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Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
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Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance May 9, 2017 7.07am BST
Is someone watching while you work? Jay Moff/flickr
Email
Surveillance has become so ubiquitous that it appears likely that Russia was caught
Twitter
in the act conspiring to fix the 2016 United States presidential election, and at least
Facebook
one of his staffers was basically overheard conspiring with them.
LinkedIn Print
Politicians aren’t the only ones being watched. Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations
Author
Sara Koopman
Research Associate, Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere
detailing the US National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance have made clear that, these days, everyone should be thinking about privacy and security.
Disclosure statement
That includes academics, some of whom are undertaking sensitive, even dangerous, research. How can we work safely and ethically in an era of internet spying and
Sara Koopman is affiliated with the
wiretapping?
Geography and is an Assistant
Weaponising
group Canadian Woman and Professor of Geography at York
your
own
research
This question is particularly salient for scholars who work on peace and justice
https://theconversation.com/weaponised-research-how-to-keep-you-and-your-sources-safe-in-the-age-of-surveillance-75124[2017-05-09, 3:20:56 PM]
University.
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Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
organising: recent leaks confirm that the military (or the police) may not only be reading your published work – they could also be tracking your online activity,
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monitoring your whereabouts and even listening in on your conversations.
RCUK, The Nuffield Foundation, The
from Hefce, Hefcw, SAGE, SFC, Ogden Trust, The Royal Society, The
Exposed files from the IT security company the Hacking Team confirm that its
Wellcome Trust, Esmée Fairbairn
software is widely used around the world to listen to ambient conversations held in a
Evidence, as well as sixty five
Foundation and The Alliance for Useful university members.
room with a cell phone, even when it is off.
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Cory Doctorow
@doctorow
Follow
Hacking Team leak: bogus copyright takedowns and mass DEA surveillance in Colombia #1yragoboingboing.net/2015/07/07/hac… 4:00 AM - 8 Jul 2016
2
11
That opens up the ethically distressing possibility that your research can be weaponised – used by armed actors do to harm. Geographers are particularly vulnerable to this threat. In 2007, the American Anthropological Association denounced the US Army’s Human Terrain Systems, which embeds social scientists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, as “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise”. Since then, the US military’s attempts to know (and control) the so-called human terrain have shifted to geography. Even the highly critiqued term “human terrain” has been widely replaced with the term “human geography”. As a result, we see a fast-growing trend of geographers being offered military funding for research, often through front organisations such as the US Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative. The army’s new favour for geographers was reinforced when the American Association of Geographers (AAG) for years refused to take action on a militaryrelated scandal. Researchers led by Peter Herlihy at the University of Kansas who were doing participatory mapping with indigenous groups in Oaxaca, Mexico, failed to disclose both their US military funding and the fact that they were thus sharing
https://theconversation.com/weaponised-research-how-to-keep-you-and-your-sources-safe-in-the-age-of-surveillance-75124[2017-05-09, 3:20:56 PM]
Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
research findings with their donors. That’s unethical anywhere, but it’s particularly problematic in Oaxaca: the US military likely shared that detailed GIS information about Zapoteco communities with the Mexican military, which has long repressed those indigenous communities. In early April 2017, the AAG finally agreed to form a study group to examine the issue of ties between their discipline and the US, UK and NATO armed forces.
Research
hack
Even if you’re an academic who doesn’t accept military funding, your findings may already have been added to the military’s huge databases without you knowing it (the citation is unlikely to come up in a Google Scholar search). Karen Morin of Bucknell University, for example, discovered that her chapter on interpreting landscape had been cited in a Marines operational guide. Its subject: reading the cultural landscape correctly can enable troops to immediately control a population upon arrival.
You never know who’s listening in. EUCOM
It is very hard to track down this sort of misappropriation of your work. But you can keep it in mind when publishing. Ask yourself: who might want this information, and could it in any way be used to do harm? Academics should also be aware that unpublished research data can also be hacked. I found this out the hard way, when the email account of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a group that I was doing research with and regularly emailing, was hacked by Colombian intelligence and their emails used to prosecute a human rights activist on trumped-up charges.
https://theconversation.com/weaponised-research-how-to-keep-you-and-your-sources-safe-in-the-age-of-surveillance-75124[2017-05-09, 3:20:56 PM]
Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
Protect
yourself
(and
your
sources)
These basic steps can prevent your data being similarly hacked and misused. 1) Add two-step verification to your email. For Gmail, simply select this option under preferences under security, and then when you log in from a new computer it will ask you to enter a code texted to your phone. You can also download a list of ten backup codes to use when you are away from cell coverage.
Two-step verification on Gmail. Screenshot/google.com
2) Encrypt your computer. Or, more realistically, encrypt one folder on it, which is where you will store those backup codes and other secure information. Beware that encryption will slow older computers down. Also encrypt all data every time you do a backup, and set up twostep verification on backups. 3) Put away your phone. You can now record long interviews on most phones. But if you at all suspect that the content of that interview could be misused in any way, by anyone, and particularly by armed actors, use a small digital recorder instead. Pixabay
4) Get away from your phone. Simply turning off your phone is not enough; hackers can still record ambient conversations. A safer bet is to keep the phone outside of the room. (Remember to also take along another timepiece if you usually depend on your phone for that.) 5) Destroy the evidence. When your write field notes by hand, snap a photo of them and save the images behind encryption, then destroy your hard paper copy. Do I sound paranoid? Most researchers, after all, are hardly embarking on James Bond-like missions. Think what you like, but recent revelations have shown that governments around the world have purchased software for listening to conversations in the room through your smart phone.
Edward Snowden
@Snowden
Follow
One month apart, @CIA and @NSAGov had "nobody but us" surveillance tools stolen. The "lawful access" debate is over.motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/… 11:00 PM - 14 Apr 2017
https://theconversation.com/weaponised-research-how-to-keep-you-and-your-sources-safe-in-the-age-of-surveillance-75124[2017-05-09, 3:20:56 PM]
Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
Your Government's Hacking Tools Are Not Safe
From Cellebrite, to Shadow Brokers, to the CIA dump, so many recent data breaches have shown there is a real risk of exposure of motherboard.vice.com
1,957
2,151
The community organisers, political activists, rogue scientists, indigenous rights defenders and environmentalists we routinely talk to as part of our research can become targets of government retaliation. Given the high levels of surveillance and the growing weaponisation of research, caution is warranted. What it means to do ethical research has changed, and that should be reflected in both our own research methods and our methods classes.
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Weaponised research: how to keep you and your sources safe in the age of surveillance
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