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Monday 10 July 2017

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Dear Riseup Users,

The internet can be a cold and hard place full of nasty people, surveillance, and data mining.

Last summer, Riseup was in a really bad place. We were broke and on the edge of needing to shut down and end our seventeen-year-old tech project. So we sent out an email to you all as a last ditch effort to see if we could raise enough money to keep going.

We didn’t like sending it out, but we also didn’t want to close up shop.

The internet can be a warm and soft place full of sweet people, liberatory communications, and acts of solidarity. Last summer you all saved us. This is another letter asking to keep us going.

When we talk about giving money to Riseup, here’s how we think about it.

There is a movement happening in every place where there are people, which is everywhere. This movement is big and small, local and international. It is a movement in motion with a million parts working on the environment, social justice, ending war, and fighting tyranny to name a few. Even though it’s really different all over the place, this movement is moving in the same direction, it’s working, all over the planet, to bring sunshine to some dark places. Our small spot within all that motion is to ensure that there are excellent and secure tools to keep everything moving. We hope, when people give a little, we can give a lot back.

What will we do with the money?

All kinds of things, like buying hardware, paying for all the bandwidth that your VPN eats, but mostly we need money to keep things growing. It is crucial to us that we are always expanding our services and making our infrastructure more secure, because the rise of the surveillance apocalypse is no joke. Our big project this last year has been creating and migrating to a system where we don’t have any access to your emails and therefore can’t give it to anyone. We are really happy with the new system, it was a huge step forward, now we want to take the next steps to reach our end goal of transparent end-to-end client encryption.

Last, if you donate to us, know that we are a small collective and every cent goes toward things that are essential to our work. Not everyone can afford to donate, so know that if you can, you are supporting people and social movements around the world that are badly underfunded.

• Many thanks for all that you do.
• With love and struggle,
• The Riseup Collective.