The world’s cybersecurity woes can feel like a sideshow when physical violence is being inflicted on protestors in most major US cities.
But those conflicts overlap. That’s why we at WIRED published a guide to keeping yourself and your devices safe from digital surveillance while you protest. We also reported on “non-lethal” crowd control weapons pose a serious danger to protestors, and how the 1033 program created by the National Defense Authorization Act allowed police to inherit hand-me-down military equipment. The result has been armored military vehicles in our neighborhoods and police who look ready to storm Fallujah rather than encounter peaceful protestors armed with water bottles.
In non-mass-revolution news, Zoom’s decision to add end-to-end encryption only to paying customers’ accounts—after initially claiming it offered the feature to everyone—raised the hackles of privacy advocates. Facebook rolled out long-overdue privacy features that let you move posts en masse to a private archive. Google’s Chrome, too, is adding privacy and security features, like enhanced “safe browsing” designed to warn users about phishing sites, and a password manager that automatically checks your passwords against collections of leaked user credentials. Riot Games launched the long-awaited first-person-shooter game Valorant—whose lack of moderation on users immediately led to a toxic environment for female players. Pandemic sheltering-in-place appears to have led to a boom in dark web weed sales. And the Pentagon is using a bot to find software vulnerabilities before the bad guys do.
Record numbers of people are downloading Signal to send encrypted messages; if you’re one of them (and you should be) here’s how to get