existing page you want to edit. Be realistic in your goals and don't put too many edits on your agenda because to edit Wikipedia carefully takes time.

Relevant links:

• Advice on organising a wikistorming: http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/wikistorming
• Great examples of wiki storming: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/03/05/wikipedia-edit-a-thons-international-womens-day/
• Lectures about the gender gap in wikipedia and how to overcome it: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap

Dealing with Trolls

Women and trans* persons who begin to grow a following and have influence online might experience what Kathy Siera describes as a “koolaid point” (http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/). This is a point at which a certain group of people decide that you have too much influence, and make it their mission to silence you or discredit you. This is commonly referred to as 'trolling' - although it is more often than not targeted, discriminatory in nature and hate-based. A troll's tactics can include anything from sending constant derogatory and belittling messages, to editing and distributing images, and even making threats.

Block or engage?

If you are not planning to ignore the trolls, then there are two key ways you can deal with trolls. One is to block them and then report them to the platform you are using. The other is to engage with them. The decision on which way to go depends on what you want to achieve.

Blocking trolls can sometimes be effective, and can allow you to continue with your work unimpeded. Projects like Block Together (https://blocktogether.org/) and Block Bot (http://www.theblockbot.com/sign_up) were developed to help people who are harassed share their blocklists with each other.

When trolls are really committed to harassing you, however, blocking doesn't really help. A determined troll can create numerous different profiles (called “sock puppet accounts”) to continue the harassment, and this means your blocking has to keep up with their new account generation. This quickly becomes very tedious.

Historically, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have not handled reports of intimidation and violence very well. However, this is beginning to change, as they recognise the severity of problem and see how it deters people with important voices from using their services.

You might consider the alternative - engaging the trolls who are harassing you. One way to do this is to try and enter into rational arguments with them and interrogate their views. Another way is to try to shame them, or to use humour to deflate their egos. Effective engagement with trolls can actually help to generate debate and public interest around the act of harassment, and can involve others online in discussions about safe spaces, violence, sexism and online behaviour. It can also be a source of empowerment for the subjects of trolling: seeing others laugh at your harasser can be very uplifting.

Swarming can be another way to drown out the voices of the harassers. This can be done in retro style by creating communities of support with your allies in social media spaces where you are likely to encounter harassment. When someone is being targeted, others can quickly be alerted and bombard the harasser with messages. The content of that message is up to you: it could be scolding, educational, or loving. Another option is: instead of directing messages towards the harasser, the swarm can fill the victim's content stream with lots of new content in order to quickly make the negative, violent content disappear into online history.

If you want to engage with trolls, or try “swarming”, you might prefer to stay anonymous to avoid having your real identity trolled. Setting up a network of second accounts to do your troll-response work can be a good idea for your organisation or your community of friends. It might be easier too, psychologically, to say some of the things you want to trolls, than you would if the comments were linked to your main identity. And it is more performative: you can create any kind of identity you want and style it with an avatar, a funny name, a character etc.

However, while battling the trolls in the old-fashioned human way can be fun and eye-opening, it can also be a time waster. Another option to consider is automation using bots. For this you need to do some coding, or you can work with freely available code that someone has already uploaded on a software repository such as Github.

Further readings:

• Lindy West on What happened when I confronted by my cruelest troll: (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/02/what-happened-confronted-cruellest-troll-lindy-west)
• 9 Ways to Dodge Trolls: A Feminist’s Guide to Digital Security by CommunityRedː(https://medium.com/thelist/9-ways-to-dodge-trolls-a-feminists-guide-to-digital-security-471f66b98c79)
• Video global Voices "Do We Feed the Trolls?"ː (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YRZTeea9ohM)

Bots against trolls

A bot is a piece of software that runs an automated task over the internet, performing tasks much faster than we can.

There are many different types of bots. There's the spambot, for example, which harvests email addresses and contact information; and there are also the 1800 approved bots on the English Wikipedia, which help to semi-automate the editing of Wikipedia pages. Bots can post content, gather information and click on things. Twitter is also filled with bots which use algorithms to harvest information and tweet. Many of these are humorous and random - for example @twoheadlines, which grabs random news headlines and combines them to create funny combinations.

A bot can be programmed to document trolls' activities, or talk to them, so that you don't have to. The possibilities outlined below apply mainly to Twitter; however some of these ideas can be used across other platforms as well.

The data-gathering bot: quietly scans Twitter and gathers up tweets, usernames and any other available information you have programmed it to collect. It places this information in a file for you. This bot can be useful for understanding what kind of content is out there, and for doing a first-stage analysis of abuse. Foxxydoxing is such an example; it is intended to help you analyse who your harassers are (https://github.com/DeepLab/FoxyDoxxing).

The simple talking bot: if you follow the #gamergate hashtag on Twitter, you will see a bot called @everyethics which tweets different humorous reasons for the #gamergate trolling, ridiculing the claim that the major trolling which has been called "Gamergate" was not about attacking women in gaming but about “ethics in game journalism”. While this bot could be seen as spam, it was actually clearly a strategy to undermine and make fun of the trolls.

The retweet bot: is programmed to scan Twitter for a list (created by you) of specific words, phrases or hashtags, and to retweet those. This would be a strategy for documenting and publicising Twitter abuse. Here's an example of such a bot you can download and install yourself (https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=17418).

The autotweet bot: is similar to the retweet bot except that every time it finds a tweet with one of the words, phrases or hashtags you have programmed it to look for, it will tweet a pre-written tweet directed at that user. These bots get shut down much faster now, as was shown by @fembot, which was programmed to automatically respond to racist and sexist tweets. @fembot was blocked after only 75 tweets.

The data-gathering bot in combination with the talking bot: in this example the data-gathering bot finds the users according to your search terms, and compiles them for you to read over, check for accuracy and remove any false positives. Alongside the data-gathering bot, you can have a talking bot or a team of talking bots which can tweet whatever you want to those users. The campaign Zero Trollerance (https://zerotrollerance.guru) used this method, employing 160 talking bots which enrolled 3000 identified trolls in a self-help program and then sent them humorous motivational messages and video clips over a period of one week.

