Alison Macrina | |
|---|---|
 Macrina in 2016. | |
| Born | Alison Macrina |
| Occupation(s) | librarian, activist |
| Known for | Library Freedom Project |
Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, founder and executive director of the Library Freedom Project. [1] [2]
Alison Macrina | |
|---|---|
| Macrina in 2016. | |
| Born | Alison Macrina |
| Occupation(s) | librarian, activist |
| Known for | Library Freedom Project |
Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, founder and executive director of the Library Freedom Project. [1] [2]
Macrina grew up in Collingswood, New Jersey. She was an undergraduate at Temple University. [3] She received a Master of Library and Information Science from Drexel University in 2009. [4]
Macrina was a librarian at the Watertown Free Public Library in Watertown, Massachusetts and a member of Boston's Radical Reference Collective. [5] While at the public library, Macrina made a zine for librarians titled We Are All Suspects offering a "quick and dirty introduction to basic privacy and security tools." [5]
She founded the Library Freedom Project in 2015 in order to help non-techie people learn to protect their privacy online. [6] As a victim of online harassment for her work on racial and gender justice, Macrina teaches other professionals, especially librarians, to use available tools to manage and deal with inappropriate behavior, saying "The thing about privilege isn't just that it shields you ... It also gives you a platform." [7]
Macrina is vocal in her opposition to digital surveillance, and was a core contributor and Community Team Lead on the Tor Project. [8] She is the co-author of Anonymity, the first book in the American Library Association's Library Futures Series. [9] She was also one of the librarians protesting the CIA's recruitment attempts at the American Library Association's annual conference in 2019, co-publishing a letter with librarian Dustin Fife entitled "No Legitimization Through Association: the CIA should not be exhibiting at ALA." [10]
A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with the establishment of the "Cypherpunks" electronic mailing list in 1992, where informal groups of activists, technologists, and cryptographers discussed strategies to enhance individual privacy and resist state or corporate surveillance. Deeply libertarian in philosophy, the movement is rooted in principles of decentralization, individual autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority. Its influence on society extends to the development of technologies that have reshaped global finance, communication, and privacy practices, such as the creation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which embody cypherpunk ideals of decentralized and censorship-resistant money. The movement has also contributed to the mainstreaming of encryption in everyday technologies, such as secure messaging apps and privacy-focused web browsers. The cypherpunk ethos has had a lasting impact on debates around digital rights, surveillance, and personal freedoms in the 21st century. The movement has been active since at least 1990 and continues to inspire initiatives aimed at fostering a more private and secure digital world.
An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world.
A darknet or dark net is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
Jessamyn Charity West is an American library technologist and writer known for her activism and work on the digital divide. She is the creator of librarian.net. She is the Vermont Chapter Councilor of the American Library Association, and was Director of Operations at the group blog MetaFilter from 2005 to 2014. West owns MetaFilter.
Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, hacker and teacher. Appelbaum, who earned his PhD from the Eindhoven University of Technology, first became notable for his work as a core member of the Tor Project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity. But it was Appelbaum's work with WikiLeaks and his journalism at Der Spiegel based on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden that made him famous, status accentuated by his standing-in for Julian Assange at computer security and hacker forums when Assange could no longer travel to the United States. Under the pseudonym "ioerror", Appelbaum was an active member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective from 2008 to 2016. He was the co-founder of the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge with Mitch Altman. He worked for Kink.com and Greenpeace and volunteered for the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network. He was on the Technical Advisory Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network.
Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas without restriction. Viewed as an integral component of a democratic society, intellectual freedom protects an individual's right to access, explore, consider, and express ideas and information as the basis for a self-governing, well-informed citizenry. Intellectual freedom comprises the bedrock for freedoms of expression, speech, and the press and relates to freedoms of information and the right to privacy.
Tails, or "The Amnesic Incognito Live System", is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity against surveillance. It connects to the Internet exclusively through the anonymity network Tor. The system is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB and never writes to the hard drive or SSD, leaving no digital footprint on the machine unless explicitly told to do so. It can also be run as a virtual machine, with some additional security risks.
Internet censorship circumvention is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship.
Librarianship and human rights in the U.S. are linked by the philosophy and practice of library and information professionals supporting the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), particularly the established rights to information, knowledge and free expression.
CryptoParty (Crypto-Party) is a grassroots global endeavour to introduce the basics of practical cryptography such as the Tor anonymity network, I2P, Freenet, key signing parties, disk encryption and virtual private networks to the general public. The project primarily consists of a series of free public workshops.
The Calyx Institute is a New York-based 501(c)(3) research and education nonprofit organization formed to make privacy and digital security more accessible. It was founded in 2010 by Nicholas Merrill, Micah Anderson, and Kobi Snitz.
The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, Massachusetts. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.
.tor is a pseudo-top-level domain host suffix implemented by the OnioNS project, which aims to add DNS infrastructure to the Tor network enabling the selection of meaningful and globally-unique domain name for hidden services, which users can then reference from the Tor Browser.
Library Freedom Project's stated mission, "is radically rethinking the library professional organization by creating a network of values-driven librarian-activists working together to build information democracy."
Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director.
Emily Drabinski is an American academic, librarian, author, and teacher who served as president of the American Library Association from July 2023 to July 2024.
Sarah Jamie Lewis is an anonymity and privacy researcher with published research in the fields of deanonymization and e-voting. In 2019, Lewis in collaboration with researchers from the University of Melbourne and UCLouvain published details of critical vulnerabilities impacting e-voting systems in Switzerland and Australia.
Media related to Alison Macrina at Wikimedia Commons
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