Where the statements came from
Alongside the main coalition letter, the SaveOTF campaign gathered short public statements from dozens of individuals and groups. These were not full opinion pieces. They were a paragraph or two, published on group websites, quoted in press releases, or read aloud at hearings. The point was volume and variety: many voices from many places, all saying the same thing in their own words.
The what happened to saveinternetfreedom.tech post covers the campaign timeline. The statements page in the original site is the place where those short paragraphs were collected in one scroll.
The themes that repeated across the statements
Across dozens of statements, three themes came up again and again:
- Transparency. OTF publishes its grants, its criteria, and the security audits of the tools it funds. That transparency is what makes the tools trustworthy.
- Safety. The tools OTF funds are used by real people in dangerous places. Interrupting the pipeline means putting those users at risk.
- Independence. An independent grantmaker with an outside technical review is what keeps the work honest. Politicizing the pipeline would break that.
Those three points were the shape of the campaign in miniature. Every statement, however differently worded, said one or more of them.
Statements from journalists and human-rights defenders
Journalists talked about source protection. Reporters who cover authoritarian states rely on Signal to talk to sources and on Tor Browser to research stories without leaving a trail. Their statements were often the shortest: they simply named the tools they used every day and pointed out that they could not do the job without them.
Human-rights defenders had a related point. Lawyers who represent detained activists, researchers who document abuses, and small NGOs that operate under surveillance all use the same short list of tools. Their statements were the ones most likely to name specific colleagues who had been arrested or killed. They wanted policymakers to see that the debate about grant policy was also a debate about people.
Statements from technologists and researchers
Security researchers and open-source maintainers wrote a different kind of statement. They focused on the audit process — the outside cryptographers, the published reports, the reproducible builds. Their argument was that the specific structure of OTF, not just its existence, was what made the tools it funded better than untested alternatives. Read our explainer on OTF for the mechanics of that structure.
Maintainers of individual projects — Tor, Delta Chat, Certbot, and many others — described what OTF grants had let them do that private funding had not: pay for years of unglamorous audit work, translate interfaces into languages private vendors ignore, and keep small teams together through slow periods.
Why short, plain statements moved the needle
The SaveOTF statements worked because they were short, plain, and specific. Nobody had to read a policy paper to see the argument. A staffer preparing a member of Congress for a hearing could scan the list in a few minutes and pick a quote from a journalist, a researcher, and a defender for the same speech. That density of voice is hard to argue with, and it turned a technical grantmaking issue into a story about the people who would be hurt by the wrong decision.
Length was part of the point. The campaign asked people to write two or three plain sentences, not an essay. That made the sign-on process easy for busy people and easy for readers who only wanted a quick sense of who supported the letter. It also meant that a wire-service reporter could paste a full statement into a story without cutting anything for space. The volunteers who ran the page enforced this length limit gently — most signers stayed within it on their own once they saw the pattern.
The statements were small. Together, the statements of support for the Open Technology Fund moved a policy conversation that was already tilting the wrong way, which is exactly what they were meant to do.