Remarks at the Internet Freedom Technology Showcase: The Future of Human Rights Online, City University of New York Graduate Center
Ambassador Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
U.S. Mission to the United Nations
New York City
September 26, 2015
AS DELIVERED
Hi everybody. And could we have a better or more determined Assistant Secretary for Human Rights representing the United States of America? His Yankees unfortunately do appear destined for the playoffs, so we’re in deep despair here in a very small pocket of New York. Okay, this is a super important topic and I’m just really honored to be a part of it. You’ve heard a great deal today about the ways in which governments increasingly are using the internet to repress citizen’s rights: blocking access; censoring content; passing laws to restrict and punish online speech; hacking websites and Twitter feeds belonging to NGOs, press outlets, and opposition parties; stealing identities, smearing reputations, and in some instances threatening, physically assaulting even, or killing human rights defenders and journalists for disseminating their work online. It’s very, very clear that repressive governments are throwing huge resources at this problem from the way they see it. And the internet and these technologies are a problem from their perspective, from the perspective of these repressive governments. They are innovating. They are a virtual Silicon Valley of innovation when it comes to cracking down and they are learning from one another’s worst practices. And I know that many people in the room are on the front lines of this struggle, and some days it must feel like a very unfair fight.
And I think what’s really important about this gathering today and this work that you all are doing is that it’s both intrinsically important to share ideas and learn about decoy routing and all the rest, but it’s also really important for you to know that you’re not alone and to be reminded of that. And it’s also worth reminding oneself that we’re also not alone – indeed, we’re not even the minority, given that there are nearly 3 billion people using the internet every day. So just as repressive governments can share ways to close online spaces, we can share ways to reopen them. And that’s what this is about. It’s why we need the virtual and in-person conversations that you’ve been a part of for so many years.
So as the, somehow, as the closing speaker here, after these extraordinary and inspiring presentations, it falls to me just to draw a few general conclusions and to propose next steps. I’d like to just start by offering three points of context, because sometimes we get so into the conversation about the technology and the tool and the particular act of oppression, we may not stick our heads up, particularly when we’re around gadgets.
So the first point I would make by way of context is just that, while the repressive tactics that governments are using in the online sphere may be new and may be ever-evolving, the playbook is extremely familiar. Every time in history that a new technology has emerged that has allowed people to amplify their voices, governments – many governments, maybe not all governments – but have moved swiftly to control or even destroy that technology. And I’d just give just one example which is probably familiar at least to some of you – but for decades, people in the Soviet Union were prevented from owning fax machines. And if a foreign correspondent working in the Soviet Union wanted to fax an article to an editor at home, he or she of course had to send the article through government telegraph offices where Soviet officials reviewed and censored their contents before forwarding, faxing them along. But what’s really I think the best symbol of this is that the fax machine at Moscow’s central telegraph office was held behind a closed door, guarded by an armed soldier. I feel like there’s something in that that offers, is probably very, very familiar to working in wholly different technologies today.
Second, the human rights at stake on the internet are not new rights – they’re the same rights – that we value in other spheres and that we have been defending for many decades in those other spheres. So when Ethiopia detains bloggers for their reporting, it is violating their freedom of speech. When Burundi shuts down Twitter during a public protest, it is stifling freedom of assembly. And when Russia shuts down a website that is providing an online support community for LGBT youth, it is repressing freedom of association. The rights at stake are not online rights as such – they are human rights. And while the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may not have, it’s fair to say, anticipated the internet as such, they understood that governments would be very, very, very tempted to restrict technologies that provide new means of exercising rights. And that is why, really interestingly, when you look at Article 19 in the UDHR, it of course protects the right to freedom of opinion and expression – an iconic right, an essential right – but it explicitly states that “this right includes the freedom…to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And so in a way this was commendably prophetic. It wasn’t cabined in the way that one might have been tempted to do and I’m sure that some governments were eager to confide in, in some fashion.
