01 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
Hillary Clinton offered a glowing narrative of the US role in Middle Eastern Internet freedom in a speech back in February that championed American values while chastising regimes that trample free expression.
“Our commitment to Internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions,” she declared. “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.”
All of this action certainly sounded good (and the image of America as benevolent global Internet expression cop surely flattered many Americans listening). But Clinton left out of her speech one messier topic – the role of US companies in facilitating those filters, sometimes even in supporting the Internet blockades State Department money then pays to help locals circumnavigate.
That element of the story out of the Middle East over the last few months has been largely obscured from public debate in the US over global Internet freedom. Some Internet advocates lamented that Clinton’s speech didn’t tackle the topic, or propose serious measures the US could take to halt the export of homegrown technology used (often with the knowledge of US companies) in censorship abroad.
Lately, though, this uncomfortable complication has been getting real attention.
“Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” blared a New York Times headline on Monday. The story recounted the case of Flickr, the photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo), which removed photos uploaded by an Egyptian blogger of images swiped by activists from the State Security Police headquarters. Flickr insisted the photos violated its policy that users may post only their own, original work. But activists jeered what appeared to be selective application of a policy some of Flickr’s own employees don’t follow themselves.
Facebook, meanwhile, was caught this week in a similar awkward spot over a fan page devoted to promoting a Third Palestinian Intifada. Israeli officials demanded Facebook remove the page, which had already amassed more than 200,000 friends. Facebook originally refused, arguing that content that is upsetting to some “alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.” But Wednesday, the social networking site reversed course and yanked the page (now with more than 350,000 followers), on the grounds that its peaceful discourse had dissolved into out-right calls for violence that violated Facebook policy.
That flip-flop has compounded claims that Facebook hinders protesters around the world just as much as it helps them, particularly given the company policy that porhibits activists from signing up for accounts without exposing their true identities.
In the media, stories questioning the role of less visible US technology companies have also proliferated.
“US Products Help Block Mideast Web,” warned the Wall Street Journal this week.
“Censorship: Made in the USA,” read the Huffington Post headline above a story written by Free Press campaign director Tim Karr.
Both pieces relied on revelations unearthed in a new report from the OpenNet Initiative by Jillian C York (a contributor to the new Index magazine) and Helmi Noman. The two found that American and Canadian-made software had been used to block socially and politically objectionable online content for more than 20 million web users in nine North African and Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, the AUE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan and Tunisia.
“This is not simply a case of a general purpose, neutral tool being used for an end not contemplated by its maker,” reads the forward to the report. “The filtering products of today engage in regular communications with their makers, updating lists of millions of websites to block across dozens of content categories, including political opposition and human rights. When McAfee Smartfilter or Websense do their utmost to maintain lists of non-profit and advocacy groups their efforts directly affect what citizens in some authoritarian regimes can and cannot access online.”
The discovery is about as embarrassing as those images of Made-in-the-USA tear gas canisters that turned up in Tahrir Square, and US politicians have begun to take notice, too. Earlier this month, Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate human rights subcommittee, wrote an op-ed for the popular Washington-based political site Politico under the banner “Tyrants can use Facebook, too.”
He finally said what Hillary Clinton did not.
“US technology companies allow millions around the world to express themselves more fully and freely,” the senator wrote. “But the industry has a moral obligation to ensure that its products and services do not help repressive governments. If U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in.”
16 Feb 11 | Uncategorized
Secretary Clinton’s George Washington University speech can best be understood by comparing it to her internet freedom speech given, with great flourish, a little more than one year earlier.
The 2010 speech was given, primarily, with an eye on China. This speech was set in the wake of Tunisia and Egypt. The 2011 speech sought – nobly and romantically — to emphasize the human aspects — not the mere technological ones — of great public actions that could alter history.
This was a speech nominally about the internet, but Secretary Clinton again and again talked about the power of people massing and demonstrating, not because of technology but merely aided by it.
Brave individuals “stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The internet did not do any of these things; people did.”
There was a modesty to the speech that refined the claims of its predecessor. The 2010 speech was on internet freedom (see my blog about it in the Huffington Post; the 2011 speech was on “Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices and Challenges in Networked World.”)
Things were and should be stated in a more complicated way. The 2010 talk spoke about “one internet”, a challenge to notions of state sovereignty.
This trope, a specific challenge to China, was less marked in the 2011 presentation. The 2011 speech marked the United States on the “side of openness” in fighting for an Internet that would aid in fulfilling human rights, a more precise shaping of the balances and contradictions at stake, than was present a year earlier.
This speech – more rounded, more circumspect, is more precise and still prescriptive and committed.
At the end, the Secretary moves to the practical and instrumental. “We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real world activism.”
A key paragraph:
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 not a silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There is no app for that. Start working those of you out there. 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.
Here, implicit is defining the proper role of the US in furthering an open internet, in furthering the “right to connect” as Secretary Clinton tries to define it. State seems to be trying to find this spot — what combination of strenuous activities advances internet freedom.
Implicit is that some interventions can be counterproductive. Of course, it’s an appealing idea to say that opening up the sluices of information will swiftly bring down dictators, and that’s a plausible and welcome reading of events. But that’s the consequence of a system of approaches, not the pulling of an off/on switch.
Involved are myriad other activities, “supporting multiple tools”, as Clinton put it, connecting NGOs and advocates with technology and training, playing a role as “venture capitalist” for new technologies of freedom.
What mix is the right one, what judgments help produce the great human acts of bravery and the shift to democratic realisation. That remains subject to the hard realities of day to day executive judgment.
Professor Monroe Price is the director of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
16 Feb 11 | News and features
In a major speech on internet freedom, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has warned governments not to restrict online liberty, while saying she opposed confidential leaks. This comes in the midst of uprising and protest in Middle Eastern countries, and as the US attempts to gain access to Wikileaks members’ Twitter accounts. Index on Censorship consulted a number of experts for their verdict. Watch and read the full speech here.
(more…)
16 Feb 11 | Uncategorized
It seems to me that Clinton’s speech had a number of aims:
1. Re-iterate the State Department’s commitment to the free and open Internet as a core component of US foreign policy.
2. Against the backdrop of the recent dramatic events in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere, this was an opportunity to respond to critics (unnamed in the speech) who have questioned whether the Internet is necessarily a force for good and who have criticised the US government’s support for internet freedom as naive or even counterproductive.
3. To assert that the US State Department remains a legitimate advocate of internet freedom despite its experience with and reaction to Wikileaks.
4. To clarify that by championing “internet freedom” last year she never intended to advocate a free-for-all or lack of rules; and thereby to emphasise that along with freedom comes responsibility – not only the responsibility of governments to uphold rights, but the responsibility of companies to act in the public interest and the responsibility of citizens not to abuse freedoms in ways that do harm to others.
5. To defend the State Department’s Internet freedom funding strategy, which includes a broad spectrum of projects aiming to assist people around the world who face barriers to online free expression, and to address criticism by some in Washington who believe the State Department should focus its funding exclusively on “circumvention tools” which help Internet users access blocked websites.
I applaud the secretary’s strong commitment to the idea that internet and telecommunications companies must be 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon is co-founder Global Voices Online and Bernard Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation
