Palo Alto, California, April 28, 2014—Benetech has announced the appointment of Christy Chin as the Chair of its Board of Directors. Chin is a Managing Director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation and has served as a member of Benetech’s Board of Directors since 2009. Chin succeeds longtime Chair and Benetech Founder, Jim Fruchterman.
As we start to grasp the scope and scale of unchecked surveillance, it is clear that having the know-how to protect personal information and privacy is no longer something that only human rights activists need. That’s why our Human Rights Program is working to increase use of end-to-end, open source encryption among journalists, citizen reporters, and activists, as well as broad awareness of the self-empowerment that open technology can generate. Team members of the Benetech Human Rights Program have just hosted a two-day workshop in New York City, where they introduced Martus, Benetech’s open technology for secure information management.
Benetech has signed a joint letter from a coalition of civil society and human rights organizations seeking clarification as to the allegations that the NSA and GCHQ monitored or are monitoring the communications of their organizations, or of other civil society organizations, media organizations, and human rights groups.
The African region has seen rising levels of homophobia over the last several months. Amidst the changing climate of restrictive, “anti-gay” laws that have swept the region, local LGBTI activists are facing new types of risks and threats, yet digital security literacy among LGBTI activists in the region remains quite low. That’s why a joint team from our Human Rights Program and from Access organized a workshop and a digital security health clinic focused on improving digital security for LGBTI activists in the African region. In a joint blog post published on the Access blog, they report from the field.
Did you know that April is National Volunteer Month? We’d like to take this opportunity to recognize and thank Benetech’s fantastic community of dedicated volunteers who amplify the positive impact we make in the lives of our beneficiaries. In this post, we’ll highlight the wonderful contributions of our student volunteers from Brigham Young University, who regularly meet to describe Bookshare textbook images, as well as the impact created through our SocialCoding4Good initiative that operates at the hub of technology-for-good volunteer engagement.
