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Content type: News & Analysis
There are three good reasons why security is so hard for NGOs. First, we are afraid to speak about meaningful security. Second, we focus on the wrong areas of security and in turn spend money and prioritise the wrong things. Third, we struggle to separate the world we want from the worlds we build within our own organisations. At PI we have failed and struggled with each of these for over 20 years. Out of exhaustion, we decided to do something about it: we are building an open framework, a…
Content type: News & Analysis
The past few years have seen a huge rise in the number of attacks both active and passive, against organisations big and small. Attacks against organisations happen for a multitude of reasons: extortion via "ransomware", exfiltration of commercial secrets, or just "the lulz". While this can be crippling to a commercial business, it can potentially be devastating to an NGO, especially those which work to hold powerful institutions to account. The types of information held by such NGOs could…
Content type: News & Analysis
Dear Politicians,
With elections coming up and quite a few cringe-worthy comments that have come from many of you and from all sides of the political spectrum, we figured it was time to have a chat about encryption.
First, let’s say what you shouldn’t do:
call for boycotts of companies because they protect their users’ data even from the companies themselves.
say something like “we’ll develop a Manhattan-level project on this” (which, as we’ll remind you, ended up with the creation of a…
Content type: News & Analysis
On a hot day in Nairobi, our researcher is speaking to an officer of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The afternoon is wearing on and the conversation has turned to the presidential elections, taking place in August this year. He has just finished describing the NIS’ highly secret surveillance powers and the disturbing ways in which these powers are deployed.
“It is what you might call ‘acceptable deaths,’” he states about the misuse of communications surveillance powers. “People…