FYI – when you send a DM, the receiver CAN SEE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS from the DM sent via email. BE AWARE!!! @twitter #security #fail

– ChicagoBungalow about 18 hours ago on Twitter

For those who aren’t on Twitter, a DM is a “direct message”, twitterspeak for a private message between two people.  When you receive a DM, Twitter notifies you via email.  And sure enough, just as ChicagoBungalow said, if I send you a DM, if you look at the email header information, you’ll see that the “Sender” field has an address like

twitter-dm-jon_pincus=yahoo.com@postmaster.twitter.com

This field is hidden by default — in gmail, you need to select “Show original” to see it — but once you find it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what yahoo.com account name I used to sign up on Twitter.

If I want somebody to have my email address, I’ll send it to them.  I don’t want Twitter giving it out for me. And most especially, I don’t want Twitter doing it behind my back.

jon

PS: I updated this post several times to clarify the description; thanks to all for the feedback, and @NiteStar for the gmail instructions.

from Twitter

The events in Iran the last several days illustrate a theme repeatedly at this year’s CFP in the panels on Internet censorship, China, anonymity, and social network activism: governments will routinely block access to the internet and SMS to prevent organizing.  Or at least they’ll try to …

As the video of CFP08’s panel on Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet discusses, activists in Iran have plenty of practice in getting around their government’s technical and legal restrictions.   And so, despite horrendously slow internet speeds in Iran and multiple reports that the government is blocking SMS and Facebook, there continue to be viable communication channels in cyberspace:

• Octavia Nasr’s Tear gas and Twitter: Iranians take their protests online on CNN.com, the BBC’s Internet brings events to life and Ben Parr’s HOW TO: Track Iran Election with social media on Mashable are excellent overviews.
• Tehran Bureau, the bloggers at niacINsight, Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic , and the New York Times’ The Lede and many others highlight and contextualize the online news.
• Blogs like Raye Man Kojast? Where Is My Vote?,  25khordad, Flickr, YouTube, and aggregators like Iran primary sources are also playing important roles in keeping information flowing.
• Twitter is a particularly vibrant source of first-person information and links via the #iranelection hashtag.  Twazzup’s page is a great way to view it.

Additional resources for people in Iran:

• proxy servers can often let you access sites the government is trying to block.  How do I use a proxy server? has instructions for many different browsers.  Austin Heap has been keeping an updated list of available proxy servers and there’s also a lot of information on Twitter.
• If you need to remain anonymous, Tor can help — there’s a Farsi download page at گمنامی آنلاين : Tor For bloggers, Global Voices Advocacy’s Anonymous blogging with Wordpress and Tor is important reading.  There’s a lot more information and many additional tools at sesawe.net, which also has Farsi-language pages.

At CFP09, Gaurav, Ralf, Nancy and I ended the Online activism around the world panel discussing with a sobering discussion of whether social network sites favored grassroots activists or regimes in power.  At least so far, the protestors in Iran seem to be using the Internet to route around censorship, and social networks — Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook — are a huge part of it.

Twitter figures prominently in the “coverage of the coverage”, with headlines across the world like La révolution n’est pas télévisée, elle est twiterrisée and Twitter links Iran protestors to the outside world. Twazzup, who provided a custom page for CFP09, has done a great job steadly enhancing their Iran coverage.  Dolores M. Bernal’s Twitter users shame CNN for not covering Iran elections, riots on News Junkie, Mark Drapeau’s How online word-of-mouth can change mainstream election media coverage in the Examiner, and Brian Stelter’s Real-time criticism of CNN’s coverage of Iran in the New York Times illustrate the effect Twitter can have on other media.  As Ralf said in our panel, Twitter changes everything … hopefully enough to make a difference.

CFP09 speaker Michael Anti, on Twitter

jon

What about 2009?

For me, magic happened a coupel of times on Thursday:

• the panelists on the Internet and social change in China panel using Twitter and their cellphones to track reports of the demonstrations in Hong Kong and the mass censorship of the Chinese internet
• at the closing Panopticon panel, where speakers like Anne Roth and Steven Hatfill talked about how their lives had been turned upside down by total government surveillance — at the same time as tweets about the unexpected success of the Chaffetz amendment limiting whole-body imaging (aka “digital strip search”) showed the potential for privacy advocates using social network activism

What are the other “CFP moments” you particularly remember, from CFP 2009 or past years?

jon

Panel, June 4: the Internet and social change in China

I just posted reflections on my personal blog from Tuesday’s opening Keynote and panel discussions. I’m impressed by the conference organizers’ incorporation of Twitter, and optimistic about the opportunities for dialogue that this will enable.

Above is a screenshot of my Twitter client, Tweetdeck … concurrent searches of the conference hashtag #cfp09 as well as my curiousity about who might be writing what about #freedom.

The best ways to follow what’s happening:

• The official CFP site at http://cfp2009.org, including the online schedule for streamed video
• and the CFP 2009 blog
• The CFP Wetpaint Wiki
• On Twitter, where http://twitter.com/cfp2009 has the latest updates and information, and the #cfp09 hashtag has discussions.  http://cfp09.twazzup.com/ is a good place to watch the tweetstream.  If you’re new to Twitter, please check out our Getting Started on Twitter page for some helpful tips.

