RConversation

Surveillance technologies and "apolitical" corporations

There has been a steady stream of headlines recently about the use of Western surveillance technology by repressive regimes. After the hacktivist group Telecomix exposed the use by Syria of filtering and surveillance devices manufactured by the California-based company Blue Coat last month, the company has finally acknowledged that at least thirteen of its devices are being used by Syria.

Today, The Guardian has an amazing article titled "Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens." It describes the annual Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas  conference, at which surveillance firms share tips on the latest "lawful interception" techniques used to spy on citizens. The companies showed little concern for how this technology can be and is being abused around the world. An excerpt:

Jerry Lucas, the president of the company behind ISS World, TeleStrategies, does not deny surveillance developers that attend his conference supply to repressive regimes. In fact, he is adamant that the manufacturers of surveillance technology, such as Gamma International, SS8 and Hacking Team, should be allowed to sell to whoever they want.

"The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world," he said. "Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that's probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good?"

Would he be comfortable in the knowledge that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing this technology from western companies? "That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country. That's not our business, we're not politicians … we're a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."

The EFF has proposed a two-part "know your customer" framework for surveillance equipment:

1. Companies selling surveillance technologies to governments need to affirmatively investigate and "know your customer" before and during a sale.  We suggest something for human rights similar to what most of these companies are already required to do under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the export regulations for other purposes, and
2. Companies need to refrain from participating in transactions where their "know your customer" investigations reveal either objective evidence or credible concerns that the technologies provided by the company will be used to facilitate human rights violations.

Click here for further details. One of the broader problems, of course, is that the market for ever-more sophisticated surveillance equipment feeds unaccountable abuses of power not only by authoritarian regimes but also by democratic governments.

As long as engineers and companies claim to have no responsibility for the political context in which their inventions and products are used, the problem is going to grow worse. This problem has been exacerbated in the Internet age, but it has been around a lot longer. In a talk I gave last week at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, I played a video clip from Tom Lehrer's early 1960's song about ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun:

The lyrics :

Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun

More problems in Facebookistan

UPDATE: Click here to read the response to this post by Facebook's Barry Schnitt, Director, Policy Communications, followed by reactions from others, including Rafik Dammak whose account suspension is discussed in this post.

Privacy is only one many problems eroding users' trust in Facebook. Don't forget Facebook's inconsistent and untransparent approach to account deactivation and page takedowns. I recently wrote about how Hong Kong democracy activists have had pages disabled or deleted with no explanation. Robert Scoble recently reported on how a Texas radio show recently had its Facebook page disabled, and that he gets "a new email from someone who has gotten removed from Facebook every week." [This sentence has been corrected thanks to "Wrldvoyagr" in the comments section, below.] Scoble continues:

They need a more mature approach toward customer service. People and content are still getting deleted by spam filters which no one understands or can explain to me and there isn’t good place to go to appeal content deletions. This the problem with not having a federated system that runs on our own servers. Facebook has too much control over our digital lives and that power to delete content really freaks me out.

The problem is especially upsetting for Facebook's international users, particularly those who come from countries where there is heavy censorship and political repression. Rafik Dammak, a Tunisian student living in Tokyo and who is an upstanding and active member of the global Internet community and represents non-commercial Internet users on one of ICANN's councils, announced last week that his Facebook account was suspended without warning. "They don't bother to give rationales, we have to "trust" them," he later wrote on Twitter.  Rafik did e-mail [email protected] to complain, (Updated/corrected details:) Rafik says he was chatting with a friend on Tuesday when suddenly a message popped up telling him to log back in. When he did so, received this generic message (click to enlarge) which began: "Hi Rafik, Unfortunately your account has been permanently disabled for violating Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities [link added]. We will not be able to reactivate it for any reason, nor will we provide further explanation of your violation or the systems we have in place. This decision is absolutely final." The e-mail then continues on with instructions about how to flag abusive content.

While Rafik has no way of knowing for sure why Facebook deactivated his account, he has some theories. In an e-mail exchange, he and Nasser Weddady, a Mauritanian activist based in Boston, described a concerted "abuse-reporting" campaign being carried out against Tunisian exiles, activists, and other Facebook users who the people conducting the campaign don't like. Rafik pointed to a couple of Facebook pages (here and here) which he says are devoted to targeting and organizing abuse-reporting efforts against specific Facebook users. France 24 has a report in French about those groups here. Here's how Nasser explained it to me:

This phenomenon seems to have been first triggered by the mass protest over things like the Danish Cartoons and Mohamed's portrayals. But the novelty now is the extent at which some pro-government elements in Tunisia resorted to this tactic to shut down dissenter groups or individual user accounts, most to seem to be targeted on account of their political views but that is not always the case hence the name in Arabic: Moubid which means insecticide. This is how it works:

- A user with a large following designates a group as "subversive"

-spreads the news to his following by inviting other users with the explicit request to pass it on in order to create a snowball effect

-Facebook agrees to shut down the group most likely based on the number of complaints

As you can see, it is a double abuse: an abuse by users who embark on witch hunts just because someone said those accounts or facebook groups are bad, and an abuse of facebook's opaque policy on designating groups as violating its users agreement.

There was a similar phenomenon during the last Gaza war, when pro-palestinan users accounts and groups were targeted by pro-israel groups and individuals in a similar way as in Tunisia. While, it is very difficult to prove that the Tunisians learned that technique from the pro-israel advocates, the first malicious precedent we know of in the Middle East is that one.

In early May Curt Hopkins wrote an article on ReadWriteWeb about how Facebook's move over the past year to make people's accounts and pages public by default had made it easier for such harrassment to occur. While he quotes Facebook representatives who insisted that they don't deactivate accounts without human review, it's clear that something remains seriously wrong with their system.

