Abbas Gassem of Inside Somalia on Social Media and Social Change

By BHRP

[Guest blogger Abbas Gassem, of Inside Somalia, (and Yahoo! employee) talks about his work, and the role of the Internet in supporting communication and information sharing across cultures.]

In June 2007, I founded insidesomalia.org, a news and social networking website focused on Somalia.

My motivations to start the website were due to the limited knowledge and a view of insignificance outsiders have about the Horn of Africa.

When people mention Somalia to me, they use such words as: pirates, failed state, Black Hawk Down, refugees, Extremist Islamists, poor, and clan politics. Whilst these words on the surface are true, it requires deeper analysis to fully understand the crisis taking place in the past 20 years.

Traditional media has limited space and time to highlight the problems of Somalia in depth, causing the lack of understanding about the region.

The Internet carries an immense power in shaping a nation’s agenda. The old gatekeepers of media; television, newspapers and radio, have a lesser role in the dispersal of information. Insidesomalia.org aims to take advantage of the new media to educate the global community by bringing together an extensive resource of information.

We are living interesting times; never has it been easier, faster or cheaper to create and publish content.

It is important that people are able express their views and feel a sense of control of their destiny.

To what extent do these technologies contribute to conflict resolution?

All media have vital roles to play; the Internet in particular will play a pivotal part in bringing peace and addressing key issues of the reconstruction of Somalia.

On the conflict resolutions the Internet can:

Bring forth the voices of moderates, “the silent majority”;

Hold the Somali government & International community accountable to the people;

Be a platform to discuss & exchange views to building peaceful & prosperous society;

Looking beyond the current state of conflict, the Internet will serve all sectors of society, namely:

To ensure that the government is transparent and open to the people;

To help lift people out of poverty by giving low cost access to educational and healthcare.

To connect businesses and consumers to the global marketplace.

It will be a long journey, mistakes will probably be made, but through the Internet and the networking of billions of people, an unprecedented force for the good can be achieved.

-Abbas Gassem, Founder and Editor, Inside Somalia and Senior Manager, APG and Business Optimisation, Yahoo! UK

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Mr. Yang goes to Washington

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

On April 26th, Jerry Yang was a featured speaker at President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. To read his speech, and see video of his remarks, check out the blog post at Yodel Anecdotal.

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Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow, Evgeny Morozov, leads panel on Digital Power and Its Discontents

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, co-sponsored by Yahoo!’s Georgetown Fellowship, will host a  conference  on April 21st, from 10.30 until 4.30. The one-day conference will be hosted by Yahoo Georgetown Fellow, Evgeny Morozov.

The day will feature thought-provoking discussions about the ways that digital technologies can disrupt the balance of power between and among states, their citizens and the private sector. Speakers will include Ambassador Philip Verveer, John Morris of CDT, and Rebecca MacKinnon.

For more information and to RSVP, please go here.

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Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

For those of you who can get to London in the next couple of weeks, Human Rights Watch is holding the 14th edition of their International Film Festival, from March 17-26 in London. There are 28 films, from 20 countries, including the Congo, Iran, Tibet, Cambodia and Palestine. The event will also showcase Human Rights Watch’s Adobe Youth Producing Change program.

This year, there are three distinct themes: Closed Societies: Iran and North Korea, Accountability and Justice and Development and Migration.

All of the films look fascinating, and there are three films specifically about free expression, focusing on Iran and North Korea. To learn more about the films and to download the program, go to: http://www.hrw.org/en/iff/london.

The Festival will be in New York from June 17-24, so be sure to go the website for updates.

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Digital Dictatorship?

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow Evgeny Morozov has written a fascinating opinion piece on what he describes as “techno-utopianism”: The belief that free and open access to information on the Internet inevitably leads to free and open societies. He argues that in many authoritarian regimes, the governments are using the Internet and technology to stifle free expression, and that in countries like Iran and China, citizens are arguably more repressed than before the “Twitter revolution”. I think his insights and conclusions are very interesting; Internet companies and diplomats alike need to carefully consider the limits of the Internet as a force for social change or diplomacy. That said, the examples Evgeny gives are, themselves, a bit of a paradox. I, for one, would say that authoritarian regimes’ strenuous efforts to shut down Internet services or censor content demonstrate that those governments themselves recognize the potentially liberating power of the Internet and free expression and are threatened by it.  Better worlds will not be built by Flickr or Twitter alone, and the same social media tools are available to both enemies and friends of open societies. I still believe that history demonstrates that all positive movements are born and nurtured through the exchange of information, and the ability of passionate and dedicated people to connect and to communicate their ideas. The Internet is a platform; a tool that enables information and ideas to spread at the speed of light. Its impact is wholly determined by how we use it. It’s not utopia; it’s potential.

