CZAssist is for people whose equipment can be physically seized: journalists, human-rights lawyers, NGO field staff. Full-disk encryption assumes the attacker arrives over a network. CZAssist assumes they arrive with your bag. It detects physical tamper and irrecoverably erases its keys, with no recovery procedure and no vendor backdoor.
A funded six-month project took it from an idea to working hardware: schematic and PCB in KiCad, enclosures 3D-printed on a desktop printer, and Claude Code writing most of the integration firmware, serial protocols and test harnesses.
Where it stands: a proven foundation with working demonstrations, not a product. Manufacturing, certification and more funding stand between it and a journalist in the field. It’s the first of a planned suite of tools built on the same principle.