The Operator Distribution is a tool that we are working on to help deploy and create secure and autonomous environments and networks to communities organizing in hostile environments.

When we say secure we mean that use of each environment and network is resistant to eavesdropping (via openvpn), and resistant to loss of data that could compromise the security of the group and allow for infiltration (via full disk encryption with luks).

The Operator Distribution: explanation and humble begining from March-Hare Collective on Vimeo.

This tool is being created to solve the problem of managing and providing support to a decentralized team that does not have a uniform computing environment. In past comms deployments a lot of time has been spent getting each operator up and running with the tools they need on the operating system they are running. This solution allows for a unified operating environment and decreases the amount of support and documentation needed for a comms team deployment.

All of this will be accomplished by customizing a slax image that will be equipped to run the desired service (openvpn server, asterisk server, silc server, ushahidi / swiftriver build) and be capable of creating and managing users of those services with clients that can be pre-configured and delivered on bootable usb media to users.

We are planning on having the core of this tool along with a secure voice conference call solution available at the 2011 SF Anarchist Bookfair where we will be tabeling with the hackbloc collective. Issues and progress can be traked on the project page locally and at the March-Hare github repo.