User Clip: Chair of Open Technology Fund Karen Kornbluh Denies Claims of Waste and Mismanagement at OTF

Karen Kornbluh: Thank you so much for giving me a chance to respond. It’s hard not to be emotional about this because the team at OTF is a small team, there are ten people. They have voluntarily taken a pay cut under the financial pressure the agency is in because they care so much about the mission of vulnerable journalists, human rights activists and ordinary people around the world using their tools and services. I would love to submit for the record fuller responses, but needless to say I believe that the Congressman has been misinformed. The security claims are just not true. We only have information on hard drives. We don’t use ZOOM. 90 percent of the funding is used for programming, for technology. There are no $2 million in conferences. I think that must be a problem with somebody reading some numbers In the past we spent $200,000 on bringing together civil society groups, but nothing like 2 million and with the epidemic not at all. So those claims unfortunately are not tr close