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The Calyx Institute
FormationMay 2010
FoundersNicholas Merrill
Micah Anderson
Kobi Snitz
Type501(c)(3)
27-2800937
HeadquartersBrooklyn, New York
ProductsCalyxOS, CalyxVPN, Calyx Mobile Hotspots
Executive Director
Nicholas Merrill
Revenue$1,615,118[1] (in 2019)
Expenses$1,476,960[1] (in 2019)
Website

The Calyx Institute is a New York-based 501(c)(3) research and education nonprofit organization formed to make privacy and digital security more accessible. It was founded in 2010 by Nicholas Merrill, Micah Anderson, and Kobi Snitz.

History

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The Calyx Institute was founded on May 19, 2010, through a filing with the New York Department of State. Its original office consisted of a single desk in a law firm in Manhattan.

In 2011, Calyx was described in an article in The New York Times and also entered into the Congressional Record as a new non-profit that "aims to study how to protect consumers' privacy".[2][3] The same year, The Washington Post described it as an organization that "promotes 'best practices' with regard to privacy and freedom of expression in the telecommunications industry" [4] In April 2012, Declan McCullagh at CNET published an in-depth profile of the Institute and its plans to develop best practices and proof-of-concept software for running a privacy-focused internet service provider and phone company.[5] The following month, the security publication CSO Online described the organization's plan as: "By showing there is a market demand for privacy, The Calyx Institute hopes to nudge telecoms in a positive direction and intends to 'release all software developed under an open source model as well as all underlying policies and network designs.'"[6]

On December 4, 2014, the Calyx Institute received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, giving it the status of "public charity" and making donations to it tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.[7]

In 2017, it moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, renting office space in the Industry City development.

In 2020, the Calyx Institute was a signer of an open letter asking Google to be more transparent regarding user data being shared with law enforcement.[8]

Leadership

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The Calyx Institute's board of directors originally consisted of Nicholas Merrill, Micah Anderson, and Kobi Snitz; in 2016, attorney Carey Shenkman joined the board.[9]

The Institute also has an advisory board, which as of January 2022 consists of Enrique Piracés, Isabela Bagueros, Jonathan Askin, Matt Mitchell, Sandra Ordoñez, and Sascha Meinrath.[10] Past advisors included Brian Snow, Susan N. Herman, John Perry Barlow, and Bob Barr.[11]

Funding

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The majority of the Calyx Institute's funding comes from its membership program. In its early years it received minor funding from Internews, the Wau Holland Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and NLnet.

DuckDuckGo donated $2,500 in 2017 to support Calyx's mission,[12] and the following year selected it as a participating organization in its Privacy Challenge crowdfunding campaign, through which it raised over $18,000.[13]

The Calyx Institute accepts donations in Bitcoin, which allows anonymity, but requires an email address for acknowledgement if desired.[14]

In December 2022, the Calyx Institute announced it was awarded a $1 million grant from Jack Dorsey's #startsmall philanthropy.[15]

Grantmaking

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The Calyx Institute has given grants and other financial assistance to a number of organizations and projects including CryptoHarlem,[16] MuckRock's Hacking History project, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.[citation needed]

Tools

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  • SeedVault is an open-source data backup application for Android. Calyx Institute is credited for LineageOS including SeedVault backup.[17][18]
  • Datura is an open-source firewall application built in CalyxOS for controlling the per-app network access.[19]
  • Calyx Institute runs CalyxVPN, a free VPN service that does not require an email address or any personally identifiable information from the user. It is based on an open-source system called LEAP, which uses OpenVPN.[20]
  • In January 2014, The Calyx Institute announced it had set up a new XMPP chat service, Calyx XMPP Service, at that time unique in forcing the use of end-to-end encryption using off-the-record messaging and leveraging DNSSEC and DANE as well as making itself accessible as a Tor hidden service.[21]
  • In 2015, a coalition of organizations consisting of the EFF, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, NYU Law, the Calyx Institute, and the Berkman Center created a website called Canary Watch in order to provide a compiled list of all companies providing warrant canaries,[22] with prompt updates of any changes in a canary's state. It is often difficult for users to ascertain a canary's validity on their own and thus Canary Watch aimed to provide a simple display of all active canaries and any blocks of time that they were not active.[23][24]

Conferences

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The Calyx Institute has participated multiple times in the DEF_CON hacker conference[25][26][27] and the HOPE conference,[28] and has also participated in the Hackers Next Door conference.[29]

It has also sponsored and presented at the Internet Freedom Festival.[30]

Reception

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The Calyx Institute's membership program provides mobile Internet access as a benefit. This was recommended in September 2016 by Cory Doctorow in an article in Boing Boing entitled "I have found a secret tunnel that runs underneath the phone companies and emerges in paradise",[31] and in January 2017 by Jake Swearingen in New York Magazine.[32]

Since 2013, the Calyx Institute has been cited as an example of Internet users' being interested in protecting their privacy and related to Merrill's successful challenge of a national security letter.[33][34] Its Internet offerings have been called "an exception not the norm".[35]

In 2019, several Calyx Institute servers were included in a study of the oldest, longest-running Tor exit nodes.[36][37]

