CloudFlare to provide free protection for public interest websites

In an effort to counter censorship, content delivery network CloudFlare is working with NGOs to help protect valuable public service websites from being silenced by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Through its Project Galileo, CloudFlare will provide its Enterprise-class DDoS protection for free to selected sites to help ensure “politically and artistically important organisations and journalists” can stay online against attacks that would otherwise censor and silence their work.
The company explains:

“we strongly believe that bullies should not be able to knock sites offline simply because they disagree with their content”.

Which sites to protect?

To identify valuable sites to protect, CloudFlare is partnering with NGOs, free speech, public interest and civil society groups. They will help select websites that qualify for Project Galileo.
These include Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union and Committee to Protect Journalists. Applications to benefit from Project Galileo should be made to one of the partner organisations, not to CloudFlare.

Which sites qualify?

To benefit from Project Galileo, a website must meet the following criteria:

• It is engaged in news gathering, civil society, or political/artistic speech.
• It is the subject of online attacks related to its news gathering, civil society, or political/artistic speech.
• It is a not-for-profit organisation or a small commercial entity.
• It acts in the public interest, broadly defined.

 
CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince told Recode:

“The solution to speech is more speech. It is not our role to pick what speech is good speech and what speech is bad speech. We’ll do everything we can to keep that speech online even if someone is trying to shut it down.”

 
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