Is there a public archive of internet-freedom letters?

Not a single unified one. Access Now, EFF, and the Global Encryption Coalition all maintain partial archives.

How is a joint letter different from a petition?

A joint letter carries the names and reputations of specific groups. A petition is usually a mass signature drive without formal endorsement.

Who typically drafts these letters?

One or two well-known organizations usually take the first draft, then it circulates for edits and signatures.

Do policymakers actually read them?

Some do. More often, staff read them and quote from them in briefings for their principals.

Can a small NGO sign a big joint letter?

Yes. Most sign-on processes are open to any organization whose public work matches the letter's topic.

What happens after a letter is delivered?

Usually a press cycle, sometimes a hearing, and often a private meeting between the signing groups and the recipient's staff.

Are letters more effective than lawsuits?

They do different jobs. Letters build public pressure. Lawsuits change what governments can legally do. The best campaigns use both.

Letters in defense of internet freedom

Why open letters keep coming back

Open letters keep coming back because they do one thing well: they make a coordinated public position visible in a single place, at a single moment. That combination is hard to argue with and easy to quote. A letter is not a substitute for lobbying, litigation, or careful drafting of alternative legislation, but it is a public marker that all of those quieter things add up to a shared view. That is why the internet-freedom community keeps writing them.

Letters also serve an internal purpose. Drafting one forces a coalition to agree, in writing, on what it actually thinks. That is harder than it sounds, and it is often the most useful part of the whole process even when the letter itself changes no minds. A coalition that has worked out one shared paragraph can work out the next one much faster.

Our post on this domain's history covers one letter in detail. This page zooms out.

The 2020 SaveOTF letter in context

The 2020 SaveOTF letter belongs to a specific subgenre: coalition letters aimed at protecting public funding for open-source security tools. There are only a handful of comparable examples in the last two decades. Most of them share the same shape: a short public argument, a diverse set of signers, and a clear ask directed at a small number of specific officials. The 2020 letter to Congress ticked every one of those boxes.

Letters on encryption laws

A much larger subgenre is letters against proposed limits on end-to-end encryption. These come back every few years in the US, UK, EU, and Australia, and every time a country debates a new bill:

Open letters against the US EARN IT Act in its various iterations.
Coalition letters against the UK Online Safety Act's content-scanning clauses.
EU civil-society letters against the chat-control scanning proposals.
Global letters coordinated by groups like the Global Encryption Coalition.

The pattern is the same: security researchers, human-rights defenders, and end-to-end encryption providers argue that any back door built for good reasons will be found and used by bad actors. Those letters do not always win, but they have shifted several fights.

Letters on shutdowns, spyware, and platform pressure

Other letters have targeted:

Government-ordered internet shutdowns — often in advance of elections in specific countries.
Cross-border exports of spyware and surveillance software.
Platform-liability laws that would put encrypted providers in impossible positions.
Domain seizures and hosting takedowns aimed at independent news outlets.
New national identity and traceability rules that would break account privacy.

Access Now's #KeepItOn coalition has run several of the biggest shutdown-focused letters. Amnesty International and Citizen Lab have led several spyware letters. Every one of these campaigns leans on the same template that the 2020 SaveOTF campaign used: a short public argument, a diverse set of signers, and a clear ask.

What makes a letter actually work

Reading through the archive, the working letters share a few features. They are short — a page at most. They have one clear ask directed at named decision-makers. They carry a global spread of signers, not just a home-country roster. They are paired with individual statements and quotable quotes so that reporters can build a story around them.

Timing is the other quiet ingredient. The best letters land in the two-week window when a specific bill is being marked up, a specific hearing is scheduled, or a specific court is about to rule. A letter released a month early gets forgotten. A letter released a week late is a press release. Coalitions that keep track of these calendars and can move fast when the window opens are the ones whose letters make the news.

And they respect the reader's time. A letter that reads like a policy paper rarely moves anything. A letter that reads like a coalition of people who care about a specific decision, delivered at the right moment, is what letters in defense of internet freedom at their best always try to be.

Letters in defense of internet freedom: an archive