In the summer of 2009, following tensions surrounding the Iranian elections, the worlds eyes were opened to clampdowns on personal privacy and widespread obstructions to free speech. At the same time I came to realise that not only is any government capable of limiting its citizens liberties and access to information, but that most are already doing just this in one form or another.
During this period, many hackers came to the aid of the Iranian people by providing a variety of open and anonymous proxy servers and services designed to obfuscate web traffic. And while this technique was workable in the short term, as soon as any proxy became popular it effectively advertised itself to the authorities due to the volume of traffic that it handled, resulting in a prompt blacklisting by local ISPs.
Keeping with the spirit of these hacktivists, I developed a business plan in late 2010 based on a collection of open source code, to provide a personal private proxy service, on demand, to any Internet user. While these proxies might also suffer from similar problems as any other popular service, my hope was that the sheer proliferation of open servers could offer some hope to those in need of it - wherever they might be.
Since then other work has taken over my time, but rather than let this idea wither on the vine I am formally open sourcing the project. You can download a copy of the business plan, which is released under the GNU Free Document License, here. For obvious reasons I have removed some details such as directors curriculum vitae and detailed financial projections, but otherwise the business plan is intact. Feel free to do whatever you wish with this document. Use it to start a company, use it to change the world. I hereby relinquish all commercial rights to any ideas developed within, and ask only that whatever you do, you do it for the right reasons.