SecurAID
Overview
SecurAID securely connects aid organizations directly with individuals in dangerous situations to allow them to discreetly and effectively get the assistance they need.
Trusted users, such as members of aid organizations or people working directly on the ground in a humanitarian crisis, have the ability to create secure logins for people they know in dangerous situations. Using these credentials, at-risk people are able to enter into a secure one-on-one internet chat with members from organizations that can best serve their needs.
Through our secure network of trusted organizations and users, SecurAID greatly minimizes the risk of at-risk individuals communicating with non-trustworthy or malicious sources, and also lowers the risk of them being identified by dangerous people or groups. SecurAID solves three key problems at once: eliminating duplicate information, identity verification, and streamlined resource allocation.
Background
Currently there are many disjointed groups of people helping Afghans that they know who are stuck in a dangerous condition. The efforts to help those in need come with many difficulties. Here’s a real-world example to explain the problems encountered:
I’ve deployed to Afghanistan several times and became friends with my interpreters who had my back in combat. I’m now part of a slack group and a Signal chat group that both provide a place to share critical information and to try to allocate resources to our friends overseas. My ultimate goal is to get my interpreter’s family out of Afghanistan, but in the meantime their daughter is suffering from kidney issues and the family is low on money. I’ve filled out numerous forms for visa paperwork, medical assistance, manifesting the family on future flights, and financial aid, but I have no idea what happens to that information once it’s submitted, and very few ways to check the status of the requests. In addition, I’ve submitted forms only to find out another soldier who previously worked with my interpreter also filled out the same forms for his family. This causes extra work for aid workers to sift through duplicte entries. My Afghan family, along with many others, sometimes receive emails saying that they should go to a certain location at a certain time in order to receive help from American aid, however, many of those emails are traps sent by the Taliban to try to find American sympathizers. These families need a way to make sure that the messages they receive are actually coming from the correct sources.
How SecurAID works
SecurAID uses a centralized database to store and eliminate duplicate entries, saving valuable time and making it easy to ensure that a family receives the exact assistance they need. The database contains information about assistance type, allowing effective resource allocation by directing aid requests to the appropriate aid organizations. For instance, if a family needs insulin, their category in the database will be set to “medical needs,” which will notify medical aid organizations who can access our database, and will ensure that only one organization is filling the request for aid.
To solve the issue of identity verification, the only people who will be able to add an Afghan family to the database will be someone invited into groups similar to the Slack and Signal chats discussed above. In order for a person to be invited to these chat groups, a person needs to be verified and vouched for by someone already in that group. This creates groups of trusted sources who personally know the Afghans they’re trying to help. Once the Afghan account is created by the trusted member, that information is added to the database and the appropriate organization is notified of a person to assist overseas. A person at that organization gets assigned to the Afghan in need, allowing them to update the at-risk individual’s database entry as more information about their situation comes in. (Individual entries will be read-only for all others who can access the database and are not actively assisting that individual.) From there, the assigned organization contact will send a link to the Afghan family with a link to a secure one-on-one chat room through SecurAID. Whenever important information is sent, it will be sent through the chat room, which means any other forms of communication received through email, text, etc. can be assumed to be nefarious and can be ignored. No one will have access to the unique chatroom except the organization contact and the person receiving assistance. If an overseas ally needs more than one thing (e.g. legal help for passports and heart medication), they will receive multiple links, one from a different contact at each relevant aid organization (e.g. link fomr a legal office, and one from a medical office). At the same time, the trusted source who created the account can see the status of the request and can inform his/her friend of any updates.