If you are considering creating bots to work for you to fight online bigotry and harassment, there are some things you need to watch out for. Twitter is not against bots and if you just want to create a bot that scans information from Twitter for you to analyse, or a bot that just tweets out to no one in particular, you will likely not encounter any problems. However if you want to tweet @ other Twitter users, you have to take into account Twitter's policy against spam.

Also keep in mind that language is slippery and if you want to tackle violence against women and trans* persons online, you will have to be very careful about what kind of language you search for. For example, every time someone uses the word “bitch” on Twitter to intimidate or harass a someone, there are probably at least five other people using it to tell their friend how much they love them. The best way to figure out which language is being used for harm is to crowdsource it from people who have been harassed and then do a number of tests, pulling tweets from Twitter and then analysing the results yourself. Read more of this section, including how to set up Twitter accounts to be bots for you. Read more of this section, including how to set up Twitter accounts to be bots for you.

Relevant links:

• Simple bots: (https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=9247) you can download and test out yourself with a little patience from Lilith Lela
• Block Bot: (http://www.theblockbot.com/sign_up) will block known harassers and trolls on Twitter for you.
• Block Together: (https://blocktogether.org/) allows you to share your block lists with others on Twitter.
• Trolldor: (https://www.trolldor.com/faq) works like a blacklist of Trolls, and is open to any user in the world with a Twitter account.
• Sharing block lists: (https://blog.twitter.com/2015/sharing-block-lists-to-help-make-twitter-safer) on Twitter has become possible since past 10th June 2015.
• Zero Trollerance: (https://zerotrollerance.guru) a humorous, video-based self-help program for sexist Twitter trolls. You can send your Twitter trolls links to individual videos or to the main website zerotrollerance.guru. You can also contact @ztrollerance on Twitter to do it for you.
• Trollbusters: (http://www.troll-busters.com/) still in development, this tool plans to counteract Twitter abuse by flooding your timelines with love messages.

Further readings:

• How to evade Twitter's spam filters with your bot: https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Step_2#Evading_Twitter.27s_spam_filters
• Twitter's guide to Automation Rules and Best Practices (https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915-automation-rules-and-best-practices).
• How the Zero Trollerance bot army worked: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/11535405/How-do-you-stop-Twitter-trolls-Unleash-a-robot-swarm-to-troll-them-back.html
• Learnings from the producer of the gender-correcting Twitterbot @she_not_he: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06/02/i-created-the-caitlyn-jenner-bot-she_not_he-this-is-what-i-learned/

Supporting others

It can feel daunting to know what to do when you see someone experiencing online violence, and sometimes in trying to help you can inadvertently worsen the situation. Knowing how to act in the best possible way is our individual and collective responsibility in helping to create a safe space online for everyone. If you are someone who wants to support a disadvantaged group but is not part of that group (men are allies when it comes to women's rights issues), it's important to speak out and say “NO”, in a public space, to online harassment and violence. Otherwise, the culture of impunity to online harassment will continue. Now when your friends or allies are being harassed and/or attacked online, there are some best practices you can follow.

Offer quick support: When someone is being attacked or harassed, try to be quick in bringing in support. If you are close to the person under attack, offer immediate assistance. Bear in mind that this person might feel overwhelmed and might not have a clear set of instructions in mind about how to best supported. Remain quiet, attentive and patient and try to not create any extra pressure or stress. In the event of doxing - where confidential info has been released on the internet about that person - you might want to offer a safe space (a home) if the person does not feel safe in their own home. You can also offer to moderate your friend's Twitter feed or blog comments to allow her/them to take a break from it. Finally, you can also review local and national law and policies for dealing with online and offline harassment and translate your knowledge into concrete actions to support the person being attacked.

Speak out: If you do not know the person well, you can at least speak out against what is happening. It's not enough to simply send a private email or a tweet to the person who is under attack telling them that you think this kind of behaviour is unacceptable (sometimes, if the person under attack is being flooded with tweets and mails, it's even better not to write at all). Instead, speak out about it in your networks and raise your voice against such behaviour. You can, for instance, commend publicly the work that the person under attack has been doing. Don't be silent, especially if you are a colleague or a team-mate. Make your voice resonate online - particularly if you are a man! Here is a great example of Jay Smooth calling on men to challenge anti-feminist internet trolls: (https://vimeo.com/44117178)

Organise collectively: If you want to have more impact, think about crafting a "collective action" as those are often more effective than individual actions. Gather a group of friends, and friends of friends, for a Twitter storming, for instance. This will show to the person under attack that you and others care and that such acts are not OK.

Write a solidarity statement: If you are part of an organisation or network, you can write a solidarity statement that explicitly says you condemn online gender-based violence and harassment. Having feminists review the statement of solidarity is a best practice. If it's a person from your organisation who has been under attack, make sure she/they read the solidarity statement before it is released. You can also prepare an organisational policy in advance on what to do if someone is under attack. If you have a policy and specific steps to follow when such a situation occurs, chances are you will do less harm and be more effective in your response. See for instance the Tor solidarity statement against online harassment: (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment).

Talk to the media: Depending on the nature and context of the situation, you might want to speak out through the media and highlight the gendered and sexist nature of online attacks. It's always best practice to consult the persons targeted before speaking to the mainstream media. If you do not know the person personally, go through the web of trust - your trusted online network. Thinking about the harm and added stress that the person can go through if they are made visible in the mainstream media is something that you should carefully assess. Consider especially that this is not about you: this is about fighting sexism online and supporting others!

