Here are some quick tech tips and tricks to help you improve your organising capacity and simultaneously protect yourself from state and corporate surveillance.
Mailing lists can be frustrating especially if you are signed up to many different lists. We would recommend setting up a completely separate email address for your organising activities to keep your union activities separate from your day to day email usage.
This also gives you a degree of separation from your personal identity, which isn't the same as anonymity but can be useful in an organising context.
You can also decide whether you want your union email address to be on your various devices. A lot of people don't want all their union emails to come to their phone constantly and prefer to catch up on emails when they feel comfortable and able.
Some alternative email services that you might consider:
- Posteo (Paid service)
- Proton Mail (Paid service with free tier)
- RiseUp (Donations)
- Espiv (Donations)
- Autistici (Donations)
- Mailbox (Paid service)
- Aktivix (Donations)
You can also request a iww.org.uk email. We recommend that you use Thunderbird to access your IWW email as the webmail we currently have sucks.
Thunderbird should automatically guess all your details apart from your username which has to be formatted in a specific way. If your email address is [email protected] then your username will be example.iww.org.uk. Notice the "." rather than an "@".
Further information can be found here.
Once you have your email account setup in Thunderbird you can start using mails filters to automatically sort your incoming emails into different folders based on a specific criteria.
The
documentation
for this process is kind of crappy but you can get started by going to Tools > Message > Filters in the menu and create a new filter.
However, email a somewhat archaic system and was never designed with security in mind. If you require secure communications and believe us you do, you should use end to end encryption. In other words, strong mathematics that ensure that only the intended recipients can read your messages and no one is able to snoop on them in the middle.
The easiest way of setting up a secure means of talking is by using Signal which is available on Android, iOS and as a Chrome App. If you and your friends both install the app and share phone numbers then you can exchange messages and calls with all the modern features you'd expect such as video, pictures group chats and disappearing messages but with open source encryption technology protecting you.
The design of the Signal protocol is so highly regarded that WhatsApp recently incorporated it into their app, bringing end to end encryption to over 1.2 billion people around the globe.
Download Signal or find out more.
The WISE-RA tech department have also just launched a new chat platform called WobChat based upon the open source RocketChat software.
You can use it to communicate and connect with members from around the UK and Ireland. There are many different "channels" or chat rooms for different topics. If you need to start your own channel for a project, you can just do it without waiting for anyone. There is file sharing, video conferencing and many other slick features.
To login, simply visit chat.iww.org.uk and login with your members area details.
There are also apps available for a variety of platforms including Android and iOS. You can download them here.
Hopefully this has given you some tools for improving your comms setup. There are many resources out there where you can learn more and become a kick ass Industrial Worker of the World Wide Web!
Check out these sites for further info about tools for increasing your privacy and security: