Riseup welcomes new collective member, Colibrí Jacobina!

Colibrí Jacobina (Florisuga mellivora) is a blue hummingbird who has been flying with the Riseup flock for a while, and has recently come to roost with us! We are so excited to welcome her into the collective.

Originally from the most dangerous neighborhoods of Santiago de Chile, Colibrí Jacobina has left her hometown in order to live a life without an address. A light blue strip crosses her well-maintained feathers and while she is dedicated to reading and writing in absolute tranquility, she doesn’t hesitate to use her abilities and radical spirit to fight rich people, men, meat eaters, fascists, monogamy, and the police.

You can find her in Riseup forming alliances with other organizations and arguing eloquently that autonomous infrastructure is the only thing that is going to save us from this neoliberal and hyper-surveilled internet that we inhabit.

Story Time

How do you use Riseup? How is it helpful and not so helpful? We’d love to hear some stories from you, and you, and you! Tell us how Riseup has helped you in your organizing. Or tell us how we could be even more helpful. We may use these stories in grant writing or in a future newsletter. We will for sure use them to warm our hearts and feel more connected to all of you. Thanks! Email to story@riseup.net

Riseup Letters: Who are you really?

Here is a common question we are asked:

I was wondering, how can I know that Riseup is trustworthy? Something like riseup.net could be the perfect place to lure social movements to a concentrated place for monitoring. Guess this is a tough question… hope it’s taken with best thoughts.

Our answer:

Trust, in computer security, is about the harm that someone can cause if they betray your trust. To be more secure, you mostly want to reduce the things and people that you trust, but it is impossible to eliminate trust relationships entirely.

If someone asks you to trust them, particularly when it comes to technology, you should be extremely wary. For this reason, Riseup has never asked anyone to trust us.

However, we do demonstrate through our actions that we will fight for you. We have designed our system to know very little about you, and for it to be impossible for us to read your mail when you are not logged in; we actively support other autonomous tech collectives to start and thrive; we create and contribute to free-libre open source software development; and we answer hundreds of tech questions every week for social justice organizers across the planet who aren’t so tech savvy.

Seventeen years ago, when Riseup was getting started, we had very strong trust with most of the people and groups that we provided services for. We were connected through networks of organizing and solidarity. We protected them, and they knew it, because they knew us. In the interest of providing resources to more people, we made a decision to open up Riseup to people outside our activist circles. Unfortunately, this has made Riseup seem anonymous and distant for many. We are real people! We have lives, day jobs, and kids. We are geeks and writers and students and lawyers and social workers.

Although we are real live people, you probably don’t know us. So we don’t ask you to blindly trust us, and we never will. Talk to someone who is tech savvy in your community and ask them who they trust and why. There are many fine autonomous tech projects in the world, and you are likely to find one that you trust: https://riseup.net/resources/