Relevant linksː

• Crash override network: (http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com/) a support network and assistance group for victims and targets of unique forms of online harassment, composed entirely of experienced survivors. They work preventively and reactively with survivors during episodes of harassment to keep them safe and provide them with the means to reduce harm and rebuild, as well as disempower their harassers.
• The Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (OAPI): is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing and mitigating online abuse through the study and analysis of abuse patterns, the creation of anti-harassment tools and resources and collaboration with key tech companies seeking to better support their communities. It works in collaboration with the Crash Overide network (http://onlineabuseprevention.org/)
• HeartMobː is a platform for real-time support to individuals experiencing online harassment and empowers bystanders to act. Visit their Kickstarter project to know more about the initiative (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4096561/heartmob).
• CHAYN Staying safe manual deals with women that face stalking and invasion of privacy online and offline by abusers. The guide addresses how to avoid being tracked ONLINE & OFFLINE (http://chayn.co/staying-safe/)

• Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds by Robert Chu (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html)

Documenting violence

Besides directly supporting and showing solidarity with people subjected to violence, you can also populate and contribute to the documentation of instances of online violence and harassment. Those initiatives are key in order to show the extent of the problem and to make visible some of the structural aspects of violence in societies.

Relevant links:

• Take back the Tech: is an APC international campaign which has collected more than 500 stories of women who have experienced violence online. These stories were gathered using the open source platform called Ushahidi. The data visualisation can be see here: https://www.takebackthetech.net/mapit/ . The overall results of those who have participated in this exercise show that women between 18 and 30 who are using Facebook are most likely to be under online threat (http://www.genderit.org/articles/mapping-strategy-disclose-online-violence-against-women).

• GenderIT.org: emerged from APC's Women’s Rights Programme’s advocacy work in information and communications technologies. The need to have examples of national policy, gender-sensitive language, tools for lobbying, and an understanding of the impact of poor or positive policy all within easy access has been expressed by ICT advocates and policy makers alike (http://www.genderit.org/).

• The Geek Feminism Wikiː has been documenting sexist incidents in geek communities. You can see the timeline of incidents (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_incidents) and also check out their resource pages for allies supporting support women in geek communitiesː (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Resources_for_men)

• Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) has written a report on online violence on Twitter (https://womenactionmedia.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/05/wam-twitter-abuse-report.pdf/) and created a Twitter Harassment Reporting Tool (https://womenactionmedia.wufoo.com/forms/wam-twitter-harassment-reporting-tool/).

• Foxxydoxing: (http://foxydoxxing.com/) scripts to help you analyze the connections between your attackers on Twitter and a wonderful graphic story to explain how it works.

• Breaking the circle: is an international UNI trade union campaign to raise awareness on the fact that gender violence is a problem that concerns both men and women, which focus on the role of men and include them as agents of change. They have developed a series of tools and information that will help us spread the message and raise awareness (http://en.breakingthecircle.org/).

• Crowdmaps in Indiaː After the Delhi Gang Rape there was a lot of interest in how tech could be used to address the issue of sexual violence against women in offline spaces. These initiatives emerged from spaces where tech meets gender in order to see how tech can be used to tackle gender based violence gender problems. See for instance Harassmap in Bombay (www.akshara.crowdmap.com ) and the Safecity -Pin the creep (www.safecity.in) and the 'Safetipin' app for safely auditing public spaces (http://safetipin.com/).

• Macholandː This french platform wants to voice actions, embedded in the public, media and political speech, driven by citizens who refuse to see sexism spread massively without reacting. Each user can participate and propose an action that pin with humor brands, organizations and public figures (http://macholand.fr/).

• Feminist Frequencyː This project includes the video series Tropes vs. Women, created by Anita Sarkeesian with Bitch magazine to examine common tropes in depictions of women in film, television and video games, with a particular focus on science fiction. Videos produced in this series include “Women in Refrigerators”, “The Smurfette Principle” and “Postive female characters in video games” (http://feministfrequency.com/)

Safe spaces offline

Many of the principles of creating and maintaining safe spaces online can also be applied offline. As noted in the introduction of this chapter, safe spaces can either be temporary and take place during a one time event or training or can also become permanent spaces where collectives or organisations embed the basic principles of safety, support, respect, inclusiveness and reflexivity in their own space management. Safe spaces imply a vital use of reflexivity in order to critically engage in the social realities in which we live and understanding how power and privileges shape relationships. By knowing how power is played out we can gain space for critical questioning and awareness. 

In the case of security and privacy training, you also need to consider how participants can best learn skills to protect themselves when the topics themselves can be frightening or overwhelming. The environment also has to be suited to the participants sharing stories about threats they have been facing online and offline. Those stories can be very intimate and distressing to share so they should be handled carefully, but at the same time they are a very important part of the process of developing security and privacy strategies. As underlined by digital security trainer, Yvonne Reyes: “Without safe spaces you are bound to miss the true, the honest stories that participants want to share. So making your participants feel safe is an important aspect for the success of any digital security and privacy training”.

The difficulties in defining what a "safe space" should look like are inherent in the fact that you are bringing a diversity of people together, who might be considered to be part of the same community but who all have different histories, contexts and needs. What one person might find politically, socially or personally threatening might mean very little to another. And everyone will of course also come with different experiences and levels of knowledge and skills with regard to technology.

It is important to be aware that, in struggling to perfect a safe space, one always runs the risk of creating instead yet another form of social control and pressure to conform to a particular image of what, for example, a woman or trans* person is or should be.

General framework

When trying to create a safe space, you might encounter the issue of who is included and who is excluded from it. It can very divisive, as it will often touch on people's strongly held sense of their political, personal, sexual and social identities. Issues of sexual orientation and gender identity will likely come up. Some will prefer a women and trans* only environment, some will feel that this opens up an opportunity for external attacks on the whole project by adversarial forces, while some will feel that cis-men friends and colleagues are being unfairly excluded, and feel resentful. If you are having a debate about this, some things to consider are:

• Is there an agreed framework and rules of engagement? How do we define "woman" and "trans*"? How do we define "safe"?
• Who do we want to include, influence or support? Specifically women and trans* persons, or also potential allies?
• How important versus how contentious? Is it worth alienating some people from the group? How can we frame the debate to avoid alienating people who don't agree with the decision?
• How will the decision affect the actual experience of people within the space?
• Do we have all the skills we need to deliver this project among our networks, or will we need specific additional skills? Where will we get them?
• How will the space be organised to promote equal participation, especially if cis-men are included?

