RightsCon Toronto 2018

Digital security training plays a very important role in securing activists and human rights defenders and increasing the efficiency of their work while they use the internet. However, a lot of the time, face-to-face security training is hard to organise, conduct and follow-up post training.

Over the last several years, we have seen a variety of community developed toolkits, guides and other resources that help aid security trainers educating the human rights community on how to protect themselves and their peers from the multiple threats they face.

As technology rapidly evolves, the digital threat landscape evolves with it. Digital security tools and tactics go outdated pretty quickly and it is becoming extremely important to create new sustainable approaches to help human rights defenders stay updated with the latest, efficient ways to improve their defence and minimise these threats.

Some newer initiatives such as https://advocacyassembly.org/ and https://totem-project.org are trying to improve the efficiency of online learning by applying some of the best practices from traditional forms of online education such as MOOCs(massive open online course) and interactive testing methods to digital security training aimed towards the activist community.

This session aims to engage with rights activists, digital security trainers and other thought leaders from the community to present some new ideas, discuss and help develop the future of digital security training for HRDs, with focus on offline and online methods/techniques that can be combined to create a training environment that encourages better community engagement, helps build a continuous learning environment and increases knowledge retention.