CypherCon 2026

OPSEC For Liberation Movements: Field Notes from 2025

Daly Barnett

Abstract:

Throughout 2025, countless activists and human rights defenders felt an increased urgency of tech-enabled violences that they face. The Electronic Frontier Foundation often lends these folks much needed OPSEC advice, strengthened by the Surveillance Self-Defense guides it has published for 17 years. Daly Barnett, a senior staff technologist at the EFF, presents her field notes and takeaways from the trainings and consulting sessions she held in 2025 for over 1000 activists and human rights defenders, primarily those focused on issues of abortion access and transgender rights. Elevated threat models require unique and advanced mitigation strategies. Come hear about how these activists are staying resilient against living under the most sophisticated surveillance systems in all of human history.

Daly Barnett

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Daly Barnett is a multidisciplinary technologist whose work focuses on disarming the antisocial impacts of computers. She pursues this by empowering liberation movement workers with the knowledge and capability to resist the annihilating forces of surveillance and hypercapitalist technology overreach. Daly is most attuned to movements for bodily autonomy, with dedicated experience advocating for and working within criminalized issue-spaces such as sex worker rights, transgender liberation, and abortion access. She believes OPSEC for liberation is achieved through community activation (not through application of corporate infosec paradigms) and that bodily autonomy and self-determination are paramount obligations worth fighting for.