Hello friends,

Long story short, the Trump administration just appointed a new CEO to USAGM, which is the US government’s global media agency which oversees news broadcasters like Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, as well as a key funder in the Internet Freedom field, Open Technology Fund (OTF). FYI, this CEO, Michael Pack, is very close to Steve Bannon. The USAGM news agencies, combined, reach millions if not billions of people throughout the world.

There are folks lobbying hard to take away congressional-approved funding going to Internet Freedom, of which a large chunk goes to OTF, potentially impacting the 2020 budget. The strategy is to shift funding to only a handful of commercial VPN services. This will be catastrophically detrimental for Internet Freedom worldwide - It will put human rights defenders, activists, and journalists in danger, especially activists campaigning against highly sophisticated technical adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and more.

What Can You Do:

1- We’re calling on your organization to sign a letter that is being sent to Congress You can read and sign for support here: https://saveinternetfreedom.tech/ Please share the website with your contacts.

2- Organizational statement It would be incredibly helpful to have your organization put out a statement in support of Internet Freedom and OTF. Here are some talking points. https://frama.link/tp-saveinternetfreedom

3- Join the mailing list Join the mailing list, where folks are coordinating efforts against this: https://groups.io/g/sift-talk/

4- Press statements If you work with groups that have benefited from OTF funding, and can attest to how crucial it is in the fight for internet freedom, human rights and against censorship, please let us know. We might use some of these quotes for press statements.

5- Help us with Outreach & Public Support:

a) You can tweet about it using #saveinternetfreedom, and use any means in your disposal to draw media attention to this.

Thank you!