It's important to remember that building offline spaces is resource- and labour-intensive, and often many compromises have to be made. It may be a good idea to try to identify as early as possible which values are shared, important, and relevant to the event, so that you can constantly remember to prioritise those and de-prioritise less important or potentially divisive issues.

Building offline spaces is easiest and most successful when you're clear about what you're trying to do and how you plan to go about it. The second thing which must be considered is exactly what the event is intended to achieve. For example:

• Skills: How can we learn to do xyz?
• Advocacy: How do we change the culture of tech sectors to be more amenable for women and trans* persons, and/or let the world know that they are great at tech?
• Support, networking and boundary-crossing: What does it mean to be a woman or trans* person in tech? How can women from different places or sectors come together to spark off new ideas and practices? How can we support each other as women and trans* persons in tech?

Different aims will inform different safe space policies. For instance, it's difficult advocating for change in the male-dominated tech sector if you haven't invited cis-men to hear what you want to say - but you might prefer to discuss *how* to do this in a women and trans*-only environment first. If, on the other hand, you are advocating for engagement with technology to women and trans* persons and mainly want free, honest and mutually supportive discussions or skills-sharing, then in this case, a women and trans* only environment suggests itself. Take into account that in some cases, you will also need to decide if you can mix women, transwomen and transmen in one space or if you should create separate spaces, based on gender identification.

With skills workshops, there is research to suggest that women and trans* persons learn tech skills best with each other, so these workshops have a very clear and communicable reason for being exclusive. Another possibility is to run an event twice, once for women and trans* participants and once for open participation. This can have the positive side-effect of enabling others to experience a safe space methodology and thereby change their own practices in the spaces they organise, but it will be clearly more time consuming. Last but not least, if you are running a training or workshop at a mixed gender event, don't be shy to create a shared agreement with the participants to your own space and activity, even if there isn't one in place at the main event.

Further readings:

• AdaCamp was a two-day unconference dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture. The Ada Initiative has made available the AdaCamp Toolkit, which gives people the tools they need to run events similar to AdaCampː (https://adacamp.org/).
• Tips and Strategies for Creating a Safe Space for GLBTQ Youth: (http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/publications-a-z/496-tips-and-strategies-for-creating-a-safe-space-for-glbtq-youth).
• Women friendly events (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Women-friendly_events).
• Safe Public Spaces Mentoring Program: (http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/our-work/mentoring-program/).
• Chatham House Rule for holding debates and discussion panels on controversial issuesː (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule)
• The creeper move cards (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Creeper_Move_cards).

Choosing a format that fits

Once you have settled the basic questions on what your event is for and who you want to invite, it's time to think about the format of your event. Deciding which format to use can be helped by your answers to some key questions:

• What are you trying to do? Which format will support this activity best?
• What are the participants' needs, existing skills, experience and preferences?
• What physical spaces are available, what will they allow you to do, and what resources do you have?
• What are your human and organisational resources - how much can you take on?

There are many different ways of organising events. Some of the most popular in FLOSS and tech-related communities are:

• Un-Conference: helps people to make connections, share knowledge, collaborate and inspire each other. To take part, participants are encouraged to give a presentation, create a discussion, or even chair a debate (http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/unconference-howto/ ; http://openspaceworld.org/wp2/what-is/). This format can be relatively egalitarian and relatively easy to organise (no messing about with programmes, scheduling and advanced prep) but you should watch out for the tyranny of structurelessness. They can also be extremely intimidating and therefore exclusionary towards less experienced or skilled participants; and can be stressful if you need to organise tech or other resources for specific activities in advance.

• Workshop: transferring skills or knowledge in an interactive session. There are many possible workshop methodologies. Workshops can be a good format for building skills or for maker and design activities. For instance in Pakistan Hamara Internet is a campaign by Digital Rights Foundation that seeks to raise awareness about violence against women online through various workshops. It literally means ‘Our Internet’ in English and works to impart digital security tips and training to women and bridge the gender digital divide in Pakistan (http://hamarainternet.org/).

• Hackathon: With its general motto "programming till someone drops from exhaustion", hack events can mix different groups - like NGOs with hackers - to come up with new approaches to building technology for that group. For instance IGNITE (Women Fueling Science and Technology from the Global Fund for Women International) organised a global Hackathon called #hackgirlsrights. This 24-hour, multi-country coding event, targeted girl coders which collaborate to develop a website or application that address specific challenge facing girls and young women (http://ignite.globalfundforwomen.org/gallery/ignite-international-girls-hackathon). On the past 23th of April 2015, another global feminist hackaton called Femhack was organised around the world in loving memory of Woman Human Rights Defender Sabeen Mahmud (https://f3mhack.org). You can read more about how to run a hackathon here: (http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/11/23/hackathons-in-droves-how-is-a-hackathon-organised/)

• Sprint: A sprint is a gathering of people involved in a specific project to further the focused development of some aspect of the project, such as working on sections of code, writing manuals or books, etc. These are effective at getting a lot done quickly for code and manuals (less so for other forms of writing), but can be exhausting and emotionally demanding - make sure you keep food and drink coming! To read more about sprints, visit wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(software_development) and Flossmanuals: (http://www.flossmanuals.org/service/booksprints). To note for instance that this manual was edited during an editorial sprintǃ

• Seminar: A seminar brings together a small group for recurring meetings which focus on a particular subject. In a seminar, everyone actively participates, or offers information or training on specific topics. On the one hand, this kind of structured activity supports people with less experience or confidence; planning for tech/resource support is fairly straightforward; and people know what to expect. On the other hand, the event can be experienced as overly structured and lacking spontaneity for more experienced participants; more 'top-down'; and requires more organisational effort in advance. Check out for instance The documentation of the Feminist Server Summit which consisted in a feminist review of mesh- cloud- autonomous- and D.I.Y. servers (http://vj14.constantvzw.org/r/about).

