"This is a report on the health of the open-source digital safety tool ecosystem that draws from the BASICS experience. Internews' BASICS project (Building Analytical and Support Infrastructure for Critical Security tools) was a 30-month initiative to strengthen the capacity of open source digital safety tool development teams ("tool teams") to better understand their vulnerable users, respond to urgent security and privacy threats, and evaluate their impact. BASICS set out to address the unique challenges faced by tool teams in order to improve the protection of the users of these tools. Vulnerable populations, such as human rights defenders and marginalized groups, count on independently-developed open source digital safety tools not only to provide safety and censorship circumvention, but also to avoid reliance on cloud-based services which can be censored or hacked, and to protect themselves from costly licensing issues when using commercial tools. Many of the most popular and most critical open source digital security tools are maintained and updated by "tool teams" rather than businesses or organizations. These ad-hoc groups have little if any institutional capacity, are often under-resourced, and have limited insight into the specific needs of at-risk users." (Publisher description).