Celebrating 15 Years of Surveillance Self-Defense

On March 3rd, 2009, we launched Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD). At the time, we pitched it as, “an online how-to guide for protecting your private data against government spying.” In the last decade hundreds of people have contributed to SSD, over 20 million people have read it, and the content has nearly doubled in length from 40,000 words to almost 80,000. SSD has served as inspiration for many other guides focused on keeping specific populations safe, and those guides have in turn affected how we’ve approached SSD. A lot has changed in the world over the last 15 years, and SSD has changed with it. 

The Year Is 2009

Let’s take a minute to travel back in time to the initial announcement of SSD. Launched with the support of the Open Society Institute, and written entirely by just a few people, we detailed exactly what our intentions were with SSD at the start:

EFF created the Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands… The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.

SSD’s design when it first launched in 2009.

To put this further into context, it’s worth looking at where we were in 2009. Avatar was the top grossing movie of the year. Barack Obama was in his first term as president in the U.S. In a then-novel approach, Iranians turned to Twitter to organize protests. The NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, but we hadn’t gotten to Jewel v. NSA or the Snowden revelations yet. And while the iPhone had been around for two years, it hadn’t seen its first big privacy controversy yet (that would come in December of that year, but it’d be another year still before we hit the “your apps are watching you” stage).

Most importantly, in 2009 it was more complicated to keep your data secure than it is today. HTTPS wasn’t common, using Tor required more technical know-how than it does nowadays, encrypted IMs were the fastest way to communicate securely, and full-disk encryption wasn’t a common feature on smartphones. Even for computers, disk encryption required special software and knowledge to implement (not to mention time, solid state drives were still extremely expensive in 2009, so most people still had spinning disk hard drives, which took ages to encrypt and usually slowed down your computer significantly).

And thus, SSD in 2009 focused heavily on law enforcement and government access with its advice. Not long after the launch in 2009, in the midst of the Iranian uprising, we launched the international version, which focused on the concerns of individuals struggling to preserve their right to free expression in authoritarian regimes.

And that’s where SSD stood, mostly as-is, for about six years. 

The Redesigns

In 2014, we redesigned and relaunched SSD with support from the Ford Foundation. The relaunch had at least 80 people involved in the writing, reviewing, design, and translation process. With the relaunch, there was also a shift in the mission as the threats expanded from just the government, to corporate and personal risks as well. From the press release:

“Everyone has something to protect, whether it’s from the government or stalkers or data-miners,” said EFF International Director Danny O’Brien. “Surveillance Self-Defense will help you think through your personal risk factors and concerns—is it an authoritarian government you need to worry about, or an ex-spouse, or your employer?—and guide you to appropriate tools and practices based on your specific situation.”

2014 proved to be an effective year for a major update. After the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, protestors hit the streets across the U.S., which made our protest guide particularly useful. There were also major security vulnerabilities that year, like Heartbleed, which caused all sorts of security issues for website operators and their visitors, and Shellshock, which opened up everything from servers to cameras to bug exploits, ushering in what felt like an endless stream of software updates on everything with a computer chip in it. And of course, there was still fallout from the Snowden leaks in 2013.

In 2018 we did another redesign, and added a new logo for SSD that came along with EFF’s new design. This is more or less the same design of the site today.

SSD’s current design, which further clarifies what sections a guide is in, and expands the security scenarios.

Perhaps the most notable difference between this iteration of SSD and the years before is the lack of detailed reasoning explaining the need for its existence on the front page. No longer was it necessary to explain why we all need to practice surveillance self-defense. Online surveillance had gone mainstream.

Shifting Language Over the Years

As the years passed and the site was redesigned, we also shifted how we talked about security. In 2009 we wrote about security with terms like, “adversaries,” “defensive technology,” “threat models,” and “assets.” These were all common cybersecurity terms at the time, but made security sound like a military exercise, which often disenfranchised the very people who needed help. For example, in the later part of the 2010s, we reworked the idea of “threat modeling,” when we published Your Security Plan. This was meant to be less intimidating and more inclusive of the various types of risks that people face.

