Who counted as an individual signer
The individual signature list on the 2020 SaveOTF letter was open to any person with a working affiliation in the internet-freedom field. Verification was light: a working email, a public affiliation where possible, and a short check by the volunteers who maintained the list. That kept the process fast without letting the list drift into anonymous mass sign-ons.
The volunteer team also gently trimmed obvious duplicates and asked signers with only a personal email to clarify their public work. That handful of small checks was enough to keep the list credible without turning the process into a gatekeeping exercise, which is exactly the balance the coalition was aiming for. A small number of pseudonymous entries were accepted after a second check with a trusted contact.
For context on the whole coalition, see our overview of who signed and why.
Journalists and reporters on the list
A large fraction of the individual signers were journalists. Reporters who cover authoritarian states rely on the same tools OTF funds — Signal for source contact, Tor Browser for research, encrypted email for cross-border coordination. Their signatures were often the shortest and most direct: a title, an outlet, and a line about which tools they use every day. Many freelance investigators signed under their own names. Others signed through their outlets because their bylines are already sensitive.
A smaller subset of signers worked at press-freedom groups rather than at newsrooms. Their sign-on came with a different message: they were the people who train reporters to use the tools in the first place. Losing the tools would mean rewriting years of training material overnight.
Technologists and security researchers on the list
The other largest bloc was technologists. Security researchers who had audited OTF-funded tools signed because they knew the pipeline first-hand. Independent maintainers of open-source tools — some of which OTF had funded directly, others not — signed to show that they trust the process. The list included cryptographers, network measurement researchers, and secure-messaging developers. Read our OTF explainer for how the audit and review process they trusted actually runs.
Several technologists on the list had themselves benefited from OTF fellowships in earlier years. Their signatures were personal: they knew what a well-run fellowship program can do for a career, and they did not want the next generation of researchers to lose that path.
Human-rights defenders and lawyers on the list
Human-rights defenders formed a third recognizable group. Lawyers who represent detained activists in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia signed because their clients rely on encrypted tools to communicate. Frontline defenders who work in exile signed under their own names when they could and under pseudonyms when it was too dangerous not to. Their signatures often carried the biggest weight in policy conversations because they connected the abstract argument to specific, named people whose safety depended on the tools.
Some defenders signed jointly with the family members of activists who had been detained or killed. Those joint signatures made the stakes hard to ignore for any policymaker who took the time to read the list. They also showed the community that the coalition took the personal cost of this work seriously.
What the individual list means today
Read down the individual signatory list today and you get a working directory of who was doing this kind of work in 2020. Many of the same journalists are still writing. Many of the same researchers are still publishing measurement work. Many of the same lawyers are still fighting the same fights. The list is a good starting point if you are trying to find allies in your own country or specialty.
It is also a small, human answer to the question of who cares about internet freedom. The individual signatories to the SaveOTF letter are, in short, the human infrastructure that keeps the tools we cover here honest and used.