Protecting the free flow of information in the digital age
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."The First Amendment · United States Constitution · Ratified December 15, 1791
The OpenNet Foundation is an independent research and advocacy organization dedicated to preserving the open internet, protecting whistleblowers, and defending the constitutional rights of individuals in an era of pervasive digital surveillance.
We believe that encryption is not a threat to public safety — it is the backbone of privacy, commerce, journalism, and democratic participation. Weakening encryption weakens democracy itself.
Modern censorship rarely arrives as a government decree. It arrives as a throttled connection, a filtered DNS query, a deep packet inspection node deployed quietly at an internet exchange point.
State-sponsored surveillance systems now operate in over 50 countries, monitoring traffic, identifying dissidents, and suppressing speech without any due process whatsoever. The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches must evolve alongside technology — or it will be rendered meaningless.
Strong encryption is not negotiable. Backdoors for governments are backdoors for criminals. We advocate for uncompromised cryptographic standards across all communications platforms.
Internet service providers should treat all data equally — regardless of source, destination, or content. Discriminatory throttling and deep packet inspection violate the open internet's foundational architecture.
Those who expose government overreach and corporate malfeasance in the public interest deserve legal protection — not prosecution. A free press requires protected sources.
The ability to bypass censorship systems is a fundamental digital right. Citizens living under authoritarian internet controls have the moral and, in many jurisdictions, legal right to access the open internet.
Government surveillance programs must be subject to independent oversight, judicial review, and public accountability. Secret law is incompatible with constitutional democracy.
Security through obscurity is no security at all. We support the development and distribution of open-source privacy tools that can be independently audited and freely deployed worldwide.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."Fifth Amendment · United States Constitution · 1791 — Applied today to digital due process rights and data seizure without warrant