++ This guest post is part of a spotlight series on the organizations defending the free Internet.++

Fear of digital surveillance breeds silence. 

In the words of a youth activist in Zambia who took part in a research study tracking digital security threats: 

We are all fearful. It makes you constantly paranoid. It also undermines our work. It discourages us. It's very disheartening. It's difficult to keep the fire going. I've sort of stepped back from the front line.

Silencing of whistleblowers, journalists and human rights defenders deprives citizens of the credible information they need to participate meaningfully in public life. It undermines democracy, enabling corruption and human rights abuses to flourish.

Blueprint for Free Speech is a non-profit committed above all to upholding the right to freedom of opinion and expression for all people, as enshrined by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We work internationally to promote protections for a free and independent media, the free flow of information, institutional transparency and support for whistleblowers.

Industrial-scale surveillance with military-grade spyware is having a chilling effect on investigative journalism and human rights advocacy work, with profound implications for access to truth about power. 

Killer corporations

Free access to reliable information has never mattered more. Some of the world's biggest corporations are manipulating scientific data, controlling narratives and capturing regulators to sell products they know will kill us.  That's not an overstatement: it's the conclusion of the New England Journal of Medicine. Their latest research shows fossil fuels, tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, chemicals and pesticides, and drugs such as opioids cause 20 million deaths a year.

Blueprint works closely with activists, journalists and whistleblowers in many of these fields, exposing or highlighting a range of public interest issues, from data privacy violations in the EU, organ trafficking in East Africa and deaths squads in West Africa and South Africa, the collapse of quality control at Boeing in the US, and the dirty tricks deployed by big tobacco in Asia and Africa. 

We provide them with support, public recognition, guidance, referrals and training, legal assessments, as well as arming them with actionable research. 

More recently, with the rise of unaccountable tech oligarchs raising the spectre of a dystopian cybernetic authoritarianism, we are increasingly supporting AI whistleblowers and have added artificial intelligence safety to our arsenal of offerings through a new European project.  

A common thread is the need to guard against intrusive surveillance. For anonymous whistleblowers, this translates into the difference between coming forward with public interest disclosures that could save lives, or staying silent. For journalists and activists, it means being able to continue the work of speaking truth to power. 

Ricochet Refresh

Blueprint develops and maintains software that allows people to reach out to the media, NGOs and anti-corruption agencies anonymously. Ricochet Refresh is a peer-to-peer, instant messaging application by Blueprint that prioritizes user privacy and user control by design. The application and protocol are completely decentralized, and do not depend on any third-party infrastructure apart from the Tor network itself. Best of all, the project is community-driven, so we listen to what people need when using it and translate that into action.

Ricochet Refresh is free and open-source software that works by creating a Tor onion service on your computer, which serves as your anonymous identity and endpoint on the network. When you communicate with a contact, a Tor circuit is established between your machine, routing data through multiple nodes so that no single node knows both the origin and destination. This strengthens anonymity. All communications are end-to-end encrypted, so message contents are only visible to the parties in a conversation.

The architecture makes it particularly valuable for protecting freedom of expression among civil society groups worldwide who face surveillance risks. The Ricochet Refresh package also bundles in the Tor Project's censorship-circumvention tools to enable connectivity even in constrained network environments. It is one of the only free, open-source applications that allows unlimited file size transfer on a fully anonymized basis. This is incredibly important if you're a journalist, activist or whistleblower who wants to transfer large files, such as videos. 

Cybersecurity training

Since 2024, Blueprint has conducted a series of cybersecurity training sessions in over a dozen lower- and middle-income countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, where the need for technical support to guard against digital surveillance is the greatest. We support journalists, researchers, community advocacy workers and others who face threats to their digital and often personal safety.

These sessions apply foundational and more advanced digital security precautions with expert facilitators on-hand to help participants make practical changes to their device set-ups during the sessions. They walk out at the end of the day more cybersecure than when they arrived in the morning. As part of this, we introduce them to metadata-resistant communications platforms --  including Ricochet Refresh -- to make it safer to receive whistleblower disclosures.

Whistleblowers often face vicious retaliation attacks. Anonymity gives them some protection -- and it does something else important: it shifts the public conversation from "let's blame the whistleblower!" to "let's focus on finding out about the wrongdoing".

The impact of this work, made possible thanks to the time and energy invested by many people and organizations who ensure the internet is kept open and secure, is tangible and profound. As this journalist in North Africa put it: 

This session made me realise, in a very concrete way, that cybersecurity isn't just an IT department's responsibility, but also concerns my daily actions, my digital reflexes, and how I protect my professional identity online. As a journalist, this pragmatic approach was particularly useful: it gave me concrete tools, but also a new framework for analysing the risks I face.

The digital threats faced by defenders of truth and democracy are multiplying. So should our capacity to respond to them. The free internet is at the frontline of this battle, and Blueprint's digital protection tools make a difference where it counts.