Where OTF fits in the internet-freedom picture
The Open Technology Fund, or OTF, is a nonprofit that sits inside the US Agency for Global Media, alongside Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. It does not build tools itself. It pays grants to independent projects that build, audit, or study the open-source tools people use to bypass censorship and communicate securely.
That funding role matters because most internet-freedom projects are small. A cryptographic messenger with a hundred million users is often maintained by a team of a few dozen engineers. Independent security audits cost real money. So does hosting infrastructure that will not fold under pressure. OTF fills those gaps in a way that private donors alone rarely can.
How the money moves
OTF runs a small number of grant tracks with published criteria. Applicants describe the project, the threat model, and what they will deliver. Outside technical advisors — cryptographers, security researchers, human-rights experts — score the applications. Successful grants come with public deliverables and, for security-sensitive work, a required independent audit paid for by the same program.
That last part is important. A grant that ships closed-source software with no audit is a black box. A grant that ships open-source software with a published audit can be trusted by a Cuban journalist or an Iranian lawyer without either of them having to take the vendor's word for it. If you want the longer story of why this transparent process almost got dismantled in 2020, see what happened to saveinternetfreedom.tech.
Tools you use because of OTF
Some of the projects OTF has funded, at least in part, are household names:
| Project | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tor | Anonymous browsing and hidden services. |
| Signal | End-to-end encrypted messaging and calls. |
| WireGuard | Modern, small-footprint VPN protocol. |
| Let's Encrypt | Free TLS certificates for the whole web. |
| Delta Chat | Chat client that runs over standard email. |
| Psiphon | Circumvention app used heavily in Iran and China. |
| Certbot | Auto-renewing TLS certificates for servers. |
The list of smaller projects is much longer: browser extensions, network measurement tools, secure file-drop platforms, and language localizations of every tool above into dozens of languages that no commercial vendor will ever bother with.
Rapid response and fellowships
Two smaller programs are worth knowing about. The Rapid Response Fund pays for immediate help when an activist, group, or independent media outlet is under active technical attack. Think emergency forensic work after a spyware infection, hosting migration after a targeted takedown, or a legal consult when a border stop turns into a device seizure. The turnaround is measured in days, not months, which is what makes it different from any normal grant program.
The Information Controls Fellowship supports independent researchers who study how censorship and surveillance systems actually behave — measuring what is blocked, in which country, using which technique. That research is what lets tools like Tor add new anti-censorship features that keep working when adversaries adapt. Fellows often publish their findings openly, which means the next tool built anywhere in the world can learn from what they saw.
A third strand worth knowing is the Localization Lab, an OTF-supported effort that translates internet-freedom tools into dozens of languages. A well-designed Tor Browser is not much help to someone whose only language is Farsi if the interface is only in English. Localization is the unglamorous work that turns a technically strong tool into something a real user in a real country can actually pick up and use.
What good open funding looks like
The reason OTF's structure keeps coming up in policy debates is that it is one of the few working examples of open, transparent public funding for security software. The applications are open, the reviewers are technical, the code is public, the audits are public, and the incidents (when they happen) are documented. Compare that to a black-box vendor contract, and it becomes clear why security researchers keep pointing at OTF when someone in a legislature asks how public money for security tools should be spent.
The other reason OTF is worth understanding is that its model can be copied. Nothing about the process is unique to the United States. Any country, foundation, or coalition that wants to fund open security tools well can adopt the same rules — open calls, outside reviewers, open source, published audits, honest incident reports — and end up with something similar. That is what "Open Technology Fund" means in the name, and it is the story of the Open Technology Fund in short.