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Nico Sell is a US-based entrepreneur and activist for online privacy and secure digital communication. Sell is the CEO of Wickr, a private messaging app with watertight encryption technology. Messages sent using the app self-destruct after a length of time adjusted by the sender – from six days to one second – and are then overwritten by gibberish data on the sender’s and receiver’s phones, making them impossible to recreate.
“Wickr is a messaging app that allows you to send pictures, videos and files, but the only difference is that only you have the keys, so we don’t see who any of our users are, or what they are sending. We are essentially just a transports of gibberish, and it’s used by a lot of human rights fighters around the world for those reasons”, Sell told Index on Censorship.
Wickr’s secure encryption and lack of a central database distinguishes it from similar apps such as Snapchat, which was hacked in January 2014 and had its users’ details posted online. After the breach, downloads of Wickr increased by 50 per cent.
Files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency had covertly retrieved users’ personal data from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others. Many other countries were also shown to be extracting information from tech companies: the Venezuelan government, for example, has been accused of broadcasting human rights activists’ Skype calls on national television to intimidate them.
But Wickr was designed to run without a master key that could decrypt its users’ messages, which means it has no user information to hand over to the authorities if they demand it. Indeed, in early 2014 Sell rebuffed an FBI agent who informally requested that she implement a backdoor into Wickr, so that its data could be acquired if necessary.
Wickr has been downloaded more than three million times since launching in 2012. Since then it has added secure photo- and video-sending features. In December 2014 it was launched in desktop form. Sell hopes that billions of people will eventually use either Wickr or services incorporating it, and envisions its technology being used for “all the financial transactions in the world”.
Sell has also acted as a venture catalyst for more than 20 successful digital security companies and has co-organised Defcon, the largest hacker conference in the world, for over a decade. She is the group’s liaison with federal agencies seeking the services of white-hat hackers, who probe organisations’ websites for flaws in their security systems.
Sell told Index that she got involved with this field of work when was introduced to The Dark Tangent, founder of Defcon, about 15 years ago. She began working with him, and was “educated by the very best hackers in the world.”
“That’s where they taught me things like why lawful intercepts is something we don’t want to do, because if you can break into it, what that means is a backdoor for the good guys will always mean a backdoor for the bad guys,” she said.
“I think security and privacy naturally go in hand together, but I think just understanding the underlying technology and what’s going on making privacy obvious.”
Every year at Defcon, Sell runs a nonprofit training camp for children and teenagers called R00tz Asylum, which she is also CEO and co-founder of, in which digital skills such as white-hat hacking techniques are taught.
“So we teach them things like how to eavesdrop on cell phone calls, look at other people’s text messages that are going over the wireless network, turning on your interfacing camera on your computer or smartphone or smartTV, and how to break into lawful intercept machines,” Sell said. She added that the point of this, is that people need to understand hacks so that better systems can be built.
Sell raises awareness of the need for individuals to take more care over their digital privacy through frequent public engagement talks. At these talks, she hands out stickers for her audience to place over all their front-facing cameras. She also explains why she always wears sunglasses in public – to block facial recognition software – and keeps her phone and passport in an unhackable Faraday cage.
When asked about the relationship between online privacy and freedom of expression, Sell said:
“I think it’s vitally important. 52 per cent of the world still lives under dictatorship, and I think that what brought my founders together is that there was the belief that private correspondence is a universal human right, and in fact, the most important human right that we have for the next decade as we’re bringing all of these billions of people online and having a way for them to have private conversations without interference from government, or even a bigger threat, is corporations who are buying and selling this information.
“It’s our belief that if we can provide this vital right to everyone no matter our frontier, then we can have more evolution instead of revolution, because you don’t get pent up energy and people backed in a corner if there is open communication and education. So we think it’s vitally important in society as we all get connected over the next decade.”
This article was posted on 12 March 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
Californian legislators have come up with a plan that would help teenagers delete their online presence, or at least the parts that are held by social media sites.
It’s an incredibly tempting notion: as the Independent’s Grace Dent points wrote this week:
If only I could have rounded up my past in binliner at 18 and set it alight. All those love letters, declaring undying love now sitting in the lofts of boys I can’t remember the names of, the missing diaries, the angry letters sent to the NME, some petulant letters sent to Mars Inc. about the Marathon to Snickers name change. How lovely if aged 18, following a short button pressing ceremony I was officially no longer a twerp.”
Dent is writing about a teenage past pretty much pre-Internet, never mind pre-smartphone with 8 megapixel camera. I’m of the same vintage. There’s really very, very little of young me out there. Thank God.
