
Ask HN: Opportunities for pro-bono work democratizing strong encryption - sbrother
As I&#x27;m sure many of you are also feeling right now, I&#x27;m worried about the direction the US is taking toward total surveillance and loss of freedoms both on and offline. I&#x27;m already making donations to organizations like the ACLU, but I would really like to put my engineering skills to use on a project that could help fight back.<p>Is there any existing organization whose goal is building and marketing a highly distributed, open source messaging platform with end-to-end encryption, with good enough UI&#x2F;UX that it&#x27;s understandable and attractive to the average American?
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micaksica
Yes, Open Whisper Systems. Signal is open source and meant to be accessible.
There's also ToxCore -
[https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore](https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore)
\- which I have no experience with and I've heard sometimes the community is a
little trollish, but it has similar goals.

Remember, _any_ privacy project could use this help. _All_ of them want to be
accessible to the end user, including old-school tools like GnuPG. Often times
these security engineers aren't very UX oriented and we like our command
lines. Build good interfaces on top of them. Although a shitty name, Felony
looked good for this:
[https://github.com/henryboldi/felony](https://github.com/henryboldi/felony)

Someone else asked a similar question in another Ask HN earlier, and I replied
with this:

> Welcome to the fray.

> First: decide what your skills are, and where you can contribute.

> Try the Tor Project first:

>
> [https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en)

> The community is great there and very accepting of newbies that have the
> skills.

> Signal / open whisper systems also are open source and accept pull requests:

> [https://github.com/whispersystems/](https://github.com/whispersystems/)

> Read the anonbib:

> [http://freehaven.net/anonbib/](http://freehaven.net/anonbib/)

> Also, there are other mixnet/darknet projects that could use help, such as
> i2p:

> [https://geti2p.net/en/get-involved](https://geti2p.net/en/get-involved)

> And if you want decentralized, mesh communications, cjdns and the Hyperboria
> experiment:

> [https://hyperboria.net/](https://hyperboria.net/)

Get involved with any of it. Push for the user, fight for the user. Make it
accessible and message the shit out of it. All of them have their merits and
any work toward any of them is progress.

