Projects & Technologies
We run several projects mostly in the area of research, software engineering and advocacy. In early 2012 we developed a Project Plan that summarizes our mid-term vision for most projects implementation. We aim at starting-up each project we work on in a way that will facilitate the creation of an independent community around it. All projects started on a voluntary basis by Hermes members, Fellows or spot contributors, but was able to receive support by several organizations:
GlobaLeaks 0.1 has been financed on a project by USAID Serbia.
Research and development of GlobaLeaks and Tor2web Projects are currently financed by the Open Technology Fund of Radio Free Asia.
Project development in the global south is funded by Hivos.
Below a summary of our currently active projects:
GlobaLeaks
GlobaLeaks is the first open-source whistleblowing framework. It empowers anyone to easily set up and maintain an anonymous whistleblowing platform. GlobaLeaks can help many different types of users: media organizations, activist groups, corporations and public agencies.
Tor2web
Tor2web is the software project to create the Tor2web Network, a worldwide distributed network of proxy that aims at creating a bridge between the Internet and Tor Hidden Services. The goal is to make the Tor darknet accessible from anyone without the need of actually run Tor.
LeakDirectory
Currently leakdirectory.org is a community wiki that contains the list of all whistleblowing sites as well as useful information on the topic of whistleblowing. It will became a site (and software) providing an index of GlobaLeaks Whistleblowing sites, with their capabilities, goals, references and information. It will be the AppStore of whistleblowing sites.
OpenWhistleblowing
OpenWhistleblowing is a free software product to deploy digital whistleblowing initiatives specifically designed for anti corruption, financial market regulation, food safety, fraud prevention and environmental monitoring.
Ahmia
Our mission is to create a working search engine for indexing, searching and cataloguing content present on the Tor network. Striving to support the Tor project, we are running exit nodes and tor2web nodes (tor2web.fi).
Big Brother Award
Yearly the Big Brother Awards is presented to government agencies, private companies and individuals who have excelled in the violation of citizen privacy. The italian edition is run by PWS in cooperation with Hermes.
Fax2social
Fax2social is a tool that acts as a bridge between analog telephony FAX and the Internet, allowing submission via Fax both on public social network (Twitter, Dropbox) or on a GlobaLeaks site. It has born as anti internet-kill-switch tool following Egyptian disconnections.
E-Privacy
Since 2002 and twice a year Progetto Winston Smith and Hermes Center organize e-privacy, a convention where privacy, digital civil rights and transparency issues are the main focuses. Attorneys, technologists, policy and law makers presents and discuss latest issues and news. Last edition, the sixtenth, was held in Cagliari the 17th and 18th of October 2014.