And please, don’t just follow along — get involved! Join in the conversations on the blog and on Twitter. When you see articles, videos, blog posts, and discussions about CFP-related issues, tweet them and include the #cfp09 hashtag. And stay tuned for more about Ask your lawmaker about computers, freedom, and privacy, a joint project with Capitol News Connection, focused on getting answers and coverage on key legislative issues.

During the conference, one of our major goals is broaden participation in CFP. While there’s no substitute for being there in person, we want to make it so that that people who aren’t able to attend get to see what’s going on and be part of a lot of the discussions. Another goal is to increase coverage of the conference and computers, freedom, and privacy issues online from last year’s baseline — CFP’s got a reputation as “the best conference you’ve never heard of” and it’s time to start changing that.

After the conference wraps up on June 4, we hope that the blog, wiki, and twitter hashtags are interesting enough that people keep coming back afterwards. If the CFP blog can reflect the conference — high-quality discussions of the broad array of “CFP issues” from policy, technical, legal, international, and advocacy perspectives across the spectrum — it’ll fill a huge gap in the blogosphere. The wiki can be a place for resources for people and organizations wanting information about privacy and online civil liberties; and Twitter can be a way to reach out to communities that historically haven’t been involved with CFP.

It won’t all happen over night, of course … but the more people who participate, the more quickly we’ll get there. So please, check it out … and get involved!

jon

* a joint project with Capitol News Connection to get people’s questions about civil liberties, free speech and digital privacy answered by Senators and Representatives.

The Twittering in the Trenches Workshop is Monday, June 1, 9am-5pm (eastern). Please join us online or in person

In 1995 I went to my first Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference. I was completely boggled: every issue that was discussed had at least three compelling sides to it. I was also inspired because I could really see how the Net could be great for building communities.  Even back then it seemed that the Net was about building bridges and communities.

I remember David Brin speaking about surveillance cameras (no cell phone cameras yet), how ubiquitous they were going to become, and how we had to turn them to our advantage. I remember very smart, tech-savvy, civil libertarians like John Gilmore and Mike Godwin on panels with representatives from the White House and the FBI debating the use of cryptography, free-speech, and privacy issues. The techies stated that the Net was going to be a place where we would have the ability to share knowledge widely, without regard to geographical location, and where we would have more freedom to discus topics than in traditional media.  We could reshape our reality; old-fashioned laws wouldn’t hinder us, technology would finally give power to ordinary people.  It was exciting stuff.

I also remember the White House representative responding, almost in angry frustration, that we may have won the first round of the crypto wars, but that they’d be back and he Net wouldn’t be a “lawless” place — meaning that the status quo would be regained.

Of course, he was right. Now we have CALEA, the Patriot Act, Carnivore and its successors, draconian copyright laws, and a host of other privacy-invading tools that governments can use against people.

So here we are again in 2009.  The same kind of power is there on social network sites – on Facebook, MySpace, Tribe, Second Life, Free-Association, LiveJournal, and all the rest. Unlike Usenet and other ways of communicating on the Net a la 1995, social networks now are quite usable for us non-technical people, and the interfaces are pretty and inviting.  It’s never been easier to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues online.

And those that want to keep the status quo, they see the power too, so they want to hobble the social networks as best they can. They use fear of drug abuse, pedophiles, terrorists, and porn … and draft the same kind of privacy invasive and free speech hindering laws they’ve been pushing for years.

We don’t have to allow entrenched power bases take away our ability to organize and make our voices heard. Let’s not allow the Net to become just another TV outlet and shopping mall.

Social networks have already proved extremely useful in various activist campaigns. Stop Real ID Now, Join the Impact (for marriage equality), Get FISA Right, President Obama’s election campaign, and others, have shown that shown how quickly we can organize using online tools. At this workshop, we’ll discuss what worked and what didn’t, so that we can be more effective in the future.

We’ve learned from our experiences and so can empower users of social networks.  We can provide and expand online resources for people so that they can quickly get up to speed on services like Twitter, and know how to better translate online communications into actions.  We can work with site operators to make it more likely that we’ll have policies that protect our ability to use social networks, policies that protect our privacy and our free-speech rights.  And we can reach out on social networks to involve more diverse groups of people and hopefully jump start activism on privacy and first amendment issues.

Here’s our opportunity to realize the promise of the Net that was so present in 1990s when CFP started. If we don’t take and use our power now to keep social networks as open as we can make them, I don’t think we’re going to get another chance.

A new study by Cambridge law Professor Pratricia Akester looks at the effects of Digital Rights Management on Freedom of Expression.   Apparently, it turns us all into pirates.

With Obama about to announce a new Cybersecurity Czar with a “Broad Mandate,” folks are weighing in on what path the senior White House official should (or shouldn’t) take.  A CFP Panel on Cybersecurity and the New Administration, featuring congressmen Alan M. Grayson (D-FL) ask what is the best way to improve the security of the nation’s cyber infrastructure.

As Proposition 8 was upheld on Tuesday, activists from across the country turned to Join the Impact as they organized demonstrations.  Michael Bolognino of JTI will join us at CFP to discuss net-roots organizing on the Wednesday’s Online Activism Around the World panel.

We’d love to hear about the news related to CFP topics that you’re interested in!  Please share your links and ideas in the comments!