Nominet Trust, a United Kingdom leading social tech funder, selected the Martus Project, an initiative of Benetech’s Human Rights program, among this year’s top 100 innovations using technology to drive social change around the world. The curated listed of these leading innovations, known as the Nominet Trust 100 (NT100), appears in the Nominet Trust’s 2014 Social Tech Guide.
Today, International Human Rights Day, the Benetech Human Rights Program is delighted to announce the release of version 5 of the Martus app and the debut of the updated Martus Project website. With these updates, Benetech is taking a leap towards improving the usability of end-to-end, open source encryption and extending its benefits to rights defenders, activists, journalists, citizen reporters, and other organizations and individuals who rely on secure data collection.
In a guest post published on the blog of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Society on Social Implications of Technology, CEO Jim Fruchterman highlights four general principles that guide Benetech in developing humanitarian technology applications.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that the United States is negotiating with eleven other countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, has raised significant concerns about risks to fundamental rights of the world’s citizens. In a story that examines the risk of private data flow within the countries that are negotiating the TPP, Mexican weekly news magazine Proceso cites Benetech VP of Human Rights, Enrique Piracés, on the implications of the TPP for human rights groups and other vulnerable communities.
While new technologies can play a critical role in defending human rights, they can also create unforeseen risks for human rights groups and activists. On October 30, 2014, Benetech Vice President of Human Rights Enrique Piracés joined fellow panelists Iain Levine, Deputy Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS, and Andrew Rasiej, Founder of Personal Democracy Media and the Personal Democracy Forum, in a discussion of key issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. You can watch the complete webcast on Livestream.
