Rebecca MacKinnon,  co-founder Global Voices Online; Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation; expert on Chinese internet censorship

I applaud the Secretary’s strong commitment to the idea that internet and telecommunications companies must uphold core and universal rights of free expression and privacy. It was also very important that Clinton reiterated US support for multi-stakeholder internet governance.

I also agree that “there is no silver bullet” or “app” for internet freedom. There is no one set of tools that will magically and easily free people living in authoritarian societies from oppression. She was right to emphasise that people cause revolutions, not technology — though smart use of technology certainly helps.

It is indeed a good thing that the US State Department continues to champion the free and open, globally interconnected internet as a core component of US foreign policy.

I am also not surprised, however, that US government’s global internet freedom policy is dogged and weakened by the same types of contradictions that have dogged and weakened US credibility on human rights and democracy promotion for the past half-century.

While the State Department advocates internet freedom other parts of the US government are pursuing aims that run directly counter to the idea of a free and open internet where dissent and unpopular speech can be protected.

I found the section of her speech dedicated to Wikileaks to be weak and logically inconsistent. She conflated the actions of the alleged leaker who stole classified documents (Bradley Manning) with the actions of the publisher (Wikileaks the organisation).

In an ideal world I wish that the US Secretary of State would declare to the world that while she and her colleagues believe that Wikileaks was irresponsible, the United States has a First Amendment protecting free speech. It is a country based on rule of law and due process which must be respected without fail in order for our democracy to remain strong.

I wish that she could have stated that even the most difficult and troubling cases must be handled with full respect for the fundamental principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Unfortunately, the statement she did make will give comfort to governments everywhere that want to treat whistleblowers, and organisations that publish information obtained from whistleblowers, as criminals from the get-go before a case is even made or a judgment is delivered.

Read Rebecca MacKinnon’s full analysis here

Ian Brown, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Hillary Clinton is right to say “the choices we make today will determine what the internet looks like in the future”. The US government can have a long-term impact by supporting the development and use of technology in tune with her vision of the “freedom to connect”.

Such technology would make it easy for individuals to debate, organise and protest online without making it trivial for government spies and monitor and suppress those activities. It would widely distribute control, rather than concentrate it in government or corporate hands that can easily choose to extinguish speech — as Amazon did in throwing Wikileaks off their servers.

It would certainly not come with surveillance functionality built in – as the US, UK and many other western governments require of internet routers and telephone exchanges and would like to extend to social media sites.

In short: Clinton needs to make sure the internet’s future public spaces look more like Tahrir Square and less like Tiananmen Square.

Wen Yunchao is a prominent Guangdong-based internet activist. Writing for platforms including the now banned bullog.cn, Wen established himself as one of China’s best-known bloggers –– under the alias Bei Feng –– and new media experts.

From a macroscopic point of view, as I see it, Hillary Clinton’s speech today shows Obama ideas of freedom of speech taking the fruit of Bush’s labour over democracy in the Middle East.

In terms of the protests in Egypt, apart from [helping] convene people on the first day, the internet did not have an effect in the following few days. Compared to Hillary Clinton’s last speech on internet freedom, there isn’t much new.

Her comments on the “approach… that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines” is a more direct expression compared to the last speech. My attitude to this: “Listen to their speech. Also watch their actions”.

From my sources, I know that in terms of current methods for breaking down internet control, the American government, Congress and the people who provide funding do not want to aim their target at the surveillance in China.

The level of control in China is very high and very meticulous. Also, resisting them could affect the arrangement of other interests. However, these technologies may have a better effect on Iran, and countries like Iran.

Leslie Harris, President/ CEO, Center for Democracy & Technology

The Secretary of State presented a cogent, clear affirmation of the importance of maintaining a free and open internet.

In the wake of recent events — the employment of an internet “kill switch” by Egyptian authorities and the harnessing of social media by democracy advocates in the Middle East, she showed a nuanced understanding of the internet and strongly embraced a medium that can be unpredictable and at times at odds with government aims.

Even as the Wikileaks controversy continues to unfold, Clinton made clear that the State Department stands with the internet.

It was a powerful example that should be heeded by world leaders as well as our policymakers here at home.

Mahmoud Salem, Egyptian activist and  Sandmonkey blogger

As someone who was actively involved in the creation of the Egyptian blogsphere, and been a cyber-activist for years, I must say that I am against any kind of type of restrictions placed on the net in the name of security or responsible speech. The internet has been a wonderful resource because it is  both open to everybody and self-correcting at the same time.

