Ambassador Donahoe at a Press Briefing with the 2012 Internet Freedom Fellows. Photo by US Mission to the UN in Geneva, June 2012.
As I noted, the US co-sponsored a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council on Internet freedom which was unanimously passed by 47 members, including such Internet enemies as Russia, China, and Iran.
The US State Department is hyping it as a tremendous achievement for the Obama Administration, in getting this controversial body to pass a unanimous resolution -- over the objections of China, Cuba and other authoritarian states that control the Internet -- seemingly in support of a more free Internet (yet they will be back, and they will be back through those three paragraphs, look out). But precisely because it is a compromise exercise always at the UN, the resolution contains some troubling language that could well come back to haunt the US later, and -- again, particularly in the hostile UN context -- be seized upon by bad actors to thwart Internet freedom.
How did it come about that the US risked sponsoring this gambit in such a hostile environment, and now has compromised on some of its basic principles, i.e. not to allow the drive by socialist countries interested in privileging economic and social rights to trump the more endangered civil and political rights?
This exercise had help, and it wasn't just because Carl Bildt or State Department "Innovation" director Alec Ross are on Twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers.
DEVELOP, DEVELOP, DEVELOP -- BUT WHO DEVELOPS?
As I noted, Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, who is from Guatemala, has been working on this issue with US government and Soros help for some time, and brought the Third World perspective of "development" which tasks states with wealth distribution.
That socialist Sweden seized on the effort to negotiate a new Internet freedom resolution for its reasons makes sense -- as Foreign Minister Carl Bildt explains in an op-ed piece in The New York Times, he wants Internet freedom to be seen not as a Western-induced value that undermines Eastern and Southern states but which all states can enjoy for reasons of "development":
Beyond affirming that freedom of expression applies also to the Internet, the resolution also recognized the immense value the Internet has for global development and called on all states to facilitate and improve global access to it.
Such "facilitation and improvement" inevitably puts states back into the job of controlling the Internet, of course, as I've explained -- you have to hope that those "facilitators" are Swedes and not Cubans or Iranians.
Perhaps the resolution also removes the sting, for some, of Sweden's role in asking to extradite anarchist Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, back to Sweden from the UK to face questioniong on sexual offenses -- a move that some radicals paranoically believe is an act of collusion with the US ultimately to force extradition of Assange to face prosecution for WikiLeaks in the US and a supposed "Internet freedom crime" all its own. Of course, one wonders why this danger never ensued from the British government since 2010, since the UK also has extradition agreement with the US. Assange supporters never explain why the US didn't push the extradition with the British government to date, and why they'd be more likely to push it with Sweden -- it just doesn't make sense.
So how and why did the US get involved in promoting Internet freedom that was in fact actually doing just fine without their interference in many unexpected places?
NO NEW NORMS
As the media began to speak more and more of a "new" Internet right in the wake of Frank La Rue's statements and reports at the UN after his appointment, critics began to demand that the UN not add any new norms. The US was already wary of other efforts at the UN to control the Internet, such as a resolution sponsored by Russia and its allies at the UN General Assembly to establish "information security" -- which amounted letting states control information faucets.
By attempting to add any new special norms around the Internet, the door would be opened to having to re-negotiate the entire premise of freedom of expression itself with states that were decidedly hostile to it -- China, Russia, Iran, and others who are all in the Human Rights Council regardless of their own dismal human rights records.
The US had also taken the position of demanding that no new norms be set on a previous resolution that had threatened freedom of expression, a call to condemn "defamation of religions" which some members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation would use to prevent criticism of theocratic states and state religious leaders. The US successfully fought off that attempt in a resolution co-sponsored with Egypt on religious intolerance, which kept to norms in fact were decided by US Supreme Court Decisions -- only calls to "imminent violent incitement" could be criminalized. Groups like Human Rights First greeted the effort as skillful US diplomacy that avoided being coopted by enemies of free speech under the guise of working against discrimination -- yet the enormous efforts they go to "myth-busting" on their website let us know the real problems lurking in and around this resolution that will not go away.
Even so, with this victory under its belt, next, the US became caught up for various reason in promoting a Swedish-sponsored Internet freedom resolution at the UN Human Rights Council which contains a number of problematic features inviting state interference, as I wrote.
