UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic Launches Guidelines for Mutual Aid Projects & FinTech Developers
Underserved by FinTech, mutual aid organizations are fighting for the digital safety of volunteers and the people they support.
After a months-long study of six mutual aid organizations representing a large range of interests in the human rights sector, the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic has released a new report. The report offers a set of guidelines and best practices for mutual aid organizations that send funds, and FinTech developers that want to build for them. The report comes in an era of unparalleled financial privacy loss, and as surveillance corporations like Palantir assemble a “mega-database” of the intimate personal details of every person in the US for the Trump Administration to use as they see fit.
Read the report here: https://cltc.berkeley.edu/publication/securing-mutual-aid-cybersecurity-practices-and-design-principles-for-financial-technology/
“The cybersecurity challenges identified through interviews and risk assessments point to critical gaps in the current infrastructure mutual aid organizations rely upon. As such, any future financial platform designed for mutual aid must not only meet functional and compliance standards but also align with grassroots values of autonomy, resilience, and privacy by design.”
The report is divided into two sections. The first section details financial security best practices that mutual aid groups may be able to adopt in order to increase their resilience to attacks and bad actors such as authoritarian law enforcement, hackers, and scams. The second section speaks to FinTech platforms and developers themselves, offering requirements for a product that would sufficiently serve mutual aid customers.
“As budgets for government services and relief are cut, climate catastrophes escalate, and bodily autonomy is under attack in dozens of states, mutual aid organizations are playing an increasingly crucial role in the resiliency and recovery of communities around the country,” said Cybersecurity Clinic Director Elijah Baucom (he/him). “These organizations are largely powered by volunteers, and they face ever-increasing threats of being surveilled, deplatformed, or even incarcerated for the essential work they do. It has become clear to us that financial services companies have lacked the imagination and solidarity to serve these community institutions in a way that fits their needs. We are releasing these guidelines to help mutual aid projects improve their resiliency, and to urge FinTech developers to center this growing sector as they build financial tools.”
“The surveillance hellscape we all find ourselves in is bearing down on mutual aid groups,” said Lia Holland (they/she), Campaigns & Communications Director at Fight for the Future, a group whose work on financial surveillance and mutual aid sparked UC Berkeley’s analysis. “For years, FinTech companies, especially so-called decentralized financial technology companies, have been saying that they intend to serve activists and help them evade authoritarian regimes. We know that the technology to give activists and organizers greater financial privacy and control exists—yet this report is a wake-up call: the dots have not been connected between privacy-forward financial technology and everyday people. It’s a stunning disappointment to see how much work a mutual aid group would need to do to defend the safety of their volunteers when using today’s financial tools. Thirty years ago, the level of financial surveillance and censorship activists and marginalized communities face would have been unimaginable. We need Signal for money, and we need it yesterday.”
About the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic:
The UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic is an interdisciplinary, public-interest digital security clinic within the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. Through a model similar to university clinics in law and medicine, they train teams of students to help social sector organizations build the capabilities they need to proactively defend themselves against malicious governments, powerful corporations, hate groups, and extremists. You can read more about the Clinic here.
About Fight for the Future:
Fight for the Future is a queer women-led group of activists, strategists, artists, and technologists defending human and civil rights in the digital age. Their mission is to ensure a just Internet—and that technology, and the policies that govern it, are a force for liberation and empowerment, not oppression and inequality.