Awareness – nathan's open ideals

Combating “Fake News” With a Smartphone “Proof Mode”

We have been working for many years with our partners at WITNESS, a leading human rights media training and advocacy organization, to figure out how best to turn smartphone cameras into tools of empowerment for activists. While it is often enough to use the visual pixels you capture to create awareness or pressure on an issue, sometimes you want those pixels to actually be treated as evidence. This means, you want people to trust what they see, to know it hasn’t been tampered with, and to believe that it came from the time, place and person you say it came from.

Enter, ProofMode, a light, minimal “reboot” of our more heavyweight, verified media app, CameraV. Our aim was to create a lightweight (< 3MB!), almost invisible utility (minimal battery impact!), that you can run all of the time on your phone (no annoying notifications or popups), that automatically adds extra digital proof data to all photos and videos you take. This data can then be easily shared, when you really need it, through a “Share Proof” share action, to anyone you choose over email or a messaging app, or uploaded to a cloud service or reporting platform.

On the technical front, what the app is doing is automatically generating an OpenPGP key for this installed instance of the app itself, and using that to automatically sign all photos and videos at time of capture. A sha256 hash is also generated, and combined with a snapshot of all available device sensor data, such as GPS location, wifi and mobile networks, altitude, device language, hardware type, and more. This is also signed, and stored with the media. All of this happens with no noticeable impact on battery life or performance, every time the user takes a photo or video. We have been running it for months on fairly old, low end phones, and you just forget it is happening.

While we are very proud of the work we did with the CameraV and InformaCam projects, the end results was a complex application and proprietary data format that required a great deal of investment by any user or community that wished to adopt it. Furthermore, it was an app that you had to decide and remember to use, in a moment of crisis. With ProofMode, we both wanted to simplify the adoption of the tool, and make it nearly invisible to the end-user, while making it the adoption of the tool by organizations painless through simple formats like CSV and known formats like PGP signatures.

The source and direct APK downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/guardianproject/proofmode

The beta release is also available today for Android phones on Google Play. We hope to have an iPhone version in beta in the next few months.

We have also published a sample batch proof data set on Github here: https://github.com/guardianproject/proofmode/tree/master/samples/sample-proof-1

Our design goals included the following:

Run all of the time in the background without noticeable battery, storage or network impact
Provide a no-setup-required, automatic new user experience that works without requiring training
Use strong cryptography for strong identity and verification features, but not encryption
Produce “proof” sensor data formats that can be easily parse, imported by existing tools (CSV)
Do not modify the original media files; all proof metadata storied in separate file
Support chain of custody needs through automatic creation of sha256 hashes and PGP signatures
Do not require a persistent identity or account generation

We also were able to take advantage of the new Android “Quick Settings” developer API, to add a ProofMode toggle button right along side other system functions like Wifi, Location, Bluetooth and more. This fulfills a vision that WITNESS has had for a while in mainstreaming the concept of our prototype into mainstream adoption, giving every citizen journalist a quick mode to activate when their moment arrives.

You can read a bit more in the project README on the workflow we imagine being used for all of this. What we hope is that the ProofMode app is simple and low impact enough that potential users will install and forget that it is there. It will go along doing its business quietly without fuss, until the users realizes they have taken a photo or video that might have some value as digital evidence. Then, using the SHARE PROOF action, send their proof data set off to an organization, journalist, lawyer, or other advocate that would be able to verify the chain of custody and integrity of the files and proof using off the shelf OpenPGP and CSV visualization tools. While we have a bit more work to do on the last part, we already have many partners in the human rights world who are skilled and capable of doing just that.

If you’d like to learn more about the CameraV app and our collaboration with WITNESS and Coletivo Papo Reto video activist group in Brazil, please watch this video below from the Al Jazeera “Rebel Geeks” documentary.

Message me on Keybase

I’ve started using Keybase Chat, and I am really enjoying it. It combines Slack and Dropbox, with end-to-end encryption, all without needing a phone number or “real name”. Send me a message and say hello!

