On Thursday, we had our first Skype meeting with Jillian from the EFF (Eva and Jillian are both going to be our point people). We thought it went really well – we’re excited for the semester!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization devoted to fighting for our (by which we mean internet users’) rights online, which can include, among other things, free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights. Founded in 1990, the EFF is made up of a mix of lawyers, activists, and technologists, who work together to defend the general public’s digital rights.

The project we’re working on is an update and extension to their Surveillance Self Defense project, which aims to educate users about electronic government surveillance and how to properly defend themselves against possible threats. Although the project was initially addressed at an American audience, they’re hoping to make it more international, with the work translated into several different languages. Additionally, the hope is, in conjunction with various partners, to create content “playlists” for specific audiences. A college student in California, for example, might not want/need the same level of surveillance self-defense as a journalist working in Syria.

Our goal, therefore, is to work with them to create this online resource. One of the challenges for us is that the website needs to be easily accessible/modifiable, and since the EFF is already using Drupal, it makes sense for us to build on that. Although we’re feeling pretty good about our website design skills, neither of us have worked with Drupal before, so we’ll see what we can do.

For the Discotech this coming weekend, we’ll be running a Threat Model workshop, working on building visual representations of threat models. Stay tuned for details!

– Paulina and Wei-Wei