CryptoParty will be at the Laura Poitras exhibit at the Whitney

How do we protect privacy and personal liberty in a post-9/11, post-Madrid train bombing, post-Charlie Hebdo world?
Brooklyn’s own David Huerta will be leading a workshop on this topic at the Whitney’s new Laura Poitras show, Laura Poitras: Astro Noise, this Sunday at 3 p.m. Huerta is the co-organizer of CryptoParty NYC, along with Harlem’s Matthew Mitchell and Runa Sandvik.
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If you want to learn about privacy and security on your computer, CryptoParty NYC is maybe the best resource available to you. We covered their event at Brooklyn Public Library last fall, where Huerta gave us a primer on how to use Tor.

Poitras, if you don’t know the name, is the other journalist, besides Glenn Greenwald, to have the most access to Edward Snowden. Her documentary film, Citizenfour, won the Academy Award last year for best documentary. Her show at the Whitney covers many of the same topics — government power, espionage — that she’s dealt with in recent years.
The CryptoParty event is produced in collaboration with Harlo Holmes and Freedom of the Press Foundation, and is part of a series of public events, lectures and talks organized in tandem with ​the Poitras exhibit, according to the museum.
Privacy, liberty and security and the balance between them is probably the tantamount issue in our digital age. And although he wasn’t talking about Tor, perhaps the best, simplest explication of one side of the argument comes from David Foster Wallace in 2007:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea¹ one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?² In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?