Cryptoparties For Learning Essential Survival Skills

Privacy: An interesting movement gaining momentum is cryptoparties, which is about learning and sharing fundamental survival skills.

I say “survival skills”, because it is about learning the fundamentals of communicating securely and privately. In some places in the world, this is a very tangible survival skill – right here, right now. People who don’t master this survival skill… disappear. In several places, it is outright social darwinism: people who master these skills survive, others don’t.

In other parts of the world, it can very quickly become a survival skill. The European Union and the United States alike are going down a path towards similar societies quickly – and Odin knows what will happen on the United States’ impending collapse 5-10 years from now when it runs out of new creditors.

From Cryptoparty.org:

CryptoParties are meetups to share and learn basic cryptographic tools such as PGP/GPG, Tor, OTR, TrueCrypt, etc. At CryptoParty, we teach, learn and share.

These are skills that will never be taught in official curriculums, so they must spread in the underbrush by necessity – just like the skills for sharing culture and knowledge using BitTorrent and similar tools have spread in the underbrush and now have reached 250 million Europeans and 150 million Americans, just like the skills on reflashing your Android phone with Cyanogenmod has spread to over a million in the underbrush.

It is all our duty to support that underbrush. Our own survival depends on other people we can communicate with securely, so it is in our interest that other people, too, know how to communicate without being wiretapped and… disappeared.

This movement has significant similarities to the early PGP keysigning parties, where people would meet to sign each other’s keys to establish a so-called cryptographic trust chain, but those assumed a much higher level of up-front knowledge about cryptography and public-key technology. The cryptoparties are more about learning the necessary skills from a fundamental level.

If you want a cryptoparty in your home town, why don’t you request one and tap into the community?

All my devices are walk-away safe: no confidence placed in me will be leaked if my phone, pad or notebook are stolen or forgotten. All my firewire ports are glued shut and disabled at the bios level. All my iron locks up on power loss and requires manual unlocking. I use encrypted, unwiretappable and untraceable voice communications and text communications. I use my own mail server and encrypt anything sensitive I put on Dropbox. I use Bitcoin for unseizable funds and money transfers. Today, these are survival skills. If you don’t know why, you should attend a cryptoparty.

(Hat tip to Asher Wolf and several others.)