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CoPilot is a wireless hotspot for digital security trainers that provides an easy to use web interface for simulating custom censorship environments during trainings. CoPilot lets participants experience and successfully circumventing censorship in the safety of an interactive training environment.

Research on the needs of digital security trainers has demonstrated that one of the leading needs of trainers is a framework for assessing the effectiveness of trainings, as well as a more robust set of tools and resources for evaluating trainees’ uptake during and after trainings. As a part of the overall objective to improve the quality and effectiveness of digital security resources Internews has been exploring innovative and interactive ways to increase the adoption of safer digital behavior while understanding the time constraints of trainers to monitor the progress of participants.

This process resulted in the successful development of the CoPilot tool, which has the following features:

• A wireless hotspot that allows trainers to provide a safe environment for participants to explore censorship.
• Easy-to-use interfaces that allow trainers to have fine-grained control of censorship environments.
• The ability to for trainers to download and share different censorship configuration profiles with other trainers through the CoPilot interface.
• Pre-loaded DNS censorship plugins that allow targeted DNS Blocking and Redirection.
• Pre-loaded “Intrusion Prevention” plugin which allows for wide-ranging censorship simulation using censorship “rules” from standard Intrusion prevention and detection systems.
• A plugin system that allows developers to easily add new censorship and surveillance functionality.
• Support for the “playing card deck” sized embedded hardware platform Beagle Bone Black that allow CoPilot to be built for under $100 USD.

Please see our issues list for current work taking place on this project.