Building a Better Digital Security Training
I'm holed up with a bunch of geeks for a week talking about the art of digital security training. Since I've been with NDI, keeping people safe on the intertubes has gone from an afterthought in the international development space to something that scores of organizations are doing to support activists, journalists, rights defenders and democracy advocates.
With regimes getting nastier online by the day and even the head of the world's biggest intelligence service vulnerable to government cyber-snooping, there's a huge need for increasing the number of people able to share lessons in this area; funders, too have been shoveling heaps of money into this space. We desperately need to grow the pools of well-taught trainers deeply experienced in digital security for people in the most sensitive political spaces,. There's been some well-intentioned but not well-educated trainers who can do more harm than good struggling to fill this void, leaving a swath of pupils who feel safer than they should in their wake.
We're trying to fill in this gap.
A new program being led by Internews and NDItech with support from some of the top international digital security teams is working to create a gold-standard curriculum of teaching modules running the gamut of topics that a trainer may have to teach.
We've got a crackerjack crew of highly experienced trainers from around the world locked up here in a groovy hotel for the week. We're going to be cranking out scores of teaching modules with quizzes, exercises, demonstrations, lecture notes, and anything else that might help an instructor really deliver the concepts in the way most compelling for their audience. We've got a couple cases of mate, so I think we can pull it off.
For the most part, we're not trying to create content. Our trustworthy old friend Security in a Box from Tactical Tech and Frontline Defenders has done that job well in the past but needs to be updated. There are of course some gaps in content - ones we're focusing on are using risk assessment methodologies and crossing borders safely - but we are all about resuse and improvements here.
When our week here is done and we've cranked out as many of these as we can, we'll be handing them off to a new crew of experts to evaluate for content and pedegogy before serving them up to the public. You'll hear more about this effort as it continues.