The Guardian Project

About the Organization

The Guardian Project is an open source mobile technology team creating easy to use applications and developer tools focused on personal security, anonymity and privacy. We work closely with rights defenders, activists and NGOs to understand the specific risks and threats they face in their work, and our software is designed to be used by anyone seeking to protect their communications and personal information from unjust intrusin and monitoring, whether domestic or international.

Our apps allow for a mobile user to browse, download content and communicate over the Internet, without allowing that traffic to be surveilled, filtered or blocked. We offer a privacy-by-design mobile browser and instant messaging chat app, that provide extra layers of communications security, while also being sensitive about what data is locally cached and stored on the phone. We offer easy to use, freely licensed software libraries for data encryption and network proxying that extend these same capabilties to any Android application developer who wishes to include them.

Software

We have a number of mobile projects that we hope you might be interested in contributing to. They range from deeply complex mobile censorship circumvention to media manipulation for personal identity obfuscation.

Orbot - Mobile Anonymity & Circumvention

Our first and flagship Android application, Orbot is an app that allows mobile phone users to access the web, instant messaging and email without being monitored or blocked by mobile internet service providers. Orbot brings the features and functionality of Tor to the Android mobile operating system.

Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Learn more at https://torproject.org

As Orbot has been developed in close partnership with The Tor Project, we use their Git and Trac repos for source management and issue tracking, respectively.

Gibberbot - Secure Instant Messaging

Gibberbot is a full featured instant messaging application integrated with the “Off the Record” encrypted chat protocol. Our app is built on Google’s open-source Talk app and modified to support the Jabber XMPP protocol.

Gibberbot was the winning submission in the first inaugural Develop for Privacy Challenge organized by the ACLUs of Northern California and Washington, the Tor Project, and the Information & Privacy Commissioner’s Office of Ontario.

ObscuraCam - Secure Smart Camera

The goal of the SecureSmartCam project to to design and develop a new type of smartphone camera app that makes it simple for the user to respect the visual privacy, anonymity and consent of the subjects they photograph or record, while also enhancing their own ability to control the personally identifiable data stored inside that photo or video. Also, we think an app that allows you to pixelize your friends, disguise their faces and otherwise defend their privacy just a little bit, is a lot of fun and helps raise awareness about an important issue.

The current release focuses on ‘obscura’ by optimizing the workflow of identity obfuscation in still images. Future releases will look at ‘informa,’ the process of properly gaining and recording informed consent from subjects, while also moving to video.

SQLCipher - Easy Application Encryption for Android

SQLCipher is an SQLite extension that provides transparent 256-bit AES encryption of database files. To date, it has been open-sourced, sponsored and maintained by Zetetic LLC. In the mobile space, SQLCipher has enjoyed widespread use in Apple’s iOS, as well as Nokia / QT for quite some time. Given that Android by default provides integrated support for SQLite databases, our goal was to create an almost identical API for SQLCipher, so that developers of all skill level could use it, without a steep learning curve.

NoteCipher is a sample application pulled from the standard Android samples code and updated to use SQLCipher.

Development Team

Developer community management is handled by our founder and lead developer, Nathan Freitas, who actively contributes to all of our software projects. Our development team include Hans Christoph-Steiner, lead developer for the Gibberbot messaging app, Shawn Van Every, lead developer of ObscuraCam, Harlo Holmes, lead developer of InTheClear and major contributor to ObscuraCam, and Lee Azzarello, formerly of Drop.io. All are based in New York.

The development team is supported by Derek Halliday, who handles product management and application design. Derek recently relocated from New York, to San Francisco.

Tools

Our goal is to conduct as much of our design and development as possible in public. To that end, GitHub Issues is the place for issue and bug tracking, and GitHub Wiki is the place for product documentation. Keep in mind that as a result, each of our projects has its own Wiki and Issues site.

We're very active on IRC, and rely on it as our primary communications channel. Join us on #guardianproject on either Freenode or OFTC and look for n8fr8, djhalliday, _hc, harlo, or PatrickBatman.

Volunteer Onboarding

While prior experience with encryption and/or security is a major plus, we're happy to accept contributions from developers of all skill levels.The best way to get started is to be proactive, clone and explore the source of your choice, and jump into IRC with questions. Because we have so many active projects being concurrently managed by a relatively small team, it's difficult for us to spend too much dedicated time on 1:1 walkthroughs.

For volunteers with less availabilty, each and every one of our projects could use a documentation refresh. Up-to-date user reference guides would be extremely helpful for our users.