More stable kinds of safe spaces for experimenting and learning technology include:

• Hacklab, hackerspace or makerspaceː These are community spaces with hardware and/or tools - great for people to "get their hands dirty" and play around with anything - from taking computers apart to installing Linux to making music with bananas or building a radio out of razorblades and wire. Read more about hacklabs and hackerspaces here: "Hacklabs and Hackerspaces: Shared Machine Workshops":(http://www.coredem.info/IMG/pdf/pass11_an-2.pdf). You can also visit the following portalsː (http://makerspace.com/) (http://hackerspaces.org/)

• Feminist hackerspace: Those vary in shape, form, and size. What often unites them is a set of boundaries that are decided on collectively (who can be a member, who can be a guest, what are the policies, etc.) and an explicit belief in feminist principles. Feminist hackerspaces provide a place to work on individual and collective projects in a supportive environment. To know more about feminist hackerspaces you might want to visit the website Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna (http://www.mzbaltazarslaboratory.org/), The Mothership Hackermoms in Berkeley (http://mothership.hackermoms.org/), Double Union in San Francisco (https://www.doubleunion.org/) and FemHack in Montreal (http://foufem.wiki.orangeseeds.org/). During past Chaos Computer Camp took place a formal Queer, Trans* and Feminist Village (https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015/wiki/Village:Queer_Feminist_Geeks).

For sharing skills, setting up a feminist hackerspace, or choosing an unconference, workshop or seminar format makes a lot of sense. For advocacy and networking events, the choice is not so obvious. Advocacy events can be some of the most challenging as it's easy to spend the entire day "re-inventing the wheel" with people who are new to the questions. If you have participants from diverse backgrounds in your advocacy event, it could be best to go with a more structured format. Unconferences and hackathons work best with activists or experienced practitioners who are used to a high level of self-determination, and who have a shared understanding of the implicit rules and structures of the space. Having said that, it can work well to try more open formats anyway, but be prepared for some skilled facilitating to make it a safe and fun space for both experienced and less experienced participants. Sometimes a mixed approach is what's needed - and some experimentation!

Fixing gender gap in tech

Gender gaps in tech can be bridged by focusing more on building safe spaces where women and trans* persons can access, uptake and develop technologies at their own rhythm and according to their own needs and motivations. Those spaces and initiatives can also help to have more women and trans* persons building their own tools which will strengthen their technological autonomy and thus freedom of opinion and expression. In order to get some inspiration we list below a selection of initiatives specially oriented at getting more women in ICT and technological related fields.

• Asikana Network (Zambia)ː is a group of females aiming to empower women in ICT related fields by changing mindsets and eliminating negative stereotypes attached to girls and women in ICT (http://asikananetwork.org/).
• Akirachix (Kenya)ː is an african wide network of women in technology to make tech and to inspire and mentor other women to be technologists (akirachix.com).
• Donestech (Spain)ː is a cyberfeminist and activist research group which develops also workshops and audiovisual productions in relation to gender and ICT access, uses of and desires. Lelacoders project is about studying and making visible the presence of women in the development of computer sciences, free software and hacker cultures (www.donestech.net) (https://n-1.cc/g/donestech+lelacoders).
• Feminist Approach to Technology (India)ː mission is to empower women by enhancing women’s awareness, interest and participation in technology (http://fat-net.org/).
• Flossie (UK)ː runs a conference and also skills workshops and it is intended to combine advocacy, boundary-crossing, support and skills-sharing bringing together women involved in digital arts with coders, artists, and makers (http://www.flossie.org/).
• Speakerinnenn (Germany)ː aim is to increase the visibility of women in the field of public speaking. With the help of our list it will be easier for organisers to find female experts to speak at their events (http://speakerinnen.org/).
• The Ada initiative (Global)ː organised AdaCamps, a series of un-conferences dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture such as open source software, Wikipedia and other wiki-related projects, open knowledge and education, open government and open data, open hardware and appropriate technology (https://adacamp.org/).

Shared agreements

It's important, especially in mixed environments, to think about what's acceptable conduct in the space and what isn't. In order for this to have any practical effect, you should think about what you'll do if individuals breach this - or when things go wrong generally. You can find plenty of information and example policies on the Geek Feminism Conference anti-harassment/Adoption page (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Adoption).

Make sure your participants understand the shared agreement and how it relates to their own conduct. It can be useful to make time in your schedule at the beginning of the event to share your policy, and reach consensus with the group on how to maintain a safe space over the days of the event.

Your shared agreement should be about preventing aggressive behaviour and not about trying to police how people identify, communicate or present themselves. It's also worth remembering that people who are struggling in a culturally unfamiliar environment can become confrontational more easily than they usually would. There may be many reasons why a participant might be struggling to communicate positively at any given moment. It's key to remain calm and to provide a non-judgmental space for the expression of emotions like anger or frustration. Because of this, a shared agreement should also include some people that will be assigned to receive feedback if any problem takes place. They should be good facilitators or moderators and be calm and patient. We are different, let's celebrate it, even when it's difficult to do!

Last not least, your code of conduct should include an agreement about how participants will respect other participants' right to privacy. Some general guidelines could include the following:

• Don't take or circulate sound, video or photos without permission. If anyone present faces significant external risk then don't take photos at all unless participants have given express permission and an opportunity to cover their identity.
• If you wish to record the event, prepare formal consent forms telling people exactly what audio-visual records are being made and how they will be stored, used, licensed and ask for clear consent with a signature.
• Don't share details of anyone's participation, speech or actions on social media without their express permission.

How safe is the space?

As a check-list, here are some questions that can help you assess whether a space is safe or not.

