LFI Course Materials 2020/Week five/Notes

Library Freedom Institute - Cohort 3

Lecture 5 Notes - 4/6/2020

This lecture we had a guest speaker, Lindsay Oliver from Electronic Frontier Foundation. Lindsay is the Activism Project Manager - she focuses one educational portion of the program. Lindsay told us about her experience in teaching and disaster preparedness - making her an incredibly insightful person to speak to at this time.

What has been happening with EFF in the last few weeks, in regards to COVID-19?

• Almost the entirety of EFF’s work has pivoted to responding to the COVID-19 crisis, dealing with issues of copyrights, patents, topics of open access, net neutrality, and issues of equity and access.
• EFF is working on developing an issue page documenting COVID-19 material.
• Evaluating the type of surveillance programs being put in place, and looking at what tools people are using their life online.

Zoom

• There has been a massive uptick in number of daily users in zoom. In December, Zoom saw 10 million daily users. As of last week, Zoom was seeing 200 million daily users. (Notetaker’s note: Lindsay questioned herself and wondered if those numbers were right, and if those numbers were monthly, not daily. I double checked she shouldn’t have questioned herself! She was right - those numbers are daily, which blew my mind, I had no idea it was so high to begin with, and that number is incredible now)
• Problems with this ballooning of Zoom, and programs like Zoom are becoming obvious - they are now being used by a much wider audience base then intended, and being used in ways not originally expected.
• Lindsay said that she felt Zoom has responded to critique well by responding to the criticisms that have been leveled at Zoom, and saying that Zoom has actually made timely moves to address the issues. Lindsay compared Zoom’s response to other large tech companies like Facebook, that simply doesn’t respond at all.
• Lindsay spoke about the importance of being aware of how tools such as Zoom can be misused, such as Zoom bombing and some of the more sinister seeming administer tools, such as attention tracking. Another issue raised is how these tools that replace working together physically, erode some privacies that was easy to take for granted before. For example, how easy it is to be working via Zoom, and for a boss to join the Zoom meeting undetected. One example given was how a superior could join a channel without explicit consent, at a meeting between an employee and an HR representative, without the employee’s knowledge.
• Even when the above examples are not happening, Lindsay spoke about how these incidents, and tools like attention tracking can create a culture of fear and breaks down trust amongst colleagues.

Zoom and End to End Encryption

• Lindsay mentioned that some portions are end to end encrypted. The chat is end to end encrypted, while video is not.
• What is end to end encryption? Encrypted by the sender, the only person who can read it is the receiver. If the person in the middle can read it (zoom), it is not end to end encryption.
• Lindsay addressed the Intercept article, saying that the article is not untrue, but the framing of the issue was a little off. Lindsay spoke about how Zoom’s vulnerabilities need to be fixed, and said that while they are serious, they are not necessarily world-ending. The bigger concern are abuse of administrator privileges, such as the attention-tracking features, and the ability to create transcripts of supposedly ‘private’ messages.
• Lindsay said that the EFF tech people, as they have explained it, have said that Zoom is still safer than a phone call. (Lindsay said she would get back to this with more specifics/technical information straight from the EFF tech people rather than from her).

Slack

• Lindsay described Slack’s response to privacy issues to be the opposite of Zoom - they seem to be ignoring the issue altogether.
• Slack does not provide much control at all for their free service. They retain all of their messages - and you are only able to see the most recent 10,000 messages.
• You do not have the ability to see older messages, or ask them to delete those messages (Slack retains them even if you can’t see them). You can do this with a paid version though.

Alternatives

• Wire, as an alternative to Slack and/or Zoom. This was mentioned as being better for 1 to 1 conversations, rather than groups
• Keybase, as an alternative to Slack, which was met to a lot of excitement from the cohort.

Teaching People To Protect Their Own Privacy

In response to a question about how to teach people to protect their own privacy, Lindsay described EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense project, which can be found here: (https://ssd.eff.org/en). Linday described it as a place where EFF has put all of their institutional knowledge about keeping people safe online. The project includes scenario based articles, starter resources for people to learn about protecting their security, and guides to teach people how to teach others. The material falls under creative commons license to be used by others as needed.

What is happening in the education system?

• As a former teacher, Lindsay spoke about she had a lot of concerns of how surveillance is impacting students, and how these issues have been only further heightened as students are now working remotely. She spoke of three specific areas of concern:

• One is a massive uptick in security, two just concerned about.

• Proctoring: Lindsay spoke about how test proctoring technology; software used to monitor students as they take a test remotely.

• Lindsay described how a proctor will lock down a person's computer so they are unable to do anything but take the assessment. The software can require the camera and microphone on computer be enabled, and how the proctor can ask you to move camera to examine the room you are in. The software could be automated, used face scanning technology, and detecting how many times in a specific period that the student using the computer looks away from the screen, and can invalidate the student’s exam.

• Lindsay said they have been getting an increased amount of people contacting EFF about proctoring software, many of which are actually High School students. Sometimes this software is installed in a way that people do not have control over it - and cases where the software is found to start on bootup, and is unable to be uninstalled, providing numerous obvious privacy and surveillance issues.

• School Issued Devices: For some students, school issued devices are the only technological devices they have access too. When these devices are used after school hours they are still under surveillance (not to justify surveilling students during school hours).

• Social Media Monitoring: Schools monitoring social media accounts to gather data on students, and Lindsay mentioned schools using some programs that are able to mine students data from online.

• Lindsay also made a very important statement about surveillance in our education system that she wanted people to keep in mind: The bad actors in these situations are not the schools, parents, teachers, students - they are the companies that have jumped into this space, and capitalizing on situations like COVID-19 (among others) and this newfound fear they bring about in people.