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Comment by vjust | Hacker News Reader

I once worked in a 'dissident' org (supported by the US Agency for International Development) - these orgs were fighting for human rights in their countries. In one extreme case/country, my prospective project team mate, no one knew her real name (came to know this later), though she was our colleague, was quite social and pleasant. In her country's expatriate circles in DC, she was worried about foreign spies. Family back home is at risk, and so is she, even if she lives in DC. These are brave people.

She wanted to build a database of something, and we were like, "keep your phone in another room" if you want to come discuss. Something that I am not sure she practices but more people need to practice.

CitizenLab is doing yeoman's service for people's rights to privacy and human rights. They're heroes.

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I'm glad you put "dissident" in quotes. USAID is notoriously rife with CIA plants and many CIA operatives use the organization as cover, which implies that a nation targeting its members would have a lot more justification than a homegrown activist. That USAID might be targeted by hackers is mostly a consequence of the US government's decision to use it as a front for clandestine operations overseas.

Regardless, they do help real dissidents. People, who are at risk in their home country as they are perceived to be a threat to their authoritarian government.

I can't find any 'dissident USAID' outfit concerned about the fate of Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, however. Seems like 'human rights concerns' are highly conditional on the amount of money an repressive government invests in Wall Street.

> supported by the US Agency for International Development

Isn’t it more usual for the NED to do such things? I remark upon this because it occurs to me that using USAID to do politics might make recipients suspicious of aid even when it’s both necessary from a humanitarian perspective and unlikely to threaten the ruling dispensation in the recipient country. (This is a separate question from whether the NED/US government as a whole should even involve itself in such matters, to which my answer is ‘maybe’, since the dubious stuff probably happens anyway and lots of these civil society organisations &c. actually do good work [e.g. the The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma.])

True.. I was slightly inaccurate, This org. had various USG funders, with a large slice of funding from US-AID projects. Washington is full of these 'USAID contractors', some tiny others mega-sized. But this project may have been funded by a division of US Dept of State that is focused on Human Rights - DRL. Not sure where the lines are about which one US-Aid gets and which one is State. For example development of journalism in an emerging country would be US-Aid. But OTOH, a project promoting free elections in the same country could be State. Not sure.

In any case, they span the range from benign to hostile nations, with varying risks attached. The "About" page for many such sensitive orgs would be silent on who the team was, except if it was Americans (like me) who didn't mind being their name out there (or nervously okayed the name being public).

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