At Keybase we collectively use and love WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, and iMessage, to name a few. However, in all those apps: recipients are looked up by phone number or email.That works ok with friends and coworkers.But it sucks with people you know on the Internet. First off, they have to give you their phone number in a preliminary back and forth. That takes time and prevents you from sending your message until you hear back.Then, to make sure you’re really secure, you’re supposed to compare special codes by meeting in person. That’s impossible in most cases.Keybase is different. For example, in Keybase chat, I can simply use my Hacker News name, malgorithms, as my secure address; no phone number or email needed. My Twitter username would work, too. Or even my Reddit username.

Source: Introducing Keybase Chat

Getting Signal on a PocketCHIP

I’m a big fan of the NextThingCo and their $9 CHIP computer for the simultaneously radical and practical approach to hardware manufacturing and low cost computing. Being a fairly early backer of their crowdfunding effort, I was able to get the super fun PocketCHIP dock/case/shell, as well, which looks like a cross between a Blackberry and a Gameboy, with all the circuitous guts exposed. The PocketCHIP is an open-source, handheld, portable computing device, with built-in Wifi and Bluetooth, a hilariously difficult keyboard, and a not so terrible battery. While I have tried to find legitimate uses for it in my day to day toolkit, including as an IoT monitoring terminal for a car’s ODB2 port, I have mostly just carried it to remind myself that the future of mobile computing could be one based on open-source hardware, software and an infinite variety of 3D-printed form factors.

Now, in the last few days, I have become a big fan of Signal-CLI, a Java-based command line interface to the Signal Messenger service. On this very blog, I wrote post on how you can easily send batched encrypted broadcast messages from a terminal shell using it. Then, tonight, I was looking at my PocketCHIP, and I had a moment of inspiration, when I realized that I could easily “apt-get install” java onto it, and by extension run Signal-CLI. This means that I could turn my underused PocketCHIP into a portable, open device upon which to send and receive encrypted messages to anyone in the world who also had Signal.

To make a long story short, it works! I installed Java (“apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless”), I downloaded the latest Signal-CLI releases (“wget https://tinyurl.com/signalcli035”), unpacked it (“tar xzvf… ” yada yada), and then ran the signal-cli command line. From there, you just follow the simple instructions provided on Github for registering and verifying, and away you go! I used a Google Voice number to handle receiving the SMS verification code. You could also use any landline or payphone – you just need something that can receive a text or voice call. Make sure to follow all the Signal safety tips, as well!

With Signal-CLI, you can send and receive messages, create and manage groups, and even list and verify safety number “keys”. The limited processing power and memory on the PocketCHIP does cause each command to take a few seconds, but that can be worked around. I can easily imaging an ELM or PINE style user interface for this, that would hide all of that fetching and receiving in a background process.

So, now my PocketCHIP is on Signal, and it has become infinitely more useful. Oh, and did I mention, it also runs Tor? Who is up for writing Ricochet-CLI?

Dwarf Fortress OS: Security through Insanity?

I want to design a new operating system whose entire user interface is based on navigating through an instance of Dwarf Fortress, you know just for fun. It would be like bringing back Norton Commander, but with a user experience designed by George R.R. Martin. If you wanted access to my data, you must be prepared to go on a quest!

Update: apparently someone on Reddit has already begun this critical work!

The goal of course, would be to make it that much more fun for people who want to inspect your laptop at border crossings and other powerless zones within 100 miles of a border.

When asked by an inspecting officer of some kind “What the hell is this?!”, you can then spout bardic verses such as these when describing how to navigate to your sensitive email, documents, contacts and other magical treasure:

“Of easy passage to the prize, I did not promise,” said the stranger. “Through haunted woods we must go, there to find the elf princess to join our quest, then through the savage plains to the dwarf fortress, to find the dwarf champion and learn the location of the final prize. The path will be fraught with danger, for we cannot make this journey alone.”

What to do when the internet goes down?

From CBC’s Spark radio show:

There are lots of reasons you can find yourself offline: a natural disaster, government censorship, or simply a flaky ISP. Nathan Freitas researches alternative network technologies, and he knows first-hand what it’s like to not have internet access — he was in New York City during 911 and for the major power outage in 2004, he was in Boston during the marathon bombings and he’s lived in remote parts of Nepal.

That got Nathan thinking about alternatives to the internet — ways that small groups of people can set up their own peer-to-peer networks, from the bottom up. He thinks there are lots of ways you can share digital information without ever going online, and he calls this kind of ad-hoc sharing “Wind.”