Deadline: 09-Jan-2025

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) announces a Request for Proposals from interested organizations for programs that support Internet Freedom.

Goals

• Anticipate and prevent digital repression online.
• Lessen the impact of digital repression online when it occurs.
• Provide support and remedy for those who suffer from digital repression online.
• Ensure accountability for those who enact and enable digital repression online

Themes

• Funding Theme 1: Directly Circumvent or Defeat Internet Censorship (Technology)
  • Goal(s): Develop, improve, and implement technologies to support uncensored and secure access to the global Internet.
  • Current Area(s) of Interest include, but are not limited to:
    • Technologies that counter advanced surveillance, censorship, filtering, or blocking of websites or online services.
    • Technologies that counter internet shutdowns and/or degradation of access.
    • Anti-censorship technologies that use machine learning to automatically bypass new blocking methods.
• Funding Theme 2: Prevent and Remedy Online Attacks (Digital Security)
  • Goal(s): Conduct programs that enable at-risk, vulnerable, and marginalized populations, or those who protect them, to prepare for, prevent, identify, investigate, and/or obtain remedy for repressive digital attacks; or other types of repression (including online surveillance and censorship) designed to prevent these populations from exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms online.
  • Current Area(s) of Interest include, but are not limited to:
    • Projects that address the repressive use of spyware, especially when used against civil society, human rights defenders, or independent media.
    • Protecting human rights defenders, independent media and civil society from Denial of service (DoS) attacks, impacting their fundamental freedoms including freedom of expression.
    • Promoting accountability and remedy available for victims of digital repression.
    • Combating Transnational Repression (TNR) conducted by digital means (such as by the tactics).
    • Developing effective methods for mitigating the impacts of artificial intelligence-enabled human rights abuses, including online abuse and harassment (without curtailing freedom of expression)
• Funding Theme 3: Advocate Against Repressive Internet Laws, Policies, and Regulations (Advocacy)
  • Goal(s): Conducting or enabling policy advocacy to counter laws, judicial actions, regulations, standards, company policies, and protocols that restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms online; enabling the goals of the Digital Safety or Technology funding themes; and/or otherwise promote and expand Internet freedom.
  • Current Area(s) of Interest include, but are not limited to:
    • Combatting Internet shutdowns, including degradation of access.
    • Countering attempts to splinter the Internet.
    • Ensuring technology governance or regulation policies or legal measures do not restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms online.
    • Increasing the accountability and remedy available for victims of digital repression, including Transnational Repression (TNR).
    • Advocating in multilateral and international standard-setting bodies for Internet governance policy protective of human rights online and/or against policy promoting or enabling violations of those rights.
    • Preventing and ensuring accountability for perpetrators of digital repression and rights abusing online data-collection practices, especially those that leverage artificial intelligence or machine-learning technology.
    • Combatting and preventing threats of online repression enabled by artificial intelligence, such as the deployment of network censorship and surveillance systems that leverage artificial intelligence or machine-learning technology.
    • Advocating against the integration of rights-abusing applications of machine learning or artificial intelligence in internet technical standards.
• Funding Theme 4: Research and Document Key Threats to Internet Freedom (Research) 
  • Goal(s): Research efforts to inform and benefit Internet freedom globally as outlined in the Goal(s) of the above Funding Themes, or to otherwise better understand and counter threats to Internet freedom.
  • Current Area(s) of Interest include, but are not limited to:
    • The repressive misuse of spyware, especially for surveillance, censorship, or repression of civil society, human rights defenders, or independent media.
    • Internet shutdowns, degradation of access, and splintering of the Internet.
    • Laws, regulations, policies, practices, and protocols that restrict Internet freedom, including those related to artificial intelligence.
    • Methods for mitigating the impacts of online abuse and harassment without curtailing freedom of expression.
    • Denial of service (DoS) attacks targeting human rights defenders, independent media and civil society, impacting freedom of expression.
    • Accountability and remedy for victims of digital repression, including Transnational Repression (TNR).

Funding Information

• Award Ceiling: $3,000,000
• Award Floor:   $500,000

Eligibility Criteria

• Organizations submitting SOIs must meet the following criteria:
  • Be a U.S.- or foreign-based non-profit/non-governmental organization (NGO), or a public international organization; or
  • Be a private, public, or state institution of higher education; or
  • Have existing, or the capacity to develop, active partnerships with thematic or in country partners, entities, and relevant stakeholders including private sector partner and NGOs.
• To be eligible, Technology programs must:
  • Be based on existing and proven open-source technologies, which have matured to the point where they can be responsibly used in relevant repressive, fragile, or conflict affected environments and with identified at-risk, marginalized, or vulnerable populations.
  • Serve a clear human rights use case in their application.
  • Demonstrate a clear understanding of adversarial efforts that may impact the use of a proposed technology, and provide a strategy for addressing them.
• To be eligible, Digital Security programs must:
  • Have a clear focus on protecting human rights online.
  • Demonstrate a clear understanding of adversarial efforts and a strategy for addressing them.
  • Address acute repressive threats faced by the populations served.
  • Exhibit a clear understanding of the operational risks of operating in local contexts.
  • Clearly demonstrate strong internal capacity and deep expertise in risk management and operational security, with a history of successful implementation of similar programs in high-risk environments.
• To be eligible, advocacy programs must:
  • Clearly identify and articulate a specific Internet freedom policy focus area for advocacy.
  • Demonstrate a clear advocacy strategy, clearly enumerating activities, and setting concrete goals and measurable outcomes for policy change, to the greatest extent possible.
  • Articulate a clear understanding of the local policy advocacy context.
  • Exhibit a clear understanding of the operational risks for operating in local contexts.
• To be eligible, Research programs must:
  • Exhibit a clear understanding of the operational risks for operating in local contexts.
  • Show that they are complementary to, and not duplicative of, existing research.
  • Be transparent in their research methodologies to allow verification, peer review, and further research by others.

For more information, visit Grants.gov.