====== Deflect — DDoS Protection for Civil Society ======

[[https://deflect.ca/|deflect.ca]] — a project of [[https://equalitie.org/|eQualitie]], a Canadian social enterprise based in Montréal.

===== What It Is =====

DDoS mitigation and CDN for civil society organizations, independent media, and human rights defenders. Founded in 2011 by Dmitri Vitaliev and David Mason — predating both Google's Project Shield and Cloudflare's Project Galileo.

Origin: built in direct response to a [[https://cyber.harvard.edu/|Berkman Center report]] documenting how DDoS attacks had become a standard tool of political repression against independent media and human rights groups.

===== How It Works =====

Commercial revenue from paying customers directly subsidizes free protection for qualifying non-profits, human rights defenders, and independent media. Not a charity model — a cross-subsidy model.

  * Infrastructure has withstood malicious traffic in excess of **100 Gbps**
  * Uses Apache Traffic Server
  * Seeks datacenters powered by renewable energy
  * [[https://github.com/deflect-ca|Software published as open source]]
  * Does not sell user data

===== Who It Has Protected =====

  * Black Lives Matter website during the Ferguson protests
  * Rohingya news organizations during the Rakhine State violence
  * Human rights organizations in Gaza under active DDoS attack
  * Uzbek activists under persistent state-backed cyber offensive
  * Thousands of civil society organizations globally since 2011

===== Eligibility =====

[[https://deflect.ca/non-profits/|Deflect's eligibility criteria]]:

  * Defend human rights
  * Run a civil society organization
  * Produce independent media
  * Work does not contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

===== Why It Matters =====

The alternative — defaulting to [[folkzone:networking:cdn_consolidation|Cloudflare]] — means routing traffic through a platform that has unilaterally decided which civil society organizations deserve protection based on CEO mood and media cycles. Deflect was built specifically because that power should not exist in a single private company's hands.

===== See Also =====
  * [[folkzone:networking:start|Homelab Networking Index]]

  * [[folkzone:networking:cdn_consolidation|CDN Consolidation and Internet Resilience]]
  * [[folkzone:services:cloudflared|Cloudflare Tunnel (homelab usage)]]
  * [[indieweb:good_web|The Good Web]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]
  * [[folkzone:start|Return to folkzone]]