Project Galileo at Six: Protecting Vital Voices in a Year of Crisis

Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, which provides free security services to vulnerable nonprofits, independent media, and other at-risk groups, marks its sixth anniversary this month. The project’s mission has been consistent since launch: protect marginalized voices from being silenced by cyberattacks. The past year has tested that mission in new ways.

Since the last anniversary, Project Galileo has seen a more than 60% increase in participants, surpassing 1,000 organizations worldwide. The project now works with 36 civil society partners, adding eight new groups over the past year. New partners include the Center for International Media Assistance, DefendDefenders, Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, Open Briefing, PEN America, The Carter Center, and The Internet Society.

The added partnerships reflect a deliberate goal of expanding protections into new regions and areas of expertise. The Carter Center, which joined in September 2019, works in 80 countries on election monitoring, democratic institution-building, and support for human rights defenders. As Michael Baldassaro, Senior Advisor for Digital Threats to Democracy at The Carter Center, said, "Project Galileo plays a crucial role in helping to safeguard election observers, human rights activists, and independent media from malicious actors that aim to silence their voices."

The past year has also shaped the kind of organizations seeking protection. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven many existing participants to shift focus toward relief work, while new applicants have emerged building pandemic-response tools.

Pandemic Response Tools

In recent months, Project Galileo has seen an uptick in applications related to COVID-19 relief efforts, including symptom tracking sites, personal protective equipment donation platforms, and DIY mask creation initiatives.

CoronaSafe, an open-source public utility built for the Kerala State government in India, joined in March 2020. The project aggregates information on tracking the spread of COVID-19, telemedicine options, food delivery networks, hospital capacity, and ambulance networks. Within two weeks of joining, CoronaSafe launched 20 projects in multiple languages. Bodhish Thomas of CoronaSafe noted, "We're seeing thousands of new visitors each week that are looking for information and resources about COVID-19 across our multiple domains. We've seen attacks trying to get to us and huge spikes in traffic since March when we launched, and Cloudflare has kept us up and running through it all."

In Germany, Digital Waitingroom provides a platform that simulates a doctor's visit, helping patients assess COVID-19 symptoms while connecting to information services and health authorities. Freifunk Munich, also joining in March 2020, launched an online conference system for schools; Annika Wickert from the organization recounted how they "almost immediately... saw an increase in DDoS attacks" upon going live with the service.

#BeatCovid19Now, an Australian symptom tracker developed by researchers at the Centre for Global Health and Equity and data scientists at Swinburne University of Technology, joined the project in March 2020. The tracker collects daily symptom data for research while providing public information. Matthew Bailes, Professor and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, said the platform handles sensitive information and that the project's SSL encryption and web application firewall secure that data "against cyberattacks with Cloudflare."

Social Welfare and Community Groups

Roughly 35% of Project Galileo participants work in social welfare, community building, education, environmental and disaster relief, or global health. The pandemic has pushed many of these groups toward relief efforts, distributing PPE, organizing food delivery, and supporting frontline workers.

The Water Project, part of Galileo since 2017, provides clean water and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa. Since April 2020, the organization has expanded to include COVID-19 prevention training in more than 700 communities. "Our website is where all of our donors, team members, partners, and communities come together to learn about our work, manage project data, track impact and performance, and offer support. If it doesn't work, we don't work and the communities we serve suffer," said Peter Chasse, President and Founder.

Mental health support services have also become more prominent participants. The Mix UK, a member since 2017, extended its services during the pandemic to include phone, chat, and online helplines for young people. Samaritans, a UK and Ireland charity with over 20,000 volunteers and 200 branches, has been providing round-the-clock emotional support throughout the crisis. In the eight weeks since UK lockdown began, Samaritans helped more than 400,000 people; one in three callers mentioned COVID-19-related anxiety. Francis Bacon, Assistant Director of Digital Services and Change at Samaritans, noted that "Cloudflare for Teams enables staff to continue to securely access and maintain our highly critical systems" — a critical requirement, as all their volunteers have been working from home since the outbreak began.

Environmental Organizations

Environmental nonprofits make up approximately 5% of Project Galileo participants. Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, a conservation organization based in Cairns, Australia, has been protected since the organization launched in 2017. With only four full-time employees, the group relies on the internet to rally support for conserving and restoring the reef. Cloudflare's caching features help reduce bandwidth costs and secure their origin server from traffic surges or malicious actors. "Under Project Galileo, we can remain fully operational as a web-fronted organization with a small team and the budget of a local cafe," said Som Meaden, Technologist at the organization.

Independent Media and Journalism

Nearly a quarter — 23% — of Project Galileo participants work in journalism or independent media. At the onset of the pandemic, these sites saw a significant traffic increase as audiences sought authoritative local and national information about virus mitigation.

Independent media coverage during the crisis has proven vital, but also targeted. Daniel O'Maley, Digital Policy Specialist at the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy, explained that independent outlets "in many countries have reported an uptick in cyberattacks aimed at pulling them offline." He attributed these attacks to "increasingly sophisticated authoritarian regimes" seeking to silence factual reporting about government mishandling of the pandemic. His organization recently joined Project Galileo as a partner to help identify and support these groups.

Civil Society and Non-Governmental Organizations

Civil society and NGOs account for 16% of Project Galileo participants. The International Policy Center for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) is one such participant. The global forum brings together economists and political scientists to address poverty and inequality, and has seen more than 7.6 million downloads of its policy publications across 179 countries.

IPC-IG faced a DDoS attack when launching its online knowledge-sharing platform in 2019 — a critical moment just before an online training session for dozens of participants in sub-Saharan Africa. "In a matter of hours, IPC-IG's website was not only protected from attacks but protected at no cost," said Patricia Cavallari, Senior Knowledge Management Assistant at IPC-IG. The group is now using the platform to map social protection responses to the COVID-19 crisis and host policy webinars.

Cloudflare's commitment since 2014 has been to ensure that organizations working to empower marginalized voices are not censored or taken offline by cyberattacks. While the world has changed dramatically, the need to protect these groups remains constant.