FreedomBox: wall-wart firmware to provide privacy and route around censorship

The FreedomBox Foundation is a newly formed charity that has set out to make wall-wart sized, self-contained Linux routers that will provide important anonymizing and networking services, even when the government (or some other entity) terminates or surveils your network access. The project is led by Eben Moglen, formerly of the Free Software Foundation, now with the Software Freedom Law Center.

Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree “platform” technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times.

Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. “Plug servers” and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as “media centers,” “communications centers,” “wireless routers,” and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home.

Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom.

The FreedomBox Foundation