2/24/26, 11:34 AM US funding for global internet freedom ‘effectively gutted’ | Censorship | The Guardian The purpose of the programme was to make it extremely difficult to do what North Korea has accomplished through decades of censorship efforts, and what Iran succeeded in doing this January during a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests: cut an entire population off from the global internet. The US aimed to circumvent this by funding groups capable of building and harnessing technologies that evade such restrictions and censorship. These include familiar tools, such as the encrypted messaging service Signal and the Tor browser, which allows users to be anonymous online. They also include far more powerful tools. Advanced circumvention technologies can make it possible to get past even extremely powerful censorship regimes – to leap the firewall in China, for example, or to obtain international news in Iran even when mobile phone networks are out, through methods like satellite datacasting, in which data is broadcast in a similar way to television signal. Another technology has allowed Iranians to securely communicate during recent anti-government protests, alerting each other to shootings and police presence, even as the rest of the internet has been cut off. The soft-power aim behind this was to keep the internet as it is: mostly accessible, mostly a global commons. The groups it funded made censorship costly and difficult. “When you challenge censorship, the long-term effect is that oppressive governments must either open their internet, or to go in the direction of North Korea,” said the former US official. “But because each of those options is costly for them, they’ll keep trying to censor their networks so as to have the economic benefits of the internet without the drawbacks of freedom of speech and access to information. So the fight continues.” “Internet Freedom funded the development of many of the censorshipcircumvention technologies that millions of people around the world depend on to maintain a link to the outside world,” said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert who works closely with many of these groups. Their makers are “often operating on a shoestring and passion. They believe in the cause. There’s no fancy offices, they’re working out of their apartments. It’s not a moneyed industry.” Most recipients of this money keep it quiet; it’s a dangerous thing, in some places, to take state department funds. But even as the funds run out, more and more organisations – journalists, activists, and civil society – are seeking https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for-global-internet-freedom-effectively-gutted 3/5