EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense Guide

A project to teach users about digital surveillance and how to protect their information.

View our Final Presentation.

View our Case Study.

We have been working with Alvaro from Neo on the Drupal site, which you can view at ssd-staging.eff.org/en. We are still working a bit on the overall look and some of the content. During the mini disco-tech in class on Wednesday, we will have time for everyone to explore the site.

Our presentation for class can be viewed here. We are still finalizing and incorporating feedback into our case study.

This week, we met with Alvaro from Neo and continued to work on graphics and tools to accompany the SSD content.

We asked Alvaro to help us build a Drupal theme based on our wireframes into which we will dump our content. We went over the wireframes that we put up last week and generalized them to specify a more structural layout that he will be able to work with (view here), the structural layout is below the original mockup). He will be providing us with an update by Wednesday, and he hopes to have the completed theme done by next week.

We have a few more completed graphics, and we are still working on more graphics as well as an interactive threat model flowchart tool.

Last week we had a really productive meeting with Jillian and Mark (and Becky). Jillian had some feedback about the visual elements of the website, and Mark had some thoughts about the current staging site and the more technical aspects of the site, particularly the various Drupal modules which he’s installed. We talked about a timeline for the project – our goal is to have a functioning prototype within the next week or so. The goal of our first project iteration is to allow us to assess the overall design of the site.

Over the weekend, we met up to try to hack something together. Unfortunately, we struggled a lot with just installing Drupal and getting into our Virtual Machine, as well as understanding the structure of the repo, but after spending hours poring over the code, we’re starting to get a handle on Drupal, and we’ve developed a work plan for this week. Hopefully, now that everything’s installed and we have access to the staging site, the github repo, and the virtual machine, things will be smoother sailing from here on out.

The first step in our work plan will be to finalize the design of the SSD home page and individual content pages and then implement them with our custom Drupal theme. Then we will be able to focus purely on the content of the site.

This is the week the EFF will be presenting in class, and we’ll be doing an interactive workshop afterwards.

– Paulina & Wei-Wei

Some first layout ideas:

Our first potential layout for the homepage we sent to Jillian and Hugh.

After some feedback from the EFF, we changed the navigation bar, and the sidebar’s “New Content” would be a Blog stream.

Our first idea for a module’s page layout with an embedded prezi.
Not sure about embedding prezis, but that top part would be some sort of graphical or interactive thing. Sidebar helps organization and navigation of the text content.

Over the past two weeks, we have signed our working agreement, met with Jillian to go over some ideas and wireframes, and been introduced to two new EFF members, Hugh from the design team (designed the logo above) and Mark from the tech team.

During our meeting with Jillian, we showed her two mockups of the SSD site, one for the homepage and one for a content module. We also discussed our ideas for making the content more interactive and bite-sized such as Prezis or Buzzfeed-style articles. Since the content needs to be available in many different languages, we have to keep in mind how to make these content bits easily translatable. Jillian also sent us the module list, so we are beginning to organize the modules for the site’s navigation bar.

Jillian also introduced us to Hugh (design) and Mark (tech). Mark has added us to the github repository for the working version of the SSD site, so we will begin exploring what they have implemented and how to work from there.

We will be meeting with Jillian, Eva, Mark, and Becky on Monday (3/31) to go over the more technical aspects of the site and to plan out an implementation schedule.

We will show the class our wireframes and example interactive modules on Wednesday during the project presentations.

– Paulina & Wei-Wei

For this week, we worked on solidifying our personae (user stories) and Working Agreement. At the moment, the SSD is intended for journalists and activists – people who need solid information on the logistics of how to protect their data/information. Some of the other personae are people who might need more basic information, such as the average college student, or a community organizer.

We also started to talk about the “fun” aspects of the site to engage people who are not as proactive about properly protecting their digital assets – we (and a lot of our friends) are really into Buzzfeed quizzes (like this one), so we were thinking something along the lines of that. We might also be developing an actual workshop module for the Threat Model workshop, but we’ll see.

We’ll be meeting with Eva (Jillian’s out) – and this week, Bex as well – on Wednesday, right before class, so we’ll definitely have more concrete ideas of how we’ll be moving forward by then.

– Paulina & Wei-Wei