This larger context also helps explain the extent to which moderate and cosmopolitan Muslim Facebook users who believe in free speech and who are generally against censorship were so alienated and upset by the fact that Facebook allowed the "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" page - which on the several occasions when I looked at it was full of obscene and gratuitous anti-Muslim hate speech - to stay up for more than a week. It's well known that Facebook quickly takes down other racist and anti-semitic pages. Yet they allowed a page full of nastiness and hate against the Muslim faith to stay up. We also know from this interview given by one of the page's administrators to Radio Free Europe that Facebook admins were in touch with the page's creators and "not in a negative way," as administrator Andy Freiheit (a pseudonym) put it.

Many things remain seriously wrong in Facebookistan.

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In search of "Internet freedom"

At the end of the Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman and I led a session in which we asked everybody in the room to help answer a question: "How do we keep the Internet open and free?" In his blog post titled "How big is Internet freedom?" Ethan does a great job of summarizing the range of responses - and lack of agreement.  In the room that day were a diverse group of people: activists, citizen-bloggers, journalists, civil liberties lawyers, educators, and academics, as well as people who work for foundations, companies, international organizations and governments. Not all of these people felt comfortable about being in the same room with some of the others, as Ethan's post reflects, and as others like Andrew from EngageMedia have also commented. Yet everybody was united by the fact that they characterize their work to be related in some way to one or all of six things:

• building platforms that facilitate online expression, discourse, and/or organizing;
• fighting censorship and surveillance;
• working to shape laws and policies in a way that protects and facilitates people's ability to exercise their rights to free expression and assembly;
• informing the public about threats by governments, companies, or others to online free expression and assembly through various forms of research and reporting;
• educating the public about how to use technologies that can help us exercise our rights when they are threatened by censorship and surveillance;
• providing financial support for one or more of the above.

Debate centered around the following issues:

Government involvement: Some activists were very uncomfortable about the fact that a young woman from the U.S. State Department, whose job is to work on "Internet freedom" issues, attended our public conference - a conference that was free for anybody who registered before we ran out of space. Global Voices Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile and grassroots activist, said he worries government money is poisoning the online activism space, causing grassroots causes to be hijacked or used by geopolitical actors who he feels are more interested in influencing the politics of certain countries in  certain directions than in the welfare and safety of specific individuals on the ground. He is also concerned that U.S. government money, inspired by the Obama Administration's new "Internet freedom" agenda, means that activists in politically "sexy" countries like China and Iran get lots of support and attention, while the problems faced by activists in countries whose Internet repression is less well covered in the global English-language media, from Tunisia to Russia to Thailand to Syria, are largely ignored. A lively debate about this issue ensued, with Bob Boorstin of Google (who once worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration) called Sami's position "paranoid" and pointed out that like it or not, governments are players in this space. This could be a good thing, he said, if it leads to greater honesty and transparency among all governments about how they are trying to regulate and control various online and mobile spaces. An activist from Brazil argued that taking an "us vs. them" stance towards government is "b.s." "We can't keep government out of the Internet because government is part of the Internet," he said. Certainly, those of us who are citizens of democracies need to push our governments to be consistent and transparent about what they are doing in this space. We have a responsibility to make sure that our tax money is not being spent in a counterproductive, hypocritical, or duplicitous manner. That much we owe to Sami and the vulnerable grassroots communities around the world that he works with.

Corporate-owned platforms and services: Both Google and Yahoo were active at the conference and helped to fund it, along with a number of foundations. Google - along with Reuters - also funded a new Breaking Borders award for individuals or groups doing extraordinary work to promote free expression online. Google is in constant friction with a range of governments - from democracies to autocracies - seeking to regulate its platforms in various ways. While Google's executives have made a commitment to do the socially responsible thing for reasons that are honorable, it's also true that it's in Google's corporate interest to align itself with the global online free speech movement as it faces regulatory battles around the world.  As I reported in my last blog post, YouTube's Victoria Grand participated in a lively session dedicated to the human rights implications of content moderation. Yet a number of participants voiced concern about over-reliance on corporate-owned platforms and service providers. As Ethan put it in an important blog post back in March: "These entities have no more legal obligation to allow open, unfettered political speech in their spaces than shopping malls do to host political rallies."

Which brings us back to the issue of "netizenship." If we depend on commercial services and platforms for our expression and assembly online, then we have to stop acting like passive "users" and start acting like "citizens" of these spaces: organizing with others and pushing the companies to act in the public interest and to take free expression and human rights fully into account. Companies will only change their practices if they feel that their brand reputations and business success depend on it.

One could build open-source, non-profit, community administered web-hosting platforms, social networking services, and e-mail systems that would not depend on companies for the most part. Mozilla's Drumbeat movement aims to educate the broader public about non-proprietary and open source alternatives available out there - and seeks to build a robust "open web" that supports a thriving international community of content creators, programmers, and citizens who take responsibility for building and defending the Internet we want. Perhaps things will evolve in a manner similar to how, in many democracies, you have commercial media companies coexisting alongside non-profit public media funded by foundations and audience donations (and in some cases also government subsidies and tax money). In cyberspace both for-profit and non-profit spaces can coexist peacefully, each serving different needs of different kinds of people and communities. Society benefits from having both, as there are some social needs - and social groups - which companies may never have much interest in serving or respecting. The "open web" can also help to keep the commercial spaces honest.

This however still doesn't solve the problem of commercial carriers lower down in the stack: Internet Service Providers in many parts of the world are monopolies and we often have little choice about who provides our basic connectivity. One self-described "anarchist" from Brazil is working to build mesh networks that would enable people to access the Internet without going through a commercial ISP. If communities could create viable mesh networks as alternatives to commercial ISP's in cases where ISP's are non-existent, unreliable, or untrustworthy, that would be interesting, but it would require a great deal more public engagement and activism than we've seen anywhere thus far.

