Aleksandr Litreev sent a message to William Henry Gates that said:
Hi Bill,
It's Aleksandr, I am 22 years old, CEO of Vee Security (veesecurity.com) â an Estonian startup fighting for the freedom of speech, cybersecurity, and privacy around the world. I'd like to reach you by the e-mail to share more information about what we are doing if you're interested in supporting freedom of speech and share our values.
Recently, the Russian government banned Telegram â free & secure, end-to-end encrypted messenger, claiming that terrorists may use it. However, the real reason is that the Russian Federal Security Service is trying to illegally establish surveillance over citizens communications in order to find political dissidents and usurp the power. Such actions of many governments compromising democracies around the world, putting many other-minded people at risk. I and two of my friends decided, that we need to fight back for our freedom. We established a small company in Estonia called Vee Security and build the largest proxy service in Russia, so the governmental campaign failed to block Telegram. We've reached about 2 million users simultaneously, made Telegram available to every Russian user, despite government's attempts to ban it. Therefore, we helped the Telegram team to bypass restrictions, we developed a range of methods how it is possible to bypass DPI traffic detection and so on. Now, the need for proxy service in Russia vanished, but we still have a lot of things to do in order to set Internet free in Russia, Iran, China, Kazakhstan, Belarus and other countries. Currently, we're building a VPN service and going to introduce new tools, that will help many people to have sustainable protection against surveillance.
Until now, our company used my own money to keep on going. But now our customers base growing up and we need more funding to operate. So, we're now fundraising.
P.S. I previously also made an app to help illegally detained political dissidents, maybe you'll also like it:
https://www.scribd.com/article/347365172/Don-T-Be-Alarmed-This-Red-Button-Is-Meant-To-Help-Russians
Best Regards,
Aleksandr Litreev
