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2 US
Internet declaration bugs
China By Peter Lee
Many
of the causes, consequences and implications of
the popular unrest sweeping the Arab world and
Iran are topics of heated debate. However, one
outcome is without dispute: the "freedom to
connect" has become the newest, high-profile
irritant in United States-China relations.
On February 15, US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington
University reiterating the US declaration that
"freedom to connect" is the new fifth freedom,
added to the four freedoms (freedom of speech and
religion, freedom from want and fear) stated by
president Franklin Delano
Roosevelt in 1941:
Together, the freedoms of
expression, assembly, and association online
comprise what I have 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 ...
"[1].
Actually, in 1948 the United
Nations Declaration of Human Rights - which
incorporated FDR's freedoms, as well as many
others honored in the breach by the United States
and China - already contained the necessary
stipulation in Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes
freedom to hold opinions without interference
and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of
frontiers. [2]
In her remarks, Clinton
painstakingly (and painfully) tried to navigate
between the politically mandatory demands for
Internet freedom and the diplomatically necessary
quest to reassure authoritarian allies that the
United States had not gone into the business of
regime change through Internet subversion full
time:
Liberty and security. Transparency
and confidentiality. Freedom of expression and
tolerance. There are times when these principles
will raise tensions and pose challenges, but we
do not have to choose among them. And we
shouldn't.
On the hypocrisy front, it
was widely noted that at the same time Clinton was
taunting the Iranian regime for its hostility to
the Internet, the Barack Obama administration was
going to court to demand Twitter traffic as part
of its vendetta against Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks.
Clinton's speech represented an
urgent effort to make lemonade from Middle Eastern
lemons. If the information-freedom agenda is to be
taken seriously, its initial exercise has yielded
two classic cases of blowback: bringing down
pro-American regimes in Tunisia and Egypt instead
of the anti-US authoritarian governments of Iran
and the People's Republic of China it was intended
to target.
The events in Tunisia and Egypt
raise an important issue, one that is exhaustively
chewed over in a timely new book, The Net
Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov, a morose
cyber-skeptic hailing from Belarus. Morozov's
point is that the Internet is neither universally
beneficial nor neutral, censorship circumvention
is not a panacea, and authoritarian regimes can
often effectively exploit the Internet as a tool
against dissent, rather than simply blocking it.
[3]
In an interesting and instructive
illustration of the myopia that can afflict even
the most conscientious pundit, pre-Tunisia and
Cairo both Morozov and the State Department
largely ignored the issue of blowback and
concentrated on the role of and responses to
Internet freedom advocacy in sticking it to
America's adversaries in Iran and the People's
Republic of China.
In a challenge to
Morozov's conclusions, with shoutouts to Facebook
from triumphant dissidents in Egypt and Tunisian,
the State Department can claim a victory for the
Internet freedom agenda in the toppling of two
authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Wael Ghonim, the
"Google Gandhi" of the Egyptian revolution: "First
Tunisia, now Egypt, what's next? "
Ghonim
replied: "Ask Facebook." [4]
On the other
hand, the fall of Hosni Mubarak's regime, in
particular, has elicited much concerned
chin-stroking from foreign policy aparatchiks both
inside and outside the State Department. It is
considered to be bad for Israel, at least for the
conservative government of Israel, which has
traditionally relied on peace with Egypt to
underpin its high-handed policies with its
Palestinian subjects and its Arab neighbors.
And Facebook is non-existent inside China.
It's banned. The local social media Goliath is
renren, a government-friendly site that claims 170
million registered users. [5]
If it turns
out that Facebook is only good for overthrowing
America's allies, and is an ineffective weapon
against America's dug-in enemies, score one for
Morozov because the fundamental assumption that
Internet freedom is good for all the good guys is
open to serious challenge.
However, there
are indications that "freedom to connect" is not
taken particularly seriously - nor are its
implications and consequences being taken
seriously. As Morozov worries, invocations of
"freedom to connect" seem more like a feel-good
slogan than a careful strategy.
Judging
from recent events in Washington, what is taken
particularly seriously is the danger of lost
funding and clout when public diplomacy is in
political and fiscal retreat. "Freedom to connect"
offers the chance for a political and public
relations counter-attack.
Republicans in
the congress mistrust the State Department for its
elevation of pragmatism over red-meat liberation
theology. Richard Lugar, the Republican senator
from Indiana, has proposed partially stripping the
State Department of its management of Internet
censorship circumvention operations, and handing
them to the Broadcast Board of Governors.
The BBG, as it is known, is the oversight
committee that handles Radio Free Europe, Radio
Free Asia, and a host of other initiatives to
deliver America's message to citizens in
authoritarian regimes across the airwaves and over
the Internet.
Ironically, its own funding
is on the chopping block as part of the Republican
jihad against big government.
This
occasioned a classic piece of Washington farce.
As Clinton was burnishing the State
Department's credentials as the flagbearer in the
crusade to give the world "freedom to connect", on
February 15 the BBG convened a dog-and-pony show
in Washington to lobby for more money and
increased responsibility for rolling out
circumvention technology.