• Background: What is the history of the space? Who started it and why? How many women and trans* persons have been involved?
• Participation: Who has stopped participating in the space since it was founded, and why? Is it mostly women who have left?
• Policies: Does the space have policies? If so, what kind? Are the policies regularly put in practice? Ask members in the space, particularly women.
• New people: How does the space welcome newcomers? The first time you went to the space, did you get a tour? Did people say hello? Were the people in the space friendly?
• Regular assemblies: Are there regular meetings (assemblies) that offer possibilities to raise concerns, to suggest collective projects, to suggest the organisation of workshops, to discuss the space (its cleanliness, etc.), to present yourself, etc.?
• Language: Is the language and vocabulary used on the website and in the space explicitly feminist? Read the website carefully, or go and see for yourself what the space looks like.
• Trust: Do you know people who you trust in the space or do you know friends of friends? The web of trust can be very useful here.
• Access: Who can go into the space and under which conditions? This should be made explicit on the website, otherwise ask.
• Accessibility: Is the space itself easily accessible? In which part of town is it located? Are there bathrooms? What are the opening hours? Who has access to the keys of the space?
• Cost: How much does it cost to become a member? Is there a sliding scale policy?
• Security: Make sure the space is secure and participants don't have to worry about external threats. Sometimes you will need spaces where you can control who is in the space and who is not. On those cases shared spaces such as hotels might not be the best idea for instance.

No space is perfect; a safe space should always, however, at least provide an environment and a set of boundaries in which to meet up, talk, and address and raise difficult issues. Creating such spaces involves a subtle shift of focus from what is absent to what is present (our emotional maps, realities, fears, sorrows, frustrations, despair, even rage). In creating safe spaces, we are reconnecting with ourselves and each other in the present moment. We have a chance to honor our feelings, and through deep listening to understand our own perspective and the perspective of others, their experience, their journey, their pain and their struggles. When people begin to feel heard and valued in this way, amazing things can happen.

Relevant links:

* Holistic security manualː (httpsː//holisticsecurity.org) is a manual from tactical technology collective to understand how to develop an integrated approach to security for activists and human rights defenders.

* Integrated Security Manual: (http://www.integratedsecuritymanual.org/) a resource for planning, convening, and hosting your workshop which prioritize your participants' emotional and physical well-being.

* Level Up: (https://www.level-up.cc/resources-for-trainers) resources for digital security trainers and organisers of these trainings too.

Glossary

Anonymisation is the process that ensures users to remain anonymous as they access and use the internet by removing personally identifiable information from the traces they leave behind. Anonymisation can also be supported by encrypting communications and contents exchanged over the internet.

Appropriated technologies are generally recognized as encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralized, people-centred, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled. (most from wikipedia)

Bitcoin is a pseudonymous online payment system based on the name sake cryptocurrency bitcoin. Bitcoins are created through "mining", a process in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments. Besides mining, bitcoins can be obtained in exchange for different currencies, products, and services.

Bots is a piece of software that runs an automated task over the internet, performing tasks much faster than we can.

Circumvention is the act of bypassing Internet filters to access blocked websites and other Internet services.

Cis-man is a man who is naturally-born as a man and self-identify as a man. "cis" is the opposite of "trans". We can also see cis-women, cis-Gender, cis-men, etc.

Cookies are tiny pieces of data that are stored in our browser when we visit a website. Some cookies are harmless, as they are just used to make browsing easier and quicker, but others, so-called “profiling cookies”, are used to profile users for commercial purposes.

Digital traces

Digital shadow

Domain (if you are looking for "Social domain", see "Social networks") The domain name is a component of a URL, the address we write in our browser to access a certain web site. URLs (https://www.wikipedia.org) are formed by a top-level domain name (in our case .org), by a host name (www), and by a second-level domain name (wikipedia), which is what identifies a certain website and is generally called a domain.

Doxing (also written as "doxxing", or "D0xing", a word derived from "Documents", or "Docx") describes tracing or gathering information about someone using sources that are freely available on the internet.

Encryptionis a way of using clever mathematics to encrypt, or scramble, information so that it can only be decrypted and read by someone who has a particular piece of information, such as a password or an encryption key

Feminist hackerspaces are physical spaces created by women, queer and trans* a set of boundaries that they decide collectively (who can be a member, who can be a guest, what are the policies, etc.) and an explicit belief in feminist principles. Feminist hackerspaces provide a place to work on individual and collective projects in a supportive environment.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that, unlike proprietary software, can be freely used, copied, studied and modified and whose source code is openly shared so as to encourage others to voluntarily improve its design.

Gender roles are sets of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally considered acceptable, appropriate or desirable for a person based on their actual or perceived biological sex. These are usually centered around opposing conceptions of femininity and masculinity, although there are myriad exceptions and variations.

Gender queer is a gender variant person whose gender identity is neither male nor female, is between or beyond genders, or is some combination of genders.Often includes a political agenda to challenge gender stereotypes and the gender binary system.

Holistic security are interventions and practices which ensure the agency, safety and well-being of activists and human rights defenders from a more holistic perspective; one which includes the physical, psycho-social and digital aspects of security.

HTTPS see TLS/SSL.

Hackaton with their general motto "programming till someone drops from exhaustion" are hack events that can mix different groups - like NGOs with hackers - to come up with new approaches to building technology for that group.

Hack nights is a day or night that is dedicated to computer, body, software or hardware hacking. Often hack nights focus on special content, themes and/or demographics. Many women, queer and trans* have tried to organise women-only nights in hackerspaces

Hacklabs and Hackerspaces are spaces whose communities embrace the hacker ethics, based on the principles of hands-on approach to technologies, sharing, openness, decentralization, and free access to technologies. Both are places where people go to learn how to use technologies, especially computer and internet-related ones, and share their skill with others. Hacklabs, which have basically existed since the advent of the personal computer and whose golden age was the decade around the turn of the millennium, are often located in squatted spaces and occupied social centres. Hackerspaces, the newer generation of such spaces, tend to interface more with the institutional grid through legal entities (associations or foundations), and rent spaces financed through a club-like membership model.

