Background: Why Humanitarian Security?

The threats to human rights activists and journalists working in the field are a clear and present danger to them and to everyone benefitting from their work. CRF develops and integrates strong communications security solutions for humanitarians with critical field communications needs who operate in moderate risk to severe hazard environments. CRF's security technology support and training services assist humanitarian organizations in the successful deployment of these technologies to those working in the field where it is most needed to coordinate activities and otherwise strengthen human rights.

Communications security is a complex discipline that requires a combination of tools, policies and processes to be sucessfully harmonized in order to establish and maintain effective force protection and responses. Building a robust, secure communications infrastructure to help protect human rights work requires technology research and development expertise which is not traditionally available to nonprofit organizations.

Existing security tools, especially commercial ones, rarely offer the high assurances required by human rights fieldwork. Even when they could be useful, they are usually cost-prohibitive and generally lack appropriate management services. On the other hand, inexpensive (free, open source) public domain security tools are available, however they are often incomplete, user-unfriendly, hard to administer properly and difficult to field to those most in need in real life (-and-death) situations.

For international humanitarian organizations in particular, this places them at a severe disadvantage often resulting in grave risks for their personnel. Everyone capable of intercepting and observing their communications knows where to find and kill them and/or how to render them ineffective by disabling their access to resources, witnesses, evidence, etc. All too often, we see news stories that document the injury, disappearance and death of humanitarian relief workers caught between two factions of a violent conflict.

Frequently, the very subjects of human rights field investigations and actions, are not surprisingly very interested in the intelligence they can easily gather by observing and interfering with human rights efforts. They also monitor international criminal investigations, non-violent direct action protests and field investigative journalism. These persons and their organizations often take advantage of the human 'soft targets' these NGO's put in harm's way. Unfortunately, 'friendly' intelligence services are prohibited by their political masters from revealing what they know about these threats (and especially how they know it: their intelligence sources). Thus, they must refuse to be of any assistance to front-line NGO fieldworkers, a situation that actually upsets many of the people working in the intel services.

Humanitarian workers and journalists routinely work on the front lines of intra- and international political and military disputes, religious and secular conflicts, terrorist attacks, ethnic disputes, genocide and organized criminal activities. The general lack of basic security awareness and commsec capabilities has resulted in serious injuries to, and the deaths of, many thousands of these brave people.

Equally serious is the chilling effect this phenomenon creates in the world's human rights community. The many serious threats and deaths among humanitarians contributes to more and more failures to bring War Criminals and persons who have committed serious Crimes Against Humanity to the swift and decisive justice in international legal arenas. More justice for such human rights violators and more safety for human rights workers is required if the human community is to ever realize true democracy and respect for human rights on a global scale. Every one of those injured or lost is a terrible blow to ongoing efforts toward justice, and news of each new casualty also has a chilling effect on the recruitment of future humanitarian volunteers.

Secure communication technologies can create positive social change, especially when reliable high technology witnessing and evidence tools are placed in the hands of the human rights community.

We at CryptoRights ask for your help in building tools and services to help these fieldworkers — the very people who make the world safe for us to live in.

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