New rights or old rights?  Do we need a new Bill of Rights for Cyberspace as Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested? In Brazil they've already drafted such a document, now up for public discussion and comment. (The CPJ's Danny O'Brien provides some critical analysis of that draft, which might actually provide justification for more takedown of content without judicial oversight or due process, in the name of protecting the rights of people who are slandered.) Or do we simply need to work hard to make sure that existing internationally recognized covenants, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are fully applied to the Internet and upheld in both online and mobile spaces? A couple of efforts build on this idea. The Principles for corporate conduct developed by the Global Network Initiative are based on those existing international covenants. The Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles is currently working on a document that seeks to elaborate on how existing human rights covenants should be applied by governments and companies to ICT's. That draft will be made public sometime over the summer. As a number of people at the Summit pointed out, most governments don't respect the existing rights covenants in "meatspace," and thus they're not terribly optimistic that such rights declarations will have much concrete impact. On the other hand, these U.N. documents are used by human rights activists worldwide as the moral baseline upon which to build their arguments against human rights violations. Documents clarifying how the UDHR and ICCPR should be applied to cyberspace might be helpful tools, but they are not going to lead to solutions in and of themselves.

Defining and coordinating goals across the global network  This is the toughest part. Cyberspace is a global network. What people do on and to it in the U.S. or Pakistan or China can have a global impact. "Freedom" in the context of cyberspace - or in the context of human civilization - does not mean "free for all." Nor does it mean that we won't pay for anything, depsite what some in the entertainment industry may insinuate. We don't want cyberspace to be a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short." This is why modern governments gain their legitimacy from the idea of a "social contract," in which we give up some of our freedoms to do anything we please for the sake of the greater social good, and if we are in a democracy those laws, rules, and enforcement institutions are formed with our consent and supervision. So how do we work out a global social contract for the civilization we are building in cyberspace?

Back in March after Google withdrew its search engine from China,  British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian about how we urgently need a global debate and a global consensus around the idea that "everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available." He concluded:

It's in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That's a likely outcome, but not the best.

But it's hard to find consensus - even amongst liberal internationalists with different cultural and religious backgrounds - about how to find the right balance between our right to free expression and assembly and our right to privacy and security. Even trickier is the question of what is "hate speech" and what constitutes justified criticism or even satire of one religion by members of another. The Global Voices community has come together around a set of common values around freedom of expression and communication. Our Manifesto begins: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech."  But all you need to do is to read this post about Pakistani reactions to the "Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page, then read this post by another member of our community, to see how far we are from having a consensus about how civilized cross-cultural discourse should or shouldn't be managed on global Internet platforms.

Last August, Lisa Horner of Global Partners and Max Senges (then an academic, now at Google) published a paper titled Values, Principles, and Rights in Internet Governance, which called for a global, trans-cultural dialogue around two questions:
• Can we maintain cultural diversity while at the same time agreeing to universal values to underpin internet governance?
• Can we translate these values into practical guiding principles for different internet stakeholders, from the technical community through to regulators and users?

Looking at the world today, the answer would seem to be "No." But then we've not even attempted the kind of informed discourse that would be needed before ruling out "Yes" altogether.

Right now I see two fundamental obstacles to such a discourse. First, we don't have adequate global platforms on which to have such a multicultural discussion. As Global Voices continues to expand its multilingual translation community, and as we build capacity to translate conversations across different languages, maybe that could be a place to experiment.

Second, global publics don't have enough information to hold an informed discourse right now. People who follow global news and domestic politics in their home countries are not well informed about issues related to Internet governance, how software engineering and hardware design can affect our freedoms, how government regulations play out around the world, etc. Most news organizations cover technology as a business, cultural, and consumer phenomenon. Few journalists (I can count them on one hand) cover technology as a global political space. Very little technology journalism approaches stories with the goal of serving the interests of an informed global netizenry. We need global coverage of cyberspace as a new political space. This coverage needs to begin with questions like: "What do people need to know in order to be informed participants in shaping the future of our global network? What do people need to know in order to determine what their own interests are within the network, and to understand who and what is affecting those interests either negatively or positively? What do people need to know in order to figure out what kind of Internet they want? What do people need to know in order to understand and debate what is possible?  What do people need to know about the players, institutions, companies, and politics so that they can figure out how they as citizens of the network can take action?" We need hard-hitting, original, investigative stories that help to fill this void. Perhaps it's time for somebody to create such a news organization.

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Human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension by companies

Facebook deserves every bit of flak being flung at them for their cavalier and irresponsible attitude toward privacy. Another problem, however, has gotten much less attention: activists around the world who use Facebook to promote political and human rights causes frequently find their Facebook groups and accounts suspended.

In all cases that I've heard of, Facebook has been either unresponsive or unsympathetic to activists' complaints. Since the beginning of this year, pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong have complained of repeated deletion of their Facebook groups. One of these groups was called "Never Forget June Fourth," set up to commemorate the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Last month some Hong Kong pro-democracy Facebook users wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (in Facebook). Readers will be shocked and stunned to learn that neither The Zuck nor his colleagues bothered to respond to this letter:

Dear Mark,

We are users of Facebook with shared interests in the political development and democracy of Hong Kong and China. We have set up a political nature group page named ‘Never Forget June the Forth’. This group was formed to engage in a free exchange of ideas and remembrances around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, and there has never been an intention to be abusive, or bullying or “take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s right or otherwise violates the law,” to quote your own official policy.

Nevertheless, the group of key administrators and creator of ‘Never Forget June the Forth’ is being unfairly harassed by Facebook, which has blocked them from posting new content and working on it at all.

This latest violation of their rights comes on top of numerous other examples of harassment. Some sites have been closed without notice. Facebook has attributed the problems to “technical difficulties,” an explanation that strains common sense.

Therefore we are calling on Facebook to end this harassment (apparently done on behalf of Beijing). We feel, especially in light of what is happening at Google, that both the regional and global press will be interested in this story, should we choose to take it to them.

Please end your harassment, which will prevent us from taking this drastic step. The ball is in your court, and We are certain you can feel the moral weight of how this case may impact your reputation.

