400 organizations sign open letter to save Open Technology Fund (OTF)

guest · Jun 22, 2020

400 organizations sign open letter to save Open Technology Fund (OTF)
June 22, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-organizations-sign-petition-to-save-open-technology-fund-otf/

More than 2,300 individuals from the open source and human rights communities have also signed the letter in their names.
The letter relates to preserving the work of the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a US non-profit that has been acting as an intermediary between the US government and open source projects.

Through the years, the OTF has funded tools to bypass China's firewall, bypass censorship in Iran and Syria, funded the Tor Project's bug bounty program, and numerous encrypted email and instant messaging projects to support secure communications for residents in oppressive countries.
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Giorgio Maone, the creator of the NoScript browser extension, and one of the organizations that signed the open letter, has told ZDNet in an interview today that the OTF has played a key role in the development of countless of projects, including his own.

"OTF has funded specific development efforts, and namely the complete [NoScript] rewrite needed for the WebExtensions architecture and the porting to Chrome/Chromium," Maone told ZDNet.
"It is currently funding the development of a cross-browser library to support NoScript and similar privacy/security browser extensions to partially overcome Chrome's Manifest V3 limitations."
Keeping the OTF alive to continue its mission to support open source projects is a must.
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Save Internet Freedom: Support the Open Technology Fund

The internet is a vital information lifeline for over 3 billion people worldwide, but for many, this lifeline is being severed. From Xinjiang to Hong Kong and from Caracas to Tehran, repressive regimes are deploying a new generation of advanced censorship and surveillance technology, designed to stifle dissent, track religious and ethnic minorities, and manipulate content online.

As the fight for free expression escalates, the US is in danger of losing the most effective program that Congress has at its disposal for defending internet freedom, the Open Technology Fund (OTF).
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guest · Jun 25, 2020

Save Open Technology Fund, #SaveInternetFreedom
June 24, 2020
https://blog.torproject.org/save-open-technology-fund

The Tor Project has joined the voices around the world from the internet freedom community and in the U.S. Congress to express concerns about the rapid firing of key personnel and dissolution of the board of directors at the four agencies (Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund) under the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

Of most immediate concern to Tor is the future of the Open Technology Fund (OTF) and its crucial mission, since 2012, of providing funding for technology that enables free expression, helps people circumvent censorship, and obstructs repressive surveillance.
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The Tor Project and OTF both recognize that for any strategy to provide censorship circumvention and surveillance protection to really be successful for the long term, it has to be an open, decentralized approach.
The abrupt changes under USAGM, especially the firing of key OTF leadership, raises concerns regarding the future of a core supporter of the internet freedom community.
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guest · Jul 3, 2020

Inside the Plot to Kill the Open Technology Fund
July 2, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgx5z3/inside-the-plot-to-kill-the-open-technology-fund

OTF’s goal is to help oppressed communities across the globe by building the digital tools they need and offering training and support to use those tools. Its work has saved countless lives, and every single day millions of people use OTF-assisted tools to communicate and speak out without fear of arrest, retribution, or even death.

The fund has helped dissidents raise their voices beyond China’s advanced censorship network, known as the Great Firewall; helped citizens in Cuba to access news from sources other than the state-sanctioned media; [...]

“The attacks on the OTF are also an attack against us all, too,” Caturani told VICE News. “Losing our safety and security could mean losing our fights for freedom, human rights, and democracy.”
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Now, groups linked to Pack and Bannon have been pressing for the funding of closed-source technology, which is antithetical to the OTF's work over the last eight years.
Closed-source technology — where all or part of the code is kept private — isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the danger is it can be designed with backdoors that would allow governments to secretly monitor users' activity.

That the OTF would pivot its funding from trusted, open-source tech to more obscure, closed-source tech has alarmed activists around the world and has resulted in open revolt among OTF's former leadership.
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400 organizations sign open letter to save Open Technology Fund (OTF)

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