Sponsor 9
Project Title - Usability and Community Intervention on Support for Democracy and Human Rights
Project Period: December 1, 2017 - December 31, 2020
Project Goals/Activities
Summary - implement an intervention in support of activists and others fighting for their rights under repressive and unstable regimes. This intervention will specifically target organizers on the ground in Colombia, Kenya, and Uganda and provide training on how to use the Tor Network through desktop and mobile devices in order to communicate anonymously and securely.
Objective 1: Eliminate censorship barriers that prevent agents of change from influencing political, civic, social, and environmental discourse, organization, and activism via the Internet.
Goal 1.1: Empower agents of change to circumvent censorship blocks to Internet access. Goal 1.2: As censorship blocks evolve, empower impacted groups to impel corresponding updates in anti-censorship technologies.
Objective 2: Empower agents of change to act against corruption and abuses of human rights and safety when and where they are observed, through publication, activism, whistle-blowing, and reporting, irrespective of physical location.
Goal 2.1: Provide access to secure, untraceable communications in places where censorship of mobile web access and app usage is increasing.
Objective 3: Reduce the technological barriers that isolate marginalized individuals and cultural and civic groups,including women and other historically oppressed groups, from actively participating in broad dialouges about peace-building and situational improvement.
Goal 3.1: Increase awareness of Tor as a means for marginalized and oppressed groups to avert imposed barriers to online access.
Goal 3.2: Reframe Tor as a user-friendly consumer product, not tool just for technologists.
Objective 4: Reduce opportunities for oppressive actors to identify, locate, physically or digitally attack, and persecute agents of change.
Goal 4.1: Empower agents of change to avert online surveillance and to communicate as anonymously as they wish.
Objective 5: Empower vulnerable individuals to safely and securely communicate, organize, share resources, and express opinions using Internet resources without fear of retaliation or recrimination due to negative surveillance.
Goal 5.1: Cultivate a general understanding of online threat models and risks related to oppressive surveillance.
Goal 5.2: Empower vulnerable groups to freely connect, learn, and engage online without fear of identification, retaliation, or recrimination.
Goal 5.3: Reduce technological barriers to safe, secure communications.