The anonymity provided by it is what protects those of us in opressive countries from oppressive governments. No matter how much risk might exist from the information on it, we can’t start applying the current conditions of free speech of any country to it, since it belongs to all countries, independent of culture or government.

Not to mention that the majority of security and identity protection measures and technology was presented by the net itself, and not by any government. Netizens have proven to be responsible citizens — with some exceptions — and we can’t punish the majority because a minority bothers us. I urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration to leave the internet alone.

Emily Bell, Professor of Professional Practice; Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on internet freedom was always going to draw a skeptical reception.
There are many contradictions in how the US government has tackled the issue of the internet; from a rather ambivalent approach to net neutrality, through the involvement in industry of providing cyber security to overseas repressive regimes, to its extremely hostile reaction to the Wikileaks disclosure of diplomatic cables.

At the heart of the speech, which sought to underline a commitment of the US government to “internet openness” guaranteed by the development of common global standards, there was a great deal about “balance”.

Clinton talked about how the Wikileaks episode underlined the need for security to be balanced against openness, and several times used the words “theft” and “Wikileaks” in conjunction without acknowledging that Wikileaks had not actually stolen the cables but was a conduit for publication — just like the press Clinton is anxious to keep free.

That said, by  raising the issue of internet openness Clinton is challenging the US administration and businesses as much as she is  overseas regimes, like Thailand and China, who she called out for censorship.

The rhetoric as Clinton noted has to be met with activism. Does this mean that the encroachment of the principles of net neutrality will be met by firmer resistance?  Or that the US Government will define a public position on the trade between the cyber security industry and repressive regimes?  Or even what the cyber surveillance is of its own citizens?

The irony of the timing of the speech was not lost on the Twitterverse. As Clinton spoke, lawyers from the department of justice were defending their pursuit of information on Wikileaks operatives, which involved ordering platforms such as Twitter to hand over user data on individuals it linked to the organisation.

All the major search companies and email providers found in the wake of tightened national security in 2001 that their own legal teams spent significant time fielding requests from government to disclose data under the flag of national security.

Clinton has described this aim of an open internet as a project which will evolve and be judged over years, and says it is “the grand challenge” of our time.

The Secretary of State’s remarks could be an important point in the development of the open net if it is backed by action.  For that to really take, there needs to be more explicit acknowledgement of what the issues are domestically as well as abroad.

Maybe that is what is coming next. If not, then the words will remain only that.

Katitza Rodriguez, International Rights director, Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Secretary Clinton’s speech did not go far enough as regards corporate social responsibility. The Electric Frontier Foundation felt that the speech could have done more to address the role that corporations should play in the protection of citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression and fundamental human rights.

As she recognised, most of people’s communication and interactions online rely on websites and networks that are privately owned and operated. We would have liked to have seen more comments on the role and opportunities for corporations to provide meaningful protection for individual’s rights online.

Corporate social responsibility is a crucial part of developing international human rights norms, especially at a time when government action on the internet is increasingly more indirect and may fall outside of limitations on government power.

EFF believes that the selling of customised surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes in situations where companies know, or should know, that governments may use those technologies to target people for arrest, torture, and enforced disappearance is in violation of international human rights standards, and deserves close scrutiny.

One area that deserves further investigation is whether corporations that sell technologies that could be used to violate human rights should undertake thorough and independent human rights impact assessments before engaging with authoritarian regimes.
Read more from EFF here

The post Analysis: Index’s experts assess Hillary Clinton’s latest speech on internet freedom appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Thank you all very much and good afternoon. It is a pleasure, once again, to be back on the campus of the George Washington University, a place that I have spent quite a bit of time in all different settings over the last now nearly 20 years. I’d like especially to thank President Knapp and Provost Lerman, because this is a great opportunity for me to address such a significant issue, and one which deserves the attention of citizens, governments, and I know is drawing that attention. And perhaps today in my remarks, we can begin a much more vigorous debate that will respond to the needs that we have been watching in real time on our television sets.

A few minutes after midnight on January 28^th, the internet went dark across Egypt. During the previous four days, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had marched to demand a new government. And the world, on TVs, laptops, cell phones, and smart phones, had followed every single step. Pictures and videos from Egypt flooded the web. On Facebook and Twitter, journalists posted on-the-spot reports. Protestors coordinated their next moves. And citizens of all stripes shared their hopes and fears about this pivotal moment in the history of their country.

