Spy agencies like the NSA can hack anyone, but they can’t hack everyone. Mass surveillance is only possible because our tools and systems make it very easy to get at our private communications by transmitting and storing them without any kind of privacy protection, like cryptographic scrambling. Reset the Net aims to fix that, making our Internet into a place where no one — not governments, crooks, or spies — can conduct indiscriminate privacy attacks on whole populations.
Reset the Net comes in two parts:
A privacy pack: with downloadable tools to make your phone or laptop secure, running Ios, Android, Windows, Mac OS, or GNU/Linux. Also in the pack are tools for making secure phone-calls, conducting secure chat and SMS, hardening your passwords, and making your browsing more anonymous and private. Also included: instructions and tools for including your phone’s storage or your laptop’s hard-drive; even booting up your computer into a secure operating system like Tails.
A pledge for developers and site operators: Here are best-practices for people who make mobile apps, host sites, and write code to make the Internet more secure against mass surveillance. For example, mobile developers can use cert pinning and end-to-end encryption to keep their users safe and private. And websites can use SSL to protect their users’ privacy when they use the net.
The campaign is collecting pledges from developers with the steps that they’re taking to make the Internet safer from spying.
We’re proud to announce that we are migrating Boing Boing to SSL-by-default and plan on having this in place shortly.
If you have a website of your own or social media account, you can help spread the word about Reset the Net.
The campaign has a great collection of banners and buttons ready-made for your social-media account. And if you add this code to your website, you’ll put a great banner on every page advertising the campaign to your friends and readers:
<script src="//fightforthefuture.github.io/reset-the-net-banner/banner/rtn.js" async></script>
-Cory Doctorow