The backdrop for these negotiations, of course, is the Arab Spring, and the surge of expression that people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other countries began to enjoy through the use of new social media such as Twitter, Facebook and other local and glocal social networking sites. Those concerned to bring Internet resoultions to the UN felt they had the wind of the Arab Spring demonstrators at their backs, as they had succeeded in toppling dictators and bringing about social change. And as always, they thought they could boost their version of social change at home with internationalization of the issue.
Of course, the outcome of the Arab Spring is still uncertain and increasingly showing grave signs of oppression, not freedom. No matter -- the nature of the Arab regimes had changed at the UN, too, and they were less resistant to human rights resolutions than in the past.
But even before the stirrings of the Arab Spring, there was another development coming to pass -- Barack Obama was elected president and his administration brought the US back into the UN Human Rights Council, which had been scorned as politicized and hijacked by the world's worst rights offenders as a forum to distract from their own records and obsess with the real or more often hyped wrongs of the US or Israel. Under the Bush Administration, the US had left the Council -- after suffering such indignities as losing one election to Austria, even when Austria was denounced by the other democracies of Europe for having elected Jorg Haider.
Amb. Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, an Obama supporter and campaign contributor and bundler of $500,000, was rewarded for her Democratic Party loyalty to Obama with the appointment as ambassador to the HRC as the US rejoined the UN Human Rights Council. Donahoe is the wife of John Donahoe, president and CEO of e-bay, the online auction site. California -- Silicon Valley notabley -- provided most of the fund-raising for the Obama presidency.
The US team at the State Department working on international organizations wanted to co-sponsor this Internet freedom resolution for its reasons, which have to do with appearing positive and wishing to advance human rights in this very contentious body where awful things happen, such as states praising Sri Lanka for killing 40,000 civilians in putting down a terrorist rebellion. In a context where the US can have minimal effect when the rest of the members do little or nothing to protest the mass violations in Sudan or Iran, even as the microscopes are taken out to examine every offense by Israel in a special agenda item, US diplomats and internationalists want some positive achievements that they can show to conservatives like Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who would be just as happy to cut the entire budget for US involvement in troublesome bodies like the UN Human Rights Council because of their perceived ineffectiveness.
WHICH INTERNET FREEDOM?
Furthermore, the US official "progressives" in the Obama Administration hoped to accommodate a growing powerful movement of "Internet freedom fighters" made up of an amalgam of anarchists, leftists, open-source software cultists, start-up engineers and Silicon Valley technologists with business models on giant platforms with millions of users, whose success depends on avoiding prosecution for carrying copyrighted material unlawfully on their servers -- or indeed, encountering any friction at all in their rush to move us all online along with an "Internet of things". Some figures in these online movements, such as Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov, have been heavily critical of Secretary of State Clinton for her more moderate positions on Internet freedoms.
Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US has advanced a number of Internet freedom funding programs, activities, and resolutions and yet faced at times vicious domestic criticism for supposedly being "hypocritical" in promoting freedom of the Internet in Egypt or China but also accepting Congressional or US Trade Representative efforts to pursuing copyright enforcement and cybersecurity, inevitably seen as "chilling" on speech by "progressives" ( a term I'll always put in scare quotes because they are actually quite paleolithic on attitudes toward Russia and China and promoting outdated 1960s or 1980s Democratic Socialist of America agendas on a variety of domestic and foreign issues).
Amb. Donahoe seemed determined to strengthen the hand of the "progressives" and give this UN effort lift by bringing it out of the obscure processes of the UN in Geneva to an arena where she had a lot of connections and where it could get more visibility -- Silicon Valley. And the agenda of the anarchists and opensourceniks and Google engineers didn't seem to trouble her, but only represented new "grassroots energy".
THE RIGHTS CON
Hence the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (known as the Rights Con in more ways than one) where none other than John Perry Barlow presided, the grand-daddy of "information wants to be free", founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which got its start trying to exonerate hackers who had committed cybercrimes) and himself the author of an Internet manifesto which I've countered and critiqued for years. Watch JPB on Youtube (he doesn't view intellectual property as property, especially in the Internet age), and you'll realize he recognizes NO copyright (except possibly if you were to filch unattributed one of his Grateful Dead lyrics!) EVER -- it's an outdated concept only putting a "chill" on "innovation".
