US Judge Is Helping Save America’s Open Technology Fund

Twenty-eight cents per taxpayer is well worth the boost to U.S. national security.

A computer displays a message from the Chinese "great firewall" on the proper use of the internet at an internet cafe in Beijing. Ng Han Guan/AP Photo

Commentary

U.S. government support for the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which helps citizens in authoritarian countries like China access the open internet, ended by executive order on March 14, but was restored on March 27.

On March 21, the OTF sued the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for unlawfully failing to disburse grant funds that Congress authorized. The USAGM’s reversal, noted in a U.S. Justice Department communication to a judge hearing on the matter, was apparently due to the judge siding with OTF. It is unclear when the grant money will actually “hit” the OTF’s bank account, as the Justice Department attorney said to the judge. The OTF will likely wait to drop the court motion until the USAGM actually delivers the money.

The tech helps millions of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian people, including journalists and human rights activists, secure their communications and thus at least in part escape the repression of their regimes. The OTF provides virtual private networks (VPNs) and secure messaging technologies critical to encrypting the world’s communications and delivering U.S. soft power into authoritarian countries.

Many listeners of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, for example, rely on OTF tech to access these services securely. These are some of the only news outlets critical of the Chinese regime. But their funding, too, has been under fire by the White House based on budgetary considerations.

The OTF program is comparatively small, with approximately 32 full-time employees and an annual budget of $43.5 million. That comes to about 28 cents per taxpayer. The total annual cost of OTF is less than one of the U.S. Navy’s hypersonic missiles. Is the missile more lethal? Certainly. But are the OTF technologies more likely to promote democracy in countries like China and Russia? Very likely.

The history of the current controversy over OTF is more complex than most of the mainstream reporting indicates. From 2000 to 2002, the internet censorship of the Chinese communist Party (CCP) expanded in both scope and intensity. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) and Ultrareach Internet Corporation, both of which were reportedly founded by Falun Gong practitioners, developed some of the first privacy software, called Freegate and Ultrasurf, to help evade censorship. This started around 2002 and predated the similar OTF software. By 2009, the U.S. Congress set aside $30 million for the Department of State to promote this type of software.

The Hudson Institute think tank reportedly advised GIFC, and in 2010, the U.S. State Department funded Freegate and Ultrasurf with $1.5 million through the parent agency of the Voice of America, called the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The technology then had the capacity to serve approximately 1.5 million people per day, according to GIFC. The GIFC claimed that millions of people per month used its services, and that more could be added with more staff and equipment. Hudson’s Michael Horowitz at the time advocated for approximately $30 million a year for the technologies.

However, the CCP denounced the funding due to the technology having been developed by Falun Gong practitioners. Apparently, due to the pushback from Beijing at a time when the State Department was trying to maximize trade with China, the department tried to walk back its support. Horowitz responded that “Officials at the State Department have sacrificed the interests of the demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the interests of Google, and the principle of Internet freedom in closed societies on the altar of not making China go ballistic.”

Then in 2012, OTF developed privacy software similar to that of GIFC, except that OTF was open source, whereas the GIFC was closed source. Independent security professionals could audit the OTF software for vulnerabilities, while they could not do the same for the GIFC software. Over the years, OTF exploded with the help of congressional funding. In addition to VPNs for more than 45 million users worldwide, OTF supports encrypted messaging and anonymous web browsing through the Signal and Tor technologies.

In the context of controversy over whether to use the former open source software, or new private closed source software, the U.S. Agency for Global Media fired the CEO of OTF, Laura Cunningham, in 2020. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), along with five other Republican senators, criticized the firing of Cunningham. She got her job back.

By 2021, the Signal technology that OTF supported was used to secure the privacy of 2 billion people who use Facebook Messenger, Skype, and WhatsApp. That is about two-thirds of the world’s smartphones. That year in Cuba, OTF technology assisted more than 1 million people in circumventing a regime blackout of social media.

With increased funding from Congress after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, OTF’s VPN users increased about fourfold, especially in Russia and Iran. Independent journalists in Russia have used the tech to protect their privacy from the regime in Moscow. In Iran, 18 million people use OTF technology, including the Kandoo software, to access censored material on websites like X, Telegram, and Reddit. Users include Iranian pro-democracy demonstrators against the Mullahs. Many in Hong Kong and Burma (commonly known as Myanmar) also benefit from OTF.

By 2024, approximately 46 million people used U.S.-subsidized VPNs. If the cut had not been reversed on March 27 due to the OTF’s motion and the judge’s support, citizens in these countries could have lost their access to OTF technologies by the beginning of April. They could then more easily be surveilled and persecuted.

OTF has bipartisan support in Congress. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) have supported OTF for years. A source who spoke to The Washington Post recently claimed that members of Congress from both major political parties have lobbied the White House to keep the program.

Whatever one thinks about open versus closed source privacy software, approximately 6 million people in China and more in other authoritarian countries now directly benefit from OTF technology. The loss of OTF would remove another obstacle to the consolidation of the CCP’s power in China, because critical views of the CCP will be even harder for regular Chinese citizens to access. Once OTF users are lost, they are almost impossible to get back. Cutting OTF would, therefore, be a loss of freedom around the world, on which U.S. national security is partially dependent.

While the Trump administration’s work to cut the federal budget is laudable, 28 cents per taxpayer is not enough to justify the loss of freedom to so many. America’s historic promotion of freedom around the world is in part what makes us popular. U.S. national security is in part based on that popularity. This particular cut involves so little money and so much loss to freedom worldwide that the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.