[tor-reports] ISC Global Meeting Trip Report

[Andrew Lewman]

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the Information Security Coalition
Global Meeting in Washington DC [0].  The ISC is a collection of
people working on technology for human rights defenders and the actual
human rights defenders themselves. It covers a large range of
companies, technical prowess, and challenges to solve. The meeting
itself was under Chatham House Rule [1], so I can't talk in too much
detail.

I was asked to do a "speekgeek" session where I have 5 minutes to
showcase something. I chose to showcase Tails 0.17.1 [2] as an example
of Tor being used in the wild. After repeating myself 9 times, all 130+
participants had heard of Tails. Many already used it for sensitive
work. Many wanted to try a copy of it, so I used the Tails installer to
simply clone my USB drive about 20 times. I'm out of USB drives now.
There was a minor debate about branded Tails drives or not, with
everyone settling on the need for branded Tails USB drives. Those who
don't want branded drives figured they could just use duct tape to
cover up the name.

A few people stuck around aftewards to learn more about Tails. It's
clear that Tails is not for novice users. It looks deceptively simple,
but understanding permissions, enabling persistence, and the like all
need some training. I did manage to train two people over an hour and
they were up and running with Tails afterwards. Lots of people had
Macs, which mean Tails doesn't work for them yet.

One of the more challenging threat models was from a locale where the
local police forces routinely raid the offices and homes of the human
rights workers. They confiscate all technology they find. It's not
clear what the police do with the technology once stolen, but it's
unlikely they have the sophistication to analyze any of it in detail.
Tails appealed to these people, as did the use of encrypted drives and
a hope for a safe, free, well designed cloud storage system. For added
challenge, the police forces sometimes demand passwords for "Internet
apps" at gun point. Thinking about solutions resulted in some lively
lunch discussions.

Overall, there were talented people at the meeting. Everyone there
shared a passion for improving the world, sometimes with technology
and sometimes without.


[0] https://isc2013.eventbrite.com/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule
[2] https://tails.boum.org/

-- 
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475