Updates from Patrick RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• When It Comes to Human Rights, There Are No Online Security Shortcuts 

  Patrick Permalink
  7:37 am on 08/10/2012  

  Lots of people in the world depend on electronic security. That means it has to be seriously strong, and I have been worrying that lots of folks — esp media folks — are eager for easy-to-use shortcuts, even if those shortcuts aren’t actually secure. CryptoCat is one such shortcut, as was Hushmail, and I believe neither are adequate for the hard case of protecting human rights information. There are solid security solutions, though we have a long way to go to improve user interfaces and overall user experience.

  View Link [wired.com]

• Guatemalan police archive goes online 

  Patrick Permalink
  1:18 pm on 04/26/2012 | TECH ( 1,148 )   

  More than 10 million images from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police (AHPN in the Spanish acronym) are now online at the University of Texas. Documents from the Archive start in the late nineteenth century and continue until the Police were disbanded in 1996. Scholars using the documents have detailed the role of the National Police in illegal surveillance and attacks on dissidents during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict, scientists have used sampling and statistics to find patterns in the Archive that illuminate how command works, and prosecutors have won convictions of former police officers for disappearances that were unsolved for decades. Several retired officers from the senior leadership of the Police, including the former Director, Col. Héctor Bol de la Cruz, have been charged with overseeing disappearances in the 1980s, and are likely to stand trial. Now the AHPN is putting the entire archive online, unredacted, so that the world can learn from Guatemala’s example.

  View Link [ahpn.lib.utexas.edu]