Executive Order to the State Department Sideswipes Freedom Tools, Threatens Censorship Resistance, Privacy, and Anonymity of Millions

In the first weeks of the Trump Administration, we have witnessed a spate of sweeping, confusing, and likely unconstitutional executive orders, including some that have already had devastating human consequences. EFF is tracking many of them, as well as other developments that impact digital rights. 

Right now, we want to draw attention to one of the executive orders that directly impacts the freedom tools that people around the world rely on to safeguard their security, privacy, and anonymity. EFF understands how critical these tools are – protecting the ability to make and share anticensorship, privacy and anonymity-protecting technologies has been central to our work since the Crypto Wars of the 1990s.

This executive order called the Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid has led the State Department to immediately suspend its contracts with hundreds of organizations in the U.S. and around the world that have received support through programs administered by the State Department, including through its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. This includes many freedom technologies that use cryptography, fight censorship, protect freedom of speech, privacy and anonymity for millions of people around the world.  While the State Department has issued some limited waivers, so far those waivers do not seem to cover the open source internet freedom technologies.  As a result, many of these projects have to stop or severely curtail their work, lay off talented workers, and stop or slow further development. 

There are many examples of freedom technologies, but here are a few that should be readily understandable to EFF’s audience: First, the Tor Project, which helps ensure that people can navigate the internet securely and privately and without fear of being tracked, both protecting themselves and avoiding censorship. Second, the Guardian Project, which creates privacy tools, open-source software libraries, and customized software solutions that can be used by individuals and groups around the world to protect personal data from unjust intrusion, interception and monitoring. Third, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, or OONI, has been carefully measuring government internet censorship in countries around the world since 2012. Fourth, the Save App from OpenArchive, is a mobile app designed to help people securely  archive, verify, and encrypt their mobile media and preserve it on the Internet Archive and decentralized web storage.

We hope that cutting off support for these and similar tools and technologies of freedom is only a temporary oversight, and that more clear thinking about these and many similar projects will result in full reinstatement. After all, these tools support people working for freedom consistent with this administration’s foreign policy objectives  —including in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and China, just to name a few. By helping people avoid censorship, protect their speech, document human rights abuses, and retain privacy and anonymity, this work literally saves lives.

U.S. government funding helps these organizations do the less glamorous work of developing and maintaining deeply technical tools and getting them into the hands of people who need them. That is, and should remain, in the U.S. government’s interest. And sadly, it’s not work that is easily fundable otherwise. But technical people understand that these tools require ongoing support by dedicated, talented people to keep them running and available.

It’s hard to imagine that this work does not align with U.S. government priorities under any administration, and certainly not one that has stressed its commitment to fighting censorship and supporting digital technologies like cryptocurrencies that use some of the same privacy and anonymity-protecting techniques. These organizations exist to use technology to protect freedom around the world.

We urge the new administration to restore support for these critical internet freedom tools.