The US Government will fund and facilitate innovative approaches to expanding internet freedom and access, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this morning. Activists like those in Iran’s Green movement were “redefining how technology is used to spread truth and expose injustice”.
Just as samizdat literature undermined communism – “words that pierced the concrete and concertina wire of the Iron Curtain” – so blogs and social networks are challenging the new “virtual walls” and electronic barriers of a “new information curtain that is descending across much of the world.”
Blogs are the samizdat of our day, she said, invoking the disseminated image of Neda Agha-Soltan as a “digital indictment” of the Iranian regime.
“The freedom to connect is like freedom of assembly in cyber space,” she said.
Clinton observed that text messages had helped rescuers in Haiti find women trapped in a supermarket after the earthquake and the U.S. text “HAITI” campaign had raised more than $25 million.
But she warned that while new communications technologies can facilitate cyber-solidarity with democracy and civil society movements, they are also employed by al Qaeda to spread hatred and by authoritarian regimes to crush dissent.
“The same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al Qaeda to spew hatred and incite violence against the innocent,” she said. “Technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights.”
She singled out China, Tunisia and Uzbekistan for accelerating Internet censorship, Vietnam’s denial of access to social networking sites like Facebook and Egypt’s recent detention of 30 bloggers and political activists.
Clinton considers Internet freedom as critical to America’s commitment to promoting democracy and to diplomatic relations, her senior adviser Alec Ross told the Wall Street Journal. “When we sit across the table from governments and talk about what matters to us, this is now on the table,” he said.
The State Department will provide funding for innovative programs to promote government transparency and accountability, she said, including applications through which citizens can evaluate government departments or expose corruption. The department used the occasion to announce a new $15 million program to promote digital democracy by expanding “civic participation”, increasing women’s access to the Internet and developing new media tools in the Middle East and North Africa.
“It’s a very significant development,” said Brett Solomon, executive director of AccessNow.org, an NGO that helps Iranian dissidents get past Internet barriers. “It underlies the power of new technology to shift the political agenda.”
Some other analysts were less impressed.
The speech betrayed “an anachronistic view of authoritarianism”, writes Yevgeny Morozov, that doesn’t account for states like Russia or Egypt where there is technically little censorship. It also neglected “the evolving nature of Internet control (e.g. that controlling the Internet now includes many other activities – propaganda, DDoS attacks, physical intimidation of selected critics/activists),” he notes.
Clinton called on US companies to end collaboration with authoritarian regimes that censored and impeded access to the internet or used it to persecute critics.
“The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression,” she said. “And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply the prospect of quick profits,” she said.
US firms like Yahoo! and Cisco have been criticized by democracy and human rights groups for colluding with China’s communist authorities’ efforts not only to censor the web and stifle dissent, but to track down and persecute dissidents.
“I hope that refusal to support politically-motivated censorship will become a trademark characteristic of American technology companies,” Clinton. “It should be part of our national brand.”
Beijing’s anxiety appears merited, writes Megan Fluker, deputy director of the Laogai Research Foundation, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, as the day after Google declared it would stop censoring search results, the most popular search term on Google.cn was “Tiananmen”.
The State Department will engage corporations as “stakeholders” in partnerships to promote and defend freedom in cyberspace, official Jared Cohen told The Cable.
“The Internet represents the new virtual commons, and the State Department has the mission to insert the issues of freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy into these new commons,” said Cohen, the official who reportedly persuaded Twitter to delay maintenance on behalf of Iran’s Green movement. “This notion of shared responsibility between companies will likely suggest that collaborative efforts to promote human rights and democracy.”
In a recent speech at the Forum for the Future, ostensibly a forum to promote democracy, Clinton announced a new Civil Society 2.0 project to empower grassroots civil society organizations.
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