'Lax' Internet Freedom Group Balks at New Oversight

In e arly August, two government officials showed up at the taxpayer-funded Washington, D.C., offices of a nonprofit billing itself as devoted to enabling dissidents in China, Iran and other repressive countries to gain Internet access and escape censorship and surveillance.

What the officials of the U.S. Agency for Global Media -- the umbrella organization for Voice of America and several other foreign-language news outlets -- found set off serious alarm bells about what they describe as the organization’s carelessly lax security. It was as if the nonprofit, the Open Technology Fund, or OTF, was still moving into the offices and had yet to put any security protocols in place. Laptops and hard drives were left unsecured in boxes throughout the room. An internal door connecting the OTF office space to offices rented by other firms and entities was not only unlocked but left wide open. Read Full Article »