Transnational repression, on the record.
Polaris is a small, privacy-preserving web app for individuals from the Hong Kong, Tibetan, Uyghur, and mainland Chinese communities — and for allies in the United States — who continue to experience the Chinese Communist Party's transnational repression.
It is built to feel like a page from a thoughtful field guide rather than a panic app: steady, plainly written, and respectful of the reader as a capable adult who is already thinking carefully.
- Assess your risk. Ten short questions about your situation, asked one at a time, with a calm read of your exposure and a few practical steps to consider next.
- Report an incident. A structured place to put down what happened — when, where, and what you remember — one section at a time. You decide whether to share contact details for follow-up. No account required.
- See the public overview. An aggregate map and a few summary statistics drawn from community reports. No individual report or location is shown.
When foreign governments seek to intimidate, silence, coerce, harass, or harm members of diaspora and exile communities, it is known as transnational repression. It can take the form of stalking, online disinformation, harassment, threats, coerced returns, threats against family in the country of origin, abusive legal practices, cyberhacking, assault, attempted kidnapping, and worse.
- Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS 4 for styling
- Supabase for Postgres, Auth (magic links for the research surface), and preview branching
- Cloudflare Turnstile to gate report submissions against abuse
- Tinfoil for private inference (voice transcription, incident analysis, narrative blinding)
- Vercel for hosting and scheduled jobs (Vercel Cron)
- Vitest for unit tests
You'll need Node.js 20+ and npm.
git clone https://github.com/ATLBitLab/polaris.git
cd polaris
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000. The home page links to the safety quiz and the incident report flow.
The app runs without any environment variables filled in, but several features (Supabase analytics writes, the research dashboard, Turnstile, Tinfoil-powered analysis) are no-ops until you provide credentials. See AGENTS.md for the full environment, Supabase, and operations reference.
AGENTS.md— agent rules and the deeper technical reference (environment variables, Supabase setup, branching, quiz internals).PRODUCT.md— who Polaris is for and what it is trying to do.DESIGN.md— the design system and visual language.