User:Digi-ark/draft-journalists-digisec

Sources to add:
 * UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity

= Digital security of journalists= Surveillance, data storage capabilities and digital attack technologies are becoming more sophisticated, less expensive and more pervasive, making journalists increasingly vulnerable to digital attacks from both state and Non-state actors.

With the widespread availability of surveillance software and hardware, in a number of states across multiple regions, broadly defined legislative acts have been seen by some as working to silence digital dissent, prosecute whistle blowers and expand arbitrary surveillance across multiple digital platforms.

= Source protection in the digital age =

Source protection is regarded as a moral imperative in the realm of journalism, but in an everonment where most communications are mediated by digital technology

Chilling effects on sources
In the wake of the Snowden revelations in june 2016 the general public became aware of the mass surveillance that predeted the western world. The chiling effects are a follow up on the realization that if one is being surveilled then one might bastain from doing certain things and it has demonstrated the chillings effects do play a significant role in self-censorship in access to information.

In the case journalistic sources, chilling effects are the consequence of a source understanding that everything they share with a journalist might be surveilled by a governmental intelligence agency and thus inhibit the potential source from becoming a whistleblower.

In a report made by Human Rights Watch in 2014, where interviews were conducted with 46 national security journalists in the USA, it was concluded that sources were less willing give out information to journalists, even when it relates to non-classified documents.

Projects like SecureDrop aim to help mitigate the surveillability of source-journalist interactions.

= Threats =

Surveillance
Digital communications are by definition mediated by electronic networks, which means that by controlling the means of communication a powerful organization may be able to see who talks to who, about

Metadata collection
Metadata is information about information. If a phone call is the data itself, then the metadata is who called who, for how long and from where. The concealment of this information is vital for source protection and encryption does not solve the problem. Education is required to instruct journalists on how metadata is collected and how it can be mitigated.

Cyber-harassment
In late 2016, the International Press Institute launched the OnTheLine database, a project that aims to systematically monitor online harassment of journalists as a response to their reporting. As of July 2017, the project had collected 1,065 instances of online harassment in the two countries (Turkey and Austria) in which the project collected data. In Pakistan, the Digital Rights Foundation has launched the country's first cyber harassment helpline for journalists, which aims to provide legal advice, digital security support, psychological counselling and a referral system to victims. As of May 2017, the helpline handled a total of 563 cases since its launch six months earlier, with 63 per cent of calls received from women and 37 per cent from men. Research undertaken by Pew Research Center indicated that 73 per cent of adult internet users in the United States had seen someone be harassed in some way online and 40 per cent had personally experienced it, with young women being particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking.

= Digital security trainings for journalists = Due ot th

= Challenges = Making journalists safer has its own set of challenges. The guide "SaferJoruno" produced by Internews has summarized some of the challenges and other key issues have also been highlighted by research in the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Usability (PETs and Usability).

Poor usability of some security tools
Since its origins security tools have had usability problems as they were typically designed for people who already understood security concepts and issues (expert users). But in order for journalists and other at-risk populations to have access to security software usability is a requirement. The stragegy of making already usable software more secure has proven effective with the key example being popular messaging services like the Signal and Whatsapp's introduction of end-to-end encryption.

Lack of financial resources
With the advent of the Internet disruption of the traditional media happened both on the dissemination of news and well as in the typical funding source from advertisers.

With the need for fundamental restructuring of many news organizations suffer from finantial restrictions which further limits the software that can be acquired and the training that can be provided.

The software used tends to be free and open source (FOSS) for security reasons, but also for the financial limations of the newsroom and the low/no cost of FOSS, which can also lead to problems of the financial sustainability of said software projects.

Lack of publicly available data on attacks
Data on historical attacks on journalists with digital technologies is generally not available. Organization like the Citizen Lab have compiled reports on the subject  and media organizations have reported on such attacks but it is suspected that the vast majority go unreported for fear of reprisal. The list of comprehensive studies on digital attacks agains civil society is also limited with one example being citizenlab's "targeted threat index"