ISOC-CH awarded Beyond the Net grant to work on privacy

It is a great pleasure to announce that our project on privacy via mass encryption got selected for funding in the Beyond the Net programme of Internet Society. This two-year long project (June 2017-June 2019) will be undertaken together with the pEp Foundation in order to implement privacy by design. More specifically, the project aims to standardise pretty Easy Privacy protocols and help encrypt end-to-end all communication via close involvement in the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Since the 2013 Snowden revelations of mass surveillance, the level of trust in Internet services has plunged. While discussions around privacy protection advanced considerably, little progress has been achieved in designing tools that can be used on a daily basis by citizens around the world. The pretty Easy privacy (pEp) project has to goal to radically ease the use of already existing open standards and their corresponding tools for end-to-end encryption, to allow for mass encryption. The pEp project focuses primarily on written digital communications, with the goal of making end-to-end encryption of emails the norm rather than the exception.

This will be achieved by automating all steps necessary for regular Internet users, to provide a hassle-free, zero-touch experience to everyone. To this aim, the ISOC Switzerland Chapter (ISOC-CH) teamed up with the Swiss-based, tax-free pEp foundation to develop Internet-Drafts (I-Ds) for automatization protocols. The pEp foundation already provided early drafts of I-Ds to achieve the goal of an open standardization of the pEp protocols, but the work to develop them professionally and adapt them to the requirements and expectations of the Internet community (in particular the IETF) can successfully be undertaken in partnership with ISOC-CH. This work would further strengthen the links between the Chapter and the IETF.