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United States News Title: Hillary Clinton: 'Internet freedom' activist? Within a day, Guerra’s phone rang: One of Hillary Clinton’s top digital advisers was asking how the State Department could help. Soon, at the department’s urging, U.S. tech companies added security protections for the protesters’ online messages, while Clinton’s spokesman condemned the hacks and State raised the matter directly with the Tunisian government, just days before President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali stepped down. The State Department’s swift, high-level efforts to protect activists from government snooping were a “pleasant surprise,” said Guerra, who worked then for the human rights group Freedom House. “It was interpreted by me and other colleagues as: The administration genuinely cares about this issue.” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton answers questions after announcing her college affordability plan, Monday, Aug. 10, 2015, at the high school in Exeter, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) The episode was one outcome of the State Department’s “Internet freedom” agenda — Clinton’s effort as secretary to promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies, including by spending tens of millions on technology to help bloggers and dissidents evade censorship in countries like China, Myanmar and Iran. But those efforts got decidedly mixed reviews at the time, especially for doing too little to confront China. And they could pose complications for her presidential hopes — especially now that the Obama administration is calling unbreakable online secrecy a threat to national security. People who worked with Clinton say the initiative shows that, fundamentally, she got the Internet — something that may surprise people who know only her infamous foibles with email and fax machines. In particular, they say, she seized on the fact that the online world was fast becoming an important organizing platform for traditionally dispossessed people, including women, democracy activists, civil society groups and gay and transgender people. “I think, broadly, she recognized the way in which the world was changing and the role of the Internet in that shift,” one ex-official said. But critics say Clinton’s efforts were too timid in the face of major threats to freedom of expression, such as the Great Firewall that China’s government has erected around its citizens’ use of the Internet. They also say she and the Obama administration as a whole were selective in where they championed online liberty, both at home and abroad. “The Obama administration has received criticism from foe and friend alike for what many perceive as a weakness in the promotion of human rights,” said a February 2011 report approved by the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “This was particularly true regarding Secretary Clinton’s Internet Freedom Agenda with its promise to push nations to allow freer access to the Web.” Among other flaws, lawmakers criticized the department’s reluctance to give funding to certain anti-censorship technology associated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong. Nathaniel Heller, whose nonprofit, Global Integrity, ran administrative functions for another Clinton-era open government initiative, the Open Government Partnership, called the department’s Internet freedom work “weirdly inconsistent.” He noted that it came as the U.S. was simultaneously carrying out mass surveillance on its own and “turning a blind eye in places like Egypt.” “The U.S. was out preaching the gospel of internet freedom to ‘bad’ governments while seemingly oblivious (willful or otherwise) to the deep inconsistencies in its approach as viewed by many outside of the U.S.,” wrote Heller, who’s now a managing director of the Results for Development Institute in Washington. Those inconsistencies became even more glaring after NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed classified documents about U.S. spying and hacking in 2013, he added in an interview Monday. “People said, ‘Holy cow, you’re out there teaching us how to use [the anonymous communication tool] Tor and at the same time you’re trying to create back doors into every piece of secure software you can get your hands on,” Heller said. Still, he said, he got the impression that Clinton’s Internet freedom agenda was “quite genuine. The people doing this were really committed and doing it for all the right reasons.” Parts of Clinton’s strategy could present risks for her White House hopes, however. For instance, the department put $45 million into small technology ventures that helped dissidents communicate anonymously and evade Web censorship. But those are sometimes the same tools that online drug markets and child pornography traffickers use, and the Obama administration is now clashing with the tech industry by demanding that law enforcement get back-door access to encrypted communications. Clinton has not taken sides in that dispute, aside from calling the encryption debate “a classic hard choice” in a February appearance with Re/code’s Kara Swisher. “If she weighs in on this debate, her Internet freedom activities may come back to haunt her,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “How can you complain about the widespread use of technology that you yourself funded?” Clinton’s ex-aides say her efforts were sincere, and were part of a larger effort to address a wide range of challenges arising from the digital age. Before she became secretary, “there was a lot of work going on in the building on Internet freedom issues … and on cybercrime and in the economic bureau,” said Chris Painter, who reported directly to Clinton as the department’s first-ever cyber coordinator. “But we really weren’t integrating it all together and upping our game.” Clinton’s commitment to cyber development was born partly from bitter experience: Asked to pinpoint the origin of her interest in the Internet, many people pointed to the 2008 presidential race, in which Barack Obama’s tech-savvy startup campaign bested her old-school behemoth. “She took that lesson to heart,” said one former Obama administration official who worked on cyber policy. And, the officials say, she recognized that the Internet offers both promise