Encourage users to download the Tor browser bundle and use Tor when viewing or posting to your site.Support the use of pseudonyms in forums and chat rooms.Administrators of such websites can help to protect their users by taking the following steps: Users should be circumspect about posting to these sites, keeping in mind that their chat room conversations and login credentials may be intercepted and read. Many of the local forums and social networking sites that ordinary Mexicans use to exchange news about drug cartel violence offer limited support for HTTPS or do not support it at all. Note that some third-party applications on Facebook can cause an encrypted connection to "break." To be sure that your connection to these services is encrypted at all times, EFF suggests using the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Firefox browser.
The good news is that Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all support HTTPS. Twitter, on the other hand, allows pseudonyms. Pseudonymous Facebook users may find themselves suspended without warning and without the opportunity to export their content or social graphs. Google Plus has instituted a grace period before suspension takes effect, which gives users the opportunity to export their data, but Google may not always apply its grace period consistently. Both Facebook and Google Plus will suspend accounts if other users report them as pseudonymous or fake it only takes a trivial effort by malicious parties to silence the opposition or quash dissent.
These policies do not prevent users from making pseudonymous accounts, but they leave users vulnerable to account suspension. Some social media sites, such as Facebook and Google Plus, have policies that forbid the use of pseudonyms. Pseudonyms, Tor, and HTTPSĮFF recommends that bloggers who are concerned about their security and safety should post under a pseudonym, use Tor to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing the sites they visit and prevent websites from collecting data that might reveal their physical location, and use HTTPS to encrypt their private communications when possible. Posters sometimes use nicknames or pseudonyms to protect their identities, but the murder of "La Nena de Laredo" suggests that such measures are insufficient. In some parts of Mexico, websites such as Blog del Narco and Frontera al Rojo Vivo and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are able to provide news about drug-related violence that is not being covered in local newspapers or on television. Throughout Mexico, traditional media outlets are no strangers to threats, kidnappings, and violence against journalists such threats have often had the effect of forcing journalists to refrain from coverage of violence stemming from the drug trade. Because the bodies remain unidentified, it is impossible to confirm that the victims really did post to the social networking site, but the message to would-be bloggers, citizen journalists, and whistleblowers is loud and clear. Signs hanging near the bodies indicated that the still-unidentified man and woman had been killed in retaliation for denouncing the cartel’s activities on a social network. On September 14th, police found two bodies hanging from a pedestrian bridge. The murder of "La Nena de Laredo" is the second such incident in the border town in as many weeks. The woman, who has been identified in some reports as Maria Macias and in others as Marisol Marcias Castaneda, was reportedly an administrative manager at the Prima Hoy newspaper, and also moderated a chat room on Nuevo Laredo en Vivo. On the morning of September 24th, police found the headless and mutilated body of a woman with a note referencing an alleged pseudonym, “La Nena de Laredo” (“Laredo Girl”), which she had used to post on Nuevo Laredo en Vivo ("Nuevo Laredo Live").
Chilling Speech Through Violenceīloggers in the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo are being terrorized by the Los Zetas drug cartel, which is trying to silence citizens who speak out against drug-related violence. Update: A Spanish translation of this post is available here.