Project HighFire:

Vision Statement

At CryptoRights, we ask ourselves daily what kind of a world we would be living in if it were too dangerous for human rights workers, aid & relief organizations, journalists and other humanitarians to uncover social injustices, save lives or tell the world the truth. The unfortunate fact is that the world is very unsafe for these professionals, and yet, they do their work anyway. If we owe them anything, it's the ability to do their work with adequate privacy. Fortunately, if we provide it to them, everyone benefits both indirectly and directly.

Humanitarian workers face very special communications challenges: witnesses and their testimony must be verified and sources protected, a process exacerbated by additional threats within unstable or highly volatile political climates in developing nations. The information that these humanitarian manage and transmit is also extremely sensitive: social justice work exposes the workers to dangers above and beyond consumer-grade threats, (e.g. identity theft, and spam email), when using mass communication networks. These dangers often include threats of, and actual, physical violence, since their adversaries will stop at nothing to prevent information about their crimes from being published.

Once gathered, humanitarian information requires protection from interception and tampering as well as the ability to verify sources. Because the data must travel over an increasingly insecure international communications infrastructure much of this work cannot safely take advantage of the existing Internet infrastructure: as the information is known to be intercepted in transit and used to make physical threats against the workers. The work is often done in the open, with the workers simply hoping that they will be lost in the general noise, but the Internet provides insufficient privacy protections for these people, resulting in serious threats against their persons, their sources and their effectiveness. The Daniel Pearl case is only one example of the dire threats they face: various professional humanitarian organizations publish annual reports on how many of them are killed, and even these studies do not account for the chilling effects of these threats on the effectiveness of other such workers (see "Attacks on the Press in 2001", by the Committee to Protect Journalists, ISBN 0-944823-21-1).

In addition, recent psychiatric and psychological studies [e.g. http://www.apa.org/international/ webpispring02.prn.pdf] found that humanitarians, and in particular war correspondent journalists, suffer from pronounced posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD) because of the events they have witnessed firsthand. These people desperately need private communications with each other and their families to maintain a reasonably healthy level of mental health, and common internet issues such as unsolicited commercial email can be disruptive and destructive under such conditions. These special challenges to humanitarians and their important work demand better personal and organizational security solutions (assessments, policies, technologies and training) that create safer, more private ways to use the available communications infrastructure.

The funding we are requesting here will be used to create a scalable communications system (nicknamed HIGHFIRE for "Human rIGHts FIREwall") with very strong privacy protections and a very friendly user interface and easy management/administration tools. This system will enable social justice workers to communicate more effectively by enhancing their productivity through the elimination of unsolicited messages, as well as providing them with the ability to verify the sender and contents of messages, hence promoting a freer exchange of ideas, information and evidence with diminished danger to the persons involved.

A unique feature of our proposal is that we will first perform a privacy needs assessment for (at least four of) our humanitarian NGO clients: very few so-called "privacy" efforts in this field have yet to actually ask the humanitarians themselves what they actually need. The project then involves developing a software & hardware privacy protection system (three major components: one small hardware device, two software packages), full documentation and training materials, on-site training seminars and technical support. Finally, we will conduct an ongoing usability study and reporting our findings to the NGO participants, our funders and the general public. The finished HIGHFIRE system will be released to the world as a free, open source "toolkit" (minus support services) with broad appeal to end users (consumers), small businesses, internet service providers, NGO and enterprise users, thus bringing the privacy enhancements to the widest possible audience. The hardware designs will be packaged into a do-it-yourself kit that any member of the public may follow to construct their own low-cost home protection system under the philosophy that "if it's good enough for human rights workers, it's good enough for home users."

CRF's ultimate goal is global justice: in order to achieve that, humanitarian professionals (human rights workers, journalists, medical aid workers) who work on the front lines on behalf of all of us, need to be able to communicate safely, with assurance and without fear.

If you would be interested in working with our R&D team on HighFire development, please please contact the project administrator.

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