Advocacy

Mobile Security Survival Toolkit for Activists

MobileActive's SaferMobile project is running two trainings at the Internet at Liberty conference on mobile security with colleagues from IWPR, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and UC Berkeley. We’ll be demoing common mobile threats and provide hands-on tips on how to better protect yourself.

We put together a set of resources in a ‘mobile security survival kit’ for activists and journalists with practical tips and advice. They are all online at SaferMobile.org but we are also compiling here in a Primer Toolkit on Mobile Security. You'll find:

05.23.12 admin Advocacy Citizen Media Democratic Participation

uReport: Citizen Feedback via SMS in Uganda

For aid organizations, knowing what local communities and beneficiaries want and need is the key to running successful, sustainable programs. In Uganda, UNICEF is using mobile phones and broadcast media to get direct feedback from Ugandans on everything from medication access to water sanitation. The project, called uReport, allows users to sign up via a toll-free shortcode for regular SMS-based polls and messages. Citizen responses are used both in weekly radio talk shows to create discussion on community issues, and shared among UNICEF and other aid organizations to provide a better picture of how services work across Uganda.

Sean Blaschke, a Technology for Development specialist at UNICEF Uganda, explains that uReport gathers information from participants and informs citizens of their rights and available services. Recent polls have included questions about school dropouts, water point availability, mosquito net usage, and youth employment, all collected via SMS polls.

The use of SMS makes the program available to all literate mobile users regardless of handset; says Blaschke,

08.28.11 AnneryanHeatwole Advocacy Citizen Media Democratic Participation

Mobile Anonymity and Censorship Circumvention: How to Browse the Web Anonymously On Your Phone

The first part of this article - Using HTTPS for Secure Mobile Browsing - describes how mobile browsing over HTTPS provides:

encryption for you data during transmission
verification of the identity of the remote site

However, using HTTPS does not hide your identity. If you don’t want someone to know that you were accessing a particular web site (or that you were accessing it at a particular time, such as when inflammatory content was posted), you need to anonymize your mobile browsing. Depending on how your network is set up, the site you are accessing may be able to see and keep a record of your IP address. Your network administrator, Internet Service Provider and/or Mobile Network Operator can see and keep records of the IP addresses of both your Internet-connected mobile device and the site you are accessing. IP addresses can nearly always be linked to a geographic location, whether a zip code or a city, and your ISP or mobile network provider can link your IP to your individual device.

Organisations and countries that block websites can do so by blocking communication to and from specific IP addresses. For this reason, anonymizing your browsing is also the first step to circumventing Internet censorship.

This article describes two tactics for anonymous browsing and censorship circumvention - using a proxy, and using a mobile version of the circumvention tool Tor. Both are used on cpmputers as well as mobile devices. Specific tools for mobile phones are described in the second part of the article.