For nearly two years, my primary focus has been on the information security of activists and marginalized communities at risk of being targeted by hostile actors through the internet. I began working on this as part ActSecure, an ad-hoc group of movement technologists formed after the 2016 election.
The need is great, and there’s only so much an informal group of volunteers can do before hitting the limits of what we can deliver. Despite the fact that we mainly work with individuals, we’ve been approached by a number of non-profit organizations over the past two years looking for help.
Serendipitously, we met Oliver Day, founder and executive director of an organization called Securing Change. Oliver had just had a baby and was in discussion with his board of directors around shutting Securing Change down. With a focus on helping non-profit organizations with tech security and five years of history, we started talking about what we could do together. Earlier this year, we began the process of transitioning leadership of Securing Change to the ActSecure core team and rebooting the organization.
As I have the most experience with startup and non-profit work, my primary focus right in facilitating this merger is to build an operation under which we can develop new programming within and parallel to ActSecure.
More to come.