People of the CryptoRights Foundation

It takes many interesting people to make up a unique organization like CryptoRights, as well as partnerships with many different organizations to support it and make it successful. Human rights fieldwork, journalism, information security research and security software development are diverse disciplines that require the special talents of people from different skill-sets and communities to be brought to bear on CRF's common causes.

In the internetworked world of the present and the future, information on the public networks cannot too easily be trusted — and may even be disinformational or fraudulent — unless there is some widely available and reliable method for verifying its authenticity. Human rights workers and journalists have virtually no way to authenticate their data and protect it from tampering or interception. Confidential witness statements, NGO data and even public appeals for support and donations can easily be forged and spoofed. Unverifiable online "petitions", which rapidly turn into junk e-mail, can in many cases do more damage to NGOs and their causes than the benefits they might bring in. It's time for serious authentication methods to be introduced, and the widespread use of cryptography is the only viable solution. For fieldworkers working in dangerous places, one need only look at any recent newspaper — filled with a growing number of stories about human rights workers, doctors, missionaries, relief workers and foreign correspondents being injured or killed — to know that these brave people need help to protect their communications, their lives and the lives of those for and with whom they work.

Similarly, the work of dedicated security researchers is threatened now more than ever by skillful manipulations of public opinion by special interest groups and by such technically unsound initiatives as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Only one of many examples of false security, the DMCA creates a chilling effect on purely scientific, academic research into security technologies that could protect the public from rogue governments agencies, greedy corporate interests and even terrorist organizations, all of which can threaten not just the personal privacy and intimate details of our personal lives, but even the very lives of people working toward truth and justice. By selling the public "snake-oil" security solutions and choosing profits instead of real security — look at the bogus airline security that led to the deaths of thousands on September 11th 2001 — governments and corporations left to their own devices are literally placing us all in jeopardy. The security community needs human rights activists to work on their behalf, just as those activists need the training and security technologies their counterparts in the security area can develop and make available.

CRF's goal is to build a bridge between these communities and to offer the human rights community the technical know-how of the professional communications security community. That's why the community of Clients, Donors and Partners who stand behind CRF is as important to our mission as are the committed CRF Staff and Volunteers on the front lines.