May

Love to Bradley Manning

Our hearts go out to Bradley Manning as he starts to go to trial in a U.S. military court. His brave and lovely whistle-blowing daylighted so many shadows of the United State’s strong-armed diplomacy in the Middle East and atrocities of the Iraq and Afghani War.

We wanted to remind people that Manning got caught because he told a supposed friend (Adrian Lamo), what he had done. This is in no way to blame Manning, but a reminder that good security culture is not just using good encryption or safer technology, but applies to all human communications.

A Reminder of Why we do what we do…

When people start to learn about the rise in surveillance in our communication technologies and all the freaky data-gathering and tracking governments and corporations are doing, they can feel overwhelmed – who wouldn’t?

Some decide that it is impossible to be secure, so they resign themselves to live under perpetual surveillance and hope for the best (what could go wrong?) Some decide to forsake all forms of digital communication and give up one of the most powerful movement-organizing tools in the history of the planet (at least in our opinion).

At Riseup, we believe in and work toward a third option: our goal is to make a high degree of security easy and accessible, where you don’t have to be a huge encryption nerd to have communication privacy. Riseup focuses on new technology creation, because we believe that a new technical reality is necessary for the health and safety of our social movements. We also think it’s cool that you are working with us toward this new reality, and hope you talk to your friends and allies about being safe/safer in their digital communication.

News from the Collective

We have three new additions to the Riseup Collective. Snow Owl has added a four-legged mutt to his household who enjoys long walks through the city and smelling things. Pigeon and Waxwing have added a two-legged human to their nest who enjoys sleeping through noisy situations and doing Winston Churchill impersonations. Gadfly and Arara have a feline friend who likes critiquing neoliberalism and snuggling with her peoples.

Thank you

Thank you so much for supporting Riseup! We’ve been around a surprising thirteen years now, and all the radical, fiery, and young Riseup hackers are getting wrinkles and grey hairs, and wondering how it is that we still get to work on this fun, annoying, and beautiful project that costs a lot of money just to keep our machines running. So thanks for your ongoing, and generous support. And if you can, if you are able, donate to Riseup today, https://riseup.net/donate.