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Last weekend I was in NULLCON at Goa. It is India's one of the largest security conferences. This year, Micah Lee was the keynote speaker, and he spoke about all the alleged whistleblowers who were prosecuted during the Trump era.

From the last year, the NULLCON organizers are also focused on a special track for media and activists, Micah also did the opening talk in the track, and after that, we had a panel (co-hosted with Hasgeek, organized by Zainab, Anwesha) on the “Anatomy of Internet Shutdowns”, the four panelists were Arjun Venkatraman, Prateek Waghre, Raman Jit Singh Chima, Shehla Rashid Shora. The panelists spoke about the situation in India (which has the world's highest number of shutdowns), and issues people face during the shutdowns.

After the panel, Saikat Datta talked about “Surveillance and journalism”, with many practical examples. The rest of the day, I had my “Digital Security workshop” for the journalists. We went through the basics and also answered the specific questions people had.

I want to especially thank Antriksh, and Prateek and the rest of organizers of NULLCON as they provided this safe space for the journalists and activists to meet, and discuss issues.

If you read the Caravan story about one of the activists from the Bhima-koregaon case you will see the kind of the environment (both legal and digital security-wise) our activists go through. There is a clear presence of malware, and the police decided to skip it altogether.

This also brings our attention to the fights for privacy, and online freedom, especially the Internet Freedom Foundation. We never had a similar organization in India, which works on digital rights and Internet era. To keep the fight on, the organization needs more regular donor members. To all of my Indian readers, if you can, please support the organization by becoming a donor member. The team there is doing an amazing job and needs our support in every way possible.

If you want to discuss any of these topics, hop on to the Freenode server (IRC), and come to the #learnandteach channel. Or you can find me on fediverse https://toots.dgplug.org/@kushal.

Kushal