WASHINGTON — The State Department is developing an internal portal to give foreign nationals in Europe and elsewhere a tool to skirt their home country’s governmental content moderation policies.
Sporting the domain “freedom.gov,” the portal being developed is intended to help combat internet censorship around the world, including by European allies.
“Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department, however, and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs [virtual private networks],” a State Department spokesperson said.
It’s not clear when the new anti-censorship tool is set to launch, though the department had, at one point, intended to unveil it at the Munich Security Conference last week, but ultimately got delayed, Reuters first reported.
At the moment, the website, whose domain was registered last month, features text proclaimed, “Freedom Is Coming” and “Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready.”
The web address freedom.gov was registered on January 12, according to the federal registry get.gov. On Wednesday, the site had no content but showed the National Design Studio’s logo, the words “fly, eagle, fly” and a log-in form.
Freedom.gov will use a VPN system so that users can pose as though they are accessing the internet from America, and therefore, bypass any content moderation policies in their home country.
Many people already use VPNs to access internet content only available in certain countries and to avoid being tracked. It’s not clear if the new portal will have any advantages over a traditional VPN service.
The US government has previously deployed or funded VPN systems to combat internet suppression in China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and elsewhere.
User data on Freedom.gov will not be tracked, sources told the outlet. The project is being overseen by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers’ team.
Rogers has been publicly critical of some of the European Union’s policies on content moderation, having alleged that certain right-leaning organizations are being suppressed.
Last December, for example, she touted the department’s move to bar five Europeans Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as “egregious” figures in the “global censorship-industrial complex” from entering the US.
Around that time, the EU fined X €120 million ($141 million) for allegedly breaching its transparency obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act, provoking the wrath of the Trump administration.
Other high-ranking Trump administration officials have been critical of Europe’s digital policies, including the president and Vice President JD Vance.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion,” Vance chided at the Munich Security Conference last year.
Back in December, the Trump administration rolled out its National Security Strategy, which called for the US to focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Over recent weeks, Trump has chafed with Europe over his pressure campaign to acquire Greenland and the war in Ukraine.
