Collateral Freedom

RSF’s Operation Collateral Freedom provides access to censored sites worldwide

Operation Collateral Freedom is one of the world’s biggest censorship circumvention operations. Launched in 2015 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), it currently provides access to more than 100 censored media outlets around the world by means of mirror sites – constantly updated copies of the original sites  – in locations that are not blocked by authoritarian governments

Collateral Freedom can create mirror sites in minutes

Collateral Freedom can create mirror sites in minutes

RSF is capable of creating and hosting mirror sites in just minutes, thanks to its technical team and the investments it has made in order to adapt to developments in online censorship techniques. RSF can also provide media outlets that have appropriate IT resources with an app that allows them to create their own mirror sites that are hosted on infrastructure deployed by RSF.

Use the Internet’s structure to combat censorship

RSF hosts its mirror sites on content distribution networks – strategic servers that distribute accessible online content more quickly around the world and thereby render online censorship of news media largely ineffective.

In the event that an authoritarian regime directly attacked the servers, all other services hosted on these servers would be quickly deactivated. This would cause a multitude of online malfunctions, including within the censoring country, but would not affect RSF's ability to put sites back online.

See the list of sites that have been unblocked by Operation Collateral Freedom on its Github account. 

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