I am very happy to announce a new initiative, Code Red, that Simon Davies (the founder of Privacy International and The Big Brother Awards) and I have been organising over the last few months. In fact, not just us, but a panoply of global privacy and anti-surveillance campaigners from many areas of expertise.
Simon and I have known each other for years, way back to 2002, when he gave one of the earliest Winston Awards to David Shayler, in recognition of his work towards trying to expose surveillance and protect privacy. That award ceremony, hosted by comedian and activist Mark Thomas, was one of the few bright points in that year for David and me — which included my nearly dying of meningitis in Paris and David’s voluntary return to the UK to “face the music”; face the inevitable arrest, trial and conviction for a breach of the Official Secrets Act that followed on from his disclosures about spy criminality.
Anyway, enough of a detour down memory lane — back to Code Red. Regular readers of this website will know that I have some slight interest in the need to protect our privacy for both personal reasons and societal good. Over the last 18 years since helping to expose the crimes of the British spies, I have worked with the media, lawyers, campaigners, hackers, NGOs, politicians, wonks, geeks, whistleblowers, and wonderfully concerned citizens around the world — all the time arguing against the encroaching and stealthy powers of the deep, secret state and beyond.
While many people are concerned about this threat to a democratic way of life, and in fact so many people try to push back, I know from experience the different pressures that can be exerted against each community, and the lack of awareness and meaningful communication that can often occur between such groups.
So when Simon posited the idea of Code Red — an organisation that can functionally bring all these disparate groups together, to learn from each other, gain strength and thereby work more effectively, it seemed an obvious next step.
Some progress has already been make in this direction, with international whistleblower conferences, cryptoparties, training for journalists about how to protect their sources, campaigns to protect whistleblowers, activist and media collectives, and much more. We in Code Red recognise all this amazing work and are not trying to replicate it.
But we do want to do is improve the flow of communication — would it not be great to have a global clearing house, a record, of what works, what does not, a repository of expertise from all these inter-related disciplines from a round the world that we can all learn from?
This is one of the goals of Code Red, which launched to the media at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia a few weeks ago. We were then lucky enough to also hold a launch to the tech/hacktivist community in Berlin a few days after at C Base — the mother-ship of hackers.
Here is the film of the Perugia launch:
Code Red — launched in Perugia, April 2015 from Annie Machon on Vimeo.