Editor’s note: We’re pleased to continue our series of guest posts with one from our good friends of the UK Radical Librarians Collective. RLC’s incredible work organizing librarians across the UK and Ireland is a great inspiration to us at LFP, and so we’re especially excited to share their experience of running a local CryptoParty and implementing some FLOSS technologies in their work. We hope it will encourage other librarians and affinity groups to do the same.
In 2013, the public learned of extensive programs of corporate and state surveillance operating through the web and internet technologies that have become embedded in our lives. Data about citizens and consumers is routinely harvested, retained, traded, and examined without the informed consent of the public. Thanks to the leaks of Edward Snowden, subsequent revelations about the UK’s TEMPORA Project, the UK Government’s proposed ‘Snooper’s Charter’, and the more recent “extremism clampdown” in UK Higher Education, surveillance is known to be a widespread embedded practice that restricts our freedom in a variety of ways. The more aware we are of this, the more we can defend ourselves.