LFP WINS ROSE FOUNDATION FUNDING
We are thrilled to share some exciting news about the future of Library Freedom Project. Thanks to a grant from the Rose Foundation’s Consumer Privacy Rights Fund, Nima Fatemi will be joining Library Freedom Project as our chief technologist. Nima has been a dedicated volunteer with LFP for over a year, most notably helping create the highly successful Tor exit relay pilot project that we recently concluded in New Hampshire. With support from Rose Foundation, we’ll be able to continue the exits project at scale, with Nima traveling to libraries all over the country to implement relays. Nima will also conduct privacy trainings in libraries, taking them to a more advanced level, and help libraries set up privacy-protecting infrastructure.
Rose Foundation’s Consumer Privacy Rights Fund supports privacy protection and privacy education efforts, particularly those projects which help users take control of personal information and digital devices in order to protect themselves from a hostile internet. We are humbled that the Rose Foundation has recognized us as leaders in the field, and excited about the potential of this new partnership.
Nima is a cypherpunk, a privacy activist and longterm member of the FOSS community, working on censorship circumvention technologies and privacy-enhancing tools for more than six years. He’s heavily involved with The Tor Project, focusing in particular on usable security, and he has deep personal understanding of threat modeling and adversary resistance. He began volunteering with Library Freedom Project in our early days, working with us on everything from securing the webserver to developing privacy trainings, and helped create the idea for our exit relay project. He brings a wealth of technical knowledge and a passion for making privacy and security tools safer and easier to use for all people.
With Nima officially on staff, we’ll provide a resource packet for libraries interested in running Tor exit relays. This resource packet will have everything a library needs for successful exit relay deployment and operation, including ideological materials to help make the case for relays to library stakeholders, legal documents developed by our attorney partners, and technical resources for successful relay maintenance. In addition to publishing the resource packet, we’ll begin soliciting more libraries to participate in the exits project. Nima will also be available to conduct more advanced privacy trainings to our library communities, such as helping them set up secure library websites using Let’s Encrypt and Tor onion services. Lastly, we’re developing a privacy bootcamp for librarians who are ready to get to the next level. More to come on that soon!
As ever, we continue to work closely with the ACLU, particularly the ACLU of Massachusetts, and this new initiative will further solidify our partnership with The Tor Project. This Rose Foundation funding marks a turning point for Library Freedom Project — one where we are able to take our highly successful work to the necessary next steps — and we’ve only scratched the surface of what we want to do. We can’t wait to introduce Nima to our greater library community, and we’re looking forward to hearing from libraries who want to work with him. Contact us to discuss what Nima and LFP can do for your library. Thanks for your continued support for all that we do.