[x-pubpol] Internet Freedom Starts at Home

[Joly MacFie]

**

     <http://consentofthenetworked.com/author/rebeccamackinnon/>  Internet
Freedom Starts at
Home<http://consentofthenetworked.com/2012/04/04/internet-freedom-starts-at-home-2/>
by
Rebecca MacKinnon<http://consentofthenetworked.com/author/rebeccamackinnon/>

I have just written an essay for Foreign Policy on the Global Online
Freedom Act and why the United States needs to do a better job of
practicing at home what it preaches for the world. Here is how it begins:

*"An electronic curtain has fallen around Iran," U.S. President Barack
Obama warned in a recent video
message<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/20/nowruz-president-obama-speaks-iranian-people>marking
the Persian New Year. Government censorship and surveillance, he
said, make it more difficult for Iranians to "access the information that
they want," denying "the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with
the Iranian people."*



*Implied though not explicit in Obama's remarks was the idea that if Iran's
Internet were freer and more open, Iran's relationship with the world
generally -- and the United States in particular -- would be different.
Cases like Iran are the main driver of Washington's bipartisan consensus
around the idea that a free and open global Internet is in the United
States' strategic interest.*



*Yet more than two years after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave
her first
speech <http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm> declaring
"Internet freedom" to be a major component of U.S. foreign policy, it turns
out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free
speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA. American
corporations are major suppliers of software and
hardware<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/surveillance-inc-how-western-tech-firms-are-helping-arab-dictators/254008/>used
by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance
-- and not just dictatorships. Inconveniently, governments around the
democratic world are pushing to expand their own censorship and
surveillance powers as they struggle to address genuine problems related to
cybercrime, cyberwar, child protection, and intellectual property.*



*Even more inconveniently, the U.S. government is the biggest and most
powerful customer of American-made surveillance technology, shaping the
development of those technologies as well as the business practices and
norms for public-private collaboration around them. As long as the U.S.
government continues to support the development of a
surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human
rights and civil liberties implications of its business -- even rewarding
secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies -- the
world's dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global industry.*

Click here<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/03/The_Worlds_No_1_Threat_to_Internet_Freedom>to
read the rest.


  *Rebecca MacKinnon<http://consentofthenetworked.com/author/rebeccamackinnon/>
* | April 4, 2012 at 12:35 pm | Tags:
Netfreedom<http://consentofthenetworked.com/?tag=netfreedom>,
USA <http://consentofthenetworked.com/?tag=usa> | Categories:
Announcements<http://consentofthenetworked.com/?cat=217>| URL:
http://wp.me/p1MwtA-68


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