“CIPHR” = “Cryptography & the International Protection of Human Rights”
CIPHR is a Northern California research and development thinktank and wilderness retreat where thinkers, creatives and makers can live and work (individually or cooperatively) while researching & developing technologies that protect and enhance human rights online.
The physical location in the Northern California wilderness is open to visiting scholars, researchers, software and hardware developers who can come for a picnic, camp out, park a house-on-wheels or even construct a small cabin for longer-term involvement. The site’s eleven acres are on beautiful high mountain valley woodlands with tree groves, glades, hills/valleys, meadows, creeks, glacial granite boulders with quartz deposits, native Pomo archeological artifacts (left in place). There is a grove surrounded by massive oak trees, far older than the United States itself, that shelter a wide variety of wildlife, humans, tinyhouse building and sustainable agriculture projects, dozens of species of birds and a robot drone.
Please use the Contact form to learn about visiting the ThinkTank. You can arrange a residency to work on a tech project (ours or yours), or collaborate with other techno-nerds and cypherpunks on arcane topics. Past meetings covered one-way functions, secret ballot systems, war crimes evidence systems, cryptocurrencies and other related topics (including harmless little hardware devices). CIPHR supports working with open cryptographic protocols and technologies so the results of collaborations can be made available to the world as ‘FROST’ (FRee and Open Source Technology), i.e. both open hardware designs and free and open source software (aka FOSS).
Your tax-deductible donations help us to build a cooperative community of altruistic techno-nerd-maker-philanthropists who love nature and enjoy communing with creatures while also examining how to improve human rights, protect women and children online, analyze voting and vote counting system security, create permanent digital evidence-chains for war crimes cases, make safer tools for investigative journalists, improve online witnessing and whistleblower systems, etc. We encourage you to support these efforts to strengthen democracy and promote the good of humanity.