Internationally: the start of a new cycle
The end of the year saw the launch of three new structuring projects with the support of Open Technology Fund and Digital Defenders Partnership.
Rapid Respond Fund: in 2023 Nothing2Hide was accepted as a member organisation of the Rapid Respond Fund, an Open Technology Fund programme dedicated to digital emergency response. Nothing2Hide now has the capacity to launch an emergency response very quickly, provided that it meets the criteria of OTF’s Rapid Respond Fund project, i.e. aid dedicated to activists, journalists and human rights defenders operating in authoritarian countries (France is not yet one of them). The contracting process was a long one, and the first intervention under this framework took place in April 2024.
Piguard reloaded: in December 2023, with the support of the Open Technology Fund, Nothing2Hide was given the opportunity to work on PiGuard, an ambitious project enabling us to equip organisations in nine countries around the world with hardware VPNs that are remotely manageable, easy to use and difficult to block. The project will start operationally in 2024, but the contracting process has taken up much of the last 4 months of 2024.
Media support in Afghanistan: we have secured the support of the Digital Defenders Partnership to carry out an ambitious media support project in Afghanistan, in the cities of Kabul, Herat and Balkh. The bulk of the project will take place in 2024 and will be fully reported on in the next progress report (and in our April newsletter, which you can subscribe to if you want to find out more about the project before the next progress report).
We have also finalised the projects initiated in 2022, namely :
the citizen investigation workshops supported by the Puech / Isocrate foundation;
support for APEDDH, a Rwandan human rights organisation
the latest emergency digital assistance operations under the Tech4Press project launched in 2022 with the support of the Digital Defenders Partnership.
In France: media education and digital citizenship
For 3 years now, Nothing2Hide has been running workshops and creating resources around digital citizenship and the fight against disinformation. We have run a number of citizen investigation sessions, an innovative workshop format that brings together the general public and journalists to work together on an investigative subject relating to their town or region. First, Nothing2Hide’s digital experts present the tools and techniques for advanced online information research. Participants discover, for example, how to identify the owner of a website, company or social network account, or how to recover pages that have disappeared from the Internet. Armed with this new knowledge, participants then begin investigative work in collaboration with an investigative journalist. This workshop format provides a practical approach to related topics such as the definition of a source, its credibility, and how the Internet works (what is a browser, a search engine, a website, etc.).
In 2023 we ran 10 citizen investigation and digital citizenship workshops. We are documenting these workshops and making all our resources freely available online so that other organisations can use them.
We were able to present this workshop format at the Assises du Journalisme in March 2023. For 2 hours, journalists and citizens were able to discover OSINT (Open Source INTelligence or advanced online information search) tools for collaborative work on an investigative subject. Journalist Amaelle Guiton from Libération was kind enough to help us run this workshop by proposing research on a French company trading in digital surveillance tools.
Training
While our association has been less active on the project side (i.e. funded by public or private subsidies), we have continued to invest as heavily in training as in previous years: in 2023 we trained 660 journalists, activists and campaigners.
Events
Open Technology Fund Summit, Austin Texas: Nothing2Hide was invited to the Open Technology Fund’s annual summit. This event brings together people and organisations from around the world working on anti-surveillance, anti-censorship and digital rights technologies. Participants include privacy and security experts, frontline defenders, journalists and researchers, among others.
Digital for freedom of information: we organised our first round table on 13 October 2023 on the theme Digital for freedom of information. We invited four of our partners to tell us about the situations in Ukraine, Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan. Informing during wartime, informing during election periods (with repeated Internet blackouts), bypassing digital censorship in a locked-down country, creating emergency digital assistance for journalists in Central Asia: the speakers presented the geopolitical situation in these four zones before outlining projects that enable journalists and activists to continue to inform (as safely as possible).
Cyberbullying: what are newsrooms doing? In March, we co-hosted a round-table discussion with Prenons la Une on the subject of Cyberbullying: what are newsrooms doing? Prenons la Une recorded the discussion and posted it on its website as a podcast in two episodes. You can listen to it here.
Mapping Festival, Geneva Switzerland: this festival in Switzerland aims to promote the audiovisual, technological and transdisciplinary arts on the French-speaking region’s artistic scene and to raise its profile internationally. The 2005 Mapping Festival takes place in May each year and features exhibitions, installations, performances, conferences and workshops. Nothing2Hide was invited to run a workshop for the general public on digital security, and to take part in a round table on surveillance.
Cyber security on Mayotte La Première: we had the opportunity to work in partnership with France Télévision in Mayotte to run cyber security training sessions on the local channel as part of Tous Hackteurs, a programme to raise awareness of cyber security on all France Télévision channels, which was launched 2 years ago and of which we are partners. This action was doubled by an intervention “outside the walls” organized by France Television during which professionals – of which Nothing2Hide – were able to exchange live on the air of Mayotte la première with high school and university students in Mayotte around the professions of the cyber-security.
Life at the association
The team has grown! Clémentine Billé has joined the Nothing2Hide salaried team. She had been a volunteer since the association was set up, including two years as president, before she was taken on. She now works part-time and is in charge of Nothing2Hide’s media and digital literacy programme.
In 2023, Nothing2Hide moved into its first offices! We have an office right in the centre of Paris, thanks to the Plateaux urbains scheme. We also use the meeting rooms to organise our various events, including board meetings, general assemblies, privacy cafés, training sessions for members and round tables.
Donation campaign: our 2023 donation campaign raised €2,565, which was invested in our emergency digital assistance. Thanks to the support of the F5 agency, we were also able to support our campaign with video clips in which our partners presented their collaboration with Nothing2Hide. F5 provided us with free support for the second year running, for which we would like to thank them.
Share it skills sponsorship: In 2023, Nothing2Hide benefited from support from Share It, an association that helps other associations with their digital projects. We asked Share It to help us with the PiGuard project. They designed a graphical interface to make the tool easier for end users to use. It was a bit of a culture shock. We discovered the world of consultancy, with its miles of meeting minutes posted on centralised proprietary tools such as Notion, as well as the mechanism of skills sponsorship and the tax reductions granted to companies taking part. The 92-day project was valued at €78,200. The results are available online on our Github repository. We leave it to you to judge the relevance of this valuation.