Summary
The practice and pedagogy of protecting activists, their data, devices, communications and organisations from digital surveillance, harassment, and attack.
Body
The practice and pedagogy of protecting activists, their data, devices, communications and organisations from digital surveillance, harassment, and attack.
Digital security for activists covers threat modelling, account and device hygiene, secure communications (Signal, encrypted email), data minimisation, two-factor authentication, and organisational incident response. Tactical Tech produces the canonical practitioner material — Data Detox, Glass Room, and the Holistic Security Manual — translated into many languages [source: tactical-tech]. Blueprints for Change publishes practical security guides for US organisers, with attention to the legal context (can a border agent compel device access? what is the Fifth Amendment reach?) [source: blueprints-for-change]. The Civic Tech Field Guide places digital-security tooling within the broader civic-tech stack and points to vetted implementations [source: civic-tech-field-guide]. For the threat-modelling discipline itself, Tactical Tech’s Holistic Security is the standard reference — start with the question “who might want what we have, and what would happen if they got it?” before picking tools.
Digital-security tooling sits within the broader civic-tech stack mapped by the Civic Tech Field Guide directory [source: civic-tech].
Use it for
Running a digital-security training for activists; assessing an organisation’s threat model; responding to a doxxing or account-compromise incident.
Related
- civic-tech
- tactical-tech
- distributed-organizing
- blueprints-for-change
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- sources/tactical-tech — grounding: secondary — RAW (588 chars)
- sources/blueprints-for-change — grounding: secondary — RAW (218 chars)
- sources/civic-tech-field-guide — grounding: secondary — RAW (5392 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.