I’ll give you another example, a more recent one that Tom and I have worked on together for the last few weeks and Tom’s tremendous team in DRL. We have launched a campaign in the U.S. Government called “Free the 20,” hashtag #Freethe20. And we launched it in the run up to the Beijing+20 Conference, which will be held tomorrow here in New York – that conference marks 20 years since the very memorable Beijing Conference of 1995, where Hillary Clinton famously said, “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights,” and where governments and civil society leaders then agreed on an ambitious set of goals to advance gender equality and women’s rights. Now, in the run up to this year’s meeting, we are highlighting 20 cases of women whose freedom has been denied unjustly. Stories – we are telling the stories of women who have been imprisoned for expressing themselves or for exercising their rights – we describe who they are; where they’re from; why they were unjustly locked up; what the governments are saying about them. And we have pressed through our diplomacy and through a quite unusual, I think, public campaign to secure their release. We now have huge support also from, in the first instance, the 20 women Senators down in Washington – that’s a totally bipartisan coalition and there’s a lot of enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for that. There are, among the 20, three Chinese women, particularly given that China is hosting this conference, these are women that have a remarkable amount to contribute to their societies and we’ve been able, again, to use the technologies – social media and so forth – to lift up their face, but we’re also using old-fashioned photographs of these women and hanging them in the walls of the front of the U.S. Mission so that diplomats and dignitaries who walk to the Beijing+20 Conference tomorrow will get a glimpse of who’s missing and what’s missing.
Now, these women have been denied their freedom for a range of so-called crimes: documenting government graft, taking on the legal defense of women – in this case, in China – who were protesting sexual harassment, and just participating in peaceful demonstrations. Their cases, though, share a common thread – virtually all of their efforts, the efforts that they were making in their own countries as well – have been amplified in one way or another by the internet.
This is the case with one of them that I’ll just describe for you today, Bahareh Hedayat, some of you may know her, she is an Iranian women’s rights advocate who helped lead what was called the One Million Signatures Campaign in Iran, and this was a signature campaign that aimed to change Iran’s discriminatory laws against women – and a campaign that the campaign’s organizers promoted with a website, as one does. Bahareh was detained multiple times, including the day before her wedding in 2008, and she was held then for a month in solitary confinement. In December 2009, she was detained for her fifth time and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison. Her sentence has been prolonged several times, including a six-month extension that she received just for writing a letter from prison urging students and young activists to continue their peaceful struggle for freedom – now, this letter itself was widely distributed online and across social networks in Iran. My point is this, just coming back again to the larger argument, which is that the human rights at stake online are the traditional human rights. Bahareh is not – has never been – a self-styled “online activist” as such, but the internet played a critically important role in helping her voice and advocacy efforts reach a much broader audience within Iran and of course well beyond Iran’s borders.
Third, and final, just point of context here, is that, and again I know many of you are bumping up against the point I’m about to make every day, but the effort by repressive governments to clamp down on the Internet is part of a much larger global crackdown on civil society groups. So it is a symptom, I think, of this larger phenomenon. If it weren’t technology, it would be something else, as we’ve seen. This is a decade-long streak in which democracy has retreated in more places than it has advanced. And since 2012, again as many of you know well, 60 countries have introduced or enacted 120 laws restricting civil society. Cambodia passed a new law restricting NGOs in July, and drafts for additional restrictive laws have been put forward in China and Uganda. These restrictions come on top of countless other regulations and policies aimed at closing space for civil society – and again the restrictions can involve, of course, prohibiting access to foreign funding, placing additional onerous requirements on NGOs that make it impossible for them to secure what becomes mandatory registration. And were it not for civil society efforts to push back against these laws, such as the successful effort in Kenya not long ago that mobilized broad support to beat back draft legislation that would have cut off almost all foreign funding to NGOs, the environment, which is not ideal, would be much, much worse.
And that is the context for the struggle that you all are seeking to address in the online space and using these new technologies. It’s a struggle that extends beyond Internet rights, to human rights in general, and closing space online is just one part of a comprehensive effort to crack down on civil society.
President Obama believes that we have a stake in this fight. We believe that the rights to freedom of expression and assembly are rights that all people should enjoy – online and offline. And we also believe that Americans and people around the world have a tremendous amount to gain from a free and open Internet, all the things you know – from the broader sharing of information and ideas, to more markets for businesses, to a more transparent and accountable government. The SDGs that we’ve just agreed to – the new Sustainable Development Goals – I mean, how is there going to be reliably anywhere near the implementation we need without accountable government and how is it going to be accountable government without civil society being able to document and harness technologies and their own voices to hold governments accountable. We have seen – and this is just in terms of the U.S. interest in this, never mind the values at stake here – but we have seen significant overlap between governments that use the internet to repress their own citizens and NGOs, and those same governments using the internet to launch cyberattacks on other countries and to hack the websites of foreign nationals and companies. So there’s a correlation there that’s also very important.