Sincerely,

Creator and Group of Administrators

While the group was eventually restored and revived (here) the people involved with it feel that Facebook has failed to communicate clearly with them so that these kinds of problems can be avoided in the future. People still have no idea what happened or why. Many suspect that the abuse-reporting mechanisms within Facebook are themselves being abused by governments and other powerful entities. Some including the authors of the above letter - thanks to Facebook's lack of honesty and transparency  - suspect Facebook is responding to pressure from governments, including Beijing. I myself doubt there is direct collusion between Facebook and the Chinese government, but I have concluded - based on their actions and inactions - that they don't give a toss about the human rights activists using their service, in spite of what their executives say in speeches about Facebook being a force for world peace and whatnot. In this discussion thread one Hong Kong user posted the following set of suggestions for how Facebook might treat activists with more care and respect:

Dear Mark,

I don't want reiterate what people said here. Here I point out a few things.

1. There is no doubt that Facebook is a commerical company. However, it is a leader in social networking now in the planet. It therefore undeniably bears certain social responsibility.

2. There is no clear guideline on when a political oriented group is banned or limited. Today, the removal of a group is all a subjective decision, which is not good enough. I oppose to removal of groups without a public reason, including groups holding opposite political view.

3. Abuse use of report mechanism is a problem. If the report is in fact invalid, and it is an organized act by a gang, there is no punishment at all. This really hurts freedom of speech. This leads to problem that people opens 2nd account to avoid get banned, or form a gang to counter act on the opponent with such report mechanism.

Ok. better to suggest rather than just complaint. Here is my suggestion

A. If it is a political group, pls list out the guideline and restrictions for the admins. What can be done and what can't. What extra limitation can be applied to political group. If violation is confirmed, warnings should be sent to all admins. If several warnings are ignored, FB has the reason to take action. If the group is banned, pls leave a page explaining why.

B. If confirmed case of abuse use of report mechanism, there should be "bad marks" accumulated for that user. Up to certain point, warning is given, and onwards, liable to be disabled.

C. For political group, do we have better option for admin to manage? e.g. ban certain user for 3 days just to let him calm down, or limit certain unfriendly action for 3 posts per 24 hrs. For all posts, unlike option, admin vote count for removal/warnings, and FB operator warnings flag are considered useful.

I think the above required your internal discussion and system modification. But I hope that your company will take my advice seriously.

Rgds
Justin

There are other examples from other regions. In March, Jillian York reported on Global Voices Advocacy that Facebook removed a Moroccan secularist group and its founder. While the group and the founder's personal account were eventually restored, "Facebook did not respond to any requests for an explanation."

I know of a couple of specific instances in which U.S.-based free speech and civil liberties organizations with contacts at Facebook have tried to get Facebook executives to have a conversation with some members of the human rights community to discuss this problem. Their efforts have all met with total radio silence. Facebook has shown zero interest in holding even a private conversation about this issue. Thus I can only conclude one or all of the following: They are in denial. Or they really don't care. Or they are overwhelmed and upset that people won't love them unconditionally and are sticking their head in the sand. Or they have such a Messiah complex that they really think anybody who wants to talk to them about their faults can only be an enemy.  If you have any further conclusions to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments section of this post.

Facebook is certainly not the only company with problems stemming from abuse-prevention and content moderation. There have been several cases in which human rights activists got their YouTube accounts deleted or disabled (the accounts were restored after an outcry from activists). Other activists have had takedown and suspension problems with Flickr, other Yahoo services, and domain hosting companies. But at least Google (YouTube's parent company) and Yahoo have been willing to engage with activists to discuss how content moderation and abuse-prevention mechanisms and procedures might be improved so that they can avoid inadvertent "censorship" of human rights activism taking place on their platforms. Both participated actively in a recent conference call convened by the Global Network Initiative, during which activists and people from the Internet industry held a frank discussion about how company practices can be improved - and how activists might also better educate themselves about terms of service and moderation procedures in order to anticipate and prevent problems. (Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page for a contact e-mail if you want to get involved with further discussions.)

At last week's Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile, YouTube's Victoria Grand joined me, Jillian York, and Oiwan Lam of Hong Kong for a wide-ranging discussion on this issue. I've embedded the video below. At the beginning of the session I asked everybody in the room (probably around 80 people) whether they'd ever had problems with content being removed or accounts suspended on one of the social networking services they use. A couple dozen hands went up. I asked people for concrete suggestions about how netizens (I hate the word "users") and companies could work together on preventing inadvertent suppression of dissent on social networking platforms. Here are a few points that multiple people repeated:

• Automated moderation and abuse-prevention processes will inevitably result in mistakes that hurt activists. Human judgment - informed by adequate knowledge of cultures, languages, and political events around the world - needs to be brought into the mix.
• Companies need to be as transparent and open as possible about how their takedown, moderation, and suspension procedures work. Otherwise they have nobody but themselves to blame if users cease to trust them.
• Companies should designate staff members to focus on human rights. Their job should be to develop channels for regular communication with the human rights community.
• It's almost impossible for globally popular social networking and content-sharing services to hire enough staff with enough knowledge of political movements and disputes in all obscure corners of the world in all kinds of languages. But communities like Global Voices and others with large networks of bloggers and online activists all over the world are ready and willing to help companies keep abreast of political hot-button issues and online movements around the world - and even provide help with obscure languages - so that extra care can be taken, and political activism won't be mistaken for spam or some other form of abusive behavior. We just need to figure out how to set up workable mechanisms through which this kind of feedback, advice, and communication can take place.
• Activists need to pay closer attention the Terms of Service used by social networking platforms, and be more proactive in educating themselves about how moderation, takedown, and abuse-prevention mechanisms work. We probably need a "Guide to avoiding account suspension and takedown for human rights activists."
• It might also be good to have some kind of respected clearing house organization - or consortium of organizations - which can help mediate and resolve problems between activists and companies.
• People who rely on social networking and content sharing platforms run by companies to do political and social activism should engage more actively with company administrators to improve policies and practices. Anticipate problems and help solve them not only for yourself but for everybody else in the community. Act like a citizen. Not a passive "user."

