The Winston Smith Project (Italian: Progetto Winston Smith, or PWS) is an informational and operational project for the defence of human rights on the Internet and in the digital era. The project was started in 1999 as an anonymous association and it is characterised by the absence of a physical reference identity. It is named after the main character in George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The reference to Orwell's dystopia is embodied in the motto of PWS: "Unplug the Big Brother" which is aligned with its more generalist motto "Paranoia is a virtue".