So this gang -- which managed to draft for attendance Michael Posner, the Obama Administration's appointee to the office of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights -- ambitiously set about drafting the Silicon Valley Principles -- principles which I've critiqued heavily as in fact not being rooted in any rights-based approach but in privileging technologists and their technology as the arbiters of freedom and privileging undemocratic decision-makers about technology. Access Now is one of the NGOs avidly pushing access to the Internet as "a human right" because it fits their agenda. Privately, I know that some staff in the Dept. of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor -- Posner's office -- didn't like the goofy direction this was going in, but they didn't publicly antagonize it at all, merely privately worked at cooperatively shaping it.
The process of promoting the more ambitious and lengthy "Silicon Valley Principles" went its course, but meanwhile, a shorter version of some of the same ideas, in concordance with the Swedish effort and Frank La Rue, was being worked up at the Human Rights Councils.
The Daily Caller exposed some of this effort as the usual "progressive" Soros-funded operation, but it makes it seem somehow lurid and conspiratorial and doesn't sufficiently challenge the ideas as distinct from the affiliation. In fact, there's nothing wrong with non-governmental organizations and think-tanks like the Open Society Institute working with UN officials to promote the human rights agenda, even paying for discussion meetings. It's done all the time, and by forces on the left as well as right, by NGOs and governments, and it's how things get done at the UN. The UN rightly responds to civil society -- the problem is merely in the war over who gets to be civil society at the UN. It's not a surprise and perfectly normal for the left-leaning cadres of the Obama Administration to seize upon this Internet cause as part of restoring US cooperation with the UN -- something I agree is a must in the modern world.
What is troublesome is that people supposedly devoted to "no new norms" and "fundamental human rights principles" deliberately put in three mentions of the "development" concept, even harness on the Internet to "accelerate" such development -- all code expressions for state involvement. What were they hoping to achieve?
Both NGOs and increasingly, Internet corporations, feel they have "ownership" or a "stake" in these issues, and they demand a "multi-stakeholder approach" so that not only states decide matters of rights that affect us all. There's some obvious pitfalls in this approach, of course, because some of these "multistakeholders" -- the IT corporations notably -- have never signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or other international laws and are not recognizable subjects of treaties in any event. They might affirm this or that coalition statement carefully worded to avoid real accountability, but they are not going to start really putting teeth into human rights by beginning to practice due process right on their own servers -- in making sure, for example, that a man trying to gain lots of followers to get attention for his daughter's rare disease doesn't find his account banned by automatic processes detecting "spam" -- for which he was lucky only after persistence and getting old-media attention to reverse.
So the US is busy spinning its victory in the Internet freedom war now by simply remaining silent about the three "development" paragraphs in the resolution that could contain some very unpleasant demands for them to suddenly supply free broadband for everyone and have the state (in the form of the FCC) restrain companies from legitimately load-balancing demand by insisting on "net neutrality".
And of course, that's exactly how it will be used and that's exactly the plan by some of those demanding an "Internet freedom" agenda which is actually a socialist-style "social change agenda" -- like Google, they're confident that if smart people like themselves run the state, it won't do evil.
"INTERNET FREEDOM BEGINS AT HOME"
In promoting the Internet freedom agenda in Geneva last month as the prospect for the vote on the Internet resolution grew near, Amb. Donahue took the tactic of emphasizing US wrongs rather than international rights to soften up third-world objections. She presided over a panel with US-funded Internet fellows from all over the world with keynoter Rebecca MacKinnon, sponsored by the US mission to the UN through the State Department's Speakers' Bureau, who gave a talk called "Internet Freedom Begins at Home" based on a Foreign Policy article she published in April. As I've noted in my critique, that article incredibly found the US the "greatest" threat to the Internet in the world (!) and didn't focus on killing of journalists in Syria or the kind of increasing controls put on the web by Russia or China, but obsessed about US legislation -- both SOPA (where Congress was flashmobbed and didn't even get to vote on the measure) and CISPA (a cybersecurity bill that unlike SOPA, has the support of Facebook and other Internet companies privately fed up with being hacked by Russia, China, Iran and others). (I've called out MacKinnon before for her myopic views of Internet freedom in harness to the "progressive" agenda.)
Yet typical of the way these exercises are spun in different ways for different audiences, in a blog posting on state.gov, Amb. Donohoe makes no mention of the perceived US ills or US legislation, but puts the focus more properly put again on the real menaces to the Internet like the Syrian government and the need to protect people like Dlshad Othman, a Syrian IT engineer and activist.
