There is a lucrative growing marketplace of private spyware firms developing and selling sophisticated surveillance technologies to governments around the world. This multi-billion dollar industry is not yet meaningfully constrained by international regulations, and is helping to facilitate physical violence, reinforce authoritarianism and support political repression globally. From Pegasus spyware targeting human rights activists and predator spyware being used to silence opposition politicians and critical journalists, these attacks affect every area of our lives and underscore the magnitude of the risks we all face – and the need for a global field of civil society organizations advancing threat research, advocacy, and accountability.

In 2023, the Ford Foundation’s Dignity and Justice Fund, fiscally sponsored by the New Venture Fund, has launched new funding initiative for spyware accountability with contributions from Apple, Open Society Foundations, Okta for Good, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and more donors are expected to join over the course of the initiative. The funding initiative currently has a budget of $11 million and will last for at least five years. It will primarily support civil society organizations working to investigate, expose, and prevent spyware and help bring accountability to global trade in surveillance technologies.

During its first round of funding in 2023, the initiative has supported nearly two dozen organizations globally with a funding volume of over $4 million with more than half of the grant recipients working in the Global South / Global Majority. SAI grantees leverage regulation, litigation, and investigation to ensure that governments and corporations cannot use state-sponsored mercenary spyware to harm or unjustly surveil the civil society organizations that keep them in check. 

Building on these existing efforts, the Spyware Accountability Initiative will continue to support a range of strategies that seize current political opportunities toward effective accountability for the trade and use of spyware and strengthen the capacity of civil society groups. Towards this end, the initiative will deploy grants in several different ways, including through direct invitations to leading organizations modeled on the Ford Foundation’s Technology and Society existing grantmaking practice. The funding initiative will also continue to run open requests for proposals, as well as supporting convenings, research, communications and other shared field infrastructure.