Digital Dictatorship, by Evgeny Morozov

A storm of protest hit Google last week over Buzz, its new social networking service, because of user concerns about the inadvertent exposure of their data. Internet users in Iran, however, were spared such trouble. It’s not because Google took extra care in protecting their identities—they didn’t—but because the Iranian authorities decided to ban Gmail, Google’s popular email service, and replace it with a national email system that would be run by the government.

Such paradoxes abound in the Islamic Republic’s complex relationship with the Internet. As the Iranian police were cracking down on anti-government protesters by posting their photos online and soliciting tips from the public about their identities, a technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran’s state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country’s communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.

Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit (why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day). The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization afforded by blogs and social networks, leads to the opening up of authoritarian societies and their eventual democratization now forms one of the pillars of “techno-utopianism.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vows to make Internet freedom one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy, and one senator after another issues calls to “tear down this cyber wall” and allocate more funding to groups that promote Internet freedom and fight online censorship without giving much thought to the footnotes. The spirit of techno-utopianism in Washington rides so high it often seems that the Freedom Agenda has been reborn as the Twitter Agenda—perhaps only with more utopianism about both democratization and the Internet’s role in it. Even such a seasoned observer of foreign affairs as Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana could not resist the urge to join the church of Twitter-worship, penning a Foreign Policy op-ed that urged American diplomats to engage with social media. What remains overlooked by Sen. Lugar and others is that authoritarian governments may survive the age of information abundance relatively unscathed—and in fact, they’re already using the Internet to fight the challenges posed by modernity.

Is this growing fascination with social media a mere sign of our desperation with other, more conventional instruments of diplomatic leverage? Perhaps so. While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

The government did its share to obstruct its opponents, too. Not only did it thwart Internet communications, the government (or its plentiful loyalists) also flooded Iranian Web sites with videos of dubious authenticity—one showing a group of protesters burning the portrait of Ali Khamenei—that aimed to provoke and splinter the opposition. In an environment like this—where it’s impossible to distinguish whether your online interlocutors are your next-door neighbors, some hyperactive Iranians in the diaspora, or a government agent masquerading as a member of the Green Movement—who could blame ordinary Iranians for not taking the risks of flooding the streets only to find themselves arrested?

Our earlier, unfounded expectations that the Internet would make it easy for the average citizens to see who else is opposing the regime and then act collectively based on that shared knowledge may have been inaccurate. In the age of the Spinternet, when cheap online propaganda can easily be bought with the help of pro-government bloggers, elucidating what fellow citizens think about the regime may be harder than we thought. Add to that the growing surveillance capacity of modern authoritarian states—also greatly boosted by information collected through social media and analyzed with new and advanced forms of data-mining—and you may begin to understand why the Green Movement faltered.

The excessive attention that many Western observers devoted to the role of the Internet in the Iranian protests also reveals another, more serious impact that techno-utopianism has on how we think about the Internet in an authoritarian context. Unable to transcend the hackneyed framework of post-electoral protest, we are becoming blind to more general changes and effects that the Internet has on authoritarian societies in between elections. We spend so much time thinking about the dissidents and how the Internet has changed their lives, that we have almost completely neglected how it affects the lives of the average, non-politicized users, who would be crucial to any democratic revolution.

For example, while the American public is actively engaged in a rich and provocative debate about the Internet’s impact on our own society—asking how new technologies affect our privacy or how they change the way we read and think—we gloss over such subtleties when talking about the Internet’s role in authoritarian countries. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream American magazine running a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Case of China,” as the Atlantic did (without the China part) in 2008. Such attitudes almost smack of orientalism-in-reverse: While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments.

This is not to say that there are no young people living under authoritarian conditions who have used the Internet to organize a protest; they exist and should be applauded for their courage. But we should not lose sight of the fact that they are only a tiny minority. For the vast majority of Internet users in those countries, increased access to information by itself may not always be liberating. In fact, it may only undermine their commitment to political dissent.

The case of East Germany offers some valuable lessons here. According to data compiled by the East German government, East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country and the communist regime. Speaking in 1990, the East German writer Christoph Hein spoke of the difficulties of mobilizing his fellow citizens, pointing out that “the whole people could leave the country and move to the West…at 8 p.m.—via television.” Ironically, the fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city’s inhabitants.

The parallels to the Internet with its endless supply of online entertainment are obvious: Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization of the kind that is required to topple dictators harder, not easier.

Our binary view of modern authoritarianism as an endless struggle between the state and its anti-state, pro-Western and pro-democratic opponents also blinds us to the fact that public life in these societies has many more layers and textures. Not all opponents of the Russian or Chinese or even Egyptian state fit the neoliberal pattern. Nationalism, extremism and religious fanaticism abound; Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are very active online too. It’s not at all guaranteed that empowering those forces by weakening the state with the help of the Internet is going to speed up the process of democratization.

Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like. To put it in a more formal framework: not all social capital created by the Internet is bound to produce “social goods”; “social bads” are inevitable as well. The political scientist Robert Putnam, who was instrumental in promoting the notion of “social capital” in popular discourse, was not blind to such possibilities. In “Bowling Alone,” his most famous book, he explicitly cautioned against the “kumbaya interpretation of social capital,” stating that “networks…are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive.”

Thus, it’s not just the women’s movement that is using Facebook to promote its causes in Saudi Arabia; it’s also religious conservatives who have set up an online version of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Not that the Saudi government disapproves of such online “activism”; the mutual empowerment between the state and the civil society does not always lead to liberalization. Similarly, Russian nationalist groups are very excited about organizing cyber-attacks on foreign governments and even using online maps to show locations of ethnic minorities in Russian towns. While Sen. Lugar’s op-ed lauded a new U.S.-backed mobile-phone-based system for Mexican citizens to report crimes, it failed to mention that Twitter users in Mexico use the site to share information about police checkpoints in their areas so that drunk drivers may avoid arrest.

What we don’t seem to realize is that some civil associations, undoubtedly greatly empowered by the Internet, may work toward rather uncivil ends. Instead, we cling to a very outdated view that, as far as authoritarian governments are concerned, all non-state power is good and inevitably leads to democracy, while state power is evil and always leads to suppression. Based on this logic, we often arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that it’s okay to scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater, as long as that theater belongs to the Chinese Communist Party or Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Despite these caveats, it would be unreasonable for the American government to simply abandon all efforts to use the Internet for promoting democracy abroad. A good starting point is to stop thwarting America’s own technology companies, which currently need a host of waivers from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to export Internet services to authoritarian countries (often the target of government sanctions). The reason Microsoft’s Messenger is unavailable in Iran is not because the Iranian government hates it, but because Microsoft would need to fight an uphill battle in Washington to bypass the numerous restrictions imposed by OFAC to make that happen, and the poor commercial appeal of places like Iran, North Korea or Cuba makes such fights very costly. Similarly, a host of American hacktivists who wanted to assist the Green Movement with anti-censorship and anti-surveillance technology have also found themselves paralyzed by these sanctions.

This is certainly not a good way to promote “Internet freedom.” Resolving such arcane policy disputes is likely to advance American interests abroad more effectively than the flashy and media-friendly undertakings—like the U.S. State Department’s leaked request to Twitter executives to halt the site’s maintenance during the June protests in Iran—of which American diplomats have grown so increasingly fond. The growing coziness between them and the top executives of America’s leading technology companies, epitomized by state dinners and joint trips to countries like Russia and Iraq, is also a cause for concern. (And flashy such trips really are: The recent delegation to Russia was spearheaded by such a distinguished American technology authority as Ashton Kutcher; why are American taxpayers paying for that once again?) It is certainly a good thing that Obama’s youthful bureaucrats have bonded with the brightest creative minds of Silicon Valley. However, the kind of message that it sends to the rest of the world—i.e. that Google, Facebook and Twitter are now just extensions of the U.S. State Department—may simply endanger the lives of those who use such services in authoritarian countries. It’s hardly surprising that the Iranian government has begun to view all Twitter users with the utmost suspicion; everyone is now guilty by default.

But there is a broader lesson for the Obama administration here: Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of “open government”; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors. But this may be increasingly hard to achieve in the age of Twittering bureaucrats.

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That’s Right: Yahoo! in Berlin

By Jen Swallow | Legal Director EMEA | Product Compliance

As the final touches were being put to Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedoms, a rich discussion on human rights was hotting up in Berlin.  National and international representatives of industry, commerce, politics, civil society and academia had come together at the ‘That’s Right’ conference to exchange views and ideas on the topic of corporate responsibility for human rights.  Yahoo!’s BHRP was thrilled to contribute.

Hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the event was led by Professor John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative for human rights and trans-national corporations, who held a lively ‘town hall’ meeting in the morning, giving participants an opportunity to engage in direct dialogue on the practical implementation of his policy framework: Protect, Respect, Remedy.  Later in the day, the Special Representative praised the Global Network Initiative, which Yahoo! co-founded, and called for European ICT companies to sign up as members.

Yahoo!’s BHRP participated alongside Microsoft and Google in a panel session in the afternoon on the topic of “which approaches can be taken when national legislation is incompatible with internationally recognised human rights”.  After keynotes from the highly respected speakers Lene Wendland, Officer of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center and Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China, the companies shared their experiences and approach to addressing the challenges of incompatibility between national laws and human rights.

I outlined how Yahoo!’s BHRP is integrating human rights issues into the way we make business decisions across our organisation and gave some examples of how that integration has already paid dividends for the promotion of free expression and privacy, e.g. our human rights impact assessment in Vietnam, which resulted in our decision to manage and operate Yahoo!’s Vietnamese language services out of Singapore so the services would be governed by laws with stronger protections than in Vietnam today.

