Officials: Trump move crippling internet freedom
The Trump administration is withholding $20 million in funding approved by Congress for a U.S. internet freedom organization, forcing the cutoff Friday of tools used by tens of millions of people worldwide to access the net and uncensored news through the Voice of America, officials said.
The head of the Washington-based Open Technology Fund said Thursday that it is being forced to halt 49 of the fund’s 60 internet freedom projects. The move, according to acting chief executive Laura Cunningham, affects about 80 percent of the group’s work helping human rights and pro-democracy advocates, journalists and others in 200 countries.
“Most troubling is that these actions will directly strengthen the hands of Internet freedom adversaries, like the Chinese and Iranian governments, who are actively working to undermine freedom and democracy around the world,” Cunningham wrote in an email to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
The move is the latest fallout in a power struggle between the Open Technology Fund and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees U.S. governmentfunded news outlets.
After his confirmation in June, the agency’s new director, Michael Pack, moved to fire the fund’s board and officers, before being blocked by a federal appeals court from doing so earlier this month.
In a email Thursday to Pack, Cunningham said the ongoing, “arbitrary and unnecessary” withholding of grants earmarked by Congress has compromised the fund’s work countering digital surveillance, supporting technologies used by 2 billion people a day. She also said it “jeopardized the lives of millions of users who rely on our technologies worldwide,” including the agency’s own journalists and its audience overseas.
The cutoff “not only compromises OTF’s mission but sabotages USAGM’s as well,” Cunningham said, including the advancement of human rights, U.S. foreign policy and national security priorities.
The email, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, states that 85 percent of the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s audience in Iran and 40 percent of its audience in China rely on fund-supported technologies to access content produced by the VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcast Networks.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media in a statement called OTF’s accusations meritless and not based on fact. It said the fund is “very focused on being handed millions of taxpayer dollars without any oversight, whatsoever. USAGM is committed to protecting U.S. national security, sharing America’s story with the world, and supporting legitimate Internet freedom projects.”
Pack’s moves are controversial among some executive branch security and diplomatic officials battling censorship and surveillance by U.S. adversaries in Iran, China and Venezuela.
Spokesmen for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development declined to comment on whether they supported the funding freeze or if it was consistent with the administration’s policies countering repressive regimes, referring questions to the agency.
Spokeswoman Christine Bednarz of the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded organization founded in 1983 to support the spread of human rights, said NED does not take positions on U.S. policy but “anti-censorship and circumvention technologies — such as those provided by the fund — are critical to the ability of people to access information and work in closed societies, like Iran, China, and Venezuela.”