Freedom Tool is a Rarimo-built open-source software for citizen-run, anonymized elections and polls. It has solved the long-standing technical challenge of enabling digital identity checks while also protecting citizens from tracking. Anyone, anywhere, can use it to build voting systems outside of state apparatus. This will provide safe outlets for silenced people to express dissent and is part of a broader effort to embed privacy into the digital world.
The cypherpunk promise to defend privacy with cryptography is often treated with suspicion. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, or so goes the common saying. This year, however, over 64 countries will head to the polls, and not all of these countries are democracies. Many of them are regimes, and their citizens will have much to fear and nowhere to hide if they voice dissent or vote against their prevailing rulers.
It is through this absence of privacy that dictators will retain their grip. The need for cypherpunk innovation is urgent, but embedding privacy in electoral infrastructure is notoriously difficult, particularly in the digital realm. Citizens need to prove their eligibility to vote by showing identification, and this leaves them vulnerable to tracing, making their votes and their participation in polls, painfully easy to track.
Rarimo has launched Freedom Tool, to solve this issue, inject privacy into identification, and enable citizens to register their support for opposition without the risk of surveillance.
Freedom tool is open-source and license-free; anyone, in any part of the world can use it to run citizen-led elections and polling that are solidly outside the reach of state interference.
Communities will be free to set their own terms, defining which candidates are on the ballot, and who is able to vote. In regions where opposition is barred from running, and minority groups systematically excluded from voting, this capability will shift power back towards the people.
How Freedom Tool Works
With Freedom Tool, citizens prove their eligibility by scanning their biometric passports with their phones. Freedom Tool verifies the data on the NFC chip inside the passport and after confirming that it is legitimate issues an anonymous voting pass. The citizen then uses this pass to cast their vote.
Zero-knowledge cryptography is 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.
Privacy is further ensured by the fact that it is only the voting pass that interacts with any external voting apparatus. The passport data never leaves the mobile device used for scanning. This means that the data never passes through a server, and that there are no points where it could be intercepted.
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.
A more detailed technical description can be found here in the White Paper.
On-the-ground Applications
The first applications to launch on Freedom Tool will be amongst the world’s first user-facing applications to leverage zero-knowledge proofs.
Beyond voting, Freedom Tool’s infrastructure can be used in any number of use cases where passport-based identification is taking place and where users would benefit from privacy.
The Broader Vision
While voting makes the perilous consequences of the trade-off between privacy and digital identification particularly visible, it is in fact an endemic online issue. Rarimo’s mission is to reverse invasive online practices and embed privacy into the digital identity layer.
In Rarimo’s vision of the future, users are not only free to vote anonymously, but to browse the internet without being traced, combat fraudsters without compromising their privacy, and select both the personal information about themselves they share and who they share it with.
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. We will all be free to wield our digital identities on our own terms.
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 don’t yet know what exactly Rarimo is; it’s a decentralized identity protocol. It acts as the largest network for decentralized identity access and verification, and comes with an inbuilt zero-knowledge layer so that builders can root privacy into the heart of their solutions.
The cypherpunk promise to defend privacy and democracy was the original vision of blockchain. Let’s uphold this promise, and build a new internet where users can roam free of surveillance of any kind.