Millions worldwide answered in real time, “You are not alone and we are with you.” Then the government pulled the plug. Cell phone service was cut off, TV satellite signals were jammed, and internet access was blocked for nearly the entire population. The government did not want the people to communicate with each other and it did not want the press to communicate with the public. It certainly did not want the world to watch.

The events in Egypt recalled another protest movement 18 months earlier in Iran, when thousands marched after disputed elections. Their protestors also used websites to organize. A video taken by cell phone showed a young woman named Neda killed by a member of the paramilitary forces, and within hours, that video was being watched by people everywhere.

The Iranian authorities used technology as well. The Revolutionary Guard stalked members of the Green Movement by tracking their online profiles. And like Egypt, for a time, the government shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. After the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended.

In Egypt, however, the story ended differently. The protests continued despite the internet shutdown. People organized marches through flyers and word of mouth and used dial-up modems and fax machines to communicate with the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt came back online. The authorities then sought to use the internet to control the protests by ordering mobile companies to send out pro-government text messages, and by arresting bloggers and those who organized the protests online. But 18 days after the protests began, the government failed and the president resigned.

What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet. In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

So it is our values that cause these actions to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it. And it is these values that ought to drive us to think about the road ahead. Two billion people are now online, nearly a third of humankind. We hail from every corner of the world, live under every form of government, and subscribe to every system of beliefs. And increasingly, we are turning to the internet to conduct important aspects of our lives.

The internet has become the public space of the 21^st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs – these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the internet. And because the internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

In the year since my speech, people worldwide have continued to use the internet to solve shared problems and expose public corruption, from the people in Russia who tracked wildfires online and organized a volunteer firefighting squad, to the children in Syria who used Facebook to reveal abuse by their teachers, to the internet campaign in China that helps parents find their missing children.

At the same time, the internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

These actions reflect a landscape that is complex and combustible, and sure to become more so in the coming years as billions of more people connect to the internet. The choices we make today will determine what the internet looks like in the future. Businesses have to choose whether and how to enter markets where internet freedom is limited. People have to choose how to act online, what information to share and with whom, which ideas to voice and how to voice them. Governments have to choose to live up to their commitments to protect free expression, assembly, and association.

For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.

And today, I’d like to discuss several of the challenges we must confront as we seek to protect and defend a free and open internet. Now, I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Liberty and security are often presented as equal and opposite; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact, I believe they make it each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them.

Finding this proper measure for the internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress – its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed – also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.

So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the internet’s greatest attribute. The United States is aggressively tracking and deterring criminals and terrorists online. We are investing in our nation’s cyber-security, both to prevent cyber-incidents and to lessen their impact. We are cooperating with other countries to fight transnational crime in cyber-space. The United States Government invests in helping other nations build their own law enforcement capacity. We have also ratified the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, which sets out the steps countries must take to ensure that the internet is not misused by criminals and terrorists while still protecting the liberties of our own citizens.

In our vigorous effort to prevent attacks or apprehend criminals, we retain a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is determined to stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we are committed to pursuing these goals in accordance with our laws and values.

Now, others have taken a different approach. Security is often invoked as a justification for harsh crackdowns on freedom. Now, this tactic is not new to the digital age, but it has new resonance as the internet has given governments new capacities for tracking and punishing human rights advocates and political dissidents. Governments that arrest bloggers, pry into the peaceful activities of their citizens, and limit their access to the internet may claim to be seeking security. In fact, they may even mean it as they define it. But they are taking the wrong path. Those who clamp down on internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever.

The second challenge is protecting both transparency and confidentiality. The internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the internet is also a channel for private communications. And for that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online. Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential to protect them from exposure or retribution. And governments also rely on confidential communication online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not alter the need for it.

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes. Or consider the content of the documents that WikiLeaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by WikiLeaks relate to human rights work carried on around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It is dangerous work. By publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke. But of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public, and we must review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws designed to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people, and the Obama Administration has also launched an unprecedented initiative to put government data online, to encourage citizen participation, and to generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests. Let me be clear. I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to internet freedom.

And one final word on this matter: There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

A third challenge is protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility. I don’t need to tell this audience that the internet is home to every kind of speech – false, offensive, incendiary, innovative, truthful, and beautiful.

The multitude of opinions and ideas that crowd the internet is both a result of its openness and a reflection of our human diversity. Online, everyone has a voice. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom of expression for all. But what we say has consequences. Hateful or defamatory words can inflame hostilities, deepen divisions, and provoke violence. On the internet, this power is heightened. Intolerant speech is often amplified and impossible to retract. Of course, the internet also provides a unique space for people to bridge their differences and build trust and understanding.

