Announcing Groundwire!
We’re excited to officially announce the launch of our new digital security consultancy, Groundwire Advisors.
Josh Levy co-founded the Center for Digital Resilience nearly 10 years ago, building out a human rights-focused approach to digital security by making basic and seemingly actionable recommendations: use Signal, encrypt your emails, watch Mr. Robot. CDR, and a lot of others in this field, always believed the human bits, including leadership buy-in, staff habits, and building a security culture, actually created change. Getting the field to move in that direction has taken time.
At the same time, Galia Nurko entered the international development sector when it was in the grip of a powerful idea: that digital tools could be a silver bullet for humanity's greatest challenges, expanding access to healthcare, education, and clean water, reducing poverty, improving governance. She soon understood that technology may help address all of those things, but only if we're honest about the risks it introduces to the very populations it's meant to serve: privacy violations, cyber attacks, surveillance, and the spread of mis- and disinformation.
Now, in 2026, some things have changed a lot -- like the type of threats faced by U.S. mission-based groups -- and some things are eerily the same; we're still recommending Signal as a panacea to an incredibly complex risk environment. With the threats facing civil society expanding and being exacerbated by our dependency on technology, and our complementary experiences and backgrounds, we knew it was time to build something different. That's why we co-founded Groundwire Advisors.
We have spent our careers working at the intersection of civil society, technology, and human rights, from building incident response infrastructure for journalists and activists facing state-sponsored attacks, to conducting large-scale digital risk assessments across Ukraine, Ghana, and the Western Balkans. We've watched organizations struggle not because they lacked the right tools, but because security guidance rarely meets them where they are: resource-constrained, mission-driven, and navigating a threat landscape that changes faster than most guidance can keep up with.
The threats facing civil society today are legal and political as much as technical. Subpoenas, financial surveillance, deplatforming, and the chilling effects of public exposure sit alongside (and increasingly surpass) hacking and intrusion as the risks organizations actually face. Effective security means helping leadership understand where the real vulnerabilities are, not just which app to adopt next.
Groundwire is built around a unique approach. We call it care-centered, right-sized security, meaning we match our guidance to your organization's actual capacity, mission, and threat environment, not to some idealized understanding of "cybersecurity." We ask what your staff can actually adopt and sustain. We build with you to identify priorities and next steps, rather than deliver a laundry list of fixes that, more often than not, paralyzes organizations and their leadership. When our engagement ends, your organization is more capable, more confident, and less dependent.
We work primarily with U.S.-based civil society organizations: groups doing immigration legal services, climate advocacy, democracy and voting rights work, reproductive rights organizing, and more. We also support small businesses and entrepreneurs who need practical, proportionate guidance and don't have a security team to call.
Our approach is unique. We focus on:
Care-Centered & Right-Sized Support: We match our guidance to your actual capacity, mission, and specific threat environment, not idealized industry standards.
Practical Sustainability: We focus on habits and practices your staff can realistically adopt and maintain over time.
Collaborative Prioritization: We identify clear next steps together, avoiding overwhelming "laundry lists" of fixes that paralyze organizations.
Ultimate Outcomes: By the end of our engagement, your organization will be more capable, confident, independent, and secure.
The name comes from an electrical metaphor:
A groundwire is what stands between a manageable problem and a catastrophic one. It doesn't do anything visible day to day. But without it, a single fault can take down the whole system.
Our backgrounds are complementary: Josh brings two decades of support for global and domestic human rights and civil society groups, along with experience building security infrastructure for high-risk communities. Galia brings rigorous, large-scale assessment methodology and deep international experience with complex threat environments. Together, we're building the kind of practice we always wished existed.
If your organization is navigating elevated digital risk, or if you're a funder trying to understand the security posture of your grantees, we'd love to talk.