Cybersecurity for Civil Society

This paper explores emerging security and privacy challenges faced by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), particularly those advocating for democracy or human rights within closing spaces, such as conflict zones or surveillance states. We met with CSOs and experts in democracy and governance to understand their challenges and concerns. Informed by experience developing information security best practices, we propose alternative design patterns based on their input that will help the technology industries, security professionals, and advocacy groups better address CSOs’ most pressing security and privacy needs.Our contention is that security guidance offered by professionals from democratic societies is ineffective for closing spaces due to ignorance of their environments and assumptions that do not apply outside a liberal-democratic context. For resource-constrained CSOs with limited capacity for strategic planning, traditional approaches have proven difficult to apply. We introduce an alternative approach focused on expanding security literacy and improving software design patterns.