On 08/27/2013 09:36 AM, Richard Brooks wrote: > I have colleagues living in a small country, far, far > away with a history of rigged elections who want to > put in place a system for collecting information > using SMS. The local government keeps shutting > down the systems that they put in place.
As you probably know, the main solutions people use for this are Ushahidi or FrontlineSMS, but neither of these are secure enough for your needs, I think. FrontlineSMS has a good rundown of risks here: http://www.frontlinesms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/frontlinesms_userguide.pdf Guardian created a fork of the Ushahidi android app to support encrypted transport, but it requires a data plan (and maybe isn't maintained?): https://guardianproject.info/2010/03/10/ushahidi-linda-testimony-protection/ If you want secure reporting over SMS as the transport, I think your only option is moxie's TextSecure android app. This will not help in processing the reports, but it will allow the reports to be securely submitted. The government will still be able to identify and shut down this approach by identifying which devices are sending encrypted SMS messages or by blocking the number that reports are submitted to. The final option is to use SMS over satellite phones. Supposedly, this works very well, but is monstrously expensive. -elijah -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
