HRF's profile of Halvorssen states that he founded the Human Rights Foundation in the spring of 2005 and that he is its Chief Executive Officer. The organisation says it opened its New York office in 2006 and was created with the backing of figures who had themselves resisted dictatorships, including Elie Wiesel and Vaclav Havel, and that its distinguishing choice is to work specifically on authoritarian regimes rather than on human rights everywhere.
He is listed here because the organisation he leads is one of the largest non-commercial funders of open-source Bitcoin and privacy software through its Bitcoin Development Fund, and because HRF's Oslo Freedom Forum is where much of the argument connecting financial surveillance to political repression has been made in front of a mainstream human rights audience. His own public work is broader than Bitcoin, and this entry does not attempt to cover it.