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.