Some take the view that, to encourage tolerance, some hateful ideas must be silenced by governments. We believe that efforts to curb the content of speech rarely succeed and often become an excuse to violate freedom of expression. Instead, as it has historically been proven time and time again, the better answer to offensive speech is more speech. People can and should speak out against intolerance and hatred. By exposing ideas to debate, those with merit tend to be strengthened, while weak and false ideas tend to fade away; perhaps not instantly, but eventually.

Now, this approach does not immediately discredit every hateful idea or convince every bigot to reverse his thinking. But we have determined as a society that it is far more effective than any other alternative approach. Deleting writing, blocking content, arresting speakers – these actions suppress words, but they do not touch the underlying ideas. They simply drive people with those ideas to the fringes, where their convictions can deepen, unchallenged.

Last summer, Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, made a trip to Dachau and Auschwitz with a delegation of American imams and Muslim leaders. Many of them had previously denied the Holocaust, and none of them had ever denounced Holocaust denial. But by visiting the concentration camps, they displayed a willingness to consider a different view. And the trip had a real impact. They prayed together, and they signed messages of peace, and many of those messages in the visitors books were written in Arabic. At the end of the trip, they read a statement that they wrote and signed together condemning without reservation Holocaust denial and all other forms of anti-Semitism.

The marketplace of ideas worked. Now, these leaders had not been arrested for their previous stance or ordered to remain silent. Their mosques were not shut down. The state did not compel them with force. Others appealed to them with facts. And their speech was dealt with through the speech of others.

The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive. History, after all, is full of examples of ideas that were banned for reasons that we now see as wrong. People were punished for denying the divine right of kings, or suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, or religion. These restrictions might have reflected the dominant view at the time, and variations on these restrictions are still in force in places around the world.

But when it comes to online speech, the United States has chosen not to depart from our time-tested principles. We urge our people to speak with civility, to recognize the power and reach that their words can have online. We’ve seen in our own country tragic examples of how online bullying can have terrible consequences. Those of us in government should lead by example, in the tone we set and the ideas we champion. But leadership also means empowering people to make their own choices, rather than intervening and taking those choices away. We protect free speech with the force of law, and we appeal to the force of reason to win out over hate.

Now, these three large principles are not always easy to advance at once. They raise tensions, and they pose challenges. But we do not have to choose among them. Liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, freedom of expression and tolerance – these all make up the foundation of a free, open, and secure society as well as a free, open, and secure internet where universal human rights are respected, and which provides a space for greater progress and prosperity over the long run.

Now, some countries are trying a different approach, abridging rights online and working to erect permanent walls between different activities – economic exchanges, political discussions, religious expressions, and social interactions. They want to keep what they like and suppress what they don’t. But this is no easy task. Search engines connect businesses to new customers, and they also attract users because they deliver and organize news and information. Social networking sites aren’t only places where friends share photos; they also share political views and build support for social causes or reach out to professional contacts to collaborate on new business opportunities.

Walls that divide the internet, that block political content, or ban broad categories of expression, or allow certain forms of peaceful assembly but prohibit others, or intimidate people from expressing their ideas are far easier to erect than to maintain. Not just because people using human ingenuity find ways around them and through them but because there isn’t an economic internet and a social internet and a political internet; there’s just the internet. And maintaining barriers that attempt to change this reality entails a variety of costs – moral, political, and economic. Countries may be able to absorb these costs for a time, but we believe they are unsustainable in the long run. There are opportunity costs for trying to be open for business but closed for free expression – costs to a nation’s education system, its political stability, its social mobility, and its economic potential.

When countries curtail internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free inquiry that spurs people to question old ways of doing and invent new ones. And barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which create economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.

So it’s not surprising that the European-American Business Council, a group of more than 70 companies, made a strong public support statement last week for internet freedom. If you invest in countries with aggressive censorship and surveillance policies, your website could be shut down without warning, your servers hacked by the government, your designs stolen, or your staff threatened with arrest or expulsion for failing to comply with a politically motivated order. The risks to your bottom line and to your integrity will at some point outweigh the potential rewards, especially if there are market opportunities elsewhere.

Now, some have pointed to a few countries, particularly China, that appears to stand out as an exception, a place where internet censorship is high and economic growth is strong. Clearly, many businesses are willing to endure restrictive internet policies to gain access to those markets, and in the short term, even perhaps in the medium term, those governments may succeed in maintaining a segmented internet. But those restrictions will have long-term costs that threaten one day to become a noose that restrains growth and development.

