The Trump administration is undermining international efforts for Internet freedom by holding funds, officials say

Most troubling is that these actions will directly strengthen the hands of opponents of Internet freedom, such as the Chinese and Iranian governments, who are actively working to undermine freedom and democracy around the world, the funds operated by Chief Executive Laura Cunningham , wrote in an email to the US Agency for Global Media.

The funding war is the latest result in a power struggle between the Open Technology Fund and the US-based Global Media Agency, which oversees US-funded media.

In an email Thursday to package, Cunningham said the ongoing arbitrary and unnecessary maintenance of grants set by Congress has compromised funds working against digital surveillance, backing the technologies used by 2 billion people a day. She also said she risked the lives of millions of users who rely on our technologies around the world, including agency journalists and her overseas audience.

The disruption not only compromises the mission of the OTFs, but also sabotages the USAGMs, Cunningham said, including advancing human rights, U.S. foreign policy and national security priorities.

The e-mail, a copy of which was given to The Washington Post, states that 85 percent of the US Global Media Agency audience in Iran and 40 percent of its audience in China rely on technologies backed by funds to access content. produced by VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media, in a statement, called the allegations against OTFs undeserved and not fact-based. He said the fund is very focused on handing over millions of dollars to the taxpayer without any oversight, whatever. USAGM is committed to protecting U.S. national security by sharing America’s history with the world and supporting legitimate Internet freedom projects.

The package moves are controversial between some executive branch security officials and diplomats fighting censorship and surveillance by US opponents in Iran, China and Venezuela.

State Department spokesmen and the U.S. Agency for International Development declined to comment on whether they supported the freeze or whether it was in line with the policies of administrations opposing repressive regimes, referring to questions from the agency.

Christine Bednarz, spokeswoman for the National Endowment for Democracy, a congregation-funded organization founded in 1983 to support the spread of human rights, said the NED does not take a stand on U.S. policy, but anti-censorship and avoidance technologies like those provided by the fund are critical to the ability of people to access information and work in closed societies such as Iran, China and Venezuela.

The Open Technology Fund is one of the largest sources of funding for the development, distribution, and maintenance of open source technology tools, such as Signal and Tor, which allow users to encrypt communications and use the Internet anonymously. , despite government controls.

It also works to protect journalists, resources, activists and consumers from digital attack, as well as to assist researchers and technology developers. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. directly harmful.

The impact is devastating, not only on our work, but on the people we work for, said Dragana Kaurin, whose localization lab translates security and privacy tools into 200 native languages, including vulnerable groups in Bolivia, Colombia, Myanmar. , Turkey, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

People do not trust foreign private security tools that are not in their language … and it takes time to build that trust, said Kaurin, who has helped independent journalists in Vietnam apply equipment encryption tools, such as are Veracrypt to adapt to government attacks.

Users are asking, what will happen now? What will we use? Who has our data? … Will tools like Signal and Tor be safe to use if they lose funds to regularly update their code? she said. Faith is the most precious thing in the world, and you can lose it so easily.

Open Technology Fund projects include a Red Team Laboratory, which has audited and patched more than 2,100 privacy and security vulnerabilities in tools such as SecureDrop, used by journalists to receive story advice from anonymous sources. .

Loss is a huge loss to secure private communications and worldwide, and especially to those targeted by the dominant nation states, said Red Team Lab member Erik Cabetas, head of the Brooklyn-based Inclusive Security .

Another funded group, Montreal eQualitie, is helping protect more than 500 vulnerable civil society organizations from cyber-attacks with its deflect.ca project, and is applying machine learning technology to respond to traffic. malicious Web and developing a peer-to-peer messaging application that can work when shutting down the Internet, said founder Dmitry Vitalev.

The fund also supports the monitoring and detection of increasingly sophisticated Internet censorship in some 210 countries through the Open Network Intervention Observatory, which collaborates with entities such as Psiphon, a very popular censorship circumstance tool in Iran.

The network has identified politically motivated attacks, including a 2019 shutdown of social media sites targeting supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaid, anti-government demonstrators in Ethiopia and fuel protesters in Zimbabwe, said Maria’s director of group and partnership research Xynou. She has also targeted lesbians and gays and ethnic minorities in Iran, Ethiopia and Indonesia, she said.

The OTF is one of several outlets focused on marginalized populations, people who are most affected by censorship and widespread surveillance, those who understand it, and those who are best positioned to fight it, Xynou said.

Those people have trusted the OTF, and if there are drastic changes in its leadership and funding, it means that people who are more positioned to protect Internet freedom will no longer be supported, Xynou said. This will have a long-term impact on the wider Internet freedom community beyond our work.

The Internet freedom arena is a cat and mouse space, where governments find new ways of spying and suppressing human rights, and advocates must constantly create new ways to protect them, said Raphael Mimoun, founder of Horizontal. The group develops an OTF-funded tool called Tella that safely hides and encrypts sensitive material on mobile devices and shares it with human rights organizations.

Without OTF funding, we are simply losing the ability to keep our tools safe, improve security infrastructure, and make sure our users are protected from harassment, Mimoun said.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media has paid $ 9.3 million of the $ 20 million 2020 allocation funds, the agency said. But he also holds an additional $ 9 million from the previous year that he promised to release as part of a contract transfer from Radio Free Asia, where the fund started as a pilot project in 2012, Cunningham said.

Pack helpers have complained of prejudice and partisanship and mismanagement and unspecified but well-known scandals in the media components. The Agency statement called the funds’ desire to divert attention from these transparent failures. Cunningham said the fund has not received any explanation or justification for the funding delay, nor has the agency made it aware of any compliance or security breaches.

The OTF always and continues to welcome and respect USAGM oversight, as well as congressional oversight, OIG and GAO, she said, adding, “I’m disappointed by this mischaracterization of issues that the OTF takes so seriously.”