Inspired by London CryptoFestival, Brighton CryptoParty & Festival aims to encourage critical thinking about technology, data, surveillance, censorship and privacy as well as offer practical tips, tools and behaviour. The CryptoFestival is free and intended for everyone; no prior technical expertise or knowledge is assumed. Kids are most welcome, all children under the age of 18 must be accompanied by an adult.

Duncan Campbell

The leaking of top secret documents by Edward Snowden is the most important event in understanding the true extent of the mass spying operations of the NSA, GCHQ and partners.

But how have the Snowden files changed the game for citizens wishing to protect their privacy, and journalists their sources? Brighton-based investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell, talks about how far and how deep and how long the US NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have set out secretly to subvert the security, safety and effectiveness of the Internet.

Their methods include breaking into fibre cables, hacking communications companies, and recruiting or blackmailing software engineers to break their companies systems.

Campbell has exposed state snooping for nearly 40 years. In 1976, he revealed for the first time the existence of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in a piece for Time Out magazine called, The Eavesdroppers. This led to his arrest under the Official Secrets Act the following year, when the government attempted to imprison him for 30 years.

After the trial, he joined the New Statesman magazine. During his 15 years, he investigated Britain’s secret phone-tapping centres, corruption in GCHQ, secret war time plans to suspend civil liberties, and the top secret global surveillance programme, Echelon.

Recently, he has produced reports based on the Snowden files for the Independent, including how the British Embassy in Berlin was being used as a covert listening station.

See website for more

Javier Ruiz from Open Rights Group

Open Rights Group is the UK’s leading voice defending freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, creativity and consumer rights on the Internet. ORG is a member organisation of European Digital Rights (EDRi).

Smári McCarthy

Executive director at IMMI. He was a co-founder of the Icelandic Digital Freedoms Society in 2008 with the aim of promoting digital rights, free culture, free software, and free hardware in Iceland. He has worked on developing and spreading digital fabrication technology through Fab Labs and Hacker Spaces. He's very passionate about systems and information, and having grown up on the Internet, he feels it's very important to protect it. @smarimc

Paolo Vecchi

Paolo Vecchi is the CEO of Omnis Systems Ltd a distributor specialised in Open Source based solutions operating in Europe with offices in the UK and Italy. Working on the IT infrastructure side of businesses of all sizes he accumulated a great deal of skills in improving the privacy and security side of enterprise computing. That's one of the reasons why he decided to move away from the usual closed source brands and started implementing Linux and Open Source based solutions since the mid '90 as already then it was already common knowledge that several services and applications had “backdoors”. He warned his customers about the security and privacy issues present in using public cloud services and the Internet in general well before the PRISM/NSA scandal and his comments have been published by The Guardian and other newspaper. Now his companies are helping SME, enterprises, public and educational organisations in keeping their data safe while reducing their IT expenditure and and simplifying its management.

Kitten Groomer

Grooming the Kitten (or cleaning up possible malware from a USB using Raspberry PI)