EFF's Seth Schoen and April Glaser will be presenting at LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation's annual conference for free software enthusiasts. LibrePlanet brings together software developers, policy experts, activists and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments and face challenges to software freedom.
This year, the theme of LibrePlanet is "Free Software, Free Society." How can free software protect journalists, whistleblowers, activists, and regular computer users from government and corporate surveillance? How can free software, or free software values like copyleft, community development, and transparency, be used by people fighting to create free societies around the world? What challenges are standing between us and our goal of free software ubiquity?
"What does this program do? Reproducible builds, transparency, and freedom"
Today we often use binaries that someone claims were built from particular source code, but we usually have no way to check that the source and binaries we've been actually given correspond to one another. We rely on someone's say-so, and they might be wrong! Software developers and the infrastructure used to create and distribute software are significant targets of attack. We need ways to give everybody meaningful assurances about the provenance and integrity of the software they use.
"Tracking changes: activists using free software across movements"
For years activists have been using free software tools in their efforts to organize and build movements. This panel brings together organizers from the media justice and digital rights movements that all rely on the use of free software in their advocacy and essential communications. The centrality of technology to all projects of social change means that even in the seemingly passive use of proprietary software (like emailing a Microsoft Word document or sharing a Google spreadsheet) we are complicit with a copyright regime that locks millions of people into long-term relationships with companies that restrict and surveil users. We will explore how activists use free software and how the adoption of free software has helped or impeded advocacy and networking efforts across disparate campaigns and initiatives.
