[liberationtech] Circumventing Government-Imposed Communication Blackouts

[Yosem Companys]

http://rangzen.denovogroup.org/wp/

We develop technology to allow citizens of repressive regimes to
communicate freely, independent of government or corporate-controlled
infrastructure, while providing strong anonymity guarantees.

- Infrastructure Independent: A mobile mesh that scales to millions of
users, without compromising their safety.
- Trustworthy: Leverages social connections to resist attack and infiltration.
- Private: Provides strong anonymity guarantees to users to preserve
their privacy.

Enabled by a generous grant from the US State Department’s Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), as part of their Internet
Freedom Initiative, we embark on an exciting journey to help citizens
of oppressive regimes circumvent government-imposed communication
blackouts.

At the core of this work, is our recent study – Rangzen, on which
we’ll build the remaining elements for a widely deployable solution.
Some of these elements pose fascinating research challenges, while
others call for skillful integration of existing solutions.
Our core team of developers is housed in Berkeley’s computer science
department (EECS), amidst graduate students and faculty, at the CITRIS
headquarters, to drive the research agenda and incorporate
cutting-edge studies through a collaborative process.

We plan to release a beta version of the Android-app by the end of
summer 2014. This version will be rigorously tested, peer reviewed and
experimented with by students and the general public, leading to bug
fixes and feature enhancement in successive releases.

Our work is freely available as open-source encouraging peer review
and transparency.

We work in tight collaboration with the TIER group and the Data and
Democracy Initiative (DDI).

Rangzen is the Tibetan word for Freedom/Liberty/Independence.