GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop

Journalist and digital rights activist Danny O'Brien came to GUADEC to try to educate GNOME hackers about the threats facing journalists, their computers, and their online communication from governments and organized crime. But free software can help, so he wanted to outline the features that he thinks could be added to desktops to help secure them and protect the privacy of all users, not just journalists. Part of his job as internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is to talk to internet developers and "persuade them to think about how journalists in repressive regimes are affected" by the choices those developers make.

O'Brien has written for multiple publications including Wired UK and the Need To Know email newsletter that he founded, which ceased publication in 2007. He has also worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as activist coordinator and most recently its international outreach coordinator. He is now with CPJ, which is an organization that seeks to protect journalists from various threats, both physical and in the online world. "They know the levers of power to get people out of trouble, or to stop them from getting into it", he said.

He started out by explaining that journalists do not understand recursion as he found out when he tried to unpack GUADEC (GNOME users' and developers' European conference) for his boss. The use of an acronym as the first word of an unpacked acronym was problematic enough, but when tried to explain that GNOME is (or was) the GNU Network Object Model Environment, he sensed he was getting in a bit too deep. Then he had to try to explain "GNU's Not Unix".

The problems that many in the online and free software worlds have been concerned about for years are finally becoming mainstream he said. "Powerful forces are trying to stop the spread of information online", and that message is finally starting to get out. He put up the recent xkcd comic ("It's the world's tiniest open-source violin") as an example of one place where those concerns are starting to get some mainstream attention.

He pointed to a number of different attacks against the computers of journalists, generally from governments, but sometimes also from organized crime syndicates. It's not just repressive regimes that target journalists, he said, noting reports on the CPJ website regarding Japanese journalists who have been subjected to governmental pressure and mistreatment.

One of the more insidious attacks against journalists' computers was an email sent to foreign journalists based in Shanghai and Beijing from a fictional editor for The Straits Times. The email was a credible request for assistance in contacting people on a list contained in a PDF attachment—a PDF with a zero-day exploit that installed spyware on the computer. It was not just the foreign correspondents who were targeted, however, as the email was also sent to the native Chinese assistants of the correspondents, which is a list that would be difficult to generate—unless a large intelligence agency was involved.

Another common tactic used by governments to intimidate and spy on journalists is to raid the offices of a television/radio station or publication because the organization supposedly owes back taxes. All of the computer equipment is then seized for evidence. A variation of that scheme was recently used in Kyrgyzstan where a television station was raided due to alleged software "piracy" and all of the computers were confiscated. Whether tax or copyright violation charges are ever filed is irrelevant because the government is really after the information stored on the computers.

Free software hackers have more of an interest in these kinds of problems "than just not [being] the ones affected". There are things that free software already does fairly well because those hackers "have an interest in creating secure systems", but there's more that could be done. It makes sense for it to be the free software community that fixes these problems, because it is "not beholden to big interests", O'Brien said.

So what is the "low hanging fruit"? Encryption is one area that is relatively well covered, at least for the web, with TLS. It provides security for both publishers, readers, and commenters that is protected from even "state-sized interceptors". It makes simple censorship more difficult. The well-known Great Firewall of China looks for keywords, while the lesser-known Great English Firewall matches URLs to a list of child pornography sites; each of those censorship methods is blocked by encrypting web traffic.

But there all sorts of internet protocols that are plaintext. "Since we don't use telnet any more, why should our code?" He was disappointed that the Telepathy communication framework doesn't ship with Off-the-Record (OTR) encryption support because it makes his job harder when recommending tools to journalists.

He mentioned some Russian journalists that he had talked to who don't talk on the telephone because they believe it to be bugged. They also only use Gmail over HTTPS, "which is fine if you trust Google", but they switched to using Yahoo Messenger "because they heard good things about it"—unfortunately Messenger isn't encrypted. O'Brien said that the reason they didn't know that it "is less secure is because their desktop isn't telling them".

SSL certificates are another area of concern. Certificates can be forged by governments or other entities and then used in targeted attacks to intercept encrypted communications. The journalists that O'Brien deals with are the "canaries in a coal mine" for these kinds of problems. It is a "challenge for user experience" to alert the user to things like changed certificates, but there are also technical barriers as the libraries often don't return that kind of status to the applications.

He would like to see desktops have some sort of "advocate" for user security that would check and report on privacy and security issues with the software being used. User privacy and security are "pervasive concerns that should live on the desktop", O'Brien said. The desktop is becoming more intertwined with the web so it would be very beneficial to have some kind of active monitoring that is "sitting there checking that the systems are secure".

When someone wants to communicate with multiple friends, why does the data have to be sent to a central server, he asked. He would like to see the desktop become a "first-class player on the internet" by communicating in a decentralized, peer-to-peer fashion.

The organizations that know they don't want people to have privacy recognize that the desktop is the gatekeeper. A person's desktop is their "heart of trust", he said. "We have a responsibility to take the freedom that we take for granted and give it to people whose only privacy is their desktop".

O'Brien came to GUADEC because he believes that the project can help solve the problems in the privacy and security areas. GNOME has the "user experience chops" to make these kinds of changes, while continuing to produce a usable desktop. While he is particularly focused on journalists, the changes he advocates would be useful to many, but making them usable too will be a big challenge.