How do we teach Digital Self-Defence?

Helen and Andy went out into Southampton's East Park for a day, collecting vox pops. These informal street-interviews were our own market research for the Cybershow podcast and our teaching activities.

Listen to the episode here:

The key questions were:

• Do you get the idea of personal cybersecurity or "digital self-defence"?
• Who would benefit most from it?
• Would you attend classes like that?
• Who can teach it?
• Who pays for it and how much should it cost?

East park is busy on a sunny September afternoon. We managed to interview over 20 groups or individuals ranging in age from about 17 to 85 and equally male and female. Of that sample, six representative speakers were selected for the episode, mostly on the grounds of audio legibility.

• Almost everybody thinks it's an amazing idea! A few are cynical and think it's too late, corporations are too powerful, or that cybercrime is inevitable.
• Most people identify other people as needing it, but not themselves.
• Nobody would pay for classes. It's something the government ought to pay for and sort out.
• A few people identify anything connected to "cybersecurity" to be suspicious and possibly a scam.

There are three parts to our analysis.

Kate Brown talks about the sense of non-ownership and dissociation of responsibility around tech. How can people ever feel a sense of care for things they see as instruments of control forced upon them?

An extended version of that discussion can be heard here

A technological society still relies primarily on assent, cooperation, and willing "enjoyment" of technology. Without that, in a world where people feel sick of dependency and "bullying" technology, things will start to rapidly fall apart.

Security Engineer Helen Plews looks at the decline of accessible education and our descent into info-populism of "bread and circuses". Helen exalts the format of "the show", and the power of mixing drama, comedy, music, light but penetrating discourse with complex technical education.

Meanwhile Ed and Andy review the vox-pops, eyeing the intel through practical, commercial and egalitarian optics. How do we build a school or even a movement around popularised personal cybersecurity?

Back in 2012 Andy Farnell was involved in running "hackathons" in London, in Shoreditch, at the old Foundary and Hackspace where lots of the London arts-hacker scene hung out, and at SAE, a digital arts school. Some of the focus was on helping people write their own software. But these classes also became about how to protect privacy, device security, and understanding cryptography. By 2016, in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, these had become "crypto parties". But the foundation of civic cybersecurity and the urgent, wider need for digital self-defence for everyone had not yet emerged.

During the 2019-2022 pandemic, a big change in working relations, the economy, the environment, and the political landscape took place. We've seen rising fascism and authoritarianism threatening human rights, civil liberties and free speech around the globe. A dangerous concentration of power in Big Tech and the normalisation of intrusive "surveillance capitalism" has laid waste to trusting, peacable and covivial human relations that we enjoyed in the last century.

We've moved from "It's more fun to compute" to "I have nothing to hide".

Meanwhile some teachers have been patiently experimenting with novel pedagogy, ways of teaching what we call "civic cybersecurity" and championing a new era of digital literacy that helps people to "take back technology". A paper from 2019 lays out some of the ideas and challenges:

http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf

Today that project continues via the Cybershow.

Whether it is giant corporations, cybercriminals or governments stealing our data and compromising our security, the cost to our economy and to democracy is the same. In a technological society, the infrastructure of liberal democratic life is now digital. Protecting that from all hostile actors becomes an urgent collective project, one in which the people, via grass-roots volition, must play an active part.

More about Digital Self-Defence with Andy's essays https://digitalselfdefence.org/content/about.html

Ed is writing a (very practical) book to help people https://cyberbook.net/

Helen is working on a powerful mini-series about systems theory and the timeless relevance of Dana Meadows. Get a preview here:

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