The advice in SSD has changed over the years, too. Take passwords as an example, where in 2009 we said, “Although we recommend memorizing your passwords, we recognize you probably won’t.” First off, rude! Second off, maybe that could fly with the lower number of accounts we all had back in 2009, but nowadays nobody is going to remember hundreds of passwords. And regardless, that seems pretty dang impossible when paired with the final bit of advice, “You should change passwords every week, every month, or every year — it all depends on the threat, the risk, and the value of the asset, traded against usability and convenience.”

Moving onto 2015, we phrased this same sentiment much differently, “Reusing passwords is an exceptionally bad security practice, because if an attacker gets hold of one password, she will often try using that password on various accounts belonging to the same person… Avoiding password reuse is a valuable security precaution, but you won’t be able to remember all your passwords if each one is different. Fortunately, there are software tools to help with this—a password manager.”

Well, that’s much more polite!

Since then, we’ve toned that down even more, “Reusing passwords is a dangerous security practice. If someone gets ahold of your password —whether that’s from a data breach, or wherever else—they can often gain access to any other account you used that same password. The solution is to use unique passwords everywhere and take additional steps to secure your accounts when possible.”

Security is an always evolving process, so too is how we talk about it. But the more people we bring on board, the better it is for everyone. How we talk about surveillance self-defense will assuredly continue to adapt in the future.

Shifting Language(s) Over the Years

Initially in 2009, SSD was only available in English, and soon after launch, in Bulgarian. In the 2014 re-launch, we added Arabic and Spanish. Then added French, Thai, Vietnamese, and Urdu in 2015. Later that year, we added a handful of Amharic translations, too. This was accomplished through a web of people in dozens of countries who volunteered to translate and review everything. Many of these translations were done for highly specific reasons. For example, we had a Google Policy Fellow, Endalk Chala, who was part of the Zone 9 bloggers in Ethiopia. He translated everything into Amharic as he was fighting for his colleagues and friends who were imprisoned in Ethiopia on terrorism charges.

By 2019, we were translating most of SSD into at least 10 languages: Amharic, Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, and Urdu (as well as additional, externally-hosted community translations in Indonesian Bahasa, Burmese, Traditional Chinese, Igbo, Khmer, Swahili, Yoruba, and Twi).

Currently, we’re focusing on getting the entirety of SSD re-translated into seven languages, then focusing our efforts on translating specific guides into other languages. 

Always Updating

Since 2009, we’ve done our best to review and update the guides in SSD. This has included minor changes to respond to news events, depreciating guides completely when they’re no longer applicable in modern security plans, and massive rewrites when technology has changed.

The original version of SSD was launched mostly as a static text (we even offered a printer-friendly version), though updates and revisions did occur, they were not publicly tracked as clearly as they are today. In its early years, SSD was able to provide useful guidance across a number of important events, like Occupy Wall Street, before the major site redesign in 2014, which helped it become more useful training activists, including for Ferguson and Standing Rock, amongst others. The ability to update SSD along with changing trends and needs has ensured it can always be useful as a resource.

That redesign also better facilitated the updates process. The site became easier to navigate and use, and easier to update. For example, in 2017 we took on a round of guide audits in response to concerns following the 2016 election. In 2019 we continued that process with around seven major updates to SSD, and in 2020, we did five. We don’t have great stats for 2021 and 2022, but in 2023 we managed 14 major updates or new guides. We’re hoping to have the majority of SSD reviewed and revamped by the end of this year, with a handful of expansions along the way.

Which brings us to the future of SSD. We will continue updating, adapting, and adding to SSD in the coming years. It is often impossible to know what will be needed, but rest assured we’ll be there to answer that whenever we can. As mentioned above, this includes getting more translations underway, and continuing to ensure that everything is accurate and up-to-date so SSD can remain one of the best repositories of security information available online.

We hope you’ll join EFF in celebrating 15 years of SSD!