Perhaps other hands got involved in the editing as they would inevitably in any process at State, but it lets us know how this entire process is being handled -- signing bills that in fact mollify third-world objections to corporations and insist on government-controlled "development," that resonate particularly in the recession era by calling for restraint of capitalism and a greater role in "development" for states; holding sessions that bash the US more than the real enemies of the Internet abroad (MacKinnon was also invited with US support to the Dublin Conference on Internet Freedom last month); and then spinning it at home as merely a big affirmation of the fundamental freedom of expression we all support.
Indeed, the State Department's circular today on the accomplishments at the 20th session of the UN Human Rights Council has this to say about the Internet Freedom resolution -- and not a word about the thrice-mentioned "development" problem:
Internet Freedom: The United States was proud to work closely with the main sponsor, Sweden, and over 80 co-sponsors, including Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria, and Tunisia, to help unanimously pass a landmark resolution that underscores that all individuals are entitled to the same human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of expression, online as they are offline, and that all governments must protect those rights regardless of the medium. We will continue to work with our partners to address challenges to online freedom, and to ensure that human rights are protected in the public square of the 21st century.
Even as over at NPR, Donahoe goes back to invoking domestic legislation as a problem:
SYDELL: But Donahoe says it isn't just China or repressive Arab regimes that fear the Internet. She says even the United States sometimes struggles with its openness, whether it be the release of documents by WikiLeaks or downloading of illegal music files. What the new resolution does is open a conversation that's likely to take decades to resolve.
Er, the US "struggles" with openness when an anarchist group incites hackers to steal its classified cables? And just how does the administration plan now to combat piracy after pre-emptively nullifying any Congressional vote by announcing a veto, by having input to a rules process at the FCC? The idea that this might take "decades" overlooks the incredible speed at which the Internet itself amplifies and accelerates change, for good or bad.
My objection to this exercise is that it is not sufficiently democratic nor managed by the democratically-elected Congress or even a larger more diverse group of NGOs and think-tanks. It's essentially a product of the left-leaning international justice jet-set, the Soros-funded and other liberal-funded NGO and US official " gov 2.0" enthusiasts for the "progressive" agenda which now very much has the feeling of a Silicon Valley hustle as well because of the more radical groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation which have pushed the anti-copyright campaign.
I've debated these people for seven years ever since I first found them in Second Life, the 3D virtual world that has prototyped and predicted many of the events and phenomena we have come to see in the real world of Internet policy -- with many of the same actors like Barlow and Mitch Kapor. And the reason I debate them is not only because I think their position on copyright in fact damages the livelihoods of the little guy making digital content in online virtual worlds or social media content, not just big evil record companies. More urgently, they distract from real freedom of expression problems such as occur in China or Iran or Syria when they obsess about legislation that doesn't even pass in America. And most of all, I debate them because I am troubled by their lawlessness and anarchy in never accepting that anything about cyberspace can ever be prosecuted as a crime; whether combating piracy, or terrorist incitement or child pornography, they imply it can never be legislated without furious shrieks that the US is "becoming like China" and "censoring" and "putting a chill on free speech".
They never met a law that controls the Internet they like -- they don't recognize the principle that like all human artifacts and means of communications and transportation, this one, too, will have to have some enforcement of freedom as well as prevention and prosecution of crime in order to prevent powerful authoritarian governments, corporations and anarchic social forces from trampling on all our rights and to protect one right from being trumped by another.
It's as if they don't recognize all the other organic institutions of real life -- Congress, the courts, the media, NGOs -- make a context for the prosecution of crime utterly unlike China or Iran. It's as if they've left them all behind when they migrated to cyberspace and became anarchic flashmobs and ethics-free hackers.
There are many troubling implications to such non-democratic and manipulative processes that in fact go against what wiser heads even in the US government have crafted. These include not only the bulk of the Internet freedom funding projects, including efforts on circumvention software, but such a resolution as was advanced at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Fundamental Freedoms in the Digital Age, which sticks to the basics of merely affirming that all rights agreed on freedom of the media, freedom of expression, and freedom of association apply on the Internet, and which contains no such worrisome invocations of "development" and instead affirms "prosperity" (more on that to come in another post).
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