Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline was created in 2013 and started providing 24/7/365 real-time support to civil society members, journalists, activists, and human rights defenders the following year.
Since then, we have handled all sorts of cases, mitigating digital security emergencies and strengthening the practices of organizations and individuals to protect them from potential harm, both online and offline.
Each time we have encountered a new type of threat or found out about a new approach to solving digital security issues, we have documented our procedures, always trying to tailor them to the specific needs of civil society. At the same time, we have also created a series of email templates to make our responses quicker and more reliable.
Now we have shared a large part of these documented procedures and email templates in a website and a public Gitlab repository so everybody can access our knowledge base, suggest edits, and contribute to it.
The Helpline Community Documentation website is a resource for digital security help desks and rapid responders, who can find tested workflows and email templates for handling any kind of digital security issue, and a number of email templates have also been localized to the other languages we speak at the Helpline.
By sharing it also in a public Gitlab repository, we hope to receive feedback on our documented procedures and improve our workflows and communications. If you would like to suggest any changes, you can create a new issue here, or just edit the relevant files and submit a pull request following these instructions. And if you want to add a translation, this guide will walk you through it.