Field Notes From a Year of OPSEC for Liberation Movements

Daly Barnett

Throughout 2025, EFF facilitated digital privacy and security trainings for more than 2000 people. The issue spaces at hand ranged from animal rights activism, abortion access, immigration legal defense groups, and many many more. Although the particular characteristics of the various audiences differed, one thing remained true: traditional sources of information security were either inaccessible to these groups or fundamentally unable to meet their unique needs. In this talk, EFF senior staff technologist Daly Barnett will present field notes collected from the trainings conducted throughout 2025. This high-level survey will cover the types of digital privacy and security threats facing various liberation movement workers in America today, as well as the mitigation strategies they are walked through. For fellow hackers and technologists, this is not only an indispensable insight into the actual impacts of surveillance technology and digital security threats facing today’s activists, but also a blueprint for how they might be able to provide movement workers with much needed help.

Friday 1400 Crystal Ballroom


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.

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