About
The Censorship Research Center (CRC), a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3)* non-profit organization, was founded by Austin Heap and Daniel Colascione in 2009 to serve as the legal entity which will provide anti-censorship education, outreach, and technologies for free to those who need it most. The CRC’s first major project is Haystack (official project site), which seeks to provide access to information and communications to the Iranian people in the wake of recent restrictions imposed by the government of Iran.
As filed with the State of California, the CRC’s mission statement is as follows:
To help secure and safeguard human right to free communication, especially with regard to emergent 21st-century communication technologies like the Internet. We seek to uphold the ideals of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — that all people have the right to seek, receive and impart publicly available information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers — by:
- Investigating the precise techniques and technologies used by censors for surveillance and blocking, and advocating their removal.
- Educating communities affected by censorship about ways to mitigate its effects, and reaching out to communities to demonstrate ways to safely bypass filtering.
- Promulgating software for this purpose, and when necessary, developing our own.
