1/Developing and providing technological tools to enhance privacy and security of people living in non-democratic regimes when using ICT.
2/Educating and raising awareness of activists about the opportunities and risks of ICT. In particular assisting activists to make best use of tools such as social networks and blogs while raising awareness of surveillance risks when communicating via ICT.
3/Gathering high quality intelligence about what is happening “on the ground” in order to monitor the level of surveillance and censorship at a given time, in a given place.
4/Cooperation. Developing a practical way to ensure that all stakeholders can share information on their activity and promote multilateral action and building cross-regional cooperation to protect human rights.
Apparently, the software already exist, and is currently used by computer experts, but the EU would like to educate human rights activists (and anyone else) to use these tools. It will also provide a download space. This is an interesting development and we will keep an eye to see how the EU implements this, what software they will recommend using, and if it works on the ground. [press release]