Digital privacy is an important issue of our generation and mass surveillance is affecting different aspects of our lives, members in a panel discussion said April 14.

The panel discussion titled “Government Spying, Threats to Privacy and Your Rights Online” was organized by the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication as part of First Amendment Week in the Sun Room.

“Once you consider the centrality of technology to our daily lives to everything we do, I think it’s easy to see how important it is for our rights to adapt to technologies,” said April Glaser, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The organization is an international non-profit that works on digital rights and privacy through legal means.

“What we know so far has been the product of leaks from whistle-blowers who have taken actions to reveal human rights violations and often placing themselves at risk of persecution, including detention,” Glaser said.

Other speakers included Jane Fritsch, assistant professor of journalism, Zayira Jordan from the Human Computer Interaction program at Iowa State and Nik Kinkel, senior in software engineering.

Kinkel is also the founder of the student organization, Digital Freedom Group, at Iowa State that aims to educate people about using encryption technologies. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been in litigation against the National Security Agency since 2007 before the revelations last year by Edward Snowden. Leaked documents by Snowden revealed mass collection of phone records, internet communications and social media data among others.

“We are really at a critical juncture in journalism. It’s very very difficult to get people to believe they can speak to you without there being a record of it,” Fritsch said. “We are certainly back to 60s when Bob Woodward had to meet his source in a garage in Washington.”

She said stories like the My Lai massacre and Watergate scandal were uncovered as sources talked to journalists they knew. However, this is difficult to do when sources are hesitant to talk using modern communication technologies.

Glaser said the argument is essentially about the relationship with the government as there are laws in place we don’t know about. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been lobbying the government to make changes to NSA. But, steps proposed so far do not go far enough to protect digital privacy, Glaser said.

“It’s not weird to want privacy online. This is something we should all have,” Kinkel said.

Kinkel said there had been some apprehensions when he was starting the student group, Digital Freedom Group, as they planned to discuss encryption methods and other ways to protect online privacy. The group eventually convinced the Information Technology Services that their group was not going to harm the university network.

Students also interested in protecting themselves online attended the conference.

“I was just interested to see the EFF in person and the nature of their organization,” said Matthew Bullard, sophomore in elementary education.

He said it was necessary to become aware of the complacency that comes with using technology.

“I didn’t know a whole lot about any of it coming in. But, it was just presented in a manner that it seemed to be a conspiracy,” said Allee Wengert, senior in journalism and mass communication.

In a following event called the CryptoParty, audience members were shown different ways to encrypt internet chats, email and web browsing. They also had a chance to install some of these tools on their own devices.