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.

The Spyware Accountability Initiative is a fund dedicated to supporting the civil society organizations fighting back against the threat of spyware. Since 2023 it has given over $12M in grants to over 45 organizations around the world. 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. A few examples of SAI’s impact include:

• Powering a Network of Defenders
  SAI-supported research labs are building powerful, collaborative networks to share tools and intelligence for detecting spyware. To fuel this work, regional leader SocialTIC created a key resource: the Digital Forensics for Human Rights Defenders portal. This multilingual guide shares expert methodologies and best practices, empowering emerging threat labs across the region to build their capacity and strengthen the entire network’s ability to fight back against targeted surveillance.
  
• Pursuing Justice, No Matter the Odds
  Legal momentum is building: a U.S. court ordered NSO Group to pay $167 million in damages in its case with Meta, and an appeals court revived a suit against NSO led by SAI grantee Knight First Amendment Institute. Both of these actions were advanced by the legal arguments and technical evidence of SAI partners. At the same time, we fund the painstaking work of partners like Media Defence, which has pursued more than 20 spyware cases and continues to fight for victims by filing appeals in countries with poor judicial independence.
• Making Technology Safer for Everyone
  A global network of SAI partners from DigitalReach in Southeast Asia to CyberHUB in Armenia are on the front lines of technical discovery, finding and closing the security holes that spyware companies exploit. In one case, researchers at Citizen Lab discovered a flaw in Apple’s Messages app that was actively being used to infect the phones of European journalists with spyware. They reported the vulnerability to Apple, which promptly issued a patch to secure the millions of iPhones used by activists, reporters, and citizens around the world.

SAI is made possible by grants and donations from organizations like Apple, Open Society Foundations, Luminate, Limelight Foundation Okta for Good, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. SAI is hosted at the New Venture Fund as part of The Ford Foundation Dignity and Justice Fund (the “Dignity and Justice Fund”). Grantmaking is managed by New Venture Fund with the advisory input of a Technical Advisory Council made up of spyware accountability experts and the Dignity and Justice Fund advisory board.