Ok, so at the risk of adding more politics to everyone’s timelines: the Trump administration has appointed a new director to the US Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America and the Open Technology Fund. He has fired basically every director. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/17/media/us-agency-for-global-media-michael-pack">https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/...

This matters for a bunch of reasons: but most critically, OTF is responsible for many of the anti-censorship and privacy tools used around the world. They funded Signal to the tune of $3m. And they are at risk of being dissolved. https://saveinternetfreedom.tech/ ">https://saveinternetfreedom.tech/">...

The new director has indicated that funding, which previously went to OTF, may now be going to “other circumvention tools”, particularly closed-source ones. Which always works out great. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/935k5p/open-technology-fund-ceo-resigns">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www...

I’d guess that this is plain old garden-variety corruption. But the impact is that it’s going to severely damage the ability of millions of people to circumvent the Great Firewall and other nation-state Internet filters. This is a gift to repressive societies everywhere.