In a 2021 review of CalyxVPN, TechRadar called Calyx Institute a "long established non-profit" and said it was unusual in being "powered by donations" without ads and using open-source software.[38]

References

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  1. ^ a b "The Calyx Institute Form 990 2019". The Calyx Institute.
  2. ^ "Twitter Shines a Spotlight on Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas". The New York Times. January 9, 2011.
  3. ^ 2011 Congressional Record, Vol. 157, Page H1490
  4. ^ "How the Patriot Act stripped me of my free-speech rights". Washington Post. October 25, 2011.
  5. ^ "This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always". CNET. April 11, 2012.
  6. ^ "Fight the Patriot Act and win. Next? Promise privacy, a surveillance-free ISP". CSO Online. May 10, 2012.
  7. ^ "IRS 501c3 Determination Letter" (PDF). December 4, 2014.
  8. ^ Morse, Jack (December 8, 2020). "Activists demand Google open up about user data shared with police". Mashable. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
  9. ^ "Leitner Human Rights Speaker Series: Carey Shenkman, Institute for Social Policy and Understanding – Equal Treatment?: Measuring the Legal and Media Responses to Ideologically Motivated Violence in the United States". Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.
  10. ^ "Advisory Board". Calyx Institute. Retrieved January 2, 2022.
  11. ^ "Archived 2014 copy of Calyx Institute advisory board" (PDF). Cryptome. October 2014.
  12. ^ "2017 DuckDuckGo Donations: $400,000 to Raise the Standard of Trust Online". Spread Privacy: The Official DuckDuckGo Blog. February 14, 2017.
  13. ^ "2018 DuckDuckGo Privacy Donations: $500,000 + $142,000 From You!". Spread Privacy: The Official DuckDuckGo Blog. June 5, 2018.
  14. ^ McCorry, Patrick; Shahandashti, Siamak F.; Clarke, Dylan; Hao, Feng (2015). "Authenticated Key Exchange over Bitcoin". In Chen, Liqun; Matsuo, Shin'ichiro (eds.). Security Standardisation Research: Second International Conference, SSR 2015, Tokyo, Japan, December 15-16, 2015, Proceedings. Springer. p. 4. ISBN 978-3-319-27152-1.
  15. ^ "startsmall grant - Calyx Institute". calyxinstitute.org. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
  16. ^ "CryptoHarlem - Calyx Institute". calyxinstitute.org. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  17. ^ "LineageOS 18.1 leva o Android 11 para mais de 60 modelos de celulares". Canaltech (in Brazilian Portuguese). April 3, 2021. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
  18. ^ Crochart, Pierre (April 1, 2021). "LineageOS 18.1 (Android 11) est sorti et déjà compatible avec plus de 60 smartphones". Clubic.com (in French). Retrieved August 5, 2021.
  19. ^ "Datura Firewall: Technical notes on CalyxOS built-in firewall app". CalyxOS.
  20. ^ "Calyx: is this free and unlimited VPN worth downloading?". Tech Radar. July 30, 2021.
  21. ^ Nicholas Merrill (January 30, 2014). "New public XMPP / Jabber server with Forward Secrecy/DNSSEC/Tor Hidden Service/DANE support - jabber.calyxinstitute.org". liberationtech list. Stanford University.
  22. ^ Rahman, Amn (2016). Improving the transparency of government requests for user data from ICT companies (Thesis thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/104826.
  23. ^ "Canary Watch tracks government requests for your information online". Gizmag. February 4, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2015.
  24. ^ "Meet Canary Watch, A Way To Disclose Gag Orders Without Disclosing Them". readwrite. March 9, 2015.
  25. ^ "DEFCON 25 Vendors".
  26. ^ "DEFCON 26 Vendors".
  27. ^ "DEFCON 27 Vendors".
  28. ^ "11th HOPE Speakers".
  29. ^ "Hackers Next Door 2019 Schedule".
  30. ^ "Internet Freedom Festival: VPN Village 2020". Archived from the original on July 9, 2021. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
  31. ^ Cory Doctorow (September 22, 2016). "I have found a secret tunnel that runs underneath the phone companies and emerges in paradise". Boing Boing. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  32. ^ Swearingen, Jake (January 12, 2017). "Intelligencer: True Unlimited Phone Data Plans Are Dead". New York Magazine. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
  33. ^ Stanger, Allison (September 24, 2019). Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump. Yale University Press. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-300-18956-8.
  34. ^ Klein, Joshua (2013). Reputation Economics: Why Who You Know Is Worth More Than What You Have. St. Martin's Publishing Group. pp. 77–78. ISBN 978-1-137-38701-1.
  35. ^ Open Technology Institute (November 2013). "Virtually Unused, Virtual Private Networks and Public Internet Users" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on August 5, 2021.
  36. ^ Akmut, Camille (June 12, 2019). "Lustrum, the oldest relays of the Tor network and their ISP's". Open Science Framework.
  37. ^ Akmut, Camille (June 11, 2019). "Fearless, 1000 days and still running: the 'most resilient' exit nodes of the Tor network and their ISP's – a quantitative approach". Humanities Commons. Archived from the original on August 5, 2021. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
  38. ^ Williams, Mike (July 30, 2021). "Calyx: is this free and unlimited VPN worth downloading?". TechRadar. Archived from the original on July 30, 2021. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
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