During a trip to China before the pandemic, I woke up early on my first morning in the hotel and turned on CNN International while getting ready. I wasn’t paying close attention to the broadcast, but I couldn’t help but notice when, after about three seconds of a story about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the television in my room cut to black. After about 90 seconds, the television appeared to work again. I waited for the 30-minute broadcast to cycle through and watched as the same thing happened a second time. I sat on the bed with only the low buzz of the black-screen television for what felt like a very long time. Though I was physically alone in the stillness, I felt a heavy presence with me—because, of course, I was not alone. The state had entered my room, and in the reverberating silence of the black screen, it sent a resounding message: “We are in charge here.”
Sadly, what was for me a single fleeting experience is the daily life of millions. Authoritarian regimes around the world monitor their citizens’ communications and limit what media they can access. The United States has long sought to combat censorship and propaganda by such regimes through radio and television broadcasts. With the rise of the internet and social media, the U.S. government expanded its anti-censorship efforts to include circumvention of internet blackouts and cyber monitoring.
However, within weeks of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the new administration impounded funds appropriated by Congress to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as well as its grantee organizations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. One of the lesser-known grantees of USAGM is the Open Technology Fund, an independent nonprofit that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and secure communication around the globe. OTF had its funding restored by a federal district court but only through the end of September. With the court’s order now expired, funds are again impounded, and a new round of litigation is underway. As the administration decides what’s next for USAGM and the nonprofits it funds, OTF’s record and the history behind its creation are deserving of another look.
In June 2009, incumbent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed reelection victory with 83 percent of the vote. Believing the outcome to be rigged, demonstrators organized through social media and took to the streets in what would become known as the “Green Movement.” During the ensuing violent crackdown, images of police violence and murdered protesters went viral online. The regime responded by instituting an internet blackout, and the Green Movement eventually collapsed under the strain of shootings and mass arrests. But the protests showed the world that access to social media would be essential to those resisting authoritarian regimes, and the Obama administration was determined to keep those channels open in the future.
Images of the Green Movement protests also inspired a couple of computer programmers in California to join the fight against the regime’s censorship. Austin Heap and Daniel Colascione soon created an internet-blocking circumvention software called Haystack. Haystack claimed to be more advanced than other encryption software in use at the time by not only encrypting communication but by camouflaging the very websites used to facilitate it. The software made websites a regime might view as subversive appear as mundane internet traffic, theoretically adding another layer of protection for users visiting the sites.
Understandably, internet freedom advocates were excited about the software’s potential. By January 2010, Heap was making the rounds on Capitol Hill and meeting with State Department officials. The Guardian named him its 2010 Innovator of the year. The U.S. government granted a license to export the software to Iran to avoid running afoul of U.S. sanctions; by summer, Haystack was on the way to deliver the repressed people of Iran the safe communication and open internet all people deserve. This was going to be great.
Except … nobody checked the software’s security. Haystack was a “closed-source” software, meaning the creator retains proprietary control of the source code. Open-source software is considered to be more secure, given that the creator’s decision to make the code publicly available allows the public to attempt to modify it—and penetrate it. If so-called white-hat hackers fail, there’s more certainty that a malicious hacker (or foreign adversary) would fail as well.
There is nothing inherently wrong with closed-source software. It’s how many developers protect the integrity of their creations and monetize them. But it also means that any user implicitly trusts that the software is secure. And if you are the U.S. government backing the deployment of closed-source software for the purpose of allowing individuals living under autocratic regimes where dissidents are regularly jailed and executed to communicate safely, you’d better hope the creators know what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, the lack of security vetting ended the Haystack saga in a public fireball. In September 2010, a small group of hackers obtained a copy of the Haystack source code, reversed-engineering and cracking it within a single day. When the news became public, Haystack deemed the security concerns “valid” and posted a notice on its website to its human testers to immediately cease its use. Colascione confirmed that while the software had been deployed to a limited number of testers in Iran, others had begun to use it without Haystack’s authority or knowledge. He called the whole affair “a debacle, a disaster and an embarrassment.”
Haystack put its Iranian users at risk, but exactly how many and whether any of them were caught, arrested, or worse is something that, frankly, nobody knows. As The Economist put it, the software was “worse than useless.” If there was a silver lining, it was that the U.S. government realized its error and ceased funding other closed-source circumvention tools. In the future, circumvention tools would need to be open-source. There could be no more Haystacks.
In the wake of the Haystack affair, the Broadcasting Board of Governors—the federal agency that would later be renamed USAGM—decided in 2012 to invest some of its meager internet freedom budget toward a new pilot called the Open Technology Fund. Initially, OTF was located within Radio Free Asia, the congressionally authorized nonprofit supporting local independent media throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The goal was to harness the power of private sector ingenuity to create secure censorship circumvention tools that permit those in authoritarian countries to access a free internet and independent media. OTF partnered with dozens of companies, including Signal and the Tor Project, to develop circumvention technologies and conduct security audits of new software. Perhaps its greatest contribution to digital freedom was its partnership with Signal: OTF’s funding led to the creation of the Signal algorithm that supports the encrypted communication of billions of people around the world through WhatsApp, Signal, and other platforms.
Given these achievements, Rep. Michael McCaul and Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduced the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act in 2020, which, after quickly garnering bipartisan support, became law as part of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The act established OTF as a standalone nonprofit entity under USAGM and gave it the statutory mandate to “advance freedom of the press and unrestricted access to the internet in repressive environments overseas.” It authorized a designated funding stream of $25 million, ensured congressional access to its records for oversight purposes, and, crucially, required funding be prioritized for the support of fully open-source tools that undergo comprehensive security audits.
OTF has achieved marked success since the law’s enactment. In 2021, investigative journalists supported by OTF revealed the extent of Chinese repression of the country’s minority Uyghur population in a series of articles for BuzzFeed. The team won the Pulitzer Prize, and OTF ensured that a translated version was made available online in China. When Iran tried again to block access to the internet in 2022 during protests against the country’s morality laws, OTF’s surge funding led to 30 million daily Iranian users of OTF-supported circumvention tools. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, OTF deployed numerous circumvention technologies, allowing millions of Russians and Ukrainians to access an unrestricted internet. In May 2024, OTF announced that monthly users of OTF-supported tools quadrupled to 40 million in less than four years. And, most recently, it supported the creation of an extensive report by the online magazine ChinaFile detailing how the Chinese government controls cyberspace.
The regimes that thwart access to information and persecute those who spread the forbidden are like the Party in George Orwell’s 1984. In a world where knowledge is power, their fragile control rests on the doublespeak mantra: “Ignorance is Strength.” As people resist oppression or defend their country from invasion, we cannot always support them with our military, weapons, or funds. But as they seek their own freedom, we can help bring some light to their darkness: We can help them communicate.
