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10/03/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/03/2025 11:21

How AWS Wickr is helping save lives in crisis situations

This article has been updated since its original publish on March 23, 2023.

Key takeaways

  • AWS Wickr helped Operation Recovery evacuate nearly 4,000 at-risk Afghan citizens through secure, encrypted communications protected from Taliban surveillance.
  • During Hurricane Helene, the U.S. Army deployed AWS Wickr in less than 15 minutes to establish secure communications across multiple civilian agencies.
  • Wickr's HIPAA-compliant encryption enabled critical telehealth connections between resource-limited hospitals and remote specialists during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AWS Wickr is a secure collaboration application designed to protect communications through end-to-end encryption and administrative controls. It enables confidential messaging, file sharing, and communication across teams while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy and security.
With Wickr, non-profits and government agencies can encrypt every call, message, and file with a new random key, and remains indecipherable in transit; only the intended recipients and the customer organization-not even AWS-can decrypt each transmission.

How AWS Wickr helped evacuate 4,000 at-risk Afghan citizens

For more than a year, Jawid wondered if he would ever reunite with his wife. Originally from Afghanistan, the former interpreter worked with the United States Army before earning his U.S. citizenship. Jawid moved to the states with a plan for his wife, Farzana, to join him once her visa process was complete. Their plan, however, was shattered on August 15, 2021, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Farzana, like thousands of other Afghanistan citizens, was unable to evacuate, and because of her husband's connection with the U.S. Army, she was in danger of Taliban retaliation.
"Day and night, I was thinking about how to get my family out of Afghanistan," Jawid recalled. "My wife was always asking me, 'Did you find a solution?'"
After the Taliban takeover, Jawid sought help from Operation Recovery, a U.S.-based nonprofit with a mission to support distressed Americans and allies of America located abroad. Farzana was one of more than 7,500 applicants in Afghanistan, on Operation Recovery's evacuation list.
"Since the Taliban controlled the internet, email was not a reliable way to communicate," said Jon Collette, president and CEO of Operation Recovery. "We needed secure communications."
To do this, Operation Recovery looked to AWS Wickr.

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With consulting firm UNCOMNthe AWS team developed a solution that would integrate with Operation Recovery's existing case management system and provide end-to-end encrypted communication for volunteers (known as shepards) and evacuees. It also provided "burn on read" messages, so people could share their location and then delete the information; as well as mask web traffic as AWS traffic to go unnoticed. The solution also included a bot to answer frequently asked questions surrounding evacuees' case statuses. This gave shepherds the ability to query information from Operation Recovery's systems at any time, without requiring human intervention.
Operation Recovery has used AWS Wickr to coordinate the evacuation of nearly 4,000 at-risk Afghan citizens in 2021, including Farzana. After three years apart, she was finally reunited with Jawid in the U.S., where the couple has built a new life.
At-risk Afghan citizens evacuate during the Taliban takeover in 2021.Photo by Operation Recovery

AWS Wickr has solved critical communications challenges during other crisis situations

During Hurricane Helene response operations in 2024, the Army successfully implemented AWS Wickr as a communications solution to coordinate with local civilian agencies.
When the storm hit North Carolina in September 2024, the 18th Airborne Corps established a secure communications network in just 10-15 minutes, and created a self-service onboarding website that allowed local law enforcement, police, and fire departments to quickly join the network. It enabled immediate cross-agency communication. AWS Wickr worked across personal and government devices, provided tiered-access control that allowed civilian agencies to participate without requiring full military device management, and allowed for quick deployment, within minutes.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) developed a lifesaving solution using AWS Wickr, whose end-to-end encryption capabilities ensured compliance with both HIPAA regulations and Department of Defense security requirements for handling sensitive medical data. Their National Emergency Tele-Critical Care Network (NETCCN) connected resource-limited hospitals with remote medical specialists through secure messaging, video calls, and file sharing. This secure network was successfully deployed in over 60 hospitals across the United States, with a hospital in Missouri going live with the solution in just 3 hours. The U.S. Army later deployed this critical care network in response to a COVID-19 surge in Guam. A nurse there used it to save a patient suffering from tension pneumothorax by connecting with an ICU doctor in San Diego, who guided the treatment.
Building on this success, the U.S. Army adapted the technology for military use as the Military Emergency Tele-Critical Care Platform (METCC-P), combining AWS Wickr RAM with AWS Private 5G to function in remote combat settings. It is estimated to have saved hundreds of lives. The intuitive platform, which military medical students used for training, and learned to use in under 15 seconds, has empowered combat medics to deliver care beyond their training level-what one user described as "having an intensive care doctor in her pocket."
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Amazon.com Inc. published this content on October 03, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on October 03, 2025 at 17:21 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]