Digital Freedom
Digital Freedom Fund – Advancing digital rights in Europe
Advancing digital rights in Europe
The Digital Freedom Fund supports partners in Europe to advance digital rights through strategic litigation.
DFF offers litigation grants, connects partners with expert pro bono support, and seeks to catalyse litigation efforts.
Register for our Speakers Series
Our Speakers Series, Taking Digital Welfare Systems to Court, will run during October and November 2021. Register now!
DFF funds two types of activities: litigation and pre-litigation accept grant applications through regular calls for applications, which are announced on our grants page.
Join our Panel of Experts
DFF is looking for further experts on privacy, data protection, free speech, artificial intelligence and strategic litigation to join our independent Panel of Experts.
Digital Rights are Human Rights
For Human Rights Day 2020, DFF published 16 short articles illustrating how the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights remains relevant in the digital era. Each bite size post was written by an esteemed guest author in our network.
Digital Freedom – Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
Over the past two decades, human rights defenders and activists have increasingly engaged in online organising and advocacy. In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution which reaffirmed that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online”. Nonetheless, states around the world continue to filter, monitor, and otherwise obstruct or manipulate the openness of the internet. Companies in the ICT sector can be involved in this limiting of digital freedoms, either directly, or by facilitating violations by governments and/or abuses by other freedom continues to decline across the globe. Freedom on the Net index 2020 covers trends such as manipulation of social media in democratic processes, shutdowns of mobile and internet service, and attacks on online activists. These obstructions and attacks impact on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, but also create economic costs, affecting entire economies and individual businesses. Ranking Digital Rights’ 2019 Corporate Accountability Index ranked 24 internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on their commitments and policies affecting freedom of expression and privacy of users and found that although most companies improved their scores from previous years, most lacked transparency about how they police content or respond to government demands and failed to anticipate and manage privacy and expression risks caused by their business models, and by the deployment of new ernment use of surveillance technology created by private firms to surveil and monitor human rights defenders is also a serious concern. Given the scale of human rights risks and harms associated with this sector, in June 2019 the then United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, called for an immediate moratorium on the sale, transfer and use of surveillance technology until human rights-compliant regulatory frameworks are in ternet, mobile, and telecommunications companies’ policies and practices can positively affect users’ freedom of expression and privacy, including those of defenders, especially when they work together, such as through the Global Network Initiative (GNI) or the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue (TID), whose company members commit to uphold principles of freedom of expression and page includes the latest news and developments regarding digital freedom and key reports, guidance and tools.
Digital Freedom Forum – Center for a New American Security
Technology was supposed to be the great “democratizer” of our age. The advent of the internet and social media promised to wrench control of information from the hands of a few and distribute it to the many, to air marginalized perspectives, to elevate new views in a meritocracy of ideas, and even to propagate a more open society. Yet, increasingly, that vision is under threat. Technology created for social good is used instead for malicious ends —disinformation campaigns on social media threaten public discourse, facial recognition technologies deepen the hold of autocratic regimes over their populations, and user data is exploited to target individuals for manipulation. The Digital Freedom Forum aims to recapture the original promise of digital technologies to both combat the spread of high-tech illiberalism and purvey a more open world, where free and open systems of governance — and the citizens within them — can thrive.
The Digital Freedom Forum is an effort by private sector leaders, policymakers, academics, and civil society experts to identify solutions to protect digital democracy in the United States and abroad. The Forum, one line of effort in the CNAS-wide initiative on Countering High-Tech Illiberalism, will recommend to policymakers what tools, technologies, and policies can maintain the integrity of digital technologies and defeat their abuse by malign actors.
Forum Chairs
Sen. Kelly A. Ayotte
Former U. S. Senator (R-NH)
Secretary Jeh Johnson
Member, CNAS Board of Directors, Partner, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, LLP
Nicole Wong
Former Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States
Forum Members
Tom Bossert
President, Trinity Cyber, Inc.
Dr. David Danks
Professor of Data Science & Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Renée DiResta
Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust & Technical Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory
Alexandra Reeve Givens
President & CEO, Center for Democracy & Technology
Susan M. Gordon
Event Guest Speaker, Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Associate Professor of Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
Richard Fontaine
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Andrew Imbrie
Senior Fellow, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University
Jamil N. Jaffer
Founder and Executive Director, National Security Institute, George Mason University, Vice President for Strategy, Partnerships & Corporate Development, IronNet Cybersecurity
Elsa B. Kania
Adjunct Senior Fellow, Technology and National Security Program
Dr. Aynne Kokas
Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia
Danika Laszuk
General Manager, Betaworks Camp
Kevin Martin
Vice President, US Public Policy, Facebook
Dr. Chris Meserole
Fellow in Foreign Policy and Deputy Director of the Brookings Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, Brookings Institution
James Murdoch
Co-Founder, Quadrivium Foundation
Dr. Alina Polyakova
President and CEO, Center for European Policy Analysis
Martijn Rasser
Senior Fellow and Director, Technology and National Security Program
Dr. Nadia Schadlow
Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, President, Scout Strategy Group, LLC
Dr. Kori Schake
Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Dr. Sarah Sewall
Executive Vice President, Policy, IQT
Raj Shah
CNAS Board of Advisor, Co-Founder and Chairman, Resilience
Maya Wang
Senior China Researcher, Human Rights Watch
