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Debian GNU/Linux in a Human Rights environment?



Hello,

I hope this is the right list to post this to, otherwise please excuse me for 
the intrusion.

I recently was approached by someone who wanted to build a linux distribution 
to be used by human rights workers, or more generally, people who have 
controversial knowledge that needs to be protected. The idea was to create a 
linux distribution to incorporate the following features:

- Strong Cryptography (Public Key, without a Certification Authority, ie. Web 
of Trust like) built into the system from the bottom up. Everything on disk 
and in memory should be encrypted by default, and only decrypted when needed. 
There's willingness to sacrifice a noticable amount of system load to do this.

- Crypted content (witness statements, eg) should be replicated to several 
machines  connected to a same medium (the internet). This replication should 
be transparent to the user, and be done in an automatic way.

- There should exist the possibility to send "anonymous" email. This mail 
should be untraceable to protect the sender to the untomst extent.

- the whole system should be built on Free Software (in the DFSG sense).

- the system should be based on capabilities, not the unix-line model of 
user/group/world.

- support for multiple languages, eg. spanish & chinese. It should be possible 
to completely localise the system, ie. also translate manpages & error 
messages into the target language.

- the system would be used by people with reading difficulties, let alone 
complely unable to read.

I thought debian was a good starting point, and yes, I know, its a lot of 
work. Any comments/inputs welcome (mail me if its off-topic of this list)

Robert Ribnitz



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