Please share any further thoughts you may have in the comments section of this post. Below is the video from our Global Voices session last week.

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part I:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part II:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part III:

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Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

(Image by FabsY)

The Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries for a two-day public conference, followed by two days of internal meetings for people who work directly on Global Voices Online in some way. Our citizen media community is now five and a half years old. It has grown organically in ways that Ethan Zuckerman and I never imagined when we started the project back in late 2004 with a small meeting of bloggers from a range of different countries. 

Since 2004 the global information environment has changed dramatically. One of our board members, Rosental Alves, gave a presentation on Friday in which he compared the pre-Internet media environment to a desert. For most members of the public, there were very few sources of information about what was happening around the world. You had access to a handful of TV stations and newspapers. Your understanding of the world depended on the priorities and budget decisions of the editors who ran those news organizations. 

Then came the deluge. Now, in the Internet Age, the information environment has gone suddenly from a desert to a rainforest. We have moved rapidly from a problem of scarcity to a problem of over-abundance - at least for some kinds of information. Other kinds of information remain rare and harder to find amidst the rapidly proliferating dominant species. 

In my closing remarks at the public conference, I pointed out that just because we have the Internet, and just because anybody can now create media, doesn't automatically mean that human society will be more democratic or peaceful. Life in the jungle is just as likely to be a Hobbesian state of nature, in which life can be nasty, brutish and short. In the offline world, this is why we build civilizations.

It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators.  Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media  - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society.

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China, the Internet and Google: Congressional testimony

Tomorrow the Congressional Executive China Commission will conduct a hearing titled Google and Internet Control in China: A Nexus Between Human Rights and Trade?  They had originally invited me to testify in a similarly titled hearing, "China, the Internet and Google," which was postponed and rescheduled twice: the first attempt was foiled by the Great Snowcalypse; the second attempt scheduled for March 1st was postponed again at the last minute for some reason that isn't entirely clear. Meanwhile I had already gone and written my testimony. When they rescheduled the hearing they said I was no longer invited, as they wanted the hearing to have different witnesses from recent related hearings in both the House and Senate. Given that I appeared in both hearings it seems reasonable that they'd want to hear from some other people.

Since I put some effort into my testimony, however, and since it drills down in a lot more detail on China than my testimony for the other hearings, I think there is some value in my sharing it with the world.

WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: A Commission staffer just called me to say that they had meant to contact me about including the written testimony in the hearing's official record, but that the email somehow had not been sent. They now plan to distribute copies of it at the hearing and may quote from it during the proceedings. Click here for the updated PDF or click here for the web version. Some highlights:

From the introduction:

China is pioneering a new kind of Internet-age authoritarianism. It is demonstrating how a non-democratic government can stay in power while simultaneously expanding domestic Internet and mobile phone use.  In China today there is a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in the pre-Internet age, and this helps bolster the regime’s legitimacy with many Chinese Internet users who feel that they have a new channel for public discourse. Yet on the other hand, as this Commission’s 2009 Annual Report clearly outlined, Communist Party control over the bureaucracy and courts has strengthened over the past decade, while the regime’s institutional commitments to protect the universal rights and freedoms of all its citizens have weakened.

Google’s public complaint about Chinese cyber-attacks and censorship occurred against this backdrop.  It reflects a recognition that China’s status quo – at least when it comes to censorship, regulation,and manipulation of the Internet – is unlikely to improve any time soon, and may in fact continue to get worse.

Overview of Chinese Internet controls

Chinese government attempts to control online speech began in the late 1990’s with a focus on the filtering or “blocking” of Internet content. Today, the government deploys an expanding repertoire of tactics.

In other words, filtering is just one of many ways that the Chinese government limits and controls speech on the Internet. The full text then gives descriptions and explanations of the other tactics, but in brief they include:

• deletion or removal of content at the source
• device and local-level controls
• domain name controls
• localized disconnection or restriction
• self-censorship due to surveillance
• cyber-attacks
• government "astro-turfing" and "outreach"
• targeted police intimidation

I then describe a number of efforts by Chinese netizens to push back against these tactics, which include (see the full text for further explanation):

• informal anti-censorship support networks
• distributed web-hosting assistance networks
• crowdsourced "opposition research"
• preservation and redistribution of censored content
• humorous "viral" protests
• public persuasion efforts

I end with a set of recommendations. Once again, see the full text for explanations, but here is the basic list:

• anti-censorship tools - including outreach and education in their use
• anonymity and security tools - to help people better defend against cyber-attacks, spyware, and surveillance
• platforms and networks for the capture, storage, and redistribution of content that gets deleted from domestic social networking and publishing services
• support for "opposition research" - remember the Chinese netizens who deconstructed Green Dam?
• corporate responsibility - see Global Network Initiative, but also appropriate legislation if American and other Western Internet companies fail to accept the idea that they have some obligations as far as free expression and privacy are concerned
• private right of action - so that Chinese victims can sue U.S. companies in U.S. courts
• incentives for innovation by the private sector that helps Chinese Internet users access blocked sites as well as protect themselves from attacks and surveillance.

My conclusion:

Many of China’s 384 million Internet users are engaged in passionate debates about their communities’ problems, public policy concerns, and their nation’s future. Unfortunately these public discussions are skewed, blinkered, and manipulated – thanks to political censorship and surveillance. The Chinese people are proud of their nation’s achievements and generally reject critiques by outsiders even if they agree with some of them. A democratic alternative to China’s Internet-age authoritarianism will only be viable if it is conceived and built by the Chinese people from within. In helping Chinese “netizens” conduct an un-manipulated and un-censored discourse about their future, the United States will not imposing its will on the Chinese people, but rather helping the Chinese people to take ownership over their own future.

