December 2015 – Vera Wilde

Protect Tech Thought Leaders

True to his name, Lauri Love went AWOL (absent without leave) from the Finnish Army to care for a sick friend. Before formalizing his conscientious objector status in 2004, Love noticed what felt right about being a friend and caretaker — while also realizing what felt wrong, for him, about being a soldier. The soft-spoken son of a Baptist preacher and a Finnish teacher has since been intermittently plagued by a range of health problems of his own. Love’s struggles echo Aaron Swartz’s — and he is accused of participating in Anonymous’s digital political protest and mourning of Swartz’s death…

France Goes China: How to Enhance Your Information Security Anyway

Following China’s example, France has banned anonymizing software, open WiFi, and private cryptographic keys under the auspices of security. In the wake of the Paris attacks, several high-ranking American federal officials criticized surveillance roll-backs and suggested encryption should be banned despite no evidence that it played a role in the tragedy — to the contrary, the attackers in this case communicated in the clear, and the top intelligence lawyer recently lamented that the government lacks a single good example of terrorists relying on cryptography to do their dirty work.