I also contended that it would be a mistake to focus only on countries with a poor record on human rights, as is illustrated by a recent Belgian court judgment against Yahoo!, and that such cases show the importance of implementing practices, such as those recommended by the GNI, consistently, throughout an organization, not just vis-à-vis certain countries.

The panel took questions ranging from Google’s recent China announcement, to the practical difficulties of respecting local content standards in the context of global products such as YouTube and Flickr, to the question of corporate accountability, which panel member Alexis Krajeski of F&C Management Ltd. explained was an important focus area for the GNI.

It was a privilege to contribute to the debate and to have the opportunity to learn and share ideas.  Yahoo!’s BHRP looks forward to continued efforts on these topics and to a positive outcome of the Special Representative’s mandate.

To share your views, please comment below, or join the debate on the Special Representative’s forum, at http://www.srsgconsultation.org.

by Jen Swallow| Legal Director EMEA | Product Compliance

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Secretary of State Clinton’s Remarks on Internet Freedom

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Marcn

Video: Secretary of State Clinton’s Remarks on Internet Freedom

Today, Secretary Clinton talked about the transformative power of technology and the Administration’s commitment to support Internet freedom.  She talked about the private sector, describing both the opportunity it has to create innovative technology that supports engagement, and about the responsibility we as companies have to respect human rights.  Secretary Clinton also specifically mentioned the GNI, noting:

“[GNI] goes beyond mere statements of principles and establishes mechanisms to promote real accountability and transparency.”

The full text of the speech is below, and video is above; thoughts?

***

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you very much, Alberto, for not only that kind introduction but your and your colleagues’ leadership of this important institution. It’s a pleasure to be here at the Newseum. The Newseum is a monument to some of our most precious freedoms, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to discuss how those freedoms apply to the challenges of the 21st century.

Although I can’t see all of you because in settings like this, the lights are in my eyes and you are in the dark, I know that there are many friends and former colleagues. I wish to acknowledge Charles Overby, the CEO of Freedom Forum here at the Newseum; Senator Richard Lugar* and Senator Joe Lieberman, my former colleagues in the Senate, both of whom worked for passage of the Voice Act, which speaks to Congress’s and the American people’s commitment to internet freedom, a commitment that crosses party lines and branches of government.

Also, I’m told here as well are Senator Sam Brownback, Senator Ted Kaufman, Representative Loretta Sanchez, many representatives of the Diplomatic Corps, ambassadors, chargés, participants in our International Visitor Leadership Program on internet freedom from China, Colombia, Iran, and Lebanon, and Moldova. And I also want to acknowledge Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, recently named to our Broadcasting Board of Governors and, of course, instrumental in supporting the work on internet freedom that the Aspen Institute has been doing.

This is an important speech on a very important subject. But before I begin, I want to just speak briefly about Haiti, because during the last eight days, the people of Haiti and the people of the world have joined together to deal with a tragedy of staggering proportions. Our hemisphere has seen its share of hardship, but there are few precedents for the situation we’re facing in Port-au-Prince. Communication networks have played a critical role in our response. They were, of course, decimated and in many places totally destroyed. And in the hours after the quake, we worked with partners in the private sector; first, to set up the text “HAITI” campaign so that mobile phone users in the United States could donate to relief efforts via text messages. That initiative has been a showcase for the generosity of the American people, and thus far, it’s raised over $25 million for recovery efforts.

Information networks have also played a critical role on the ground. When I was with President Preval in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, one of his top priorities was to try to get communication up and going. The government couldn’t talk to each other, what was left of it, and NGOs, our civilian leadership, our military leadership were severely impacted. The technology community has set up interactive maps to help us identify needs and target resources. And on Monday, a seven-year-old girl and two women were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed supermarket by an American search-and-rescue team after they sent a text message calling for help. Now, these examples are manifestations of a much broader phenomenon.

The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. When something happens in Haiti or Hunan, the rest of us learn about it in real time – from real people. And we can respond in real time as well. Americans eager to help in the aftermath of a disaster and the girl trapped in the supermarket are connected in ways that were not even imagined a year ago, even a generation ago. That same principle applies to almost all of humanity today. As we sit here, any of you – or maybe more likely, any of our children – can take out the tools that many carry every day and transmit this discussion to billions across the world.

Now, in many respects, information has never been so free. There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at any moment in history. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.

During his visit to China in November, for example, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet. In response to a question that was sent in over the internet, he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable, generates new ideas, encourages creativity and entrepreneurship. The United States belief in that ground truth is what brings me here today.

Because amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can either energize a city or destroy it, modern information networks and the technologies they support can be harnessed for good or for ill. The same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to spew hatred and incite violence against the innocent. And 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.

