The battle for democracy will be fought — and won — with access to open information

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.

And this requires sustained commitment, which is funding

Here’s an editorial in which the Washington Post’s dives into an increasingly technology driven struggle for (and against, tbh) democracy. It’s authored by the editorial board, and quotes some really good organisations out there deploying the grassroots toolkits pro-democracy movements around the world need.

As we see the world’s authoritarians creating a more splintered and closed internet, there are some good efforts to push back: NetFreedom Pioneers‘ development of Toosheh (or knapsack), which makes use commercial satellites to provide uncensored information in Iran; the Open Technology Fund‘s support of censorship circumvention tools globally; and the China Dissent Monitor‘s use of AI to find and archive images of protests across social media channels faster than government censors could take it down.

These great things aside, the WaPo points out, though, that “the existing U.S. government democracy effort, about $3 billion a year, less than four-tenths of a percent of the defense budget, is grossly under-resourced compared with the investments made by Russia and China.” This comes down to infrastructure. All the great projects, that good information, those censorship circumventing tools that totalitarians don’t like, they need to sit on something and be available somewhere. Everyone likes sparkly new things, but it’s hard to get the funds that keeps them maintained and more accessable, and its in the maintaining of them that makes them both useful and scalable.

The future needs to be funded today.