Mass Surveillance
Queercryption: Safety in Numbers
We deserve to live free from persecution. Where this is often lacking in the physical world, many people in the LGBTQIA+ community rely on encryption to find community, resources and support. Attempts to break encryption are not only damaging to our human right to privacy but also a security threat.
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A Protective Shield
As Chelsea Manning wrote, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell forced to her live a double life, with encryption as a protective shield. She warned that breaking encryption would have “negative consequences that would outweigh any law enforcement value, because it could allow anyone from individual criminals to powerful organisations and countries to exploit such ‘back doors’.”
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Even so, the UK government have put in place powers that can undermine end-to-end encryption in the Online Safety Act. They’ve given Ofcom the ability to force secure messaging companies like WhatsApp or Signal to have our private messages scanned before they’re encrypted. In effect, this is a back-door that could be exploited by bad actors.
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Queer identities can be weaponised against us, whether through harassment, blackmail or violence. ORG signed an open letter to stress the “vital importance of encrypted communications for victims of domestic abuse and for LGBTQ+ people in countries where they face harassment, victimisation and even the threat of execution. Far from making them safer, denying at-risk people a confidential lifeline puts them at greater and sometimes mortal risk.”
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Messaging services cross borders. Breaking encryption in the UK puts in danger people who we communicate with all over the world. LGBTQ+ Migrants could find themselves at an increased risk of persecution in their country of origin, as well as activists within repressive societies having their identities exposed.
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“Strong encryption strengthens the foundation of trust online and ensures that our digital spaces remain ones where individuals can live authentically and without fear.”
– Shae Gardner, LGBT Tech
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Where even our private conversations are insecure, people will consign themselves to the pain of isolation and self-denial. LGBTQ+ young people are three times more likely to self-harm and twice as likely to contemplate suicide than their peers. This is due to factors such as a lack of social support and affirming spaces putting individuals at a higher risk. We must not destroy the lifelines that encryption guarantees. It’ll only put more LGBTQ+ people at an even greater risk of mental health struggles.
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Introducing a backdoor to encrypted services means that anyone can find their way into your private life. Privacy is safety for marginalised communities.
“Encryption empowers the members of our community to take control of our identities and our privacy. In the 70+ countries where being LGBTQ+ is still criminalised, encryption can be a matter of survival.”
– Shae Gardner, LGBT Tech
“As a queer/trans individual it is utterly important to maintain the privacy of my communication, because the intersection of my queerness with my activism since 2011, is a golden recipe for a hyper surveilled country such as Egypt.”
– Radwa Fouda
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Interview with Radwa Fouda
Tell us about yourself.
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I am an inter and multidisciplinary person working on various topics: gender and anthropological research, digital culture and security, queer feminist mobilizing, political economy and graphic design. I have a MFA in painting and MA in Gender and Women’s Studies in the Middle East and North Africa.
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I work as a digital security officer and Grants Management officer in the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA), as well as a cyber security trainer. My activism is a blend of all the aforementioned disciplines, as well as Queer community organizing and crisis management.
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What led you to your work?
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In short, the gratification of helping another human being, and solving problems. But more so, being a person who inherently doesn’t accept injustice and breach of privacy and does not believe that the systems of oppression ought to bring any form of justice, no matter how anyone says otherwise.
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How important is it that you can communicate securely in your work and personal life?
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As a queer/trans individual it is utterly important to maintain the privacy of my communication, because the intersection of my queerness with my activism since 2011, is a golden recipe for a hyper surveilled country such as Egypt. LGBTIQ+ organizing and mobilization is not allowed by the Egyptian Gov’t.
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Moreover, identities and sexualities such as Non-conforming assigned-male-at-birth, gay men, trans women, are highly targeted as individuals by the police. Therefore, on different personal and political levels it is highly important to maintain the privacy of my communications as well as my community members.
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On another vein, conducting academic and/or independent anthropological research mandates that researchers should keep the records of their interlocutors safe, it is therefore important in my opinion not just as an activist but as a researcher to communicate securely.
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How do you protect your communications?
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By using measurements and tools that ought to protect me from targeted and untargeted attacks. Such as:
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- Backups
- Encryption (symmetric and asymmetric)
- Password Protection
- Secure erasure
- Email protection
- And other measures
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Many women have tactics for keeping themselves safe when out in the ‘real’ world. Do you think there is enough awareness about encryption and other security tools for keeping safe in the digital world?
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I think there is both a growing knowledge about it, and a collective exhaustion from having to worry about their security and safety, to protect themselves from falling victim to TFGBV [Technology-facilitated gender-based violence].
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What would you say to policymakers who want to remove or weaken encryption so that law enforcement can try to access criminals’ messages?
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Honestly?! “You’re a bunch of pathetic useless imps”. Policy will never catch up to the speed of tech, especially big tech companies, nor will the formal economy. ‘Criminals’ is a very vast word, such as “terrorism” or “Bad Guys”, it is another thing that is left loose so the state can better catch opposition and practice unmonitored mass-surveillance.
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But it is important to remember that ‘criminals’ have an economy of their own, unlike student-movements who protest in campuses, or queer students who are organizing in non-queer friendly countries, or indigenous community organizers, or women seeking abortion etc. are people who are functioning in the everyday economy, to achieve their rights, and these are the primary targets that will be, when encryption is lifted.
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Finally, as Signal told the German government when they requested a back-door for the app “End-to-end encryption is an on or off state for all, we will either delete the encryption for everyone or keep the encryption for everyone, no back-doors”
PETITION: KEEP OUR APPLE DATA ENCRYPTED
Stop the Home Office from putting our security at risk by demanding a backdoor into Apple’s encrypted services
Take actionThe Case for Encryption
Monitoring private communications jeopardises privacy and security on a mass scale. End-to-end encyption helps us to stay safe online.
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