In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet. In Vietnam, access to popular social networking sites has suddenly disappeared. And last Friday in Egypt, 30 bloggers and activists were detained. One member of this group, Bassem Samir, who is thankfully no longer in prison, is with us today. So while it is clear that the spread of these technologies is transforming our world, it is still unclear how that transformation will affect the human rights and the human welfare of the world’s population.

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

Franklin Roosevelt built on these ideas when he delivered his Four Freedoms speech in 1941. Now, at the time, Americans faced a cavalcade of crises and a crisis of confidence. But the vision of a world in which all people enjoyed freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear transcended the troubles of his day. And years later, one of my heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt, worked to have these principles adopted as a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They have provided a lodestar to every succeeding generation, guiding us, galvanizing us, and enabling us to move forward in the face of uncertainty.

So as technology hurtles forward, we must think back to that legacy. We need to synchronize our technological progress with our principles. In accepting the Nobel Prize, President Obama spoke about the need to build a world in which peace rests on the inherent rights and dignities of every individual. And in my speech on human rights at Georgetown a few days later, I talked about how we must find ways to make human rights a reality. Today, we find an urgent need to protect these freedoms on the digital frontiers of the 21st century.

There are many other networks in the world. Some aid in the movement of people or resources, and some facilitate exchanges between individuals with the same work or interests. But the internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them. This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, emails, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics. Two months ago, I was in Germany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The leaders gathered at that ceremony paid tribute to the courageous men and women on the far side of that barrier who made the case against oppression by circulating small pamphlets called samizdat. Now, these leaflets questioned the claims and intentions of dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc and many people paid dearly for distributing them. But their words helped pierce the concrete and concertina wire of the Iron Curtain.

The Berlin Wall symbolized a world divided and it defined an entire era. Today, remnants of that wall sit inside this museum where they belong, and the new iconic infrastructure of our age is the internet. Instead of division, it stands for connection. But even as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls.

Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world. And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.

As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools. In the demonstrations that followed Iran’s presidential elections, grainy cell phone footage of a young woman’s bloody murder provided a digital indictment of the government’s brutality. We’ve seen reports that when Iranians living overseas posted online criticism of their nation’s leaders, their family members in Iran were singled out for retribution. And despite an intense campaign of government intimidation, brave citizen journalists in Iran continue using technology to show the world and their fellow citizens what is happening inside their country. In speaking out on behalf of their own human rights, the Iranian people have inspired the world. And their courage is redefining how technology is used to spread truth and expose injustice.

Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people across the world. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are both growing challenges that the international community must confront together. And we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

The freedom of expression may be the most obvious freedom to face challenges with the spread of new technologies, but it is not the only one. The freedom of worship usually involves the rights of individuals to commune or not commune with their Creator. And that’s one channel of communication that does not rely on technology. But the freedom of worship also speaks to the universal right to come together with those who share your values and vision for humanity. In our history, those gatherings often took place in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Today, they may also take place on line.

The internet can help bridge divides between people of different faiths. As the President said in Cairo, freedom of religion is central to the ability of people to live together. And as we look for ways to expand dialogue, the internet holds out such tremendous promise. We’ve already begun connecting students in the United States with young people in Muslim communities around the world to discuss global challenges. And we will continue using this tool to foster discussion between individuals from different religious communities.

Some nations, however, have co-opted the internet as a tool to target and silence people of faith. Last year, for example, in Saudi Arabia, a man spent months in prison for blogging about Christianity. And a Harvard study found that the Saudi Government blocked many web pages about Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and even Islam. Countries including Vietnam and China employed similar tactics to restrict access to religious information.

Now, just as these technologies must not be used to punish peaceful political speech, they must also not be used to persecute or silence religious minorities. Now, prayers will always travel on higher networks. But connection technologies like the internet and social networking sites should enhance individuals’ ability to worship as they see fit, come together with people of their own faith, and learn more about the beliefs of others. We must work to advance the freedom of worship online just as we do in other areas of life.

There are, of course, hundreds of millions of people living without the benefits of these technologies. In our world, as I’ve said many times, talent may be distributed universally, but opportunity is not. And we know from long experience that promoting social and economic development in countries where people lack access to knowledge, markets, capital, and opportunity can be frustrating and sometimes futile work. In this context, the internet can serve as a great equalizer. By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunities where none exist.

Over the last year, I’ve seen this firsthand in Kenya, where farmers have seen their income grow by as much as 30 percent since they started using mobile banking technology; in Bangladesh, where more than 300,000 people have signed up to learn English on their mobile phones; and in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women entrepreneurs use the internet to get access to microcredit loans and connect themselves to global markets.

Now, these examples of progress can be replicated in the lives of the billion people at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder. In many cases, the internet, mobile phones, and other connection technologies can do for economic growth what the Green Revolution did for agriculture. You can now generate significant yields from very modest inputs. And one World Bank study found that in a typical developing country, a 10 percent increase in the penetration rate for mobile phones led to an almost 1 percent increase in per capita GDP. To just put this into context, for India, that would translate into almost $10 billion a year.

