This week’s Radio Motherboard podcast (MP3) talks with Matthew Mitchell, a former data journalist who organizes Harlem Cryptoparty, a regular training meeting for black activists who want to learn to defend themselves against the burgeoning police/DHS practice of racially profiling black activists through targeted surveillance.
Though social media surveillance is a modern phenomenon, the US government has a long and shameful history of surveilling black activists (see, for example, the FBI’s attempt to convince Martin Luther King to kill himself).
Harlem Cryptoparty is an attempt to help black people armor themselves against everyday surveillance, promoted through barbershops, hair salons, black churches and flyers in the neighborhood.
2:24 Mitchell explains why a cryptography meetup makes sense in Harlem.5:05 In order to reach the Harlem community, you have to recruit offline.
7:55 Cryptoparties and privacy events are still rare in the inner city in predominantly black and Latino communities, even though it’s not just a hypothetical threat. “You’re worried about, hey this guy threw me against a wall, flashed a badge at me, took my phone, he said if I gave him the phone he’ll let me walk, otherwise I have to do paper work. What was he doing with it?”
9:40 Nusrat Choudury from the ACLU’s Racial Justice program joins us. She wrote this piece, “The Government Is Watching #BlackLivesMatter, And It’s Not Okay.”
12:40 There is a pattern throughout history of the government using the fear of threats to conduct surveillance on “people who look or act different.”
15:30 A private security firm called Zero Fox collected information on protesters in Baltimore and labeled some “high severity physical threats.”
The Black Community Needs Encryption
[Adrianne Jeffries/Vice]