We’re hugely pleased to confirm that – yes – Courage will be at HOPE later this month. The conference will be held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City on 20-22 July.
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Category: Events
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Courage at RightsCon 2018
Going to the conference? Come find us!
This year’s RightsCon, a privacy rights conference bringing together activists, journalists, government representatives, and security researchers from around the world, will be held in Toronto, 16-18 May. Read more about the conference and its participants here.
Courage Director Naomi Colvin participated in a Pursuance Project panel, entitled “Effective 21st Century Organizing: Learning From the Past, Building the Future,” along with Barrett Brown, Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Diani Barreto, and Birgitta Jónsdóttir.
Watch the full panel video here.
Read more about Pursuance, Barrett Brown’s innovative software to crowdsource investigative journalism, here.
Watch Pursuance’s lead developer Steve Phillips give a tech demonstration of how Pursuance will work here.
Courage at the Elevate Festival
Courage cofounder Sarah Harrison and Courage Trustee Renata Avila are speaking at the Elevate Festival in Austria, 28 February 2018, which this year deals with “two basic concepts of modernity – risk and courage.” Harrison and Avila will introduce their new book with Courage Advisory Board member Angela Richter, ‘Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks’, the proceeds of which will go to Courage.
Julian Assange will highlight the opening night, giving a talk and Q&A by video from the Ecuadorian Embassy. Harrison will also moderate a panel on ‘Fearless Journalism’ on 2 March.
Get tickets to the festival here.
Truthtelling in Trump’s America: Reality Winner and the war on whistleblowers
Courage is excited to team up with Expose Facts to co-host a discussion with three US national security whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, Lisa Ling, and Jesselyn Radack, on 1 March 2018 at Juju’s Bar & Stage in London, about Reality Winner, the first whistleblower on trial in the Trump era.
As Reality Winner awaits trial, her treatment gives us a glimpse of what we can expect in the coming years. How is the situation for whistleblowers deteriorating under Donald Trump, when truth itself is under attack? What can we do to help Reality? And what are the lessons for the UK and Europe? Can we build a politics more welcoming to whistleblowers without a rethink of the fundamentals?
The event is free, but please RSVP here.
Reality Winner’s pretrial hearing
When: 27 February 2018
Where: County Courthouse, Augusta, Georgia
What: This hearing is specifically focused on what evidence can be used against Reality and the judge’s ruling will have a significant impact on her ability to attain a fair trial or not.
We’re calling on supporters in the area to pack the courtroom in support of imprisoned alleged truthteller Reality Winner, who faces an Espionage Act charge for purportedly revealing important information about the government’s assessment of Russian activity during the 2016 US election. Winner has already been denied bail four times, and she needs our support more than ever.
Those who can’t attend in person can join our tweetstorm on the 27th.
More info about Reality and the hearing here.
Donate to Courage, privacy protected
Courage now accepts donations by credit or debit card over Tor, thanks to our partnership with Stripe – you can donate here: https://staging.couragefound.org/donate
Courage also accepts Bitcoin, at this address: 3KLQbeE7rGs8fP8RAxZNQyDJqLxFNSLwEB
And Zcash, here: https://staging.couragefound.org/donate
Courage hosted a panel discussion at the 11th HOPE Conference in New York City, entitled ‘Hackers are Whistleblowers Too: Practical Solidarity with the Courage Foundation.’
Naomi Colvin and Nathan Fuller, of Courage, summarised our mission and emphasised the importance of building solidarity for each member in the information-exposure chain, from sources to couriers to journalists and publishers. Carey Shenkman, of CCR, explained how a public-interest defence would give whistleblowers the opportunity to fairly defend their actions and motives in the courtroom. Grace North spoke about Jeremy Hammond, who was recently placed in solitary confinement. Yan Zhu, who visited Chelsea Manning earlier this year, read a statement from Chelsea herself, addressed to the HOPE audience. Finally, Lauri Love, via videolink, recapped his case and its wider implications.
View the video below, from about 1 minute in to the 1:08:00 mark.
On another panel, entitled ‘Leak Hypocrisy: A Conversation on Whistleblowers, Sources, and the Label “Espionage”’, Colvin and Shenkman joined Jesselyn Radack (via Skype) for a discussion on selective prosecution and a comparison of whistleblower treatment and laws between the US and Europe.
View the video below:
This year’s Logan Symposium has just concluded in Berlin, bringing together journalists, technologists and others. During the conference, the Courage Foundation hosted a workshop on how best to connect the communities attending the Logan Symposium around solidarity for individual truthtellers as well as some of the broader issues we’ve faced in our two years as an organisation.
The Courage Foundation is excited to join journalists, lawyers, activists and surveillance experts at this year’s Logan CIJ Symposium, 11-12 March at the BCC in Berlin. The 2016 conference is titled Challenge power! Building alliances against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship.
What happens to the idea of democracy in an age of mass surveillance, data espionage and collaboration between the BND and NSA? How was the NSA scandal received in the United States and Germany and what can – and must – we learn from this?
Courage is proud to co-host a discussion between some of America’s most celebrated intelligence whistleblowers and some of the German politicians charged with investigating the extent of US and German surveillance cooperation. Thomas Drake, Daniel Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack and Coleen Rowley will be attending the event at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt on Sunday 7 June, along with members of the Bundestag surveillance investigation Konstantin von Notz, Martina Renner and former Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Peter Schaar. The event will be moderated by Courage Acting Director Sarah Harrison and introduced by Expose Facts’ Norman Solomon.
The event has been organised in association with ExposeFacts.org, DIE ZEIT, ZEIT Online and Transmediale and tickets will be available on the day on a first come, first served basis. The event begins at 3pm.
Missed the event? You can listen to the audio recording online here:
The 31st Chaos Communication Congress was in Hamburg, Germany, 27-30 December. On 28 December, Courage Acting Director Sarah Harrison and FreeJeremy.net manager Grace North gave a talk entitled Doing Right by Sources, Done Right, in which they discussed the “ethics, operational security and public protections of sources,” in addition to the need for expanding our understanding of the term “whistleblower.”
In addition to Courage’s work hosting the defence funds for Edward Snowden and Jeremy Hammond, Harrison spoke about our upcoming projects. These include providing detailed advice for journalists to operate securely, to protect their sources from first contact to post-publication aftercare. Another project is Courage’s forthcoming Network of specialised lawyers who will be prepared to provide future sources at risk with legal advice and logistical assistance, be that funding, physical extraction, or negotiating asylum.
Harrison, who is WikiLeaks’ investigations editor, also revealed a US search warrant to Google demanding all emails and metadata from a member of WikiLeaks, which Google complied with.
ALERT: Google notified us on Xmas eve that they handed over all emails+metadata from one of our staff in response to a US search warrant.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 26, 2014
Visit the CCC’s YouTube channel for more videos from the Congress, and here for more information about other events.
At last week’s Global Media Forum, WikiLeaks Investigations Editor and Courage Foundation Acting Director Sarah Harrison gave the keynote address, entitled “The Battle Against Unaccountable Power”, which covered whistleblowing, publishing, and press freedom. Harrison stressed the the value of publishing source documents in full and in searchable formats, using transparency to hold the powerful to account and the importance of combating government claims that overstate threats to national security.