Access, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and Others Partner with Cloudflare to Protect Freedom of Expression on the Internet

San Francisco, CA, June 12, 2014

Cloudflare, the leading Internet performance and security company, today announced Project Galileo to protect free expression online. The company is working with global NGOs to find websites at risk of attack and provide, at no cost, the same state-of-the-art mitigation technology already used by Cloudflare’s thousands of enterprise customers including national government and Fortune 500 customers. Project Galileo equips politically and artistically important organizations and journalists with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work.

“Cloudflare’s mission is to build a better Internet. Bullies should not be able to knock sites offline simply because they disagree with their content. We realized this was an increasing problem and there was something important Cloudflare could do to solve it,” explained Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Critical to Project Galileo’s success is that we alone aren’t picking who deserves protection. That’s why we’re proud to be working with some of the leading NGOs, spanning the political spectrum, in order to identify the websites that should qualify for the Project.”

Project Galileo partners

Cloudflare is partnering with more than 15 civil society organizations — including Access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the Freedom of the Press Foundation — to help identify and protect politically and artistically important websites that come under DDoS attack.

“Project Galileo is a breakthrough. It shows how Silicon Valley tech companies can actively create a more secure and safe Internet for the world’s most vulnerable Internet users. Civil society actors around the world are under attack and this service helps create a level of protection we would otherwise not be able to access,” said Brett Solomon, executive director at Access. “The right to freedom of expression now has a new ally online.”

Through Project Galileo, Cloudflare provides partnering NGOs with an effective “bat phone” to call when they know a politically or artistically important website is under attack. Once notified, Cloudflare is committed to providing, at no cost, the at-risk organization with the company’s most advanced DDoS protection.

“Cloudflare has shown remarkable leadership in its commitment to digital human rights, and Project Galileo is a bold step in ensuring that important and often controversial content online cannot be silenced by blunt, brute-force denial-of-service attacks,” said Joe Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Project Galileo participants

Project Galileo website participants have come under increasingly virulent, even state-sponsored, attacks. The Project already protects sites including minority rights organizations, LGBT groups in Africa and the Middle East, global citizen journalists and independent media outlets in the developing world.

“Cloudflare’s Project Galileo can significantly help secure websites at risk, adding a layer of protection otherwise beyond the reach of most NGOs, grassroots civil society organizations, independent journalists and activists,” explained Sanjana Hattotuwa, founding editor at Groundviews, a Sri Lankan citizen journalist website protected by the Project. “Cloudflare helps secure information in the public domain vital for accountability, human rights and justice in Sri Lanka — and globally.”

For more information about becoming a partner or an NGO participant please visit www.projectgalileo.org.