[tor-project] Notes from June 23 2016 Vegas team meeting

Mon Jun 27 08:15:39 UTC 2016

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See this posting for context:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-April/000223.html

Notes for June 23 2016 meeting:

Georg:
1) GSoC workload is starting to increase for the Panopticlick project
2) Helped with press related things around the Selfrando paper

Karsten:
1) Met with metrics team members in Berlin to talk about the new
Mozilla award and to start making some plans.

Roger:
0) My next several weeks are going to continue to be messes,
logistics-wise. So if there is something concrete that you need from
me, please let me know early and often. Sorry in advance. :(
1) We got permission to have spent the rest of our SponsorR Year2
money. That means soon I will need to sit down and map out the Year3
milestones that we will want to use.
2) We wrote a "rebuttal" for the reviews on our NSF-Eindhoven
proposal. Things are looking promising but who knows.
3) I helped Shari with a first round of Seattle invite brainstorming.
It's with her now, to make some decisions how much travel to fund.
Also we should be sure to send the draft invite list to some
sufficiently large set of people (tor-internal?) so we can learn about
potential problems early.
4) Shari asked me to help move forward the donations platform thing. I
need a person who can lead it, because I'm going to flake if it's just me.
5) I'm considering doing a panel the Monday before PETS in exchange
for them paying for my flight (yay making money by saving money).

Nick:
1) No updates, actually. Mainly doing software, trying to be helpful
to Isa and my team, trying to stay focused.
2) Could use some triage help from Isabela, but it's less urgent than
all the other stuff Isa is doing.
3) Hoping to discuss many of the things Roger raised above.
4) Never enough hours in the day or days in the month.

Kate:
0) My request for good news about Tor work is going well. Had planned
to just do blog posts (as media bombs were exploding all around) but
will now to try to pitch some of this to journalists. Will also resume
newsletter going forward.
It was a little difficult to elicit good news from the group. People,
don’t be shy! We’re doing so much interesting work! Also, if you are
doing a software release, let me know if there are particular features
that users (or info sec folks) will think it’s important or useful. I
may not be able to figure this out without you :)
Good news blog posts:
Tone: Fun, interesting, friendly (which is true to these projects!)
Karsten —Karsten’s Mozilla award blog post is published - yay!
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tors-innovative-metrics-program-receives-award-mozilla
GeKo—I interviewed him on Selfrando;
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/selfrando-q-and-georg-koppen
Serene -Q and A about Snowflake is drafted and I am editing it
Nick—Writing a blog post on history of Tor’s cryptography!
1) EFF/Tor Day of Action on Rule 41 (First Tor advocacy campaign ever?)
Funny and pointed tweets by flexlibris and Isis to support it :)
(loved them both so much)
300,000 Twitter impressions
1,000 retweets
We tweeted, participated in EFF's mainstream media (a  judicious
amount); helped provide quotable quotes, blogged, Facebooked.
Helped signal boost the proposed bill “Stop Mass Hacking Act” that
would undo changes to Rule 41
Despite intentionally keeping a low profile on mainstream media (as we
are a hot potato at the moment), we were quoted in BoingBoing and SC
Magazine
Listed as a supporter of the campaign in very good Hill article,
Christian Science Monitor (also The Register TechTarget, and TechWorm
Media was overwhelmingly positive; Twitter response was very positive
(so--no backlash against Tor or campaign)
The Hill:
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/284278-google-paypal-push-back-on-change-to-federal-hacking-powers
(barely there but in a useful context in a useful article)
CSM:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0622/Google-privacy-groups-urge-Congress-not-to-expand-federal-hacking-power
SC Magazine:
http://www.scmagazine.com/justices-caldwell-lauds-rule-41-changes-eff-other-orgs-start-campaign-to-thwart/article/504629/
Great working relationship with Rainey;  we communicated in real time
for two days straight; tried to set this up for tech people but no dice
Planning a twitter survey to see if people learned more about Rule 41
during Day of Action (interested in any advice from Isabela)
Banner for our website was super tricky—I think EFF expected us to be
able to just paste it onto our website, but in the future—we should
have a Tor-EFF policy and tech meeting ahead of time to discuss any
issues—and especially—be able to communicate in real time with EFF
tech people to ask questions. Thanks to Roger and Sebastian, who
worked on it.
2) Fenton Communications: Shari, Sue, and I met with them; had a
useful discussion with them about crisis communications, realized that
we are already on the right track and decided not to use them. Will
reserve the right to re-engage with them if all heck breaks loose or
looks like it’s going to. :)
3) Funders need to help us resist FBI exploits! That is all. I hope
they do. Smart people are working on it. :)
Relevant: “As quietly as possible, the government is renewing its
assault on your privacy”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/government-privacy-fbi-justice-department-surveillance

Alison:
1) Social contract progress
2) Getting a professional facilitator to help us talk about consent,
abuse, etc at Tor-dev
3) OTF proposal for Torservers got another extension

Isabela:
1) DRL - visit moved to first week of August (yay) - we (me, shari and
sue) are actually going to DC for this audit thing (that is a lot of
work on this front for me this month and in July)
2) DRL - next round of proposals August 26! We need to coordinate what
we will do, Mobile is definite one but we should try two proposals
3) SIDA - Marcin reached out with a list of things for us to do in the
process of submitting a final proposal for them by August 1st
4) Internews - so painful :( trying to get Nima to sign his contract
and to invoice us. I need to start gathering the deliverables because
it ends next week.. very painful but I think I will survive this project
5) Network team - catch up on 029 state of things and start working on
follow ups from our last retrospective and prep our next one (we said
mid July)