![](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/5c92d0c5ee20947f575edb34\/master\/pass\/Venezuela-1129410255.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Credit to Author: Emily Dreyfuss| Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Even when Maria <\/span>sleeps, she hears the voices.<\/p>\n One at a time, they speak of chaos, hunger, confusion. As she dreams, she hears a familiar voice explain where you can still find certain medicines. This is the latest news from the US<\/em>, reports another. Run, run south right now<\/em>, someone warns as calmly as they can. As Maria makes lunch for her kids and drops them off at their school in Miami, the voices are in her ear. As she falls asleep next to her husband at night, they\u2019re there.<\/p>\n They are Venezuelans, and members of the Venezuelan diaspora, who for years have been engulfed by political<\/a> and economic crisis<\/a> under the country\u2019s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro. Thousands of them come together in Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos<\/a> (Venezuela to the Marrow, or to the Bone), a channel Maria runs on the popular voice chat app Zello. As Venezuela descends further into political turmoil, Maria\u2019s channel has become an essential lifeline to people in the country where she was born and raised, and where she still has family. To protect her identity, WIRED is using only her first name.<\/p>\n Maria learned about Zello in 2014, when the app first emerged<\/a> as a crucial tool for Venezuelans protesting widespread hunger and political oppression under Maduro\u2019s regime. She was already living in the US, and used the app to find out what was happening back home. She created Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos later that year. \u201cEver since, I have been on the app pretty much 24 hours a day,\u201d she says. She takes out her earphones to shower, and that\u2019s about it. \u201cAlways at least I am hearing. Sometimes I\u2019m speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n Like a walkie-talkie, Zello allows one person to talk at a time, whether in private chats or on public channels that can function like CB radio. The way Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos is configured, only the moderators can speak; anyone else listening to the channel can ask them for permission to talk. Aside from Maria, Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos has a dozen moderators. They take shifts so that the channel has someone speaking and listening to subscriber requests 24 hours a day. While sometimes the moderators let people speak directly on the channel, other times they pass on requests or questions or tidbits of information they receive from users, like radio hosts reading listener mail.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople will come to our channel and say to us, \u2018I desperately need these pills for my mom,\u2019\u201d Maria says. The moderators will put that plea out on the channel, and then, hopefully, someone else will privately tell them they have it. \u201cThen we will arrange for them to get it, and we make it so these people never actually need to meet each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Venezuelans face an overwhelming shortage of medicine; in 2017, the country\u2019s pharmaceutical federation estimated 85 percent<\/a> of medication needs were being unmet. While the Maduro government has refused foreign aid from a number of countries<\/a>, including the US, Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos moderators have helped people find food and medical supplies, like hearing aids. They have warned people to keep their kids home from school on days when listeners report that the government is arresting people on the street.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople will come to our channel and say to us, \u2018I desperately need these pills for my mom.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Maria, Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos<\/p>\n People also tune in for access to news that isn\u2019t controlled by Maduro, which Maria and the moderators read aloud throughout the day. \u201cThere is no true media down there,\u201d Maria says. \u201cEverything has been bought by the government and they broadcast whatever the government wants them to broadcast. So the people in Venezuela have no access to the truth, to what\u2019s going on even in their own state.\u201d Reporters Without Borders ranked Venezuela 143rd<\/a> out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index. Economic and political pressures have forced many independent outlets to shut down<\/a>. When the country\u2019s largest remaining anti-government newspaper shuttered last year, its journalists said<\/a> the government had made it impossible to get enough paper to print.<\/p>\n Venezuelans turn to Zello, Maria says, to fill the gaps. Since January 23, when opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself<\/a> the rightful president of Venezuela, downloads of the app inside the country have increased 135 percent, according to the company. Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos has more than 71,000 subscribers. Zello says it is the largest channel in the country.<\/p>\n Zello CEO Bill Moore is very conscious of the role his app plays in situations like those in Venezuela. The Austin-based company was founded in 2012 on the idea that the human voice is the best, simplest, and most direct way to convey information, and that the internet could make push-to-talk-style conversation more accessible. Over the years, the truth of that premise has often shown up during times of crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cOur voice instantly carries a huge amount of information,\u201d says Moore. \u201cParticularly when stakes are high and when there\u2019s an emergency, you can organize a lot of people at once using your voice.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Zello has 133 million registered users around the world. Most of them use the app for free; the company makes its money from a paid service, ZelloWork, used by businesses such as trucking and construction companies. The app does require an internet or cellular data connection, but because it is built to have a small data load\u2014no videos or large files can be shared on the channels, and only one voice speaking at once\u2014it can often work even with a poor connection, when other apps and services might not load.<\/p>\n \u201cParticularly when stakes are high and when there\u2019s an emergency, you can organize a lot of people at once using your voice.\u201d<\/p>\n Bill Moore, Zello CEO<\/p>\n Zello has been been a popular app during hurricanes and other natural disasters. It briefly topped Apple\u2019s app store charts<\/a> in the US as Hurricane Irma bore down on Florida in 2017. After a devastating earthquake in Mexico that same year, rescue workers relied on Zello to coordinate operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n Zello has a number of other features that make it attractive for organizers like Maria. Any voice data shared in private channels or directly between two users is end-to-end encrypted<\/a>, as is text information. Though the app requires people to give a username and email at sign-up, it does not require those to be real names. And the app keeps no logs of the voice or text data that is sent over its lines, public or private.