There are political costs as well. Consider Tunisia, where online economic activity was an important part of the country’s ties with Europe while online censorship was on par with China and Iran, the effort to divide the economic internet from the “everything else” internet in Tunisia could not be sustained. People, especially young people, found ways to use connection technologies to organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change. In Syria, too, the government is trying to negotiate a non-negotiable contradiction. Just last week, it lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube for the first time in three years, and yesterday they convicted a teenage girl of espionage and sentenced her to five years in prison for the political opinions she expressed on her blog.

This, too, is unsustainable. The demand for access to platforms of expression cannot be satisfied when using them lands you in prison. We believe that governments who have erected barriers to internet freedom, whether they’re technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in. They will face a dictator’s dilemma and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked and people who have been disappeared.

I urge countries everywhere instead to join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries. At its core, it’s an extension of the bet that the United States has been making for more than 200 years, that open societies give rise to the most lasting progress, that the rule of law is the firmest foundation for justice and peace, and that innovation thrives where ideas of all kinds are aired and explored. This is not a bet on computers or mobile phones. It’s a bet on people. We’re confident that together with those partners in government and people around the world who are making the same bet by hewing to universal rights that underpin open societies, we’ll preserve the internet as an open space for all. And that will pay long-term gains for our shared progress and prosperity. The United States will continue to promote an internet where people’s rights are protected and that it is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work.

In the past year, we have welcomed the emergence of a global coalition of countries, businesses, civil society groups, and digital activists seeking to advance these goals. We have found strong partners in several governments worldwide, and we’ve been encouraged by the work of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together companies, academics, and NGOs to work together to solve the challenges we are facing, like how to handle government requests for censorship or how to decide whether to sell technologies that could be used to violate rights or how to handle privacy issues in the context of cloud computing. We need strong corporate partners that have made principled, meaningful commitments to internet freedom as we work together to advance this common cause.

We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real-world activism. That’s why we are working through our Civil Society 2.0 initiative to connect NGOs and advocates with technology and training that will magnify their impact. We are also committed to continuing our conversation with people everywhere around the world. Last week, you may have heard, we launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, adding to the ones we already have in French and Spanish. We’ll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block.

Our commitment to internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions. Monitoring and responding to threats to internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There’s no app for that. (Laughter.) Start working, those of you out there. (Laughter.) And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn gave a speech on this issue just yesterday. All these efforts build on a decade of work to sustain an internet that is open, secure, and reliable. And in the coming year, the Administration will complete an international strategy for cyberspace, charting the course to continue this work into the future.

This is a foreign policy priority for us, one that will only increase in importance in the coming years. That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.

The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.

So we are playing for the long game. Unlike much of what happens online, progress on this front will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security, and prosperity of an open internet.

As we look ahead, let us remember that internet freedom isn’t about any one particular activity online. It’s about ensuring that the internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.

We want to keep the internet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world.

Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.

Thank you all very much.

The post Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices & Challenges in a Networked World appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Not that removing Wikileaks would prove straightforward: though the main site has had to move its servers after Amazon withdrew hosting, and change its web address after EveryDNS cancelled Wikileaks’ account, it is still up and running.

Even on Wednesday, the day the site was most disrupted, Cablegate received 54m hits, from at least 3.6m unique individuals. Duplicate copies of Wikileaks are now loaded hundreds of different servers worldwide. Even PayPal’s closure of Wikileaks’ account has so far proved little more than an annoyance.

But even these could all vanish tomorrow, thanks to an even more traditional fallback: old media. The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais are all running Wikileaks material.

All shared the same editorial judgement as Wikileaks having seen the material: they judged it in the public interest and chose to run it. At this point, these sites are running the same cables as Wikileaks. They have contributed to the redactions.

The Guardian website, at the time of writing, actually contains more US material than Wikileaks’ own. None have faced the political or technical backlash of the main Wikileaks site, yet all would have to be taken offline to bury the Embassy Cables story.

Yet the ineffectiveness of the censorship efforts from the US Government, Senator Joe Lieberman and others does not detract from their troubling nature.

In a sense, attempts by Lieberman and the French government to prevent web hosts providing servers to Wikileaks are the least problematic issue — in the print press era, printers and distributors were regularly targeted with lawsuits when governments or private individuals sought to prevent stories getting out.

