about qualifications partners

If you are an organization working on behalf of the arts, human rights, civil society, or democracy, you can apply for Project Galileo to get Cloudflare’s highest level of protection, for free.

Learn More

Cloudflare’s Project Galileo - Ensuring that At-Risk Public Interest Groups Stay Online

Founded in 2014, Project Galileo is Cloudflare’s response to cyber attacks launched against important, yet vulnerable targets, like artistic groups, humanitarian organizations, and the voices of political dissent. These attacks have become all too prevalent and powerful in recent years.

The Internet is a powerful tool for spreading and expanding ideas. Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet includes protecting free expression online for vulnerable groups. When journalists, social activists, and minority groups are repeatedly flooded with malicious traffic in an attempt to knock them offline, and keep them offline, the Internet stops fulfilling its promise.

Such organizations often face attacks from powerful and entrenched opponents, yet operate on limited budgets and lack the resources to secure themselves against malicious traffic intended to silence them.

Cloudflare provides robust security to enterprises that are the targets of DDoS and other cyber attacks. Cloudflare’s Project Galileo has made that same security available for at-risk public interest websites at no cost.

We will offer services through Project Galileo to any proposed recipient if brought to us by or approved by any one of our trusted partners. Such inclusion does not require and should not be understood as endorsement by all our diverse partner organizations.

Recipients

Any qualified vulnerable public interest web property can seek participation in Project Galileo. Examples of participants include, but are not limited to: minority rights organizations, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, arts groups, and democracy and voter protection programs.

A qualified organization should meet one of the following criteria:

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

Many of our Galileo participants are under threat of persecution. In an effort to keep participants safe from potential backlash, Cloudflare will not publicly announce sites involved in Project Galileo without explicit permission. We are grateful the following groups were willing to share their stories.

Read recipient stories:

and hundreds more.

Partners

Cloudflare is a leader in Internet security and performance solutions, but we admittedly lack expertise in matters of geopolitics and human rights. For this reason, we partner with respected free speech, public interest, and civil society organizations to help it to identify in-need, at-risk websites which are worthy of our pro bono efforts by participation in Project Galileo and to ensure that we do not bring our personal and corporate biases to the decision.

Once identified, Cloudflare extends its Enterprise-class DDoS protection and business-level performance benefits to ensure these websites stay online, protecting their voice from being silenced.

Read participant stories:

Apply to Project Galileo

If you represent a vulnerable public interest website that wants to participate in Project Galileo, please contact one of our partner organizations and ask them to sponsor you (listed above).

If you are not affiliated with any of our partner organizations, please fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page.

© Cloudflare, Inc. 2017