ObscuraCam

More Information on Guardian Project

Other apps from the Guardian Project

There are many other apps available from the creators of ObscuraCam. Many of them are designed to improve the security of the use of your phone.

Gibberbot, Orbot, Orweb provide other ways of communicating more securely via your Android device. They give you options for using encryption during live chat, web browsing and generally connecting to the Internet.

Details and tutorials on these apps are available at the Guardian Project's website. https://guardianproject.info/apps/
https://guardianproject.info/apps/tutorials/

InformaCam

While ObscuraCam aims to subtract information from images, including metadata of images taken, InformaCam does the opposite by making sure that accurate and verifiably metadata is taken along with images and video. The thinking behind this is to make sure that footage can be used in courts with good authority.

According to WITNESS' Bryan Nunez, ObscuraCam is part of a larger app suite called SecureSmartCam, a “suite of mobile media apps designed for activists, journalists, and citizen witnesses. The other app in the suite is InformaCam, which adds an array of smartphone sensor data (GPS, network information, etc.) to the video and images captured. The idea is that this information could be important in cases where the pictures and videos shot with the smartphone are used as legal evidence.”

The importance of Open Source

The fact that the Guardian Project code is open source (specifically Free Software) is advantageous for a number of reasons. One of the most relevant is that anyone can inspect the 'source' of the programme to see how the code works.

A large amount of surveillance happens through 'backdoors' in software. This allows contractors to bypass normal security and makes spying much easier. In Open Source projects such backdoors would be viewable in the source code and identified.

Additionally, when choosing Open Source apps we also should check that there is a healthy community of developers and peers inspecting the work being done to check it does exactly what it should do, and most importantly nothing more than it should do.

There are a few ways to test this. You can look the project's code home which is often at Github. Here you can see how often the project is updated and how many people are working on it and how good the documentation and help files are. You can also check the communications channels of the project to see if there is an active mailing list or IRC (chat channel).

There are many interesting Android and iPhone apps that may be free to download but are unfortunately no longer available or kept up to date. This situation is partly due to the high turn-over of start up companies that try out free apps but then withdraw them if they are not very successful. This is much less likely to happen to Open Source projects with a strong community.

Getting involved

There are many ways that you can get involved with the Guardian Project and the development of ObscuraCam. If you are a techie then you could apply to be an alpha tester. Alpha testers are invited to test out apps before they are released - https://guardianproject.info/contact/alpha-testers-apply-here/

There is also a page which details other ways to work with the project which is targeted more towards group and partner projects. https://guardianproject.info/home/how-you-can-work-with-us/

Getting Help

You can also contact the team via the contact page of their website.
https://guardianproject.info/contact. This page has details of their twitter account (@guardianproject) and relevant email lists for users and developers to get help.

Another way of getting help is probably via the chat client called IRC. You can find many of the team and supporters there in the network irc.freenode.net channel #guardianproject.