and peril. “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,” Clinton said at the Newseum in January 2010, during the first of three major policy speeches she gave on Internet freedom as secretary. The former officials say Clinton’s commitment to online freedom continued even after the department suffered a major embarrassment with the unauthorized release of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. “Our message at the time was, ‘Yes, in this instance, this is negative, but it’s not always going to be negative,’” a former Obama administration official who worked on cyber policy said. “This is simply a new, powerful vector in international relations and we need to learn how to anticipate and harness it to minimize risks and maximize benefits.” The State Department’s intervention on behalf of protesters in Tunisia — a U.S. ally — was a little-noticed but perhaps telling episode. The call to Guerra by Alec Ross, Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, was one of many that the State Department made to activists and other citizens in the region during those days, seeking information about the spreading protests and their digital components. The department also worked closely with tech companies, especially Facebook, to ensure that its case for alleging government hacking was airtight. Before going public with its accusations, the department filed formal diplomatic protests known as démarches with the Ben Ali government, an ex-official said. “The decision whether or not to démarche an ally was Hillary Clinton’s call and, when it came down to it, she didn’t blink because of human rights concerns,” the former State Department source said. Full coverage of cybersecurity policy Clinton also acted internally to make cyber issues a higher priority for the department. For example, she and Deputy Secretary Jim Steinberg established a cyber coordinator’s office and hired Painter, a 20-year veteran of federal cybersecurity policy, to fill it. The initiative “was really the secretary’s,” Painter said in an interview. “It was a recognition by Secretary Clinton and Deputy Secretary Steinberg that this was an emerging and important foreign policy area.” Within months of Painter’s arrival, a memo went out under Clinton’s signature directing all major embassies to appoint one official to manage a cyber portfolio, including security and crime. The department also created a cyber coordinating committee with representatives from all of State’s regional and functional bureaus and directed regional bureaus to write up cyber action plans. In her speeches on Internet freedom, Clinton sought to balance what one former department official called the “dark side and light side to humanity that plays out on the Internet.” By the time of her third speech at the first Freedom Online conference in The Hague in December 2011, Clinton was calling out surveillance software companies for “selling the hardware and software of repression to authoritarian governments” such as Syria and Iran. Still, the department’s $45 million in Internet freedom grants drew criticism from many in Congress, including then-Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who said the strategy was too modest, especially when it came to China. For some lawmakers, “Internet freedom was our sort of asymmetric attack against China,” said Ian Schuler, former senior manager of State’s Internet freedom programs. “Some people supported it for reasons that were more antagonistic, more a fear of China than support for democracy or human rights.” Schuler added that he “never saw anything at State that would have led me to believe that’s how they were pursuing it.” One former department official acknowledges that officials were split on China. “When we put Internet freedom and human rights on the table, this was not something the [U.S. Embassy in China] was really excited about,” the ex-official said. “There was some pushing internally to keep that on the radar, and high-level support made that more possible than it might have been under a different secretary of state. [But] the people dealing with China every day might have been just as happy to see this issue go away.” Some lawmakers specifically wanted the department to put more money into Freegate and Ultrasurf, two censorship circumvention tools developed by Falun Gong supporters. Both tools are widely used by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, the parent agency of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which uses them to beam radio and television broadcasts into China and other nations. “State had a lot of worries about the overall bilateral relationship,” said Ken Berman, who was chief information security officer for the broadcasting board during those years. The department did more than just pay “lip service” to Internet freedom, Berman said, but he thinks it was more cautious than necessary. The department maintained it would have been counterproductive to commit too many resources to a single tool that might be broken by Chinese censors or, worse, corrupted and used to track dissidents. Clinton referred to the dispute in her second Internet freedom speech, saying that “some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no app for that.” Another concern, some former officials said, was that dissidents in societies where the U.S. is unpopular should not use the same online tools as the United States government’s foreign media wing. “Tying Syrian journalists to U.S. propaganda is not a good move,” one ex-official said. Even some former officials who broadly support Clinton’s digital résumé warn that her work at State may not translate to the White House — and not just because the job of president demands a different focus than that of secretary of state. After the Snowden revelations, they say, the United States’ case for an open Internet seems much more morally ambiguous — a point that adversaries in Russia and China are eager to make. “There was a very different understanding at the time,” Guerra said of Clinton’s State Department. “It was a different moment — pre-Snowden. … There was a genuinely broader trust in the U.S. and the support coming from the State Department.” What USA NSA surveillance program? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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