Project HighFire: Communications Assessment Tool (CAT):
A Survey of the Communications Security Needs of
Human Rights Organizations
HighFire Phase 1: Communications Needs Assessment
To ensure that the result of the HighFire project
is an optimum
solution tailored for the real-world needs of human rights groups, the
development work must
be informed by an understanding of end-users' communications technologies,
capabilities and limitations.
As part of the first project phase, CRF is currently identifying ideal NGO
participants by leveraging existing relationships developed over the
last four years of CRF's fieldwork. At the same time, CRF's
client services and security research staff have developed a Web-based
Communications
Assessment Tool (CAT), which will generate a gap
analysis detailing where security needs are not currently met, and which will allow the participants to clarify their
communications privacy needs, guiding CRF's subsequent work to develop
HighFire. To provide quality control and to improve the
accuracy of the tool, the analysis and recommendations will reviewed by
CryptoRights and the NGOs, with the results both used to further improve
the assessment tool and also to be published in the first HighFire project report.
The Goals of the CAT Survey:
By creating an online communications security and threat assessment
tool, CAT will positively impact the safety and abilities of human rights
organizations. Specifically CAT will:
- Enable leaders & IT managers at NGOs to directly evaluate
the risks to their organizations communications
- Raise NGO awareness about the collective communication
privacy needs common to human rights workers
- Collect (and anonymize) the output of the survey and produce a
report to inform CRF, the HR community and the communications
security & privacy field
- Provide a gap analysis revealing to each participating NGO
where threats exist that HighFire could mitigate
- Optimize the engineering requirements for CRF's current
and future projects, including HighFire and several others,
reduce development time and ensure that the end product is
as relevant, functional and usable as possible
- Determine which NGOs are most in need of
private communications, data integrity assurance and
authentication, so that we can assist them first.
If you work for a human rights NGO that you think would be interested in the Communications
Assessment Tool, please
please contact the project administrator.
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