It is different of course for teens today, who innocently post vast amounts of information about themselves online. We’re beginning to see the repercussions of that. Cast your mind back to earlier this year and the case of 17-year-old Paris Brown, the recently elected youth police and crime commissioner for Kent, who lost her salaried job after someone dug up a few stupid things she’d posted on Twitter a few years previously. It’s depressing that people can be so unforgiving of children.
Much worse, Texan teenager Justin Carter could face jail after being charged with making “terroristic threats” during a Facebook argument about a video game.
Could an erase button solve any of this? I’m not sure. It is possible to get rid of one’s Facebook and Twitter accounts already, but will it be possible to erase all the mentions? The tagged photos and endless other footprints left online? I’m not so sure.
Moreover, I don’t know if it’s a really positive idea. If the web is to be part of everyday life, which we seem to want to encourage, then how does this initiative, essentially creating two different lifetimes, work?
At an Index on Censorship discussion on young people’s free speech online last Monday, an interesting idea emerged: should the joys and dangers of social media be taught in school? Like sexual education is taught? Social media, like sex, is part of life and people should be taught about it sensibly. The worry with a button that effectively erases one’s adolescence is that it may mean we avoid talking about positive social media use for teens in the first place.
On top of all this is broader society. Should we not be a little more forgiving of young people’s indiscretions? A little less judgmental?
We should be able to to delete information we’ve put online about ourselves, absolutely. But we should also be creating an atmosphere where young people don’t feel the need to take the nuclear option and erase years of thoughts, ideas and memories.
This article was originally published on 27 Sept 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
In February 2010, a group of 11 students disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador to the United States. They shouted protest slogans for 20 minutes before they were arrested during Michael Oren’s hour-long speech at the University of California Irvine’s campus . Last week, ten of the students went on trial for misdemeanor charges of “conspiring to disturb a meeting” and “disturbing a meeting”, they face up to six months in prison.
Both parties believe that their First Amendment right to free speech was trampled on in the incident. Prosecutors said that the disruption prevented attendants from being able to listen to Oren. The student’s defence attorneys argue that the students were expressing their views, and their prosecution violates their right to freedom of expression. On Tuesday (13 Sept), the defence argued that Oren actually left the lecture because he’d been given VIP tickets to a Lakers game — he was pictured with Kobe Bryant — rather because he felt threatened by the protesting students as the prosecution claims.
With the frequency of student protests on university campuses, the severity of the potential sentence is mystifying. John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, pointed out the regularity of these kinds of protests on university campuses across the nation, including the UC Irvine campus, where a Muslim speaker was kept from speaking back in 2001. Others have pointed out the waste of taxpayer’s money, especially after the university already disciplined the students, handing them 100 hours of community service, two years of probation, and a quarter-long suspension of the Muslim Students Association.
The authorities insist that the student’s religious beliefs have nothing to do with the case, but according to Dan Mayfield, the attorney of one of the students, prosecutors were able to illegally obtain search warrants through focusing on the religion of the students, even going as far as calling the case the “UCI Muslim case”. As a part of the jury selection process, potential jurors were required to fill out an eight-page questionnaire, which asked questions about their views on the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, as well as whether or not they “harbour negative feelings towards Muslims”.
Focusing on the role of Islam in the prosecution of the students could easily turn the conversation into one about freedom of religion, which is not necessarily interchangeable with freedom of expression. What must be protected is the right of students to express their views, regardless of what they might be.
The state-owned California Science Center has been embroiled for two years in a legal dispute over a documentary critiquing evolution. The American Freedom Alliance, which says it “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals” — apparently, among them, the dubious scientific theory of Intelligent Design — originally sought to air the film in the rented science center’s IMAX theatre in 2009.
The museum eventually canceled the documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record, for fear of appearing to endorse its claims. The American Freedom Alliance then sued, arguing that the government-run science center had violated the First Amendment by showing preference for one viewpoint (evolution) over another (intelligent design, generally considered to be a more publicly palatable version of religious-based creationism).
Last week the two reached a settlement: The science center is paying the American Freedom Alliance $110,000 to end the dispute, although, as the Los Angeles Times has pointed out, neither party is admitting wrongdoing in the unusual agreement. As part of the settlement, the science center agreed to invite the film back for a screening, and the American Freedom Alliance agreed to turn the invitation down.
Intelligent Design advocates are properly claiming victory, although their logic is slightly flawed. Said William J. Becker, Jr., the alliance’s lawyer: “It’s a vindication for ID, and First Amendment guarantees of free speech.”
While the latter may be true, the settlement hardly confers on intelligent design some new respectability in the eyes of public institutions. The notion that government may not suppress or favor the expression of certain ideas has nothing to do with whether or not those ideas have any merit.