There’s this fantastic article from NPR — which I whole-heartedly recommend — detailing the rise of Michael Pack as the Trump-partisan head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. If you would like some further background to the issues there is this piece from Vice in June 2020 which explores the issues which the NPR article retrospectively analyses.

But amongst all the horror, what nailed me to my seat was a tiny quote from Pack:

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“I find it odd that they weren’t funded,” Pack said. “This spin-off agency of ours, a separate grantee called the Open Technology Fund, in its very name, they are self-limiting. I can’t figure it out.”

my emphasis

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I thought: “Wait, what? Open? Self-limiting? What?” – but fortunately this quote leads to a Epoch Times YouTube video from Pack himself, where I can get more context:

…oh, and in case you aren’t aware of the Epoch Times, the NPR article explains: “People with close ties to Falun Gong own The Epoch Times, which has promoted pro-Trump conspiracy theories in its pages and in videos posted to Facebook and YouTube. Falun Gong provided ballast for Trump’s rhetoric against China”; so you may guess where this is going.

Pack frames his actions in terms of eliminating anti-Trump bias, and that the actions and writing of the Voice Of America journalists and other employees are Federal Government employees and so need to “cover the news in an objective and balanced way” and that he “would never a journalist what to do or what to report”, but they are “not independent journalists” and “the goal is to further the foreign policy goals of Trump the United States, broadly considered” rather than to be objective.

Oh, and the journalists need to have “decent security clearances”, which would not be revoked if their employers were unhappy, of course. He was just enforcing “VOA Rules”.

But it’s when we get to Internet freedoms (at 19:01s) and the Open Tech Fund (at 19:50s) that we learn what “self-limiting” means:

… (20:15s) we want to give it to open, closed, partially open […] (22:10s) the Open Technology Fund, in its very name, they are self-limiting […] (22:22s) there’s a sense that people with proprietary software are making a profit from these things in a way that maybe open source companies are not, but I have no problem with people making a profit if it’s the most efficient way to deliver these services to the people who need it. So I am not sure why they [OTF] are focused on that [Open-ness] but it doesn’t, it seems to me an undue limitation […] (22:55s) we have to continue to subject these grants to rigorous review of course, and even if something was funded in the past it could be not appropriate to fund it in the future, but there’s no reason to be exclusive, I cannot imagine what the reason would be to only fund open-source technology in this area. So, I dunno, you’ll have to ask the advocates of open-source technology why they think theirs is the exclusive way.

Michael Pack, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0A8EeTUDAc

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Pro-capitalism, pro-free-market advocate of open source technology here. Your answer is: “because solutions which are developed by committed experts and yet are exposed at the source-code level to the whole world of potential attackers in order to break them, and which still function in spite of that, are more robust. And you want robustness.”

It’s a bogus argument on his part: painting “open-source” as a market exclusion tactic, rather than as a means for people to be thoroughly informed consumers.

The host attempts: (23:23s) “this is one of the examples […] where you can let the market decide […] if it works, if it delivers more holes in the firewall, then why not?”

Pack: “Exactly. That should be the only measure.”

How about: whether it achieves its goals at scale and without getting the users thrown into prison? No?