phone

Welcome, freedom fighters! This week’s action is easy and astonishingly badass.

There’s a free application for your iPhone or Android that automatically engages high-grade encryption technology on all your texts, as long as you’re communicating with others who are similarly equipped. And it’s clever enough to fall back on normal texting when it knows the encryption won’t be understood.

It’s called Signal!

What do you have to hide?

Nothing! But every oppressive regime wants to know everything it can about its targets, which in this case may include you. If you’re anywhere near a protest, even one that is fully legal in every way, police and regime supporters will want to gather all possible intel including the content of text messages. Why tell them more than you intended?

How do you get started?

Get it at the Apple Store or the Google Store depending on your phone type. It’s free and doesn’t take up an exorbitant amount of storage.

Your alternative action:

Probably a lot of readers are already using Signal. That’s great. If that means you, then your action this week is to get a couple of friends, neighbors, or family members to read this page and help them install Signal. The more of us who are using it, even if we’re not in politically “interesting” activity at all, the harder it is for intruders to isolate individual traffic for analysis.

Check back–how is it going for you?

I want to know if you’re using Signal and how it’s working out. Try it out and respond in the comments!