John,

It's been a huge year for Fight for the Future.

With a small team of activists, artists, and tech wizards, we've managed to keep the fight for net neutrality alive. We've exposed Amazon's surveillance empire. We stopped facial recognition technology from ruining music festivals and launched the country's largest campaign to ban it entirely.

But listen, John, our digital rights are facing even more threats in 2020, and Fight for the Future is facing a grave funding shortfall as the end of the year approaches. If we don't raise at least $35,000 by midnight New Year's Eve, we'll start the year in a serious financial hole and need to think about cutting back our plans for the year ahead.

Will you make a year-end donation to Fight for the Future? All donations will be DOUBLED by a generous donor.

DONATE

2019 was marked by unprecedented threats to Internet freedom, online privacy, and human liberty. In fact, we are in the midst of a ten-year low for free expression online, and fighting for that right means fighting billion-dollar corporations and authoritarian government policies.¹

But we have more than two million supporters—like you—who believe that technology has the power to transform our society, upend injustice, and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. With your help, here are the campaigns we are making a priority in 2020:

Restore net neutrality. Ajit Pai's repeal of the open Internet protections created an insurmountable barrier to Internet freedom. If Big Cable has the ability to throttle traffic and block access to websites, we can never truly have free expression online. Fortunately, the backlash against the repeal has been unprecedented, and we've kept the issue at the forefront of the fight for digital rights. In 2020, we're going to help states pass laws similar to California's gold standard net neutrality rule, rendering the FCC's repeal meaningless. But we can't just focus on the states—we need to also stop Big Cable funded senators in Congress from blocking net neutrality.
Ban facial recognition. Fight for the Future has been at the forefront of the battle to ban facial recognition technology, which has been shown to identify the wrong person up to 98% of the time.² We're exerting strategic pressure on Congress to get the strongest legislation possible at the federal level, while providing “air support” for grassroots campaigns to ban this type of surveillance at the local and state levels.
Oppose for-profit surveillance technology. Amazon has made billions of dollars on its Ring and Alexa technologies, which promise to make our lives more convenient and secure—when in reality, they've left us wide open to invasions of privacy.³ Ring footage is now in the hands of more than 600 law enforcement departments, with no warrant or authorization. We've built a powerful coalition of dozens of civil rights groups and tens of thousands of people fighting to end this privately owned surveillance dragnet. We're also using our mass mobilization playbook to fight for strong privacy legislation that reins in Big Tech's data harvesting practices.
Defend decentralized tech and stop censorship. When politicians try to regulate technology that they don't understand, we all suffer. We're preparing a major new campaign in 2020 to fight for policies that protect public interest, privacy, and the liberatory potential of decentralized technologies. In the last year, we've seen increasingly dangerous calls for Internet censorship coming from both Democrats and Republicans. We're going to fight those bad bills.

This is a big agenda for a small team, and we can't afford to cut back on any of these campaigns. We need to build new Internet tools, hire on-the-ground organizers, and more to make them a success in 2020—but we can't do it all with our current fundraising shortfall.

The good news is that a generous donor has stepped up to match every donation we get between now and the end of the year. We need to take advantage of this match as much as possible—will you donate today?

Yes, I'll donate to Fight for the Future and have my gift matched 100%.

Thanks for all you do,

Evan at Fight for the Future

Footnotes:

1. Article 19: https://www.article19.org/xpa-2019/

2. The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/09/facial-recognition-use-by-federal-agencies-draws-lawmakers-anger/

3. The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/12/she-installed-ring-camera-her-childrens-room-peace-mind-hacker-accessed-it-harassed-her-year-old-daughter/?arc404=true

Fight for the Future works to protect your rights in the digital age.