Riseup, providing encrypted comms for over 15 years, is running out of money

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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@[email protected]
@gcluley

Riseup

Riseup.net, the non-profit collective which has been providing dissidents a way to encrypt their communications since 1999, without revealing your location or logging your IP address, is running out of money:

The news is not good

We hate to be bad news birds, but we need to tell you that Riseup will run out of money next month. We had a number of unexpected hardware failures, lower-than-expected regular donations, and a record year of new Riseup users which puts more financial pressure on us than ever before.

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We need your help to keep things going this year, so we are starting a campaign to ask Riseup users to give us just one dollar!

Can you give us a dollar? There are a lot of easy ways to do it: https://riseup.net/donate

It seems that Riseup.net saw a boom in new users in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, but has not managed to match that growth with sufficient regular donations.

If Riseup.net shuts down, that also means the end for 150,000 email accounts and over 18,000 mailing lists that depend on the service for their privacy and security.

It would be sad to see Riseup.net close its doors. I hope people who value online liberty will support this noble cause.

(Yes, I already donated.)


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

5 comments on “Riseup, providing encrypted comms for over 15 years, is running out of money”

  1. Kevin
  2. anon

    I hadn't heard of riseup before, so am not a user but it looks interesting.
    I wonder, since the us go v would prefer this service to be unavailable they might be responsible for increase of non donating users.

    1. David L · in reply to anon

      No conspiracy, just tons of competition since Snowden. Look at the Guardian Project, and all the start ups. I've never heard of this group, but now will look into it. Thanks Graham.

  3. Bob

    Riseup was the go-to email service. Now there are plenty of other rival services out there including: Posteo, Tutanota, ProtonMail and VFEmail which all offer similar services (and in some cases, more secure).

  4. Ian

    What is their annual operating cost?

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