A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity. In the early years of these technologies, many believed that they would divide the world between haves and have-nots. But that hasn’t happened. There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who’ve historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.

Now, we have every reason to be hopeful about what people can accomplish when they leverage communication networks and connection technologies to achieve progress. But make no mistake – some are and will continue to use global information networks for darker purposes. Violent extremists, criminal cartels, sexual predators, and authoritarian governments all seek to exploit these global networks. Just as terrorists have taken advantage of the openness of our societies to carry out their plots, violent extremists use the internet to radicalize and intimidate. As we work to advance freedoms, we must also work against those who use communication networks as tools of disruption and fear.

Governments and citizens must have confidence that the networks at the core of their national security and economic prosperity are safe and resilient. Now this is about more than petty hackers who deface websites. Our ability to bank online, use electronic commerce, and safeguard billions of dollars in intellectual property are all at stake if we cannot rely on the security of our information networks.

Disruptions in these systems demand a coordinated response by all governments, the private sector, and the international community. We need more tools to help law enforcement agencies cooperate across jurisdictions when criminal hackers and organized crime syndicates attack networks for financial gain. The same is true when social ills such as child pornography and the exploitation of trafficked women and girls online is there for the world to see and for those who exploit these people to make a profit. We applaud efforts such as the Council on Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime that facilitate international cooperation in prosecuting such offenses. And we wish to redouble our efforts.

We have taken steps as a government, and as a Department, to find diplomatic solutions to strengthen global cyber security. We have a lot of people in the State Department working on this. They’ve joined together, and we created two years ago an office to coordinate foreign policy in cyberspace. We’ve worked to address this challenge at the UN and in other multilateral forums and to put cyber security on the world’s agenda. And President Obama has just appointed a new national cyberspace policy coordinator who will help us work even more closely to ensure that everyone’s networks stay free, secure, and reliable.

States, terrorists, and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks. Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government, and our civil society. Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation. In an internet-connected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all. And by reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons.

The final freedom, one that was probably inherent in what both President and Mrs. Roosevelt thought about and wrote about all those years ago, is one that flows from the four I’ve already mentioned: the freedom to connect – the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you’re on the internet, you don’t need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society.

The largest public response to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai was launched by a 13-year-old boy. He used social networks to organize blood drives and a massive interfaith book of condolence. In Colombia, an unemployed engineer brought together more than 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to demonstrate against the FARC terrorist movement. The protests were the largest antiterrorist demonstrations in history. And in the weeks that followed, the FARC saw more demobilizations and desertions than it had during a decade of military action. And in Mexico, a single email from a private citizen who was fed up with drug-related violence snowballed into huge demonstrations in all of the country’s 32 states. In Mexico City alone, 150,000 people took to the streets in protest. So the internet can help humanity push back against those who promote violence and crime and extremism.

In Iran and Moldova and other countries, online organizing has been a critical tool for advancing democracy and enabling citizens to protest suspicious election results. And even in established democracies like the United States, we’ve seen the power of these tools to change history. Some of you may still remember the 2008 presidential election here. (Laughter.)

The freedom to connect to these technologies can help transform societies, but it is also critically important to individuals. I was recently moved by the story of a doctor – and I won’t tell you what country he was from – who was desperately trying to diagnose his daughter’s rare medical condition. He consulted with two dozen specialists, but he still didn’t have an answer. But he finally identified the condition, and found a cure, by using an internet search engine. That’s one of the reasons why unfettered access to search engine technology is so important in individuals’ lives.

Now, the principles I’ve outlined today will guide our approach in addressing the issue of internet freedom and the use of these technologies. And I want to speak about how we apply them in practice. The United States is committed to devoting the diplomatic, economic, and technological resources necessary to advance these freedoms. We are a nation made up of immigrants from every country and every interest that spans the globe. Our foreign policy is premised on the idea that no country more than America stands to benefit when there is cooperation among peoples and states. And no country shoulders a heavier burden when conflict and misunderstanding drive nations apart. So we are well placed to seize the opportunities that come with interconnectivity. And as the birthplace for so many of these technologies, including the internet itself, we have a responsibility to see them used for good. To do that, we need to develop our capacity for what we call, at the State Department, 21st century statecraft.

Realigning our policies and our priorities will not be easy. But adjusting to new technology rarely is. When the telegraph was introduced, it was a source of great anxiety for many in the diplomatic community, where the prospect of receiving daily instructions from capitals was not entirely welcome. But just as our diplomats eventually mastered the telegraph, they are doing the same to harness the potential of these new tools as well.