"One Google, One World; One China, No Google"

China's insomniac twitterati were on fire this afternoon U.S. time, powered no doubt by much caffeine and sugar in the the wee hours of the morning in China. Half an hour before Google's David Drummond posted his announcement that Google.cn is now effectively operating from Google.com.hk, Guangzhou-based open source programmer @LEMONed broke the news that google.cn was being redirected to the Hong Kong service. Reacting to the news, @wentommy quipped: "One Google, One World; One China, No Google."

As of now (still early morning in Beijing), Google.com.hk is accessible from mainland China although specific search results for sensitive terms result in a browser error - or in other words, are blocked. Same as it's always been for sensitive searches on Google.com from inside mainland China. This is network filtering and would happen automatically as part of the "great firewall" Internet filtering system.

The ball is now in the Chinese government's court in two ways:

1) Whether they will block all of google.com.hk, which until now has not been blocked. If they are smart they will just leave the situation as is and stop drawing media attention to their censorship practices. The longer this high profile fracas goes on, the greater Chinese Internet users awareness will be about the lengths to which their government goes to blinker their knowledge of the world. That may inspire more people to start learning how to use circumvention tools for getting around the censorship. Chinese censorship is only effective if a large percentage of the population isn't very conscious of what they're missing. As I like to explain it: if you're born with tunnel vision you assume it's normal until somehow you're made aware that life without tunnel vision is both possible and much better. The longer this story remains in the headlines, the more people will become conscious of their tunnel vision and think about ways to eliminate it.

2) Whether they allow Google to retain its ad sales and R&D businesses in China.  Google has now removed the part of the business that might have defied Chinese law, relocating it to a jurisdiction where websites are not required to censor political speech. The remaining parts of Google's business should be able to operate within the confines of Chinese law without much problem. If the Chinese government is smart, they will declare victory for having forced Google to back down and remove its potentially illegal operation from their jurisdiction. They should say they welcome all foreign law-abiding businesses and look forward to working with Google as long as it abides by Chinese law. If they punish Google further for events of the past few months, that will further feed the anxiety of a foreign business community who have already been complaining of unfair and politicized treatment, and it will cause the U.S.-China business and trade relationship to deteriorate further in ways that I would think are not in China's interest - certainly not in the Chinese people's interest.

As it so happens, I interviewed David Drummond on December 15th for the Index on Censorship, but due to the magazine's long production time they're just publishing it now, with an update that we did with him via e-mail after the January 12th announcement. They've posted it online today. I think a lot of it remains very relevant.

UPDATE1: For journalists trying to get their heads around this story Andrew Lih has an excellent primer on the basic facts and background you need to know.

UPDATE2: The Chinese government is reacting in a knee-jerk and counterproductive manner which implies that they think they should have jurisdiction over websites hosted on computer servers physically beyond their borders, and which implies disrespect for the Hong Kong Basic Law to which the CCP made a clear commitment.  See Reuters for the text of the Chinese official comments on Google.

ADDENDUM: Here's the post I wrote in 2006 when Google went into China with Google.cn: Google in China: degrees of evil final conclusion: "At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot further into the mud. Now let's see whether they get sucked in deeper or whether they end up holding their ground."

Global Internet Freedom and the U.S. Government

Over the past two weeks I've testified in both the Senate and the House on how the U.S. should advance "Internet freedom." I submitted written testimony for both hearings which can be downloaded in PDF form here and here. Full transcripts will become available eventually but meanwhile you can click here to watch the Senate video and here to watch the House video. In both hearings I advocated a combination of corporate responsibility through the Global Network Initiative backed up by appropriate legislation given that some companies seem reluctant to hold themselves accountable voluntarily; revision of export controls and sanctions; and finally, funding and support for tools, and technologies and activism platforms that will counter-act suppression of online speech.

Lawmakers are moving forward to support research and technical development. February 4th Rep. David Wu [D-OR] and Rep. Frank Wolf [R-VA] introduced the Internet Freedom Act of 2010, which would establish an Internet Freedom Foundation. The bill's core section reads:

(a) ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INTERNET FREEDOM FOUNDATION. - The National Science Foundation shall establish the Internet Freedom Foundation. The Internet Freedom Foundation shall -

(1) award competitive, merit-reviewed grants, cooperative aggreements, or contracts to private industry, universities, and other research and development organizations to develop deployable technologies to defeat Internet suppression and censorship; and
(2) award incentive prizes to private industry, universities, and other research and development organizations to develop deployable technologies to defeat Internet suppression and censorship.

(b) LIMITATION ON AUTHORITY. - Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship in furtherance of law enforcement aims that are consistent with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Whoever runs this foundation will have their work cut out for them in sorting out its strategies, goals, and priorities - and dealing with a great deal of thorny politics. The Falun Gong-affiliated Global Internet Freedom Consortium have been arguing that they were unfairly passed over for recent State Department grants which were given to other groups working on different tools that help you get around Internet blocking - "circumvention tools" as the technical community call them. For the past year they've been engaged in an aggressive campaign to lobby congress and the media to ensure they'll get a slice of future funds. (For examples of the fruits of their media lobbying effort see here, here, and here).

But the unfortunate bickering over who deserves government funding more than whom has distracted attention from the larger question of whether circumvention on its own is sufficient to defeat Internet censorship and suppression of online speech. In his recent blog post, Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention my friend and former colleague Ethan Zuckerman warns against an over-focus on circumvention: "We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship." In short, he summarizes his main points:

- Internet circumvention is hard. It’s expensive. It can make it easier for people to send spam and steal identities.
- Circumventing censorship through proxies just gives people access to international content – it doesn’t address domestic censorship, which likely affects the majority of people’s internet behavior.
- Circumventing censorship doesn’t offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher.

