July

ONGOING LOGIN TROUBLES

Our user authentication database for email users became corrupted recently. Unfortunately, the recent backups were also corrupted. We were faced with a choice of reverting to old data or trying to recover the current data. We attempted to recover the current data, but this has caused ongoing login problems.

Most of the time, if you cannot login you just need to try again later. If that does not work, please fill out a help ticket at http://help.riseup.net and we will try to fix your account as soon as possible.

Fear not! Our busy little birds are pecking away at the problem with great alacrity.

HOW TO ESCAPE THE EYE OF SAURON

On January 31, the Electronic Frontier Founding filed a class action lawsuit[1] against AT&T, accusing the telecom giant of running a massive dragnet to intercept and analyze internet traffic for the NSA.

On May 10, USAToday broke the story[2] that the NSA has a database designed to track every phone call ever made in the US.

If you put these two pieces of information together, what do you get? Lets just say that it is a safe bet that the NSA has more than phone calls on their sneaky minds.

There are many ways in which this kind of mapping of people’s associations and habits is far worse than traditional eavesdropping. By cataloging our associations, the government has an intimate picture of how our social movements are organized–a more detailed picture than even the social movements themselves are aware of.

This is bad. Really bad. The US government has a long track record of doing whatever it can to subvert, imprison, kill, or squash social movements which it sees as a threat (black power, anti-war, civil rights, anti-slavery, native rights, organized labor, and so on). And now they have all the tools they need to do this with blinding precision.

Fortunately, there is something you can do about it! Meet our little friend we call “StartTLS”. By encrypting the behind the scenes traffic among email providers, StartTLS allows you to send and receive email with a high confidence that no one is building a database of your associations.

Using PGP, GPG, or secure connections are all good things, but the only thing which protects you against an general “association mapping” dragnet is StartTLS.

This will only work, however, if both the sender and recipient use a mail provider which supports StartTLS. See this page for a listing of providers which use StartTLS:

http://help.riseup.net/security/measures/#use_secure_email_providers

Tell your friends and spread the word: StartTLS is the best thing since vegan brownies!

[1] http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/ [2] http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm

SEND OUR BIRD TO PGA

As many of you may know, Peoples' Global Action is holding a European conference in various decentralized sites throughout France. One of these sites will focus on the issues faced by those of us running autonomous servers.

Riseup sees this as a vital opportunity to collaborate with our European friends and allies. It is essential to our work that we are able to participate in the organizing of tech resistance on a wider scale.

Because of this, we have decided to fly one of our birds across the pond to chatter away with other birds of a feather. Unfortunately, the expenses are high and our funds are low!

It has been a few months since we sent out a newsletter, and donations have dropped off dramatically. If you want us to survive, we need your support, and we need your ongoing support. Please consider signing up for recurring donations: these donations sustain our services and keep the love flowing.

See http://riseup.net/donate for information on how to donate.

In solidarity, The Riseup Collective