Imagine a world where every digital trace you leave can be used against you. Where your writing marks you for surveillance, your family for intimidation, your sources for imprisonment, and your work for erasure.
For many writers today, this is not a hypothetical risk—it is their reality. Across the world, they are losing ground in a technological battle against increasingly sophisticated systems of control and surveillance.
Our first task is to listen: to collect the experiences of writers who have lived, or are living, under such conditions. Their accounts will form the basis for education and the development of tools—designed not in theory, but from lived necessity.
Our goal is practical: to reduce risk at every stage of writing and publishing, to bypass censorship and digital restrictions, and to help writers continue their work with greater safety, autonomy, and ownership—without being forced into exile from the countries they love and seek to change.
Because the threats are not only from governments. Today’s digital landscape encourages dependence on platforms that track, extract, and replicate. Writers risk losing not only their safety, but their control.
The challenge is significant. The work must be careful.
But the objective is simple: protect the right to write—and to be read—on the writer’s own terms.
AES-451 is built around the real needs of writers under threat.
// We don't assume — we ask.
1. **Listen.** We begin by talking directly with writers living under censorship and surveillance. We gather real stories, not assumptions.
2. **Identify.** From these accounts, we define the challenges: what’s breaking, what’s working, and what’s missing.
3. **Develop.** Volunteer technologists respond with practical tools — secure, lightweight, and adapted to hostile conditions.
4. **Deploy quietly.** Everything we build is designed to vanish if needed, work offline, and keep the writer safer than before.AES-451 begins by listening.
Patiently. Quietly. Without distortion.
We collect first-hand accounts from writers working under surveillance:
Purpose:
To understand failure. To trace how compromise spreads.
To find points where resistance holds — and where it falters.
AES-451 is a growing collaboration between writers, volunteer technologists, and defenders of free expression.
We begin by listening to writers who have lived under censorship and surveillance. Then, we combine existing technologies—encryption tools, secure systems, anonymity layers—into tailored solutions that respond to their real-world needs.
//If you're a:
- Writer with experience navigating censorship
- Developer or security-minded technologist (especially in encryption, UI, or portable systems)
- Researcher or advocate working in digital rights, anonymity, or information access
…we’d love to hear from you.