So, we will continue to support initiatives like the ones we heard about today; and that is the motivation behind President Obama’s broader Stand with Civil Society agenda, of which this is just one part. And it is also the reason I am now proud to announce that we are expanding our Internet freedom efforts by launching an initiative called LIFT: Leading Internet Freedom Technology initiative. And based on a venture capital model, LIFT will foster, we hope, innovative next-generation technologies to circumvent Internet censorship. We are launching LIFT with a $10 million investment this year – part of an increase in our annual funding for Internet freedom to $33 million. And the potential impact of these new technologies really can be profound. Rather than providing individual users with anti-censorship capabilities, they have the potential to make the Internet inherently, as we’ve heard, more resistant to control, by making the cost of censoring the Internet prohibitively expensive. Good cost-benefit analysis. And more importantly, these new technologies could help millions of users gain access to the global Internet free of censorship.
But we cannot do this alone. We need more governments to join the Freedom Online Coalition, as Assistant Secretary Malinowski mentioned earlier. We need more governments to join something that I bet some of you may not even be familiar with, something called the Open Government Partnership, because when governments join the Open Government Partnership, there is a relationship with civil society that can allow civil society and NGOs to get more traction on issues like this. We need more businesses – and in particular tech companies – to embrace the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, to join the Global Network Initiative, and to help use their creativity and private sector savvy to help figure out how to keep this space free and open. But above all we need to persuade more of the nearly three billion daily internet users to recognize that this struggle, the one that consumes all of you, is their struggle, and that is both challenging but opens up, I think, a whole vista of opportunity to bring people into this conversation, and into this advocacy, and into this innovation.
To any of you – just a closing comment – in the audience who at times feel that the odds are stacked against you, just given what governments can bring to bear, I think it is really worth focusing on the brights spots and those examples where we have seen the internet empower people in places where government officials have violated the rights of their citizens or where government officials have simply failed to do their job.
Look at Ipaidabribe.com, this is one of my favorites when I visited India with President Obama, where Indians report their experiences in paying a bribe, in refusing to pay a bribe, and if they encounter a situation where they don’t have to pay a bribe; at this point nearly 50,000 people have filed reports in 70 Indian cities, paying bribes totaling somewhere around $73 million. Many of their reports apparently have been passed along to authorities and to the media. If that example isn’t inspiring and interesting enough, look at the harrowing, devastating cellphone footage captured by Syrians of the gas attacks carried out by the Assad regime, which were swiftly disseminated, and which showed without any shadow of a doubt what had happened. These videos were eventually used by the international community as part of an evidentiary base to establish that chemical weapons were used for the first time since 1988, and one day this same sort of cellphone, Internet, and Twitter evidence will be used, I’m sure, to hold the perpetrators, including Assad, accountable. There are other examples, we’re a year now since President Obama launched a big Ebola-related initiative here, the curve of Ebola was trending toward a million infections by early 2015, and it was simple programs that were built to collate the data coming in through email and text messages that allowed teams on the ground to do contact tracing, to launch burial teams so that safe burial could be done, because that was the means by which the infections were spreading like crazy. It was a combination, again, of just tremendous sacrifice by a huge number of Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, and Guineans and the harnessing again of these new tools that have really helped to bend that curve, and we are very very close to getting to zero, which we need urgently to get there. And the ones we’ve talked about today, it goes without saying, just what technologies are helping people achieve for themselves and to amplify their rights and their claims vis a vis their governments and their communities.
So, if repressive governments seem a little well-resourced and daunting, it is worth taking heart from history, from the same history I invoked earlier. Every previous effort to destroy or curb new technologies enhancing freedom of speech have eventually failed. And – as you all know better than I – the architecture of the internet is broader, flatter, and more efficient than anything that has come before it. So there is a reason that repressive governments are pouring so many resources into trying to control the internet – they also know that history and they know that the odds and time, and these technologies are on our side.
Thank you.
For detail please visit here