The Intercept misrepresents the @StateDept’s Freedom Tech Excellence Partnership and the organizations involved. We are deeply proud of this program and our partners, who will bring world-class technical expertise to the government and bolster our efforts to advance free speech and digital freedom. Most importantly, we get top talent at zero cost to the taxpayer.

FTEP allows America’s foremost innovators – including those from cutting-edge tech companies like Palantir and Anduril – to serve the public while remaining employed and paid by their private firms. The Intercept takes umbrage that the government would work with these companies (which are among the highest-profile government contractors), though its coverage curiously omits other great FTEP partners: @VoCommunism  and @bitcoinpolicy

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has spent decades documenting communist repression and defending dissidents. Bitcoin Policy Institute advocates for decentralized digital financial systems that are resistant to censorship and surveillance – and BPI has also done frontier work exposing online propaganda without censoring the Internet (a core mission for us).

Quoting the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Intercept claims that neither the @StateDept nor our partners are “trustworthy” when it comes to advancing online free expression or countering digital surveillance. This is a weak, fake stone thrown from a glass house, as we’ll show below.

The Knight First Amendment Institute has been on the correct side of some First Amendment fights.  But readers (and donors) who think the Knight Foundation protects free speech should note that this group spent years funding third-party organizations whose purpose was to pressure, flag, and influence the moderation of domestic political speech on social media platforms.  This fed into a broader matrix of Murthy-style conduct designed to end-run the First Amendment and create a de facto DSA “trusted flagger” regime in the United States.

For example: in 2019, the Knight Foundation announced a $5 million investment to establish what became the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public (CIP). The Knight Foundation also supported the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). In 2020, SIO and CIP ran the Election Integrity Partnership, flagging election-related posts to platforms for censorship. In 2021, they launched the Virality Project to identify Covid-19 vaccine-related content for removal.

The Knight Foundation also funded the German Marshall Fund, operators of Hamilton 68 – a dashboard that identified the activity of hundreds of Twitter accounts they purported were part of a Russian influence operation. The Twitter Files, released in 2023, revealed many of the tracked accounts were ordinary American citizens, not Russian-controlled bots.