My reaction to the Snowden disclosures was a mix of “I’m not surprised” with “this is a lot worse than I imagined”.\u00a0 Not long after, I went to a small workshop and during breaks tried to engage colleagues in discussing the implications of the capabilities of the surveillance state of which we were now at least partially aware.\u00a0 Responses were at best disappointing.\u00a0 The near-universal apathy was disturbing.\u00a0 Most of the people I spoke with teach undergraduate computer science.\u00a0 If they don’t care about the ethics of a surveillance system whose maintenance and expansion depend on our graduates, what hope would there be for change?<\/p>\n
In thinking, “what more can I do from my highly privileged position?”, my partner and I have been teaching activists in social movements to use end-to-end encryption and other online self-defense techniques.\u00a0 We’ve also designed a freshman course to teach online self-defense.\u00a0 Since we are in particular concerned with the impact of state surveillance machinery on social movements, the course is offered through the Difference, Power and Discrimination (DPD) program<\/a> at OSU and so addresses institutionalized systems of power, privilege, and inequity in the United States.\u00a0 We will be teaching the technical concepts for understanding online surveillance and the encryption tools that can mitigate it alongside the historical and contemporary impacts that state surveillance has had on social movements.\u00a0 The course will be offered for the first time this coming Spring — CS175: Communications Security and Social Movements<\/a>.<\/p>\n From the reading that accompanied the development of this course and our trainings, it became clear that teaching CS175 through the DPD lens was a good move. Muslim populations in the US are subject to heightened surveillance, scrutiny, infiltration, provocation and entrapment<\/a>.\u00a0 The Department of Homeland Security monitors<\/a> those involved with #BlackLivesMatter.\u00a0 Historically, we know that surveillance is key to suppressing groups that challenge the state (for example, the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement<\/a>) and the mass collection of data on targeted populations has facilitated genocide<\/a>.\u00a0 Mass surveillance doesn’t affect us all equally — mass surveillance is disproportionately directed at marginalized groups<\/a> such as people of color.<\/p>\n