Anonymous Media Origination Standard
Project AMOS is an open protocol proposal for anonymous, censorship-resistant, one-directional media submission from witnesses in hostile environments to any consuming platform. It addresses a gap that existing anonymous-submission tooling (SecureDrop, Tor, Signal, social media) was not designed to fill: smartphone-originated media from places without reliable internet, submitted without accounts, without persistent identifiers, and delivered through a distributed relay network that no single entity controls.
This repository contains the protocol specification, the technical whitepaper, and the advocacy manifesto, along with historical iteration snapshots and contributor guidance.
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amos_protocol.md — the protocol specification. RFC-style format with threat model, cryptographic primitives, wire format, node role definitions, and IANA considerations. Current version: 0.5. Audience: cryptographers, IETF/IRTF reviewers, protocol implementers.
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amos_whitepaper.md — the technical companion document to the specification. Motivates the design, walks through the key properties, and provides an illustrative end-to-end scenario. Current version: 0.5. Audience: technical readers who want context before reading the spec itself.
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amos_manifesto.md — the advocacy companion document. Non-technical, emotional-register presentation of the problem and the protocol's purpose. Audience: journalists, human-rights workers, press-freedom advocates, and anyone who might be moved to implement the protocol because they recognize the problem it is designed to solve.
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snapshots/ — frozen historical drafts of the specification and whitepaper, preserved as filesystem artifacts for diff history. See snapshots/README.md.
This is a research seed and foundational protocol proposal, not a deployment-ready system. The specification has not undergone independent cryptographic audit and has no reference implementation. It is published for public review, adversarial attack, and community iteration. Adoption in a high-stakes environment would be premature. See STATUS.md for the full status statement.
- Project site: projectamos.org
- Specification home: amosprotocol.org
- DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19547507
See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to file an issue, what the issue labels mean, and what response you can expect. The short version: the originator is operating in a "curator, not defender" posture. Substantive cryptographic critique, independent implementations, and honest attacks on the design are all welcome and will be acknowledged in successor drafts where applicable. Sustained engagement with the originator personally should not be expected.
This work is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. You may freely reproduce, translate, implement, and distribute it without restriction and without attribution (though attribution is welcomed).
The technical specification, the whitepaper, and the manifesto were developed through iterative collaboration with Anthropic's Claude Code (Claude Opus 4.6), April 2026. Conceptual direction, architectural decisions, and publication posture are the responsibility of the named originator. Specific drafting, cryptographic review assistance, and technical iteration were AI-assisted. Readers evaluating the specification are invited to verify its claims against the cited normative references rather than relying on the authorship history.