The Open Technology Fund is an American non-profit corporation with the aim to support global Internet freedom technologies. Its mission is to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies." As of November 2019, the Open Technology Fund became an independent grantee corporation of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Until then, it had operated as a Radio Free Asia program.
History
The Open Technology Fund was created in 2012 as a pilot program within Radio Free Asia. Under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department adopted a policy of supporting global internet freedom initiatives. At this time, RFA began looking into technologies that helped their audiences avoid censorship and surveillance. Journalist Eli Lake argued that Clinton's policy was "heavily influenced by the Internet activism that helped organize the green revolution in Iran in 2009 and other revolutions in the Arab world in 2010 and 2011". In September 2014, the OTF worked with Google and Dropbox to create an organization called Simply Secure to help improve the usability of privacy tools. In March 2017, the OTF's future was reported as under question due to the Trump administration's unclear positions on Internet freedom issues. Since then, the OTF has continued to receive Congressional funding under the Trump administration. In November 2019, OTF announced that they became an independent non-profit corporation. In June 2020, Libby Liu resigned as CEO of OTF.
Organization and funding
The Open Technology Fund operated for seven years as a program of Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded, nonprofit international corporation that provides news, information and commentary in East Asia. Since 2019, the OTF has had its own Board of Directors reporting directly to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent agency of the U.S. government that operates various state-run media outlets. The OTF is sustained by annual grants from the USAGM, which originate from yearly U.S. Congressional appropriations for State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. According to the OTF, it works together with other publicly funded programs to fulfill a U.S. Congressional mandate to sustain and increase global freedom of information on the Internet with public funds.
Projects
The OTF funds third party audits for all of the code related projects that it supports. It has also offered to fund audits of "non-OTF supported projects that are in use by individuals and organizations under threat of censorship/surveillance". Notable projects whose audits the OTF has sponsored include Cryptocat, Commotion Wireless, TextSecure, GlobaLeaks, MediaWiki, OpenPGP.js, Nitrokey, and Ricochet. The OTF also matched donations that were made toward the auditing of TrueCrypt. In December 2014, the OTF reported that it had funded more than 30 technology code audits over the past three years, identifying 185 privacy and security vulnerabilities in both OTF and non-OTF-funded projects. In December 2015, The Tor Project announced that the OTF will be sponsoring a bug bounty program that will be coordinated by HackerOne. The program will initially be invite-only and will focus on finding vulnerabilities that are specific to The Tor Project's applications. In October 2019, Sarah Aoun, the OTF's Technology Director, discussed the findings of OTF-funded research into a Chinese governmentmobile application, telling ABC News that the app essentially amounts to a "surveillance device in your pocket." "The access itself is significant," Adam Lynn, the OTF's Research Director, told The Washington Post. "The fact that they've gone to these lengths only further heightens the scrutiny around this." According to its parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, OTF's impact by 2019 was global, with over 2 billion people using OTF-supported technology daily, and more than two-thirds of all mobile users having OTF-incubated technology on their devices. "As authoritarian states worldwide increasingly attempt to control what their citizens read, write, and even share online," said OTF CEO Libby Liu, "this next stage in OTF's growth could not come at a more crucial time." OTF had $2 million of funding from the USAGM to assist with the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, however this funding was frozen in June 2020 as China was preparing to introduce a new national security law for Hong Kong.