Targeting web hosts is merely the modern take on an old trick; and one which doesn’t seem to work nearly so well in the web era. Controversial publications which lack Wikileaks’ audience and resilience, on the other hand, may be anxiously watching current developments.

What is newer — and disturbing — is attempts by governments to prevent millions of their citizens from reading this material. America’s 19m federal government employees have been told not to read the cables material — or any publication containing them. Agencies have added virtually every mainstream news outlet to web filters and blocks, a move reminiscent of China’s Great Firewall.

Students at Columbia University have been advised not to comment on the cables if they might want a government job. And a US data visualisation company, Tableau, has even retracted derivative works based on the Wikileaks stories, without receiving a single specific request to do so.

The US government’s efforts to stop this story show both a distressing lack of commitment to the core internet principles of transparency and neutrality, and also a fundamental lack of understanding of its infrastructure.

Recent events should not disturb only journalists or campaigners – based on their recent public comments, it should prove a cause for concern for a pair of prominent Americans, too.

The first strident voice, speaking at a town hall meeting in China said:

“The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves.

He concluded,

“I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free internet — or unrestricted internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged,”

A second speaker called, in January this yea said:

“Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand…This needs to be part of our national brand. I’m confident that consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles”

The identities of these two radical firebrands? None other than President Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.

I couldn’t agree with them more.

James Ball is an investigative journalist currently working with Wikileaks

READ MORE ON WIKILEAKS

Jillian C York: Wikileaks and the hazards of “intermediary censorship”
Plus Wikileaks and State Department correspondence

The post Wikileaks: The internet ideal triumphs appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Despite all the hype that surrounded the changes announced by the President Raúl Castro, over a year ago –– changes that generated so much hope in the population and, to some extent, international public opinion –– they have been reduced to small liberalisations of the laws concerning Cuban citizens’ rights, such as the right to purchase computers and mobile phones, and unrestricted access to tourist facilities that had previously been exclusively reserved, in flagrant apartheid, for foreign visitors. It is not that these measures are bad — of course they aren’t — but they only benefit a tiny minority of the population of the island: those who can already afford these goods and services.

In spite of Castro II’s trumpeting, there have been no truly important changes so far. The regime continues to keep a stranglehold on what little private enterprise exists among the Cubans living here and puts innumerable obstacles in the path of foreign investors. The dual monetary system is still in force; this involves the co-existence of the peso or ‘national currency’, now dreadfully devalued, in which workers’ miserable wages are paid, with the CUC or ‘convertible peso’, stronger than the US dollar and necessary for the acquisition –– at exorbitant prices –– of numerous basic items. This situation means that no Cuban worker can live on their wages alone. In Cuba, it is not a matter of eating the same thing every day, as so many optimists here claim: there are millions of people who, to put it plainly, often do not have enough to eat. This has not changed.

Nor has there been any change in the serious problems of housing, transport and the electrical infrastructure, while the education and health systems, those mainstays of the Castro propaganda machine, continue to be a couple of dead losses. Castro II talks less and, therefore, spouts less nonsense and tells fewer lies than the Fidel Castro regime, but the new government continues to have complete, unlawful control of the media. It continues to censor any trace of an alternative press or freedom of expression in general; it continues to restrict access to the Internet, limit Cubans’ freedom of movement (it is necessary to have an exit permit to travel abroad), and criminalise the non-violent opposition. In short, the Castro regime goes on being as inefficient, corrupt, deceitful, oppressive and totalitarian as ever.

It is not surprising then, that, after long months of waiting for the implementation of the promised and necessary reforms, the predominant feeling in the country is one of frustration.

US President Barack Obama’s elimination of the restrictions on travel to Cuba and the sending of remittances by Cubans now resident in the United States seem a very positive move, which will benefit hundreds of thousands of my compatriots.

It would be wonderful if relations between the two countries were normalised and the US government were to lift the embargo which, during its almost half-century of existence, has served the Castro regime (which terms it a ‘blockade’) as a justification for both its dreadful mismanagement of the economy and its habitual suppression of our most basic civil rights.

However, if the Obama administration expects an authentic gesture of goodwill from the Cuban government, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has said, I suspect that things will remain the same for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Castro I, in a spectral voice, is insisting that the USA must ‘beg Cuba’s pardon’; that is to say, beg his pardon.

Ena Lucía Portela is an award-winning novelist based in Cuba. She was chosen as one of the best Latin American writers under 39 in 2007 by the Bogota 39 project

Translated by Christina MacSweeney

The post Cuba: changes? What changes? appeared first on Index on Censorship.