<\/p>\n Anyone can tune into public channels like Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos, which makes it useful for reaching large audiences\u2014but it also means government officials can listen, too. Anonymity on Zello is crucial. The Maduro government can and does listen to the channel, according to Maria and Zello junior data analyst Alejandra Garcia Buenaventura, who has worked with Maria and Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos to ensure they can safely use the app.<\/p>\n \u201cThe moderators have gotten really good at not using private information,\u201d Garcia says. \u201cWhen you go to the channel they are not giving any clues of where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n Garcia has taken the lead in studying how Venezuelans and other at-risk communities use Zello and making sure Zello\u2019s 40-person staff in Austin is maximizing their support. \u201cWe consistently contact moderators, saying, here are best practices,\u201d says Moore. When the company sees hotspots in disaster zones\u2014political, environmental, or otherwise\u2014they reach out to see how to make the app work best for the circumstances.<\/p>\n Sometimes that support is as simple as passing on best practices for maintaining anonymity, or getting in touch with aid groups when Zello hears reports that donations have been hijacked before they could be delivered, says Moore. But the most important way Zello supports politically oppressed people is by making sure Zello is available to use at all\u2014a lesson it learned in 2014.<\/p>\n Back then, as the Venezuelan government saw people flock to Zello to share information and help coordinate the riots and protests that were erupting, they blocked the app<\/a>. \u201cThe government-controlled service providers were ordered to block Zello," says Moore. "But they did that in a relatively crude way: by blocking IP addresses.\u201d The company responded by IP hopping, essentially changing Zello\u2019s IP address to a new one every time it got blocked. \u201cWe had very good help from the tech community within Venezuela,\u201d Moore says. Quickly, Zello created a program that would automatically detect when an IP address was blocked and immediately switch to another.<\/p>\n The IP hopping program would come in handy. In 2017<\/a>, Russia told Zello it would need to register with the government in order to operate in the country legally. \u201cEssentially they said, \u2018Make all this communication available for our use,\u2019 and we said, \u2018Sorry, of course we can\u2019t do that,\u2019\u201d says Moore, adding that because the app was encrypted, it was technically impossible to turn over everything that Russia wanted anyway. At that point, Russia began blocking Zello\u2019s IP addresses, and Zello started hopping.<\/p>\n Though this kept Zello available in the country, it caused all sorts of problems for the IP hosting services Zello used, chief among them Amazon Web Services. Since Zello wasn\u2019t the only service using certain IP addresses, when the Russian government blocked Zello, it blocked other, unrelated AWS customers, too. As Zello hopped and more addresses got blocked, more and more services using AWS were taken offline. Amazon told Zello to knock it off.<\/p>\n \u201cAmazon came back to us and said that it was against their policy,\u201d Moore says. \u201cOur argument to them was that Amazon was a tool of the Russian government, who was using Amazon to censor their people.\u201d Amazon did not agree, according to the Zello CEO, and argued that it had no political agenda but needed activity that was hurting its other customers to stop. (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.) Moore found the response was similar at other hosting services Zello could switch to, such as Google; Zello still uses AWS today.<\/p>\n Privacy advocates have criticized the role internet infrastructure companies can play in government censorship. \u201cWhen the profitable answer is for a software giant to acquiesce to censors' demands, how long can internet freedom last?\u201d Bruce Schneier wrote after Russia pulled the same thing<\/a> with encrypted messaging app Telegram<\/a> one year later.<\/p>\n Moore says that neither the Russian nor the Venezuelan government blocks Zello\u2019s IP addresses anymore. He isn\u2019t sure why. \u201c[The Russians] sort of forgot about us and so Zello continues to operate there,\u201d Moore says. But the company still recommends people use a VPN<\/a> to access it. That\u2019s what people in Venezuela do, according to Maria, since Zello is blocked in app stores there. Venezuelans hear about Zello and her channel through word of mouth, and also from social media; the channel has Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud accounts.<\/p>\n Like any communication platform, Zello can be used for good or bad. As WIRED reported last year<\/a>, the app has taken heat for a more hands-off approach toward terrorist groups like ISIS. At the time, Moore admitted that the company needed to do a better job. Since then, Zello removed its trending channels portal, which Moore acknowledges had encouraged bad behavior, turning Zello into a sort of \u201cCB radio Twitter,\u201d as he put it. Zello has also joined the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism<\/a>, which YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter formed in 2017. The company has also committed to the Tech Against Terrorism pledge, created by the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee to help smaller tech companies counter extremism on their platforms.<\/p>\n But if terrorists represent the worst of what can be done on an app like Zello, Maria and her fellow Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos moderators represent the best.<\/p>\n It hasn\u2019t been easy. Maria\u2019s dedication to Venezuela, and to providing information and support to the people there through Zello, comes at a personal price. She has a full-time job, though she can thankfully work from home, and a family. \u201cIt has been an issue for my marriage,\u201d Maria says. Her husband, who is from the US, at first objected to how much time she spent devoted to the channel. It was like part of her was always somewhere else, somewhere falling apart. He asked her to stop, or at least cut down. \u201cI remember crying and telling my husband, \u2018You don\u2019t understand how I feel that I can help a little bit my family and my people. This is important to me. Don\u2019t make me not do this,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Maria and her team hear all the time from Venezuelans telling them without Venezuela Hasta Los Tu\u00e9tanos they\u2019d be in darkness. \u201cSometimes I felt so overwhelmed and I felt like we are never going to get out of this and I want to quit,\u201d Maria says. \u201cAnd then I think about the people of the channel who will not get news or hope if I stop and I truly feel that I have a responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n