It’s easy to look at access to the internet — “the freedom to connect,” as Hillary Clinton called it — as a black-and-white proposition. Either you have it, or you don’t. Either your government allows the free flow of information online (as is the case in much of the West), or it doesn’t (as in China, Iran or Burma).<\/p>\n
But equally important is the question of the\u00a0quality<\/em> of access,\u00a0warned\u00a0Nasser Weddady<\/a>, the outreach director for the American Islamic Conference<\/a>. He spoke Sunday at the National Conference for Media Reform<\/a> in Boston on a panel parsing the status of global internet freedom and solutions needed to expand the universal right to information.<\/p>\n “Quality of access is about censorship, or lack of it, but it’s also about secure access,” Nasser said. “This is a fundamental issue that is discussed insufficiently. Look at what\u2019s just happened in the Middle East: hundreds of thousands of people converted from being citizens to being activists, and those people aren\u2019t necessarily aware of the security consequences of being online.”<\/p>\n The same online tools that allowed activists to organize online may also in many cases allow repressive governments to identify and punish them.<\/p>\n “A radical solution is to make sure that people who are online are actually online safety,” Weddady said.<\/p>\n Free expression advocates looking for ways to do this would be wise to argue against censorship not just as a human rights issue, but as an economic one too, suggested Emily Parker, an official with the US State Department and a former journalist.<\/p>\n “If you\u2019re [a business] operating in a country that has heavy censorship requirements, you\u2019re going to have to spend a lot on hardware, spend a lot of senior management bandwidth just dealing with censorship,” she said. “That\u2019 going to have costs as well.”<\/p>\n