Rift Recon Blog — journalism

Last week, the 2015 Oslo Freedom Forum united hundreds of international voices to address some of the world’s most critical human rights issues with the goals of challenging ideas and implementing change. The Rift Recon Team was on site running the conference’s first Tech Lab, which was designed to advise the attending activists, journalists, attorneys, artists, government officials, and other warm bodies on sensitive issues of security, privacy, and anonymity. “This year’s company presence was markedly different from last year’s,” said Rift Recon CEO Eric Michaud, “Last year we combined a presentation with subsequent focus groups, but we discovered an...

Tomorrow kicks off the seventh annual Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) hosted by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a non-profit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. At last year’s revolutionary conference Rift Recon traveled across the world to present a comprehensive security workshop to the crowds of rights defenders, scholars, dissidents, policymakers, Nobel Laureates, visionaries, heads of state, journalists, and other activists. Due to the undeniable popularity of the workshop and the demand for more individualized attention to specific incidences of threat and vulnerability, Rift Recon returned to OFF this year in a...

Back in May of this year, Rift Recon CEO Eric Michaud and Lead Trainer Brian O'Shea were poised to present a comprehensive security workshop geared toward protecting high-risk individuals in possession of sensitive information at the 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF). When a hotel union labor strike unexpectedly occurred, the conference was postponed until October 20-22. This left Rift Recon a few months to reexamine and refurbish their presentation, bringing in skilled reinforcements in the way of notorious author, blogger and journalist Violet Blue. Rift Recon staffer Arianna Travaglini recently got the opportunity to sit down and chat with Blue...