[liberationtech] WSJ Op-Ed: No Quick Fixes for Internet Freedom

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704104104575622080860055498.html

NOVEMBER 18, 2010, 10:21 A.M. ET

No Quick Fixes for Internet Freedom
The hard work to promote free speech online has barely begun.

By REBECCA MACKINNON

Just before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Hanoi late
last month, Vietnamese authorities redoubled their assault on Internet
dissent. Two more bloggers were arrested and another due to be released had
his sentence extended. Dissident websites came under cyber attack, taking
them offline at a time when they most needed to be visible.

Meanwhile in Washington, a battle is raging over funding for organizations
and projects supporting "Internet freedom." Like many Washington fights,
this one makes it harder for the U.S. government to help real people with
real problems.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent. Activists
from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been
telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Such attacks disable activists' websites at politically crucial times. Email
accounts are hacked and computer systems are breached, enabling intruders to
install spyware and monitor every electronic move. They are desperate for
training and technical help to fight increasingly sophisticated, well-funded
adversaries.

The cyber-attacks are one of several new and intractable problems faced by
online activists, alongside the older and more clear-cut problem of Internet
censorship. A number of repressive governments, including Vietnam, Iran and
China, block local Internet users from accessing politically sensitive
overseas websites, as well as commercial social networking services like
Facebook and Twitter. Anybody can get around this blockage if they know how
to use what is called "circumvention technology." Several U.S-based
organizations have developed a range of circumvention tools.

Tools for circumventing censorship are indeed important for activists. But
they do nothing to protect against cyber-attacks, or to address a growing
number of other ways that governments work to prevent activists from using
the Internet to access information, get their message out, and organize.
Still, many in Congress and the media have bought into the fantasy that all
the U.S. needs to do is put enough money into these circumvention tools, and
one in particular—and freedom will flood through the crumbling firewalls.

Since 2007, Congress has inserted a total of $50 million of earmarks into
the State Department's budget to fund organizations dedicated to fighting
Internet censorship. One group that has been lobbying hard for the money is
the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, run mainly by practitioners of the
Falun Gong, a religious sect banned in China. The GIFC has produced a suite
of circumvention tools that work well, as long as the user doesn't mind that
GIFC engineers can see their unencrypted communications, or that the
security of the tool has not been vetted by independent experts.

The GIFC has found powerful allies in Mark Palmer, who was U.S. ambassador
to Hungary when the Iron Curtain fell, and Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan
administration official and longtime advocate for human rights and religious
freedom. They argue that if the GIFC can get sufficient funding to scale up
their tools, authoritarian regimes will be brought to their knees.

The State Department has come under fire in the Journal, the Washington Post
and the New York Times for failing to support GIFC. And it's true that of
the $20 million already allocated, most went to other groups that are less
radioactive as far as U.S.-China relations are concerned. Some of these
groups work to help activists with training and security against
surveillance, cyber-attacks and other threats, in addition to circumventing
censorship.

In August, $1.5 million out of $5 million available for 2009 was finally
awarded by the State Department to the GIFC via the Broadcasting Board of
Governors. The bidding process for a remaining $30 million is expected to
start soon. With the mid-term elections now finished, we can look forward to
a new surge in the war over who gets to be hero of the fairy tale "Toppling
the Iron Curtain 2.0"

Meanwhile in real life, the human rights watchdog organization Freedom House
warns of a "global freedom recession." They point to a decrease in online
freedom even in many countries that engage in little or no website blocking.

Take Russia, for example. In a new book published by the Open Net
Initiative, "Access Controlled," University of Toronto scholars Rafal
Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert point out that while the Russian government
doesn't block many websites, it stifles online dissent in a range of other
ways. Government critics in Russia face cyber-attacks, surveillance, and
good old-fashioned intimidation.

In a growing number of countries including China, domestic Internet
companies are enlisted in this effort through regulatory pressures. Laws and
mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight
online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.

In real life, conceiving and implementing an effective set of policies,
programs, and tools for promoting a free and open global Internet requires
hard work by both the public and private sectors. This work has barely
begun.

A range of fast-evolving technical problems requires an array of solutions.
Activists around the world need technical assistance and training in order
to fight cyber-attacks more effectively. We need more coordination between
human rights activists, technology companies and policy makers just to
understand the problems, and how they can be expected to evolve in the next
few years.

What's more, existing research indicates that many of the problems aren't
technical, but rather political, legal, regulatory and even social. Other
obstacles to free expression are probably best addressed by the private
sector: Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be
urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists
using their platforms.

Circumvention technology is one tactic to support access to information and
online dissent. It makes sense to keep funding these tools, so long as
activists are given choice. On their own, however, they are not the silver
bullet that many claim. The State Department and Congress need to approach
freedom of speech issues strategically, based on a clear understanding of
purpose and effect.

Ms. MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America
Foundation.

-- 
Rebecca MacKinnon
Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
Co-founder, GlobalVoicesOnline.org
Cell: +1-617-939-3493
E-mail: rebecca.mackinnon at gmail.com
Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rmack
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