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Deflect — DDoS Protection for Civil Society
deflect.ca — a project of 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 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
- 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
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 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.