Russian Opposition use Rarimo’s Freedom Tool to launch surveillance-free voting app
The Rarimo community built Freedom Tool with the dream of using blockchain and privacy tech to help people in regimes vote without the fear of being traced. That dream is now becoming a reality. Russian opposition have used Freedom Tool to launch Russia2024, an app that allows dissenting citizens to sign petitions, vote in polls, and participate in protest elections without being traced.
Built and led by prominent anti-Putin activist and former Pussy Riot lawyer Mark Feygin, Russia2024 was released in Russia on Friday and is available on the App Store and Google Play. Within the first 24 hours of being announced, it received 15,000 downloads.
In the totalitarian landscape of modern Russia, anti-Putin tweets mean seven years in prison. Critics cannot speak, the opposition cannot communicate, and the outside world cannot gauge the sentiment within Russia. By providing a safe and truly anonymous outlet for voting and polling, Russia2024 not only gives the people a voice — it allows them to organize.
During his announcement broadcast, Feygin highlighted that the ultimate goal of Russia2024 is to ‘create parallel government structures that take responsibility for implementing policies of democracy, freedom, and peace in Russia.’ Votes and polls can reveal, for instance, which opposition figures have the most public support in the wake of Navlany’s death, and who the remaining opposition should rally behind.
For the first 2–4 weeks, Feygin will focus on ensuring that Russian citizens can understand and trust the technology. Freedom Tool has been audited by Halborn; bounties have been issued inviting white-hat hackers to further test it; and repositories for public audits have been shared on the Freedom Tool site. There will be fortnightly explainers and technical updates from the Rarimo team on Feygin’s broadcast channel. Following this, the petitions and polls will start to go live.
What is Freedom Tool and how does it work?
TLDR: ZKPs for biometric passports allow citizens to prove their eligibility to vote while also protecting them from tracking
Russia2024 is one of many potential voting apps that can be built atop of Freedom Tool, and Freedom Tool is, in turn, one of many privacy and identity solutions built atop of Rarimo.
Freedom Tool is a license-free, open-source software for citizen-run, anonymized elections and polls. Anyone, anywhere, can use it to launch voting and polling systems outside of state apparatus.
For elections to work, or for political polling to be meaningful, citizens need to prove their eligibility to vote by showing identification. In the digital world, this process renders citizens vulnerable to tracing, making votes and participation in polls painfully easy to track.
With Freedom Tool, however, citizens can prove their eligibility without revealing their identity. Instead, they confirm their age and nationality (the two requirements for voting) by scanning their biometric passports with their phones. Freedom Tool verifies the data on the NFC chip inside the passport but does not save, store or pass it through a server where it could be intercepted. One confirming that the data is legitimate, Freedom tool issues an anonymous voting pass that can be used to cast votes.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are used to sever any link between the voting pass and the passport data so that the two cannot be paired. When the ID and the voting pass cannot be paired, neither can the citizen and their vote.
Freedom Tool uses blockchain to protect votes from rigging. All votes are published directly onto the blockchain where they are both tamper-proof and publicly auditable. This means that Freedom Tool can also bring vote transparency to regions where it is not surveillance that threatens democracy but electoral fraud.
A more detailed technical description can be found here in the White Paper.
What is Rarimo?
TLDR; Rarimo allows users to leverage any identity credential, from any provider across any part of Web3, without revealing their data or private information
In technical terms, Rarimo protocol is a layer for the universal access and verification of digital identities with in-built privacy and multi-chain capabilities. In practical terms, this means that Rarimo allows users to leverage any identity credential, from any provider across any part of Web3, without revealing their data or private information.
In the case of Russia 2024, for example, users are leveraging anonymous voting passes, generated from biometric passports, without revealing anything about themselves but their eligibility to vote.
On the dApp side, if a project needs to verify some aspect of their users’ identity, they can integrate with Rarimo to access the necessary identity credentials to do this. Again, in the case of Russia2024, opposition needed to verify voter eligibility without compromising privacy, so they integrated with Rarimo to access the ZKPs for biometric passports.
Many dApps, however, need to provide users with optionality, and they integrate with Rarimo to access multiple identity providers and artifacts at one. For instance, reputation platforms Galxe, Zealy, Talent Protocol and Orange Protocol all wanted to ensure that only humans and not bots were using certain facets of their platforms. They integrated with Rarimo to give users a choice over how they proved their humanity, and gained access to Worldcoin, Civic, Gitcoin Passport, Kleros, and Unstoppable Domains.
Given the range of Rarimo’s integrated identity providers and chains, another way to understand the protocol could be as both an aggregator or an interoperability protocol.
What is the Bigger Picture?
TLDR; Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge tech will brings users privacy and self-sovereign digital identities
Freedom Tool and Rarimo belong to a broader privacy movement whose cypherpunk roots date back to the early 1990’s, but whose potential has soared with the development of blockchain in 2008, and the explosion of zero-knowledge technology advances in the past few years.
Just as Bitcoin liberated users from a reliance on banks and governments to maintain the economy, Rarimo hopes to help liberate users from reliance on centralized organizations to maintain their privacy. Blockchain, DiDs, zero-knowledge technology, and a range of decentralized identity standards will all be used to enshrine users’ ownership over their own identities.
Embedding privacy across the entire internet is, however, a herculean task. If you care about privacy, need support, want to build on Rarimo (especially if it’s on Freedom Tool) or are simply looking to talk privacy with like-minded folk, get in touch.
If you’re new to digital identity, the cypher punk movement or Rarimo, we’ve shared some recommended reading below. Welcome to the club!
Reading List
Eric Hughes — A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto
Dc builder (Worldcoin) — The Future of Digital Identity
Zac Williams (Aztec) — Regeneration-a-manifesto-for-an-autonomous-future
Rarimo — Introducing Freedom Tool
