There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens -- restoring the privacy of having a conversation in your living room and having your personal records stay personal are core first and fourth amendment rights which have suffered greatly in the digital age.

My work takes me around the world to support journalists, human rights activists, and a wide variety of amazing people working to improve the world. They are all facing incredible threats posed by powerful actors. These adversaries use malware, hacking, and all forms of digital attacks to compromise the networks of activists.

Open source, trusted, strong cryptographic tools -- and increasingly, trusted commercial systems such as Google's -- are their only available defense, in situations where failure can include targeted harassment, indefinite imprisonment, torture, and even death.

Encryption saves lives.

The product description on the left is from George Orwell's 1984's telescreen. On the right, we have Intel's ad-targeting, face-recognizing TV.

Speculative fiction nailed reality, but missed the target on who was doing the spying.

The title here is, of course, from a later passage:

Social change takes trust. You trust the thought leaders of the movement, you trust some set of information around the issue, you trust those who work with you to support you and not to expose anyone to undue risk.

Social change also takes privacy. If you are really pushing boundaries, you are at risk - of physical violence, imprisonment, or worse. There's value in being very public in this space as well, but that doesn't mean there's not a stage where protecting yourself through some layer of privacy is a better plan.

Social change also takes voice - citizen media platforms, and use of existing social networking sites which already have global scale and the ability to amplify a message.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bickering around privacy, pseudonymity, and social networks - Facebook naturally, but even Google Plus is blocking pseudonyms from using the site reliably. I got tired of re-hashing the very valuable differences between using one's own name, being completely anonymous, and using a pen name - a well-storied way of getting an idea out while saving one's own neck:

No one could see that coming!

Wired reminds us that we can rail against and complain about the intrusive, privacy-destroying and free-speech-threatening monitoring that Iran has been employing against the protestors over the past few months, but we have to remember two things. First, US and European companies provided the hardware and software to Iran for them to do this. Second - our own government does the same thing, and we should stop it.

Regarding the first problem, bipartisan Senators are proposing a ban on government contracts to companies caught selling such technology to Iran, and it's technically illegal for US companies anyhow (which might not be stopping everyone, and appears to be using Secure Computing's (now McAfee) SmartFilter according to the Open Net Initiative's testing.

iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes:

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/digital-security/

It covers a lot of ground, balancing ease of use against level of security, and is looking for input!

The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection, and comments:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

Other coverage at Global Voices and Daily Kos present videos and links to photos of protests coming from Tehran.