On April 14th 2008 a mailinglist was started with an announcement for the Small Sister Project. The first e-mail explains why the project is needed, the relevance and what we try to achieve. And our goals. We are not about the activism, we are about protecting our own data. A group for citizens that needs the protection for business or personal reasons and try to be law abiding. From that perspective we try to build valuable tools and create sensible documentation. Also people in the law enforcement community help out, because they need good solutions too and they are not immune to the same threats citizens face. We take a logic approach to secure communication and data. You can read the exlaination furhter in the rest of this article.

Anecdote

Today I flew back home from the US through London. On the flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam something remarkable happened: A little girl (I guess 4 years of age) went to the toilet and when she came out the pilot was standing there. The door to the cockpit was open. When she came out the pilot invited her in to have a look. Ten years ago this would not get any reaction from anybody, but when I saw this I felt so happy: Common sense is back! A captain that realizes that people should be able to trust a small kid to a certain extend. I did make sure I told the crew and they felt the very same about it. For me this underlines the fundamental point that we are dealing with: we live in a society that has become distrusting of anything and anybody with ourselves as the main victim.

Reasons for the project

In today’s world we don’t trust anybody and we go to extreme’s to violate the privacy of everybody to get …. a sense of security? Currently there are some urgent matters that need our attention:

• Europe is implementing a new directive that enforces EU-nations to create law that stores traffic information on communication we 500+ million Europeans have. So for a period of minimal 6 months we store who’s calling who (or who’s attemting too), who’s e-mailing who, who was online and where, who has what IP-address of phonenumber. This is what we call data retention. This is a big deal since whistle blowers and journalist have to go to great length in order to do their work without the government watching them all the time;
• In a similar move the Dutch government (through transportation companies) is introducing a transportation card that fascilitates all public transportation. For fiscal reasons this data is stored for seven years. Unfortunately this has a side effect, since we are building a database with each movement of humans in our country. We know what bus they took, where they entered and where they went off. Current laws can make this information available to police and soon also to secret services. A similar system is being build for cars so that we can tax them by the mile.

The project

For the data retention there is a lot one can do to circumvent and thus obsolete the regulations. Of course without breaking the law. There are a lot of tools that enable us to obtain more privacy. The project aims to bundle those solutions and make them as broadly accessible as possible to people as we possibly can.

We aim at two things:
1. Make tools available and as simple as possible;
2. Do knowledge transfer: a lot of people are in the dark on what happens with data retention and travelling. So we need to tell the story to the world. I have arranged a lot of action already behind the scenes so that we will hit news when that is a good moment. I have good hopes to arrange that very effectively, but we still need to tell a story. So let’s build that. Second anecdote: When I took the train home I ended up with this guy. We started talking about the chipcard for transportation. When I explained what was happening on the administrative side he was visibly shocked and he told me he didn’t know. I guess that goes for many people. Information is key.

I would like to make a couple of suggestions on how we build the project:
1. We use the wisdom of the crowd. Everybody has knowledge let’s bundle that;
2. We play legal. We’re not doing anything sneaky or wrong, but we fight for our civil rights that we need;
3. We act as the KLM-pilot: Use our senses and stop accepting fear as our key driver. We’re not helping terrorist (they have their toolsets already), we’re helping the people that want secure, reliable communications and privacy;
4. We’re an open group that works together on the same vision. Everybody can help, everybody can benefit. So bring on everybody that shares our worries.