Intersectionality or intersectional feminism argue that feminism cannot be studied, understood, or practiced from a single, immediate, standpoint; understanding requires engagement with culture, class, sexuality, ethnicity, gender and other power structures which engender inequality.

IP address - An IP address (meaning "Internet Protocol address") is a number assigned to each device that connects to the internet. This number has the same function of a physical address: it is needed so that the servers that host the website we want to visit or the service we use can know where to send us the data we are asking for and how to get there.

LGBTQI – A common abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexed community. For a long time, we have seen the acronym LGBTQ. Some started reversing letters to put the emphasis elsewhere such as with GLBTQ or LGTBQ. More and more we see the "I" being added to "LGBTQI" to add Intersex people.

Liberating technologies can be defined as those that are designed mindfully, fairly produced and distributed, are rooted in free and open-source software principles, are not designed for ‘planned obsolescence’, and are built to be secure by design. In the same spirit—but ultimately determined by what users do—that the technologies, systems, and digital services we choose are not designed for or are resistant for use in gender-based violence and surveillance

Malware is a general term for all malicious software, including viruses, spyware, trojans, and other such threats

Mansplaining or splaining refers to a form of condescension in which a member of a privileged group explains something to a member of a marginalised group as if the privileged person knows more about it. For instance, a man explaining sexism to a woman, or a white person explaining racism to a black person.

Moniker is also known as a pen name or an avatar. It is a name that you use that is not your legal name.

Online identity is a set of data and features defining how every internet user presents themselves in online communities and web services. Sometimes it can be considered as an actively constructed presentation of oneself and compared to a digital version of a social mask.

Online reputation Reputation is the opinion others have of a person or, in internet, of an identity, that typically results from an evaluation based on a set of criteria shared within a group of people. This evaluation is particularly important in online communities, where it influences the level of trust each of us can have in others.

Passphrase is a sequence of words used to access a computer system, program or data. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage, but is generally longer for added security.

Patriarchy "is a form of mental, social, spiritual, economic and political organization of society produced by the gradual institutionalization of sex-based political relations created, maintained and reinforced by different institutions linked closely together to achieve consensus on the lesser value of women and their roles" Alda Facio (http://learnwhr.org/wp-content/uploads/D-Facio-What-is-Patriarchy.pdf)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that, unlike the centralized client-server model, partitions tasks or work loads between peers, thus creating a horizontal network of nodes.

Permaculture is a systems approach that include but are not limited to ecological design, ecological engineering, environmental design, construction and integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture)

Privileges refer to "advantages" people have in society. Privileges refers to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, functional diversity etc. in which a society by default privileges people with certain traits and characteristics. If you are a white cis-men in a western country for instance, changes are you will feel less street harassement than a women of color. People who have privileges in sociey are often not aware of those privileges and how they impact on our economic and social status in society. One cannot try to address issues of privileges without looking at sexism, patriarchy, ableism and racism.

Queer is an umbrella term which embraces a matrix of sexual preferences, orientations, and habits of the not-exclusively-heterosexual-and-monogamous majority. Queer includes lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans*, intersex persons, the radical sex communities, and many other sexually transgressive (underworld) explorers.

Safe space share common values, whether explicit, through a community agreement, or implicit through the sharing of values and enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community.

Self identification is something everyone could do, not just woman or trans, regardless of the biological status. In practice includes trans women as well as people who are born biologically female.

SD card or Secure Digital card is a solid-state storage card where we can save our files just as in other storage devices like USB sticks or hard disks.

Social engineering is the study of human behaviour aimed at identifying and exploiting cognitive biases (or "bugs in the human hardware") in order to attack or manipulate someone, as well as to obtain useful information from them.

Social networking platforms or social media, are online tools that offer several functions to network among users by creating, sharing and exchanging contents (text, images, videos, etc.). They can be commercial (in which case they tend to profile their users for advertising purposes), or autonomous and community-driven.

Social networks are social structures formed by relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies. Each of us belongs to several social networks that compose different social domains and may or may not be interconnected with one another (for instance social domains composed by your social networks with your family, friends, activists or friends colleagues, etc).

Spyware is software that aims to gather information about a person or organization without their knowledge and that may send such information to another entity without the consumer's consent, or that asserts control over a computer without the consumer's knowledge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware)

STEM is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Swarming consists in creating communities of support with your allies in social media spaces where you are likely to encounter harassment. When someone is being targeted, others can quickly be alerted and bombard the harasser with messages. Another option is to have the swarm filling the victim's content stream with lots of new content in order to quickly make the negative, violent content disappear into online history.

TLS/SSL meaning "Transport Layer Security" and its predecessor SSL meaning "Secure Sockets Layer", are cryptographic protocols ensuring that our data cannot be visible as they travel from our computer to the website we are visiting or to the service we are using and vice versa. When we access a website whose url is preceded by HTTPS rather than by HTTP, we are using the TLS/SSL protocol.

Trans is an abbreviation that is sometimes used to refer to a gender variant person. This use allows a person to state a gender variant identity without having to disclose hormonal or surgical status/intentions. This term is sometimes used to refer to the gender variant community as a whole.

Transgender is a person who lives as a member of a gender other than that expected based on anatomical sex. Sexual orientation varies and is not dependent on gender identity.

Transwoman is an identity label sometimes adopted by male-to-female transsexuals to signify that they are women while still affirming their history as males.

Trolls originally referred to a monster of folk stories and became in the early days of the internet a term to describe users who intentionally sowed discord on IRC and chat forums, often targeting and singling out new users. Today, the word is used more broadly to describe people who target and harass others online.

Web of trust is a set of social norms, protocols and cryptography technologies that enable to build trust on the online world. The web of trust is based on authentication and validation mechanisms to ensure that people, software, online platforms and services are really who they claim to be.

Security Extras

If you feel like there are some holes in your digital security and privacy knowledge, this is a good place to start. Below you will find a set of collected recommendations from the contributors of the manual.

