Netgain Challenge

The greatest challenge is the ability to communicate and organize safely, securely, and without fear of censorship. Governments and corporations around the world are engaged in mass surveillance of the Internet in ways that are unhealthy for democracy. Such surveillance chills the speech, and in many cases, threatens the lives of activists whose only mission is to positively change the lives of the world's citizens. Meanwhile, creators and developers of secure communications tools face a two-front uphill battle: they have to compete with a $5 billion a year surveillance industry that's trying to break its products, and they have to compete with Silicon Valley, which hires away much-needed developers at obscenely high rates, so that open-source projects cannot compete. Bridging the usability gap between highly secure communications tools built by experts and apps that millions of ordinary people use every day is the key to solving many of the problems related to mass surveillance.