Riseup.net has been obsessed with providing secure and surveillance-free services since 1999. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run email and mailing list provider that needs your help.

Historically, Riseup has provided services to a relatively small amount of environmental, human rights, and social justice activists worldwide, but since this summer's revelations about the NSA's massive spying programs, Riseup has been flooded with a whole new generation of users.

This is excellent! But it's struggling to keep up with the demand. The small group of hackers needs more hands and more hardware. It needs cash to buy new servers and disks, and funding to hire someone to meet the growing demands.

[Riseup just posted a passionate reminder of what it stands for and why we need services we can trust.]

What is Riseup.net?

Riseup.net is a different kind of email provider. It believes: "There is no such thing as free email. Services like gmail, hotmail, and yahoo make their money from surveillance: they build a profile on your behavior and your desires, and then bombard you with advertising specifically targeted to you."


So, instead of mining your data, Riseup.net exists to serve you, the user. Unlike big email providers (cough, Google) Riseup does not:

Log your IP addresses
Sell your data to third-party marketers you've never heard of, or
Hand over your data to the NSA.
Riseup provides email service with a unique level of security and privacy. Unlike almost all other email providers, logs and email headers contain no personally identifiable information. Additionally, all mail is stored on encrypted partitions and transmitted over encrypted connections whenever possible.

Additionally, Riseup is the largest non-profit mailing list hosting service, with nearly 6 million subscribers to over 14k lists; a VPN service'; and has one of the most heavily used hosted collaborative etherpad service. They also contribute heavily to a number of different Free Software projects. They fund all this by being run largely by volunteers, and relying heavily on donations.

Great. Riseup is awesome. But why are you telling me this?

Right here and now, having Riseup.net existing and growing is more important than ever. Here's an example why.
In response to the leaks about the NSA's blanket surveillance programs, a bunch of organizations — Access, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Mozilla and others — launched the StopWatching.Us campaign. We called for Congress to hold the NSA accountable and to reform the laws that made such widespread spying possible. Within a few weeks, more than 560,000 activists and hundreds of organizations and companies had signed on.

We used a Riseup mailing list we knew we could trust to keep our data secure while we organized grassroots opposition to government and corporate surveillance. If we had not, every piece of our organizing and communication would have been tracked, stored, and likely examined by the very powers that we are organizing against. We were so lucky to have Riseup's tools and expertise to help us.

But Riseup is a small shop. It's run mostly by volunteers using donated hardware and open source software. After the NSA's recent shutdowns of other email services, it has been overwhelmed by people wanting an alternative, and by coalitions like us that want to use its mailing list service instead of Google Groups.

People using alternative technology and services is great. But the not-so-great part is that Riseup's servers have struggled to keep up with the new users and traffic, so there's been more downtime. And when things get really busy — like they did recently — server hiccups can results in hundreds of emails being delayed for hours. Riseup needs new software and a troubleshooting hacker to keep this from happening.

We need independent, privacy-loving and STABLE technology

Given the StopWatching.Us coalition is doing to restore privacy protections in the U.S., we simply can't afford these outages and hiccups. But we love Riseup, the people behind it, and the model of an independent email and mailing list provider.
What can we do?

The solution is easy: Riseup needs more hardware and labor. With just a little bit of cash, they can buy a new server, a few hard drives, and pay someone to help run it all and troubleshoot problems as they occur. We need to make sure that important mailing lists like ours stay up when they're most needed.
The breakdown

Specifically, Riseup needs a low power Quad server with 16gb RAM and six SSDs:
Case: SC113MTQ-330B — $273.50
Mainboard: X10SLM-F — $167.50
CPU: 1265LV3 4 core (8 thread) 9MB cache 45W — $311.50
RAM: DDR3-1660 ECC/Reg, 2x 8gb — $143
Heatsink: SNK-P0046P — $19.25
SATA controller: Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 — $107.50
Disk: 6x Samsung 840 EVO 250gb SSDs — $1281 (one spare)
2x Samsung 840 EVO 750gb SSDs — $530 → $1060
Miscellaneous cabling and shipping — $150
Total parts: $3,513.25
In addition, it needs resources to pay a dedicated human to help maintain the systems and troubleshoot issues. Estimated cost to get a contractor started: $7,000

Total need: $10,500
And, of course, if more money is raised for Riseup, they will buy and host more servers and become even more stable and great.

If you don't have a credit card, but would still like to help, there are many other ways you can help Riseup. Just pick your preferred method, be it Bitcoin, PayPal, dwolla, opr wepay. More possibilities are available on the donate page.