1. Read up and educate yourself about your country's internet laws and policies. Some security technologies such as encryption are illegal in some countries, for example.

2. Inform yourself about your country's laws and policies in relation to freedom of expression, right to privacy and against online and offline harassment. Those laws do not exist in all countries, and when they exist they are not framed and applied in the same way. You can learn and read more for instance about related rights in relation to blackmail, cyberstalking and hate speech here:

• https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/blackmail-related-rights
• https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/cyberstalking-related-rights
• https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/hate-speech-related-rights

3. Keep your computer and devices clean and healthy: Updating your software, running a firewall, and protecting yourself from virus infection are fundamental to the security of your data (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/malware). You should also contemplate to have a full disk encryption as basic step of security for your devices. Most devices (computers and mobiles) offer full disk encryption and this requires only a bit of understanding and skills. For instance, MS Windows offers bitlocker encryption starting from Windows 7 Ultimate onwards. File Vault is part of Mac OS X and phone encryption is available on most Android devices starting from version 3.0 (Honeycomb).

4. Map your data: What kind of data do you produce and/or manage? With whom? Where is this data stored? Which devices or online platforms hold your data? Most importantly, how sensitive is your data and what would happen if this particular data suddenly disappeared or was seen and copied by a third party? Take also into account that storing information on devices and services that you don't have full control always is a security risk. This does not mean though that we should shy away from 3rd party services that can store your data, this is more a cautionary awareness of being mindful of what types of information and data you store on these services.

5. Secure your data: Especially where our data is stored online, it is crucial to choose strong passwords, or better passphrases, and to use a different one for each of our accounts. For more information on the importance of strong passwords, how to create them and how to store them, read Security in a Box's (SIAB) chapter on passwords (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/passwords) and the EFF's howto (https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/creating-strong-passwords). If you are storing information on your computer and other devices, you can use encryption to prevent others from accessing your files. For more information on what tools you can use to do this, see the SIAB chapter on secure file storage (https://www.securityinabox.org/en/guide/secure-file-storage).

6. Connect safely to the internet: When going online, especially if you are transmitting personal data and passwords, it is crucial to always use an encrypted connection which ensures that your data cannot be seen by anyone as it travels from your computer to the website you are visiting or to the service you are using. To make sure that you always connect securely to websites when an encrypted connectionis available , you can install HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere )

7. Anonymise your connections: There are sometimes good reasons to hide your physical location and your internet activities. Tor browser anonymises your connections when you're browsing the internet, by hiding the sites the you are visiting from your internet service provider, and hiding your location from the sites you visit. Be aware though that use of Tor can raise a red flag, so it might not always be the best option for you. For more information and instructions for Windows users, visit: (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/anonymity-and-circumvention). For instructions for Mac OSX users, visit: (https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-tor-mac-os-x)

8. Secure your communications: while some advice is covered in this manual, you might want to consider tools you can use and ways you can change your behaviour to increase your security when using mobile phones (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/mobile-phones) and smart phones (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/smartphones) as well as options for email and instant messaging (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/secure-communication). We recommend you strongly to take some time for reading the complete manual Security in a Box from Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders which is available in 15 languages (https://securityinabox.org/en). You can complement it with another manual designed by the Safehub collective called A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity for taking control of your digital spaces (https://tech.safehubcollective.org/cybersecurity/).

9. This manual provides links to online services or sites containing resources that provide further awareness and understanding of security topics. These can also be about tactics, actions, campaigns which have been implemented or are currently being implemented. These links can be from our network partners doing the actual work and thus can be trusted. While other links may come from third parties or news sites and you may want to verify these further. Site owners vary in relation to their security context and the tools that they use. Most of these resources are accessible via the web browsers and are of course subject to browser insecurities and threats. Some of these online services can require you to provide information, please be mindful when providing it. To note that some links might not provide https access, and some might provide it and still encounter https errors displaying messages of "untrusted website". Those messages might be related to sites which have not been able to pay or renew their SSL certificates. Last not least, some links can also connect to third party websites that may be tracking metadata information.

10. Practice self-care: Nothing is secure if we only think about technology and we neglect our wellbeing. If you are exhausted, stressed or burnt out, you might make mistakes that impair your security. Our approach to security should be empowering and not a burden; having security awareness and skills makes us more effective and zen in the work and activities that we do. Tactical Tech has developed an approach to security that looks at ensuring the agency, safety and well-being of human rights defenders from a more holistic perspective; one which includes the physical, psycho-social and digital aspects of security. Read more about this here: https://tacticaltech.org/projects/holistic-security ) . Also read this essay on The Psychological Underpinnings of Security Training (https://www.level-up.cc/resources-for-trainers/holistic/psychological-underpinnings-security-training).

Credits

Zen and the art of making your tech work for you was developed by the Tactical Technology Collective in collaboration with:

Coordination

Alex Hache

Writing

Faith Bosworth, Paula Graham, Alex Hache, valentina hvale pellizzer, Fieke Jansen, Floriana Pagano, Sophie Toupin, Núria Vergés, Jillian C. York, Marthe Van Dessel, Carol Waters

Editing

Faith Bosworth, Alex Hache, Helen Kilbey, Sophie Toupin, Floriana Pagano

Reviewers

Dhyta Caturani, Nighat Dad, Daysi Flores, Stephanie Hankey, Maya Indira Ganesh, Fieke Jansen, Sandra Ljubinkovic, Fernanda Shirakawa, Jennifer Radloff, Yvonne Reyes, Jac sm Kee

Design

Ariel Acevedo

Production Manager

Lucinda Linehan

Special Thanks to

Andrea Figari, Ling Luther, Vanessa Rizk, the participants to the network of the Gender and Technology Institute, the inhabitants of Calafou and Beka Iglesias

Funding

This manual was developped thanks to the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency funding support. To note that Sida can not be regarded as having contributed to or vouching for the content.

License

Zen and the art of making tech work for you by Tactical Technology Collective is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License