And I’m proud that the State Department is already working in more than 40 countries to help individuals silenced by oppressive governments. We are making this issue a priority at the United Nations as well, and we’re including internet freedom as a component in the first resolution we introduced after returning to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely. The United States has been assisting in these efforts for some time, with a focus on implementing these programs as efficiently and effectively as possible. Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom.

We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights, to fight climate change and epidemics, to build global support for President Obama’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons, to encourage sustainable economic development that lifts the people at the bottom up.

That’s why today I’m announcing that over the next year, we will work with partners in industry, academia, and nongovernmental organizations to establish a standing effort that will harness the power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals. By relying on mobile phones, mapping applications, and other new tools, we can empower citizens and leverage our traditional diplomacy. We can address deficiencies in the current market for innovation.

Let me give you one example. Let’s say I want to create a mobile phone application that would allow people to rate government ministries, including ours, on their responsiveness and efficiency and also to ferret out and report corruption. The hardware required to make this idea work is already in the hands of billions of potential users. And the software involved would be relatively inexpensive to develop and deploy.

If people took advantage of this tool, it would help us target our foreign assistance spending, improve lives, and encourage foreign investment in countries with responsible governments. However, right now, mobile application developers have no financial assistance to pursue that project on their own, and the State Department currently lacks a mechanism to make it happen. But this initiative should help resolve that problem and provide long-term dividends from modest investments in innovation. We’re going to work with experts to find the best structure for this venture, and we’ll need the talent and resources of technology companies and nonprofits in order to get the best results most quickly. So for those of you in the room who have this kind of talent, expertise, please consider yourselves invited to help us.

In the meantime, there are companies, individuals, and institutions working on ideas and applications that could already advance our diplomatic and development objectives. And the State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We’ll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need. Microsoft, for example, has already developed a prototype for a digital doctor that could help provide medical care in isolated rural communities. We want to see more ideas like that. And we’ll work with the winners of the competition and provide grants to help build their ideas to scale.

Now, these new initiatives will supplement a great deal of important work we’ve already done over this past year. In the service of our diplomatic and diplomacy objectives, I assembled a talented and experienced team to lead our 21st century statecraft efforts. This team has traveled the world helping governments and groups leverage the benefits of connection technologies. They have stood up a Civil Society 2.0 Initiative to help grassroots organizations enter the digital age. They are putting in place a program in Mexico to help combat drug-related violence by allowing people to make untracked reports to reliable sources to avoid having retribution visited against them. They brought mobile banking to Afghanistan and are now pursuing the same effort in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Pakistan, they created the first-ever social mobile network, called Our Voice, that has already produced tens of millions of messages and connected young Pakistanis who want to stand up to violent extremism.

In a short span, we have taken significant strides to translate the promise of these technologies into results that make a difference. But there is still so much more to be done. And as we work together with the private sector and foreign governments to deploy the tools of 21st century statecraft, we have to remember our shared responsibility to safeguard the freedoms that I’ve talked about today. We feel strongly that principles like information freedom aren’t just good policy, not just somehow connected to our national values, but they are universal and they’re also good for business.

To use market terminology, a publicly listed company in Tunisia or Vietnam that operates in an environment of censorship will always trade at a discount relative to an identical firm in a free society. If corporate decision makers don’t have access to global sources of news and information, investors will have less confidence in their decisions over the long term. Countries that censor news and information must recognize that from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech. If businesses in your nations are denied access to either type of information, it will inevitably impact on growth.

Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions. I hope that their competitors and foreign governments will pay close attention to this trend. The most recent situation involving Google has attracted a great deal of interest. And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be transparent.

The internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it is fabulous. There are so many people in China now online. But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century. Now, the United States and China have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently in the context of our positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship.

Now, ultimately, this issue isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit. It’s about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.

Information freedom supports the peace and security that provides a foundation for global progress. Historically, asymmetrical access to information is one of the leading causes of interstate conflict. When we face serious disputes or dangerous incidents, it’s critical that people on both sides of the problem have access to the same set of facts and opinions.

As it stands, Americans can consider information presented by foreign governments. We do not block your attempts to communicate with the people in the United States. But citizens in societies that practice censorship lack exposure to outside views. In North Korea, for example, the government has tried to completely isolate its citizens from outside opinions. This lopsided access to information increases both the likelihood of conflict and the probability that small disagreements could escalate. So I hope that responsible governments with an interest in global stability will work with us to address such imbalances.

For companies, this issue is about more than claiming the moral high ground. It really comes down to the trust between firms and their customers. Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their own personal information. Firms that earn that confidence of those countries and basically provide that kind of service will prosper in the global marketplace. I really believe that those who lose that confidence of their customers will eventually lose customers. No matter where you live, people want to believe that what they put into the internet is not going to be used against them.

And 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.

Now, we are reinvigorating the Global Internet Freedom Task Force as a forum for addressing threats to internet freedom around the world, and we are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression. And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply what’s a quick profit.