While circumvention tools remain worthy of support as part of a basket of strategies, I agree with Ethan that circumvention is never going to be the silver bullet that some people make it out to be, for all the reasons he outlines in his blog post, which deserves to be read in full. As Ethan points out, as I pointed out in my own testimony, and as my research on Chinese blog censorship published last year has demonstrated, circumvention does nothing to help you access content that has been removed from the Internet completely - which is the main way that the Chinese government now censors the Chinese-language Internet. In my testimony I suggested several other tools and activities that require equal amount of focus:

• Tools and training to help people evade surveillance, detect spyware, and guard against cyber-attacks.
• Mechanisms to preserve and re-distribute censored content in various languages.
• Platforms through which citizens around the world can share "opposition research" about what different governments are doing to suppress online speech, and collaborate across borders to defeat censorship, surveillance, and attacks in ad-hoc, flexible ways as new problems arise during times of crisis.

As Ethan puts it:

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.

- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity – let’s find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don’t reward them for providing service to these users.

Which brings us to the issue of corporate responsibility for free expression and privacy on the Internet. I've been working with the Global Network Initiative for the past several years to develop a voluntary code of conduct centered on a set of basic principles for free expression and privacy based on U.N. documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international legal conventions. It is bolstered by a set of implementation guidelines and evaluation and accountability mechanisms, supported by a multi-stakeholder community of human rights groups, investors, and academics all dedicated to helping companies do the right thing and avoid making mistakes that restrict free expression and privacy on the Internet.

So far, however, only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have joined. Senator Durbin's March 2nd Senate hearing focused heavily on the question of why other companies have so far failed to join, what it would take to persuade them to join, and if they don't join whether laws should be passed that induce greater public accountability by companies on free expression and privacy. He has written letters to 30 U.S. companies in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. He expressed great displeasure in the hearing with most of their responses, and further disappointment that no company (other than Google which is already in the GNI) even had the guts to send a representative to testify in the hearing.  Durbin announced that he will "introduce legislation that would require Internet companies to take reasonable steps to protect human rights or face civil or criminal liability.” It is my understanding that his bill is still under construction, and it's not clear when he will introduce it (he's been rather preoccupied with healthcare and other domestic issues, after all).  Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), who convened Wednesday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing is also reported to be considering his own bill. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the ranking Republican at that hearing, made a plug for the Global Online Freedom Act of 2009, a somewhat revised version of a bill that he first introduced in 2006. 

I said at the hearing that the GNI probably wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the threat of Smith's legislation. I was not, however, asked my opinion on GOFA's specific content. Since GOFA's 2006 introduction I have critiqued it a number of times (see for example here, here, and here). As the years have passed - especially in the past year as the GNI got up and running yet most companies have still failed to engage meaningfully with it  - I have come to see the important role legislation could play in setting industry-wide standards and requirements, which companies can then tell governments they have no choice but to follow. That said, I continue to have concerns about parts of GOFA's approach. Here is a summary of the current bill written by the Congressional Research Service (I have bolded the parts of concern):

5/6/2009--Introduced.
Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 - Makes it U.S. policy to: (1) promote the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media; (2) use all appropriate instruments of U.S. influence to support the free flow of information without interference or discrimination; and (3) deter U.S. businesses from cooperating with Internet-restricting countries in effecting online censorship. Expresses the sense of Congress that: (1) the President should seek international agreements to protect Internet freedom; and (2) some U.S. businesses, in assisting foreign governments to restrict online access to U.S.-supported websites and government reports and to identify individual Internet users, are working contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. Amends the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to require assessments of electronic information freedom in each foreign country. Establishes in the Department of State the Office of Global Internet Freedom (OGIF). Directs the Secretary of State to annually designate Internet-restricting countries. Prohibits, subject to waiver, U.S. businesses that provide to the public a commercial Internet search engine, communications services, or hosting services from locating, in such countries, any personally identifiable information used to establish or maintain an Internet services account. Requires U.S. businesses that collect or obtain personally identifiable information through the Internet to notify the OGIF and the Attorney General before responding to a disclosure request from an Internet-restricting country. Authorizes the Attorney General to prohibit a business from complying with the request, except for legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes. Requires U.S. businesses to report to the OGIF certain Internet censorship information involving Internet-restricting countries. Prohibits U.S. businesses that maintain Internet content hosting services from jamming U.S.-supported websites or U.S.-supported content in Internet-restricting countries. Authorizes the President to waive provisions of this Act: (1) to further the purposes of this Act; (2) if a country ceases restrictive activity; or (3) if it is the national interest of the United States.

My biggest concern has to do with the relationship GOFA would create between U.S. companies and the U.S. Attorney General. If the AG is made arbiter of whether content or account information requested by local law enforcement is for "legitimate law enforcement purposes" or not, that means the company has to share the information - which in the case of certain social networking services may include a great deal of non-public information about the user, who his or her friends are, and what they're saying to each other in casual conversation. Letting the U.S. AG review the insides of this person's account would certainly violate that user's privacy. It also puts companies at a competitive disadvantage in markets where users - even those who don't particularly like their own government - would consider an overly close relationship between a U.S. service provider and the U.S. government not to be in their interest. Take this hypothetical situation for example: An Egyptian college student decides to use a social networking site to set up a group protesting the arrest and torture of his brother. The Egyptian government demands the group be shut down and all account information associated with it handed over. In order to comply with GOFA, the company shares this student's account information and all content associated with that protest group with the U.S. Attorney General. What is the oversight to ensure that this information is not retained and shared with other U.S. government agencies interested in going on a fishing expedition to explore friendships among members of different Egyptian opposition groups? Why should we expect that user to be ok with such a possibility?

Another difficult issue to get right - which gets even harder with the advent of cloud computing - is the question of where user data is physically housed. The Center for Democracy and Technology,(PDF), Jonathan Zittrain and others have discussed some of the regulatory difficulties of personally identifiable information and its location. In 2008 Zittrain wrote:

As Internet law rapidly evolves, countries have repeatedly and successfully demanded that information be controlled or monitored, even when that information is hosted outside their borders. Forcing US companies to locate their servers outside IRCs [Internet Restricting Countries] would only make their services less reliable; it would not make them less regulable.