The
presentation, as much infomercial as informational
briefing, was hosted by the BBG's chairman - and
media bigwig via top management stints at Time and
CNN - Walter Isaacson. [6]
While touting
the accomplishments of the BBG's media and
circumvention technology, Isaacson made the case
for his organization as laser-focused on an
Internet censorship-circumvention mission as part
of its content-delivery effort (while trying to
deflect criticism in the right-wing mouthpiece the
Washington Times for the BBG's discontinuation of
shortwave Voice of America Mandarin broadcasts to
the Chinese countryside in favor of engaging the
hundreds of millions of urban Chinese Internet
users). [7]
He explicitly contrasted BBG's
single-mindedness with the divided loyalties of
the State Department (concerned over
destabilization of authoritarian American allies)
and America's corporations (unwilling to hurt
their worldwide business dealings with
authoritarian regimes by explicitly signing on to
the US Internet freedom agenda).
Isaacson's positioning will probably
appeal to conservatives, who believe that all that
stands between Iran and China and regime change is
the State Department's pusillanimous refusal to
throw resources into bandwidth to serve existing
circumvention tools and bring the evil empires to
their knees.
Mark Landler provided the lay
of the land in a backgrounder for the New York
Times:
Critics say the administration has
held back $30 million in Congressional financing
that could have gone to circumvention
technology, a proven method that allows Internet
users to evade government firewalls by routing
their traffic through proxy servers in other
countries.
Some of these services have
received modest financing from the government,
but their backers say they need much more to
install networks capable of handling millions of
users in China, Iran and other countries.
A report by the Republican minority of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which
was to be released Tuesday, said the State
Department's performance was so inadequate that
the job of financing Internet freedom
initiatives - at least those related to China -
should be moved to another agency, the
Broadcasting Board of Governors,
[8]
Landler also describes US
government support to the Falungong's Internet
censorship circumvention vehicle, the Global
Internet Freedom Foundation, through the BBG, to
the tune of US$1.5 million.
The State
Department is understandably loathe to complicate
its China diplomacy through open affiliation with
a group consecrated to the overthrow of the
communist regime, providing another (if not the
primary) reason for conservatives who lobby on
Falungong's behalf to agitate for state to be
stripped of the Internet circumvention brief.
Mazorov accuses Falungong and its
supporters of a simplistic, overstated, and
counterproductive insistence that all that's
needed is more money and more servers:
Shiyu Zhou, the founder of a
Falungong technology group ... says that "the
entire battle over the Internet has boiled down
to a battle over resources" and that for every
dollar we [America] spend, China has to spend a
hundred, maybe hundreds."
Mazorov
disputes this approach, which is perhaps driven by
politically-motivated nostalgia for the Cold War,
when we spent the Soviet Union into the ground
with missile defense. He posits that the
circumvention genie is already out of the bottle,
and authoritarian regimes are investing in
defensive (surveillance) and offensive
(propaganda) tactics beyond blocking and filtering
that need to be understood and addressed.
Clinging to Internet-centrism - that
pernicious tendency to place Internet policies
before the environment in which they operate -
gives policymakers a false sense of comfort, the
false hope that by designing a one-size-fits-all
technology that destroys whatever firewall it
sees, they will solve the problem of Internet
control.
Rebecca MacKinnon, the doyen
of Internet freedom studies, appeared on the
Isaacson panel. She started to make the case that
a disproportionate emphasis on funding proxy
servers (which apparently often serve as simple
porn funnels) detracted from the more important
objective of providing a safe environment for "the
conversation" - the sense of belonging,
empowerment, and coordinated action that can turn
a scattering of dissidents into a popular
movement.
Perhaps because this framing
steered Internet policy close to the unwelcome
waters of State Department "public diplomacy",
Isaacson jumped in to redirect the "conversation"
back to BBG's awesome firewall-busting potency.
The US military has also staked its claim
to the Internet freedom pie, offering to provide
connectivity in case of an Internet shutdown in a
country of concern by showering dissidents with
satellite phones and dispatching drones with cell
phone transponders to lumber overhead - and more.
In Wired's The Danger Room, Spencer
Ackerman wrote under the title "US Has Secret
Tools to Force Internet on Dictators":
Consider the Commando Solo, the Air
Force's airborne broadcasting center. A revamped
cargo plane, the Commando Solo beams out
psychological operations in AM and FM for radio,
and UHF and VHF for TV. Arquilla doesn't want to
go into detail how the classified plane could
get a denied internet up and running again, but
if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area,
suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full
strength. [9]
How the Iranian
government, let alone the Chinese government,
would respond to this can be imagined.
If
Morozov is right, Isaacson's advocacy of a
single-minded effort to boost circumvention in
China will be largely ineffectual, play into the
hands of anti-US nationalists, and be continually
undermined both by America's own equivocal stand
on Internet freedom and by the unwillingness of US
information technology corporations to sign on and
compromise their business models in authoritarian
markets.
As governments around the world
nervously look at the implications of exploding
Internet and social media participation, there is
a real convergence of official opinion, not
towards freedom but its opposite: control.
The US government and corporations are
developing the same tools to catch terrorists that
China and Iran use to track dissidents: user
tracking, traffic analysis, and data mining, with
the objective of correlating information in order
to acquire the meatspace identities of persons of
interest.
Thus, a key protection for
dissidents - anonymity - is under attack by the
policies of both the US security establishment and
China ... and Facebook.
Facebook actually
kicked Wael Ghonim - "the Google Gandhi" - off
Facebook for administering his group page under a
pseudonym.
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