We’re also encouraged by the work that’s being done through the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary effort by technology companies who are working with nongovernmental organizations, academic experts, and social investment funds to respond to government requests for censorship. The initiative goes beyond mere statements of principles and establishes mechanisms to promote real accountability and transparency. As part of our commitment to support responsible private sector engagement on information freedom, the State Department will be convening a high-level meeting next month co-chaired by Under Secretaries Robert Hormats and Maria Otero to bring together firms that provide network services for talks about internet freedom, because we want to have a partnership in addressing this 21st century challenge.

Now, pursuing the freedoms I’ve talked about today is, I believe, the right thing to do. But I also believe it’s the smart thing to do. By advancing this agenda, we align our principles, our economic goals, and our strategic priorities. We need to work toward a world in which access to networks and information brings people closer together and expands the definition of the global community. Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing, we need people around the world to pool their knowledge and creativity to help rebuild the global economy, to protect our environment, to defeat violent extremism, and build a future in which every human being can live up to and realize his or her God-given potential.

So let me close by asking you to remember the little girl who was pulled from the rubble on Monday in Port-au-Prince. She’s alive, she was reunited with her family, she will have the chance to grow up because these networks took a voice that was buried and spread it to the world. No nation, no group, no individual should stay buried in the rubble of oppression. We cannot stand by while people are separated from the human family by walls of censorship. And we cannot be silent about these issues simply because we cannot hear the cries.

So let us recommit ourselves to this cause. Let us make these technologies a force for real progress the world over. And let us go forward together to champion these freedoms for our time, for our young people who deserve every opportunity we can give them.

Thank you all very much.

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Yahoo! Fellow Evgeny Morozov On Authoritarian Governments and the Internet

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Take a look at video of this fascinating panel discussion about authoritarian regimes and technology. Our Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow for 2010, Evgeny Morozov, is one of the panelists. He is joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a journalist, blogger and scholar as well as a member of the GNI.  The other panelists are Alec Ross, of the Office of the Secretary of State, and Tim Wu of Slate Magazine and Columbia Law School, and the panel is moderated by James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly.

http://newamerica.net/events/2010/authority_meet_technology

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Haiti

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | UNDP

We are all shocked and saddened by the devastation in Haiti. My first reaction, shared by many people around the world, was “What can I possibly to do help?” I’ve been struck by how quickly individuals and groups have used the Internet to organize, to inform, and to get food, money and medical supplies to Haiti. If you would like to learn more and to help, see below for information and ideas.

• Ushahidi aggregates information from sources on the ground in Haiti, here.
• The Network for Good provides information about where to donate, get information and directly connect to organizations on the ground in Haiti.
• Partners in Health, the organization founded by Paul Farmer that has been in Haiti for over 20 years, has launched a website (http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti), where you can learn more about Haiti, get breaking news, and donate.
• Global Voices Online is providing dedicated coverage of Haiti, here.
• Yahoo! News has a comprehensive Haiti Earthquake Topic page: http://news.yahoo.com/topics/haiti-earthquake.
• Yahoo! Mobile began a “Text to Help Haiti” campaign on our mobile homepage.

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Happy Birthday GNI!

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | EPerales

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is celebrating the first anniversary of its 2008 launch. In the past year, GNI participants have worked to promote privacy and free expression in a number of ways.

GNI has developed a human rights impact assessment tool (HRIA) to help companies identify when freedom of expression and privacy may be jeopardized or advanced, and to develop appropriate risk mitigation strategies.

GNI has convened shared learning events, on a number of topics including:

• Real and potential restrictions to freedom of expression in multiple locations around the world, including Argentina, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Moldova, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Korea, Zimbabwe and Italy.

• Law enforcement request issues in multiple locations around the world, including Belgium, the USA, China and Argentina.

• The use of Internet and telecommunications services during the elections in Iran.

• The Green Dam/Youth Escort software proposals in China.

GNI has contributed to public dialogue about the intersection of technology and human rights in a number of settings, including:

• The International Seminar on Business and Human Rights in Paris, held to mark the 60th anniversary of the UDHR;
• A briefing to update members of the U.S. Congress on GNI’s progress and multi-stakeholder approach;
• The conference on “Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology & New Media” at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley;
• The Yahoo! Business and Human Rights Summit; and
• The 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference, hosted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

GNI has also  hosted  outreach events and conversations for prospective members in Washington DC, Silicon Valley, Paris and Singapore.

For more details about GNI’s past year, as well as plans for the future, please go to http://www.globalnetworkinitiative.org/newsletter/index.php.

Yahoo! is proud to be a founding member of the GNI, and we look forward to continuing to work with our fellow participants to address threats to freedom of expression and privacy around the world. We hope to welcome new members to the GNI, and we will continue to engage with all stakeholders who share our goal of protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector around the globe.

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