Advanced Secret Keepers Dispatch

August 19, 2025 Spring 2025

In Advanced Secretkeeping, students were invited to explore their own relationship to secrecy and private space, intimate memory, fugitivity and territory—mapping out the psychogeographies that make up their reality and setting the stage for new patterns. Through the five week class which was a hybrid of theoretical and practical skill sharing in digital and physical security culture practices, we learned about steganography, practiced threat modeling, demoed email encryption, and discussed language/code/jargon. This was Olivia and I’s first time teaching this class for SFPC in an effort to connect a lot of our overlapping references and experiences relating to security culture and embodied secrecy.

Redefining Secrecy

Our cohort included memory workers, healthcare/community health care organizers, farmers, mutual aid organizers, film makers, sex workers, security professionals, all with different perspectives and practices surrounding safekeeping and worldbuilding. We began our class by introducing a living glossary to encourage each other to redefine terms like secrecy, privacy, safety, legality, and hiding in their own contexts. We hoped that integrating this practice would allow us to break out of preconceived frameworks of trust we operate within systemically. We began the glossary while watching and live chatting about Style Wars (1983), in addition to discussing practices of space, narrative, and safe keeping, while performing “dangerous” or forbidden acts, and psychogeographies of the city.

Two example definitions we came up with:

Defacement

• To not have a face = to be unrecognizable
• But also, in the sense of vandalism

Unintelligibility

• Living in paradox, incomprehensibility, illegality, etc.

In redefining secrecy, we wanted to critique normative hierarchical relationships and the logics of surveillance in our practices and the spaces we move through. We read zines like “Against the Couple Form” and “Criminal Intimacy”, and pick apart practices that rely on forensics and policing to maintain trust.

On personal secrets

In week two, we discussed “personal secrets” like diaries, lockboxes, house keys, usernames, and passwords. We got to talk about intimate spaces on our devices, such as our notes apps!

In our digital worlds, we are encouraged to and rewarded for sharing. What would it look like to rework our relationships with the technologies we have become increasingly dependent on and addicted to for over a decade, that have come to mediate so much of our lives, relationships, and forms of struggle? What things hold us back from being more private people online, and what encourages us? Where are our “private spaces” and practices of keeping personal secrets?

From “Beyond the Screen the Stars” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Telling is Listening,”  we diagrammed a holistic model of secure communications that considers the contents, the medium, and the relationships of people involved. We reflected on a tendency to heap tech-security measures one on top of the other in the name of safety. Olivia and I offered low tech demos, involving a history of invisible ink and pH indicator turmeric/alcohol ink, then introduced public-private key cryptography by “wrapping emails in fierce and tender encryption luv using pgp.”

On secret worlds

I received a jarring email from Google between the second and third week where they introduced a tool in GCal that listed every bus and flight I had taken over the last few months. I knew they collected this data—we all know, on some level, that this data is collected, but seeing it all in one place was scary. Data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, ruled by those who own and control the flow of information. We began a discussion about the worlds we inhabit that are above ground/on-the books, underground, and the “demiground” as defined by Margaret Killjoy in “Into the Demiground” as “to live as full and normal of a life as possible while controlling and limiting your digital footprint.”

We discussed location as data and map technologies as tools for orientation. There are many possibilities for novel and secret placemaking when we create intimate relations with our environments. We prompted the class to interact with public spaces like treasure maps or private altars in public and where you could leave secret messages behind for your friends in cafe bathrooms or use  public bulletin boards—perhaps in disguise.

Olivia introduced wardriving, the act of searching for wifi networks, usually from a moving vehicle, using a laptop or smartphone. We even watched a cute video of a teenager wardriving on his skateboard! And after, we discussed wifi safety tips such as turning off your wifi router when you’re not using it, changing the password on your wifi router from the default one, using WPA2 or WPA3 to encrypt your traffic, and adding limits for how many devices can connect.

On secret groups

We dreamed of a secret gathering, an operation, a club, a clandestine meeting, and practiced threat modeling with attack trees and STRIDE. Some class examples included a secret guerrilla gardening club and hijacking an abandoned Google building. While it is unlikely to foresee and defend ourselves from every threat to a project or space, we can develop a model of the most likely threats and prepare ourselves against those.

We played a role playing game of workers and bosses where students practiced creating narratives on the spot, reading hidden gestures and messages over video conference, and noticing personal vulnerabilities. Olivia and I were thrilled to show up to class in our boss costumes…

Lastly, we had a few informal secret groups in the form of peer-to-peer (p2p) office hours! From poisoning and purging facebook data, hosting with Tor, hidden messages through sentimental jewelry, and probing state surveillance mechanisms, it is an act of care to teach each other. Many of our practices show each other useful, actionable, and poetic tools and habits to be able to navigate this moment in digital political space.