<Privacy Policy>

Last Updated Sunday March 10, 2009
The names and identities of people interested in encryption, privacy, and their rights are very sought after by those in power. The Oly Hackbloc recognizes that the right to privacy is vitally important to a free society and the freedom of expression. We also recognize that you don't like when web sites collect information about you and then sell it to others. Here's what you need to know:
The Oly Hackbloc and its servers do not log or store any personally-identifiable information about you without your explicit permission. We don't know who you are or what you're doing on our servers. We don't let anybody see what is on our servers without a valid court order or other legal justification and we do not process out-of-jurisdiction requests. We will challenge any requests that we believe to be illegitimate. Access to personally-identifiable information is tightly controlled. Any changes or updates to this privacy policy that do anything aside from correct spelling and grammar will be posted on the site and mailing lists ahead of time. We will even delete the information we have on you at your request. There are very few exceptions to this. For more information on how this works keep reading.

The Oly Hackbloc servers do not log any information about you. The only personal information we store on our servers is the information you explicitly provide to us through registering accounts, subscribing to mailing lists, posting to mailing list, and other normal uses of our servers. We try to require as little information as possible from you. If you think we're asking too much, remember that you can usually lie. In order to maintain our servers properly and diagnose problems, we may log personally-identifiable information for short periods of time while we work on the problem. After the problem has been fixed (unless further legal work needs to be done) the logs will be securely deleted. Some of our services keep statistics in order to track site usage. These statistics are anonymous and do not identify you, your IP address, or your online identity. We may publish these statistics. We only keep personal information that is necessary to the operation of the site such as your username, password, email address, and whatever else you explicitly provide us. The hard drives on all of our servers are encrypted with at least 128-bit encryption to prevent against theft.

Access to personally-identifiable information, encryption keys, servers, and passphrases is very tightly controlled. If we grant an Oly Hackbloc member access to personally-identifiable information on the basis of a single case, we will notify you beforehand as detailed in the section about communications later in the policy. 

If you contact us, we will store those communications as long as they are needed and then delete them. In most cases sending an email to us will give us your name, your IP address, and your email address. In some cases, such as when sending mail to an entire working group, your email could automatically be given to several people. If something needs to be referred to another Oly Hackbloc member, we will forward the email to them and then delete the email in accordance with our privacy policy. We will notify you before forwarding your email unless it has been sent to the wrong email address, in which case it will be forwarded without your explicit permission. When we delete our communications with you, we will notify you via email. If you do not receive a notification email, please remind us. This privacy policy is only as good as those who follow it and those who keep them in check. Some communications (you know what these are) with the Oly Hackbloc including but not limited to baseless legal threats and threats against an individual may be shared (without your explicit permission) among the collective and anybody else who we feel needs to see it, which could be the entire world.

The Oly Hackbloc does not give our information up to anybody without a valid court order or other legal justification. We do not respond to requests outside of our own jurisdiction. We will not respond to nice requests or demands for information (without legal justification), no matter how many people make it, who makes it, what they are wearing, which badge they show us, what they threaten to do to us if we do not comply, how much they offer to pay, how attractive they are, if they promise to sleep with us (yes, we're that hardcore), or any other situation you can imagine. We will fight any court order or any other legally-sanctioned order if we believe it to be illegitimate.

The Oly Hackbloc understands that as time goes on your level of comfort (or paranoia) with the distribution of your personal information will change. Assuming we are not currently responding to a communication from you or showing it to our lawyers, we will delete any information about you at your request. If we have published information about you or your communications with us because you have threatened us or for some other reason then we will not un-publish it. You can not expect us to clean up the internet of references to you or compromise on issues of our principles to keep your mind at ease. Most of our services provide an automated way to remove personally-identifiable information about yourself from our servers such as deleting an account. In the event that these ways do not work for you or do not exist, you can send an email to privacy[at]olyhackbloc[dot]org to ask that your information is securely purged. We will notify you once we have purged your information.

Intelligence Work

The Oly Hackbloc occasionally engages in 'intelligence' work where we try and find out information about certain individuals or entities. These individuals are usually engaged in activities that are harmful to our community or are suspected of doing so. In some cases, we may use our servers to log personally idenentifiable information on said individuals. We may also contact other entities about these individuals. If said individuals have communicated with us, we may forward such communications onto others without notifying them.

While the Oly Hackbloc makes every effort possible to insure your privacy on our servers, there are still ways that it can be violated. We can't guarantee that nobody will hack into our servers and steal your data or that somebody isn't listening in on your communications with us. We also can't guarantee the physical security of our servers, that your encryption/proxy program hasn't been backdoored, or that the encryption algorithms we use will be unbreakable forever. We can't guarantee that nobody will be able to steal our private keys (although we try really hard) or use a cold boot attack against us. We can't guarantee that our group hasn't been infiltrated by people interested in your information. We can't guarantee that our web host and ISP isn't listening in or handing over your information. In some cases, we may receive a court order to produce or hand over logs that is coupled with a legal gag order. In others, a member of our collective may be tortured or otherwise forced to violate their ideals. While we hope that they resist such treatment, we do not and cannot expect it. In the end, the people at Oly Hackbloc that implement this privacy policy are human too. We make mistakes, err in our judgement, and occasionally have our own security policies violated by outsiders and factors beyond our control. Ultimately, privacy is your responsibility. If you are concerned about the above threats to your privacy and ours (everybody should be), then consider taking additional measures to protect it such as encrypting your hard drive, encrypting your emails, and using proxy systems like Tor. Direct any questions, clarifications, or suggestions to privacy {at} olyhackbloc [dot] org