Deflect — DDoS Protection for Civil Society

deflect.ca — a project of eQualitie, a Canadian social enterprise based in Montréal.

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 Berkman Center report documenting how DDoS attacks had become a standard tool of political repression against independent media and human rights groups.

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
• Software published as open source
• Does not sell user data

• 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

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

The alternative — defaulting to 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.

• Homelab Networking Index

• CDN Consolidation and Internet Resilience
• Cloudflare Tunnel (homelab usage)
• The Good Web
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