If the goal of GOFA is to discourage US companies from violating human rights, then it will probably be successful. But if the goal of the Act is to make the Internet more free and more safe, and not just push rights violations on foreign companies, then more must be done.

Then there is the problem of Internet Restricting Country designations themselves. I have long argued that it is problematic to divide the world into "internet restricting countries" and countries where we can assume everything is just fine, not to worry, no human rights concerns present. First of all I think that the list itself is going to quickly turn into a political and diplomatic football which will be subject to huge amounts of lobbying and politics, and thus will be very difficult to add new countries to the list. Secondly, regimes can change fast: in between annual revisions of the list you can have a coup or a rigged election whose victors demand companies to hand over dissident account information and censor political information, but companies are off the hook - having "done nothing illegal." Finally, while I am not drawing moral equivalence between Italy and Iran I do believe there is no country on earth, including the United States, where companies are not under pressure by government agencies to do things that arguably violate users' civil rights. Policy that acknowledges this honestly is less likely to hurt U.S. companies in many parts of the world where the last thing they need is for people to be able to provide "documentary proof" that they are extensions of the U.S. government's geopolitical agendas.

Therefore a more effective, ethically consistent and less hypocritical approach to the three problems I've described above would be to codify strict global privacy standards absolutely everywhere U.S. companies operate. Companies should be required by law to notify all users anywhere in the world in a clear, culturally and linguistically understandable way (not by trained lawyers but by normal people), exactly how and where their personally-identifying information is being stored and used and who has access to it under what circumstances. If users are better informed about how their data is being used, they can use better judgment about how or whether to use different commercial services - and seek more secure alternatives when necessary, perhaps even using some of the new tools and platforms run by non-profit activist organizations that Congress is hoping to fund. Congress could further bolster the privacy of global users of U.S. services by adopting something akin to the Council of Europe Privacy Convention.

Regarding censorship: again, as the Internet evolves further with semi-private social networking sites and mobile services we need to make sure that the information companies are required to share with the U.S. government doesn't end up violating user privacy.  I am doubtful that government agenices in some of the democracies unlikely to be put on the "internet restricting countries" list can really be trusted not to abuse the systems of censorship and intermediary liability that a growing number of democracies are implementing in the name of legitimate law enforcement purposes. Thus on censorship I also prefer global standards. There is real value in making companies retain internal records of the censorship requests that they receive all around the world in the event of a challenge in U.S. court regarding the lawfulness of a particular act of censorship - a private right of action in U.S. court which GOFA or its equivalent would potentially enable. It's also good to make companies establish clear and uniform procedures for how they handle censorship requests, so that they can prove if challenged in court that they are only responding to requests made in writing through official legal channels, rather than responding to requests that have no basis even in local law, despite claiming vaguely to the public that "we are only following local law." Companies should be required to exercise maximum transparency with users about what is being censored, at whose behest, and according to which law exactly. Congress could, for example, mandate that the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse mechanism or something similar should be utilized globally for all content takedowns.

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House of Representatives hearing today: The Google Predicament and U.S. Cyberspace Policy

I'm back on Capitol Hill today to testify in the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. My full written testimony submitted for the record is here. The hearing will be webcast live on the House Foreign Relations Committee website here, and I believe the video will be archived on that page as well.

Yesterday members of the House launched an Internet Freedom Caucus and the Senate will be launching one as well later this month. Later this week I will write up my thoughts about Washington's recent flurry of activity on "Internet Freedom," including various efforts at legislation, funding to fight censorship and surveillance, and voluntary industry codes like the Global Network Initiative (with which I am actively involved). Meanwhile, here are the details of today's hearing:

Full Committee

Howard L. Berman (D-CA), Chairman

The Google Predicament:
Transforming U.S. Cyberspace Policy to Advance Democracy, Security, and Trade

You are respectfully requested to attend the following open hearing of the Full Committee to be held in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Date Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Time 10:00 AM

Location Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building

witnesses Nicole Wong, Esq.
Vice President and Deputy General Counsel
Google, Inc.

Ms. Rebecca MacKinnon
Visiting Fellow
Center for Information Technology Policy
Princeton University
Cofounder of Global Voices Online

Mr. Robert W. Holleyman, II
President and CEO
Business Software Alliance

Larry M. Wortzel, Ph.D.
Commissioner
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

Note Hearing has been rescheduled from an earlier date of February 10, 2010.

Search Committee Site

Keywords Dates to Search In Hearings
News

Live from the Senate on Tuesday: hearing on global Internet freedom

At 10:00am Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday I will be testifying in my first Senate hearing. Each witness gets five minutes to make an oral statement, followed by Q&A. We were also invited to provide longer written testimony for the record.

Click here to view my written testimony as a web page, or you can download the PDF here.

Here's the formal announcement from the committee website:

“Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law, Part II”

Senate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law

DATE: March 2, 2010
TIME: 10:00 AM
ROOM: Dirksen-226

---

OFFICIAL HEARING NOTICE / WITNESS LIST:

February 23, 2010


NOTICE OF SUBCOMMITTEE HEARING

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, will hold a hearing entitled "Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law, Part II" on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

Chairman Durbin will preside.

By order of the Chairman

Witness List

Hearing before the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law

on

"Global Internet Freedom and the Rule of Law, Part II"

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 226
10:00 a.m.

Panel I
Michael H. Posner
Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
U.S. Department of State
Washington, DC

Daniel J. Weitzner
Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy Analysis and Development
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
U.S. Department of Commerce
Washington, DC

Panel II
Nicole Wong
Vice President and Deputy General Counsel
Google Inc.
Mountain View, CA

Louis Riley
Vice President and Assistant General Counsel
McAfee Inc.
Plano, TX

Rebecca MacKinnon
Visiting Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ

Omid Memarian
Iranian Blogger

San Francisco, CA