How the sign-on process worked

The 2020 SaveOTF letter used a straightforward sign-on model. The full text of the letter was public. Individuals could add their name through a simple form. Organizations submitted through the same form with a short internal-review note. New signatures were added to the letter page in batches, usually daily. The whole process was designed to be fast and easy to verify, so the list grew quickly without ever losing its credibility.

See our summary of the letter to Congress for the full timeline. This page focuses on who ended up on the list and why.

The kinds of individuals who signed

Individual signers fell into a few recognizable groups. Journalists who cover authoritarian states signed because their reporting relies on the same tools OTF funds. Security researchers signed because they had audited the code themselves and knew how few teams do that kind of work well. Human-rights lawyers signed because the people they represent — often already detained — used OTF-funded tools to reach the outside world in the first place. Independent technologists signed because they had watched public funding for open-source security tools shrink for years and did not want to see one of the few working programs dismantled.

Some names were well-known figures in the field; many were not. The rule the campaign kept coming back to was that the argument was stronger with a working technologist in Nairobi or a lawyer in Yerevan than with any specific big name.

The kinds of organizations that signed

Organizational signers were more varied than the individual list. They included:

  • Digital-rights groups (the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Article 19, and many regional counterparts).
  • Media-freedom nonprofits that provide practical support to reporters in dangerous places.
  • Security-focused nonprofits that run independent audits, incident response, and training.
  • Open-source project foundations, including the maintainers of tools OTF has directly funded.
  • Smaller regional or country-specific NGOs that use OTF-funded tools every day.

Every organization on the list had a reason to sign that connected to their day-to-day work. The individual signatories page and the organizations page break that down further.

Why the geographic spread mattered

The signatures came from six continents. That spread was not accidental. A campaign about a US grant program that was only signed by US groups would have looked parochial. A campaign that carried names from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and North America proved a different point: the audience for OTF-funded tools is global, and the harm from cutting the pipeline would be global too.

That geographic spread also made the campaign harder to dismiss politically. It is easy to caricature a Beltway advocacy push. It is much harder to caricature a coalition that includes a Ugandan digital-rights lawyer, a Brazilian security researcher, and a Belarusian journalist. Read the background on saveinternetfreedom.tech for why this global framing was central to the ask.

What the signatories list still tells us

The signatories list is a small piece of internet-freedom history that is worth preserving on its own. Read down the columns and you get an accurate cross-section of who was doing this work in 2020: which groups existed, which countries had a healthy digital-rights community, which projects had grown large enough to speak for themselves.

The list is also a starting point for anyone who wants to find allies today. Many of the same organizations are still active. Many of the same people are still writing tools and defending users. If you are new to the field and looking for a first email introduction, working down the list by country or specialty is a reasonable way to start. Most groups on it will answer a polite note from someone whose interests overlap with their work, especially if you point at the letter you found their name on.

That is the ongoing value of the SaveOTF signatories list and why we keep the story of who signed the letter within easy reach.